“Go to hell.”

As though she hadn’t spoken, he said, “I’m curious. If you had gotten that door open with your toes, what were you going to do? Try to worm your way through it without me noticing? Was that your plan?”

She didn’t honor him with a reply, only glared up at him.

“And say you had cleared the door, what then, Jordie?”

Her knees nearly buckled when he spoke her name.

Of course, if he had taken her purse when he kidnapped her, he would have read her name on her driver’s license and credit card. Right?

Wrong. Because both bore her full legal name, not the familiar nickname Jordie.

He knew her.

Most despairing, however, was that it came as no real surprise that he’d called her by name. When she saw the grim pair striding toward her on the parking lot, she’d realized instantly what their purpose was and who had sent them.

The only thing she didn’t know was Why now?

“You didn’t think it through too well,” he said, continuing on that thread. “We were going over seventy miles an hour. If you’d opened that door, it would have sounded like a wind tunnel.

“And say you had managed to wiggle out, you’d have landed on the pavement like those bugs on the windshield.” He gestured toward it. “Splat! I’d have had to stop and scrape you up, which would have been time-consuming and messy as hell.”

“Why bother to stop and scrape me up?”

He replied without a blink. “Because in order to collect my money I have to produce your body.”

Chapter 5

Well, she’d asked, hadn’t she?

And he’d told her, answering the question without hesitation or inflection, without even a taunting lilt. More frightening than a voice scratchy with menace was one entirely devoid of emotion. It was characteristic of the cold-blooded way he’d shot the other man.

She swallowed with difficulty. “Who was he? The man you killed.”

“Mickey Bolden. Killer for hire.”

“He was hired to kill me?”

He just looked at her.

“Now you’ll do it alone.”

His expression didn’t change.

“Who hired you?”

As expected, he didn’t answer. Not that he needed to.

She said, “I suppose I should be flattered that I merited two hit men. Did you and Mr. Bolden often work in tandem?”

“First time.”

She looked at him with surprise.

He gave a shrug of complete indifference. “His retirement was overdue. He’d gotten comfortable in the job. Sloppy. For instance, when you walked into the bar, he told me to relax and go with the flow. Said your showing up there tonight was just a coincidence.”

She saw the bait for what it was and said nothing.

“But see, I had a problem with that coincidence theory.”

She didn’t ask the nature of his problem, but he told her anyway.

“For one thing, that joint out in the sticks isn’t exactly your kind of place.”

His tone was a shade judgmental, reverse snobbery, which put her on the defensive. “You have no idea what my kind of place is.”

“Well, there you’re wrong, Jordie. I did my homework. I know a lot about you.”

The probable truth of that statement disturbed her greatly, but she held her silence and her ground, keeping her gaze as direct on him as his was on her.

“Even without doing the homework, I’d know that a woman like you doesn’t socialize in bars that cater to trailer trash. I also had a problem with your boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend? Jackson?”

“Last name Terrell. Mickey told me all about him. Said he dropped you like a hot potato at the first sign of trouble. Cut and run like a regular heel. That true?”

She remained stubbornly silent.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I wasn’t talking about him anyway. I was talking about the guy who joined you at the bar tonight.”

She sputtered a short laugh of disbelief. “That jerk? He was a total stranger.”

“He was all over you.”

“Not by invitation.”

He tilted his head. “You two didn’t set a time and place to meet?”

She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it, clammed up, and didn’t tell him anything.

He raised an eyebrow. “You were about to say?”

“I was about to say fuck you.” She didn’t stop there, either, but gushed a stream of invectives. He withstood the tirade without blinking, but when she began repeating herself, he pressed his index finger lengthwise against the center of her lips.

“Stop it.”

She stopped, as she had stopped struggling against the hand restraint when he’d told her to, more because of the chilling voice in which he’d issued the order than because of the order itself.

Her lips held his attention for several moments. Perhaps he was watching them turn white from the pressure he applied. Then gradually he withdrew his finger and his eyes moved back up to hers. “You’ve got some mouth on you, Jordie Bennett.”

Again, it was the manner in which he spoke as much as the words themselves that caused a shakeup of her insides. She didn’t think he was referring strictly to her language, and the implication of that paralyzed her. By the time she remembered to breathe again, he was crouched in front of her, loosening the bandana from around her ankles.

The instant the knots came undone, she was off like a shot.

She got all of three feet from him before he hooked his arm around her waist and jerked her to a sudden halt, then spun her around to face him. He was furious. “Don’t think you can outsmart, outtalk, or outrun me. You can’t. Try and you’ll only make yourself miserable.”

“You’re worried about my comfort?”

“I’m not being paid to torture you.”

“Just to kill me.”

“That’s the job description.”

She gulped in a harsh breath. “Then why didn’t you do it on the parking lot when you shot your buddy? Why drag it out, why this…this…torture? Why am I still alive?”

He lowered his face closer to hers. “Because your skin is worth a hell of a lot more than Mickey settled for, and I haven’t negotiated my deal yet.”

Like everything he said, his words were candid and to the point. At least now she understood why she was still breathing.

He gave her a little shove that put space between them. “Besides, I gotta take a leak.”

He grasped her elbow and propelled her slightly ahead of him along the uneven gravel track which was pressed upon from both sides by dense woods. Beyond the dim glow provided by the car’s interior light, the surrounding darkness was impenetrable. She picked up the stench of stagnant water, sensed life-forms watching them from nests overhead and from hidey-holes in the underbrush, and felt the ghostly brush of insect wings against her arms and face.

Paralyzing fear encroached on her again, as did the teeming darkness. The darkness she could do nothing about, but she must keep the self-defeating fear at bay. Information, she reminded herself. Without information, she had no hope of escape.

“Your half doubled when you killed your partner.”