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“N-no,” she said. “Nobody.”
For the first time, his intense expression shifted. He bowed his head, his body heaving with a sigh.
“Get on,” he said.
She blinked with surprise. “E-excuse me?”
“I said get on.”
Get on? Behind him? A clearly unhappy man who looked as if he ate scrap metal for breakfast? It was one thing to admire the king of beasts from afar, but she wasn’t sure she should be crawling right into the cage with him.
“Uh…sure. Can you take me to the police station?”
“Not tonight. Too far away, and it’s too damned cold. I’ll take you someplace warm and safe.”
Warmth and safety. Currently the two most beautiful concepts in the English language. But was this the man who was going to provide those things?
She looked around, shivering wildly, looking for options and finding none.
He revved the engine. Last call.
She mentally crossed herself, strode over and slung her leg over the back of his motorcycle.
“Hang on, sweetheart.”
He hit the throttle, and only by clamping her arms around his waist was she able to keep from tumbling off backward. And in spite of the cold, the noise of the engine and her massive fear of the unknown, her only thought was that she’d just grabbed the Rock of Gibraltar. Even through the thick jacket he wore, she could tell he was all bone and muscle.
“Where exactly are we going?” she shouted.
No response. Either he couldn’t hear her over the roar of the engine, or he chose to ignore her. As they sped down the deserted street, her icy hair swirled in a frenzy around her head, the frigid strands smacking her in the face. She ducked her head against his back, hoping to keep the ice cubes that had once been her ears from cracking and falling off the sides of her head. He made an excellent wind block, which was no surprise. A man his size could have blocked a category-five hurricane. Even through his jacket she could feel his body heat, and right now, heat from anywhere was welcome. She closed her eyes, resurrected a few childhood prayers and hung on tight.
He seemed to drive forever before finally slowing down, and as soon as he did, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something that looked like a television remote. He pointed it at a large metal overhead door on the side of one of the buildings. With a grinding mechanical noise, the door came up. To her complete shock, he drove right underneath it into the building, the engine noise of the motorcycle reverberating off the walls of the empty warehouse.
She glanced over her shoulder to see the door coming down behind them. That familiar sense of self-preservation surged through her again, but Greta hadn’t addressed what do to when trapped on a moving vehicle behind a man the size of a redwood tree.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Where are you going? Hey!”
He never slowed down. He continued through the musty-smelling warehouse, dimly lit by a few overhead bulbs. Twenty feet in the distance stood two large metal doors. He leveled the remote at them, and they parted just as he reached them. He drove between them and swung the motorcycle around in a tight one-eighty just as the doors closed again. She looked around to see that they’d entered a room the size of a small bedroom. No doors, no windows. Then she heard a creaking noise, and it began to move.
Good God, they were on an elevator.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked as they slowly ascended, her voice still paralyzed by the cold.
“Home,” he said.
“Whose home?”
“Mine.”
He lived here? What could possibly live in a place like this besides rats, roaches and ghosts?
Serial killers.
Live here, or just passing through? he’d asked her. Know anybody in Dallas? He might as well have said, Hop on, baby. It’s easier to get away with murder if you’re a transient.
No. He’d said warm and safe. She’d heard him very clearly. It might have been a big fat lie, but right now she had no choice but to pray he was telling her the truth.
The elevator chugged up three floors and stopped. The doors creaked open in concert with the soft rumble of the idling engine. He eased the motorcycle forward until it exited the elevator, then killed the engine.
Wendy instantly got off and backed away. The light was dim, but still she could tell they were standing on a large three-story-high platform enclosed by an iron railing. The elevator led to one place—to this landing and a large metal door dead ahead.
He smacked the kickstand down with his foot, got off the bike and stepped toward the door. Behind her, the elevator doors screeched closed. She whipped around, looking to the left of the elevator, then to the right. Where was the control panel?
“Uh…no buttons,” she said. “How do you call the elevator?”
He held up the remote, then stuffed it into his coat pocket.
“Stairwell?”
“Not out here.”
She was trapped.
She backed against the iron railing, her heart racing wildly, her teeth still chattering like crazy, sounding like a jackhammer in the silence of the huge warehouse.
The man slipped his gloves off, stuffed them into his hip pocket, then pulled out a set of keys. He unlocked one lock. Then another. After the turn of a third key, he swung the door open, stepped aside and nodded for her to enter the darkened room.
He’d looked big sitting on the motorcycle. He looked positively gigantic now. Her question of whether he could make it through a doorway with those shoulders was answered.
Barely.
Swallowing hard, Wendy glanced back at the useless elevator. The nonexistent stairwell. The sheer three-story drop over the railing. She wished she had a choice, but the weather, the situation and the look on this man’s face had relieved her of all of those. Taking a deep, shaky breath, she walked through the door into the darkened room.
Okay. It’s warm in here. At least he didn’t lie about that.
That was her first thought, and for several heavenly seconds, it was her only thought.
Then he turned on the lights.
2
WENDY BLINKED against the sudden brightness, shocked at what came into view. The room was massive. No, it wasn’t a room. Just an extension of the warehouse that contained it, with soaring ceilings crisscrossed with pipes and ducts and wires. Along one wall was a refrigerator, a stove and a few cabinets, with a nearby table and a couple of chairs, which she guessed qualified that area as the kitchen.
Near an adjoining wall sat a television with a sofa in front of it. Against another wall was a desk with a phone, computer monitor, scanner, fax machine, printer. Industrial light fixtures hung from the ceiling, illuminating the room with a garish glow. The floor was nothing more than cracked, stained concrete without a rug in sight.
She heard a clanking noise. Turning back, she saw him lock the door with twists, swipes and flips of his fingers. “Stay here,” he commanded, then disappeared down a short hallway into another room.
Wendy looked around the bizarre warehouse loft. The furniture, the computer equipment and the TV should have made it seem at least a little homey, but stuck inside this weird place, they looked strange and surreal. And not a single personal item graced a shelf, table or kitchen counter to indicate that he was a normal human being and not a reclusive psychopath. She tried desperately to get a grip on herself, but in spite of the warmth of the room, fear mingled with the cold she still felt until she couldn’t tell which one was making her shiver.
Venturing forward, she peered around a corner into another area and saw a door standing slightly open. A moment later she heard a scratching noise, and the door creaked open a few inches more.
When a cat the size of a Yugo sauntered out of the room, Wendy leaped back with surprise. The animal stopped suddenly and glowered at her, and she was sure she’d never seen a more wicked-looking feline. He had fire-orange stripes, scruffy fur and paws the size of boxing gloves. But the scariest thing of all were his appendages, or lack of them. All of his left ear and half of his tail were missing.
Good God. He’s eating the cat. One bite at a time.
And now the cat was going to eat her.
“Hey, kitty-kitty,” she said in her best cat-whisperer voice. “Nice kitty.”
The creature tensed. Then all at once he hissed, scurried across the floor, leaped to the kitchen counter and then to the top of the refrigerator, where he glared down at her with evil yellow eyes. Wendy backed up to the wall, her hand against her chest, trying to calm her wildly beating heart. It couldn’t get any creepier here. No way could it get any creepier.
Then she looked toward the room from which the cat had just emerged.
Maybe it could.
With a compulsion she couldn’t quell, Wendy tiptoed over and pushed the door open just enough that she could see what was on the other side, and anxiety surged through her all over again.
On a table lay three guns. She didn’t know a derringer from an Uzi, but she certainly knew a firearm when she saw one.
Then she looked up on the wall.
At least forty photographs were stuck there. They appeared to be mug shots—mug shots of men who were mean and nasty looking, like particularly despicable serial killers. And through about half of the photos were big black Xs. He was marking them out, one by one, with a supersize Magic Marker, as if…
As if he’d snuffed them.
Then it struck her. He’s a serial killer who kills serial killers. Did it get any badder than that?
She quickly pulled the door closed and turned around. She could hear her captor knocking around in the other room, undoubtedly getting the torture chamber ready.
She had to get out of there.
Turning, she spied another door beside the refrigerator, one with as many locks as had been on the front door. He’d told her there wasn’t a stairwell in the elevator landing. Maybe that door led to one. She hoped it did, anyway, because otherwise there was no getting out of this apartment.
No. Not apartment. More like lair. Or hideout. Or fortress. Or covert base of operations. What in the hell did you call a place that looked more like a bunker than living quarters?
A place she wanted to escape. Right now.
She hurried toward the door, looking over her shoulder, watching for him to come out of the back room. As quietly as she could, she opened the first dead bolt, which made a hideous clanking noise. Then she unhooked a chain that had links as wide as her wrist. She was just about to push a heavy metal slide lock aside when she heard footsteps. Spinning around, she saw him walking toward her. With a quick, startled breath, she pressed her back against the door.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
Fueled by sheer adrenaline, she wheeled back around, smacked the last lock and yanked the door open. Just as quickly, he took a few steps forward and grabbed her from behind, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her back as he shut the door again. She screamed, a hair-raising, penetrating scream that could easily have awakened any dead bodies he happened to have lying around. He slapped his hand over her mouth, shoving her scream all the way back into her throat. She tried to fight him, but he pressed his body hard to hers, pinning her against the door.
“Will you cut it out?” he said. “You’re not going anywhere!”
She couldn’t struggle anymore. With a ton of bone and muscle wrapped around her, she was completely at his mercy.
“I’m going to take my hand away from your mouth,” he said, his voice low and intense. “Are you going to scream?”
She just stood there, terrified.
“I asked you if you’re going to scream,” he said sharply.
Finally she shook her head. He removed his hand slowly, and her breath came in sharp bursts that seemed to echo forever in the vast expanse of the warehouse.
“If you’re going to do this,” she said in a hushed voice, “then do it now. Get it over with quickly. Please.”
He froze. “If I’m going to do what?”
She closed her eyes. “Rape me. Kill me. Whatever…whatever it is you do.”
For a count of three, he stood motionless. “What did you say?”
She didn’t want to repeat it. She’d barely been able to get the words out the first time. “R-rape me. And kill—”
Suddenly he let go of her. She spun around, her back pressed to the door, breathing hard. He’d retreated several paces, staring at her with disbelief. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
She swallowed hard. “If you’re not going to hurt me, then why are you trying to stop me from leaving?”
“Why am I—?” He stopped short, staring at her as if she’d lost her mind. He pointed toward the window. “Is it thirty degrees out there? Sleeting?”
She looked over at the ice still pattering the window. “Uh…yeah.”
“Are there lowlifes wandering the streets?”
Clearly there were. One of them had made off with her car. “A few.”
“Do you have any idea at all where you are?”
Hell, no. A global-positioning system couldn’t have helped her out of here. She shrugged. “No. I guess I’m not completely sure.”
“Those are three real good reasons. One would have done just fine. But if you’re still determined to leave,” he said, his voice a low growl, “there’s a police station about four miles west. Why don’t you hike on down there and tell them there’s a rapist on the loose?”
She blinked with surprise, startled at this turn of events. Although he was rumbling with anger, she noticed that his dark eyes didn’t seem nearly as evil as they had a few moments ago. Actually, they looked more sleepy than anything. And he’d made a couple of pretty good points about the weather and all those other things.
Was it possible she could have leaped to a conclusion or two?
“Okay,” she said, shrugging weakly, “so maybe you’re not a criminal.”
“Hell, no, I’m not!”
She recoiled at his angry outburst. “Hey! What was I supposed to think? The abandoned warehouse, the guns, the mug shots, the big black Xs—”
“You saw all that? What were you doing in there?”
“I—” She stopped, then pointed to the cat on top of the fridge. “He opened the door. I just…I just kinda looked in.”
“You were snooping?”
