Frantically she searched the car’s dark interior, running her hands over the floor mat.
The key was gone. Had disappeared. But that wasn’t possible.
“It has to be here!” she heard herself scream over the alarm’s continuing squall.
Under the seat, maybe. It could have bounced under the seat.
She thrust her hand into the narrow space between the floor and the seat assembly, scraping her knuckles on the rough metal framework, and there it was, the key, almost out of reach. With two fingers she snagged it, slid it forward, then closed her fist over the key and raised it into the light.
Shaking, she jabbed the key at the ignition cylinder, missed the slot twice, found it on the third try.
The engine coughed, coughed again, refusing to turn over.
She wrenched the key clockwise, floored the gas-an ugly screeching sound-and finally the motor caught.
It chugged fitfully for a moment, then ran smooth.
Headlights on, gear selector thrown into reverse, she was set to go. But with the van blocking her, she had less room to maneuver than she’d thought.
Had to back and fill, back and fill, turn the car at an angle. Now she was in the lane between the van and the barn wall, a narrow lane, just enough clearance.
Her foot on the gas, the Ford reversing.
Crunch of impact.
She’d plowed into the van’s fender. Not enough clearance, after all, but there was no time to straighten out, not with the alarm still shrieking, its banshee cries pulsing in sync with the heartbeats shaking her like spasms.
She floored the gas and forced the car to continue in reverse. Nails-on-chalkboard screech as she scraped the Chevy’s side, the two vehicles grinding against each other like shifting jaws, the Ford shuddering, bucking, retreating in fits and starts, then popping free of the van and skidding backward.
The barn doors, still closed. She rammed them with her rear bumper. They exploded open, and she was outside.
Spin of the wheel, a clumsy U-turn, her headlights sweeping toward the barbed-wire fence yards away.
In the rearview mirror, a man with a flashlight, sprinting toward her.
Gunshot. The rear window blew apart in a shower of tempered glass.
She gunned the engine. The Ford plowed over weeds, over gravel, and slammed into the fence.
The impact uprooted the posts on either side, snapped the wires. The Ford fishtailed onto the road, straightened out. She sped away from the ranch as her speedometer needle climbed.
Looking back, she saw her abductor disappear inside the barn.
The road was narrow and rough. Pebbles clicked and pinged against the chassis, making tuneless music.
She kept pushing her speed-fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty. Dangerously fast for a pitted desert road lit only by her high beams, a road that at any second might coil into a cul-de-sac or dive into a flood-control depression.
Dangerous, yes, but not as dangerous as caution would be.
Behind her, headlights.
The van.
Her high beams splashed across a dotted yellow line perpendicular to the road she was traveling. Intersection.
She spun the wheel, veering to the left.
Now she was on a major thoroughfare, smooth and well maintained, but empty of traffic at this hour. No lights of houses or stores were visible along the roadside, only bleak miles of desert and, in the distance, the jagged humps of mountains, a dark, broken line against the blue-black sky.
She thought she could identify the mountains to her right as the Sierrita range, west of the city. If so, she was heading south.
Flare of headlights behind her. The van again, swinging onto the main road, frighteningly close.
Ahead… the interstate.
She saw the elevated roadway rippling with distant lights.
Get on there, and she would be safe. With other people around, her abductor couldn’t do anything.
But the highway was at least a half mile away. And the van was pulling close to her tail.
In the rearview mirror she saw him at the wheel. Blurred face, hairless scalp. No beard-the red one he’d worn in the lobby must have been fake.
Her speedometer needle was pinned to eighty-five. She might be traveling faster; the gauge only went that high.
His headlights flooded the Ford’s interior with their harsh white glare, brightening steadily. The car rocked with an impact from behind.
He had rammed her. The car wobbled drunkenly. She gripped the wheel to steady it, and then he butted her again.
“Stop,” she muttered, teeth clenched, knuckles bloodless.
The twin globes of his lights expanded as he punched the gas pedal a third time. She manhandled the wheel, and with a scream of tires the Ford veered into the other lane.
The van accelerated, trying to pull alongside her. If it did, the driver could shoot out the side windows, kill her in a hail of ammunition.
She ground her foot down on the gas pedal, straining for every increment of speed the motor could deliver. The road dipped, descending at a steep grade, and at the bottom of the hill a service station came into view.
An Exxon station, near the interstate’s on-ramp, its illuminated sign bright against the night sky, the service court floodlit, fuel islands gleaming.
Open for business. Had to be.
The van hooked sideways, crunching her rear passenger door, chewing metal like a hungry mouth.
The pavement slid out from under her. The Ford skidded onto the shoulder, plowing up a spray of gravelly earth as the steering wheel jerked and ticked under her hands.
She had almost regained control of the car when the van mashed her again, its fender gnawing at the front door on the passenger side, the door buckling in its frame, the window shattering as the frame bent, and for a wild hysterical moment she was a diver in a shark cage, and a great white was chomping insatiably at the steel bars, crushing them out of shape, forcing its huge head deeper inside Rows of mesquite bushes flew past on her left, branches whacking the windshield, scraping the doors. She was screaming-she couldn’t help it-screaming as the van plowed her sedan off the shoulder into an untended stretch of cacti and weeds.
The car bucked like a skittish horse, her seat lurching wildly forward and back, her hands slapping the horn.
Should have worn your seat belt, a voice in her head admonished irrelevantly. Most accidents occur on trips of less than one mile.
A massive columnar shape materialized in her high beams. Saguaro cactus, huge, multi-armed like Shiva, armored in needles and leather-tough skin.
She had time for one more scream before the Ford slammed head-on into the saguaro at full speed.
26
The windshield exploded. The hood popped open as the Ford’s front end caved in. That hideous grinding noise was the sound of the van punching into the passenger side like a mailed fist.
Erin was conscious of none of it. Her sole awareness was of white, a field of white, endless white, expanding before her, swallowing her up with a lover’s sigh.
The airbag, erupting out of the steering wheel to cushion the collision’s impact.
It caught and held her. Dazed, she lay in its soft folds, a captured insect in a napkin.
A heartbeat later the bag automatically deflated. She fell back against the headrest, blinking at a whirl of
