“I hope it’s not too far.”
“Why? You got a train to catch?”
“I was just thinking that I’d like to suck your dick. You know, while you’re driving? But I can’t as long as I’m wearing my seat belt.”
Well, he hadn’t expected that. She was watching his face, and saw his expression change. She couldn’t read it, not looking at him in profile, but something registered.
“Whore.”
It was remarkable how much contempt he could get into a single syllable. He hated her, just plain hated her. But she responded as if oblivious to all that.
“I know,” she said. “I’m just terrible. I’m a bad little girl and I just can’t help myself.”
He was breathing a little faster. And was it her imagination or had his grip tightened on the steering wheel?
“It’s probably the full moon,” she went on. “I get restless and all I can think about is sucking cock.”
“You’re a fucking whore.”
“I know,” she said. “Look, let me suck it now, while you’re driving. Okay? And then when we get to where we’re going, you can punish me for being bad.” She uncoupled her seat belt. “Would you do that? Would you give me a spanking for being so bad? And maybe you could think of other things to do, so I’ll really learn my lesson.”
She swung around, brought her face to his crotch. Unbuttoned his pants, lowered his zipper. No underwear. A suit and a necktie, but no underwear, and no great commitment to personal hygiene, either. His uncircumcised penis, soft and small, did not smell like anything you’d want to put in your mouth, or even be in the same room with.
But if there’d been any question in her mind, this answered it. He’d been out hunting, and he meant to kill her.
She took hold of him with her left hand, reached around with her right hand for the knife in her hip pocket. Her mouth took him in even as her fingers fumbled with the knife, finally got it out of the pocket. She palmed it, held it out of sight, and he didn’t seem to have noticed.
Now if she could only get it open. There were knives you could open readily with one hand, switchblades and gravity knives, but this was your basic Dollar Store jackknife, with fake mother-of-pearl grips and a single four-inch blade. She tried to open it with one hand, couldn’t.
Maybe the blowjob would be distraction enough. But he didn’t seem to be responding. He was breathing more rapidly, but he wasn’t getting hard. Well, that almost figured; he was a sadist, a killer, and he’d only get an erection if he was in control and she was in pain.
Just as she had that thought, she felt his hand on her throat.
His right hand, because he was still driving the car, still had his left hand on the steering wheel. His fingers settled on the back of her neck, his thumb at the base of her throat.
His grip tightened.
Don’t panic, she told herself. You can’t strangle a person with one hand. It’s hard enough with both hands.
But was that necessarily true? He was strong, he had big hands, and he was exerting a lot of pressure. Jesus, what a way to die, with a truly disgusting dick in your mouth and one huge hand throttling the life out of you.
And he was saying something. Hard to make out at first because he was muttering, but he was saying the same thing over and over and eventually she got it. “You filthy cunt you’re gonna die you filthy cunt you’re gonna die you filthy cunt...”
She used both hands, fought to get a grip on the knife blade, fought for breath. He was cutting off her air and it made her head swim and turned her hands clumsy. Then she got the knife open.
She bit down on his cock as hard as she could. His grip softened. She gasped for air and sank the knife blade into his balls.
The car was all over the road. He’d let go of the wheel and made fists of both hands, raining blows on the back of her head. She kept stabbing with the knife — his balls, his belly — and when the pain was enough to stop his fists, she reached out blindly and found the key in the ignition, turned it, shut off the engine.
The car was veering off the road, and he grabbed the wheel to right it, but with the engine off the steering was locked. The car powered through a wire farm fence, bounced crazily over uneven ground, and by the time it stopped moving she had managed to get the knife in his chest.
She had to get out. Had to catch her breath, had to unlock the doors, had to get out of the car and find her way back to her hotel.
But she’d been holding the darkness at bay ever since his hand fastened around her throat, and it had taken all her strength. Now she sighed and let go, and a tide of black rolled in and swept her under.
She never knew how long she was out. The darkness carried her away, and at some point another wave brought her back. She opened her eyes to darkness, listened to silence, and wondered for a moment if she was dead. But dead people didn’t feel pain, and she had pain in her head and neck and shoulders, and she sat up and confirmed that she was alive.
And he was dead. She remembered stabbing him in the groin, then in the chest, but she’d evidently stabbed him more times than she’d realized, and the whole front of him was a lake of blood from multiple wounds in the chest and abdomen. Her hands were bloody, and her face, and her hair. Blood everywhere, and it smelled, everything smelled. She had to get out of there but she couldn’t because the doors were locked and she was trapped with his rotting corpse and—
She breathed against the panic, stuffed it down, willed herself to rise above it. She figured out how to work the locks, opened the door on the passenger side, stepped out into the middle of a field. The car had continued some fifty yards after it left the road, and whether she’d been unconscious for three minutes or as many hours, no one had yet taken any notice of it.
She put a hand on the car for balance, drew in deep breaths. She listened intently but couldn’t hear anything. No traffic, no human sounds. The sky was dark overhead. He’d said something about a full moon, but if the moon was indeed full it was no match for the clouds. No moon, no stars, and she was stuck in the middle of nowhere, and soaked in blood in the bargain.
All right. You’re alive and he’s dead, which wasn’t the way he planned it. You can get out of this. One step at a time and you can get out of this just fine.
The first thing she got out of was the bloody sweatshirt. She had a plain T-shirt underneath, and there was likely to be blood on it, but it wasn’t soaked and sticky the way the outer garment was. She found a clean portion of the sweatshirt and used it to wipe her hands and face, then tossed it aside. It would be crime scene evidence, but of what? The blood on it was his. As for her own DNA and fingerprints, she couldn’t worry about that, not now.
She returned to the car, found the button to open the trunk. There was a suitcase, locked, but there was also a tire iron, and she picked it up and smacked the locks until they popped open. She did some more cleanup with one of his T-shirts, then drew out a white button-down shirt still in its wrapper from the laundry. It was much too big for her, but with the sleeves rolled up and the tails overhanging her jeans, it didn’t look too ridiculous.
She went through the suitcase, not sure what she was looking for, and had just about decided she was wasting precious time when she found the little drawstring pouch. She weighed it in her hands. Pennies? Gold coins?
She opened it, and poured its contents into the open suitcase. Rings, a bracelet, a wristwatch, some earrings. Souvenirs.
Well, why should she be surprised? It was hardly news that the son of a bitch had done this before.