Michael Prescott: Blind Pursuit

The stakes were meant for putting up a badminton net, but he had found another use for them.

He opened the Ford’s trunk and transferred Erin to the rear of the van. Checked again to confirm that the rope and blindfold were knotted tight.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he muttered as he swung the doors shut, “Dr. Reilly.”

He slipped into the driver’s seat of the Astro, started the engine. A V-6, 150 horsepower. Noisy as hell.

The van rumbled like an unmuffled Harley as he steered it away into the night.

He drove for two and a half miles, heading east on Broadway, past the lighted islands of shopping plazas and the dark, rustling stretches of undeveloped land.

At Houghton Road he turned south. He was near the outer edges of town now. Rare horse ranches and isolated patches of tract housing were all he saw around him.

By the time he passed Escalante Road, more than two miles south of Broadway, even these proofs of habitation had largely vanished. His surroundings were a great starlit expanse of mesquite trees and cactus, rippling like some strange ocean, extending in every direction to the mountains outlined against the blue-black sky.

He was outside city limits now. A psychological barrier had been crossed, and irrationally he felt safer. Driving with one hand, he removed the baseball cap, red wig, and false beard.

Without the disguise he was a balding, moon-faced man of forty-six, his pale cheeks as smooth as a child’s.

In profile his chin was weak, and his nose, badly broken in a long-ago fight, was flat and shapeless. Tufting his scalp were scraps of hair, straw-colored once, now prematurely gray.

The lights of the dashboard played on his face, gifting him with the illusion of expressiveness and life; but the light did not touch his eyes. They lay in shadowed hollows under thin, feminine brows.

The job, he thought, had gone flawlessly so far. Better than expected. Surpassing all hopes.

He nodded, satisfied, but he did not smile.

Harold Gund never smiled.

Erin regained consciousness and found herself in the dark, the absolute dark of a nightmare, and she couldn’t move, she couldn’t move.

Seizure, she thought in blank confusion. Had a seizure, and now I’m paralyzed somehow.

But that couldn’t be it. She hadn’t had an epileptic episode since she was fifteen. And besides, she was forgetting something, something vitally important, something that had happened to her just a short time ago.

The lobby.

Man in a baseball cap.

Electric pain shocking her body.

Kidnapped. Not a seizure. She’d been kidnapped.

A scream of blind terror welled in her throat but found no release. Her mouth wouldn’t open. Her lips were sealed.

She twisted wildly, found her legs lashed together at the ankles, her wrists tied.

And her eyes-heavy cloth was stretched tightly over them, imprisoning her in darkness.

Bound. Muzzled. Blindfolded.

Helpless.

The pounding drumbeat of her heart, the choked grunts behind her closed lips, the snorts of breath flaring her nostrils-these were the only sounds in her world, her only reality.

He could do anything he liked with her, anything at all, and she was powerless to defend herself. At this moment he might be standing over her with a knife or a gun, might be preparing to slice her throat or put a bullet in her, or something worse, inflict some variety of slow torture, and there was nothing she could do about it, no way out, no chance for her, no hope Stop it.

The voice in her mind, firm and authoritative, was her own.

Stop it, Erin, come on now, stop it and think.

Think. Yes. She had to think, because thinking was the only recourse left open to her. Had to think and understand.

With trembling effort she forced down panic, struggling for calm, directing the splintered chaos of her thoughts into straight-line patterns.

First question: Where was she?

She lay still, listening hard. Over the violent rhythm of her heart she heard the throb of an engine.

A vehicle. Was she in the trunk of a car?

No, she sensed somehow that the space around her was bigger than that. And the cold metal surface beneath her, vibrating with the engine, felt like the uncarpeted floor of the cargo compartment in a truck or van.

Moving pretty fast, she’d guess. Maybe forty or forty-five miles an hour. No stops for traffic signals. On a highway, but not an interstate. The road was too rough. One of the older highways that led out of town.

Out of town…

Into the desert? There could be reasons for taking her to an isolated spot, far from buildings and people.

Fear rose in her again, squeezing her heart in its cold grip. She thought she might pass out.

No. She had to remain conscious. It was her only chance.

There was a possibility he would unseal her lips at some point, if only to hear her scream or plead. Should he do that, she would reason with him, try to establish contact. Dealing with irrationality was her daily business. There ought to be some way for her to get through.

Then she remembered his eyes, so blue, so cold.

Well, she could try, anyway. If he let her talk at all.

And if for some reason he untied her? What then?

She would have to fight.

The idea was not entirely desperate. Three years ago she’d taken a class in tae kwon do, the Korean form of karate, as part of a training program designed to help therapists defend themselves against violent patients.

She was by no means a martial-arts expert-she’d earned only a yellow belt, qualifying her as barely more than a beginner-but if she could deliver a snap kick to her abductor’s kneecap or a palm-heel strike to his throat, she might be able to drop him to the ground long enough to flee.

In practice sessions, at least, she’d done well enough. Annie, a suitably impressed spectator, had dubbed her Erin-san, the Irish Ninja. But then, what could you expect from a woman who’d named her cat Stink?

Annie…

The voice over the intercom. Annie’s voice.

Oh, God, did he have her, too?

Erin wished she hadn’t been gagged. Wished she could call out Annie’s name, learn if her sister was somewhere nearby. Perhaps trussed and silenced as she herself was, sharing the nightmare.

Would he have wanted them both? Why? They had no enemies. It didn’t make sense.

Who was he, anyway? She’d seen his face only briefly; it had seemed utterly unfamiliar. That thick red beard and shock of carrot-top hair…

But perhaps the beard was a disguise. If so, he could be nearly anybody. One of her patients, even.

Any therapist could become a target. That was why she’d been careful to keep an unlisted address, and why she’d chosen to live in a security building.

Three of her current patients had shown occasional violent tendencies. Nothing like this, though. And none of the three had those chilly blue eyes.

Well, maybe he was someone she’d treated years ago, during her internship at a psychology clinic downtown. Or one of the numberless transients she’d met while doing pro bono work at the local shelters-sad, lost men whose faces she never would remember, because they were all alike.

Her speculations led nowhere. His identity was unguessable, and without knowing who he was, she couldn’t know his intention in abducting her. But on that point she had to assume the worst.

Had to assume he meant to kill her.

Twisting her wrists, she tried to loosen the cord that secured them. The bristly scrape of the binding against her skin told her that he had tied her hands with rope. Thick, stiff rope lashed around her wrists in multiple coils, python-snug.

She had seen a calf trussed once at a rodeo, its hooves bound with a cowboy’s lasso. Though she had pitied the bleating animal, she had never imagined one day sharing its fate.