Which made sense-sure, it did-except that when she glanced out the rear window, she saw no van. She saw only a wide, empty street.
Again the steering wheel blurred under his hands. The Dodge swung left onto Missouri Avenue, then immediately hooked right, nosing into an alley.
Wendy’s heart was beating fast, very fast.
Gravel crackled under the tires. The alley was narrow, bracketed by fences and cement walls scarred with black spidery graffiti. Utility poles marched down its length, their power lines cutting the blue sky like cracks in a mirror.
Halfway down the alley, the Dodge eased to a stop behind a parked car. An ancient Ford, dressed in white paint and polished chrome.
Wendy swallowed. Pounding pressure filled her head. She wanted to ask him why he’d stopped, but her mouth was dry and she couldn’t seem to form the words. Anyway, it didn’t matter. She knew the answer already. She knew. She knew. She knew.
Slowly the man in the driver’s seat turned to face her. In his right hand there was a gun, the blue-black Beretta 9mm from his holster. She heard a click as he thumbed down the hammer.
He smiled. His teeth shone white and looked cold, like chips of ice, below the black ovals of the sunglasses shielding his eyes.
“Hello, Wendy.”
He whispered the words, and for the first time she recognized his voice.
She stared at the Gryphon, numbness spreading through her like an injection of painkiller.
“Now,” he said softly, with the ominous politeness she remembered, “here’s what we’re going to do, you and I. First, we’re getting out of this car. And you won’t give me any trouble when we do that. Right?”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t speak.
He nodded, apparently interpreting her silence as acquiescence. “Fine.”
The door creaked open. He climbed out, then lowered the driver’s seat so she could follow.
She hesitated, her mind racing as she considered what few options she might have. She could lunge forward, plant her fist on the horn, honk for help. No, hopeless; he would shoot her long before help came, if it ever did. All right, then. Grab the gun, wrestle it from his grasp. Dammit, that wouldn’t work either; he was too strong for her.
“I’m waiting, my dear.”
Nothing. There was nothing she could do.
She left her seat and stepped out of the car, looking around at the alley. On one side, a wire-mesh fence screened off an empty parking lot. On the other side rose a crumbling cement wall, and beyond it, a house with boarded-up windows.
The area was deserted. She could scream for help, but her cry would echo down this stone corridor unheard.
The Gryphon jammed the gun in her side. “Now I’d like you to start walking. Please.”
Her shoes crunched dead weeds and broken glass as he guided her to the passenger side of the Ford. The door was unlocked. He pulled it open.
“Inside.”
If she got in the car, she was dead. He could drive her anywhere, kill her at his convenience. To live, to have any chance of survival, she had to do something, and she had to do it now.
She took a step toward the car, then spun sideways, away from the gun in her ribs, and pistoned out both arms, shoving the Gryphon off balance. He fell against the open door with a grunt of surprise. Then she was running down the alley toward the distant street, expecting at any second to feel a bullet in her back.
Behind her, the clatter of footsteps. Panting breath, hot and hoarse and close. Too close.
A hand closed over her arm and spun her around. She staggered, twirling in the killer’s grasp like a drunken dancer. He jerked her toward him. Her face, twinned and miniaturized, stared back at her from the lenses of his sunglasses. She drove a knee into his gut. He released his grip, wheezing. She whirled. Started to run. He kicked her feet out from under her. The gravel-strewn pavement came up fast. Bright glassy pain burst in her hip as she hit the ground on her side.
She twisted around to a sitting position and looked up. A shadow slid over her. His looming figure eclipsed the sun. She heard his low breathing, like the grunting rasp of an animal. She breathed the sour stench of his sweat. Her stomach fluttered.
Reaching behind her, she groped in the trash lining the alley for something to fight him with. Her bandaged hands sifted through a scatter of broken glass, the shards too small to be of use as weapons. Near the glass lay a mound of rain-soaked newspapers. A record album broken in two pieces. A Styrofoam fast-food container. Somebody’s shoe.
She picked up the shoe and pitched it at him, a final, desperate, meaningless gesture. He brushed it aside with a cough of laughter.
After that, she was finished; her pitiful last stand was over. She lowered her head and waited for him to do what he would. She hoped he would shoot her. A bullet would be quick.
Then softly he spoke to her, and strangely his voice was gentle, almost kind.
“Don’t be afraid, Wendy. I’m not going to hurt you. Not this time.”
Slowly she lifted her gaze and stared up at him through the webwork of hair plastered to her face.
“Oh, I admit I wanted to hurt you very badly last night. I wanted to do terrible things to you. But then I saw that I was wrong. That I’d missed the significance of what had gone on between us. That I’d failed to appreciate you properly. I saw that only a most exceptional woman could play the game so well.”
“The…” Her voice cracked. “The game?”
“I saw,” he went on, unhearing, the words dripping in a slow metronomic cadence, “that it could not have been an accident that I selected you. Out of all the lesser women I might have chosen, I had been led to the only one on earth who made a worthy adversary. Such things are never the product of chance. No, it was destiny that brought us together.”
He chuckled, embarrassed by his own eloquence.
“That sounds so cornball, doesn’t it? Like something in a Hallmark card. But I’m serious. I believe in destiny, in fate. I believe in a deeper meaning that transcends the ordinariness of life. And with that same faith, by the light of that same understanding, I believe we were meant for each other.”
He gazed down at her fondly. He was smiling. A shy, almost boyish smile.
“What I’m trying to say is… I love you.”
As Wendy watched, unable to move or speak or think, the Gryphon reached into the pocket of his coat and handed her a small clay statuette.
24
Wendy accepted the statue with numb fingers. She stared at it, turning it slowly in her hand.
“See the detail,” the Gryphon breathed. “The delicacy of the carving.”
“Very pretty,” she said quietly.
“Like you.”
She went on studying the figurine between her fingertips. Her body was a huddle of shock. Her mind was empty. She felt as if that hammer of his, the one he’d used to smash the car window last night, had slammed down on her brain and made it into mush.
“You… you said you love me,” she whispered at last.
“Yes.”
“But…” She almost choked on the words, on the idea of having this conversation with this man. “But that’s impossible. That’s…”
Crazy, she wanted to say, but didn’t.
“Of course it’s impossible, Wendy. Every great thing is impossible. That’s precisely what makes it great. That’s what greatness is: the act of overcoming. Overcoming the possible, the normal, the mundane.”
She swallowed, barely hearing him, her mind occupied with a new question. “Is this the statue you were going to give me last night?”
“Yes. But now it holds a very different significance.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, it does. Then it was a marker of death. Now it is a token of my love to you. You must believe that, Wendy.”
He kept saying her name, as if he took pleasure in pronouncing it. Her first name only; she wasn’t Miss Alden to him anymore. The obscene familiarity implied in his choice of words revolted her.