Pursuit (3 page)

She’d stopped at a supermarket to buy candy, fruit juice, bandages, and the largest size possible of Ziploc bags. Opening one of the bags, she filled it with the first of the three plastic bottles of hydrogen peroxide she’d bought at a drugstore.

Gritting her teeth, she raised the hydrogen peroxide-filled Ziploc bag until it was slightly higher than her shoulder, leaned forward into the sink, and punctured a corner of the bag with the sharp end of the pencil the hotel provided. Immediately, a gush of liquid poured out, hissing and bubbling at contact with her skin, irrigating the wound. Charlotte wanted to scream with pain but didn’t dare. She didn’t dare do anything that would call attention to herself.

It was like being stuck through the shoulder with a red-hot poker. It actually hurt more than when she’d been shot. Then she’d been filled with adrenaline, so enraged at witnessing her father’s murder, then so panicked at realizing that Conklin was trying to kill her, too, that she’d barely felt the bullet going through.

Right now, though, it felt as if all the pain in the world had rolled into a fiery ball that had found a home in her shoulder.

Her left hand, slippery with blood, slipped on the rim of the dirty washbasin. She clenched harder, until her shaking knuckles turned white. It would have helped to use both hands to squeeze the bag, in order to increase the water pressure, but she had to hold on to the basin or fall to the floor. She filled the bag again and lifted it. The face looking back at her in the mirror was now gray, with huge beads of sweat on the forehead. Bracing herself, she irrigated the wound again, locking her jaw against the scream that tickled her throat. Again and again she filled the bag until the liquid from the wound ran pale pink in the sink instead of bright red.

The pain was blinding. Her hands and knees were shaking by the time she’d finished. Though she could barely stand up, there was more still to do.

Opening the packet of antibiotic powder for dogs, she sprinkled it liberally over the wound, hoping against hope that her physiology was close enough to that of a dog to kill the bacteria. By the time she’d finished putting packing on the wound and taping it, she was trembling so hard she could barely stand up.

There was still one thing left to do—clean up the bloody mess she’d made. Using the towels to wipe off the blood would have been stupid. Instead she used up an entire roll of toilet paper, flushing it all down the toilet.

It was possible that if some crime-scene analyst were to examine the bathroom, he’d find plenty of DNA, but Charlotte was certain that unless she did something to call attention to herself, it would be all right. Tomorrow the cleaning crew would come in with bleach and eliminate all traces.

By the time she was finished, Charlotte was exhausted and sweaty and whiter than the dirty sheets on the bed. She knew she needed some food, something warm and solid in her stomach—or even just something warm like tea or hot milk—but there was no hope of that. Going out for something was simply beyond her, not to mention the fact that if she ate another fast-food hamburger, she’d throw up. And the Crest Motor Court definitely did not run to room service. She’d chosen it specially because it was the most depressing and desolate motel she could find.

Luckily, it wasn’t far from the bathroom to the bed. She hesitated just a moment by the side of the bed, every fastidious cell in her body rebelling against lying down on the stained counterpane, but it was either lie down on a bed a thousand traveling salesmen had slept in or fall to the floor and sleep there. It was a toss-up as to which was dirtier. Charlotte turned her head on the lumpy pillow and examined the room. Faded wallpaper, scratched Formica desk, and broken-backed chair. A TV set that only caught three channels. It was almost exactly like the other four motels she’d slept in, only worse. Where was she? Somewhere in Kansas, that much she knew, though she had no idea where or what the name of the town was. It had been a long, frightening blur of Denny’s and Motel Sixes and used-car dealerships from Chicago to here. One town had blended into another. She wouldn’t even have known she was in Kansas if it hadn’t been for the big entering kansas sign.

She still didn’t have much of a plan in mind, other than staying off the interstates and moving south, away from the vast cold front that gripped the Midwest. She was so weak and feverish, she knew instinctively that staying in the midst of a record-breaking blizzard would kill her.

She didn’t want to be in Kansas. She didn’t want to be anywhere, except back at home, caring for her father.

And while she was at it, wishing for impossible things, she wished it were five years ago, instead of now. Before her mother had died in a car crash. Before her father had fallen ill. When she was young, studying art, without a care in the world.

She lay back, shaking, trying to ignore the ball of fire in her shoulder. Charlotte stared up at the ceiling, dry-eyed, too tired to cry, too weak to move.

Tonight, somehow, it took forever for the pain medication to kick in. She glanced down at her shoulder, saw a pinprick of blood, and closed her eyes briefly in despair. Blood was already seeping through. In a couple of hours, it would spread in a bright red lake over the bandages. She had to put on extra packing and stick something under her if she didn’t want the maid to find blood on the bed and possibly remember it. If the police for some reason came around to canvass hotels and motels, maids couldn’t be expected to remember the hundreds of anonymous bodies that transited through their rooms, but they could certainly remember having to clean up blood.

She had to get up.
Now
. Though her mind gave out peremptory orders, whipping her into a state of action, her body just sank deeper into the mattress.

Charlotte lay on the bed, completely hollowed out with fatigue and blood loss and despair. The dark wings of desperation fluttered in her mind.

The motel was close to the highway, and the sounds of heavy traffic filtered in from the window. It was raining so hard she could hear the hiss of the tires plowing through the water. A siren sounded in the distance. In the next room, a man and a woman were arguing, voices shrill.

You goddamned son of a bitch!
a woman’s voice in the room next door screamed, voice sharp and high with hysteria. Charlotte had never heard that raw note in a human being’s voice before.

The dull thunk of an object hitting the wall behind the bed reverberated through the room. This was a world she’d never been in before. An airless, dark world of despair. Charlotte felt like she’d fallen into a deep well, cut off from the rest of humanity, cut off from the rest of her life.

Robert Haine had done this. He’d stripped her of everything she had and everything she was. He was responsible for the death of her father and Imelda Delgado, the sweet-faced Filipina nurse who’d been so kind to her father, and he’d managed to cast the blame on her. The Courts had stood in his way, and he’d cold-bloodedly eliminated them. This was about money. It had to be. It was what motivated Robert, what made him tick. Money and sex.

He’d certainly tried hard enough to get her into his bed.

If she hadn’t been so busy looking after her father, she’d have started a campaign with the board to get rid of him. But he was a successful manager, the board members were delighted because the shares went up, and Charlotte hadn’t cared enough to mount a campaign when she was losing her father, day by day.

Now she’d lost her father forever. She hadn’t even been able to attend his funeral. One more thing Robert had taken away from her.

How could she ask for help? Robert had run amok. If he was willing to kill her father and was gunning for her, he’d be perfectly willing to hurt anyone she turned to for help. She was on her own.

She ached with pain at the loss of her father. For the very first time in her life, there was no one to turn to. And no one knew where she was.

She realized, with a start of surprise, that she’d always been . . . reachable by the people who loved her, all her life. Her parents and friends had always had a phone number. The closest she’d ever been to being out of touch was a cruise in the Caribbean two years ago, in places where her cell didn’t have coverage for a couple of hours. All her life, she’d been tied by bonds of love and affection to everyone around her. This new place she was in—barren and bereft of human contact—felt exactly like hell must feel, only cold.

Charlotte shivered, partly from the chill of the room, partly from the fever that was burning in her veins.

The fight next door was escalating. There were ominous bumps and thumps, voices raised in anger. The snatches of words she could hear were vicious. Even though she didn’t catch what they were arguing about, it didn’t matter. The tone was enough to know that it was primal and primitive. Another sharp blow to the wall so hard she could feel the vibrations. She only hoped it was an object and not the woman’s head. Charlotte couldn’t call the police or even call down to the front desk without calling attention to herself. She started at the sound of glass shattering. Perhaps a replica of the big, cheap porcelain lamp base on the desk. Suddenly, the woman’s voice wailed, notes rising in a hair-raising sound of animal despair.

They could trace 911 calls. Charlotte knew this from a thousand TV crime shows. How could she call in an emergency without—

Suddenly the raucous voices stopped and for a heartrending moment, Charlotte wondered if the woman had been knocked unconscious. Or, worse, killed.

It took her a second to recognize the sounds now coming from the room, they were so different from the sound track of violence she’d been listening to for over a quarter of an hour. Low moans, murmurs . . .

Suddenly, the bedsprings of the bed next door started creaking in a fast, regular rhythm. Soon, the headboard was banging against the wall in brutally hard slaps accompanied by grunts.

Oh, yeah, baby
, the woman moaned.
Oh yeah, give it to me.
Violent sex had replaced the violence.

For a moment, worry about the woman next door had almost made her forget about her shoulder, but the instant she realized that the woman wasn’t in danger, the pain came rushing back, like a flood that had been temporarily dammed. It was alive, the pain, like another being in the room with her.

She reached for the bottle of pain medication. Charlotte held the bottle in her good hand, turning it slowly. A normal white plastic bottle with a childproof top, colorful label, promising pain relief from toothache, migraines, and menstrual disorders.

No mention whatsoever of gunshot wounds.

She swallowed three pills dry, one after the other, and lay back, good fist clenched around the plastic cylinder, waiting with slow thuds of her heart for the pills to take effect. It occurred to her, as she held the bottle, the plastic slowly warming up in her hand, that the bottle was full. It was entirely possible that swallowing the contents of this little bottle would yield up permanent pain relief. Maybe a way out of all her troubles was right here, in a white bottle in her clenched fist.

It would be so easy, too. Much much easier than trying to tend a wound on the run, much easier than driving ten hours a day in a frantic rush away from danger and toward nothing. Charlotte dangled the plastic cylinder in front of her eyes. Even holding the bottle up—

maybe an ounce of weight—made her hand tremble. Over-the-counter medication was probably calibrated to ensure that even a full bottle would not be a suicidal dosage. But she was weak from blood loss, had no food in her stomach to absorb the medicine, and weighed much less than the average person.

It might work.

Swallow all the pills and lie back and wait for her life to drain away together with the pain. Life as she knew it was over, anyway.

Her father was dead. Robert and his goons were out there, waiting to kill her. How could she turn to the police for protection when she was wanted for murder? The evidence Robert had planted must have been very convincing for a manhunt to have been organized that quickly.

It was all too overwhelming, too horrible. The future was an unknown abyss in front of her, dark and menacing and feral.

Opening the bottle one-handed, she shook out another three pills, popped them in her mouth and swallowed them. She could feel each individual pill as it went down. Lifting herself up slightly to be able to swallow made the pain in her shoulder explode in a fierce ball of fire, and she gasped and jerked, all the pills in the bottle spilling out onto the dirty counterpane. Tears of pain sprang to her eyes. Angrily she wiped them away with the heel of her hand.

Next door there was a loud male shout, a groan, and the bed-thumping stopped. Almost immediately afterwards, there was a sharp slap, and the woman’s voice rose again. “You
bastard!
How could you?”

Well, the postcoital glow sure hadn’t lasted very long.

Charlotte stared at the ceiling. There was a crack running across it, barely visible in the meager light of the twenty-watt bulb. At one point the crack split, like a river. She stared and stared, fingering the pills, one by one. There were thirty-three of them. Enough, perhaps, for the job.

She could do it in ten swallows. Might even be pleasant—drifting lightly above the agony of her shoulder and the squalor of the motel room, feeling the pain slowly recede as the shadows drew closer. Drifting softly, gently, on waves taking her far far away. And at the end, peace.