Drawn Into Darkness(27)

“Where’s that mouth of yours, Lee Anna?” Stoat drawled. “You’re awful quiet.”

I opened that mouth of mine. “I was just wondering who’s going to miss me first, the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I couldn’t decide which to join, so I went to both, and—”

Stoat chuckled. “Good try. I like you, Lee Anna. Don’t feel bad about what I’m fixing to do. It’s nothing personal, just what has to happen, logically speaking.”

Behind me, Justin hadn’t said a word, and I could not think what on earth to say to him.

I watched and waited for another bare-bones bridge.

But I had missed my chance. We crossed no more bridges. Stoat turned the van onto another—not a road, really, but two tire tracks in the sand, weeds thick and tall between them, undergrowth scrubbing against the sides of the van, thick skeins of Spanish moss dragging, sodden, across the windows and windshield. In the wet night it was kind of like being in a car wash.

And this was a fine time for me to be thinking such clever thoughts when, face it, I was running out of options. Next moment I heard no more brush, saw no more Spanish moss. Night opened into nothing I could see. The track sloped slightly downhill and ended. Or, really, I didn’t know it ended, but Stoat did. He stopped the van and turned it off. Its headlights shone through rain amid darkness in which I heard a bedlam of frogs. All around us, they no longer seemed to sing so much as babble, bark, bleat, and belch.

“Get out,” Stoat said, apparently to Justin; obviously I wasn’t going anywhere without assistance. Stoat himself got out, but Justin didn’t move. I watched Stoat, ghostly in the rain and headlights, cross in front of the van and come to open my door.

He snapped his fingers hard. “I told you to get out!”

I turned sideways on my seat and felt for a step with my feet before I realized he wasn’t speaking to me.

Justin said, “No.”

“What you mean, no?”

“No. I’m staying here.”

“You get out of this van, boy, or I’ll beat you like you never been beat before.”

“No. I don’t care what you do to me, I want no part of this. I’m not moving.”

Shouting obscenities, Stoat snagged me by the shoulders and flung me straight down out of the van to sprawl with my face in wet sand. I didn’t care. Somehow the flipped-out, raging Stoat was easier to handle than the marginally nice Stoat. I heard him rampaging inside the van, trying to grab Justin, but evidently Justin had lodged himself someplace impregnable, maybe under the backseat. Meanwhile I struggled to my feet—oddly, I seemed to be standing on open sand, because I felt no vegetation groping me—and I began to stumble away, blindly, into the unknown. Sure, I felt a faint hope, but realistically I was trying not so much to save myself—with handcuffs on?—as to distract Stoat from Justin.

And maybe Justin was trying to distract him from me? How ironic.

“Hey! Hey, stupid woman!” Stoat caught up to me in seconds and whacked me on the side of the head with what felt like the butt of his gun. I saw stars and nearly fell, but he yanked me upright by the handcuffs and started marching me down a slight slope.

Behind us, the van headlights went out, dumping thick darkness as well as heavy rain all over us.

“That miserable ass-reamed snot-nosed punk thinks he’s so smart!” Stoat sounded as if he might just possibly blow a major artery, which would have been wonderful. “Screw him. I got a flashlight.” He demonstrated by turning it on, and its wavering circle of white, plus his own triumph, seemed to calm him down as suddenly as he had flipped out. Stoat, a man like a lightbulb, but cracked.

Now his hand on my elbow felt gentle and ceremonious as if we were going on a date. “This way, Miss Lee Anna.” He had to raise his voice in order for me to hear him, there was so much noise in the night—the frogs twanging their soggy concert, and the patter of rain on leaves making the trees sound like an audience applauding. Stoat led me down an area of open sand between what sounded like two walls of forest. We seemed to be on a narrow beach of sorts, ending at some fairly large body of water.

“Is this a lake or what?” I asked, stopping as if to look, though I could see very little through rain so thoroughgoing it had already washed the sand off my face.

“Chatawachipolee River, running so high it’s nearly covered the boat ramp down yonder. Now stop stalling,” he added in the kindest of voices. “My gun’s right here in my belt. Move.”

Crap. There seemed to be no point in delaying the inevitable. I walked on.

“Okay, this is close enough.”