Reckless Read Free Page B

dropped her onto the passenger seat,
slammed her door and started around to his side of the car, she
thought about yanking the door open and running again. He must've
seen it in her face, because he tapped her window with the gun
barrel and shook his head. In another second, he was behind the
wheel.
    He drove fast, but not recklessly, away from
the city. The headlights barely cut a path through the pouring
rain. She watched him often. He didn't look her way at all.
    He'd driven in silence for forty-five minutes
before she drummed up the nerve to ask, “Where do you live?
Tibet?”
    His brows went up, and he glanced at her
briefly before returning his attention to the highway. “It isn't
much farther.”
    He took the next exit, and they spent ten
minutes negotiating side roads before finally pulling up to a tall
iron gate. Best she could figure, they were upstate somewhere. He
thumbed a button on his keyring. The gate swung open and they drove
through. It closed smoothly behind them. The house that loomed
ahead was a fieldstone monstrosity. It towered, three stories tall
and the color of mud.
    He thumbed another button when they pulled up
to the attached garage, and an overhead door rose. His headlights
pierced the black interior. He pulled the car in, shut it off,
killed the headlights. The door closed behind them. They sat in
total darkness.
    He sighed. She said, “Now what?”
    “Don't go nuts on me,” he said, his voice
very low, as if he thought someone might be listening. “This is for
your own good.”
    She stiffened in anticipation, but he had her
wrists quickly imprisoned in one huge hand. His other hand smoothed
something sticky over her mouth. Tape! She heard his door open. He
pulled her across the seat to get out the same side he had. He kept
hold of her wrists and managed to stay far enough ahead of her to
avoid her attempts at kicking him. A lot of good it would've done,
she thought miserably. She was barefoot
    He hauled her forward, flung open a door and
pulled her through it.
    She was in a kitchen, she realized slowly. It
was dim but not pitch dark. The impression she had was of copper
and chrome. He pulled her through another door and along a hallway.
She glimpsed a huge formal dining room to the left, and what might
be a library to the right. He moved too quickly, his long legs
eating up the distance as she jogged in his wake. Another doorway,
and she would have gasped if she could, at the living room. A
marble-topped bar with crystal glasses suspended upside-down from a
rack above it. Brass-legged coffee tables and end tables with glass
surfaces. White marble sculptures stood on every one of them: a
rearing stallion, a Bengal tiger, Pan with his pipes. The ceilings
were stucco, and there was a chandelier with crystal droplets
turning slowly. Money, the place seemed to say, not in a
whisper, but with a boastful shout.
    He pulled her along, over plush carpet that
felt like heaven to her frozen, bruised feet. She saw a foyer
beyond a mammoth archway and what she took to be the front
entrance. It glowed with muted golden light, and she caught an
unnatural glimmer from the left eye of the bear's head that was
mounted on one wall. It caught her attention immediately, and when
she looked at it, she realized that the two eyes didn't quite
match. Because one of them concealed a camera lens. She'd been at
this game too long not to spot surveillance devices as obvious as
that one. The question was, who did the big lug want to watch? Or
was someone watching him? Did he even know the thing was there?
    Her pondering was cut short when they came to
a broad staircase and he pulled her up it behind him. At the top
they veered down a hall and mounted still another staircase, this
one steep and narrow. At the top of that, they traversed a nearly
pitch dark corridor, and went through a doorway into what might
have been a study. There was a desk silhouetted in the darkness.
Other shapes loomed, but she didn't have time to