Drawn Into Darkness(8)

I tilted my head and tried to look at Justin as he tied the rope to the bedpost, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. As soon as he’d completed the job, he left the room.

“You,” Stoat said, gesturing at me with the gun, “what’s your name again? Lee Anna something?”

I nodded, afraid that if I tried to speak, I would burst into pleas or tears.

“Now, Lee Anna, listen. You shouldn’t have come here to my house. You put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. So now I got to keep you here till I figure out what to do about you. But I want you to understand I’m a logical man and I don’t hurt people for no reason. You just lay still and—is that your dog yapping?”

Sure enough, in this bedroom away from the air conditioner I could hear Schweitzer steadily barking.

My mouth opened on its own. “He needs to be fed,” I whispered. “Key to the house is in my pocket.”

“I already got it.” He held it up for me to see, the house key dangling from its Hello Kitty ring. “Dog needs to be fed, huh?”

“Please,” I said.

Justin came back in carrying a grungy white pillowcase. Stoat stuck his gun into the front waistband of his cutoff jeans and, just as I began to exhale in relief, he pulled something out of a pocket and snapped it open into a vicious-looking knife. That’s subjective. If I had seen the knife in a display case at a sporting goods store, I might have regarded it simply as a rather large folding army-style survival knife with a four-inch blade. But in the hand of—I couldn’t yet face what Stoat really was—in his hand it terrified me, slashing through the pillowcase as if it were tissue. When he was done with the knife, he made a casual move so fast I didn’t comprehend it until I saw the knife quivering with its dagger point stuck into the wall on the other side of the bed.

The man had thrown the knife right over top of me, just like that, zing. He was a knife thrower. Oh, great. Just wonderful.

He knotted the strip of cloth in his hands—those hands looked overlarge, ugly-knuckled, and very strong to me—and then he leaned over me.

“What’s that?” I gasped.

He growled, “I don’t like noise,” as he none too gently tied it around my head.

“But I won’t scream,” I tried to protest, or promise. “There’s nobody around to hear me anyway.”

“I’m a careful man. Open up.” He forced the knot into my mouth, then tightened everything, ending my side of the conversation. “I like things neat,” he told me sourly, “and you have sure messed things up for me.” Then he walked over, yanked his knife out of the wall, waved it at me with no expression at all on his crater face, and left.

I suppose it’s odd, considering my situation, but I felt great relief when he left the room. Listening, I followed his footsteps to the front door, where it sounded like he went out of the shack. A moment later I heard an engine cough into reluctant life. The van I had seen parked at the side of the house.

Good. Good, this Stoat man was going to feed Schweitzer.

Lying on a bare mattress and looking at a boring, cheaply tiled ceiling, I tried to come to grips, listening to Schweitzer bark and considering my new reality one aspect at a time. Daylight came in through two windows, but from where I lay, I could see nothing but treetops through either of them. My head hurt and I felt something sticky on my face and neck. Beer. Beer bottle. Couldn’t have injured me too badly if I remembered what had hit me. Raising two sons, I had learned all about concussions. I didn’t have one. And I had not been raped. Yet. One out of every four women is raped sometime in her life. If the posts around me were women, which one would have been raped? But what an unseemly thought about such a decorous bed, an antique four-poster, unusual for this kind of shack. Had the man Stoat acquired it on purpose for—for . . .

For Justin?

My thoughts, frightened, issued a gag order in a hurry. Back off. Justin was still alive after two years, I told myself. Stoat had kept him alive. Maybe Stoat would keep me alive. And Schweitzer. Stoat was going to feed Schweitzer. In fact, I could tell he had reached the door of my fuchsia shack, because I heard Schweitzer launch into a crescendo of barking—

And then an innocuous popping sound and a sickening scream, like nothing I had ever heard before, not human. Two more pops, then silence.

It took me a few heartbeats to get it.

The gun. Oh, my God, the gun.

“No!” I cried, or tried to cry out; with the knot of cloth in my mouth I managed only a muffled, distorted yawp. Frantically I thrashed against what must have been handcuffs around my wrists and ankles, trying to rip myself loose and run to my dog, for all the good that would do. Behind the gag of denial in my mind, I knew that Schweitzer, my “reverence for life” dog, lay bloody and dying. Yanking harder, I felt my restraints cut my skin; now I was bleeding too.