Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

Then Hrubek slipped through the cave opening. Lis turned and raced down the path. No idea where she was going, not really thinking, she simply ran. Once out of the main chamber she fled down a long corridor, about eight feet high. Hrubek was somewhere behind her. As she ran she noticed the tunnel was growing smaller. By now it had shrunk to six feet, and the sides were closing in. Once she slammed into a rock, cutting her forehead and leaving a scar that still remained. By then the chamber had narrowed down to five feet and she was running crouched over. Then, four feet. Soon she was crawling.

Ahead of her the tunnel grew even smaller though on the other side of a very narrow opening it seemed to widen and grow brighter. But escaping that way would mean crawling through a tunnel that was no more than twelve or so inches high. With Hrubek right behind her.

“The thought of being, well, exposed to him like that. I mean, wearing just my swimsuit… I couldn’t do it. I turned to my left and crawled through a larger entrance.”

It was black, completely black, but she felt cool air circulating and assumed it was a large space. She climbed inside, feeling her way along the smooth floor. Looking back she could see the entrance-it was slightly lighter than the surrounding walls. Slowly it darkened then grew less dark again, and she heard a hissing sound. He was in this small cave with her. She lay flat on the ground and bit a finger to keep silent while she sobbed.

“You have no idea what noise is until you’ve been in a place like that. I was sure my heartbeat or the sound of blood in my ears would give me away. I think I could hear my own tears falling on the floor of the cave.”

All the while Hrubek was shuffling around her. He passed her, no more than five feet away. Then he paused and sniffed the air and muttered, “There’s a woman in here. I can smell her pussy.”

Lis ran. She couldn’t bear it any longer. “I scrambled to the opening and turned back down the narrow corridor, the way I’d come. That is, I thought I did. But somehow I took a wrong turn.”

In one sense it was lucky. The light was better here and the roof of the cave high. She saw discarded cigarettes and beer cans-which led her to believe she was heading toward an exit. She kept moving toward the light.

“Then I felt a breeze stirring and way up ahead I heard running water. I ran toward it as fast as I could. Then I turned the corner. That’s where I found the body.” She gazed through the misty windows into the yard, now filled with a blustery wind. “I didn’t recognize it at first. There was too much blood.”

Robert Gillespie lay on the cave floor.

“He was twisted like a rag doll and had a huge gash in his head. But he wasn’t dead.”

She’d taken Robert’s hand and leaned close, urging him to keep breathing. She’d get help, she said. But then she heard footsteps. Ten feet away Hrubek stood staring at them. He was smiling cynically, muttering.

“He was talking,” Lis told Kohler, “about conspirators.”

Stumbling backwards Lis landed on her purse. Inside, she felt a knife. She’d packed it for the picnic, she explained, wrapping it in a paper towel and placing it in her bag so no one would reach blindly into the picnic basket and cut themselves. She pulled it out now and ripped the towel away from the blade-it was very sharp, a Chicago Cutlery, nine inches long. She pointed it at Hrubek and told him to keep back. But he just kept walking at her, saying, “Sic semper tyrannis!” again and again. Her nerve broke. She dropped the knife and ran.

“That was the knife that he used?” Kohler asked. “I remember reading that the victim was stabbed as well as beaten. Sexually mutilated too.”

After a moment Lis answered, “Robert was badly hurt but he probably could’ve survived. According to the evidence at the trial they think he would’ve recovered from the rock blows. He died from the stabbing.” She paused. “And the mutilation? Yes, Hrubek stabbed Robert in the groin. A number of times.”

Only fifty feet away Lis found the exit and scrabbled through it. She collapsed on the ground and caught her breath. Then she headed into the canyon. But after running only a dozen yards she pulled up with a fierce cramp in her side. Hrubek was twenty or thirty feet behind her. He was saying, “Come here. You’re a very beautiful woman but what’s that on your hair? I don’t like your hair that way. What’s that on your head? ” She’d gotten some of Robert’s blood on her hair. This upset Hrubek. He was very angry. She supposed that he was worried it was evidence. “What did you do to yourself?” he called. “That’s not fashionable. You shouldn’t’ve done that!”

He stepped toward her and she dropped to her knees, rolling under a jutting overhang about a foot and a half high. It went back into the rock maybe six feet and there she wedged herself, shivering in the cold and fighting the panic from confinement. As she stared at the path, his feet appeared. He wore shoes. Huge ones. Wingtips. This astonished her. For some reason she expected him to be barefoot, with long yellow toenails. She wondered if he’d killed a man for the shoes. Then he bent down and lay on his belly.

“‘Nice try,’ he kept saying. ‘Come on out here. You’re Eve, aren’t you? Beautiful lady. Ought to shave that fucking hair off.’ ”

She wedged herself as far back as she could, her face pressing into the rock. When he groped for her, she screamed and the piercing sound of her own voice stunned her ears. He screamed too, crying at her to shut up. He grunted and tried again to grab her. With a huge effort he jammed his arm forward. The tip of his middle finger eased against her thigh. Those were the only parts of their bodies close enough to touch. Lis felt the feathery trail of his callused skin move toward her knee. The sensation was like a burn and it remained, searing, even when Hrubek stood and vanished.

Lis lay, whimpering and fighting the grip of claustrophobia. Where was he? she wondered. Did she dare leave? It’d been a half hour since she’d disappeared from the beach. She knew Owen wouldn’t have arrived yet but Portia and Dorothy might’ve come looking for her. Claire too would be somewhere nearby.

Outside she noticed rain beginning to spatter on the stone path.

“I started to push myself out. Then I heard two things. One was Hrubek’s voice. He was very close and talking to himself. The other sound was thunder.”

It shook the ground. She was worried that the rock above her might shift and trap her where she lay. But this fear was soon replaced by a more immediate one-that she would drown. Huge gushes of water suddenly flowed down the arroyo and the cave began to fill.

She eased closer to the opening. If Hrubek had reached in again, he could have grabbed her easily. Her head was sideways-the only way it would fit into the narrow space-and she was twisting her mouth upward, desperately gasping for air. Soon, filthy water was surging around her face, flowing over her lips. She spat it out and started choking. More thunder, more torrents of water, tumbling over the stone. She pushed toward the opening but couldn’t make headway. Fighting the rush of water she finally got far enough through the current to fling her hand outside the cave. Blindly, she gripped a rock and pulled herself toward it.

“Then the rock moved. It wasn’t a rock at all but a shoe. I pulled back quickly but a huge hand grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me out.” Lis looked away from Kohler. “My swimsuit snagged on a rock and tore open.”

She was half-naked. But she had no choice-she couldn’t stay in the cave any longer. She remembered thinking she wished that she had the courage to choose to die by drowning rather than be raped and murdered by the madman. As she was drawn out of the cave, her mind was filled with images of Hrubek’s huge hands prodding her breasts and reaching between her legs. She began to cry.