Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“Yeah,” Billy grunts, thrusting his hips with the fury of an angry carpenter driving nails. “It’s good…yeah.”

Good? This is good? I’ve heard this word before. But it doesn’t make sense. How can this be good? But he tells me it’s good…that I’m good…and more important, that I’m special. That’s good. I want to be special….

“You’re too far back,” he gasps, lunging harder. “Scoot up to the edge of the seat.”

I obey.

Pearlie keeps banging on the trunk lid, a pitiful sound diminishing in strength, like the struggles of someone freezing to death. I imagine she’s praying, though why I don’t know. When I last left her, she told me that with God’s help I might just make it through. But God isn’t going to help me. That’s one thing I’ve always known.

Water is falling on my face. At first I think it’s rain leaking into the car, but it’s not. It’s Billy Neal’s sweat. He pushes up my shirt and yanks down my bra, exposing my breasts. “Yeah,” he says in a ragged voice, kneading them roughly. “Fuck, yeah.”

His mouth is fixed in a grimace, as though this act causes him physical pain. His breath is bad enough to penetrate my trance. I see the cause of it, too. His mouth is in bad shape. He thrashes his hips wildly, banging me against the seat back, his neck muscles straining like he’s lifting weights, his external jugulars distended like two pipes ready to burst. I’m not sure whether it’s the sight of those veins or the proximity of his teeth that awakens me, but it’s one of the two. Because in the midst of this savage assault, my mind begins to work very fast and with clinical precision.

The masseter muscle of the jaw is the strongest in the human body. It can generate two hundred pounds per square inch of biting force.

Nine pounds of force will tear off a human ear. I learned that while working in the ER when I was in medical school.

What could two hundred pounds per square inch of force driving a mouthful of sharp teeth do to a human neck? It’s a matter of some interest to me now, because Billy’s neck is exposed directly above me, his veins bulging from the exertion of violent intercourse. A caveman could tell me the answer. Teeth and nails were the first edged weapons Homo sapiens ever possessed. I tell that to homicide detectives when I brief them on my forensic speciality. I could bite straight through to Billy’s jugulars, no problem. Clamp down and whip my head back and forth like a pit bull until he’s spewing blood. That would scare the hell out of him-and hurt like blazes-but it wouldn’t kill him. It might not even disable him badly enough to keep him from shooting me in the head.

A torn carotid would, though. A torn carotid artery would kill him. It would also send him into instant panic. Not many people can watch their blood spurt three feet into the air and remain calm. But the carotids are protected by many layers of tissue.

The jugular veins lie just beneath the skin.

Billy has stopped thrashing. He’s settled into a steady rhythm now, working over me like most men I’ve had sex with, grunting and heaving, eyes blank, breath coming in quick, ragged gasps.

His breath …

The trachea is a hollow tube of cartilaginous rings, held together by the muscle and fibrous tissue that fills the spaces between the rings. Car accident victims frequently die when their tracheas are crushed by steering wheels. Would two hundred pounds of pressure crush a trachea? My instinct and training tell me yes.

Besides, two hundred pounds per square inch is a round number. Eskimos-who feed on a much more robust diet than the rest of us-commonly generate twice that amount of biting force. A woman trying to save her life ought to be able to match that.

Already my gaze has moved from Billy’s bulging jugulars to the exposed semicircle of his windpipe. To get a firm purchase, I’d have to turn my head sideways, so that my bite was perpendicular to the tube. That’s the way a leopard takes down an antelope, by biting the throat with its long canines. And that takes a sideways grip.

Not like a leopard, I think. Like a leopardess. Like Lena…

There’s a mole at the base of Billy’s neck. Dark brown, with black hairs sprouting from it. His neck muscles are flexed so hard that his Adam’s apple is invisible. But I know it’s there. My target is just above it, the smallest and softest stretch of the trachea-

“Unhh,” he grunts. “Oh, yeah…getting close.”

The gun is in his left hand-not his dominant one. He could still shoot me with it, though, no question. But I don’t have time to wait for a miracle. Tilting my head as far to the side as possible, I open my mouth and begin sucking his neck.

“Fuck, yeah,” he gasps. “Oh, yeah …”

I open my mouth wider, exploring the soft geography of his neck with my tongue. There’s the left external jugular…the ridge of the sternothyroid muscle, the buried larynx…

As Billy approaches the pinnacle of his labors, he throws back his head, as some men are wont to do. I open my jaws as wide as they will go and clamp my teeth down on his windpipe with every ounce of strength I can bring to bear.

Cartilage crunches loudly between my teeth.

I feel like I’ve bitten through a chicken breast, bones and all. Billy’s body goes rigid as blood fills my mouth in a hot rush. All I can see in my mind is the gun coming up to my head, blowing my brains all over the car.

But it doesn’t happen.

Billy flails his arms and legs like a man caught in a threshing machine, but the harder he tries to pull away from me, the more room I have to yank back my head with all my strength. For a few moments we’re locked in savage combat, and then my teeth tear free. His hands fly to his throat, and hope surges through me like a bolus of adrenaline.

He’s not holding the gun!

Frothy blood pours from a ragged wound in his throat, but it’s not the blood that shocks me. It’s the wheeze of air escaping from the hole with every respiration. That wheeze is the sound of impending death.

And Billy Neal knows it.

I’ve never seen panic like that in Billy Neal’s eyes, but I’m not waiting around to enjoy it. With a wild lunge, I throw my body most of the way out of the car. He makes a halfhearted grab for my feet, but by kicking hard, I manage to get clear.

Scrambling to my feet, I fight the urge to look back as I stagger into the trees. One moment of hesitation might be all he needs to pick up the gun and kill me. I’m still stumbling through the trees when I hear the engine start.

Terrified for Pearlie, I turn and race back toward the car. It’s hard to run with your hands cuffed behind you. I fall several times, and by the time I get back to the clearing, the Cadillac is gone. I hear its motor accelerating up the dirt road.

Naked from the waist down, I struggle down to the old river channel and work my way along it toward the bridge. It’s muddy by the water, but there’s a lot of sand in the soil, so the going isn’t too bad. Soon I am trotting herky-jerky across the bridge to the island like some armless woman running for charity.

On the far side of the bridge I see my grandfather’s orange pickup rusting in the weeds. This time it doesn’t faze me, because a hundred yards to the right of it, a white pickup is rolling down the perimeter road, heading for the bridge.

I can’t wave my arms, but I can scream.

With tears streaming down my face, I shout for help again and again, sucking in great lungfuls of air that Billy Neal only wishes he could inhale right now. I don’t know if it’s my screaming or my nakedness that draws the driver’s attention, but the truck turns onto the bridge and comes straight toward me. For a moment I think he means to run me over, but then the brakes squeal and the truck shudders to a stop. A black man jumps down out of the cab, his eyes wide. His face is a mass of scar tissue.