and gravity knives, but this was your basic Dollar Store jackknife, with fake mother-ofpearl grips and a single four- inch blade. She tried to open it with one hand, couldn’t.
Maybe the blow job 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.
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.
TWENTY-THREE
She didn’t know 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.
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 Tshirts, 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.
His name was Rodney Casselhart, and he was a long way from home. He was in Ohio, driving a car with Pennsylvania plates, and he had an Iowa driver’s license in his wallet, and other ID that showed an address in Michigan.
She hadn’t wanted to search him, but forced herself, and his wallet was in the first place she looked, his left front pants pocket, with $245 in it.
Not enough. Driving all around the country, picking up women and killing them? That would take cash. He had a couple of cards, Visa and MasterCard, both in his name, but he wouldn’t want to use them unless he had to.
God, did she really have to do this?
She decided she did, and in his right hip pocket she found a roll of hundreds secured with a thick rubber band. She didn’t waste time counting, just transferred the roll to her own pocket.
Now what?
Just leave everything, she thought.
And the knife? Just leave it in his chest?
They wouldn’t need the knife to know he’d been stabbed. You really couldn’t miss the wounds. And the knife in her possession would tie her to him. She could boil the thing for an hour and not get all his blood out of it.
But suppose she needed it?
Oh, please. You’re wasting time. Just go.
She was a few yards from the road when she heard a car approaching, the first traffic she’d heard since she came to. A ride, she thought, and then she thought No, don’t be an idiot. She hunkered down where she was, and the car turned out to be a truck, running its high beams, rolling on down the road.
And it was going away from the town, not toward it. She had her bearings now, remembered that they’d spun left when they went off the road, so the town was to her right. She couldn’t guess how far it was, or if there were any turns along the way, but that was the direction she had to take. Because she had to get back to her room, there were things she couldn’t just walk away from.
She waited until the truck’s taillights were out of sight. Then she started walking.
She’d been walking ten or fifteen minutes when she heard a vehicle behind her. She stepped off the road before the headlights could find her, concealed herself in the darkness. This time it was a car, a squareback
