“No.”
“I thought not. You see? I do know you.”
With his left hand Cray reached for her sleeves. The knot he’d tied was clever, expertly made. With one pull it came apart, and she was free.
“Now get out,” Cray said.
This was the critical moment, her last opportunity. Once she left the vehicle, the purse would be beyond her reach forever.
Cray was leaning back, his big black gun floating a few inches from her face.
She unbuckled her lap belt. The retractable portion was a three-foot strap, the buckle’s steel prong lolling at one end.
As a weapon, it wasn’t much.
But it was all she had.
With a jerk of her arm she flung the strap at Cray, whipping the steel prong at his gun hand, then dived to the floor and seized the purse, popping it open—
And Cray laughed.
“It’s not there, bitch.”
He was right.
The Colt was gone.
She looked up at Cray and saw his bland, cool smile.
“Your purse was the first thing I looked at,” he said. “I found your stupid little toy. I took it with me when I returned the master keys to the storage room. On my way there, I tossed the gun into the desert brush, where no one is likely to find it for months or years. What did you think I was doing while you were out cold?”
She dropped the purse. There was a kind of numbness in her, an absence of any sensation.
“Now,” he added, his smile unchanged, “exit the goddamned vehicle, you little piece of shit.”
The black gun, the Clock or Crock or whatever it was called, drifted down to fix her in its sights.
“Okay,” Elizabeth whispered. “You win.”
She started to rise, and without conscious intention she slipped her hand into the satchel beside the purse, closing her fingers over the first item she touched, a steel canister with a spray nozzle.
There was a trigger, and she found it as she sprang at Cray.
From the nozzle — a jet of hissing gas.
She had time to think the canister was useless, only a can of compressed air for fixing flat tires, and then she felt the atmosphere around her turn suddenly cold with a mist of ice crystals, and Cray screamed.
He spun out of the doorway, and she pumped the trigger again.
His left arm came up to protect his face. Frost glittered on his sleeve.
Whatever was in the canister, it was cold, as cold as dry ice, and she could hurt him with it, and she wanted to.
She held down the nozzle, spraying him with arctic cold, and his knees gave out, dropping him to the dirt.
For a moment she knew a wild sense of power, of victory, and then his pistol swung at her.
He had a clear shot, and there was nowhere for her to hide.
But he didn’t fire.
It seemed as if his hand wouldn’t work, or maybe it was the gun itself that had jammed or locked or—
Frozen.
She could see the glaze of ice on the black barrel.
The gun had been disabled, and Cray was defenseless.
She could punish him.
Kill him.
“Son of a bitch!” she shrieked. “You son of a bitch!”
She depressed the trigger, aiming for his face, his eyes.
But this time there was only a feeble hiss, then silence.
The canister was empty.
Cray knew it. Already he was already struggling to rise.
She threw the canister at him. Missed.
There might be other weapons in the satchel, but she had no time to look.
Into the driver’s seat. Crank of the ignition key. The motor bursting to life as the high beams momentarily dimmed.
Cray lurched upright, his face wild, and grabbed for the open door.
She saw his gloved hands seize the door frame, and then the Lexus surged forward as she wrenched the gear selector into drive and stomped the gas pedal.
Cray’s gloves, shiny with ice, slipped free of the door, and he fell again in the dirt.
Elizabeth watched him fall, then looked ahead, and there was a low wall of cactus rushing at the Lexus, no way to dodge it or even slow down, and she screamed as the chassis bucked with impact, the foliage sliding under the wheels, dirt rising everywhere in thick spiraling drifts.
Then she was in a clear patch, steering between obstacles, and behind her Cray dwindled in the rearview mirror, a dusty, staggering figure, all in black, so small now, smaller than she could have imagined, and finally gone in the night.
She kept driving, the accelerator on the floor, the big Lexus careening like a carnival ride.
There was a dirt road somewhere and a paved road beyond it, but she knew she couldn’t find either of them, not now.
She raced through the trackless desert, plowing up clumps of prickly pear, skirting the big saguaros, barely able to see, because her control had shattered at last, and she was crying.
13
Cray walked for two hours through the desert, following the Lexus’ tire tracks. His hands still ached with cold from the liquid nitrogen spray, and he found it difficult to flex his fingers.
Only the black leather gloves had saved him from serious injury. The gloves — and his reflexes. Had he been less quick to react, she would have sprayed him in the face, and he would have been permanently blinded.
As it was, he had shielded his eyes, and the gloves and his long shirtsleeves had absorbed the worst of the spray. The gun, too, of course. The Glock remained frozen, its trigger immovable, the slide locked.
Tonight’s misadventure was his first defeat. In years of deadly sport he had never lost to an adversary, had never known the embarrassment of failure.
Still, he would overcome this setback. He would find a way to win. He would bring Kaylie down.
The task posed challenges, to be sure, but he had faced and surmounted many challenges already. A lifetime of challenges.
What he was now, he had made of himself by a concerted and persistent exertion of will. He was not a born predator — at least no more than any man.
At the beginning, he had been only a precocious little boy, a boy kept soft and sheltered, doted on by his mother and grandmother, his sole caretakers in a household barren of a father.
Johnnie Cray had been told that his daddy was a policeman killed on duty, a story that sustained him in his earliest years, until he learned that it was a well-intentioned lie, and that his father was, in fact, a television repairman who had run off with his mother’s best friend when Johnnie was six months old. He left a note explaining that childbearing had made Johnnie’s mother fat.
As a small boy, Johnnie knew nothing of such unpleasantness. He knew nothing of ugliness or pain. His mommy and grandma did their best to protect him from life’s stronger jolts. They kept him apart from other children, fed him sweets, ruffled his hair, and praised his blossoming intelligence.
You’re special, Johnnie, his mother would tell him. You’re so smart. You’ll do great things with that mind of yours.
And Cray, so small, had puffed with pride at the words and the future that was their promise.
Then, at the age of seven, he started school. And things changed.
School was a different world, a universe of coarse humor and petty tests of manhood for which he was utterly unprepared. He became the goat, the class joke, the universal victim. The pack smelled his weakness. They pounced.