No Going Back (10 page)

She had no conception of time. She did not know how long it had been since she was placed in this coffin and left to stew in her own juices; she did not know if her captors were ever going to release her. Only the fact that they hadn’t fully concealed her prison gave her some hope.

But if they were coming back for her, that gave her a new sense of urgency. If she was ever going to escape and bring help for Nicole and the girl, then she needed to do something quick.

Earlier she’d screamed and pleaded, then demanded that she be released; now she held her peace, because she did not want to face the men again. Fancifully she’d thought of them as characters from
The Wizard of Oz
, but twisted into evil caricatures. The brainless idiot with the yellow hair could only be the Straw Man. The cold and heartless cowboy, he was the Tin Man. The third one, squat and ugly, was the Wizard himself. He was a sham, a fake, but worse than that: something evil and demented lurked beyond the curtain he hid behind. What did that leave her: the Cowardly Lion? She joked about living dangerously, but up until now she hadn’t shown that she was prepared to do so. She needed to get a grip, she realised, grow some balls as her dad would say, and get them all out of here.

Lying on her back, bound as she was, she could achieve nothing. But that was only an excuse.

She looked at one of the pinpricks of light, and then twisted on to her side so that she could probe the hole in the tin with a fingertip. Her fingers were almost numb, but she could feel a burr of sharp metal. It was corroded and brittle but would it be enough?

Jay rocked sideways, then allowed herself to roll over on to her belly. The position severely limited any hope of offering resistance if her captors returned for her, but there was nothing else for it. With the pressure off her ropes she was able to manipulate her arms and she drew in some of the slack until it was bunched next to her right fist. She began rubbing the rope against the metal burr, taking it easy, though desperate to move faster, so that she didn’t break it off. Perspiration flooded from her hair, streamed down her face and invaded her eyes. She squeezed her lids tight, because there was no need of vision at that moment.

While she laboured, struggling for each breath, she recalled what happened after she was brought to this place in the desert, though the memories boiled through her mind in an incoherent jumble. She had to concentrate before she could bring them into order.

The teenaged girl was carried from Jay’s dad’s SUV by the young man with blond hair, Brent. She remembered his name with a stab of revulsion. She was led by the gargoyle, both her wrists enclosed in one big hand. While she was pushed towards a decrepit wooden shack, she squirmed round, looking for Nicole. Her friend was unconscious and lying over the lanky cowboy’s shoulder as he strode from the pick-up towards an equally decrepit house half-concealed beyond a zephyr of dusty air. ‘Nicole!’

Her captor’s spare hand clamped hard over her mouth, muffling her next yell as he rasped in her ear. ‘Make another sound and I assure you it will be a scream of pain.’

Jay peered about frantically, wondering why his warning had been so explicit. Was it because they were in earshot of a neighbouring property? She doubted that very much. All she could see beyond the ill-kept homestead were wind-scoured mountains and strangely shaped rock formations. To think the beauty of the desert was what had brought her and Nicole out here in the first place. Now all it denoted was a barren hellscape. As though the man had read her mind, he said, ‘There’s no one within twenty miles of here. I just don’t like people shouting round me. Screams I’m fine with.’

He forced her to the shack and through the door. Inside was even shabbier than the disintegrating boards outside. It was dark, although strips of light punched through chinks in the walls allowing a strobe-like perusal of the interior. It smelled dry and musty, underlain by the bitter tang of corroding metal. Old tools and implements hung from the wall at the far end and a large wooden bench dominated the centre of the space. Rusting chains hung from worm-holed beams, from which dangled dusty cobwebs. Another chain lay in a loose coil on the floor, attached to one of the sturdy bench legs, large steel bolts fixing it to the wood. At one end was a half-moon of thick leather, hinged where it met the chain link. Jay’s vision fixed on it and she began to shake her head furiously.

Her captor spun her, slapping her hard across the face with a hand that was as hard as steel, and she almost blacked out. While she slumped at the knees, the man danced round her and hauled the chain off the floor. Jay felt the two horns of leather clasp round her throat, forming a tight collar. Before she could pull free, the man snapped some kind of hasp shut and secured it with a padlock.

When he stood back from her Jay wilted, going all the way down to the floor as her hands came to the collar. Within the leather she could feel iron: no way on earth could she pull it free.

‘I need to go and help with your friends, Nicole and Ellie. Be good, do as you’re told, and maybe I’ll bring you food and water. The choice is yours.’

With that ominous warning, the man had walked out without a look back. Jay knew why: he had no immediate interest in her. But was he as engrossed with Nicole and Ellie as his two crazy friends? She thought not. His gaze fell on them with a different hunger.

The night had been long in coming.

Jay tested her bonds but they were solid. She thought about demolishing the bench, but it resisted her efforts. The chain was old but strong. She couldn’t reach any of the tools on the wall. Finally she’d fallen asleep on the warped floorboards as insects and rodents scuttled among the filth.

A scream woke her.

‘Nicole!’ she’d yelled in response, because her friend’s howl had been tinged with terror. ‘Nicole?
Nicole?
’

There was no reply and all went quiet again.

Panting she’d crouched on the floor, pulling futilely on the chain where it was bolted to the bench. She rubbed the skin raw on her palms. But she kept on tugging.

What in God’s name was happening in the house? She didn’t want to imagine the scene but she couldn’t help it: Nicole writhing in agony beneath the beasts as they tore off her clothing and invaded her most private places.

When she heard Ellie scream she vomited on the floor.

‘No . . . no . . . no . . .’

She’d wept.

She woke up without any awareness of having slept. Daylight poked tremulous fingers through the chinks in her prison walls. In darkness she’d been spared much of her prison’s appearance, and now she would have preferred for night to fall again. In this weird half-light she was reminded of a haunted house, and every shifting shadow, every creak of wood or shuffling animal became a demonic creature coming to drag her down to hell.

A plate with some scraps of meat and beans sat on the floor next to her. A spoon had been thrust into the food. There was a chipped jar containing water. A bucket so she could go to the toilet. She resisted them all, until thirst won out and she gulped down the tepid water. It was only after downing the water that she realised that, at some point in the night, one of the monsters had come to her. She’d lain there oblivious while he’d stood over her. The thought made her skin crawl.

She again fought her chain, with less success than before. Her palms became a mass of weeping blisters. She wept too.

She must have slept again because the next thing she knew the gargoyle was back. He grabbed at her hands, inspected them with an angry expression. He struck her in the face again. ‘You are an ungrateful bitch. I tried to make you as comfortable as possible, and this is how you’ve repaid me?’

‘Please? Why are you doing this to us? You have to let us go.’

He struck her again, using his curled fist to jab her under the ribs. Jay collapsed on the floor, her arms wrapped around the scalding white heat in her body. Never in her life had she been hurt in such a way. But it was only the start. His fingers dug under her ribs again, probing at the point where her liver nestled, and if she thought that the punch was awful she had to think again. Not that she could string a coherent sentence together, and managed only a groan of agony that had her lips buzzing.

Next the man moved to her neck. She tried to pull away but there was no strength in her. He unlocked the leather collar from her throat, but it was no relief, because in the next instant he’d spanned her neck and sunk his fingertips into the nerves under her ears. Pain jabbed to the tip of her jaw and she drooped in his grip. The man adjusted his hand and now his fingers dug into her carotid arteries. Thankfully she did not experience pain this time, only the billowing black wings of a vulture fluttering through her mind.

When next she opened her eyes she was lying in the wooden coffin set in the desert floor and all three men were standing over her. Each held aloft a tin sheet and a chain. They were talking amongst themselves but she couldn’t make out their words. Someone was wailing and at first she thought it was Nicole or the girl.

‘Shut up!’

Blinking up at the trio of ogres standing over her, she realised the command had been snapped at her. She was the source of the wailing. She shut up, tried to lift her arms to plead with them but found her wrists had been bound beneath the small of her back. She tried to sit up.

Brent leaned into the box and forced her down with a boot heel.

‘Do not move, goddamnit!’

Jay opened her mouth to beg, but knew that these pitiless monsters would only punish her for it.

‘We can’t trust you to stay put in the shack,’ the cowboy said, adjusting his hat with the swipe of his wrist. The chain dangling from his fist rattled like a viper’s warning. ‘So we’re moving you here. Now, if you prove yourself, then perhaps we’ll let you out. But—’

The gargoyle interjected, ‘Try to escape and I’ll do worse to you than you’ve already suffered.’

Carson – that was the cowboy’s name she recalled – chuckled at his friend’s bluntness. ‘By God, Samuel! Say it like it is, why don’t ya?’

‘She’s got to learn to behave,’ he said as though talking about a naughty schoolgirl.

The tin sheets had been piled on top, sealing her in, and Jay lay in stunned silence as the chains locked her in position. Her mind was in a state of close-down. Shock, she realised.

Only when the faint strains of screaming filtered into her prison did she vocalise her terror, but this time on behalf of her friend and young Ellie.

Perhaps it was her screaming that overtaxed her, because she’d drifted then into Stygian darkness and had known nothing until waking, disoriented and bewildered, this morning.

Now, with those memories pulsing in her skull with each beat of her heart, she rubbed the rope on the shard of tin, growing ever more furious at her own ineptitude as for the third time she heard the screams of terror drifting on the desert wind.

12

I found the landscape stunning and surreal at the same time. A breeze was cutting across the valley from the north-east, causing a blanket of umber sand to obscure much of the first hundred feet or so at the bases of the mountains. From the low vantage of my GMC their crowns seemed to grow from the billowing dust, huge edifices sculpted by the elements. They had to be ancient ranges, now stripped of their outer shells that lay in a jumble of boulders at their feet displaying their immortal hearts. Strata laid down during different epochs banded the cliffs in myriad colours and textures the likes of which an artist could never conceive. Further to the north was what the Navajo had termed the Painted Desert: if this little-known area was anything to judge by, then that Mecca for tourists must have been truly remarkable.

Scott Blackstock had given me directions to the Logan homestead, but had also said that he’d never been there so couldn’t describe its layout. Apparently there was only one road in and out, but I detected dozens of minor trails leading through the hills, in older times probably traversed on horseback or foot. I suppose he was referring to an actual highway, because other than the compressed dirt I currently drove over there were no maintained roads. I was off the beaten track: a term that held significance here.

Since leaving the highway, I’d travelled the best part of twenty miles and knew that soon enough I’d have to abandon my vehicle. Not that I couldn’t drive all the way in, but I didn’t want to announce my arrival to the Logans. If indeed they had anything to do with the disappearance of the women, I wanted to discover that without them being aware of my presence. If there was nothing untoward then I’d leave them be. They sounded like arseholes, the type I normally went up against, but I couldn’t indulge myself while the women were still missing.

Two miles out from their ranch, I drove the GMC into a steep gulley that was hidden from view to anyone on the road below. I left the keys in the ignition. I wasn’t thinking about a quick getaway at the time, just being pragmatic. Should I never return to the vehicle, at least someone else might get some use out of it.

Taking a bearing off the sun, I headed due west, choosing to move steadily instead of jogging in. The water was a heavy weight in a rucksack on my back, but I’d secreted my weapons about my person. Within seconds I was lathered in perspiration, and glad that I’d driven here without the aid of the GMCs’ air-con, because I was at least part-way acclimatised to the oppressive heat. Stepping out of a chilled vehicle into this temperature I’d have possibly keeled over in a dead faint. It wasn’t quite Death Valley but near enough.