Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

“There’s that fight-or-flight instinct I warned you of,” Cray said.

Her hands thrashed inside the jacket’s nylon sleeves, and behind the gag she was screaming, but the screams were only stifled sounds that nobody would hear.

The blindfold came down, her sight blotted out in a fall of darkness, and Cray slapped her, the leather glove stinging her cheek.

“No more of your nonsense now,” he said sternly. “If you struggle, if you give me any trouble at all, I’ll hurt you. You’ll win yourself nothing but pain.”

He pulled her off the bed. The darkness tilted around her. She swayed, her knees liquefying, and then Cray’s arm was supporting her, and he was hustling her across the room.

He paused once, apparently to collect something. She heard a rustle of fabric.

The door opened. She felt the balmy night on her face.

As Cray escorted her outside, the sudden sense of air and space was shocking, disorienting. She imagined herself a space traveler ejected from the safety of the capsule into the terrifying emptiness beyond.

The walkway felt cool and smooth against the soles of her bare feet. She tried to count her steps, though she didn’t know why. It was something people did in the movies. They remembered every detail of their kidnapping, and later they could lead the police to the place where they’d been taken.

Jingle of metal, a soft click, the sound of an automobile’s door swinging wide. Cray had brought her to his SUV.

“In you go,” he said.

She prayed someone was watching from one of the motel windows, some insomniac who would see a gagged, blindfolded woman being pushed into a Lexus sport-utility and would call 911.

Cray lifted her in both hands, shoved her roughly into a passenger seat. The front seat, she was fairly sure. He pulled a lap belt tight across her waist, and she heard the snick of the buckle.

Behind the gag, she made a very small sound, something like a moan.

“No need to be scared yet,” Cray said, his voice close to her ear. “We’ve got a good half-hour ride ahead of us before things get interesting.”

Half an hour was not nearly enough time to reach the White Mountains, where Sharon Andrews had been killed. Cray must be taking her someplace nearer to town.

The desert, she guessed. The empty vastness, where he could do whatever he liked, and no one would see or hear.

Something thumped on the floor of the passenger compartment. A second item, less heavy, followed it.

Then the door banged shut, and for a moment she was alone in the Lexus while Cray circled around to the driver’s side.

Her toes probed the floor and felt rumpled canvas. The satchel.

And the other item?

She felt worn fabric and a tangled strap. Her purse.

No doubt he’d brought it for the same reason he’d wanted the envelope with her birth certificates and Social Security cards. The purse contained her identification, which he intended to destroy.

It contained a gun also. A gun now less than three feet from her grasp, if she could only reach it.

Savagely she pulled at the jacket’s knotted sleeves, fighting to rip the nylon and liberate her hands.

No use.

The driver’s door opened, and the Lexus shifted on its springs as Cray slid in beside her. “All ready for our little outing?” he asked cheerfully.

He shut his door. The engine started, its hum low and ominous.

“I know I am,” he added. “I’ve been ready for years.”

There was motion, the Lexus reversing, and Elizabeth felt her last hope sliding inexorably away.

Cray was ten miles west of the motel, driving down a two-lane strip of blacktop through the flat, unforgiving desert, when he decided it was time for a real conversation.

He reached over to the woman in the passenger seat who called herself Elizabeth Palmer, and loosened the washcloth that had stoppered her mouth.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

She coughed weakly and repeatedly, a typical reaction to the strain of being gagged. He waited for her to recover her composure, feeling no impatience.

His rage had cooled. He had no reason to be angry now. She was going to die, and first she would know terror and then pain.

It was all he could have asked for, all he had wanted throughout the past twelve years.

When her spate of coughing was finished, she raised her head, turning her blindfolded face toward him, as if she could see through the opaque fabric.

He thought she might start screaming, or plead for mercy, or thrash in her seat the way some of them did. But to her credit she seemed almost calm. He kept thinking of her as the teenager she had been, but she was older now, and the years had made her stronger.

A long moment passed, filled with the hum of the engine and the beat of the tires on the rutted road.

“Where are we going?” she asked finally.

He was disappointed. The question was too obvious.

“Is that the first thing you say to me,” he chided softly, “after all these years?”

“What should I say?”

“How much you’ve missed me. I’ve missed you. I’m so very glad to see you again. Really. You do believe that, don’t you?”

“Yes. I do.”

Her voice was as he remembered it. A soft, girlish voice, strikingly innocent. He had spent many hours in conversation with her, in the days when they had been bound together so intimately, and he had always been intrigued by the childlike quality she projected. He hadn’t expected it to last.

“Little Kaylie,” he breathed, “back from the dead. At least, I thought you might be dead. So much time had passed, and you had disappeared so utterly. As if you had vanished into some Bermuda Triangle, leaving no trace.”

She made a ragged throat-clearing noise. “You thought I’d been killed?”

“To be honest, I wondered if you’d killed yourself. You have definite suicidal tendencies.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then why have you been following me?”

She said nothing.

Another desolate mile sped by. The dashboard’s glow lit his gloved hands on the wheel, her face in profile. The car’s interior was a bubble of light, and around it in all directions lay a great and brooding darkness.

He wondered if Elizabeth Palmer, whose name when he had known her had been quite different, was thinking of that darkness and of the destiny that would soon make her part of it forever.

“You didn’t answer me,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“Not much farther.”

“Where?”

“There’s a dirt road a few miles ahead. It dead-ends in the desert. Must have served a ranch once, or perhaps a ranch was planned for that site but never built. In any case, nothing’s there now. We’ll have privacy, you and I.”

“Why not the White Mountains?”

“I’d prefer to take you there, I really would. There, or to some destination even more remote. Sadly, the hour is late. Daybreak’s coming. We don’t have as much time as I’d like.”

“Time for what?”

“Aren’t you the inquisitive one. Brimful of questions. You know what they say about curiosity and the cat.”

“Time for what?” she repeated, her voice low and toneless.

“You’ll see. It’s a kind of game I play. But much more than a game.”

“What game?”

“Patience.”

He was proud of her. She had not done the usual stupid things. She hadn’t tried kicking at him, or twisting wildly in her seat to grope for the door handle in a hopeless attempt to throw herself from the car. She hadn’t cried, not even silently.

Best of all, she hadn’t retreated into a comatose state and left him with a mere simulacrum of a woman.

He hated it when they did that. He wanted alertness, vitality, the animal instincts healthy and strong. He wanted a taut and quivering hare to chase.