Shadowfires

Rachael sat with her on the edge of the bed while Benny went through the closets and various dresser drawers, looking for clothes.

She listened for strange noises elsewhere in the house.

She heard none.

Still, she listened attentively.

In addition to panties, faded blue jeans, a blue-checkered blouse, peds, and a pair of New Balance running shoes, Benny found a trove of illegal drugs. The bottom drawer of one of the nightstands contained fifty or sixty hand-rolled joints, a plastic bag full of unidentified brightly colored capsules, and another plastic bag containing about two ounces of white powder. “Probably cocaine,” Benny said.

Eric had not used drugs; he had disdained them. He had always said that drugs were for the weak, for the losers who could not cope with life on its own terms. But obviously he had not been averse to supplying all sorts of illicit substances to the young girls he kept, ensuring their docility and compliance at the expense of further corrupting them. Rachael had never loathed him as much as she did at that moment.

She found it necessary to dress the naked girl as she would have had to dress a very small child, although the teenager's helpless daze — marked by spells of shivers and occasional whimpering — was caused by shock and terror rather than by the illegal chemicals that Benny had found in the nightstand.

As Rachael quickly dressed the girl, chivalrous Benny kept his eyes discreetly averted. Having found her purse while searching for her clothes, he now went through it, seeking identification. “Her name's Sarah Kiel, and she turned sixteen just two months ago. Looks like she's come west from… Coffeyville, Kansas.”

Another runaway, Rachael thought. Maybe fleeing an intolerable home life. Maybe just a rebellious type who chafed at discipline and entertained the illusion that life on her own, without restrictions, would be pure bliss. Off to L.A., the Big Orange, to take a shot at the movie business, dreaming of stardom. Or maybe just seeking some excitement, an escape from the boredom of the vast and slumbering Kansas plains.

Instead of the expected romance and glamour, Sarah Kiel had found what most girls like her found at the end of the California rainbow: a hard and homeless life on the streets — and eventually the solicitous attention of a pimp. Eric must have either bought her from a pimp or found her himself while on the prowl for the kind of fresh meat that would keep him feeling young. Ensconced in an expensive Palm Springs house, supplied with all the drugs she wanted, plaything of a very rich man, Sarah had surely begun to convince herself that she was, after all, destined for a fairy-tale life. The naive child could not have guessed the true extent of the danger into which she had stepped, could not have conceived of the horror that would one day pay a visit and leave her dazed and mute with terror.

“Help me get her out to the car,” Rachael said as she finished dressing Sarah Kiel.

Benny put an arm around the girl from one side, and Rachael held her from the other side, and although Sarah shuffled along under her own power, she would have collapsed several times if they had not provided support. Her knees kept buckling.

The night smelled of star jasmine stirred by a breeze that also rustled shrubbery, causing Rachael to glance nervously at the shadows.

They put Sarah in the car and fastened her seat belt for her, whereupon she slumped against the restraining straps and let her head fall forward. It was possible for a third person to ride in the 560 SL, although it was necessary for the extra passenger to sit sideways in the open storage space behind the two bucket seats and endure a bit of squeezing. Benny was too big to fit, so Rachael got behind the seats, and he took the wheel for the trip to the hospital.

As they pulled out of the driveway, a car turned the corner, headlights washing over them, and when they entered the street, the other car suddenly surged forward, fast, coming straight at them.

Rachael's heart stuttered, and she said, “Oh, hell, it's them!”

The oncoming car angled across the narrow street, intending to block it. Benny wasted no time asking questions, immediately changed directions, pulling hard on the wheel, putting the other car behind them. He tramped the accelerator; tires squealed; the Mercedes leaped forward with dependable quickness, racing past the low dark houses. Ahead, the street ended in a cross street, forcing them to turn either left or right, so Benny had to slow down, and Rachael lowered her head and peered through the rear window against which she was crammed, and she saw that the other car — a Cadillac of some kind, maybe a Seville — was following close, very close, closer.

Benny took the corner wide, at a frightening slant, and Rachael would have been thrown by the sudden force of the turn if she hadn't been wedged tightly in the storage space behind the seats. There was nowhere for her to be thrown to, and she didn't even have to hold on to anything, but she did hold on to the back of Sarah Kiel's seat because she felt as if the world were about to fall out from under her, and she thought, God, please, don't let the car roll over.

The Mercedes didn't roll, hugged the road beautifully, came out into a straight stretch of residential street, and accelerated. But behind them, the Cadillac almost went over on its side, and the driver overcompensated, which made the Caddy swing so dangerously wide that it side-swiped a Corvette parked at the curb. Sparks showered into the air, cascaded along the pavement. The Caddy lurched away from the impact and looked like it would veer across the street and into the cars along the other curb, but then it recovered. It had lost some ground, but it came after them again, its driver undaunted.

Benny whipped the little 560 SL into another turn, around another corner, holding it tighter this time, then stood on the accelerator for a block and a half, so it seemed as if they were in a rocket ship instead of an automobile. Just when Rachael felt herself pressed back with a force of maybe 4.5 Gs, just when it seemed they would break the chains of gravity and explode straight into orbit, Benny manipulated the brakes with all the style of a great concert pianist executing “Moonlight Sonata,” and as he came up on another stop sign with no intention of obeying it, he spun the wheel as hard as he dared, so from behind it must have looked as if the Mercedes had just popped off that street onto the street that intersected from the left.

He was as expert at evasive driving as he had proved to be at hand-to-hand combat, and Rachael wanted to say, Who the hell are you, anyway, not just a placid real-estate salesman with a love of trains and swing music, damned if you are, but she didn't say anything because she was afraid she would distract him, and if she distracted him at this speed, they would inevitably roll — or worse — and be killed for sure.

* * *

Ben knew that the 560 SL could easily win a speed contest with the Cadillac out on the open roads, but it was a different story on streets like these, which were narrow and occasionally bisected by speed bumps to prevent drag racing. Besides, there were traffic lights as they drew nearer the center of town, and even at this dead hour of the morning he had to slow for those main intersections, at least a little, or risk plowing broadside into a rare specimen of crosstown traffic. Fortunately, the Mercedes cornered about a thousand times better than the Cadillac, so he didn't have to slow down nearly as much as his pursuers, and every time he switched streets he gained a few yards that the Caddy could not entirely regain on the next stretch of straightaway. By the time he had zigzagged to within a block of Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, the Caddy was more than a block and a half behind and losing ground, and he was finally confident that he would shake the bastards, whoever they were—

— and that was when he saw the police car.

It was parked at the front of a line of curbed cars, at the corner of Palm Canyon, a block away, and the cop must have seen him coming in the rearview mirror, coming like a bat out of hell, because the flashing red and blue beacons on the roof of the cruiser came on, bright and startling, ahead on the right.

“Hallelujah!” Ben said.

“No,” Rachael said from her awkward seat in the open storage space behind him, shouting though her mouth was nearly at his ear. “No, you can't go to the cops! We're dead if you go to the cops.”

Nevertheless, as he rocketed toward the cruiser, Ben started to brake because, damn it, she'd never told him why they couldn't rely on the police for protection, and he was not a man who believed in taking the law into his own hands, and surely the guys in the Cadillac would back off fast if the cops came into it.

But Rachael shouted, “No! Benny, for Christ's sake, trust me, why don't you? We're dead if you stop. They'll blow our brains out, sure as hell.”

Being accused of not trusting her — that hurt, stung. He trusted her, by God, trusted her implicitly because