10
Whiteout.
The world was erased behind a brilliant screen of pure white, no depth or texture anywhere, only the perfect whiteness of snow on snow.
Elizabeth struggled to understand it, and then she knew it was a dust storm, like the one that had caught her by surprise on Interstate 10 on her way from Las Cruces to Lordsburg five years ago.
She’d been driving the rattletrap Dodge she owned back then, a car that had never been very reliable, when without warning the highway had disappeared in a sheet of windblown sand, even the hood of her car wiped from sight, and for a few terrifying seconds she had coasted at sixty miles an hour, seeing no road and no traffic, praying she would not be part of a chain collision that would leave her mangled in the wreckage.
Then the dust storm blew past her, and she was in a motel room in Tucson, slumped in an armchair.
And Cray was there.
“Hello, Kaylie,” he said.
She blinked, focusing on the tall man in black, his gloved hands, the shiny pistol aimed at her. The room was very bright. He’d turned on every lamp.
“Your first instinct will be to fight or flee.” Cray’s voice was low, nearly inaudible over the buzzing drone of the air conditioner. “Resist the impulse to do either. I don’t want to shoot you here, but I will, if you make it necessary.”
She shifted in the armchair and heard the creak of old wood. Her bare toes curled into the carpet’s short nap.
Cray hadn’t tied her to the chair, but he had dressed her in her red Lobos jacket, zipping up the front, knotting the long nylon sleeves to trap her hands across her midsection.
Like a straitjacket. Yes. He would have been amused by that.
“Do you intend to be sensible?” Cray pressed, impatience seeping through his cool smile. “Well, do you?”
Slowly she nodded. It was the only way for her to answer. Her mouth was gagged with what felt like a washcloth, tied in place at the back of her head.
“Good. Then just sit tight. We’ll be leaving soon.”
He wedged the gun in the beltless waistband of his slacks, then turned away. She saw that her suitcase lay open on the folding stand where she’d left it.
He was rummaging through her things.
She became aware of the need to breathe. But she couldn’t breathe with the towel clogging her mouth. For an awful moment she was sure she would suffocate or choke to death.
No, wrong, she could breathe, and to prove it she inhaled slowly through her nostrils, feeding her lungs.
When she was calm again, or almost calm, as calm as she could be under the circumstances, facing death at the hands of the man who was her worst enemy — when she was able to think, she tried to reconstruct what had happened.
She’d talked to Anson, then gone to sleep. Bad dreams…
Then Cray must have broken in, sedated her somehow.
She remembered an instant of alertness, of disorienting terror, and after that, a long stomach-wrenching fall.
And now…
She was his prisoner.
Again.
In the suitcase Cray found the clipping from the Dallas newspaper. She saw him study it in the lamplight. His lips formed a circle. “So.” The clipping, neatly folded, went into his pants pocket. He resumed searching.
Her gaze traveled around the room and settled on the bed. The bedspread was a rumpled mess, the pillows strewn. Amid the disorder she saw a canvas satchel, something of his, which he’d tossed there.
Just behind it, on the nightstand where she’d left it, lay her purse.
In one lunge she could reach the purse, grab the gun inside. But first she had to free her hands. She tugged at the knotted sleeves. Cray had tied them tight.
She couldn’t break free, and so the gun would do her no good, and she had no hope and no chance at all.
“I intend to dispose of your luggage, of course.” Cray said it casually, merely for the sake of conversation. “I’ll put your suitcases in your car and drive into a bad neighborhood, then leave the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. The car and its contents will disappear quickly enough.”
He was foraging in the bottom of the suitcase. She watched his hands, gloved in black, slip like twin snakes among her undergarments and toiletries.
“But just in case your personal effects are somehow recovered by the police, I need to ascertain that they include nothing that links you to me.”
Finished with the first suitcase, he closed the canvas lid, then walked to the closet and removed the second one.
“You know the sort of item I mean. A diary or journal, a torn-out page of a phone book with my name circled. Perhaps I’m being paranoid. But even paranoids have enemies. Isn’t that right, Kaylie?”
The second suitcase was large and heavy — she’d never unpacked — but with one arm Cray hefted it easily onto the counter. His strength dismayed her. She had forgotten how powerful he was.
Still, she saw a weakness. Cray looked very much like a man in cool control, but it was an act. His hands were not as steady as they should have been, and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
He was fighting for composure. Fighting against an emotion so strong it threatened to overmaster him.
Hatred. Hatred of her.
She’d hurt him deeply, and now it was his turn to inflict pain.
Cray unzipped the suitcase and rummaged in it. At the bottom he found a thick manila envelope.
“Well, well. What have we here?”
He opened the envelope and tamped a clutter of papers and laminated cards onto the countertop.
“Let’s see. A New Mexico driver’s license issued to one Ellen Pendleton. Miss Pendleton looks rather like you, Kaylie, except for the brown hair and the rather mousy librarian’s glasses.” He flipped the card aside. “An obvious fake. I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.”
She hadn’t. It was the first false I.D. she’d obtained after going on the run. A man with a camera had stood her up against a life-size posterboard display of a driver’s license form, the details filled out by hand in large block letters that looked almost like type. He’d taken her picture, then simply laminated the photo.
The results had been terrible, but for fifty dollars she couldn’t complain. Later she’d done better.
“Here we go,” Cray said. “This looks more professional. You were Paula Neilson for a while.” He studied the Colorado driver’s license, the Social Security card, the birth certificate, credit cards, even a voter-registration card, all in Paula Neilson’s name. “These documents are genuine. You got her name from a death roll, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
Knowing that the Ellen Pendleton I.D. would never hold up to scrutiny, she had stopped at a cemetery outside Colorado Springs and found a young woman’s grave. It had been easy to obtain the deceased’s birth certificate from the local department of records; she’d handled the transaction by mail.
With the birth certificate in hand, she had applied for a driver’s license, then obtained a Social Security card and the other items. As Cray had said, all the documents were authentic. For six years she had been Paula Neilson.
“And one more document. Elizabeth Palmer’s birth certificate. Another return from the dead?”
He didn’t want an answer. If he had, and if she could have spoken, she would have told him that Elizabeth Palmer was a name she had made up, and the documents establishing her reality had been created with the aid of
