Middle Of Nowhere

C H A P T E R

58

"This thing is out of hand. Does it feel that way to you?" Daphne asked. He didn't know handcuffs. He'd clamped the left cuff way too tightly to her wrist so that her hand felt cold and her wrist felt broken. She winced with pain every time the car bumped, which on the dirt road was every few yards.

"No talking." He said this, but lacked the authority of his earlier insistence. She knew he wanted to talk, needed to talk. It was the only way for him to build his confidence.

"Have you thought about why we've pursued you?" she asked.

"To fry my ass," the driver answered.

"You see? It is out of hand. That's not it at all."

"Right," he snapped. He reached for a beer. It was his fourth.

"Have you thought about how Davie would play this?"

"Don't you talk about him!"

"He wouldn't know how to play it, would he, Abby? Because Davie wasn't like you. Davie took the straight road. Davie was doing fine until you talked him into letting you hit that delivery."

"Shut up!"

"There's a tower," she said, pointing through the windshield. Sweet and sour—she needed to be both for him, play both roles herself, one moment the accuser, one moment the accomplice.

Flek slowed, but kept driving. He tried the phone and once again nearly lost his patience. He reached over the backseat and fished in her purse and came out with her phone. Same reaction to his attempt with it.

Daphne didn't believe in coincidence—Boldt had trained her not to, along with every other detective with whom he'd worked over the years. If the circuit was busy, then that was Boldt's doing. And if that was Boldt's doing, then she still had hope.

"What the fuck am I thinking?" Flek said. He sped up the car. It had finally occurred to him, she realized, to use a pay phone. She had wondered how long it might take him to see this. Get him into town—Boldt was on the same page as she.

The clock continued running in her head. Osbourne had said triangulation took time. Did they have a location on her? Was there a radio car waiting around the next corner, and three more coming up their tailpipe?

"My guess is Davie would encourage you to work it out, not get yourself killed."

"I told you to shut up!" He shoved the beer can onto the dash so that it wedged tightly between glass and vinyl. He tugged the gun from his waist and extended his trembling arm toward the floor of the car.

"No!" she hollered.

But Flek pulled the trigger, shooting her left foot. The bullet traveled through her and out the floor of the car. "That's one!" he shouted madly, saliva spraying from his wet lips. "I got eight more in here, and I'll use every damn one before I bother to finish you. NOW YOU SHUT UP!"

For a moment she felt no pain whatsoever, her brain frozen with shock. But then the burning began. It raced up her leg, through her gut, and she vomited.

"You disgusting bitch!" he screamed at close range, beating her with the butt of the gun, directly on the wound he'd caused with the bottle.

Her head swooned, but she struggled for consciousness and managed to sit herself upright and turn her head slowly to face him. The burning in her left foot was now an inferno. She could barely hear her own voice as she spoke. "What now, Abby?"

"Shut the fuck up!"

"You're going to have to bandage that, or pull a tourniquet, or I'm going to bleed out on you. And then what? Then I'm a dead cop, and Boldt isn't going to deal with you. You're damned if I die, Abby." She needed to speak but could barely find the strength. "You . . . know . . . that, don't you?" Her words were long strings of stretched taffy, her mouth disconnected from her brain. The purple goo loomed at the edges of her eyes, pulsing with each tick of her heart. She pushed it back, but it consumed her, determined to shield her from this pain. For a moment she maintained consciousness. She thought she saw a phone booth up ahead. A streetlight in the rain. But then the black hood of unconsciousness slipped over her head, and all hope was lost.