CHAPTER 2
He waited until the cab had pulled away, until I was up on the porch and out of the rain.
I set down my bags, began searching my duffel for my keys. The lights inside were off, and that annoyed, but did not surprise. Mikel was supposed to be keeping an eye on the place, but my brother had his own home, a condo in the northwest part of town, and certainly wasn’t obligated to sleep at my house. Making the place look lived-in would have been nice, though.
So I was on my haunches, searching my bag for a set of keys I hadn’t used in months, and with the rain, I didn’t hear him coming up behind me at all.
“Excuse me?”
It sounded strange, muted, but it also sounded familiar, and in the moment before I turned my head, it didn’t worry me. I’d heard that nervousness before, a thousand times, the timid question posed by an awestruck fan:
I’d found my keys, and straightened up, turning, trying to hide annoyance and find my pleasant meet-and- greet face. I said, “Yeah, look, you’ll have to forgive me but I just got home and . . .”
Then I stopped, because I was facing him, and I wasn’t liking what I was seeing one bit. Best I could figure, in a strange neuron click of clarity, was that he wasn’t just a fan.
He was a stalker.
He had longish hair, dirty blond, and green and brown cammo pants and a black sweatshirt with a hood, but the hood was down. His face was vaguely familiar, the way all faces smear together when you’ve seen millions of them from stages all around the world. He seemed big to me, but everyone seems big to me, and when I’m surprised on my porch by a strange man, that’s always going to be factored in for free.
He also had a gun, and that just added to the whole effect.
It was so utterly surreal, all I could say was “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
The man raised the gun, to point it at my head, and said, “Come here.”
My response was instinctive and contrary, and if I’d thought for a moment, I’d never have said it.
“Hell no,” I told him.
“It’s not a choice, bitch.”
He started coming forward, and the whole strangeness of it ended abruptly, and it became terrifying, instead. I went for my door, which was stupid and I fumbled it, jabbing my key pointlessly at the lock and missing. Then he was on me, and I heard the keys drop as he rammed the gun into my neck, wrapped his bare hand around it. The gun felt blunt and cold, and his grip felt hot and wet, and the cloud of fear that had been gathering coalesced into real panic.
“You come with me
The only coherent thought I had then was that I was going to die, probably horribly, and that it wasn’t fair because I wasn’t even supposed to
“Please don’t do this,” I said softly, and it didn’t sound pathetic to me, just sincere.
His answer was to pull me away from my door and off my porch. He turned me, walked me down the path from my house to the street, between the big apple trees in the front yard, to the sidewalk. Every house was dark, and there was no motion but us and the trees that shivered in the falling rain.
It seemed to me that I could probably scream for help once before he killed me, and that didn’t seem like a very good option at all.
Cars were parked along the curb, neighbor vehicles, and he walked me across the street, past a beat-up Chevy to a big Ford truck. The truck had a hardtop over the bed, something to keep it closed and dry, and he told me to open it, and then he told me to climb inside.
“Please don’t do this,” I said again. “You really don’t want to do this.”
“You don’t know what I want,” he said. “You better just hope I don’t want all of it. Get in, all the way to the back, then turn around.”
I had to go on hands and knees to get inside. The bed was lined with a hard black plastic, and the sound of the rain hitting the hardtop was loud. When I reached the far end I turned, watched as he moved his gun into a pocket, keeping his hand on the grip. He looked away from me, back across the street, as if checking on my house, and I could see he was trying to work something out, and I figured that was probably good for me, because if he already had a plan, I wasn’t going to have a chance at all. Not to say I had a chance to begin with, but to tell the truth, my fear had begun to ebb, as if it couldn’t keep up with the bizarreness of it all.
I wondered if I’d really sobered up, or if I was still drunk.
The man returned his attention to me, and when he spoke, the fear came back in a cascade.
“Give me your clothes.”
“They’re not your size,” I said, meekly.
His sweatshirt stretched around the barrel of the gun as he thrust it farther in my direction. “You think I’m joking? You think this is some fucking joke, you split-ass bitch? Get out of your fucking clothes.”
I just stared at him. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“You want me to hurt you? You want me to hurt you and do it myself?”
I shook my head. The muscles in my jaw were starting to tremble.
“Do it. Now.”
It took effort, and it took me finding a justification, it took me telling myself that this couldn’t be what I thought, that he wouldn’t do this here, not in the back of his truck parked two doors down from my own home, that there had to be something else he was after. Something more than his power and my humiliation.
He wouldn’t do this here.
Even so, my fingers copied my jaw the whole way, numb and clumsy as I fought my boots, my belt, my buttons and zippers. I struggled out of my clothes, and I thought he would leave me my underwear, but he wanted that, too. The hardtop trapped the cold, seemed to increase it, and it made me shiver.
When I was naked, he reached in and took my clothes.
“Lie down and don’t move,” he said, and then he slammed the gate on the truck.
I heard the driver’s door open and close, felt the vibration run through my skin. The engine started, the smell of exhaust in the trapped space. We lurched into motion.
I closed my eyes, and wished I was home.
It was dark and still raining when the truck stopped and the engine died. I heard the driver’s door open again, heard the footsteps splashing around to the back of the vehicle, then the key scraping the lock. The gate came down.
“Get dressed and get out,” the man said, and threw my clothes at me.
Surprise didn’t stop me. I dressed, fast, not bothering to tie my boots, just getting covered and then sliding along the bed. I dropped off the gate, onto the street, looking around, and as soon as I was out, the engine started again. I could see the man behind the wheel as he pulled away, and he wasn’t looking back.
It seemed like all of me was shaking, and for a moment, I was sure I would fall, that my legs wouldn’t hold me. I felt the rain on my face, and I searched the darkness, trying to find some sense of where I was.
I was right where I’d started.
CHAPTER 3
My front door was unlocked, and I blew through it, slammed it shut behind me, throwing the locks and switching on the hall light. The alarm panel on the wall said that the system was in reset, and I stabbed at it,
