Faces in Time (33 page)

“Get in the car,” he says in a tone that drags a memory to her consciousness of walking across an aunt’s rock driveway and the grating sound of the crushing and grinding beneath her feet.

The memory snaps as fast as it had appeared. Her eyes widen and pulse with only the lingering remembered taste of broken rock-dust surviving.

Two vehicles have passed since he lunged down upon her while she peered into her purse for her keys. It’s growing dark, but the streetlights have not turned on yet. It’s already been the longest eighteen seconds of her life.

Dusk coats her in its fading glow, kissing her with thoughts of the night that has just begun to roughly embrace her.

His hand squeezes her throat tighter, pushing the inner walls closer together, peeling her lids further back from her exposed eyes. Quickly, the hand pulls her body forward and slams her back to the car. As her head bobbles, she feels like she might black out.

With more urgency than he’s exhibited in the one line he’s delivered to her, he says quickly, “I need your car.
Now
. Things’ll be better for you if you do what I tell you to.”

 She begins to nod her head as a loud exhaust rumbles past them from right to left.

His eyes follow the sound and the red blur. He’s sure he hears the RPMs drop followed by a downshift.

Fear pumps the neurons at the front of her brain, each firing at a different rate, but all of them pulsing in an awareness-heightened panic. With her mind’s stopwatch racing, the outside world appears slow and unreal.

She’s sure he’s the one that’s been blasted on the local news all day. Repeating in her head, she can hear Judy from work laughing and saying just before she left for the day, “Now, don’t pick up that escaped convict on the way home.”

Hearing her coworker’s warning on an endless loop in her mind is bizarre now that he’s squeezing her in a chokehold. The surrealness of it all equals her terror. The two mix together and make it impossible for her to decipher the words he is spouting from his lips brushing over her earlobe.

Now, the tightening on her throat increases and cuts off her oxygen, strangling the surrealness out of her, leaving only her fear.

Her complete attention awakened, she can feel every square inch of her skin, the tips of her toes, and the follicles of every hair.

“Get in the car; get out your keys.”

The words come in clear, each only slightly louder than a whisper but booming with the weight of malice.

He spent a large majority of the night before searching for an inconspicuous location. Somewhere around two in the morning he found the Riverview Family Therapy Center. Its parking lot was what cinched it for him. The brick building has no windows on its front. Each side of the parking lot has a brick wall mostly covered in vines. The front side that meets the street is also nearly completely closed in with a brick fence, barely leaving enough space for one car to exit and another to enter at the same time. Its business name is attached to the outside of the fence in unassuming metal letters.

These measures taken to protect their clients’ privacy are exactly what have made the woman, who is being choked against her car, susceptible to his attack.

Realizing he needed a place to sleep out of sight and not wanting to miss an opportunity to seize a car, he climbed the brick fence close to where it joined the side of the building. Standing atop the fence, he grabbed hold of the roof, and with some struggling, he pulled his fatigued body onto it.

Lying behind an industrial air conditioning compressor, sleep fell over him quickly until the heat of late morning started to bake his skin touching the black roof. Since he didn’t want to stand, out of fear of being seen, he had to alternate which part of his body touched the blistering roof for the rest of the day, every minute of it dense with sweating and cursing.

The heat did nothing to relieve the pressure of the mass of pepperoni and cheese in his bloated stomach, but it did add another flavor to the fury boiling in his head. By the time the parking lot had dwindled down to the last three cars, he kept catching himself muttering sharp words aloud.

Two of the cars had been there all day, except when one of them left around lunchtime only to return seventeen minutes later with bags discolored and seeping with fast food grease. The third car is what he had assumed to be the last patient.

Apparently, late Friday appointments are unpopular for both the givers and receivers of therapy, as only one of each and an office manager had remained.

The last patient’s vehicle was perfect: the most commonly sold econo-box car in the country in silver. As long as he could lunge on her and take off before the staff closed up, it was a dream for the deviant.

Now, all the hours of preparation and the urgency to quickly escape are lost on him as he stares through the opening in the brick fence at the street, trying to feel every bit of his ears as they strain to hear another sound from the rumbling, red car that has just passed.

Her knee burns.

His eyes watch the street, and hers watch his.

She flings the hot knee at him. Underestimating how tall he is, she only glances her target, but it’s enough to make him gasp.

His hold on her neck becomes loose.

Twisting her torso left and right, his fingers slip off her throat. She turns and takes one step away. The rush of this one step of freedom tantalizes her, and she’d trade all that she owns for just a few more feet of it.

Lifting her leg for the next step, strong fingers sink into the back of her arm and yank her entire body in reverse. She slams into what feels like a wall, the rear of her head whipping into his chest. Before she gains any balance, he thrusts her forward into the car. Getting her hands in front of her before crashing into the vehicle, her palms take most of the force, pain stinging into her wrists and up her arms.

“Keys now.”

The stinging in her hands is what makes her dare not do anything but obey and dig into the side pocket of her purse. With numb fingers, she pulls out the key ring.

“Open it and get in.”

As she unlocks her door, the faint sound comes to her ears of another car door slamming from a distance. She doesn’t trust her senses or her mind. The sting in her hands has rendered both of them unreliable to her.

Lifting the door handle and pulling the door open, she sees the vacant front seats and starts to cry at the vision of her being a prisoner in the passenger side.

His hand lands on her back, shoving her forcefully into the cockpit, her knees on the driver’s seat, the shifter jabbing her midsection, and her stinging hands on the passenger cushion. Although it wouldn’t have granted her much better treatment, she wishes she hadn’t backed into the spot so that she now would be entering the passenger side instead of being pushed roughly across the center console and impaled by her shifter.

“Climb across,” he says starting to put his body into the car behind her.

Dragging her knees across her center console, smashing window and sunroof buttons, she hears a rumbling sound. She looks up to see the loud car pull up to the edge of the parking lot.

The heavy lobe of the rumble rattles deeply inside Edmund’s mind. The passenger door opens. A short man with broad shoulders steps out.

“Danny, don’t do this,” pleads a brunette from the driver’s seat.

“I love you,” he says as he shuts the door and points down the street to the right of the parking lot.

The female driver watches him take two steps away, and before she can pull off, the tears run down her face.

His face is a well-defined landscape of a stern chin, defiant cheekbones, and a stare that is earnest and devoid of fear.

Edmund thinks it must be easy to be so heroic stepping out of a thundering chariot that resembles a crimson panther, wearing unstained clothes, and not carrying the biting scent of a piece of driftwood that’s been bounced in the current for hours. The young man looks to be in his early twenties and the latest edition in a long lineage of guys who drive fast cars and date beautiful women.

Edmund loathes him.

She sees the determination in his eyes, the soft look of his lips, and most importantly that he’s walking directly toward them, and she couldn’t love anyone any more at first sight.

He shouts from a distance, “Let her go, and you won’t get hurt.”

Shaking his head, still behind the opened driver’s door, his body only halfway in the car, “You’ve gotta be kidding me, boy scout. Get outta here while you still can.”

“Don’t think so. The lady doesn’t seem to want to be with you. Doesn’t seem like she likes being choked either.”

“Maybe I should try it out on you.”

“Might be a little different with me, big man.”

Edmund looks across the seat to his captive, pulling the stolen police pistol from under his shirt and out the top of his pants, “Don’t try anything stupid. This won’t take long.”

Keeping the gun hidden behind the opened door, Edmund steps completely out of the car, the smaller man now only a few yards away from the hood. Ignoring a faint click coming from the other side of the vehicle, he sees his challenger is standing on his toes with his arms loose at his sides and confidence on his face. Recognizing the traits of a grappler, Edmund pulls out his gun and fires.

Blood bursts out the man’s shoulder, and he falls to the ground.

Grinning, Edmund takes a step closer to survey the damage. Blood continues to pour out the shoulder coursing over the fingers that are pressed against it. He hears an engine running from somewhere down the street, and the urgency of the getaway floods over him.

“Damn it!” he shouts as he turns from the wounded to his way out.

Shoving the key in the ignition, he turns it roughly, and the meager engine starts a muffled hum. Throwing the car into gear, he slams the gas pedal down. The wounded on the ground begins to roll, trying in vain to get out of the way of the launching car.

Edmund’s anxiety of escape turns to a hideous smile as the car takes off.

“No!” screams out as two female hands lunge for the wheel pulling it harshly in her direction. The front driver’s tire squeals just centimeters past the head of the man on the ground only rolling over his hair.

A fast hand shoves her with force sending her crashing back to her side of the car, her hands coming immediately off the wheel. Her right shoulder lands against the door that she had opened a crack as soon as he stepped out with the gun earlier. The door swings open dumping her shoulders first onto the parking lot, her legs flinging out behind her. The opened door swings wildly.