I quit struggling and stared. Heather Locklear, my ass. She had a pancake face to go with her syrupy voice. If you scraped off her makeup and stripped her of her Wonderbra, she would have been lucky to resemble Lassie. And twenty years old? Spare me. Maybe in Gabor years. She was pushing thirty if she was a day.
“Who’s this?” she asked, draping an arm over Bill’s shoulder and smiling sweetly at me. When it comes to marking territory, women can’t piss as easily as men. We tend to cling instead. Which was why she was hanging on him like a lamprey eel who’s snagged a ride on a fifty-pound sturgeon. cundve a da
“I’m his wife,” I told her, pushing past them both. I wasn’t worried about Bill’s reaction. What could he do? Belt me in front of her?
“Your wife?” she asked, her sugary voice cracking.
“She’s kidding,” Bill said in panic.
“No, I’m not,” I assured her. Good god. The living room stopped me cold. He had vacuumed the rug so that the nap all lay in one direction, and there were so many lit candles that I kept looking around for the coffin to go with them. “Expecting a vampire?” I asked.
“Looks like one just got here,” his date shot back, grabbing a fluffy pink sweater that had, I swear by all that is tacky, a teddy bear with sequins embroidered on it. She shouldered past Bill and flounced down the stairs, her high heels making angry little clicks as she milked her exit for all it was worth.
“Sorry about that,” I said, sitting down at the cozy dining-table and pulling a plate full of spaghetti toward me. Naturally, his date had been the type to only pick at her food. She’d barely nibbled at the meatballs. No sense letting good food go to waste.
Bill stared at me from the doorway, speechless.
“This is pretty good,” I admitted. “Your mother’s recipe?”
“Get out of my apartment,” he said grimly. He pointed outside like the proverbial father casting his daughter into the blizzard, little bastard and all.
“Look, Bill, I’m sorry.” And truly, read my lips, I was. “But you weren’t taking me seriously. I really do need your help. I think someone is following me and I have to get back to Durham. They found the bodies of two cops who used to work with Roy Taylor. They’re dead. People are starting to listen to me. I have an appointment I have to keep. I can’t afford another incident. If we take Alexander Drive, we can be in Durham in twenty minutes, and you could be back here in an hour. Please.”
He slammed the door behind him, stalked to the table and sat down across from me. He looked mean leaning toward me in the candlelight, mean and determined and, let’s face it, rather gorgeous. I hate to admit it, but I found it kind of exciting. But now was not the time to let my mind wander.
“Casey,” he said in a calm voice that made me more nervous than an angry one might have, “let’s just admit it. You’re losing your shit on this case. You’re in over your head. You’re a little confused. You’re letting your personal feelings get in the way of your job. And you’ve been paranoid for over a week now.”
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“I didn’t imagine my car wreck last weekend.”
He pulled the plate of spaghetti away from me, then snatched away the bread sticks, too. “You said it was probably that bartender you had fired, and I don’t think he’d be dumb enough to stick around for an encore.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “There is a truck following me. I saw it. And I resent the implication that I invented an excuse to butt in on your hot date with Miss Pork Rind of 1936.”
He ignored the slur. “This is why I don’t like working with women,” he told me. “You let your emotions interfere with your judgment.” He stopped me when I started to protest. “I’m not saying you aren’t truly convinced that someone has been following you. I’m sure your fear is genuine. I’m only saying that it’s common to have fears like that after you’ve been in an accident. I’ve had the same reaction myself after I’ve been shot. I keep expecting it to happen again and I look over my shoulder for weeks. But the difference between an amateur and a professional is that a professional acknowledges that what he is feeling is simply a reaction to the earlier incident.” He finished up his tidy little speech by munching on a bread stick. “And thanks for ruining my date,” he added.
“I don’t give a shit about your date,” I said. “I care about saving my ass.” But an odd feeling was spreading over me like an unstoppable infection. I was starting to doubt myself. The tiniest seeds of self-doubt had been planted and taken root. I suspect it’s happened to most women. It can begin when your friend’s husband puts his hand on the small of your back. At first, you don’t even notice it’s happening. You suppress it, unwilling to acknowledge the intrusion into your reality. But then the hand moves a crucial few inches and cannot be ignored. So you tell yourself that you’re the one misinterpreting events, that, really, you must have a dirty mind to think that such a nice man would put the moves on you. Finally, when the destination of that creepy, crawling hand becomes inescapable, you leap over the fact that some asshole is trying to use you and instead immediately blame yourself. You begin to ask, “What did I do to lead him on?” and damn if you don’t find some excuse to blame yourself.
I don’t know when and how women are programmed to react in such a way, I only know we are and that it happened to me. Simply by throwing the words “professional” and “emotion” around, Bill Butler managed to convince me I was a hysterical female who seriously needed to get a grip if I wanted to be considered an equal to men.
“Thanks for your help,” I said stiffly, confidence fleeing and something akin to embarrassment taking its place. I grabbed a bread stick. Too bad it wasn’t a nightstick. I would have loved to beat him over the head with it.
“Look, don’t be sore at me,” he had the nerve to say. “I’m not going to hold it against you for ruining my date with a gorgeous woman.”
“Please,” I said. “She was gorgeous all right—before they invented electricity.”
“Come on, Casey,” he said, still trying to placate me, “maybe her brain’s a little rusty from underuse, but she’s not that bad-looking. It’s not a big deal, anyway. She’s just someone I’m seeing.”
“You mean just someone you’re sleeping with?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Just trying to keep in practice until you come around.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Well, you can keep on practicing until you get it so perfect your pecker falls off, because I am never coming around. I’ve got you figured out. The way you talk about that woman tells me everything.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “And what exactly is it that you think you’ve figured out about me?”
“That you’re one of those guys who likes a woman until she sleeps with him, and then you decide you really don’t like her after all, because what woman in her right mind would want to sleep with your sorry ass.”
“Well, thank you for stopping by, Dr. Ruth,” he retorted.
“It’s true,” I warned him, actually waggling a finger, which is something I seldom do unless I am royally pissed off. “It makes it easier for you to throw women away like yesterday’s trash. And that is why you’re mad at me. Because I won’t go ahead and sleep with you, so that you can go ahead and decide you don’t like me. I’ve spoiled your plans for a three-minute relationship. That is exactly why you have been acting like such a jerk to me.”
“That is not why I have been acting like such a jerk to you,” he said.
“Aha!” I said triumphantly. “So now you admit you’ve been a jerk to me.”
“I am not,” he protested. “And stop saying ‘aha!’”
“Aha, aha, aha,” I answered maturely. “In fact: ahahahahaha.” I ended up laughing like the hysterical female he had envisioned, but sometimes a girl’s got to take a stand and just let it fly.
“Fine,” he said with an elaborately casual shrug. “Go ahead and laugh at me, if it makes you feel any better.”
“Go ahead and send me out there alone so some maniac can follow me, if it makes you feel better,” I shot back as I headed for the door.
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“Yeah,” he replied sarcastically. “I’m really worried about you, Casey. You just can’t seem to take care of yourself. All those bodies lying in your wake are one big coincident.”
He followed me to the door in an effort to land one more dart on my hide. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll watch from the balcony while you walk back to your car,” he offered sweetly. “If you’re being followed, I can rush to your rescue. I may even leap from the balcony with a single bound.”
“You do that,” I told him acidly. “Watch for me very carefully. I’m sure it’ll make me feel tons better.”
I stomped down the steps, angry at myself, angry at him and unsure if I really was a hysterical female or just a plain old moron. When I got to the car, I saw Bill watching me from the balcony. Patronizing jerk. I shot him the bird, and, you know, having him watch did make me feel tons better.
I felt even better when I noticed his date sitting in her car a few spaces down, spying. I rolled down the window as I passed and called out, “He’s a great guy. Except for the herpes.”
Immature—but worth it.
Traffic had thinned by the time I reached Alexander Drive and broke free of the stoplights on Highway 70. I had checked the rearview mirror carefully for the past three miles but spotted no one on my tail. Annoyed that Bill had been right after all, I took a left and accelerated down the empty road, watching the speedometer climb to a satisfying seventy miles per hour. The official speed limit was half that, but there was no other traffic, and I’d never seen a cop patrolling Alexander Drive in my life. Besides, the road cut straight through the heart of the Research Triangle Park, and it was completely deserted at night. The Park is a 36,000 acre state-sponsored business zone filled with top-secret medical research facilities, software manufacturers, telecommunications companies and other less definable and sometimes downright scary operations. Not even the burglars bothered with the Park at night—security was too tight. Each facility was surrounded by acres of undeveloped woodland with access typically limited to a single entrance road blocked by a manned guard booth. They didn’t screw around with rent-a-cops, either; most of the guards looked like moonlighting Green Berets. I passed by several buildings at top speed, their lights soon a blur behind me.
I was three miles into the park when, inches from my tail, four bright headlights blazed on without warning. The high beams cut through the back window and bounced off the rearview mirror into my eyes. A strident horn sounded and the Cutlass was bumped from behind, forcing me to the opposite side of the road. Son of a bitch. The truck was back, and its headlights had been adjusted to glare upward where they could do the most damage. A set of illegal spotlights, often used by deer hunters in defiance of law, were mounted beneath the truck’s headlights. Together, they completely blinded me. Between the lights and the roar of its powerful engine, the truck’s sudden appearance was like having a UFO appear on my tail car ad unexpectedly—powerful, terrifying and unknown.
I stomped on the gas pedal and downshifted, praying that Bobby’s boasts about his engine had not been idle. I could feel the torque kick in and the heavy car pulled away. I leaned forward as if I was riding a horse, urging the Cutlass to go even faster. I took deep breaths, hoping to quell my panic, as I calculated how far I had before we reached the Durham Thruway. There, heavy traffic would make it impossible for my attacker to run me off the road without being seen—and I didn’t think he would try in front of witnesses. I still had at least five more miles to go and I was determined to make it. Behind me, in the rearview mirror, the four high beams faded as I put distance between us. But then they began to grow large and bright again as the truck’s driver recovered from the surprise of the Oldsmobile’s speed and accelerated in response. Damn, the truck was fast. It was making up my advantage quickly. I’d never make it to the thruway in time.
Up ahead, I saw the lights of a building through the trees on my right. It was a research facility for a huge French-based pharmaceutical conglomerate and the only company accessible by Alexander Drive for several more miles. I’d be protected there. But I slowed too late and passed the entrance road before I spotted its turn-off. The well-lit guardhouse was a blur as I sped past and swore, trying frantically to come up with another plan.
I made a decision. I slammed on the brakes and the Cutlass fishtailed across two lanes, nearly flipping over on the concrete median that now divided the road. I fought to regain control until the heavy car found its center of weight. I wrestled it to a stop beside the side of the road and cut the lights. With any luck, my pursuer would speed past before he realized what I had done. That would give me time to cut back through the half mile of woods on foot. I could reach the guardhouse and ask the guard to call for help before my attacker figured out what was happening. I knew I’d be safe once I reached light and civilization. Whoever my assailant was, he was anxious to keep his identity a secret.
The truck lights were approaching at a rapid speed. I sat in the darkness of the car, holding my breath, not daring to open the door until the truck zoomed past. I was certain the interior lights would give me away. I rolled across the front seat, grabbed the magnum from the glove compartment and waited as the truck drew closer. It whooshed past at full speed, engine whining from effort.
I opened the door and threw myself onto the shoulder of the road, ready to hit the ground running. Damnit. The driver had spotted the light in his rearview mirror. As I heard the screech of brakes, I ran for the woods without stopping to shut the car door behind me. Jumping over a drainage ditch by the side of the road, I landed badly. Pain shot through my ankle, but I could still run—and run I did. Like hell.