Close to the Bone (22 page)

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Authors: Lisa Black

BOOK: Close to the Bone
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Her fury at herself edged out her fury at him. How could she have been so stupid? How many tales of abduction, murder and other woes had she heard in the line of her work? She should never have gotten into the car with him. How many times had she promised herself, and told Rachael the same thing: in the case of an attempted abduction, don’t go! If he says he’ll shoot you, tell him to go ahead. Better it be in a parking lot where help might pass by before you bleed out than lost on an isolated country road. If he says he won’t hurt you, don’t believe him. And if he says he’ll hurt you if you don’t, he had planned to anyway. Once you get in the car the needle on your life expectancy meter falls from debatable to less than slim.

But this was different
! she could say if she wanted to defend her own actions. James wasn’t a rapist or a serial killer in the usual sense. Harming her had never been his goal. She had cooperated because, first, it got him away from Don, who seemed a more likely victim, and second, because she thought her friendship with Diana might put her in a position to bring the situation to a close without further bloodshed. She had thought she could handle it. She had thought she could handle him.

That had been her most foolish mistake.

Okay. Stop with the recriminations and think. How does one get out of a car trunk?

She had read once that an intrepid Girl Scout had pulled out the taillight and then stuck her arm through the hole and waved until someone noticed and reported the vehicle to the police. She wriggled carefully and ran her hands over the outer corners, though she knew what she would find from her first pass. The frame covered the taillight area completely. They were not accessible from inside the trunk. She pulled back the molded upholstery just to make sure, but the metal felt smooth and unbroken. The taillight wouldn’t help. Maybe if she had the actual Girl Scout.

She heard a tinkling sound and stopped moving to listen. The car slowed – perhaps for a light, because she could hear other vehicles around them – and then James’ muffled tones penetrated the seat back. Someone must have called him, meaning he must have hung up at some point. It was probably Don calling back to keep him talking, communicating and, she hoped, negotiating.

The car curved to the side and sped up. They were getting on the freeway, most likely I-77. He was driving much faster than he would dare on city streets.

There were so many things that could happen next, all of them bad.

Upset, manic, distracted, James could get into a car accident, in which a large truck or even a tractor-trailer plowed into the back of him, and Theresa would have to be scraped up in small pieces for the funeral. Rachael would—

Don’t think about Rachael.

James could be planning to drive out to hilly Geauga County and dump the car in a copse of trees. Theresa would not be found until she had long since died of dehydration, her body crawling with maggots and lying in its own—

Best not think about that, either.

He might, for whatever reason, think that the vehicle would best be hidden in the lake and drive it off the end of a pier, escaping through the window she’d opened while the trunk filled up with water with nowhere for her to go.

Or James could get an answer he didn’t like – a nearly inevitable outcome, since how could Don and Shephard and Stone and the rest of the group at the ME’s possibly figure out who might have been Diana’s lover/killer this many years later? The guilty man certainly wouldn’t be willing to admit it, and, if James had been right about the pregnancy, they had incinerated the only evidence. Unless the histological samples held a surprise …

He seemed to be shouting into the phone now, though she still couldn’t make out any words. Definitely an answer he didn’t like.

Probably, the
best
scenario would be if James bailed out and left her parked in a populated lot, where a hapless shopper might hear her pounding before she collapsed from a lack of water and oxygen.

Maybe the car’s owner had reported it stolen, and the cops were looking for it – either because it was a stolen car or because Shephard had put the two things together and suspected it to be James’ current mode of conveyance. In which case the cops on the street would be keeping an eye out for a multiple murderer, not a car thief. That changed things. Cops would be extra determined not to let him get away. They might not know she was in the car – perhaps a dispatch cut out before they got that info, or they wouldn’t see her inside the car and would think he had let her out somewhere else. James could lift the knife and, seeing a flash of metal, they think it’s a gun. Or maybe they set up a roadblock and he tries to ram the officers and their vehicles. There were so many scenarios that could end in a compacted crush or a hail of bullets, cutting through the relatively thin metal compartment where she lay—

She pulled on the thin carpeting beneath her, stiff but not tacked down. A piece of plywood covered only the spare tire, not the entire expanse of trunk floor, so she could move it aside with a minimum of scrapes and splinters to get at the grimy lower crevice. Unfortunately, the lower crevice was peppered with exposed bolts and contained a jack that removed her kneecap from the rest of her leg. At least, it felt like that.

As she rubbed her knee he turned another corner. Her head would have slid into the fender frame if the exposed bolt holding the spare and jack down hadn’t caught her handcuffs, arresting her movement.

Suddenly, she had an idea.

A large wing nut held those items down, and in the pitch darkness her fingers found it. At first it seemed frozen by who knew how many years of inactivity, but she twisted it with a desperation more of anger than fear. At last it started to turn.

James stomped on the brakes for some reason, and the resultant bouncing thrust the back of her neck into the trunk lid. If she got out of this without permanent paralysis, she’d have done well.

The nut took an annoyingly long time to rotate off – guaranteed to further frustrate any unlucky motorist who needed to change a flat tire – and she pulled the jack off the top of the spare. It didn’t seem very big, but then it would have to be able to lift a car, right?

Her hands ran over the basic diamond shape of the item. It had to have a handle, which would double as a tire iron with a crowbar end for removing hubcaps.

But she couldn’t find it. In a car this old it might have been missing for years, and the jack would be useless without any way to crank it open.

In the pitch dark, and trying not to let her face bounce down on to the protruding center bolt, she felt all over the crevice. Nothing, save for decades old grease spots and insect carcasses.

The car came to a stop and didn’t start again. In fact, James killed the engine. Theresa stopped moving for a moment to listen. She heard (and felt) the car door slam as he got out. No other car engines, no traffic noises. No voices. Maybe they were in some isolated area where he intended to leave her to die. But on gravel, to judge from the faint crunching as James stepped away from the car, so it couldn’t be
that
remote.

She didn’t shout or pound. Her dignity had limits, and it wasn’t as if he could have forgotten her presence. He either intended to let her out, or he didn’t, and pounding wouldn’t make a difference. Besides, if she stayed quiet he might get curious or concerned enough to check on her welfare.

But she continued her search for the tire iron, her hands roaming without sound.

Then she heard another car engine approach, and stop. A door slammed. James – at least she thought it was James, she couldn’t be sure – said something.

Suddenly, a loud
bang
split the air, and a bullet tore through the trunk.

It happened so fast that she didn’t have time to scream. She wouldn’t even have been sure what had occurred, but the resulting hole in the frame let in a tiny point of light that alerted her to reality. Her body reacted with animal instinct, forming the tightest ball it could even as she felt a shower of metal shavings sprinkle across the hands over her face.

She didn’t move.

After a second she heard another shot.

Theresa held her breath. If whoever had the gun out there knew she was in the trunk he could pepper it with bullets until she bled out. But if he didn’t know, she wasn’t about to alert him.

Unless it was James doing the shooting, but she couldn’t quite see the logic in that. He might have met up with a friend who sold him a gun, but then why would James shoot his seller? Hell of a way to get out of a bill.

If James had encountered a patrol car and resisted arrest, she would be hearing police radios and a flurry of activity. As it was she heard nothing except a faint crunching. This must have been the person walking away, because then she heard the thud as the car door slammed and, a second later, the engine started up. The other car drove away, churning up the stones underneath its tires.

Still she waited. She made herself count to sixty to give the shooter a full minute to leave, as if that might create some magic buffer zone that would keep her safe, a grace period which guaranteed he would never return.

‘James?’ she called.

No answer.

She rolled over and tried to peer out the small hole left by the bullet. It had actually passed through two walls of metal, and so she could only see through by moving her head to the exact trajectory. This required shoving her scalp into the tight corner of the trunk where the layers and spaces of the metal frame grabbed her hair and ripped some of it out, but finally she could glimpse a sliver of the outside world.

Gravel, trees, and a clothed leg. It lay flat against the ground and wore the same pants James had been wearing.

She shouted again. No movement. No sounds at all, which did not bode well for the idea of rescue. She really needed some passer-by to notice the body and call the cops, but from the dead silence outside the vehicle she knew she couldn’t count on it.

Back to the project at hand. James could be lying outside the vehicle bleeding to death, but she could do nothing about that right now. If either of them were to have a chance of survival she needed to
get
out of that car
.

The bullet had actually helped the situation; between even that minuscule amount of light and no light at all there gaped a large and substantial difference. And now that the car wasn’t moving she could wriggle around without constant knocks to her head and neck. Almost.

She lifted the spare tire off its post, feeling around at the very bottom of the recess, trying not to think about the greasy, unknown things her fingers encountered. She found a booklet that seemed thick enough to be the owner’s manual, a leaky quart of extra oil, and, at last, the tire iron. Or jack handle, or whatever its proper name might be.

At first she tried dispensing with the jack entirely and wedged the flat end of the handle into the weatherstripping between the trunk and the lid, trying to prize them apart
. Give me a lever and I can move the world.
Perhaps he had thought so, but Archimedes had never tried to open a car trunk from the inside because Theresa got exactly nowhere. She only created some rectangular divots in the edge of the car frame. She would have to use the jack, but she had no idea if it would even work. She feared it might just pop through the metal of the lid without releasing the latch.

Again, the tiny bit of light came in handy. She positioned the jack in the center of the trunk rear, right next to the latch, and held it in place with one foot, since the cuffs kept her hands too restricted to both hold the jack and pump the handle. Insert iron, begin to crank. This would have been so much easier outside in the open where her knuckles wouldn’t scrape against the trunk lid with every pump.

The thing rose with agonizing slowness, no matter how frantically she worked the handle up and down. After what seemed like a half-hour the saddle finally touched the inside of the lid. Theresa continued to pump.

The top of the jack began to press against the lid interior. Then it created a dent in the lid interior, or at least it looked that way in the limited ambient light.

She kept pumping.

The car began to make a sort of groaning noise, which started as a small thrum but grew to a throaty purr. The jack handle showed a touch of resistance.

She kept pumping. A new sound presented itself, and after a moment she realized that it came from her, her lips forming the words
please work please work please work
over and over.

The latch fought until the bitter end, but still the car’s groan increased until, with a short screech of metallic agony, it slipped off its rod and the lid popped open. It didn’t fly back with a
ta-da
air, but it seemed dramatic enough to Theresa. She pushed it up and leapt out, leaving her friend the jack without so much as a thank-you. Only then did she take a deep breath, look around, and recall that they had landed in a gravel lot and that she wore nothing on her feet.

She and the car sat behind a large, plain building, possibly a warehouse from its lack of windows, doors or other accessories. A lightly wooded and deeply littered area ran to the other side. No other cars presented themselves. She had no idea where she might be.

James stretched, face up, about ten feet from the car. The gravel bit into her feet as she ran to him.

A hole in his T-shirt blossomed blood, spreading through the fabric and leaking on to the dirty white rocks below. But she would guess it had been the one in his forehead that ended his life before he could even cry out. Much more than a pinprick.

It seemed strange to crouch there next to the dead body of a man with whom she had spent the morning in close quarters. He had kidnapped her, cut her and locked her in a trunk, so she couldn’t quite grieve his loss. He had killed three men, men she knew, brutally. But Theresa thought he had loved his wife, even if he hadn’t known how to be a good husband to her. And now it seemed that perhaps he hadn’t killed her, either – otherwise why would someone lure him to an isolated spot only to drill him through the brain?

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