Jennifer Sturman - The Key

I waited for the voice in my ear to reply.

“You got all that, right, Ben?”

Nothing.

“Ben?” I whispered again.

And still nothing.

Then I noticed that despite the throbbing in my head and the queasiness in my stomach and the awkward position my arms were in and the way my neck still ached from Jake’s headlock, one body part felt pretty good.

My ear no longer itched.

T he transmitter was gone.

I briefly tried to convince myself that perhaps that it had fallen out of my ear and attached itself to a piece of clothing or tangled itself in my hair, in which case, Ben would have been able to continue monitoring the conversation even if I was unable to hear anything from his end. But the continued absence of Ben or any type of rescue effort didn’t do much to bolster my hopes. And then Jake put the nail in the coffin of my hopes.

“Hey, Rach. You didn’t spend your own money on that transmitter thing, did you? Because we threw it out the window somewhere on Canal Street. Sorry about that.”

I pictured the small, ticklike button lying on the dirty pavement and tried not to groan.

The transmitter was completely gone. And I was completely screwed.

I was alone, outnumbered and defenseless, and I was fairly confident that the waters off Bridgehampton would be less than balmy. Not that I’d last very long once overboard. I could only hope that sharks migrated south in the winter like birds.

Nobody would be coming to rescue me. Nobody knew what had happened, or where I was, or what Jake and Annabel had planned for me, or why they had planned it in the first place.

I should have known better than to rely on anyone else.

It was up to me, and only me, to save myself.

This realization drained the last of my good humor. Jake and Annabel were still playing their little game of You-Shut-Up/No-You-Shut-Up in the front seat, but I’d had enough.

“Why don’t you both shut up!” I bellowed.

“Hey, Rach. There’s nothing to gain by getting all worked up,” said Jake.

“There’s nothing to gain by killing me,” I snapped back. “Nobody-nobody-would believe that I killed myself over you, you conceited ass.”

Annabel chimed in. “You are conceited, Jake. I mean, I’m not worried that we won’t be able to put the whole thing over, but your ego is getting sort of bloated.”

Divide and conquer, I thought, as they bickered over whether or not Jake was conceited. I would use my keen wit to derail their plan. The fact that the two of them seemed headed for couple’s therapy at a rapid clip could only work in my favor. My mind raced as I tried to come up with a reason for Annabel to join me in ganging up on Jake, or any reason I could put forth to dissuade them from their current path.

But it was as if they could read my thoughts.

“You have to understand, Rach. It’s nothing personal,” said Jake after he and Annabel had agreed to table the conceitedness issue. “We spent a lot of time thinking this through, and there’s just no other alternative.”

“He’s right, Rachel. You have to take the fall for the Dahlia thing. There’s no other way. It’s either you or me, and I’m going to have to go with you.”

“That’s so typical of you, Annabel, to look at it that way. Killing Rachel is something we need to do for our future. It’s not just about you. I may be conceited, but you’re selfish,” Jake said.

As they launched into heated debate over whether Annabel was more selfish than Jake was conceited, I turned my attention to my hands and feet. If reason was out, maybe I could attempt physical persuasion. If I could only untie myself, then I’d be able to take them by surprise and overpower them somehow. There had to be a weapon of some sort here in the back seat with me, a tire iron or golf club or handy meat cleaver I could put to good use.

But no matter how I wiggled and squirmed, I couldn’t free my hands from the knotted silk scarf, and I knew better than to think that anything that expensive would simply tear and give way. The odds of physically persuading Jake and Annabel not to kill me seemed about as inauspicious as the odds of reasoning with them. They’d probably have to untie me so I could write out whatever fake confession they wanted me to write out, but I doubted that they’d be careless enough for me to make my escape then.

“Slow down,” Jake warned Annabel in the front seat. “You don’t want to miss the turnoff.”

“I’m not going to miss the turnoff.”

“You’re in the wrong lane. You need to start getting over.”

“The exit’s not for another two miles.”

“You’re still in the wrong lane.”

The car swerved to the right. “Happy now?”

“Happier, yes. But you should use your blinker when you switch lanes.”

“There’s hardly anybody else on the road! Who cares if I use the blinker?”

I scanned through my options again, hoping against hope that I’d missed something. But I wasn’t coming up with anything viable.

In fact, I was coming up with nothing.

The car’s pace slowed as Annabel turned off the highway. It seemed wrong that when I actually wanted to go to the beach, traffic was a nightmare, but when I had no interest in arriving there we just cruised right along.

I sighed. It was looking like I should start resigning myself to a cold and watery death. A certain fatalism washed over me. I found myself wondering if there was anything embarrassing at my home or office, any items that I wouldn’t want discovered by the unfortunate person charged with clearing out my belongings. Not that it really mattered, since I couldn’t be embarrassed when I was dead, but I didn’t want to tarnish the memories of me that Peter and my family and friends would otherwise cherish. And I hoped there would be good food at the reception after my funeral. I’d always been a big fan of the pig in a blanket, and while I recognized that some might consider it an inappropriate funeral dish, I personally believed it was suitable for any occasion. Although, it was a dish best served with champagne, and not the cheap stuff, either. I hoped that somebody would spring for something nice and dry and bubbly.

“The light’s turning red,” said Jake.

“It still looks yellow to me,” Annabel replied.

“This would be a very bad time to get pulled over for running a red light.”

“Geez, Grandma,” Annabel grumbled, but the car came to a stop.

“I’d feel a lot safer with my grandmother behind the wheel.”

“How long is this light, anyway?”

“What’s your hurry? We can’t kill her until after dark. We have plenty of-”

I was weighing the relative merits of pigs in a blanket and miniquiches when I briefly registered the sound of a car engine accelerating behind us.

Then Jake’s words were lost in the roar of metal crashing into metal.

T he impact threw me forward, my head collided with the back of the driver’s seat, and the sunny afternoon gave way to shooting silver stars.

The car skidded some distance and then crashed into an unyielding object. My head hit the back of the driver’s seat again.

I heard a voice cry out. It could have been mine, or it could have been Annabel’s-it could even have been Jake’s, taking on a strangely soprano note-but it was impossible to tell over the whoosh of exploding air bags. Not that there were air bags in the back seat-my safety hadn’t been of primary concern to the happy couple in the front.

I struggled up into a sitting position, which took significantly more abdominal strength than I would have guessed I had, New Year’s resolutions regarding personal trainers notwithstanding. Through the haze of shooting silver stars, I managed to ascertain that the air bags had pinned both Jake and Annabel to their seats, effectively immobilizing them. Police sirens sounded in the distance.