Rachel tried to send the text again. It bounced back. As she checked the door handle to see if the door was locked, the woman snatched Rachel’s phone, smashed its screen on the steering wheel until it blinked out, then tossed the phone out her window and into the woods.
“Let me out!” Rachel shouted, her mind spastic. “Let me out of this fucking car!”
The SUV sped up, careened.
At the bottom of the hill, the woman drove through the red light and through town. The fog forced her to drive at twenty miles an hour. Rachel tried to open the door. It was locked. She tried to power down the window. Locked.
She watched, helpless as the vehicle drove past the Gihon River Inn where Felix sat waiting. Where her gun sat in her backpack.
Rachel yanked on the door handle.
It was no use.
She pounded on the window. She needed to break the window and scream out for help or climb out, fall out, if she had to, risk cutting herself on broken glass, risk breaking a leg or cracking her skull on the road.
Because if the woman got out of town and headed into the wilderness before Rachel could get out—.
Rachel pounded her fist on the widow.
“Stop it!” the woman screeched. “Stop it! Stop it stop it!” She grabbed at Rachel, but Rachel elbowed her and the car swerved.
Rachel considered attacking the woman or the steering wheel and making the vehicle crash. If it were just Rachel and the woman who might get hurt, she’d do it. But she had no idea who the SUV might crash into if she did.
She pounded her fist on the window. It splintered. She unlatched her seat belt and raised her fist to finish the job and felt something touch her hair, slide over her face and around her neck. A rope or a cord or—
It pulled tight as a noose around her throat.
She gasped. Her hands flew to her throat, clutched at the cord.
She couldn’t breathe. It felt as if she’d swallowed her tongue as a pressure swelled behind and in her eyes, as if her eyes might pop.
She clawed at the cord.
She tried to fight the woman, but the grip the cord had around her neck was too tight, seemed locked, and her hands instinctively would not leave her throat.
The vehicle drove out of town and jounced as it turned down a dirt side road into the woods.
Rachel tried to dig her fingers down between the cord and her throat but couldn’t.
She couldn’t breathe. She’d pass out soon. She’d die.
The vehicle rocked to a stop. The driver’s door opened as the cord tightened around Rachel’s throat and Rachel was hauled backward across the seats, out on her back onto the muddy ground, the rain falling in her face, running into her nose. She flailed, tried to turn over, tried to get to her knees. The woman stood over her, yanked on the cord as the rain cascaded in sheets. “Did you fuck him in that nasty hotel?”
The rain drenched the woman’s hair. Her black eye makeup streamed down her cheeks. She looked wild, mad.
The cord released, just enough for Rachel to sip a breath, to gag and vomit.
“Did you?” the woman railed.
Rachel gagged. Shook her head no. Sobbed.
“Did you!” the woman shrieked.
The cord slackened.
“No!” Rachel blurted, gasping as the cord tightened again.
She kicked at the woman’s feet but the woman pulled on the cord and stepped around to stand by Rachel’s head, peering down at her, so she looked upside down from where Rachel lay on her back. She needed to tell the woman she’d left out the side door of the place. Had not stayed.
“Liar,” the woman said. “What’d he do to you? Did you like it? Like being choked? Like being abused?”
Rachel shook her head crying.
Her eyes felt so hot and strained and engorged it seemed she would start crying blood.
“You liked it, did you?” the woman screamed. The rain was nearly blinding Rachel, filling her nostrils. Her skull seemed to be cracking. “You loved it,” the woman railed. “Thought you could do more for him than me. His wife. The mother of his child. I’ll do anything for him.” She yanked on the cord, her eyes bulging as if she were the one being choked to death. “Any thing.”
She brought her face close to Rachel’s, her head cocking to the side as if she were a child merely observing, confused as this madwoman before her choked to death, unaware it was she who was tightening the cord. Her black eye makeup ran down her face and her soaked hair, straggly and wild, hung down in Rachel’s face.
The cord tightened.