BILL CONCENTRATED ON SECURING the contents of the dream in his head, memorizing the important parts like he was studying for a test back in high school. In the dream, he was standing in the parking lot of the rest stop, searching for the man who had tried to kidnap the young girl, Allie Serrano. He scanned the mammoth lot, but it was choked with cars, not full by any means but still clogged with vehicles practically as far as the eye could see. Then the man passed Bill almost close enough for him to touch. He was escaping, driving a beat-up old box truck toward the interstate on-ramp and the freedom beyond.
As the truck chugged by, blue plumes of exhaust pouring from the tailpipe and hanging in the fetid air, Bill squinted and stared, trying desperately to make out the numbers and letters on the license plate. But no matter how hard he tried, the thick pollution coming from the vehicle’s tailpipe stymied him.
Out of the corner of his eye, though, and somehow retained in a remote corner of his brain, he finally saw what he had been looking for, the key to finding his missing child. His subconscious mind must have been trying to show it to him all along with these crazy dreams. The truck drove by, and Bill concentrated on the license plate, but as he did, he took note of the obviously amateur paint job. The side of the truck was a riot of fading, off-white vehicle paint, sprayed in overlapping strokes still covering some areas completely. But in other areas, the paint had begun fading badly, to the point where a series of blocky, green letters from the truck’s previous incarnation were beginning to show through.
The kidnapper had no doubt painted over the green letters on the cargo box, since kidnapping girls in a truck with a name on the side wasn’t the best avenue to achieving a long and successful criminal career.
The I-90 Killer had been in business for three-and-a-half years, and over that time period, the harsh, northeastern winters and hot summers had done a job on the paint, so now, Bill could recall seeing faint letters on the side of the crappy truck, beneath the remains of the crappy paint job. The letters, in three rows, were:
SPE
FAR
ET
Bill reached for his wallet and pullet out the business card Agent Angela Canfield had given him and looked at the clock. Four forty-eight a.m. He dialed her cell number and hoped she wasn’t a heavy sleeper.
CHAPTER 40
CARLI SPUN ON HER heels and lunged at the kidnapper, swinging the knife with no real skill but plenty of adrenaline-fueled force. She wasn’t sure where to cut him to achieve maximum damage, so rather than take the chance of aiming for something hard to hit and missing, for example, his throat, she went for the center of mass—his belly.
Almost immediately, though, everything went wrong. She swung the steak knife in a wide arc, angling for his stomach, planning to put him down with the first thrust and take him out by any means necessary after that. But he was quicker than she had anticipated, raising an arm to defend against the slashing blade and stepping back, moving on the balls of his feet.
She felt resistance as the knife dug into his outstretched arm, slicing all the way to the bone. Blood spurted, spraying in an impressive arc onto the filthy kitchen floor. “You little bitch,” he grunted, a response seemingly made up more of surprise than pain.
Carli had put everything she had behind her thrust, driving forward with her legs and putting all of her one hundred and five pounds into the parry. The knife ricocheted off the man’s arm and the force of her momentum caused her to lose her balance. She stumbled forward, falling to her knees as the man screeched and clutched his wounded arm reflexively to his chest. She scrambled on the floor, desperate to strike again before he had time to recover.
The blood continued to waterfall from the man’s left arm, draining from the gaping wound, but after his initial cry of surprise and pain, he rallied, dropping the useless arm to his side and advancing on Carli quickly. She regained her footing and struck out at him again, but the angle was all wrong and he was coming at her quickly, and she didn’t have time to wind up and get any kind of torque behind her swing.
Martin easily danced away from the weak thrust, his hard eyes glinting. “You little bitch,” he repeated. Carli’s only advantage was surprise, and it was gone. He grabbed her wrist with his still-strong right hand, squeezing the small bones together until she cried out, first in fear and then in agony. The knife clattered to the floor and she sank to her knees as bright pain flared in her wrist and ran up her arm.
He released his hold and bent down, snatching the knife up off the floor. He was incredibly quick. He spun the weapon expertly in his hand until he gripped the handle, leaving the butt end sticking out below his fist. Then it was his turn to swing the steak knife. He lifted it high in the air as the terrified teen dropped to the floor and shrank away, scuttling like a crab, her hands and feet slipping on the grimy surface.
He thrust the knife down at her. The butt end smashed into the side of her head with the full force of his swing, tearing the skin open, and she crumpled onto her side, her head bouncing off the linoleum with a loud
crack!
Her blood splattered, mixing on the dirty floor with Martin’s, which continued to gush from his arm in frightening volume.
Carli groaned, and her arms and legs continued swinging for a moment in her reflexive attempt to escape her attacker, but her eyes were closed, and the rest of her body lay motionless. Then her limbs got the message that her brain was shutting down for a while, and they stopped moving, too.
CHAPTER 41
MARTIN STUMBLED TO THE kitchen pantry and grabbed the last clean dishtowel. “Dammit,” he hissed in frustration. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have fallen for that little traitor’s silly song and dance? “Oh, I’ve been sweating and nervous all day. I don’t want our first time to be like this!”
He felt like a world-class idiot, like some stupid, junior high sap played for a fool by the cute girl in class. He glared accusingly at her, motionless on the floor, blood flowing sluggishly out of her head, and the urge to finish her off welled up inside him like lava preparing to blow the top off a volcano. He was humiliated and angry, and she should pay.
But he was also injured, and from the looks of it, quite badly. He lifted the dishtowel gingerly from the arm to examine it more closely and he winced. There was no pain, not exactly, not yet, but he knew that was thanks to the adrenaline rushing through his body in response to the sudden altercation with Little Miss Academy Award over there. Soon enough, the adrenaline would dissipate, and the pain would come rushing in to take its place.
He was lucky that the little bitch wasn’t a fighter. She had swung the knife diagonally, holding it high, starting her swing up in the neighborhood of her shoulder, which had given him the split-second he needed to react. When she struck his arm the knife had sliced into the fleshy outside part.
If she had come at him from down low, swinging upward as she should have, she probably would have sliced his stomach open, and his innards would be scattered all over the kitchen floor, or he would even now be staggering around, dying, fighting a losing battle, trying to hold his guts inside his body.
Martin was impressed with the self-control he had exhibited once he had regained control of the situation. Every ounce of him wanted to kill her, to slice and stab and fillet his new houseguest. But he had stopped himself, as difficult as that had been. First of all, he needed to tend to his arm before he bled to death. And this girl was special, regardless of how badly she had played him. Even more importantly, his contact would be more than furious if he murdered a perfectly good girl just because she had become a little feisty, and that could jeopardize the entire setup he had been enjoying for the last three years.
Martin knew something else instinctively, too. This whole mess was his fault, not hers. He was still convinced that this beautiful little thing sprawled unconscious on his kitchen floor was the one. She had to be the one, the fates had spoken, and he was determined to enjoy the remainder of his allotted seven days with her, once he made absolutely clear who was in charge here.
But he should never have allowed his emotions and his unrealistic dreams to rule his actions. Sure, she was special, but she had only just arrived. He should never have trusted her, should never have allowed himself to believe she would do anything other than try to escape. She was still a teenage girl, after all, unused to the ways of the real world.
Martin’s arm began to throb, lobbing the opening volleys in what he knew was only the beginning of the war. The impromptu surgery hadn’t resulted in any irreversible damage, at least as far as he could tell, but the wound was deep, he was losing blood, and he knew the pain was going to get a lot worse before it got better. He needed to get to the hospital and get it sutured, that much was clear, but he had work to do first. Hopefully, he could complete it before he lost so much blood he passed out on the floor.
Slipping and sliding through the blood to the bathroom—holy crap, there was blood everywhere!—Martin knelt and rummaged through the cabinet located under the sink. He picked through spare toilet paper, boxes of tissues, a hand towel. He placed the towel between his knees and threw everything else on the floor behind him, and then finally spotted what he was looking for: a rolled up Ace Bandage.
He grabbed the bandage, and, as he did, he noticed his hands were shaking uncontrollably. Then he stood, and a wave of nausea and lightheadedness caused him to stumble. He grabbed the edge of the sink for support. He looked in the medicine cabinet mirror, and the man staring back at him was white as a ghost. Martin knew he was slipping into shock. He had to hurry.
He opened the door of the medicine chest, grabbing the rubbing alcohol, marveling at how far away from his body his hand seemed to be when he wrapped his fingers around the bottle. It was as if his arm had magically elongated, like he was some sort of superhero. Rubberman or something. In his ears, a buzzing noise had begun to sound and was growing steadily louder. It reminded him of a mosquito flying around his head at night when he was trying to sleep.
The rubbing alcohol slipped from his shaking hand and fell into the sink—luckily, it was in a plastic bottle. He really would have been in trouble if that bottle had shattered, spilling the valuable disinfectant down the drain.
Martin slapped himself in the face, hard, and it seemed to help a little. His eyes focused and the buzzing noise receded slightly, like an army falling back to regroup. How long he could keep that army at bay, he did not know. Probably not long. He placed the towel over the wound on his arm and unrolled the bandage, anchoring one end on top of the sink as the rest trailed away onto the dirty floor. Then he reached into the basin and lifted the bottle of alcohol, uncapping it with his teeth as he pressed his injured arm to his belly to keep the dish towel firmly over the wound.
When he finally managed to screw the top off the bottle, Martin placed it next to the end of the bandage on the sink. Breathing deeply, he lifted the towel, now soaked crimson red, off the knife wound. Blood gushed, and there was no way to reliably gauge the severity of the injury, but if the mounting pain was any indication, she had gotten him good.
He sucked in his breath again and, gritting his teeth against what he knew was coming, poured the alcohol straight from the bottle over the open knife wound. The liquid hissed and bubbled, and Martin sucked air in through his teeth, trying not to scream. He failed. The pain ballooned and mushroomed, detonating in his arm like a nuclear explosion. Bright white spotlights danced in his vision, and, for the second time in seconds, he had to grab the sink for support. His arm throbbed, and he felt like he was being stabbed again, over and over.
When he could stand it no longer, Martin wrapped the towel—the last clean hand towel in the bathroom—as tightly as he could manage around the wound, doing his best to pull the two halves of sliced flesh together. It wasn’t an easy trick to manage using just one hand. When he had gotten the towel packed as tightly as he could over the wound, Martin pressed it once again against his side and picked up the end of the bandage off the sink. He rolled the bandage around and around the towel, beginning at his wrist and running all the way to the elbow, then returning to his starting point, pulling it tight.
He was panting and sweating, the pain rolling off his arm in waves that crested with each beat of his heart. Martin sank to the floor and examined his handiwork with a critical eye while he tried to get his breathing under control and avoid passing out. Under the circumstances, he felt he had done a pretty impressive job of emergency first aid. The towel was packed relatively tightly against the knife wound and further blood loss would now be minimal, although it continued to soak into the thick white cotton.
The urge to lie down and sleep was strong; Martin was exhausted. He had no doubt whatsoever that he could simply ease down onto his side right here on the bathroom floor and sleep until morning, but as tempting as that thought was, there was still more to be done. He struggled to his feet and waited patiently for the accompanying wave of dizziness to pass, then reached once more into the medicine cabinet, this time pulling out a bottle of ibuprofen. His arm seemed to have returned to its normal length, at least for the time being.
After dry-swallowing five of those suckers, Martin stumbled back into the kitchen, half expecting the sneaky little Benedict Arnold to be waiting for him, awake and alert, and to come at him again. She might be his destiny, his little angel, but she had a lot to learn about loyalty and about not biting the hand that feeds you.