A wild, bitter laugh tore from her. She braced her hands against the window frame as Jimmy Lee went down on her. He caught the hem of her dress and shoved it up past her hips, so that it bunched around her waist. The strand of pearls hanging down between her breasts, she teetered on her red high heels, feet braced apart, head swimming dizzily, drunk on a mix of need and hate and self-pity and self-loathing and rapacious, insatiable arousal.
Jimmy Lee devoured her, as greedy and ravenous as a glutton at a feast. His tongue teased and flicked and probed, bringing her to the edge of orgasm but never beyond, never granting her satisfaction, only pushing the pain of unfulfilled arousal to its outer limits.
"I hate you, Jimmy Lee!" Her voice was little more than a rasp, as tormented as the rest of her body, as seized by desire and frustration. "You're a son of a bitch."
He tumbled her back across the creaking, sagging mattress of the old bed, falling across her, pinning her arms above her head with one hand. She struggled beneath him as he reached down with his free hand and stripped his belt from his trousers.
"You're nothing but a pervert, Jimmy Lee," she taunted, her heart racing as he bound her hands to a rail on the iron headboard.
"It takes one to know one," he growled.
She laughed, a throaty, seductive laugh, her cool, she-wolf eyes glowing with hunger and anticipation as he sat back, straddling her thighs, and unfastened his trousers. He didn't bother to take them off, but he did bother to protect himself, pulling a condom out of his pocket and slipping it on with practiced efficiency.
"Can't be too careful these days," he said. He braced himself above her on his elbows and stared down at her, his breath coming in hard pants. "My adoring public wouldn't take it too kindly if I caught something nasty from some alley cat who spreads her legs for every man in town."
Savannah glared at him. "I'll be sure to tell them you said that."
"Who'd believe you?" he asked, contempt for her festering inside him like a boil. "I'm their savior. You're just a bitch in heat."
"Don't bother telling anyone, Savannah. No one will ever believe you… They'll see you for what you are-little slut, little prick teaser… You're a bad girl, Savannah, and everyone knows it… There's no use telling. We both know you seduced me…"
She closed her eyes as the voice played in her head. She raised her hips as Jimmy Lee thrust into her… and hated herself.
The midnight moon cast a silvery sheen down on the trees, and the mist crept, soft and white, across the surface of the black water.
A lot of women were afraid of the swamp. A lot of men were afraid of the swamp. It didn't frighten Savannah. She felt something other than fear out here. Something ancient. Something that called to her and stirred her blood.
This place had always been her escape. This was where she and Baby had run to get away from home and the unhappiness there. Out here she felt free. She felt like a part of the swamp, like an animal-a deer or a bobcat or a copperhead snake. She wanted to take her clothes off and be naked here, be a part of it, a creature of the Atchafalaya.
Giving in to that primal desire, she slipped off the dress the Revver had ruined for her, tossed it on the hood of the car, and slicked her hands down over the curves of her naked body.
For a moment she closed her eyes and imagined what it would be like to lie down here on the mat of dead leaves and welcome her lover into her body beneath the light of the bayou moon. They would mate as all animals mated, without guilt, without inhibition, glorying in the pure excitement of it. She would scream out in ecstasy, her cries mingling with the eerie cacophony that carried across the swamp at night.
The mental image wrung a low moan from her, made her ache with need, a need Jimmy Lee hadn't been able to assuage no matter how many ways he used her-and he had used her in every way a man could use a woman. This was a need no man could quench, a need that was rooted deep in the core of her.
She threw her head back, lifting her face to the moon, tumbling her wild hair down her back. The restlessness stirred harder, hotter. The wildness pulled at her, drew on something deep within. She needed… needed… needed…
Need drives the predator. Not the need for food, but for sustenance of another kind. A need for blood, a taste for death. A need to punish, a desire to inflict pain. To watch pain grow like a cancer, from a simple response into something all-consuming. A need to control. To play God.
To play. A game. The thought brings a smile. The smile brings a chill to the prey. For every game there is a loser. The one bound and held captive knows the outcome before the game begins. For the victim there is no game, only anticipation, pain, terror, and, she prays, death. Please, death. Soon…
No one hears her screams. No one comes to her aid. There are no saviors in the swamp. Cruelty here is a way of life. Death as commonplace as snakes. Danger hidden in beauty. No salvation. No justice. Life. Death. The hunter and the hunted.
The knife gleams silver in the moonlight. The blade cuts delicately, with skill, slicing like a bow across the strings of a violin. The song it plays high-pitched and eerie. Human. A prelude to death.
And in the end, the instrument will fall silent, the prey will succumb. She will die as the predator believes she deserves to die-naked and defiled. Another dead whore left to rot in the swamp. A fitting end, a fitting place. And the predator will glide away in the bâteau, silent, safe, the secret shared with only the trees and the creatures of the night…
Laurel sat up suddenly, shaking, cold, her skin slick with sweat, her heart pounding. The nightmare faded as she grounded herself in reality, but the sounds of the children's cries still echoed in her mind, driving her from bed. She crossed to the highboy and pulled out another oversize T-shirt, trying to crowd the last of the dream from her brain. She was trembling violently, her stomach knotting with residual anxiety, and she cursed a blue streak under her breath, battling the weakness.
Her hand brushed across the bottle of tranquilizers tucked in among her underwear, left over from her stay at Ashland Heights. Dr. Pritchard had told her to take them when she needed help sleeping, but she wouldn't. No matter how badly she wanted to, she wouldn't take any. They were a crutch, another weakness, and she was so damn tired of being weak.
She changed quickly and went out onto the balcony, hoping to rejuvenate herself with fresh night air, but the air was heavy and warm, without a breath of a breeze. Folding her arms against herself to keep from shaking, she padded down to the French doors of Savannah 's room and peeked in. The bed was unmade, the rich gold-and-ruby spread a tangled drift across the mattress, lace-edged satin pillows mounded along the ornate French headboard and tossed carelessly onto the floor. The rest of the room had Savannah's stamp of housekeeping draped everywhere in the form of discarded lingerie and articles of clothing that had been dragged out of the closet and abandoned in favor of something brighter, skimpier, sexier, trashier.
Fear cracked through the other emotions that were thick in Laurel 's throat as a medley of lines played through her head. "Murders?"… "Four now in the last eighteen months… Young women of questionable reputa-tion"… "She gonna come to grief, dat one."…
She chewed hard on her thumbnail as she wrestled with the urge to call the police. She was being silly, jumping to conclusions. There was nothing unusual in Savannah 's staying out past two-or all night, for that matter. She could have been anywhere, with anyone.
With a killer?
"Stop it," she ordered, her voice a harsh whisper as she reined in the irrational urge to panic. Dammit, she wasn't an irrational person. She was logical and sensible and practical. Wasn't that what had saved her when she was growing up in the poisonous atmosphere of Beauvoir?