Frenzy (21 page)

45

 

“L
et me out of the damned car, Dwayne!”

Honey Carter was twenty and blond and beautiful. Dwayne was well aware that she resembled both his mother and Maude, reflecting his father's taste in women.

Honey had something else in common with those two women. She didn't love Dwayne, and never had.

She'd gone out with him a few times and then rebuffed him, called him a rich freak.

Well, she might as well have called him that. She'd made him
feel
that way.

What did she want? He was young and reasonably good looking. Rich, but how could she count that against him? And he carried a 3.9 grade point average at the University of South Florida. Higher education was a snap for him. Read the book (on or off his computer) in a single sitting, then relax and ace the course.

Not that he was going back. College bored the hell out of him. And some people began giving him odd looks, fearful looks, and avoided him. Rumors bloomed even if they couldn't take root. Others on campus had found out who he was, and about the murder of his father and stepmother-to-be.

This last part actually attracted a certain kind of woman to him—as long as there were other people in the room. Rumors, rumors, rumors about him. Some of them must be true. And if he was rich, he was probably guilty. Wasn't that the way it always worked?

This final attempt to save his and Honey's relationship (at least as Dwayne saw it) wasn't working out very well. They were in his car on dark and isolated Lagoon Road. It had seemed romantic to Dwayne, a perfect setting for reviving a love affair showing signs of strain.

Until the sun went down.

Now they were surrounded by darkness. He was amused. Honey was faced with the classic dilemma: stay and screw, or get out of the car and be in grave danger. He wanted to see how she'd deal with the problem.

She was pretending now, he was sure. Showing him she didn't take that kind of treatment from anyone, male or female. But it was all a show.

He used the car's lighter to fire up a cigarette, took a deep drag, and leaned his head back so he was staring up at the headliner, thinking about what he might do with the cigarette's glowing ember.

“Do you
really
want to get out of the car here?” Dwayne asked.

Honey lost her focus on him, and suddenly realized how dark it had become.

“There are gators out there,” Dwayne said. “And python snakes.”

People in the area had kept pythons as pets until they got too big and dangerous. Then they set them loose in the swamp, where they thrived and multiplied. There had been state sponsored hunting seasons on the pythons. Many of the snakes were over twenty feet long. They were still out there. Now and then there were stories in the Florida papers. Along with photographs.

Honey, a journalism major, read the papers.

“Drive me goddamned home!” Honey demanded. There was a catch of fear in her throat.

Home was where she lived off campus, in an apartment with two other young women.

Dwayne had seen Honey walking off campus, near a coffee shop where he was going to search for her. Instead, there she was, striding along the sidewalk, alone. He'd pulled to the curb in front of her and opened the door on her side of the car. Honey didn't like scenes. Dwayne made it clear to her that if she didn't get in the car so they could go somewhere and talk reasonably, he would make a hell of a scene.

He wanted her to hurry because no one they knew was around to see her get in his car.

Not knowing better, she hurried.

 

 

Now no one knew Honey was here with Dwayne, on godforsaken Lagoon Road, in the deep, deep swamp. She suddenly understood the meaning of their aloneness. The realization of her vulnerability passed between them like electricity.

He moved toward her to hug her to him, as if to reassure her of her safety.

Her eyes widened and she slid away from his grasp. The door handle clicked and the dome light flashed on.

“The classic dilemma,” Dwayne said.

“You really want to give me that choice?” she asked, her door already open six inches.

The fear in her eyes made something tighten in the core of Dwayne. A coil of pure pleasure. How terrified she was!

But she was bluffing. He was sure of it.

He decided to call her bluff, and in a fashion she wouldn't like. It was time for the stuck-up bitch to learn a lesson.

“I'm not giving you a choice,” he said. “I want you to go.”

She pushed the car door open wider, as if about to leave.

He had to hand it to her. She was going to take it to the wire.

He stared straight ahead, smiling. She was going to break, beg, give in completely to her terror.

But she didn't.

The door opened wider, swung shut. And Honey was gone.

Dwayne sat stunned.

He shut the passenger's side door so there was no interior light. The car already was well off the road where it wouldn't be noticed, and hardly anyone drove this road at night.

She'd be a manageable bundle when he found her. He might hide and watch her awhile before rescuing her. Let fear dissolve what was left of her willpower. Then it would be her turn for a fate worse than death.

He got a flashlight out of the glove compartment, opened the driver's side door, and slipped out of the car and into the black and fetid swamp.

 

 

Honey's heart was fluttering irregularly, like something wild trying to escape the prison of her rib cage. She'd never been so frightened. She was breathing hard, making soft whimpering sounds, running, simply running through the night, splashing through shallow water, flailing away at branches scratching at her face. There were creatures around her, terrible creatures, that she could sense and sometimes hear.

She knew there must be another road running parallel to Lagoon, but she couldn't think of one.

Then it came to her.

Yes, last summer, when she was helping Helga Ditweiller learn to drive.

She splashed through ankle-deep water and slammed head-on into a thick tree trunk.

And became part of the darkness of the swamp.

 

 

Dwayne took two steps into the swamp and his flashlight went dead.

He stopped and stood still, listening.

There were only the sounds of the swamp at night. Insects thrumming, larger things stirring, what might be the distant grunt of a gator.

“Honey!”

His call was unanswered.

Again.

Carefully, so he wouldn't lose his bearings in the night, he back-stepped toward the road. He held the dead flashlight as if it was a club. He hated it when things got out of control like this, and it was no fault of his own.

His heel found hard pavement.
Civilization!
Grateful for firm footing, he turned and strode toward his car.

And stopped.

He didn't have a flashlight that worked, but he had matches. And cigarettes.

And he was sure he could find his way to Honey. She couldn't have gone far in the thick foliage and mud that dragged at every step. And he couldn't hear her splashing around. She wasn't moving, he was sure. She probably thought she was hiding.

He glanced left and right into darkness. Surrounded by swamp country, no one would hear her screams. And if anyone did hear them, they'd assume the noise was being made by some animal, probably in the jaws of a gator.

If Honey did make it back to civilization, she wouldn't get all that much sympathy. If he applied the cigarettes to the folds of her body, where they were barely visible, her scars wouldn't look nearly as painful as they were. And there was no way she could prove he'd done anything to her.

He told himself that Honey would eventually be okay. She'd have a hard night, then she'd turn up somewhere, hysterical and cursing, and yammering a story that no one would believe. Not coming from such an “adventurous” girl.

A hard night in the swamp. He wondered what that would be like.

Well, it wasn't
his
fault. He wasn't the one who got stubborn and ran blindly away in the night. And he'd searched for her, hadn't he? It wasn't his fault that the flashlight went dead. Was he supposed to keep fresh batteries in the damned thing just in case some stupid cow did a dash into the swamp at night?

Now look what she was going to get for being such a nose-in-the-air bitch.

He shivered. Then he made sure there was nothing to indicate that Honey Carter had been in his car tonight. If she tried to implicate him in her panic and dumb dash, he'd simply deny it all, say she was lying. She'd gotten herself lost in the swamp and run into the wrong kind of people. Probably teased them, the way she liked to do. So they attacked her, had their fun with cigarettes and who knew what else. Now she was using
him
for a convenient scapegoat so she wouldn't seem like such a boob. Maybe there'd be no real, serious harm done, anyway. Just another he said/she said thing. People would soon forget. And pretty soon there'd be more and different rumors about Honey, tease that she was.

Dwayne found her within half an hour, unconscious at the base of a tree. He used the sash of her dress to tie her arms behind her, then bound her ankles.

Then he began with the cigarettes, and she came awake fast, squirming and screaming. He didn't bother to gag her, simply slapped her hard enough, often enough, and she suffered in silence. Well, she whimpered, actually.

Until she passed out.

He studied her for a while, knowing she was still alive. Then he removed the sash belt, and his own belt that he'd used on her ankles.

He walked away from her, wondering, if she lived through the night, what kind of story she would tell.

46

P
ain dragged Honey up from sleep. Her eyes, her face, her lips, everything had been burned and stung like a thousand needles. She remembered last night, Dwayne bending over her with a glowing cigarette.

Through her pain, Honey became aware that there was a great weight on her. She attempted to lift whatever it was that was weighing her down, but she couldn't. She squinted straight up through cypress branches at a bright morning sky and felt better, more confident. Last night was like a terrible dream. But the dream was over.

A bird gave something like a shrill warning cry, but she ignored it. After all, she'd made it through the night.

She attempted again to lift the weight from her chest, then woke all the way and felt its surprising heft and roundness, was aware of the difficulty she was having breathing. The thing was dry and smooth.

She realized what it was, but not that this was actually happening to
her.

Honey screamed, so terrified now that she lost awareness of even her painfully burned face.

Nothing happened. Her desperate shrill cry was lost in the swamp.

She screamed until she was out of breath, felt the python shift slightly and tighten its grip around her entire body. She thought about getting up and running, but it was only a thought. Her legs were pressed together with such force that her knees ached.

The huge snake tightened its grip again, and Honey heard a sound like steam escaping a valve under pressure. Her right arm was smashed tight against her ribs. She flailed with her left. Every move she made seemed to prompt a countermove and a slight increase of viselike pressure. She screamed again. Inhaled to follow with another scream, and found that she couldn't draw in enough air to muster any sound. Her waving loose left arm—the only part of her that was free—found the damp mud of the swamp floor and she pressed her palm against it, futilely attempting to rise.

More pressure. There was a muffled cracking sound, and an agonizing pain in her right side.
A rib breaking?

She was struggling mightily for precious oxygen now, making a series of gentle little puffs of exhalation. No more inhalations.

She managed to raise her head an inch. Two inches. And stared with wide eyes into eyes that were not human and held no hint of mercy.

She realized with horror that the head of the snake that returned her stare with its own implacable gaze was larger than her own head.

Her wail of utter horror emerged only as a faint puff of breath, and was another signal for the thing to tighten its grip.