“Nina.” I made it up on the spot.
“To you, fair Nina,” he said, taking a tipple.
I was really enjoying the car. I’d never been in a Mercedes, let alone driven one. I liked the way it handled and especially the way it was making the highway railing blur by on both sides, putting distance between me and Peter. My escape plan was working out even better than I had expected.
“Hitchhiking on the Overseas doesn’t seem very safe, Nina,” Frank said. “Tell me. Are you running away from something or to something?”
“Neither,” I lied again. “I’m just down here on vacation from New Jersey. My girlfriends and I are staying up in Big Pine. Got separated from them at a party in Old Town.”
“New Jersey?” Frank said, taking in my Goodwill attire and scrunching his face in doubt. “Yes, well, quite.”
“I love your car,” I said to change the subject.
Frank smiled as he pushed his rakishly cut black hair out of his face. There was an almost Asian cast to his dark eyes. His teeth seemed a little too perfect. Were they capped? I wondered.
“Funny you mention that,” he said. “That’s exactly what I said to its owner when he picked me up an hour ago. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to squeeze the big son of a bitch into the trunk.”
What did he just say? I thought, laughing tentatively.
I turned to him. He took another sip from the flask and sat staring ahead silently. The only sound was the rushing air in the dark. After a long, awkward and tense moment, he laughed loudly.
“Do-do-do-do. Do-do-do-do,” he said, imitating the Twilight Zone theme before laughing again. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. You should see your face. You need to learn to take a joke, fair Nina. Though it is dangerous to hitch. You’re lucky I’m a good person. Who knows what some completely crazy wanker might do to you out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Thanks again,” I said after I swallowed.
Was it me? I wondered. Or was this getting weird very quickly?
I was doing my best to keep my eyes on the road ahead when there was a flash and a loud click beside me.
Frank, now holding a Polaroid camera, pulled out the advancing instant film and started shaking it.
What the? Now he was taking snapshots?
“Photography’s a little hobby of mine,” he said, blowing on the film. “You know what my favorite American expression is? ‘Take only snapshots, leave only footprints.’ You look shocked. Don’t tell me a pretty girl like you doesn’t like getting her picture taken?”
That’s when a snatch of the Jump Killer news segment I’d watched in the hospital came to me. My lungs stopped working as I almost ran off the road.
The car theft and the body in the trunk may have been jokes, but the wrapper for Polaroid film was found at the site of one of the prostitute abductions!
“Say cheese,” Frank said, raising the camera again.
Chapter 45
“YOU HAVE nice bone structure,” Frank said, shaking the second instant film sheet as we drove along. “I have a friend who does some model scouting. Would you like a makeover? I could do wonders for you. Take some head shots. After I do something with that vile hair. Did a blind person color it? You could shower at my motor home.”
At the mention of the words motor home, my throat closed, as if it had been stuffed with a rag. The Jump Killer was speculated to have one of them as well. For the first time, I noticed the key chain dangling from the ignition.
No.
I closed my eyes as my hands started shaking on the leather steering wheel.
It was an eagle on a black shield. I’d been around enough military down in Key West to know that it was the Airborne symbol. Airborne meant parachutes and paracord. And how could a British guy be in the U.S. Army?
“So what do you say? Head shots? Shall we do it?” Frank said, as every molecule of saliva in my mouth evaporated instantly.
I saw some lights up ahead. Red neon in a small window. It was a bar. I accelerated toward it.
“I have to use the bathroom. I’m going to stop,” I said weakly.
“Don’t bother,” Frank said. “My motor home is parked just up the road. You could go there. Won’t be another second.”
I kept gunning it and put on the turn signal. “It really can’t wait,” I said.
“Fine,” Frank said as he put down the camera. “As you Yanks say, ‘When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.’ ”
Maybe I was wrong about him. Was I jumping to conclusions? It didn’t matter, I decided. He had turned out to be a lot creepier than I’d first thought.
Frank capped the flask and put it back into the glove compartment as I braked for the turn into the bar’s parking lot. When he took his hand back out, he was holding a blunt black gun. He pressed its barrel into one of my nostrils.
“On second thought. Keep driving, skank,” he said suddenly in a New York accent. He definitely didn’t sound British anymore. In fact, he no longer even sounded gay. “I freakin’ insist,” he said.
Chapter 46
THE JACK RUSSELL started barking from the little space behind the seats as the red lights of the bar disappeared on my left.
“What is this?” I managed to stammer out through my utter shock.
“This? It’s a Walther P99,” Frank said, waving the ugly gun in front of my eyes. He definitely didn’t sound so whimsical anymore. His voice was deeper now, ice-cold.
“Why are you doing this?” I said.
My breath came irregularly. I was on the verge of hyperventilating. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Maybe I’d fallen asleep on the side of the road and was dreaming. That’s what it felt like.
Because how could this have happened? I’d set out to pretend to be abducted.
Now I actually was!
“You know what I hate?” he said, sounding like Robert De Niro. “Cute little things like you who think that all they have to do in life is shake their ass, and the world will beat a path to their door. If I were a woman, I’d hang myself when I hit puberty. I swear to God, I would. You’re too disgusting for words.”
From out of my terror-induced fugue, I remembered reading somewhere about how victims had to try and humanize themselves. If your abductor thought you were human, it would be harder to hurt you.
“Please don’t do this. I’m pregnant. Please let me go.”
“Pregnant?” he said. “Does the father know?”
“Are you him?” I said, trying to shift the attention off myself. “The man in the paper? The one who’s responsible for the missing women?”
“What do you think?” he said with a sigh. “The Jump Killer. What a stupid name. Not a single reporter could come up with something better? How about you?”
Pain blossomed in my mouth as he suddenly raked the barrel of the gun hard over my lips and teeth.
“How about instead you shut your face before I break those exquisite cheekbones of yours.”
I felt dizzy. The surface of the road seemed to ripple through the windshield. My stomach suddenly clenched into the world’s tightest knot.
After a moment, I realized it was full-blown nausea, from Combos and exhaustion and more terror than I’d ever felt in my life. The contents of my stomach started to slosh and churn, demanding immediate release.
I was leaning to my left, about to vomit out the window, when another thought occurred to me. What did I have to lose?