2

As soon as the door opened she knew she was dead. The only questions she had were: How long do I have? How bad will it be?

It would be some time before she got those answers. Instead, the first minutes were filled with a fierce terror and uncontrollable panic that obscured everything else.

Jennifer Riggins had not immediately turned as the panel truck crept up next to her. She was totally focused on quickly getting to the bus stop slightly more than a half mile away on the nearest main road. In the careful way she had designed the scheme of her escape, the local bus would carry her to the center of town, where she could connect with another bus that would take her to a larger terminal in Springfield, some twenty miles away. And, once there, she imagined she could go anywhere. In her jeans pocket she had more than $300 that she had stolen slowly but surely—five here, ten there—from her mother’s purse or her mother’s boyfriend’s wallet. She had taken her time, collecting the money over the past month, hoarding it in a box inside a drawer beneath her underwear. She had never taken so much at one time that they would notice it, just small amounts that were immediately forgotten. When she’d hit her target number, she had known that it was enough to get to New York or Nashville or maybe even Miami or LA, and so, on her last theft early that morning, she had only taken a twenty-dollar bill and three ones, but she’d added to her stash her mother’s Visa card. She wasn’t sure yet where she was going. Someplace warm, she hoped. But anywhere far away and far different was going to be all right with her. That was what she had been thinking about when the truck pulled to a stop next to her. I can go anywhere I want . . .

The man in the passenger seat had said, “Hey, miss, could you help me out for a second with some directions?”

This question had made her pause. She had stopped walking and faced the man in the truck. Her first impressions were that he hadn’t shaved in the morning and that his voice seemed oddly high and filled with more excitement than his ordinary question required. And she was a little annoyed, because she didn’t want to be delayed; she wanted to get away from her home and from her smug neighborhood and from her small boring college town and from her mother and her mother’s boyfriend and the way he looked at her and some of the things he’d done when they were alone and from her awful school and from all the kids she knew and hated and who taunted her every single day of the week. She wanted to get away before it got too dark, but it was still just dark enough so that no one would notice her leaving. She wanted to be on a bus heading somewhere that night because she knew that by nine or ten her mother would have finished calling all the numbers she could think of, and then she might actually call the police, because that was what she had done before. Jennifer knew that the police would be all over the bus terminal in Springfield, so she had to have made her move by the time all that was set in motion. All these jumbled thoughts flooded into her head as she considered the man’s question.

“What are you looking for?” Jennifer responded.

She saw the man smile.

That’s wrong, she thought. He shouldn’t be smiling.

Her initial guess was the man was going to make some vaguely obscene, sexist remark, something insulting or belittling, a Hi, good-lookin’, you wanna have some fun lip-smacking nastiness. She was ready for this and ready to tell him to go screw himself and turn her back and keep walking but she was a little confused, because she looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a woman in the driver’s seat. The woman had a knit watchman’s cap pulled down over her hair, and even though she was young there was something harsh in her eyes, something very granite-hard that Jennifer had never seen before and which instantly scared her.

In the woman’s hand was a small HD video camera. It was pointed in Jennifer’s direction. This confused her.

Jennifer heard the man’s answer to her question and it confused her further. She had expected he was asking for a neighborhood address or a direct way to Route 9, but that was not what came out.

“You,” he said.

This made no sense. Why were they looking for her? No one knew about her plan. It was still too early for her mother to have found the false note she’d left stuck with a magnet to the kitchen refrigerator . . .

And so she’d hesitated at the very second in time when she should have run furiously hard or screamed loudly for help.

The truck door opened abruptly. The man vaulted out of the passenger seat. He was moving much faster than Jennifer had ever imagined someone could move.

“Hey!” Jennifer said. At least, later, she thought she had said hey but she was uncertain. Maybe she had just frozen. The only idea that went through her head was This can’t be happening and that was followed by a dark, icy sense of dread because she knew in that second, as she saw something coming at her, what it truly meant.

The man had clubbed her across the face, staggering her. The blow had exploded in her eyes, sending a sheet of red hurt right through her core, and she had felt dizzy, almost as if the world around her had spun on its axis. She could feel herself losing consciousness, reeling back, and crumpling when he grabbed her around the shoulders, holding her from falling to the ground. Her knees felt weak, her shoulders and back rubbery. If she’d had any strength anywhere it vanished instantly.

She was only vaguely aware of the panel truck door opening and of the man bodily rushing her into the back. She could hear the noise of the door slamming shut. The sensation of the truck accelerating around the corner drove her into the steel bed. She could feel the weight of the man crushing her, holding her down. She could barely breathe and her throat was nearly closed with terror. She did not know if she was struggling or fighting, she couldn’t tell if she was screaming or crying, she was no longer alert enough to tell what she was doing. She gasped as a sudden great blackness came over her, and at first she thought she was already dead, then she thought she was unconscious before she realized that the man had pulled a black pillowcase over her head, shutting out the tiny world of the truck. She could taste blood on her lips, and her head was still spinning and whatever was happening to her she knew it was far worse than anything she had ever known before.

Odor penetrated the pillowcase: a thick oily smell from the floor of the truck; a sweaty, sweet smell from the man pinning her down.

Somewhere within her, she knew she was in great pain, but she could not tell precisely where.

She tried to move her arms and legs, pawing at nothingness like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, but she heard the man grunt, “No, I don’t think so . . .”

And then there was another explosion on her head, behind her eyes. The last thing she was aware of was the woman’s voice, saying, “Don’t kill her, for Christ’s sake.”

With those words echoing within her, Jennifer slid out of control, tumbling swiftly into a deep, dark fake death of unconsciousness.