Blue Dog shrugged. "Who, fuckers like Dan Erickson and Mitch Brandt? I told you before, these people are no different than me. They all have secrets."
"How did you find out about them?"
She assessed how she was bound. She was on a low cot, no more than a foot off the ground. Her legs were spread, draped off the bed and tied with duct tape to the steel legs of the frame. Her body stretched two thirds of the way up the length of the cot. Her arms hung down on either side of the bed, and when she pulled on them, she realized that they were tied with cloth, not tape. A stretchy fabric, like a cotton T-shirt, was wrapped around her wrists and knotted tightly, and then pulled back to the other legs of the frame about a foot behind her and knotted again. She had some play in her arms. When she put her hand down, she could rest her palm on the floor. She felt ice-cold metal.
"There was this young computer hacker in Holman," Blue Dog told her. "He was in for molesting boys, a real sick fuck."
He said this without a trace of irony.
"A guy like that's not going to last long without protection," he continued. "I made sure nobody messed with him."
"Yeah, you're a saint," Serena said.
Blue Dog laughed. "Fuck, he was going to wind up giving blow jobs anyway, so it might as well be my cock he sucked."
"I didn't realize you were queer."
Blue Dog's grin evaporated, and he turned his knife on its point and jabbed it an inch deep into the flesh of Serena's right shoulder. She screamed and jerked back. The bed frame rocked. He yanked the knife out and wiped the blood on the mattress. Waves of pain washed over her.
"You better learn to be polite, or this is going to be a long night."
"Like it's not going to be anyway."
"Yeah, that's true. But there's long and then there's long."
Serena closed her eyes. She laid her left hand down on the floor again. The bed had moved. She explored the floor with her hand, looking for anything sharp that she could use to attack the strip of fabric that connected her wrist to the frame of the bed. She felt crumbs and puddles of frigid water that had dripped through the ceiling, but nothing that could cut.
"So what did this guy do?" she asked. Keep him talking.
"He taught me everything he knew about computers. I realized there was a lot more money to be made online than I ever did on the street. The real money is in everything people want to keep hidden."
"Blackmail."
"Sure. I got to town, and I started keeping an eye on you. But a guy's got to make a living. I was in no hurry. I found other ways to let off steam."
"So why come after me now?"
"It's time to get out of the city," Blue Dog said. "The cops are getting too close. But you and I have unfinished business."
Out of sight, under the bed, Serena spread the fingers of her left hand and stretched them as far as she could. She brushed the very edge of a piece of metal, but it nudged out of her reach as she touched it.
Blue Dog reached around behind his back and pulled out a revolver. It was a small-frame, airweight Smith & Wesson that looked like a toy in his hands. Serena mentally took stock of the gun. Light and easy to conceal. Five rounds. She wondered if she would be alive to see the last four.
"I've thought a lot about how to do this," he told her. He put the barrel of the gun to the cap of her right knee. "You know what it feels like to get a bullet right here? Makes you want to die. I thought about doing both your knees, and then poling you after that."
Serena wriggled and tried to move the bed.
"Then I thought, you won't feel me inside you if I do that. I don't want you in so much agony that you can't feel what it's like."
He put the gun to her forehead. The barrel was warm where it had been inside his pants. "I also thought about making you suck my dick."
"You put anything in my mouth, you're not getting it back," Serena said.
Blue Dog laughed. "Yeah, I'm a practical guy."
"You'll never get away with this."
"We'll see about that. You think we're still on planet earth? Let me show you how wrong you are."
He pulled the revolver away from her head and pointed it upward at the ceiling, and without hesitating, he squeezed the trigger. Serena felt the shock waves inside her skull. Dust and paint fell in a cloud, and a stream of water dribbled over her chest like a mountain waterfall from the hole that punctured the roof. The echo screamed in her ears. Her head throbbed as if he had put two live wires to her temples.
No one came running. There were no sounds outside except the constant, whistling roar of the blizzard. Serena shivered as the falling water kept on, soaking her skin.
"See?" he said. "It's just you and me."
Blue Dog stood up. He grabbed an out-of-fashion men's tie from the floor and dangled it in her face. It was wide, with black-and-yellow slanted stripes. "Is this ugly or what? I found it in the farmhouse where I hid during the hurricane."
He strung it around Serena's neck and began to pull the ends tighter.
Blue Dog unzipped his pants. "Remember this guy?"
Serena knew she was running out of time. Her hand stretched again for the metal piece on the floor and missed it. She didn't even know what it was or whether it would help her cut through the fabric that tied her to the bed.
Blue Dog climbed onto the cot at her feet, and the springs beneath them groaned under the weight of their two bodies together. The bed moved a fraction of an inch. He lowered his weight down on her. His shirt dampened as it rubbed against her wet chest. His hands took hold of the two ends of the tie and began pulling them in opposite directions, narrowing the loop that hung around Serena's neck. Below, between her spread legs, she felt him try to invade her.
"I'm going to love watching your eyes," he said.
The sand gathered in the bottom of the hourglass.
Her fingers were flat on the floor. She reached again and this time felt the piece of metal slide under her palm, where she scooped it into her hand and prayed.
It was a fish hook. Sharp as hell.
52
Maggie grew increasingly desperate as she crisscrossed the streets of Duluth. The weather made it worse. Her windshield wipers sloughed aside snow, but the downpour was so heavy that she could see little more than a swirling sea of white powder through the beams of her headlights. She squinted to see where she was going, and the car veered and fishtailed on the unplowed streets. The glowing clock in her Avalanche told her it was nearly four in the morning. They had several hours of darkness left, and even when the sun rose, it would be behind an impenetrable blanket of black clouds. The storm would still be howling, spilling a foot of snow over the city and then billowing it into house-high drifts with a wind that swept down from the Canadian tundra and blinded everything.
No one else was out on the streets, not at this hour and not in the middle of the storm. The cars were mounds of white, pasted over with snow-caps. When she passed a van that fit the right size and shape, she had to get out of her truck and brush off enough snow with her hands to make sure that it wasn't the missing vehicle from Byte Patrol.
As she passed along the south end of Portland Square on Fourth Street, she saw windows of light in a house on the opposite side of the park and realized that it was Katrina's upstairs apartment. She must have had every light in the place turned on, and Maggie knew why. For weeks after it happened, she found herself up in the middle of the night, turning on lights and sitting in the kitchen with her gun in reach on the table. It was irrational, but that was what fear did to you.
She turned left and drove around the square to the north side and parked near Katrina's building. When she got out of the car, the gales almost knocked her over. She fought through drifts on the sidewalk and then ducked into the protection of Katrina's doorway. She rang the doorbell.