But this …
It was the media and the attention, all the cops and cop theories, and how big it all was. They were using words like serial killer and psychopath and insane. No one could understand the truth of it—that it wasn’t about hate, that he didn’t have to do it.
So, why was he looking at the girl and thinking of white linen?
Because God was like that sometimes.
Complicated.
*
Channing knew more than most rich girls did about junk cars, and the reasons for that were simple. She liked working-class boys. At school, the clubs. Even when she snuck out to college parties, she tried to find the part-timers and the scholarship kids. She didn’t like the buff-nailed, pale-skinned players who were like every boy she’d known growing up rich. She preferred the tattooed and rough-handed ones, those too raw and ready to care if her family had money or not. All those boys wanted were the good times, the escape; and she was the same way. That was before the basement, but she still knew the cars: the slick rubber and throaty engines, the rust buckets and the beaters.
“Do I know you?” He was backlit by the sun, a grown man in cap and dark glasses. Something about him was familiar, but she was deep in the vodka, and the world was a comfortable blur.
“I don’t know.” He stopped five feet away, the car behind him still running. “Do you?”
A bell was ringing in the back of her mind. He was confident. She didn’t like confident.
“Are you alone here?”
She looked at his car, a thirty-year-old Dodge spitting blue smoke. Nothing was right. She felt it, now. The burble under the hood. The man who looked familiar but not really. “This is a cop’s house.”
“I know who lives here. I don’t believe she’s home.”
He wore work boots and a flannel shirt. The bell was ringing louder. Ninety-five degrees and a flannel shirt. “I can call her.”
“Go ahead.”
Channing dug the cell phone from her back pocket and managed six digits before the stun gun appeared in his hand.
“What’s that?”
“This?” He tilted it. “This is nothing.”
She saw dull teeth when his lips twitched, then a hint of profile as he checked the street on either side. Channing pushed another button. “It’s ringing.”
He took the bottom step.
She stood. “Don’t come any closer.”
“I’m afraid I must.”
She turned for the door, caught her foot on the last step, and went down hard. She touched her head and the fingers came back bloody.
“You have beautiful eyes.”
He took the final step and leaned above her.
“Very expressive.”
*
Channing woke in a car that smelled of gasoline and pee and dried-out rubber. It was the same car, the Dodge. She was beneath a tarp in the back, but recognized it from other cars she’d known, the way it ran rough and tilted on the curves, brakes grinding like metal on metal. Her head was jammed against gasoline cans, a greasy floor jack, and what felt like a cardboard box full of rocks. She tried to move, but plastic ties cut her wrists and ankles. That terror was sharp and real because she understood what that kind of helplessness meant.
Not the theory of it.
The reality.
It wasn’t supposed to happen again. She’d promised herself a million times. Never again. I’ll die first. But truth was different. It was hard plastic and gasoline, her blood in the carpet of a filthy car.
Then there was the crazy.
No church, no church …
He said it over and over, loud and soft and loud again. Springs crunched as he rocked on the seat, and she pictured hands pulling on the wheel, his back striking split vinyl hard enough to make the car rock. He was familiar, somehow. Had she seen him somewhere? The television? The newspaper?
She didn’t know; couldn’t think.
She twisted her wrists, and the plastic cut. She worked harder and felt pain sharp enough to slice her open. It felt exactly the same.
The wires …
The plastic …
Before she knew it, she was thrashing against the cardboard, the sides of the car. She felt as if she were screaming, but was not. In her mouth, she tasted blood.
“Please, don’t do that.” The craziness fell out of his voice. The words were soft.
She stopped. “What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“Ours is not to wonder why.”
“Please…”
“Hush, now.”
“Let me go.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”
She believed him. It was the voice, the sudden, crazy calm. She held still as the car turned right, rose up, and thumped over railroad tracks. Metal rattled behind her, as the car angled back down. The tarp shifted, and through a crack she saw tree limbs and phone poles and arcs of black cable.