Wrapping her right hand around him, she opened her mouth, sizing him up, wondering, Could I bite it off? As she guided him in, between her lips, past her incisors, across her tongue, she imagined it all—the swift, savage clamp of her strong jaws, the gasp and then the howl of pain, the gratifying geyser of blood pulsing from his severed stump, the spurts diminishing until there was no more blood to be shed. He’d still kill me, she realized—a quick clench of the hand around her throat, first as a reflexive response to the pain, followed by the full force of his vengeful fury. But he’ll kill me no matter what. Unless I get away. But how?
Fighting for breath, fighting back the need to gag, Janelle began cooing and moaning—softly at first, then steadily louder—feigning the desire he demanded. With her left hand, she caressed the front of his thigh, her nails lightly raking the skin. He seemed to like that—his thrusts grew more insistent, and his right hand kept time, slamming her face against his crotch harder and harder.
Releasing the shaft of his penis, Janelle now reached both hands behind him and squeezed his clenching buttocks, drawing a low groan from him. That’s right, asshole, she thought, you just think about gettin’ off. Slowly she ran her fingernails down the backs of his thighs, his knees, his calves, until her hands reached his ankles, where his pants were bunched. Taking the crotch of his bunched-up pants in both hands, she gripped it tight, then—drawing momentum from the next forward yank of the hand entwined in her hair—she drove her head into his belly. At the same instant she straightened her legs and yanked the pants toward her, turning all her terror into strength. The man grunted and toppled backward, arms flailing, whacking his head on the trunk of a fallen tree.
Janelle didn’t wait to see if he was hurt. Oblivious to the damage being done to her bare feet, she ran down the trail, out of the woods, and then—stark naked—darted across the dead-end lane, up the grassy embankment, and onto the shoulder of Interstate 40, frantically waving her arms for help.
Two cars whizzed by, horns blaring, but then a tractor-trailer rig smoked to a stop just beyond her, and another tucked in behind the first. The astonished truckers clambered down from their cabs and converged on her just in time to see a neon-orange Mustang fishtail up the dead-end lane, skid around a corner, and vanish up a serpentine road into the backwoods of east Knox County.
PART 2
The Fall
. . . your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
—GENESIS 3:5
OCTOBER 1992
CHAPTER 23
Satterfield
THE LIGHT AT MAGNOLIA Avenue and Cherry Street flipped to yellow, and Satterfield braked for once instead of punching the gas. For one thing, he was moving at a crawl anyhow, trolling for the woman who’d slipped from his grasp a few hours before; for another, he wasn’t in the Mustang, but in the van, with its anemic engine and sissy automatic transmission. The camo paint was gone, scrubbed off; anybody who bothered to glance his way would see an ordinary work van—a painter’s van—with a pair of battered, spattered aluminum ladders clattering on the roof racks.
At the far right corner of the intersection was a Family Dollar store, and Satterfield eyed it through the windshield. The Magnolia Avenue hookers tended to congregate there, or at least cross paths there. Maybe it was because Magnolia and Cherry was a high-traffic intersection, or maybe simply because Family Dollar was a cheap place to get snacks or nail polish or stockings or other tools of the trade. Does Family Dollar sell rubbers? he wondered idly. Lube? Ironic, that hookers were regulars in Family Dollar. He noticed a bail-bonding company conveniently located in the next block, and, across Magnolia, a run-down motel, probably a hot-sheet motel. Hell, if there was a Waffle House and a beer joint and a VD clinic, you could just live right here, he thought sardonically. He snapped to attention when a leggy woman in a short skirt strutted out of Family Dollar, a blond wig swaying as she walked. The strut was right and the skirt was tight, but the skin was wrong—it was black skin. As he scanned the fringes of the store’s parking lot, Satterfield’s jaw muscles throbbed, pulsing like venom glands. He’d spotted two or three other hookers along Magnolia in his first pass out and back, but not the one he wanted to find. The one he really, really needed to find.