My short ragged breaths tasted of vomit. I had to keep wiping my sleeve across my forehead as sweat itched my skin and tickled my eyes. I slammed the car through the gears. The sky kept on lightening, the purple light filling the killing hour and, as night fell away, life was being injected into the new day around me. The trees and the plants and the lampposts-they all looked purple, and where there was light there was life, but where I had been there was only death. Somewhere on the other side of the world people were arriving to Sunday night and the early hours of Monday. Light and dark. Good and evil. The purple hour had brought me into Hell. Everything around me looked like it belonged on some foreign planet, a planet where Evil still lurked and He is a god there, and the world is full of only dark because Eviclass="underline" He is dark. Then I realized I already was on that planet.
It took just under ten minutes to get to Kathy’s. There was a dark sedan parked there that hadn’t been there before. I ran up the driveway glancing around the garden. Trees and bushes and if there was a hiding Cyris I didn’t see him.
All the lights were off. I thought about yelling out, but that would only make Cyris hurry. I started with the ground floor, succeeding only in turning it into an obstacle course that chewed up more time. I reached the second floor just as the car outside started and revved loudly. I got back to the front door in time to see Cyris pulling away from the house.
I found her in the master bedroom. I found her and my fingers unrolled and the flashlight thumped onto the carpet. I didn’t bother walking inside because I could see what I needed to from the doorway. I stepped back, crying as I stumbled down the stairs. I fell twice, each time catching hold of the banister. I tripped on the driveway and skinned my knees and hands, but I felt no pain. I paused at the car, my mind empty. It was as if all thought and all fear had fallen through a trapdoor into my heart. In the passenger seat were my shorts. They were covered in blood. Cyris had put them there.
If we’d gone to the police. .
But we hadn’t. And it’s a mistake I’m correcting now. Albeit way too late.
The cellphone rings and I’m back in the present. I’d forgotten I had it. I have to pat at my pockets to figure out where it is. When I look at the display I see the number is blocked. I know who it’s going to be.
“Where is she?” I ask, opening the phone.
“She’s with me,” he says.
“I’m going to the police.”
“And I’m going to kill her,” he says. “I want my money.”
“You’ll kill us anyway.”
“I probably will. But right now she’s alive. And in five minutes she won’t be. If I see one cop I’m going to gut your wife like a fish. You’ve got five minutes to get here.”
“Get where?”
“Where it all began,” he says, and he hangs up.
I look at my phone. Not calling the police in the past hasn’t worked. Being arrested by Landry didn’t work either. Maybe now is the time to give them a chance.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Jo thinks her arm is broken. It happened on the beach. One moment she was looking for the keys, eyes down studying the sand, knowing it was pointless. Then Cyris was with her again. He was angry. Before when he hit her, when he manhandled her, that seemed tame in comparison to the beach. He struck her in the face with a closed fist. She tasted blood. He twisted her arm and she felt and heard something snap, and before she could scream he pushed her face-first into the sand.
That was the moment she was sure she was going to die. She was going to suffocate. Or he was going to drag her into the water. Where the hell was Charlie?
He hit her again. Hard. Right in the side of the head. Things got dark then, and she could feel herself being dragged by her broken arm, but the pain wasn’t there, and she wasn’t really there either, she had gone somewhere else, her mind leaving her body.
She came to again in the car. She was lying in the trunk. At least that’s what she thought. It smelled like a car, and she could hear the engine and the space she was confined in was bouncing around, and every now and then it would light up red as he put on the brake lights. When she went to scream, she couldn’t. Her mouth was taped closed. Her hands were still cuffed in front of her, but tape had been run up the length of her forearms, keeping them pinned together.
The car pulls over and goes dark. The door opens and closes, then the trunk is popped open. Cyris stands there looking down over her. He looks bad. Disfigured, almost. Burned. What the hell happened? He has a coil of rope over his shoulder. He has a black satchel in his hand. He reaches in and grabs her by the hair and pulls her out. It hurts more than her broken arm.
“Let’s go,” he says, and drags her until she can find her feet.
She’s at the pasture Charlie pointed out to her. In the distance are what he was calling Dalí’s trees. She doesn’t see why. There’s a wire fence and Cyris climbs over it then pulls her over.
“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “Your husband is on his way.”
They walk through the pasture-well, Cyris doing the walking and Jo is the one being pulled. She imagines this is what the girls went through the other night. She is petrified. So scared there’s every chance her heart will stop before they reach the trees. Last time Charlie came here he was trying to save a stranger, and he failed. Last time he had a tire iron and no shotgun. This time it’s all opposites. The only thing that hasn’t changed is Charlie-he’s the wrong person to be coming for her.
They reach the trees. Cyris switches on a flashlight. The trees look like they’ve been dragged from the set of some B-grade sci-fi movie, perhaps the same one she seems to be caught in. Everything is eerily silent, as if the sound guy came along earlier and packed the bugs and insects into containers and took them away.
There’s a clearing up ahead. He pushes her hard into a tree. “Move and I’ll cut your arms off,” he tells her. She believes him. She doesn’t move.
He wraps a piece of wire so it goes around her neck and around the tree. It’s tight. Any tighter and it’d cut off her air supply. Then he stands in front of her. He stares at her. He looks her up and down and she thinks he’s determining her worth. He hates her. He’s going to kill her. The best she can hope for is that he does it quick.
He steps forward, tugging at a roll of duct tape. He wraps pieces around her waist and arms, so she can’t move her hands anywhere. Then he disappears. He moves past the edge of the clearing. He moves into the darkness. He’s gone for five minutes. And then he comes back.
“Your husband is here,” he says.
She tries to beg him to leave them alone, but her words are muffled against the tape.
He steps behind the tree. The wire around her throat suddenly gets tighter. She can feel her eyes bulging out. She can’t breathe.
There is movement ahead. Charlie is sneaking through the trees. Suddenly he appears at the edge of the clearing. He sees her, and she knows that he knows it’s a trap, just as he knows if he doesn’t run forward to loosen the wire around her throat she’s going to die. He freezes. She doesn’t know what she would do in his situation, but she knows she wants him to help her.
“Hold on,” he says, and he runs forward, pointing the shotgun all around him as he does. There’s nothing to shoot at. He reaches her and tries pulling on the wire, but there’s no slack, and it only gets tighter when he pulls it outward. “Fuck,” he says, and he moves behind the tree. “Fuck,” he repeats, and she hears him putting down the shotgun to try and loosen the wire.