Forster, Suzanne (7 page)

"What'd she call you?"

"Satan."

Her throat burned with smothered laughter. "Your mom and I should talk. "

Suddenly her forehead felt itchy and she rubbed it against his collar bone as languidly as a cat who was angling to be stroked. The stinging sensation she felt told her the sun had struck again. She was going to have little splotches of sunburn to go with her little blotches of nail polish.

He made an odd sound, as if he were clearing his throat. She liked that sound, almost as much as she liked the hard, steady thump of his heart. She'd never been around a man who seemed so completely immune to her and preferred it that way. It intrigued her.

"About how much longer?" she asked him conversationally. "Any chance there's an oasis on the way?" She had already decided to take his silence as an affirmation. Might as well think positive under the circumstances. It was possible he was nodding.

As he forged onward, her thoughts began to stray again, creating fanciful associations with the situation. Being carried like a child drew her back to the early years of her life, the sordid years before her mother married Lake Featherstone, Sr. Oddly what she remembered most vividly were the soiled rugs—crawling across them as a toddler, playing with her dolls on them as a grade schooler. Threadbare and dirty, varying little from one fleabag apartment to another, those carpets had been one of the few constants of her young life.

Her other strongest recollection was of abject loneliness. Her mother had worked nights in a restaurant, and she'd rarely come home until dawn. Too fearful to sleep, Gus had kept the lights on and the TV running all night, but it was the picture books an elderly woman in the next apartment had given her that had held back the darkness and kept the monsters at bay. Fairy tales had been Gus's salvation.

Embarrassed as she would have been to admit it now, she'd lost herself in fantasies of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella, identifying especially with the last one. She
was
Cinderella. She was every lonely, neglected young girl who had ever dreamed of being rescued by a dashing prince.

Even after her mother's marriage, the fantasy of being rescued had sustained her through the troubled years with her stepsiblings. She'd eventually realized that no one rides to anyone's rescue unless there's something in it for them. Life had made her a hardheaded realist. But now, with the sun so hot and her thoughts so fuzzy, she could almost imagine herself being cradled in her rescuer's arms, being swept up and carried off to some glorious new existence, a fairy tale life, except that she was bound and blindfolded, and the man carrying her off was
anything
but a prince....

"This is it, " he announced.

The kidnapper's harsh words intruded on Gus's reveries. "This is what?" she asked.

"The spa I told you about. We're here. "

He tilted her until her feet made contact with a smooth, hard, hot surface, and then he began to untie her blindfold. Gus could feel him working at the knot. When the bandanna finally fell off, she blinked to clear her vision. If the sun hadn't been blinding her, she would have sworn she was staring at a mountain of rotted wood, rusted tailings, and chicken wire. "Where is it?" she asked.

She stood on a piece of granite that apparently served as the front porch, but the heap didn't look any better up close.

"Go on in," he said.

"Does it have a door?"

He kicked a column of wood that resembled window shutters. As the thing swung forward, Gus stared into the guts of what must have been a dilapidated mining shack from a much earlier era.

"Oh, my God!" she screamed as she stepped inside. The kidnapper had crowded in behind her, and she slammed up against him in her effort to back out the door. "Lizards, look at them! Millions of them!"

The tiny creatures scuttled in every direction.

"They don't bite," he assured her mordantly.

"No, but that thing does!" Gus plowed into him again, letting out a shriek loud enough to rock the shack. There was a rattler coiled not four feet away from her, and the glare of its horrible iridescent eyes pierced her courage like an icy shaft of steel.

As the snake began to slowly unwind, Gus froze solid. She couldn't move. Her coat had fallen open, but she couldn't summon the strength to close it. All she could do was whimper. She was terrified of snakes as she was of nothing else in life. She had fought valiantly to get her childhood fears under control, but she had never been able to conquer the one she was staring at now.

Riveted by the evil creature, she pressed up against her captor. "Let me out, " she whispered. "Please,
please!"

The snake flashed into the air, and Gus shrieked again.

Its twitching tail sent up an obscenely familiar sound, the death rattle. The reptile swayed toward her with a searing hiss. Its forked tongue slithered repulsively.

"You have a gun," she cried wildly, jerking at his chambray shirt "Shoot it!
Kill
it!"

Gus closed her eyes and turned her face into his chest, steeling herself for the gun shot. When nothing happened, she reared back and looked up at him. Her fists had wadded his shirt into sodden clumps. "Shoot it, " she pleaded weakly. "Why don't you shoot it?"

"If you'd stay cool," he said, "it might just slither away. "

But she couldn't. Cool wasn't an option for Gus. She'd been terrorized by snakes, literally locked up in a pit with the vile creatures when she was a child, and she couldn't even think about one without shuddering in revulsion. Swaying in his arms, she felt the bile rise up in her throat. She was either going to be sick all over him or faint.

The death rattle burst into her consciousness. She turned back just as the snake lunged at her, its fangs bared. Horrified she watched the whiplike blur of motion, but could do nothing to save herself. It was a silver spear of death flying straight for her bare leg!

A silver spear of death with an exploding head!

The kick from the gun rocked up the kidnapper's arm and reverberated through Gus's body. She wrenched away from him and turned to the wall, shutting out the gruesome scene. "What kind of man are you?" she whimpered. "That thing could have killed me! If you'd missed, if you'd taken one second more to shoot, it would have been too late!"

When he didn't answer, she glanced at him over her shoulder.

He was staring at the floor in front of him with a look of barely suppressed irony. "Seems I
was
too late, " he said.

There was a puddle in front of him, in exactly the place where she'd been standing. As she gazed at the wet spot and up at him, Gus realized she didn't have to go to the bathroom anymore.

Chapter 5

Huddled on the shack's only bed, a sagging metal cot propped up in the corner against the front wall, Gus picked at what hot-pink polish was left on her toenails and stared fixedly at a patch of dry rot on the diseased wooden floor. She was suffering post-traumatic shock. That was the only way to explain her unnatural interest in decomposing inorganic matter. It was easier to watch the floor disintegrate than her life. Stranger still, the blight appeared to be eating away a sizable portion of the wood planks even as she watched.

Some spa, she thought. This was not in the brochure.

Lizards haunted her peripheral vision, shimmying up and down the walls, their tails twitching like tiny green whips. Flies darted through the broken side window, madly buzzing the tiny spot where she'd ignominiously wet the floor and the larger one where the snake had lain before the kidnapper removed it.

Absently Gus began to count flies as they performed their aerial acrobatics and made their precision landings.

She reached a number in the high two digits before revulsion shuddered through her. Counting insects? She really was losing it. If Frances Brightly were here, she'd be swatting and stamping with a vengeance. Everyone was terrified of the housekeeper, which was why she'd become Gus's role model in the impressionable years after Gus's mother had disappeared. Even now, when Gus forgot how to be tough, she asked herself what Frances would have done.

"Frances would have shot herself, " she mumbled, surveying the horrors of her one-room cell. The shack's interior and exterior were virtually indistinguishable. The whole place was crumbling, dust to dust as the Bible said, though that process had sounded poetic, and this was anything but. There was a grimy kitchen sink of sorts, a wood-stove, and a strangely decorative bistro table made of rusted wrought iron.

There was also a grand total of two chairs, one lying on its side with a broken leg, the other an ancient rocker, carved with what might have been Native American designs. The rocker had appeared to be the cleanest thing in the place, so Gus had gingerly dusted it off and draped her bikini bottom over the back to dry, after rinsing the suit out in brick-red tap water.

The side wall nearest her had no windows, but a curtained alcove Gus couldn't quite see bore some resemblance to a closet. She didn't even want to think about what might be lurking inside the rusty metal cabinet that stood against the back wall. One of its doors was ominously ajar, but nothing could have induced her to look.

Hiding her face in her drawn-up knees, she let out a groan of despair that came straight from the heart. She was trapped here, in this pigsty of a lizard farm, at the mercy of a man who preferred reptiles to humans and sex with corpses.

How would anyone ever find her?

A
moan penetrated her shellshocked state. Several more followed, low-pitched and guttural but every bit as agonized. She lifted her head cautiously and looked around. What in the world? The sounds had come from nearby, from outside. If someone was hurt, it had to be him. There was no one else out here but the two of them. Gus had a mental picture of him lying in the sand, half-dead of sunstroke, or fatally bitten by something. The desert was full of poisonous creatures—tarantulas, scorpions, and the snakes he so loved.

A moment later she was peering out through broken slats of the boarded front window. There was nothing to be seen for miles, except a blazing sea of white sand studded with creosote bushes and blue-gray sage. Her first impression was one of barren emptiness, a wasteland, but that awareness gradually gave way to a sense of vastness.

The shack seemed to be situated in a huge, quiet basin that swept toward a moonscape of sand dunes in the distance. Beyond the dunes a range of velvet mountains in violet and magenta rose against the cobalt sky. There wasn't a cloud on the horizon. Not even a hint of haze to subdue the dense, vibrant tones.

The panoramic view was as startling to behold as the eerie silence was to absorb. It gave Gus the feeling of boundless space and unlimited natural power. Her modeling assignments had taken her all over the world, but only the Alps in Europe had left her with a similar sense of wonder at Nature's primacy. For a moment she allowed herself to simply stare and be transported by the scene. It was the last thing she'd expected to see.

From somewhere nearby, wood creaked plaintively, as if it were splintering. Another low groan startled Gus out of her reverie. A shadow fell across the sand in front of the shack, rippling grotesquely and bringing frightening things to mind. It looked like a body twisting in the wind.

"My God," she murmured when she saw what had created the effect.

A man was hanging by his arms from an exposed beam that jutted out beyond the roof of the shack. She couldn't see his face from her vantage point. It was hidden by his arms, but she knew who he was, who he had to be. Her jailer. Blue jeans were the only thing covering his body, and it was one of the most startling spectacles she'd ever seen. He was sheened with sweat, and it looked as if he might be trying to hoist himself up onto the roof. But just the sight of him that way—shirtless and straining—was enough to make her wonder what kind of physical activity gave a man stomach muscles of corrugated iron.

Gus had never seen such savagely etched muscle definition. It was as if every sinew had been hewn through painful effort. He was powerful by any standard, undeniably brawny and virile, yet without the bulk of a weight lifter. But that was only part of what had drawn her attention. He was also riddled with scars—bullet holes, unless she was mistaken.

She watched in silence, marveling as he strained toward the beam, then lowered himself. His stomach muscles sucked in violently and one of his legs kicked up reflexively. But it wasn't until he dropped an arm to his side and hauled himself up again that she realized what was going on. He'd apparently been at this for a good long time already, and whether he meant it to be exercise or self-torture, she didn't know, but now he was struggling to lift the weight of his body with the strength of just one arm.

His neck muscles seemed about to burst as he dragged himself upward. Gus didn't think he was going to make it, and she could barely stand to watch. Sweat poured off him, and the veins in his arm distended grotesquely. Even his leg muscles were knotted, and yet somehow his struggle was mesmerizing, as beautiful as it was horrible. The sun had turned him to gold and set him on fire. His body seemed to steam in the desert heat.

Gus wanted to shout at him to stop, but she didn't dare. This wasn't exercise. It was something else, something deeply private, a ritual that made her think of purification rites or religious absolution. But if this was penance for his sins, it frightened her to think what they might be. What could a man like him have done that he believed deserved this kind of self-inflicted punishment?

A moment later he dropped to the ground, landing heavily on his knees. His clenched fists and closed eyes spoke of his brute determination to contain whatever he was feeling—the emotion, the physical pain. The anguish carved into his features made her want to shrink away from the window.

When he looked up moments later, she ducked back, her heart zinging into her throat. He would never want her to see him this way, hurting and vulnerable, and the last thing she wanted was to embarrass him. She had no doubt that he was capable of anything, including venting his frustration on her if he was provoked enough.