Jess looked toward the window. The curtains were parted, the light from the street filling the room with ghosts and shadows. Maybe someone would see inside. Maybe someone was watching them now. Maybe if she could just keep Rick Ferguson talking, if she could somehow distract him long enough to get to the window. … And then what? Jump? Scream? A scream could only travel so far against a loaded gun. She almost laughed: tomorrow was the day she was supposed to learn how to disarm a would-be assailant. Tomorrow—not much chance of that.
Her forehead grew wet with perspiration, the sweat dripping into her eyes, mingling with her tears. The light from the street lamps blurred, spinning out in all directions like a spotlight, blinding her, like the sun. She thought she heard voices from somewhere outside, but the voices were distorted, like a record being played on the wrong speed. Too slow. Everything too slow. A scene from a movie filmed in slow motion, happening to someone else. So, this was how Connie must have felt, Jess thought. This was what death felt like.
“I thought Don put you on a plane to California,” she heard herself say, as if she were an actress and her lines were being dubbed by someone else.
“Yeah. Generous of him, wasn’t it? But I decided California could wait a few days. I knew how bad you wanted to see me. Take off your sweater.”
He said it so casually, the words didn’t quite register.
“What?”
“Take off your sweater,” he repeated. “And your pants too, while you’re at it. The fun’s about to start.”
Jess shook her head, feeling a word dislodge itself from her throat, tumble out of her mouth. It hit the air, barely audible. “No.”
“No? Did you say no?” He laughed. “Wrong answer, Jess.”
She felt as if she were already naked, standing exposed before him, and she shivered with the sudden cold. She imagined his hands pinching her flesh, his mouth biting her breasts, his body pounding cruelly into hers. He would hurt her, she knew, make sure she suffered before she died. “I won’t do it,” she heard herself say.
“Then I’ll have to shoot you.” He shrugged, as if this were the only logical alternative.
Jess’s heart was beating so furiously, it threatened to burst out of her chest. Like in
Alien
, she thought, amazed her mind could focus on such trivia. She felt as if she was burning up, then was suddenly ice-cold again. How could he be so calm? What was going on behind the opaque brown eyes that gave away nothing. “You’ll shoot me anyway,” she said.
“Well, no. Actually, I was planning on using my hands to finish you off. But I’ll shoot you if I have to.” His smile grew, his eyes slithering across her body, like an army of tiny snakes. “In the shoulder. Or maybe the knee. Maybe in the soft part of your inner thigh. Yeah, I kind of like that. Just enough to make you a little more cooperative.”
Jess felt the sting of the bullet pierce the flesh of her thigh, though she knew he hadn’t fired. She could barely stand for the shaking in her legs. Her stomach cramped, threatened to humiliate her further. If she could just keep him talking, she thought. Isn’t that what they always did in the movies? They talked, and then someone came along just in the nick of time to rescue them. She pushed words out of her mouth. “You shoot, and it’ll alert the neighbors.”
He was unimpressed. “Think so? Didn’t look like there was anybody home when I got here. Now, take off your clothes or I’m liable to get bored, and when I get bored, my lovemaking tends to get a bit rough.”
Oh God, Jess thought. Oh God, oh God, oh God.
“How did you get in here?” she asked, wondering where her voice was coming from. It felt detached, as if it had been disconnected and was now floating free form in the room.
“The lock hasn’t been made that can keep me out.” He laughed again, clearly enjoying himself. “I guess I can say the same thing about a woman.” He cocked the trigger of the gun. “Now, you’ve got thirty seconds to get those clothes off and lie down on the bed.”
Jess said nothing, her throat suddenly too dry to form words.
From somewhere beside her, her alarm clock loudly ticked off the seconds, like a bomb about to explode. So, this is how it ends, she thought, unable to swallow, to draw air into her lungs, terror gnawing at her extremities like a hungry rat.
What would it be like? she wondered. Would there be a while light, a long tunnel, a feeling of peace and well-being, as was often reported by those who claimed to have died and come back? Or would there be blackness? Nothingness? Would she simply cease to be? When it was all over, would she find herself alone, or would her loved ones be there to greet her? She thought of her mother. Would she finally get to see her again, to find out exactly what fate she had met? Had it been this way for her too? My God, Jess thought, her chest aching, as if it were splitting in two, had her mother experienced this same kind of terror and pain before she died? Was this what her mother had gone through?
And what would this do to her father, her sister?
When they didn’t hear from her, when they couldn’t reach her, Barry would probably assure them that Jess was just too embarrassed to contact them, that she’d merely taken off for a few days, that she was too self-centered to realize the pain she might be causing them, that perhaps, on some subconscious level, she was punishing them. It
would be days before they took her disappearance seriously, before the police were called and her apartment searched. Her apartment would show obvious signs of struggle. The blood on her duvet would be analyzed, found to be hers. There would be no signs of forced entry. No revealing fingerprints. Don would point the finger of suspicion at Adam. By the time everything was sorted out, Rick Ferguson would be long gone.
“Don’t make me tell you again,” Rick Ferguson was saying.
Jess took a deep breath and pulled her sweater over her head, the delicate hairs along her arms rising in protest. Her skin started to throb, as if she had pulled pieces of it off along with her sweater, as if she’d been skinned alive. The sweater dropped to the floor.
“Very nice.” he said. “I always liked black lace.” He shook the gun in the direction of her pants. “Now the rest.”
Jess watched the scene unfold as if from a great distance. Again she recalled the experiences of those who claimed to have died. Didn’t they always report leaving their bodies and floating toward the ceiling, watching the events from the air? Maybe that was what was happening to her. Maybe she hadn’t escaped from her living room after all. Maybe the wire sliced through her throat and killed her. Maybe she was already dead.
Or maybe she still had time to save herself, she thought, a renewed surge of adrenaline interrupting her reveries, convincing her she was still alive, that there might be something she could do. Use whatever weapons are at hand, she heard Dominic instruct, as her fingers curled into the elastic waistband of her wool pants. Like what? she wondered,
impulses colliding painfully in her brain, causing her head to throb. Her bra? Could she strangle the man with her lace brassiere? How about smothering him in cashmere?
How about her shoes? she wondered, slowly removing her hands from her waist. Rick Ferguson jabbed the gun impatiently into the air. “I have to take my shoes off,” she stammered. “I can’t get my pants off if I don’t take my shoes off first.”
“Hey,” he said, relaxing, “the nakeder, the better. Just hurry up about it.”
She bent over, wondering what in God’s name she was planning to do, slowly removing her left shoe and tossing it casually aside, thinking she was out of her mind, she didn’t have a chance, he would kill her for sure, then moving to the right foot, knowing she only had seconds left, lifting the black flat off her foot, making a motion as if tossing the shoe aside, instead gripping tightly, then hurling it with all her strength toward the gun in his hand.
She missed completely.
“Oh God,” she moaned. “Oh my God.”
But the sudden action caught Rick Ferguson by surprise, and he jumped back in alarm. What the hell should she do now? Could she push past him toward the front door? Could she possibly survive a jump from a third-floor window? Did she have the strength to disarm him?
It was too late. Already, he’d recovered his equilibrium. Already, the gun was cocked and pointed at her heart. “I think I’m going to enjoy killing you even more than I enjoyed roasting that damn canary,” he said, tracing an invisible line through the air with his gun, down past her breasts, past her ribs and stomach, stopping at the crotch of her pants.
There was no time left, no choices left. He was going to shoot her. Render her defenseless long enough to rape and sodomize her. Then finish her off with his hands. Oh God, Jess thought, picturing her dead canary, wishing she would faint, knowing he would only force her back to consciousness, make her suffer through every agonizing second. And then without thinking, without even knowing what she was doing until she was already doing it, Jess was leaping across her bed to the window, screaming at the top of her lungs.
The shot exploded into the air around her, and she knew she was as good as dead. It was so loud, she thought, louder than she had ever imagined it could be, like a burst of thunder at her ear. The room assumed an eerie glow, as if the contents had been hit by lightning, the colors newly magnified, the soft peaches now a vivid orange, the grays and blues electric. Her body felt light, suspended in midair. She wondered where the bullet had struck her, how long it would take her to fall to the floor.
He’d be waiting to rip the remaining clothes off her near lifeless body, to force himself inside her, smothering her with his weight, overwhelming her with his odors. Already she could feel his fingers tearing at her, his tongue licking at her blood. His would be the last face she would see, his grin the sight she would take with her to her grave.
And suddenly, she was spinning around and Rick Ferguson was coming at her, his hands reaching toward her, his face white with fury, his smile gone. And then he was falling, tumbling toward her, and Jess realized that she was all right, that she hadn’t been shot, that it was Rick Ferguson who was plunging to the floor, sprawling across her stockinged feet, that it was Rick Ferguson who was dead.
Darkness swirled around her, like a whirlpool in the middle of an ocean, threatening to pull her into its center, as her eyes absorbed the gaping hole in the middle of his back. The blood spurted from it, like oil from a well, soaking his black T-shirt, spilling onto the rug. Jess felt dizzy, faint. She clutched the side of her dresser for support.”
And then she saw him in the doorway, the gun dangling from his hand. “Don!” she gasped.
“I told you if that bastard ever tried to hurt you, I’d kill him myself,” he said quietly. The gun slipped from his fingers to the floor.
Jess rushed into his arms. Immediately they encircled her, pulling her tight against him. She pressed her head against his shoulder, absorbing his clean smell, clinging to the warmth of his body. He felt so good. He felt so safe.
“You’re safe now,” he told her, as if reading her thoughts, kissing the side of her face over and over again. “You’re safe. I’m here. I won’t ever leave you.”
“He was waiting for me inside the apartment,” Jess began after several minutes, trying to come to grips with everything that had happened. “He had a wire. The kind he used to kill Connie. He tried to strangle me. But I got away. I ran for my gun, but it wasn’t there. He had it. He must have searched the apartment before I got home. He said there wasn’t a lock that had been made that could keep him out.”
“It’s okay now,” Don said, his voice a salve. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. He can’t hurt you anymore.”
“I was so scared. I thought he was going to kill me.”
“He’s dead, Jess.”
“I kept thinking about my mother.”
“Don’t, sweetheart.”
“About what this would do to my father and my sister.”
“It’s over now. You’re safe.”
“Thank God you got here.”
“I couldn’t let you stay alone.”
“He didn’t get on the plane,” she said, then laughed, feeling giddy, light-headed. “I guess that’s pretty obvious.”
“I’m just glad I got here in time.” Don hugged her tighter against him.
“I can’t believe you did. You’re my Prince Charming,” Jess said, and thought that he was. How could she ever have hurt him the way she had? How could she have left him? How could she possibly survive without him? “It’s just like in the movies.” She laughed nervously, recalling all those movies where a monstrous killer erroneously presumed dead rises up to strike again. Her eyes drifted back to the body on the floor. “Are you sure he’s dead?”
“He’s dead, Jess.” Don smiled indulgently. “I can shoot him again if you’d like.”
Jess laughed, surprised at the sound. She’d been savagely attacked with a piece of wire rope, almost raped, almost murdered, and here she was laughing. Probably it was a nervous reaction, a way of coping with what had very nearly been. Her eyes traveled the length of Rick Ferguson’s body, and she understood how easily that body could have been hers. If Rick Ferguson had been allowed a few more minutes. If Don hadn’t shown up when he had, like a hero from a silent movie, riding in on horseback in the final seconds of the reel to rescue the unfortunate heroine from her fate.
It was uncanny how well Don knew her, Jess thought, burrowing in closer against his chest, how he always knew when she needed him, whatever her protestations to the
contrary. She’d told him on the phone that she was all right, that she’d speak to him tomorrow, that she was in no danger tonight. And still he’d come. Still he’d charged in and taken control. Saved her from a gruesome death. Saved her from her own stubborn stupidity.
Was she really surprised? Hadn’t he done the same thing throughout their marriage, ignoring her wishes to do what he thought best? She’d gotten angry, railed against him, fought for the freedom to make her own mistakes, demanded her right to be wrong. He’d tried to understand, given lip service to her pleas, but in the end, he’d done things the way he’d always intended. More often than not, it had proved to be the right way. Like tonight.