He grinned, pleased with himself, and fluidly shuffled the cards in front of her. Then he curled the cards backward with a harsh chatter.
“Winner has a full deck at the end.” He looked her in the eyes. “And the loser? Well, she’s left with nothing.”
Behind her, Ed pumped the COFEE carafe to fill his cup, and it made that drowning scream again. Like lungs bubbling with water. Something about it made her shoulder blades quiver.
“Bad news, friends.” Ed rattled the security shutter. “Coffee’s out.”
Ashley’s eyes goggled with faux-horror. “What? No more caffeine?”
“Afraid so.”
“Well, I guess we’re all going to start murdering each other now.” Ashley shuffled the cards a final time. It occurred to Darby, in a slow drip, that these grubby playing cards were probably not a fixture of the Wanapani rest area. The brochure stand was bolted down and the radio and coffee was caged behind a security grate. Ashley had brought these cards himself. Because he was a playful sort of evil, fascinated by games and tricks. Sleight of hand, surprises, and misdirection.
I’m a magic man, Lars, my brother.
The clues had all been there. She just hadn’t seen them.
“You should get some rest,” Ashley told her. “You look tired.”
Her throat felt like dry paper. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“No rest for the wicked.” He grinned. “Right?”
“Something like that.”
“How much sleep did you get last night?”
“Enough.”
“Enough, huh? What’s that?”
“I . . .” Her voice broke. “An hour, two—”
“Oh, no, that’s not enough.” Ashley leaned forward, creaking his chair, and divvied the cards between them. She marveled; his fingers were so chillingly fast.
“Humans are built for six to nine hours of sleep per night,” he told her. “I get a solid eight every night. That ain’t a recommendation, honey, that’s biology. See, less than that erodes your brain function. That’s everything — your reflexes, your emotional stability, your memory. Even your intelligence.”
“Then we’ll be evenly matched,” Darby said.
Ed chuckled, returning to his seat. “Kick his ass. Please.”
But she didn’t pick up her cards. Neither did Ashley. They quietly regarded each other across the table as the wind growled outside. A gust blew through the broken window in the men’s restroom, rattling the door on its hinges. The temperature in the room was dropping, but so far no one had noticed.
“Fortunately for you,” Ashley said, “the card game War is entirely luck. You know, unlike the real thing.”
Darby studied his eyes. They were vast, emerald-green, flecked with amber. She searched them for something recognizable, something human to relate to — fear, caution, self-awareness — but found nothing.
Eyeballs are on stalks, she’d learned randomly, back at an art gallery in October. She forgot the name of the artist, but he’d been there mingling with the crowd, sipping a Dos Equis, gleefully explaining that he’d incorporated authentic autopsy photos into his work. To Darby, the shape of the human ocular nerves had looked disturbingly insectoid, like antennae on a garden slug. Something about it made her skin crawl. Now, she imagined Ashley’s big eyes hanging in their sockets, firing electrical signals along those drooping stalks into the coils of his brain. He was a monster, an alien bundle of nerves and flesh. Utterly inhuman.
And he was still watching her.
“Unlike the real thing,” he repeated.
The playing cards sat between them in two ignored heaps. Questions fluttered in her mind like trapped birds, things she desperately wanted to ask aloud but couldn’t. Not while Ed and Sandi were within earshot.
Why are you doing this?
Why abduct a child?
What are you going to do with her?
And those green dragon eyes kept staring back at her, full of secrets. Jewel-like, scanning her body, assessing her dimensions, running contingencies and what-if’s. They were frighteningly intelligent, in all the same ways Lars’s had been frighteningly dumb. But it was an icy intelligence.
Other questions sparked in her mind: How fast are you? How strong are you? If I slashed your face with Blue’s keys, could I blind you? Right now, if I ran for the building’s front door, could I make it?
A door opened. An icy draft slipped into the room.
Ed glanced over. “Hi, Lars.”
Ashley smirked.
Over a snarl of deflected wind, Rodent Face took position by the door, his right hand tucked in his jacket pocket, wrapped around the grip of that black .45. She’d seen it now, glimpsed twice when he’d chased her. She knew little about firearms, but she recognized this one as magazine-fed, which meant it held more shots than a revolver’s five or six. She could just barely identify its outline under his blue coat, a bulge at his right hip — but only because she knew to look for it.
Ed wouldn’t notice it.
And Sandi was asleep.
Darby was surrounded again. Ashley at the table, and Lars posted at the door. She’d been surrounded this entire time — they’d been tacitly coordinating their locations all night — although she sure hoped her swan dive through the restroom window had been a surprise. It’d certainly saved her life, at least for a few more—
“Dara,” Ed said, startling her. “You never answered the question, did you?”
“What?”
“You know. The circle-time question. Your biggest fear.” He twirled his empty Styrofoam cup on the table. “I gave mine. Ashley gave his door-hinge story. Sandi hates snakes. So what about you?”
All eyes darted to her.
She swallowed. She still had Ashley’s IF YOU TELL THEM, I KILL THEM BOTH napkin clutched tightly in her lap.
“Yeah.” Ashley suppressed a grin. “Tell us. What scares you, Darbs?”
Words clogged up in her throat. “I . . . I don’t know.”
“Guns?” he prompted.
“No.”
“Nail guns?”
“No.”
“Getting murdered?”
“No.”
“I don’t know. Getting murdered is pretty scary—”
“Failure,” she said, interrupting Ashley and looking those green eyes dead-on. “My biggest fear is making the wrong choice, failing, and letting someone get kidnapped or killed.”
Silence.
On the bench, Sandi stirred in her sleep.
“That’s . . .” Ed shrugged. “Okay, that was a weird one, but thanks.”
“She’s—” Ashley started to say something but stopped himself. Ed didn’t notice, but Darby did, and it thrilled her. What did he almost blurt out?
She’s—
She, as in Jay Nissen. The little San Diego girl in the van outside, whose life hung in the balance right now.
It was just a small error, only a fraction of a sentence, but it told Darby she’d caught her enemy off-guard. Maybe Ashley and Lars had underestimated her — this hundred-and-ten-pound art major from Boulder who’d stumbled into their kidnapping plot. Surely, they couldn’t have predicted that restroom window escape. She was proud of that.
She hoped she was getting under their skin.