Blind Pursuit Read Free Page B

His surroundings were a great starlit expanse of mesquite trees and cactus, rippling like some strange ocean, extending in every direction to the mountains outlined against the blue-black sky.
    He was outside city limits now. A psychological barrier had been crossed, and irrationally he felt safer. Driving with one hand, he removed the baseball cap, red wig, and false beard.
    Without the disguise he was a balding, moon-faced man of forty-six, his pale cheeks as smooth as a child’s.
    In profile his chin was weak, and his nose, badly broken in a long-ago fight, was flat and shapeless. Tufting his scalp were scraps of hair, straw-colored once, now prematurely gray.
    The lights of the dashboard played on his face, gifting him with the illusion of expressiveness and life; but the light did not touch his eyes. They lay in shadowed hollows under thin, feminine brows.
    The job, he thought, had gone flawlessly so far. Better than expected. Surpassing all hopes.
    He nodded, satisfied, but he did not smile.
    Harold Gund never smiled.

 
     
     

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    5
     
    Erin regained consciousness and found herself in the dark, the absolute dark of a nightmare, and she couldn’t move, she couldn’t move .
    Seizure, she thought in blank confusion. Had a seizure, and now I’m paralyzed somehow.
    But that couldn’t be it. She hadn’t had an epileptic episode since she was fifteen. And besides, she was forgetting something, something vitally important, something that had happened to her just a short time ago.
    The lobby.
    Man in a baseball cap.
    Electric pain shocking her body.
    Kidnapped. Not a seizure. She’d been kidnapped.
    A scream of blind terror welled in her throat but found no release. Her mouth wouldn’t open. Her lips were sealed.
    She twisted wildly, found her legs lashed together at the ankles, her wrists tied.
    And her eyes—heavy cloth was stretched tightly over them, imprisoning her in darkness.
    Bound. Muzzled. Blindfolded.
    Helpless.
    The pounding drumbeat of her heart, the choked grunts behind her closed lips, the snorts of breath flaring her nostrils—these were the only sounds in her world, her only reality.
    He could do anything he liked with her, anything at all, and she was powerless to defend herself. At this moment he might be standing over her with a knife or a gun, might be preparing to slice her throat or put a bullet in her, or something worse, inflict some variety of slow torture, and there was nothing she could do about it, no way out, no chance for her, no hope—
    Stop it.
    The voice in her mind, firm and authoritative, was her own.
    Stop it, Erin, come on now, stop it and think.
    Think. Yes. She had to think, because thinking was the only recourse left open to her. Had to think and understand.
    With trembling effort she forced down panic, struggling for calm, directing the splintered chaos of her thoughts into straight-line patterns.
    First question: Where was she?
    She lay still, listening hard. Over the violent rhythm of her heart she heard the throb of an engine.
    A vehicle. Was she in the trunk of a car?
    No, she sensed somehow that the space around her was bigger than that. And the cold metal surface beneath her, vibrating with the engine, felt like the uncarpeted floor of the cargo compartment in a truck or van.
    Moving pretty fast, she’d guess. Maybe forty or forty-five miles an hour. No stops for traffic signals. On a highway, but not an interstate. The road was too rough. One of the older highways that led out of town.
    Out of town ...
    Into the desert? There could be reasons for taking her to an isolated spot, far from buildings and people.
    Fear rose in her again, squeezing her heart in its cold grip. She thought she might pass out.
    No. She had to remain conscious. It was her only chance.
    There was a possibility he would unseal her lips at some point, if only to hear her scream or plead. Should he do that, she would reason with him, try to establish contact.