Across a stretch of darkness I heard the side door of the van slide open as Justin got in. No overhead lights came on; of course Stoat had disabled them. I heard him open what seemed to be the passenger seat door, feel around with his gun-free hand for something, then say, “In you go.”
No. I wanted to keep standing in the rain, all night if it would help. I did not lift a foot to feel for a step.
“Get in.” With his free hand he grasped my upper arm and hoisted, but I became limp and unhelpful.
“Move, or I’ll kill you right here and now, ditch you afterward.”
His voice remained quiet and steady but conveyed a remorseless logic, making me suddenly cooperative. I fumbled with my feet, he maneuvered my handcuffed arms, and I landed more or less on the passenger seat, which felt unaccountably, ever so kindly fluffy and soft. Dry, warm. As if the loving mother of my earliest memories had somehow reached out to embrace me from heaven on this hellish night. Even though I didn’t believe in heaven or hell, not under normal circumstances, and even though I fully realized my comfort came from a towel meant to protect Stoat’s upholstery from my personal pollution, still the touch of terry cloth wrenched sobs out of me, one after another.
Nothing Stoat could do to me would ever make me cry? Riiight.
Did Stoat get credit if fabric softener made me quake with tears?
On my shoulder I felt a touch, tentative and quickly withdrawn. Justin, in the backseat. Meanwhile, Stoat slammed doors, started the van, and told me, “Shut up.” I saw no light, not even headlights as I felt the van begin to roll, but I did not need to look at Stoat’s face to know I’d better stop crying. Not that his voice growled or menaced. Not at all. It was his starkness that terrified me. His hollowness.
I shut up.
Stoat drove without headlights onto the road, and accelerated even though the asphalt showed only as a shinier blackness in the night. Somehow Stoat kept us more or less on the pavement, and when we hit the shoulder by mistake, no one spoke, not even him. Not even swearing broke the silence inside that van and the susurration of rain outside. We encountered no other vehicles for some time, but when one appeared in the distance, Stoat turned on his low beams.
“We’re far enough away from the house now, it don’t matter,” he remarked genially.
No one responded. Stoat turned off the paved road onto one of the gazillion dirt roads that I had not yet gotten around to exploring, meaning I had no idea—did people live back here? Since I could not lean back with my hands cuffed behind me, necessarily I perched on the edge of my seat and peered through the windshield. All I could see in the headlights, through a blur of rain, were trees and brush as oppressive as a tunnel, forest crowding the road into a single lane. Forest as thick as jungle, spiked with palmetto and slathered with Spanish moss like massive weeping cobwebs.
Since it had been raining hard all day, fervidly I hoped that Stoat, driving on a dirt road, would get his van stuck in the mud.
My mistake. Did I say dirt road? These roads were yellow sand plus maybe some orange clay. Sand roads don’t make mud in the rain. They just get nice and hard. It’s when they’re dry and soft that people get stuck in them.
Stoat turned onto another one of them, and we slowed to go over—yikes. The bridge consisted of two spans of wooden planks, each just wide enough to accommodate a vehicle’s tires, plus timber supports but no rail. Just below what should have been the middle of the bridge, I saw water rushing. I flinched and closed my eyes as Stoat sent the van across the bridge that was barely there.
We turned onto another narrow, serpentine sand road, crossed another two or three minimalist bridges, and duh, I realized we were driving not through forest, but through swamp. Or into swamp. Most of Maypop County consisted of forest or swamp, forest being trees plus undergrowth, and swamp being trees plus water. Through forest the yellow sand roads ran arrow straight. But in swamp they wriggled to find higher land.
Since we had left the paved road, we had not met up with another vehicle, not one single car, and it had been quite a while since I had noticed a shack or a trailer or even a mailbox to show that anybody lived back here. I supposed it was not the best place in the world to locate one’s home, what with mosquitoes, flooding, and the omnipresence of the nastiest of all native poisonous snakes, the water moccasin. I gave up forlorn hopes of encountering anyone who might rescue me. These twisting roads ran deep into places where my body most likely would be eaten by alligators before it was ever found.
If Stoat had not handcuffed me, I would have made a move before now, grabbing the keys out of the ignition, twisting the wheel to send us into a creek, anything for one last chance. Now I thought about throwing myself bodily against Stoat the next time we came to one of those sketchy so-called bridges. All I had to do was send the tires off the planks and the van would drop—