Stephen White - Blinded

Yes. Everything had changed.

She shivered. And why am I naked?

Oh, yeah.

Sterling .

Damn Sterling.

Five minutes ago she was still loving it. Every bit of it. The headphones, the tape, the music, the voice, the whole thing. Disrobing in the car. Waiting for him there, naked. Waiting for him to…

She tried to think.

Truth? She was more frightened of the swamp than she was of the gun. She’d grown up around guns in Virginia, was a pretty good shot herself. She didn’t have the gun this time, though. It was pointed at her. That was hard to ignore.

But not as hard to ignore as the swamp.

She hated swamps and everything that lived in them. She hated snakes. She hated alligators. She hated frogs. She even hated the damn harmless dragonflies. When she was thirteen, one had become tangled in her hair at school. She’d been so frightened by the flapping that she’d pulled the hallway fire alarm to get some help.

Her friends had never let her forget it.

She told herself not to panic in the swamp. There was a way out. She had to find the way out.

The voice from the Walkman had instructed her to duct-tape her mouth. Let that awful stuff even touch her hair? Yeah, right. She’d thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. She’d done it. Now the tape across her lips limited her to whimpers.

Her wrists were bound in front of her with the same awful gray tape. The instructions had made sense at the time is what she told herself.

What was I thinking?

On an exhale, she thought of blue herons. Herons liked swamps. She’d loved watching them on that boat tour she’d taken that time in the Everglades. She liked herons. Okay, she didn’t love them. Birds made her nervous. But she tried to imagine walking into a flock of blue herons. That would be okay. She could survive that.

She stopped.

Behind her the voice said, “Keep going.” It was a hoarse whisper. The same strange voice that was on the Walkman. “Don’t turn.”

The voice said keep going. She kept going.

Her next step took her ankle-deep into the dank water. Two more steps, and her kneecaps sank below the surface.

She’d lived in Augusta for four years. During that time she’d never visited the Phinizy Swamp Nature Park. Not once. She hated swamps. A girlfriend had once said something about there being bobcats out here.

Bobcats? She shivered.

She preferred golf courses. That was all the nature she needed: the back nine at Augusta, across town. Midnight on the thirteenth green again? She didn’t need to be a member for that round, did she? That night was… perfection.

She had no idea what was spread out in front of her. A pond-size swamp? An Everglades-size swamp? Are swamps deep? Shallow?

She heard a splash, then realized that she had made the noise herself. How far behind her was the gun? She didn’t know, but she couldn’t wait. She had to move. She decided to run. In her head she flipped a coin. Tails.

She would run right.

Before her first step, she heard another splash. She knew she hadn’t made that one. She screamed into her gag.

“Keep going.” The gun hadn’t moved with her. “Don’t turn.” The gun was farther away, back a few steps. The odds said now.

Now!

She lifted her knees high and sprinted to her right, hoping, praying that her next few steps wouldn’t be her last few steps.

She splashed. Can’t run in knee-deep water without splashing.

Please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.

She thought she spotted the glooming outline of a tree. Someplace to hide. Something to provide cover. How far away was it?

She heard more splashing. Her own? She didn’t know. She tripped on something solid below the surface of the swamp and slipped right down as though she’d been slapped. Muck seeped into her nose and ears. She tasted decay as she tried to scream, “I’m sorry, Daddy,” but despite the tape her mouth was full of the effluent of the Phinizy Swamp.

Have to get up. She tried to stand.

She felt a tug on her thigh.

It was insistent. And then it was crushing.

Suddenly, she was swimming backward involuntarily. Her last thought was I hate alligators.

“A serial killer?”

“I don’t want to say any more than what I said, Dr. Gregory. I just needed you to realize what is at stake here.”

“ Sterling has killed women all over the country?”

“Yes. Please call the police. He needs to be behind bars. We can’t wait.”

We?

I digested the implications.

“Is anyone else in danger?” If Gibbs identified a future potential victim, it would launch me into a gray stratosphere where I might be required to breach her confidentiality.

“Not that I know of,” she said.

Silently I counted to five. I spent the seconds trying to decide whether or not I believed her.

I had only fifteen minutes to begin to digest what I’d just learned.

The lunchtime appointment that followed my Tuesday morning session with Gibbs belonged to a member of the local bar. Jim Zebid was a defense attorney, a litigator who also did occasional plaintiff’s work on malpractice claims. He had an interesting background, having been around the Boulder County criminal justice system working as a private investigator while putting himself through law school.

I’d been seeing him for a few months during the same Tuesday slot, and the therapeutic relationship continued to fascinate me. At times he was eager to spar with me over seeming inconsequentials; at other times I felt he would be content to curl up in my lap in parody of my foster poodle, Anvil. Not having a solid handle on one of my patients’ psychological profiles was nothing novel for me, but I found Jim Zebid a particularly interesting and perplexing man.

Since our first session I’d been working under the assumption that Jim chose me as a psychotherapist because I was married to a prosecutor whom he knew. His underlying motivation for making that choice? I wasn’t sure, but I felt confident that he and I would come around to it before too long. I suspected that it had to do with competition, or with secrets, or with some curious transference that would follow a serpentine trail back to his mother and his father.

Or maybe it had to do with all of the above.

Jim’s presenting problem was anxiety. His anxiety manifested itself in traditional ways: through nervousness, irritability, trouble sleeping, rumination, and occasional self-medication with alcohol and marijuana. By history, the present symptoms weren’t novel for him. Although only thirty-one, he’d suffered from anxiety problems since his days as an undergraduate at UCLA. Later, when the symptoms had aggravated during law school, he’d rationalized away the problems as stress-related. But the symptoms continued unabated, and Jim had recently, albeit reluctantly, come to the conclusion that something more intrinsic might be responsible for his chronic misery.

Early on I referred him to a psychiatrist for a medication consultation. The Xanax Jim was prescribed had succeeded not only in taking the edge off his symptoms but in making him more psychologically available for the insight work that he insisted he wanted to do with me. Occasionally, though, I thought that his anxiety still proved an impediment to psychotherapy, and I wasn’t quite sure about the ultimate efficacy of the Xanax.