Sting

After waking up and assessing her situation as best she could without opening her eyes, she’d determined that she was lying on the backseat of a traveling vehicle with her hands and feet bound.

Moving incrementally and as silently as possible, she’d discovered that if she extended her legs just so, she could reach the backseat door with her bare feet. With increasing frustration and muscle strain, she had been covertly trying to lift the lever with her toes, all the while thinking that her abductor was oblivious.

Knowing now that he was on to her, and more than likely had been all along, despair, fear, and anger coalesced into a moan.

After coming to, and as soon as some of the residual muzziness had cleared from her head, she’d realized that this wasn’t her car. Her cheek was resting on cloth upholstery. The familiar texture and smell of her car’s leather seats would have provided her with a small measure of security, but, as it was, this car was as unknown to her as the driver, their whereabouts, and their destination.

No longer needing to pretend to be unconscious, she opened her eyes and blinked them into focus. She had only the dashboard’s glow for illumination. No city lights shone through the backseat window. There were no lighted signposts or overpasses indicating that they were on a major highway, no headlight beams coming from the opposite direction. She could see nothing beyond the window glass except black sky and a sprinkling of stars.

Which was as good a view as any to let her try and block the mental images of the overweight man aiming a pistol at her forehead, then of his facial features disintegrating, his hard fall to the ground, his blood spreading toward her feet as rapidly and darkly as spilled ink.

She remembered staring into a pistol at point-blank range and hearing the second man say, My half just doubled.

Upon waking, her first thought had been amazement that she was still alive.

Rather than shoot her, the tall one must have knocked her unconscious, perhaps with the sound suppressor on his pistol, and abducted her from the scene of the brutal murder that she had witnessed him commit. Leaving her now to wonder why he hadn’t also killed her. Wouldn’t that have been more practical and expedient than kidnapping? So why had he kept her alive?

Speculation on his motives brought on a surge of panic and, because stealth was no longer necessary, she began struggling to free her hands. They were restrained at the small of her back by something thin but incredibly strong that bit into her flesh. Her efforts to get loose grew more frantic.

“Cut it out.”

The unexpected command from the driver’s seat startled her, and for a moment she lay perfectly still. Then she said, “Go to the devil,” and renewed her tug-of-war to work her hands free.

But after five minutes, she was bathed in sweat, which the car’s AC rapidly turned to ice water. She conceded that no matter how strenuously she worked at it, the struggle was futile and would result only in exhaustion and raw, bleeding wrists. She forced herself to lie back on the seat, took several deep breaths through her mouth, and willfully tamped down her panic.

Thinking more calmly, she tried to isolate a single advantage that she could exploit, and soon realized that whatever was binding her feet was softer and more giving than the hand restraint.

Lifting her head, she looked down the length of her body and was forced to swallow rising gorge when she saw the dark spatters on her white top.

Dried blood. The dead man’s blood.

She shuddered but didn’t allow herself to think about how he’d died. If she did, fear of meeting the same fate would paralyze her mentally and physically.

Steeling herself to look beyond the grotesque stains on her clothing, she saw that a camouflage print bandana

had been knotted around her ankles. She began grinding her feet together, trying to stretch the cotton cloth and create enough give in it so that she could possibly free her feet, and then—

Then what?

The backseat door would still be locked and inescapable.

She could kick her abductor in the back of his head. A well-placed, surprise kick might stun him for a precious few seconds.

And cause him to crash the car.

Or provoke him into killing her sooner rather than later.

Perhaps she could distract him somehow. If she made a noise, maybe pretended to choke, or did something that would force him to stop the car, and then if he opened the backseat door to check on her, she might stand a chance of getting out and running if—

There were a dismal number of ifs, and none of the options held much promise of success. But, dammit, she wouldn’t just lie here to be dealt with when he felt like it. She wouldn’t make it as easy for him as his previous victim had. She wouldn’t be dispatched without giving him a fight.

However, she also knew on an instinctual level that this man wouldn’t be easily tricked or overtaken physically.

When she’d left the bar, the parking lot had been dark and, she’d thought, deserted. Rushing footsteps over gravel had alerted her to the approach of her two attackers. In the nanosecond between her spinning around and the pistol being fired, she’d recognized both from having seen them in the bar just a few minutes before: the heavyset man who hadn’t made any kind of memorable impression on her; and him, who had.

As he’d walked past where she sat at the bar, they’d made brief eye contact. She remembered his above-average height, an unhurried but somehow predatory stride, a severe face, and eyes sharp enough to cut diamonds. She’d had a visceral reaction to that incisive gaze and had quickly looked away from it.

She should have heeded that intuitive warning of danger, but at the time, she had mistaken it for another type of reaction, another kind of danger.