Blind Pursuit

25

Gund still had no idea how the bitch managed to free herself from the cellar, and he didn’t much care. All he knew, all that mattered to him, was that he would track her down, and then she would pay.

He had never been so angry. She’d left him. Wrong of her to do that, so very wrong, unforgivably wrong.

He could have killed her last night, but had he? No. She was special to him-still was, despite her betrayal-and he had treated her accordingly. He’d cleaned up the cellar room, stocked it with food and other necessities, even gone to the trouble of installing a foam pad so she could sleep in comfort. He hadn’t chained her to the wall, as he easily could have. Hadn’t shackled her feet or manacled her hands.

Right from the start he’d been good to her. He’d treated her with consideration and respect. And this was how she’d responded, the ungrateful little whore, the goddamned filth.

His breath came hard, partly from the exertion of frantic activity but mostly from sheer, towering rage.

The good thing was that she couldn’t have gone far. He’d been away for less than a half hour, and it must have taken time for her to defeat the two locked doors.

He was guessing she had left the house only moments before his return.

Her car keys were in his pocket, so unless she could hot-wire an ignition, the Taurus was useless to her. Penned in by barbed wire, she had two options-to hide on the grounds of the ranch, or to circle behind the house in search of another way out.

Pausing at the side of the barn, he beamed his flash into the grain bin and fuel shed. Both were empty.

The flashlight guided him as he loped across yards of scorched, bristly grass. A flattened, S-shaped thing-a dead gopher snake-was briefly visible amid a patch of purple weeds.

Behind the house was a utility shed. He looked inside. Nothing.

He didn’t expect her to hide, anyway. She would run. And he knew where she was likeliest to go.

Two hundred feet beyond the shed, his property ended in a line of barbed wire, silver in the starlight. Just before the fence was an arroyo.

The wide, dry streambed, carved by seasonal flash floods, ran west to Houghton Road, with no gates or fences along the way. Though Erin couldn’t know the wash’s destination, she was sure to see that it offered the only means of exit from the ranch, and like any local resident, she would know that arroyos were the natural roadways of the desert, ideal for easy hiking.

He sprinted for the wash, certain the flashlight would reveal her footprints.

Once he picked up her trail, all he need do was track her, a coyote stalking prey.

Erin groped in the dirt by the ladder, hunting among the scatter of broken rungs until she found a nail.

In darkness she fingered it. A two-inch nail, slightly rusty but still sharp.

Just what she needed.

She had been ready to climb behind the Ford’s steering wheel when the idea occurred to her. Her abductor was sure to hear the engine as soon as she started it. He would give chase in his van.

Unless the van had been sabotaged.

He couldn’t drive it on four flat tires.

Fumbling blindly, wishing he hadn’t shut the barn doors when he left, she touched the side panel of her Ford. Its smooth surface guided her as she crept forward in a half crouch, one hand patting the car, the other upraised before her, searching for obstructions.

Deprived of sight, she found her other senses temporarily heightened. She could hear the faint creaks of the barn walls, aged wood shifting under the wind’s caress. The smells of rot and fecal decay blended with the closer, more pungent odor of her own sweat.

The car ended, giving way to empty space. Memory directed her to the Chevy Astro, dead ahead in the blackness.

Something skittered past her right foot. Involuntarily she kicked at it with a gasp and heard a small, outraged squeak. Patter of rodent feet, diminishing, gone.

Just a mouse, Erin. Don’t start getting hysterical on me, okay?

Oddly, the reassuring voice in her head was Annie’s. Erin was irrationally glad to hear it, grateful for even the illusory comfort it provided.

Her probing hand found the van’s hood. She searched lower and discovered a flat metal disk. Hubcap. The front wheel on the passenger side.

All right, then. First deflate this tire, then the others. Shouldn’t take longer than two minutes, and she would buy herself infinitely more time to make her getaway.

If she could do it at all. Having never tried to puncture a tire, she had no idea how thick the rubber might be, how difficult to penetrate.

Only one way to find out.

Clutching the nail in her fist, the point extending from between two fingers, she tensed her arm, took a breath, and struck.

The nail slammed into the tire and punched through. She had time to congratulate herself on the successful execution of the first phase of her plan, and then an alarm went off.

For a startled second she couldn’t identify the source of the sudden noise and glare. All she knew was that the darkness was banished, the barn abruptly lit by a yellow stroboscopic light, the silence shattered by a foghorn’s furious blatting that went on and on.

Then she understood that the van was equipped with a burglar alarm, and by attacking the tire she had tripped the system.

“Jesus,” she hissed, the word lost in the insane racket howling and whooping around her.

That bedlam would be audible for a thousand yards in any direction. It was as good as a searchlight pinpointing her position.

She left the nail imbedded in the tire and sprang to her feet.

Ran for her car, now clearly visible in beats of yellow radiance from the van’s parking lights, flashing in distress.

Misjudged the distance, banged her thigh on the Ford’s bumper-sparkle of pain down her leg.

Reached the driver’s door. Locked?

No, not locked. She flung herself behind the wheel, fumbled the key out of her pocket, fingers sweaty and trembling.

The key slipped from her grasp, fell somewhere on the floor of the car.

Find it, find it.

Frantically she searched the car’s dark interior, running her hands over the floor mat.

The key was gone. Had disappeared. But that wasn’t possible.

“It has to be here!” she heard herself scream over the alarm’s continuing squall.

Under the seat, maybe. It could have bounced under the seat.

She thrust her hand into the narrow space between the floor and the seat assembly, scraping her knuckles on the rough metal framework, and there it was, the key, almost out of reach. With two fingers she snagged it, slid it forward, then closed her fist over the key and raised it into the light.

Shaking, she jabbed the key at the ignition cylinder, missed the slot twice, found it on the third try.

The engine coughed, coughed again, refusing to turn over.

She wrenched the key clockwise, floored the gas-an ugly screeching sound-and finally the motor caught.

It chugged fitfully for a moment, then ran smooth.

Headlights on, gear selector thrown into reverse, she was set to go. But with the van blocking her, she had less room to maneuver than she’d thought.

Had to back and fill, back and fill, turn the car at an angle. Now she was in the lane between the van and the barn wall, a narrow lane, just enough clearance.

Her foot on the gas, the Ford reversing.

Crunch of impact.

She’d plowed into the van’s fender. Not enough clearance, after all, but there was no time to straighten out, not with the alarm still shrieking, its banshee cries pulsing in sync with the heartbeats shaking her like spasms.

She floored the gas and forced the car to continue in reverse. Nails-on-chalkboard screech as she scraped the Chevy’s side, the two vehicles grinding against each other like shifting jaws, the Ford shuddering, bucking, retreating in fits and starts, then popping free of the van and skidding backward.

The barn doors, still closed. She rammed them with her rear bumper. They exploded open, and she was outside.

Spin of the wheel, a clumsy U-turn, her headlights sweeping toward the barbed-wire fence yards away.

In the rearview mirror, a man with a flashlight, sprinting toward her.

Gunshot. The rear window blew apart in a shower of tempered glass.

She gunned the engine. The Ford plowed over weeds, over gravel, and slammed into the fence.

The impact uprooted the posts on either side, snapped the wires. The Ford fishtailed onto the road, straightened out. She sped away from the ranch as her speedometer needle climbed.

Looking back, she saw her abductor disappear inside the barn.

The road was narrow and rough. Pebbles clicked and pinged against the chassis, making tuneless music.

She kept pushing her speed-fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty. Dangerously fast for a pitted desert road lit only by her high beams, a road that at any second might coil into a cul-de-sac or dive into a flood-control depression.

Dangerous, yes, but not as dangerous as caution would be.

Behind her, headlights.

The van.

Her high beams splashed across a dotted yellow line perpendicular to the road she was traveling. Intersection.

She spun the wheel, veering to the left.

Now she was on a major thoroughfare, smooth and well maintained, but empty of traffic at this hour. No lights of houses or stores were visible along the roadside, only bleak miles of desert and, in the distance, the jagged humps of mountains, a dark, broken line against the blue-black sky.

She thought she could identify the mountains to her right as the Sierrita range, west of the city. If so, she was heading south.

Flare of headlights behind her. The van again, swinging onto the main road, frighteningly close.

Ahead… the interstate.

She saw the elevated roadway rippling with distant lights.

Get on there, and she would be safe. With other people around, her abductor couldn’t do anything.

But the highway was at least a half mile away. And the van was pulling close to her tail.

In the rearview mirror she saw him at the wheel. Blurred face, hairless scalp. No beard-the red one he’d worn in the lobby must have been fake.

Her speedometer needle was pinned to eighty-five. She might be traveling faster; the gauge only went that high.

His headlights flooded the Ford’s interior with their harsh white glare, brightening steadily. The car rocked with an impact from behind.

He had rammed her. The car wobbled drunkenly. She gripped the wheel to steady it, and then he butted her again.

“Stop,” she muttered, teeth clenched, knuckles bloodless.

The twin globes of his lights expanded as he punched the gas pedal a third time. She manhandled the wheel, and with a scream of tires the Ford veered into the other lane.

The van accelerated, trying to pull alongside her. If it did, the driver could shoot out the side windows, kill her in a hail of ammunition.

She ground her foot down on the gas pedal, straining for every increment of speed the motor could deliver. The road dipped, descending at a steep grade, and at the bottom of the hill a service station came into view.

An Exxon station, near the interstate’s on-ramp, its illuminated sign bright against the night sky, the service court floodlit, fuel islands gleaming.

Open for business. Had to be.

The van hooked sideways, crunching her rear passenger door, chewing metal like a hungry mouth.

The pavement slid out from under her. The Ford skidded onto the shoulder, plowing up a spray of gravelly earth as the steering wheel jerked and ticked under her hands.

She had almost regained control of the car when the van mashed her again, its fender gnawing at the front door on the passenger side, the door buckling in its frame, the window shattering as the frame bent, and for a wild hysterical moment she was a diver in a shark cage, and a great white was chomping insatiably at the steel bars, crushing them out of shape, forcing its huge head deeper inside Rows of mesquite bushes flew past on her left, branches whacking the windshield, scraping the doors. She was screaming-she couldn’t help it-screaming as the van plowed her sedan off the shoulder into an untended stretch of cacti and weeds.

The car bucked like a skittish horse, her seat lurching wildly forward and back, her hands slapping the horn.

Should have worn your seat belt, a voice in her head admonished irrelevantly. Most accidents occur on trips of less than one mile.

A massive columnar shape materialized in her high beams. Saguaro cactus, huge, multi-armed like Shiva, armored in needles and leather-tough skin.

She had time for one more scream before the Ford slammed head-on into the saguaro at full speed.