“The boy's eleven years old,” I said. “I'm staying right here. Both his wrists are cut. It's a suicide attempt. Hold on, baby,“ I whispered to Marcus. ”Just hold on, baby.”
Alex Cross 2 - Kiss the Girls
CHAPTER 3.
CLICK! Casanova popped the trunk latch of his car and peered into the wide, shiny-wet eyes staring out at him. What a pity. What a waste, he thought as he looked down at her.
“Peekaboo,” he said. “I see you.” He had fallen out of love with the twenty-two-year-old college student tied up in the trunk. He was also angry at her. She had disobeyed the rules.
She'd ruined the fantasy du jour.
“You look like absolute hell,” he said. “Relatively speaking, of course.” The young woman was gagged with wet cloths and couldn't answer back, but she glared at him.
Her dark-brown eyes showed fear and pain, but he could still see the stubbornness and spunk there.
He took out his black carrying bag first, then he roughly lifted her one hundred twelve pounds out of the car. He made no effort to be gentle at this point.
“You're welcome,” he said as he put her down. “Forgotten our manners, have we?” Her legs were shaky and she almost fell, but Casanova held her up easily with one hand.
She had on dark green Wake Forest University running shorts, a white tank top, and brand-new Nike cross-training shoes. She was a typical spoiled college brat, he knew, but achingly beautiful. Her slender ankles were bound with a leather thong that stretched about two and a half feet. Her hands were tied behind her back, also with a leather thong.
“You can just walk ahead of me. Go straight unless I tell you otherwise. Now walk,” he ordered. “Move those long, lovely gams. Hut, hut, hut.” They started through the dense woods that got even thicker as they moved slowly along. Thicker and darker. Creepier and creepier. He swung his black bag as if he were a child carrying a lunch box. He loved the dark woods. Always had.
Casanova was tall and athletic, well built, and good-looking. He knew that he could have many women, but not the way he wanted them. Not like this.
“I asked you to listen, didn't I? You wouldn't listen.” He spoke in a soft, detached voice. “I told you the house rules. But you wanted to be a wiseass. So be a wiseass. Reap the rewards.”
As the young woman struggled ahead she became increasingly afraid, close to panic. The woods were even denser now, and the low-hanging branches clawed at her bare arms, leaving long scratches. She knew her captor's name: Casanova. He fancied himself a great lover, and in fact he could maintain an erection longer than any man she had ever known.
He had always seemed rational and in control of himself, but she knew he had to be crazy. He certainly could act sane on occasion, though.
Once you accepted a single premise of his, something he had said to her several times: “Man was born to hunt ... women.”
He had given her the rules of his house. He had clearly warned her to behave. She just hadn't listened. She'd been willful and stupid and had made a huge, tactical mistake.
She tried not to think of what he was going to do to her out here in these bewildering Twilight Zone type woods. It would surely give her a heart attack. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her break down and cry.
If only he would un gag her. Her mouth was dry, and she was thirsty beyond belief. Perhaps she could actually talk her way out of this of whatever it was that he had planned.
She stopped walking and turned to face him. It was draw-a-line-in-the-sand time.
'You want to stop here? That's fine with me. I'm not going to let you talk, though. No last words, dear heart. No reprieve from the governor. You blew it big time. If we stop here, you may not like it.
If you want to walk some more, that's fine, too. I just love these woods, don't you?'
She had to talk to him, get through to him somehow. Ask him why. Maybe appeal to his intelligence. She tried to say his name, but only muffled sounds made it through the damp gag.
He was self-assured and even calmer than usual. He walked with a cocky swagger. “I don't understand a word you're saying. Anyway, it wouldn't change a thing even if I did.” He had on one of the weird masks that he always wore. This one was actually called a death mask, he'd told her, and it was used to reconstruct faces, usually at hospitals and morgues.
The skin color of the death mask was almost perfect and the detail was frighteningly realistic. The face he'd chosen was young and handsome, an all-American type. She wondered what he really looked like. Who in hell was he? Why did he wear masks?
She would escape somehow, she told herself. Then she would get him locked up for a thousand years. No death penalty let him suffer.
“If that's your choice, fine,” he said, and he suddenly kicked her feet out from under her.
She fell down hard on her back. “You die right here.” He slid a needle out of the well-worn black medical bag he'd brought with him. He brandished it like a tiny sword. Let her see it.
