Free Just After Sunset by Stephen King Page B

breasts. Her legs were bound to the chair’s legs at the knees, the upper calves, the lower calves, and the ankles. He had been very thorough.
    The legs of the chair were taped to the floor, and now he put on fresh layers, first in front of her, then behind. When he was finished, all the tape was gone. He stood up and put the empty cardboard core on the Formica island. “There,” he said. “Not bad. Okay. All set. You wait here.” He must have found something funny in this, because he cocked his head upward and loosed another of those brief, yapping laughs. “Don’t get bored and run off, okay? I need to go take care of your nosy old friend, and I want to do it while it’s still raining.”
    This time he flashed to a door that proved to be a closet. He yanked out a yellow slicker. “Knew this was in here somewhere. Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don’t know why. It’s just one of those mystery facts. Okay, girlfriend, sit tight.” He uttered another of those laughs that sounded like the bark of an angry poodle, and then he was gone.
    –6–

    Still 9:15.

    When the front door slammed and Em knew he had really left, that abnormal brightness in the world started to turn gray, and she realized she was on the verge of fainting. She could not afford to faint. If there was an afterlife and she eventually saw her father there, how could she explain to Rusty Jackson that she had wasted her last minutes on earth in unconsciousness? He would be disappointed in her. Even if they met in heaven, standing ankle-deep in clouds while angels all around them played the music of the spheres (arranged for harp), he would be disappointed in her for wasting her only chance in a Victorian swoon.
    Em deliberately ground the lacerated lining of her lower lip against her teeth…then bit down, bringing fresh blood. The world jumped back to brightness. The sound of the wind and down-rushing rain swelled like strange music.
    How long did she have? It was a quarter of a mile from the Pillbox to the drawbridge. Because of the slicker, and because she hadn’t heard the Mercedes start up, she had to think he was running. She knew she might not have heard the engine over the rain and thunder, but she just didn’t believe he would take his car. Deke Hollis knew the red Mercedes and didn’t like the man who drove it. The red Mercedes might put Deke on his guard. Emily believed Pickering would know that. Pickering was crazy—part of the time he’d been talking to himself, but at least some of the time he’d been talking to someone he could see but she couldn’t, an invisible partner in crime—but he wasn’t stupid. Neither was Deke, of course, but he would be alone in his little gatehouse. No cars passing, no boats waiting to go through, either. Not in this downpour.
    Plus, he was old.
    “I have maybe fifteen minutes,” she said to the empty room—or perhaps it was the bloodstain on the floor she was talking to. He hadn’t gagged her, at least; why bother? There would be no one to hear her scream, not in this ugly, boxy, concrete fortress. She thought she could have stood in the middle of the road, screaming at the top of her lungs, and still no one would have heard her. Right now even the Mexican groundskeepers would be under cover, sitting in the cabs of their trucks drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
    “Fifteen minutes at most.”
    Yes. Probably. Then Pickering would come back and rape her, as he had been planning to rape Nicole. After that he would kill her, as he had already killed Nicole. Her and how many other “nieces”? Em didn’t know, but she felt certain this was not—as Rusty Jackson might have said—his first rodeo.
    Fifteen minutes. Maybe just ten.
    She looked down at her feet. They weren’t duct-taped to the floor, but the feet of the chair were. Still…
    You’re a runner; damn right you are. Look at those legs.
    They were good legs, all right, and she didn’t need anyone to kiss them to make her