Michael Prescott - Next Victim

She stared at the dropped weapon on the sheets, at Donald Stevenson, at the cold amusement in his eyes, and she knew with sudden certainty that she had made a serious mistake.

"Let me go," she said for no reason, except that the words seemed to come of their own will.

"Not a chance," he said softly.

She kicked at him and at the covers, trying to gain some traction and propel herself off the bed, but the covers merely skidded under her, bunching up at her feet, and then he was on top of her and there was a knife in his hand.

Not her knife. Not a switchblade. This was a hunting knife, seven inches of carbon steel with serrated edges, and along the ragged line of the blade she saw dark flecks of dried blood.

She parted her lips to shout for help. He slapped her into silence with a blow that nearly knocked her unconscious.

Then there was only her hoarse breathing and a whirl of light and shadow and the pressure of tape on her mouth, sealing her lips, then more tape binding her wrists to the headboard.

She was naked, gagged, bound, more helpless than ever in her life, and it made no sense. Who the fuck was this guy? What the fuck was going on?

Maybe he was her contact, after all. Maybe he’d been instructed to kill her instead of paying her off. But that couldn’t be right. She hadn’t given him any information yet. And now her mouth was sealed, and she couldn’t tell him anything.

It was crazy, just crazy…

Crazy.

The word quivered through her like a twitch, and she understood.

He wasn’t her contact. He was a psycho-and probably a killer.

For the past hour she’d been playing with this man, never suspecting that all the while he was playing a subtler game of his own.

"Handy little item you’ve got," he said with a glance at the abandoned switchblade on the bed. "You handled it with a certain professional aplomb. But it appears you miscalculated. I’m the one who’ll cut…"

With his knife he traced a line along her left forearm, raising a thin welt.

"…and run."

She tried to say something through the tape pasted to her mouth, but no words could get out, and she didn’t know what she could tell him anyway.

He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves from his jacket, then fiddled with her knife, clicking it open and shut.

On the desk chair across the room lay her suitcase. Pierce thought with bitter irony of its contents and what she could have done with them, the awful surprise she could have had for this man.

He noted the direction of her gaze. "You seem awfully interested in your luggage. I wonder why."

Getting up, he moved toward the desk chair. She saw him smooth out his jacket, adjust his collar, zip his fly.

He opened the suitcase and groped among its contents. "Cell phone…toiletries…change of clothes…and this." He lifted out a sealed metal canister, ten inches long. "This is interesting."

She watched him, trying to betray nothing with her eyes.

"There’s liquid in here," he said. "If it’s nitro, I’m probably in imminent danger of blowing myself up." He tossed the canister lightly. "But anybody can get hold of nitro. Nitro is no big deal. This is something else, isn’t it, Lucy?"

He set down the canister and rummaged in the suitcase’s zippered pocket, where he found her two wallets-one containing her Lucy Mallone identification, the other her real documents.

"Huh. Looks like Lucy isn’t even your name. Is it, Amanda?" He smiled. "So what have we got here? A lady traveling under an assumed name, with a professionally tricked-out belt buckle concealing a very high quality switchblade, carries a canister of liquid into the City of Angels. You know what I think you are, Amanda a.k.a. Lucy? I think you’re one of those bad people our government is always warning us about. I think…"

Abruptly his smile winked out.

"Forgive me. I got so wrapped up in my deductions-sherlockholmesing it, in James Joyce’s little neologism-that I almost lost sight of the main event. Let’s get to work, shall we?"

From a side pocket of his jacket, he removed a portable cassette player and hooked it up to the clock radio on the nightstand. He turned on the player. Faint music came from the radio’s cheap speaker. He kept the volume low, inaudible from adjacent rooms, but Pierce could hear the music well enough as it played inches from her ear.

"You like surf rock?" He nodded his head to the rhythm. "It was born here, on the left coast."

He smiled.

"Welcome to California."

Pierce didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want to think about what would happen next. Eyes shut, she listened to the music. She knew this song. The last song she would ever hear.

It was called "Wipe Out."

Tess was exhausted when she drove to her motel.

At two o’clock in the morning, the streets were not too busy, but the rush of traffic in LA never fully stopped. She took the 405 Freeway north into the San Fernando Valley, exiting at Ventura Boulevard.

Andrus had booked her into an extended-stay motel, the kind of place where relocated executives passed the time waiting for the moving company to arrive with their furniture. She couldn’t complain about the accommodations, but that term "extended stay" bothered her. She wondered how long her stay would be-and how many victims Mobius would claim before he was stopped.

The room was well-appointed and quiet, and she didn’t spend much time there anyway. It was lonely, of course, but she was used to that. She’d been lonely for two years and six weeks.

After Paul Voorhees had become her partner, people had occasionally asked her what he was like. "Centered," she would say. People took this to mean "focused," but what she really meant was "complete."

She wasn’t sure she could describe exactly what she was getting at. Maybe that he wasn’t always reaching beyond himself for some kind of external validation or acceptance. He had nothing to prove, no one to impress.

In one respect, at least, he and Andrus were alike-neither of them had an I-love-me wall in his office. Andrus didn’t want the plaques and signed photos because he knew they would be seen as a sign of vanity and therefore weakness. Paul just didn’t want them, period. Andrus never took off his jacket because he had an image to maintain. Paul had no image. He was unconscious of the way he appeared to others. Tess had never seen him look in a mirror except to shave.

Federal agents were supposed to be tough. But too often they were tough on other people and easy on themselves. Paul took the opposite approach. He cut himself no slack, but he gave others the benefit of every doubt. Once, she was with him at a party when he patiently absorbed the sarcasm of a minor city bureaucrat who had applied to the bureau and had been rejected. It was only too obvious that the man resented Paul for succeeding where he had failed. Later Tess had asked Paul why he hadn’t just squashed the guy with a cool retort; it would have been easy, and the guy’d had it coming. Paul just shrugged and said there was already enough pain in the world. "Why add to it?"

Answers like that had earned him the nickname "Saint Paul," but people used the term with affection, and when Paul eventually found out about it, he had a good laugh. Jokes at his expense never got him angry. Nothing angered him in any visible way except the mistreatment of the helpless. She’d seen him throw an IBM ThinkPad against a wall after visiting the scene of the rape and murder of a pregnant woman. But when he helped bring in the killer, he showed no emotion other than calm satisfaction.

Most feds got jaded, but Paul always seemed surprised by evil. "What the hell was this guy thinking?" he would ask as he reviewed his case notes on another homicide or abduction. The question was more than a venting of frustration. He honestly didn’t understand how people could make the conscious choice to do wrong when there was the potential for so much good.