Night Prey Read Free Page B

bag, slipped his hand inside; the ether-soaked rag was cold against his skin.
    With a smile on his face, he said, “Hey, what’s a drink. C’mon. And hey, look at this . . .”
    He turned as if to point something out to her; that put him behind her, a little to the right, and he wrapped her up and smashed the rag over her nose and mouth, and lifted her off the ground; she kicked, like a strangling squirrel, though from a certain angle, they might have been lovers in a passionate clutch; in any case, she only struggled for a moment. . . .
     
     
     
    SARA JENSEN HIT the snooze button on the alarm clock, rolled over, holding her pillow. She’d been smiling when the alarm went off. The smile faded only slowly: the peculiar nightmare hovered at the back of her mind. She couldn’t quite recover it, but it was there, like a foot-step in an attic, threatening. . . .
    She took a deep breath, willing herself to get up, not quite wanting to. Just before she woke, she’d been dreaming of Evan Hart. Hart was an attorney in the bond department. He wasn’t exactly a romantic hero, but he was attractive, steady, and had a nice wit—though she suspected that he suppressed it, afraid that he might put her off. He didn’t know her well. Not yet.
    He had nice hands. Solid, long fingers that looked both strong and sensitive. He’d touched her once, on the nose, and she could almost feel it, lying here in her bed, a little warm. Hart was a widower, with a young daughter. His wife had died in an auto accident four years earlier. Since the accident, he’d been preoccupied with grief and with raising the child. The office gossip had him in two quick, nasty affairs with the wrong women. He was ready for the right one.
    And he was hanging around.
    Sara Jensen was divorced; the marriage had been a one-year mistake, right after college. No kids. But the breakup had been a shock. She’d thrown herself into her work, had started moving up. But now . . .
    She smiled to herself. She was ready, she thought. Something permanent; something for a lifetime. She dozed, just for five minutes, dreaming of Evan Hart and his hands, a little bit warm, a little bit in love. . . .
    And the nightmare drifted back. A man with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth, watching her from the dark. She shrank away . . . and the alarm went off again. Sara touched her forehead, frowned, sat up, looked around the room, threw back the blankets with the sense that something was wrong.
    “Hello?” she called out, but she knew she was alone. She went to use the bathroom, but paused in the doorway. Something . . . what?
    The dream? She’d been sweating in the dream; she remembered wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. But that didn’t seem right. . . .
    She flushed the toilet and headed for the front room with the image still in her mind: sweating, wiping her forehead. . . .
    Her jewelry box sat on the floor in the middle of the front room, the drawers dumped. She said aloud, “How’d that get there?”
    For just a moment, she was confused. Had she taken it out last night, had she been sleepwalking? She took another step, saw a small mound of jewelry set to one side, all the cheap stuff.
    And then she knew.
    She stepped back, the shock climbing up through her chest, the adrenaline pouring into her bloodstream. Without thinking, she brought the back of her hand to her face, to her nose, and smelled the nicotine and the other . . .
    The what?
    Saliva.
    “No.” She screamed it, her mouth open, her eyes wide.
    She convulsively wiped her hand on the robe, wiped it again, wiped her sleeve across her forehead, which felt as if it were crawling with ants. Then she stopped, looked up, expecting to see him—to see him materializing from the kitchen, from a closet, or even, like a golem, from the carpet or the wooden floors. She twisted this way, then that, and backed frantically toward the kitchen, groping for the telephone.
    Screaming as she