He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, turned his head to see the spider, a black blur, dart across the room toward the fallen reptile. She was on its back as it came to life. She sank her fangs into its flesh repeatedly as it twisted and tried to throw her off, but she held on with all eight legs, riding the gecko like a cowboy rides a bronco. She stayed with it until it quit its death throes and lay still.
When she was satisfied her enemy was dead, she hopped off its back and did a little dance around the fallen reptile. Despite everything, Jim smiled when she spun around, and he watched as she moved across the floor to the door and began to climb back toward the ceiling. She paused where the wall ended and the ceiling began, but after a few seconds she started her trek along the ceiling. She didn’t go far. She stopped over the doorway. Stopped and waited.
Jim swung his bloody left hand over and untied his right. Once it was free, he pulled out the rest of the broken needle with a tight grimace. He was weak and still bleeding. He pulled the sheet from the bed and tore a strip off with his teeth. Then he wrapped it tightly around his wrist. Only when he was sure the bleeding had stopped did he untie his feet.
He still had to piss. He looked around the room and settled on the farthest corner. He climbed off the bed, made his way to it, where he lay his cast against the wall for support and urinated. Finished, he stumbled to the door and wasn’t surprised to find it still locked from the outside. He went back to the bed, picking up the IV stand along the way. A five foot long chrome tube would make a good weapon. He propped it up by the bed, then sat and massaged his legs. The only thing left for him to do was wait-like the spider.
The lights went out twelve hours later and he was still waiting and beginning to think no one would ever come. Twice more he stumbled to his corner. Once to urinate, once to squat. The pleasant, drug induced sensation was replaced by a raw, nagging hunger. One arm ached, the other itched, his head hurt. He was naked, alone and fighting for his sanity, when he drifted off to a fitful sleep.
He woke several times during the night, but no one came. When he slept his dreams were peppered with fire and monsters. When he was awake his thoughts were of death and pain. He didn’t know which was worse. But awake or asleep, through the fire or the pain, he wondered who’d brought a black widow halfway around the world to frighten him. Everyone that knew about his being bitten by a black widow and how terrified he was that day, was dead.
How did they know? Could they read his mind?
After a time that could have been ten hours or thirty he heard the sound of the deadbolt snapping open. He grabbed the IV pole and moved through the blinding black to where he imagined the center of the room was. He was weak and his grip on the chrome tube sent flaming stabs of white hot hurt shooting up from his mangled wrist, but the clicking of the turning doorknob grabbed all his attention. A man stepped through, backlit by the light flooding through the doorway.
“ Hey,” Jim heard a startled voice say as he swung the tube at the man’s head the way a home run hitter swings at a fat pitch coming down the pipe. He felt himself connect, but the tube slipped out of his hands as his eyes fought against the light.
“ Son of a bitch,” another voice screamed.
Jim squinted as the overhead light came on.
“ Get back or I’ll shoot.” It was the second man in black. The first lay dead on the floor. His face bashed in, the chrome IV stand at his side. “You killed him.” The man pointed a gun at Jim. His pockmarked face was flushing deep red and Jim could feel the heat of his anger. “The boss wants you alive, but I don’t think so.” He raised the gun and held it away from his body, pointing it at Jim’s heart as the black marble fell from the ceiling and landed on the man’s face.
The man screamed, because he knew what had just bit him on the cheek. The gun flew out of his hand as he flattened both palms to slap the spider off, but before his hands reached his face, Jim’s right foot connected with his balls. The man doubled over and the spider went flying. Jim moved in, grabbed the man by the hair, forced his head against the cold tile as the spider scooted away.
“ Where is she?” Jim demanded.
“ Fuck you,” the man said. Jim held his head fast against the floor, forcing him to face the retreating spider. The man shivered when it stopped and screamed when it turned and headed back toward him. “Get it away!”
“ Not a chance.”
“ You’re supposed to be terrified of it,” the man whined. “The boss said it’d scare the shit out of you.”
“ He was wrong. Now where is she?” The spider moved closer. The man’s eyes were open wide with fright and they turned cross-eyed as she came to a stop mere millimeters from his crooked nose.
“ She’s on the boat,” he croaked, an instant before his heart exploded. He died before he could say which boat. Frightened to death.
“ Jim, Jim Monday, are you in there?” Jim recognized the voice of Mohi Tuhiwai.
“ Here,” he called out. “I’m here.”
Mohi Tuhiwai burst in the room as he collapsed.
“ Thank you, girl,” he whispered and the black widow scooted away, hiding under the bed.
“ It’s 10:00, we only have two hours,” Mohi said, breathing hard.
“ No, we have a whole day.”
“ It’s Saturday night,” Mohi said, and Jim was crushed. He had been asleep and under the influence of the drugs for a whole day. He was almost out of time and he wasn’t any closer to finding Donna than before he’d been captured.
“ I know where she is,” Mohi exclaimed, breathless. “Reptil Rache, Linda figured it out. It means, Reptile Revenge. In German!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jim checked his damaged wrist in the light. It was already starting to scab over. He turned to Mohi. “I need clothes.”
“ The one without all the blood looks your size.”
They stripped him, leaving the body clad only in underwear.
“ The wool itches,” Jim said.
“ New Zealand wool doesn’t itch.” Mohi looked at the black sweater. “Comes from Germany, not New Zealand. That explains it.”
Jim finished dressing by putting on the dead man’s work boots, thankful that they fit. It was time something went right. Then he picked up the gun, a thirty-eight police special.
“ This thing is older than God.” Jim jammed it between his belly and the pants, under the sweater.
“ Guns are hard to come by in New Zealand,” Mohi said.
“ Apparently.” Then, “What took you so long?”
“ I got home okay,” Mohi said, “but I passed out in the driveway. Linda dragged me into the house and called an ambulance. I’d lost a lot of blood and when I came to I was delirious. They took me to the hospital, gave me blood and antibiotics. I’ve been drugged up for the last twenty-four hours.” He grimaced. “They got the bullet out, but they kept me on pain killers. It took me a whole day to remember what that guy at the motel said about this place, then I called Linda and snuck out of the hospital. Sorry, I did my best.”
“ You did good enough, we still have time. How’s the shoulder now?”
“ Not bad. I’ll be all right.” But the sweat running down his forehead told Jim that he was in serious pain.
“ Linda’s outside, in the car,” Mohi said. “Follow me.”
“ How did you get in?”
“ Door wasn’t locked.” Mohi led him through the house to the dark night outside. Linda Tuhiwai was waiting in the parked car out front. She got out when she saw them coming.
“ I was getting worried,” she whispered.