The God's Eye View

CHAPTER 33

Delgado turned onto an access road near the Triadelphia Reservoir, following it into the woods to a chained access gate. He got out, cut the chain with bolt cutters, and continued on until he reached the water. He parked, cut the lights, and waited, making sure no one else was coming.

When he was satisfied they were alone, he got out and went back in through the side door. There was a metal partition between the seats in front and the cargo area behind, which was good because it meant no light could bleed from the cargo area through the front. The cargo area itself was entirely windowless and private. There was a wheel well along either side, but other than that the back was empty — just some folded padding for moving furniture. Lying on her side on top of the padding, her wrists handcuffed behind her back, was Evelyn Gallagher. She was moaning softly, and that was good. It had been over twenty minutes since Delgado had injected her with the propofol, and if she hadn’t been stirring by now, it would mean either that he’d administered an overdose or that she was faking unconsciousness. But no, everything seemed normal. Good color in her cheeks; those sweet little moans; and now some movement, too, albeit impeded by the handcuffs.

Manus had taken her purse, and if she had what the director wanted, it was more likely there rather than directly on her person. Still, he needed to search her. He smiled, admitting he would have checked her out even if there had been nothing to look for.

He squatted next to her and removed one of the soft brown flats she was wearing. She’d lost the other on the way into the Sprinter, but Manus would have retrieved it. Couldn’t afford to leave evidence in the Safeway parking lot, and besides, the director had surmised they were looking for a thumb drive, so a shoe was a possible hiding spot.

The leather was soft and warm. He twisted it left, then right, feeling nothing out of place. He examined the sole and the lining. Nothing. He unclipped his knife and pried off the heel. Still nothing. Okay, the shoe was a negative. He tossed it and the heel aside, then slid the knife back in his pocket.

He ran his hands over her legs from ankle to thigh, feeling himself getting hard as he did so, then went up under her skirt and caressed her ass. Nothing but bare skin. He felt for a thong string and couldn’t find one. Holy shit, the little slut was going commando? He ran his hand around to the front and felt a nice, wide landing strip, the shaved skin to either side smooth and soft. He lifted the skirt to take a look, then ran a finger along her slit, fully erect now. You like that, sweetheart? God, I’ll bet you do. Well, don’t you worry, I’ll take care of you soon. Such good care. I promise.

He doubted she would have been walking around with anything in a cavity, though of course if nothing turned up anywhere else, he’d have to check. Check carefully. But he wanted her to be awake for that. So for now, he satisfied himself with her belly and back, then under her arms, and then her neck, her hair, behind her ears. Nothing. He saved her tits for last, rubbing, squeezing, pinching. Jesus, they were big. But nothing hidden under her bra. All right, she was clean. He wished he’d found something, that thumb drive or whatever, anything. Because he was really fucking aroused. But he had to stop for now. So he could question her. He sat on one of the wheel wells, breathing hard, just relishing the sight of her, so helpless like that. God, he loved this shit.

After a few minutes, her eyes opened. She blinked, then grimaced and squeezed them shut.

“Head hurt?” Delgado said. “I had to hit you. And that lip looks swollen — you must have smacked it on the floor. My bad. If you want, I can give you something for the pain.”

She didn’t answer. He gave her a minute, knowing the propofol was still in her system, but knowing too how quickly it dissipated.

She pulled in her knees and sat up. Delgado liked that. Sometimes they stayed helpless, supine, in whatever position he had chosen for them. But not this one. She made her own decisions, insofar as she could, anyway. A fighter. God, he liked the fighters.

She noticed her skirt was hiked up, and managed to pull it down a little. “Sorry about that,” Delgado said. “I had to search you. Nothing personal. But… you’re really not wearing panties? You must have been expecting me, right?”

She shifted a bit, lifting her ass by putting her hands on the floor behind her and doing a modified crabwalk, the buttons of her blouse straining across her tits as she moved. Jesus, the body on this one. He couldn’t believe his luck. He was so fucking hard. He reminded himself it was business first, pleasure after.

She stopped when her back bumped up against the side opposite from where he was sitting. “What is this?” she said, looking at him, and doing a pretty good job, he had to admit, of keeping her voice even and otherwise hiding her fear.

He waited a moment, giving her time to stew, showing her he didn’t have to answer her questions, letting her know he was completely in control. She glanced at his scalp and squinted as though trying to figure out what she saw.

“Yeah, the hair plugs,” he said, smiling. “They’re not working out so well. Shouldn’t even have bothered. I mean, it’s not like you care, right, Evie? You like me either way, don’t you?”

She was looking at him closely, and it was weird, it felt almost like she had recognized him and was trying to place his face. But that didn’t make sense. He knew she’d never seen him before. Probably she was just trying to figure out what kind of man was now holding her helpless.

Don’t worry, honey. You’re going to find out.

After a moment, she said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

He smiled. “Who I am… that depends. I guess I’m your best friend right now, if you want to be smart. Or your worst nightmare, if you want to be dumb. As for what I want, just what you took from the mailbox facility in Rockville this morning. Tell me where it is, and we’re done. We can all forget this little misunderstanding ever even happened.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Delgado couldn’t help laughing. “You know they all say that, right? Every one of them, in your position. ‘I don’t know anything, I swear!’ I wish I could place a big fat bet every time. I’d be rich.”

He examined a cuticle, taking his time, letting it all sink in. “The thing is, we know you know. We know everything about you. We know where you live, we know what you drive, we know how much you have in the bank. We know about your father in the nursing home, we know about your son at the deaf school. Likes baseball, Dash, doesn’t he? Evie, we know everything. And we don’t care about any of it. We only want the one thing. Give it to me, and you can go home to your boy right now. Isn’t he expecting you? Won’t he be worried?”

She looked down and didn’t answer. Bitch is tough, he thought, not unhappily. Not unhappily at all.

“Evie, if you don’t give me what I’ve asked for, I have to start doing some really bad shit to you. Like… torture shit, not to put too fine a point on it. I don’t think you’re tough enough to endure that kind of shit. In fact, I haven’t met anyone yet who was. So I think what’ll happen is, you’ll wind up telling me what I want to know and suffering for nothing. But you know what? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can handle having your fingertips crushed with pliers, having your lips burned off with a cigarette lighter.” He pulled a pliers and a lighter from his coat pocket to illustrate the point, set them on the floor, and continued. “But do you think you could watch me do all that to Dash? And worse? Because that’s where this thing goes if you don’t give me now what you’re going to give me eventually.”

A long moment went by. Delgado waited. He wasn’t in a hurry. Fuck, on the contrary, he was savoring all of it.

“Marvin,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s part of this. God.”

Delgado was surprised. “You mean Manus? You call him Marvin? How do you know him?”

“He’s… God, he’s been watching us. I’m so stupid.”

The director must have had Manus surveilling her. Though if she knew him as “Marvin,” the surveillance was pretty up close and personal. He wondered why the director hadn’t told him, then almost laughed. What did the director tell anyone that he didn’t absolutely need to?

He wondered for a moment whether that nice shaved bush, the lack of panties, could have been for Manus? Before the grab, Manus had told him the woman wasn’t to suffer, which at the time had been a total non sequitur. But now… Jesus, had the big deaf freak been fucking this hottie? He couldn’t imagine it. Well, even if he had been, so what? The thought of Manus’s sloppy seconds wasn’t exactly an aphrodisiac, but shit, there was still plenty of upside here to focus on.

He patted her arm, letting his hand linger for a moment before removing it. “Well, we all make mistakes, right? What matters is how we fix them. So fix your mistake, Evie. Tell me where it is.”

“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “I have to take you there.”

Delgado couldn’t stop himself from laughing again. “Hey, you’re right on schedule. Because that’s the next thing everyone says. To buy themselves time, a little reprieve, maybe an opportunity to actually escape. And everyone who says it thinks it’s original to them. No, Evie, you don’t need to show me. If you hid what you took, you hid it somewhere you can find it. If you can find it, you can explain where it can be found. No one buries something in the middle of a field with no landmarks, see? Okay, maybe an idiot might do something like that, but I can tell you’re no idiot. You’re a careful woman. Not quite careful enough, it turns out, but careful.”

He squatted in front of her and she looked down. He shot out a hand, gripped her chin hard, and raised her face until it was inches from his own. She tried to twist loose and he squeezed tighter.

“So let’s stop fucking around here, okay? Unless you want me to start having some fun with you.”

She tried to move back and he moved his face closer. “Would you like that, Evie? I think maybe you would.”

Christ, the smell of her, and the way those buttons were straining on her blouse. He thought how easy it would be to reach down and squeeze one of those tits. Fucking twist it. Think you’d tell me what I want to know then, bitch?

Maybe. But going that fast would foreclose possibilities, too. For now, he needed her to believe she had two completely different options: give him what he was asking for and walk away clean, on the one hand; give him what he was asking for after being permanently disfigured, on the other. If he started hurting her too soon, it would muddy that framework, and might make her more stubborn.

No, now wasn’t the time. Though soon it would be. One way or the other.

Her nostrils were flaring in and out with her breathing. He lifted her chin higher and she grimaced in pain. God, he wanted to hurt her. Not just a little like this. Not just to scare her. Really hurt her. Hurt her so she screamed.

“All right,” she said, through clenched teeth. “Okay.”

He eased off the pressure on her chin but didn’t release it.

“But how do I know?” she said. “How do I know you’ll let me go once I tell you?”

He laughed again. “Congratulations, sweetheart, you’re officially three for three. That’s the next thing everyone asks. And the answer’s always the same, too. You don’t know. Maybe I’m lying. And maybe I’m lying about torturing you and your boy Dash, too. Well, there’s an easy way to test me. Just don’t tell me what I want to know. See what happens. But you know what? I think you already know the answer. I think you’re looking at me and you know perfectly well that I’m telling the truth. So. Where’d you hide it, Evie? Tell me so I can get you home. In one fucking piece.”

There was a pause, then she said, “In the senior facility. Where I visited my father just before you grabbed me.”

Delgado considered. If it was a lie, it was a clever one. Because how the fuck was Manus going to slip in and out of a nursing home without getting challenged?

On the other hand, the difficulty of someone like Manus retrieving it was exactly what would have made the nursing home a good spot for real.

He looked her up and down. “You fucking with me, Evie?”

She shook her head.

“Because I have ‘Marvin’ standing by, and he’s going to go look wherever you tell me it is. And if he reports back that he couldn’t find it, then I’m going to hurt you like you can’t even imagine. Do you understand that?”

She glared at him. “I understand that.”

“What media is it stored on? Do not fucking lie to me.”

“It’s a thumb drive.”

“Where, precisely?”

“The women’s room, on the left as you go in through the side entrance. Handicapped stall, taped to the back of the toilet near the floor.”

Delgado released her chin. “All right, Evie. Good girl. I’ll have Marvin go take a look. If it checks out, little Dash gets his mommy back, safe and sound. If not… well, let’s not even think about that, right?”

God, he loved how much defiance he saw in her eyes. And how he was going to fuck every last bit out of her the moment he’d gotten confirmation they had what the director wanted. By the time he was through with her, all she’d have left was begging. And he’d let her, too. He’d let her beg for a long time. He wanted to be able to remember it for after.