Face into the wave.
Numb, her teeth fuzzy. Hard to breathe. Nina tried to spit the taste of decay from her mouth, but she was too dry. Memory jabbed. Some drug he used.
Moving. Patterns of light and shadow dappled a wall of knotty pine veneer.
The morning’s shark attack all came back to her. Jane. Ace…
Not now. Focus on the present. She tried to move.
Spreadeagled on a bed.
Not good.
Resistance at her wrists and ankles. Little strength. She could move her head and she saw that her wrists were secured with double-tied bungee cords. The same for her wrists. The hooks had been crimped together tight. She strained against the cords with her wrists and legs. Some give. They were makeshift. Maybe she could defeat them. Given time, she figured, she could. But not if he kept giving her that drug.
He. Dale. The other Shuster.
Her mind churned, scurrying. Not okay yet. Process.
Automatically, she confronted the fear. She had been trained to convert it into a manageable image. So it became a wave building in the distance. An instructor in survival training explained that extreme fear was like the ocean. Too big to get your mind around, too fast to outrun. You had to navigate it. Great, so now I’m in the fucking Navy. You had to turn into it, meet it head on, ride it out. If you froze up or ran away, it would roll you up and take you down.
Orient yourself. Face into the wave.
She was lashed down on a bed in the rear of a van or camper. From some calm center in her brain she recalled that Broker had in-grained in her a suspicion of vans. She twisted around to get a better look. Not the kind of bed that was built into this kind of vehicle. This was an ordinary twin bed, wooden head and footboard, sideboard, slats and springs and mattress. The interior of the vehicle had been gutted and the bed brought in. The bedroom was partitioned from the front seat by a curtain. Dale. Up there driving. Maybe that other dude, too. Just ten, twelve feet away.
A screened window over the bed was partly open, letting in patches of light and shadow. She heard the thrum of tires, road sounds. Traffic passing.
She tried to look around the compartment. She could see where a sink, counter, and partitions had been removed. It had been stripped and now just contained a TV bolted to a shelf over the bed, a VCR stacked on top. A small chemical toilet sat next to the curtain. Then her eyes stopped on the video camera set on a tripod in the corner with a cable looped around it. The cable ended in some kind of remote device.
The vehicle went over a bump. The video camera jiggled, came to life. The cheap tripod legs rattled on the floor, taking baby robot steps. Toward the bed. And her intuition made a few fast leaps.
Nina understood that the camera was for her.
No preparation for this. But she found it familiar. Down deep, she had been braced for something like this all her life. Every woman carried the nightmare in her blood salts: you wake up bound, powerless in the hands of a disturbed, angry man. Usually it happens to other people and you read about it in the newspaper. You see it on TV.
Not this time.
Furious, she reared against the restraints, and succeeded only in bruising her wrists. She collapsed back on the bed.
As best she was able to determine her clothing had not been torn, didn’t seem to have been removed. The smear of blood on her chest was dry and flaking around the edges, still damp in the center. Some time had passed.
The only pain she felt was in her right hand, and she carefully-selectively-worked back. Dale Shuster had stepped on her hand when she went after Jane’s pistol.
She had hardened herself to accept rape as part of capture, like a beating. In theory. But this was more. She was lashed down to something in motion. She swallowed and tried to get her breathing under control.
She was caught up in the mechanics of the thing she had been looking for. Taken. For a reason.
Not by Wahhabi fanatics out of the Afghan camps. But by Dale Shuster. And Gordy’s “funny fucking Indian,” Pinto Joe.
Then the road noise lessened and she could feel the vehicle slowing, the tires hitting gravel. Turning. The sunlight coming in through the window dappled down to shade.
Motion ceased. The sound of traffic had disappeared. She could almost hear the heat buzzing on the green griddle of fields. Bird-song. The idling motor vibrated under her, a warm steel kitten. She heard a body moving beyond the curtain. Voices.
“Goddammit, Dale, not now!” An impatient voice she could not place.
“Take it easy, we got lots of time,” Dale said. Then a hand swept the material aside and Dale entered the compartment. His bulk made the space where she was smaller, stole the light. He held a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of Coke in one hand and the remnants of a doughnut in the other. Nina could see grains of sugar on his thick lips, see his tongue dart out and lick them off.
He smiled. “How about I show you a movie?”