She heard the hollow rumbling of a bridge under the van. Abruptly, the van swung off the asphalt onto a dirt surface, gravel pinging the undercarriage. Minutes later, the van climbed a steep hill and came down the other side, then turned left onto a rocky track pocked with holes and probably strewn with desiccated tree branches and twigs that snapped and splintered up into the frame.
Bill Pepper hit the brakes, tossing her against the back of his seat. When he cut the engine, she could hear the rain pattering on the roof and see the wind flattening the drops of water on the back windows. She could not remember a time in her life when the smallest of details about the natural world had seemed so important to her. Pepper continued to smoke his cigarette, leaning forward to get a better look at the heavens, like a sailor or a fisherman trying to anticipate a squall. “I like it out here,” he said, staring straight ahead.
When she tried to speak, her voice box felt stuffed with cotton.
“My daddy used to take my little sister and me fishing for speckled trout south of Mobile Bay,” he said. “When the rain would first dimple the water, they’d start to school up. You could smell them, just like when they’re spawning.”
He rolled down his window halfway and flicked his cigarette into the darkness. A balloon of yellow electricity flared and raced through the clouds overhead and disappeared without sound beyond the hills on the far side of the Blackfoot. “You brought this on your own self. You know that, don’t you?” he said.
“My father is—” she began.
“Yeah, I know. Your father is going to punch my ticket. So why didn’t you send him after me instead of coming to my door with Mace and an ASP in your bag?”
“Clete Purcel is my father.”
“It doesn’t matter who he is. It’s just you and me now. You came to my house to do me harm. If you do me injury, you do injury to my grandchildren, and I won’t put up with that.”
He got out of the van and walked to the back and opened the doors, the rain spotting his hat and leather jacket. He stepped on the back bumper and climbed inside and closed the doors behind him. He reached in his pocket and removed a small flashlight and turned it on and set it on the floor. “A vice cop in Broward County told me you pulled a train for the Florida Outlaws.”
“He lied to you.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Because he knew it was what you wanted to hear.”
“You look like a biker girl. Except I think you have a high IQ.”
His weight shifted, and she heard him remove something from his pocket. Then she heard the snap of a metallic mechanism locking into place. He fitted his left hand on her upper arm. “This same vice cop said maybe you did a couple of hits for the Mob. Was he lying then?”
“Anything I ever did was because I wanted to.”
He moved his hand up the nape of her neck and slipped his fingers into her hair. “Do you think those things I did to you back there were bad? Or did you enjoy them a little?”
She craned her head and, in the corner of her eye, saw the dull-colored blade of the clasp knife and the long sliver of brightness along the bottom edge where it had been honed on a whetstone.
She straightened her arms and shoulders and closed and opened her eyes as a doll might, a pain growing in her right shoulder, her nerve endings coming alive.
“Opposites attract sometimes,” he said. “I can be good to a woman and love her like a father or a husband.”
She stared at the side paneling of the van and, in her mind, went to a private place where long ago she had learned to shut down her sensory system and remove herself from hands that reached down out of the dark and touched her in ways that no human being should ever be touched.
“You’re an attractive girl,” he said. “I may go to work for a very wealthy man. I could take care of you. Are you listening?”
“My father will get you. If he doesn’t, I will.”
“I wouldn’t be talking like that. This could be your last night on earth.”
“I’ll get you anyway. I’ll come back. I’d rather die than have your hands on me.”
She saw his thumb slip higher on the handle of the knife, establishing a firmer grip.
“You stink and have dandruff in your hair. You’re everything a woman loathes,” she said. “Even whores don’t want to fuck a man like you.”
“You’re starting to make me angry, Gretchen.”
She felt his callused fingertips go inside her shirt and move along her collarbone and settle on her carotid. He teased his thumbnail under her jaw and around her ear and spread his hand in the center of her back, pressing the heel into the muscles. “I could have been a lot harder on you,” he said.
“Kill me.”
“You really mean that?”
“Fuck you, asshole,” she said, her hatred and level of helplessness so intense she could hardly say the words.
She heard him snapping on a pair of latex gloves; then he ran the blade of his knife down the back of her shirt and through her bra strap and through the back of her jeans and her panties. He tore the clothes off her body, even pulling off her suede boots and her socks. He opened a bottle of bleach and soaked a wad of paper towels and scrubbed her hair and skin with it, then climbed out of the van and fitted his hands under her arms and dragged her over the bumper onto the ground.
She lay in the mud, the rain falling in her face, while he went to the front of the van and removed a paper sack from behind the seat. He took out a half pint of whiskey and a Ziploc bag of weed and splashed the whiskey in her mouth and on her face and bare breasts and over her hair, then forced weed past her lips and teeth and rubbed it into her hands and forearms and ears and nose, his chest laboring from the exertion.
He gathered up her clothes and boots and stuck them in the sack, then inserted the knife under the ligatures and sliced them loose from her wrists. “I threw your tote bag in the trees about three miles back. Write this off as a learning experience. For me it’s over, in case you ever want to let bygones be bygones. Nobody is gonna believe you, Gretchen. People like me. I’m a good guy. You’re shit on a stick.”
He got in the van and started the engine and drove past her with the window down, lighting another cigarette, the rain slashing across the taillights.
She walked a mile and a half up the road, her skin prickling with cold, her hair matted and dripping with water and dirt and twigs. A Jeep passed her and turned in to the trees at the peak of a hill. A boy and a girl got out and stared at her. A red nylon tent with a lantern hissing inside it stood in a grove of cedar trees. Below the hill, Gretchen could see the riffle on the river gliding between giant boulders, like a long streak of black oil shining in the moonlight.
“Jesus Christ, lady, are you okay?” the boy said.
She tried to cover her breasts with her arms and discovered that nothing she could do or say would explain or change her situation or undo the damage that had been done to her, not now, not ever. The greatest injury of all was the knowledge that her own merciful tendencies had allowed this to happen.
Chapter 6