The Captive (21 page)

"OK, gottcha Vaire. This will help. I'll have something definite to ask people now, and I'm going to put the police onto who these guys are and -" He paused, recalling what had happened with the Beast last night. "And Vaire,  sweetheart, thanks a million. We'll. get them back. I really feel we're on their trail now."

"Oh I hope so. Please let us know right away, and I'll keep asking around here. Both of us working like detectives and the police too, somebody's going to find them. And Barry?"

"Yeah?"

"Remember, they've got all those guns. You're the best brother-in-law I've got, and Renee and Mina will be there too. Don't be foolish."

"Nothing like that," he said, and reassured her as well as he could while thinking of death and mutilation for three men, two of whom he did not even know. When she had hung up, he started some coffee and sat in the empty kitchen trying to get straight what he would do first.

"Please take it, mail it for me. I don't have even a cent of money, he's taken everything from me. Please. No, don't give it back. Here, my wedding ring."

"No! No, Senora. They theenk I steal thees ring." The woman was backed into a corner of the tiny room between the door and wash basin. There came a furious pounding on the metal door. He was outside.

Renee pushed the crumpled up piece of cardboard into the Mexican woman's hand with a final plea, "Just put it in the mailbox, any mailbox, maybe they will deliver it anyway.  Please." She grabbed Mina's hand and pulled open the door, hoping the other woman would stay in the corner so he would not know she was in there.

"What the hell were you doing in there so long?" the big man said. He was dressed in a white shirt and black jodhpurs with high, polished boots. His face was square and beginning to look paunchy, his hair black and cut short so that he looked like a mounted policeman or a motorcycle cop.

"Don't be rude, Bill," Renee said, pulling Mina along behind her like a little boat in a rough sea. "We had to go to the bathroom." She hurried to the car and climbed in, almost tossing Mina into the front seat in her haste to get away before the Mexican woman came out of the restroom. If he knew there was someone else in there, he would stop her. She watched, stiff with fright, as her ex-husband walked slowly around the front of the car and got into the driver's seat. From the corner of her eye she saw a movement near the door of the ladies' room and prayed it was not her. She kept her eyes resolutely straight ahead.

Bill started the car with terrible slowness, Renee thought, put it in gear like a man working under water, looked out to study the traffic along the highway, and as he looked back to start, Renee caught sight of the Mexican woman emerging from the restroom. In desperation, she leaned across Mina and tried to wave out the driver's window as if she had seen a friend going by on the highway. Bill caught her arm, twisted it hard so that she couldn't help but squeal, pushed her back to her side of the car and swept a backhand blow across her face that bounced her back against the seat. Stunned, she tried to keep from screaming, holding her arms at her side, her nose feeling as if it had been hit with a hammer. Tears spurted from her eyes.

"You try that again, smarty, and I'll put you out cold," the big man said, letting out the clutch with a roar of the engine and spinning dirt out behind as he swung onto the highway.

Renee sat stiffly until her face felt whole again, wiped her nose where blood was dripping down and looked about for something to stop the bleeding. She heard Mina whimper and looked down to see the little girl sitting with her hands over her eyes.

"It's all right, baby," Renee said. "Mommy is OK, and it won't happen again. I just made a mistake."

"You damn right you did," the man said, keeping his face straight ahead on the road as they roared around the first turns into Tijeras Canyon. "You're going to find your place in the world, Renee, and that place is being my woman, not the whore of some Jew-boy writer stealing money from white people."

"Bill," she said through the oily rag she had found in the glove compartment. "How about the little girl? She's right here. You don't have to punish her. She's your own daughter."  And it made her feel a pang of despair to say it that way. Oh Barry, darling, she thought, forgive me for what I have to do to save ourselves from this madman I was married  to. She held the cloth to her nose and felt the pain subsiding. She had one arm around Mina's shoulders and the child leaned against her, but still had her hands over her eyes.

Renee looked out the window at the canyon, the gigantic boulders leaning over the road, the steep slopes of the  mountain on their left, all bare and gravelly looking, and on the right the drop down to the tiny stream that wandered around boulders and a few mesquite bushes and yucca plants. They had been planning on a picnic tomorrow.

It got hotter as they slowed to a crawl behind a line of traffic. As they came around a wide turn, she could see the long, uphill line of cars and trucks chugging slowly behind an enormous moving van far up the highway. Suddenly she was thrown back into the seat as the car leaped to the left, jerking out of line and roaring past the stacked-together cars toward the moving van almost at the top of the hill.

She looked at Bill, unbelieving, as the car roared faster, looking at the profile, the high forehead, the eyes squinted against the glare. the sharp beak of nose and thin lips, the heavy chin. He leaned over the wheel of the big car as it roared out of second gear into third and whined up in tone, faster and faster, the cars on their right flashing past in a multicolored blur, the moving van, now at the crest of the hill, and still no car coming in their lane. They would have to go over the top of the hill, into the empty sky at the top of the hill in the wrong lane! Renee grabbed her daughter, hugged her tight, felt her heart stop and beat and stop again as they roared over the top and past the van, her throat tightened to scream at the last instant before they crashed at eighty miles an hour into some other car.

The big sedan's engine whined as if it wanted to fly as they sailed over the top of the hill, the car becoming airborne over the hump. And a car was coming, swelling in size at enormous speed, Renee letting her breath out in a horrified scream that reverberated inside the car as it rocked hard to the right, almost lost hold on the concrete, the back wheels hitting the dirt shoulder, skidding sideways in a cloud of gravel and dirt, catching the edge of the road again as the oncoming car whipped by with horn blasting and a blur of white faces at the windows, and the La Salle skidded back across the highway into the other lane, Bill fighting the wheel, pumping the brake, saying to himself, "Easy, easy," pulling the wheel back over, and then they were clear,  rocking lightly like a boat in a mild swell, the road empty in front of them.

Renee sat there clutching Mina with one arm, her own stomach with the other, sobbing, her heart pounding, the terror in her body too much for words, too much to think, a hard, breathless clutching in her lungs.

"How's that for driving, toots," Bill said, but she heard the quaver of fear behind his words.

She could not speak, only shook her head. She felt saliva spurting in her cheeks. She was going to be sick. Her face went cold, and when she felt the spasms building in her abdomen she simply leaned over, letting it out of herself onto the floor of the car between her feet.

"For Christ's sake, Renee," the big man said, looking sideways at her. "Tell me you're sick, I'll stop. You got it all over the car now. Geezus."

There was not much, really. She had only eaten a hot dog at lunch and nothing but orange juice for breakfast. She felt limp, emptied, sick, the wind coming in the open windows turning her sweaty face icy cold. She wiped her mouth, looked at Mina who was watching her quietly. The poor little thing, and she was taking it all without crying.

"Mommy's sorry, darling," she said.

"Sometimes I get sick too, Mommy," Mina said wisely, "but you should do it outside."

"Sure should have," Bill said. "Now we'll have to stop and clean that up. The smell, ugh." He turned to look at Renee with hard eyes. "If you think that cute little stunt will get you another chance to talk to somebody at a gas station, you're cracked. I'm not stopping at another station, and when we do stop you keep yourself in the car."

They continued on into the canyon for perhaps another six or seven miles, Renee trying to see the mileage on the speedometer but unable to without being obvious. And then Bill began looking for the turnoff, found it and slowed for a side road to the right. He let the car go easy over the gravel as they went down into the stream bed, and there he stopped to clean the mess out of the front floor. Renee and Mina were told to simply lift their feet while, he used water from the stream to swab it out, and then with no more than five minutes delay they went on up the gravel road out of the canyon into higher country, where the pinons and cedars grew at spaced intervals as if it were a park.

The little road wound on, gaining altitude, the scenery becoming more mountainous, the road becoming more rutted  and bumpy as they went on. Sometimes there were washboards that built up a vibration until the whole car was shuddering and bouncing, the dust drifting in the window as they slowed down.

"I think I'm getting sick now, Mommy," Mina said quietly.

"Christ," Bill said. "Put her in the back seat. I'm not stopping anymore."

"Lie down back there, sweetheart," Renee said after boosting the little girl over the seat back. "Take your teddy and see if you can make him go to sleep." She watched while the child cuddled Bruno, lying on the big back seat.

Renee saw a deer, a lovely young one without antlers, racing the car for a hundred yards before it turned suddenly and disappeared in the trees. They had seen deer last week on the picnic to the crest. She closed her eyes, recalling that happiness, letting each detail move slowly through her memory,  and for the time it lasted it was better than a drug. With a start she realized Mina was tapping her shoulder.

"What is it, sweetie?" she said over her right shoulder.

"Bruno's gone," Mina said.

"What do you mean? Oh, did he fall out the window?"

"He was sitting up there to be cool and we hit a bump and he fell out." Mina put her cheek next to her mother's. "Could we ask Daddy to stop?"

"I don't think we'd better," Renee whispered. "We'll get you another Bruno first chance we get."

Mina seemed satisfied with that, which surprised Renee, for she loved the bear and slept with it nightly; but it soon slipped from her mind as she tried to get back into the  memory of Barry and Mina and the Rossis and the picnic. The air was cooler now, and she could see a double peaked mountain off to their right. Her ears popped as she yawned, making the car seem to roar suddenly. The road angled left and down out of the hills, getting flatter, the curves  becoming more gentle, the road smoother. She could not get back into her dream and she felt Bill looking over at her at odd moments. She didn't want to think about time ahead, only time past. She would have to think about the present moment,  but nothing ahead of that, unless there was a chance to escape. She tried to feel strong in that resolve, but she was weak and dirty, tired and hungry, and a sense of  foreboding kept intruding like the anticipation of pain.

The land flattened out now with windmills sitting lonely in the distance and the mountains receding off to their right. The black car roared into a tiny Mexican town with adobe walls and corrugated tin roofs. Renee got a glimpse of a sign that looked like it said "Chili" or "Chilili" and didn't know if that was the name of the town or something else. The car swung hard right at the old peak-roofed adobe church and they were out of the town again. Later came another town that looked just like the first one. Renee caught the name, Tajique, where they rushed past a group of lounging Mexicans  around an adobe building with the words "Cantina Fidel" painted on a board above the empty doorway.

Shortly after they had gone through another of the little towns, Bill suddenly turned right onto a wretched little track that didn't look like a road at all, and they were soon  crashing and bumping over slabs of rock and deep ruts so that Renee had to hang on to the dashboard and the window edge to keep from being thrown out. In the back seat, Mina slept on, rolling a bit with the bumps, but oblivious to it all.

The terrible road went on for what seemed hours, climbing steadily into the big trees again until they were obviously high on the side of a mountain where the air was cool and the scent of pines strong and pleasant. There was a final straight stretch, all uphill, a sharp turn to the left and they were close into the big trees, the swinging green branches slapping and scraping at the car as it rocked over the uneven ground.

When the car stopped, Renee saw a cabin built of logs with a rough plank porch and a stone chimney. On the porch stood a fat man wearing jodhpurs like Bill's and holding a gun in the crook of his arm. He looked like a guard.

"C'mon Renee, get the kid up and let's go." Bill got out, straightened his cramped back and stretched. Renee tried to pick up Mina, but she awoke and insisted on walking. The air was clean with forest scent, and she savored it, thinking of nothing but right now.

"Whatcha got there, Billy?" the fat man said. His face had a puffy look and his neck lay in rolls over the shirt collar.

"My woman and kid," Bill said, taking Renee's arm and pulling her along with him as he stepped up onto the porch. "She'll cook for us in this cabin, but she's my wife and not a common woman."

The puffy-faced man laughed and walked to the end of the porch where he spat into the forest. "She cooks, that's enough for me. I'm goddam sick of your beans and bacon."

Inside, the cabin was roomier than it appeared from the outside, with a single large room, a table and benches, bunks along the walls and a fireplace. Against one wall was a  kerosene stove, blackened with soot across the back and with the burners tipped sideways and rusty. Renee looked at it, remembering that her mother had once cooked on a thing like that. If the wicks in the burners were still useable, she could cook on it. She felt her only hope was to do what they wanted until Barry and the police could have a chance to find them. But she would not think about that. On each side of the fireplace there were pine slab doors with latches and leather thongs on them. Bill walked to the door on the left and opened it, revealing a sagging double bed on a homemade frame, a shelf or two and a tiny window about eight inches square up high in the back wall.