At first he merely wanted her dead, her and the child she carried as well. He employed vivid fantasies of what he'd do to her in order to dull the pain of what was happening to him during his own brutal initiation to prison life.
Over the years, he'd refined his thinking about exactly what he wanted from Diana Ladd. The Margaret Danielsons of the world were useful in the short term, good for immediate gratification, but they afforded little genuine satisfaction. Real vengeance, authentic eye-for-an-eye-type vengeance, demanded more than that. Whatever price he exacted from Diana Ladd would have to be equal to that required of him by those thugs in the prison-absolute submission and unquestioning obedience, no more, no less. The key to that would be her child....
With some difficulty, Carlisle roused himself from contemplation. He wondered uneasily how long he'd been standing, lost in thought, in that overheated storeroom.
Slipping in and out of his imagination like that was dangerous. He would have to pay more attention, keep a better grip on what he was doing. The ability to deliberately disassociate himself from reality was a necessary survival skill in prison, but letting it sneak up on him unawares on the outside could cause trouble.
Even so, thinking about Diana Ladd was sensuously seductive, irresistible. Knowingly now, he let himself slip back into the dream.
Where would he take her? he wondered idly. Where would he have the time-it would take some time, of course-4o do all he wanted, to bring the bitch to her knees?
The answer came in such a brilliant flash of inspiration that it seemed he must have known it all along. Thinking about it made him giddy. It was so right, so perfectly appropriate to go back to the place Garrison Ladd had shown him, to use the man's own pitiful excuse at research to destroy his entire family, both widow and child. How wonderfully appropriate.
Carlisle took one last careful look around the storeroom.
He had moved all the necessary equipment into one corner so it would be easily accessible and could be gathered at a moment's notice, but except for a hunting knife, he didn't take any of it along with him in Jake Spaulding's Valiant.
Not right then. It wasn't time yet.
He went out and closed the door behind him, locking it with a real sense of purpose and anticipation. All he had to do now was find Diana Ladd and that lump of a baby of hers. The child must be six years old by now. Once he did that, the rest would take care of itself All things come to them who wait.
Dr. Rosemead said you had to be sixteen years old to visit with the patients in their rooms. While his mother was down the hall in Rita's room, Davy waited in the busy lobby. He watched with interest as a very sunburned white man came in through the doors and hurried to the desk. A thick curtain of silence fell over the room.
'I'm looking for a patient named Rita Antone,' the man said loudly, glancing down at a small notebook he carried.
'Who?' the Indian clerk asked.
'Rita Antone,' he repeated. 'An old lady who was hurt in a car wreck yesterday.'
'I don't know her,' the clerk said.
Davy couldn't believe his ears. This was the very same clerk who had, only minutes before, given his mother the number to Rita's room.
'They told me she came here by ambulance. Did she die?'
'I don't know,' the clerk repeated blankly.
With an impatient sigh, the man gave up, stuffed the notebook back in his pocket, and retreated the way he had come. Almost without realizing what he was doing, Davy followed the man outside and caught up with him as he climbed into his car.
'I know Rita,' Davy said.
Surprised, the man swung around and looked down at him. 'You do?
Really?'
Davy nodded. 'That woman in there told a lie. Rita is too in there.
My mom's with her.'
The hot sun shone on Davy's stitches, making them itch.
Unconsciously, he scratched them.
'Wait a minute,' the man said suspiciously, kneeling and staring at the sutured wound. 'Wait just one minute.
What happened to your head?'
'I cut it. Yesterday.'
'How?'
'When the truck turned over, I guess.'
'Rita Antone's truck?' the man asked.
Davy nodded, wondering how the man knew about that.
'So you must be the boy who told my friend about the ambulance on the mountain?'
'You know the man in the red car?' Davy returned.
'As a matter of fact, I do,' the man said with a smile.
