Angel Face (16 page)

Maybe she was more than one person. Not a premeditating killer. Not a quick-change artist. Just a multiple of Angela.

And maybe he did have a concussion.

Birds were chirping, singing wildly. Was that his head or the jungle?

At some point, he stopped reveling in the attention long enough to notice what was happening to her. Her skin was hot, but he could feel her shivering, which confirmed that she was feverish.

“It’s you who’s sick,” he said. “You’re running a fever.”

“I’m fine.”

He couldn’t summon the attention span to argue with
her. She was working on his tied hands now, massaging his fingers to bring back the circulation.
How could that be sexy?
he wondered. Her fingers slipped through his; they curled and swirled and kneaded his palms. He was hard-pressed to remember anything ever feeling so wildly erotic. If she kept it up, he was going to have trouble with the size of his shorts. And there was something wrong with that, he told himself, something really warped. She played with sharp knives like they were flatware and oh, by the way, she
killed
people.

He’d heard of the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages came to identify with their captors, but he thought it took longer. Another couple of days, and he’d be helping her plan her next strike, the sucker she was going to off
after
she killed him. He was losing it. That’s what was wrong. Somewhere along the line, he’d surrendered his ability to detach. He couldn’t get enough mental distance to figure out who she really was. Now he had to get himself free before she could work any more wiles on him. She wasn’t a bitch, she was a
witch
. He couldn’t let himself think about anything but that, and if she really was physically sick, that would give him an advantage.

He removed his head from her breasts and breathed in.
Oxygen to the brain,
he thought, trying to rouse his nervous system from its stunned state.

“Before you get me that food,” he said, “I’ve got a more pressing problem.”

“What’s that?”

“My bladder; it’s about to burst.”

She was up and gone before he could figure out what she was doing. For someone who was septic, she was quick on her feet. He heard her going through cabinets in the kitchen, and when she returned, it was with a small bucket and a towel.

“Wait, what are you doing?” he said as she knelt in front of him.

“You said you had to go to the bathroom.”

“Yes, but I meant, I thought—”

“You thought I’d untie you?”

Her lips quivered, trying to control some urgent impulse. He assessed it as a nervous smile, but maybe that was wishful thinking.

“What I’m going to do,” she said, “is unzip you and take you out of your shorts, and then I’m going to make sure you don’t wet the floor.”

“Jesus,” he muttered, agony in his voice. If she wanted to torment him, she’d picked exactly the right way. He heard the zing of his descending zipper and flinched. The next thing he felt were a pair of silken hands, touching him, releasing his partially swollen member.

It wasn’t unusual to be semihard when your bladder was full, but semi apparently wasn’t enough for her. She was all over him, and he was huge immediately. This woman had more control over his body than he did. And then there were other complications. It was very difficult to urinate with an erection. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know that.

She was on her knees now and gazing up at him, the picture of downy, doe-eyed innocence.
His downy innocent
. A faint smile appeared on her lips.

“I think we have a problem,” she said.

H
E
tossed a few kernels of buttered popcorn into his mouth and crunched down softly. He preferred dark places, and movie theaters were dark in a way that allowed you to be with people yet still be alone. You didn’t get the usual horrified stares and whispers. The handful of others in the theater were mesmerized by the screen and seeing things far more grotesque than the solitary burn victim sitting in their row.

Not that it would have fazed him greatly if they had been horrified. He was used to that by now. His own father had been openly disgusted and had accused him of heinous things, including setting the fire that burned him. The old man had long considered his only son and heir a disappointment, and there’d been no contact for years, except through the family attorneys, who were always threatening to cut him out of the will. That didn’t faze him greatly, either. Fuck them all.

The jumbo tub of popcorn got propped against his knee while he quenched his thirst with a Coke, which was probably swimming with enough sugar and caffeine to
jump-start his car. He had no issues with artificial stimulants. In fact, he thrived on them, including noisy, ultraviolent special-effects movies.

Espionage thrillers were his favorite, but it amused him when the secret agents wore earpieces and paced the room while they talked on the phone. The hands-free devices looked like the microphones rock stars used, and they might as well have been. The potential for eavesdropping was enormous.

Some time ago he had switched to secure E-mail. He rarely used phones at all anymore, except for the cell phones he had equipped with surveillance devices and GPS chips. He’d given Jordan Carpenter such a phone with instructions to use it if he should travel outside the United States. According to the satellite link, Carpenter was now in the Gulf of Mexico, and according to Firestarter’s other sources, he’d followed Angela Lowe down there.

Firestarter had known that Lowe was smart enough to try to cover her trail. She’d disappeared before. He’d also known that Carpenter wouldn’t know to cover his trail, and his trail would lead to her.
Could be this will work out fine,
he thought, helping himself to another mouthful of popcorn. He chewed slowly, savoring the butter and heavy salt. Maybe it would only take one stone to get all the birds. That would be neat and tidy, although perhaps too neat and tidy for his taste. If there was one thing he loved, it was movie excess.

A
NGELA
walked outside with the bucket, spotted a nearby freshwater stream that emptied into the ocean, and tossed the contents. This was not polluting the earth, she told herself as she rinsed out the bucket upstream. This was contributing raw material to the flow of life.

The water felt blissfully icy to her overheated skin. She
splashed some on her face, savored the cool relief, and imagined herself lying placidly at the bottom of the streambed, as still as the smooth black stones while crystal clear water rippled over her. If her fever got worse, she would do that. She would submerge herself in the stream until she was as cool as a stone.

Cree-cree-creee, kweeup kweeup kweeup, cree-cree-cree . . .

Cackling laughter brought her head up, and as she gazed at the luxuriant green canopy overhead, she saw that the trees were teeming with life. There were vibrantly colored birds and winged insects and probably reptilian creatures that looked like branches and moved nothing but their mile-long tongues. A mother monkey diligently groomed one of her three wooly babies.

It was twilight, and as the rest of life prepared for sleep, the jungle was coming awake. The raw beauty of Angela’s surroundings filled her with awe. Behind her was a rain forest. In front of her, blue, blue waves lapped lazily on golden sands and the primal essences of the sea mingled with the exotic perfume of wildflowers. Orchids grew like clover here. How much more gorgeous could it get?

A sigh escaped her. If only the circumstances were different and she could appreciate the scenery. But they weren’t. This was a crisis of the highest order. It no longer surprised her that she seemed to know what to do in such dire circumstances, including how to handle a male hostage who had to relieve himself. She was starting to take her abilities for granted, even if he wasn’t.

He hadn’t been able to urinate until she physically left the room, which touched off some interesting locker room language. She wrote it off as a minor crisis of the male ego, and when she returned, he’d finished his business and gotten himself free of the bucket and mostly back into his shorts. She didn’t ask him how.

The last thing she wanted was for him to realize that
he’d had any effect on her. But in fact, he’d had plenty. Or at least a part of him had. She wouldn’t have believed it was possible for a man to become aroused that fast, or that
fully
, to put it delicately. A nightstick would have felt insecure in comparison. And it was all because she’d touched him.

Touched him.
Her hands had turned him into a giant. Into heat and blood and sinew. But what had shaken her up the most was that he’d been helpless to hide his body’s response.
Helpless.

His image stayed with her as she hesitated at the door of the hut a moment later, wondering what to expect. Finally, she set the bucket down and went inside.

No!” she blurted. “Don’t touch that!”

He had rolled to his side and worked his way over to the knife she’d stuck in the floor. Again, instinct took over. She knew how to drop to the ground, roll, and lunge. She knew exactly how to come up again. And the instant she had the knife in her hands, she was on him.

“Don’t ever try that again.” She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, the blade at his throat. “I’ll kill you! I swear I will.”

She vibrated with shock. It was her fault. She’d been careless, but he would damn well know there were severe consequences for taking advantage.

He went utterly still, and she thought she had him. She had to assert control, regain dominance. And her readiness—her very rage to do that—astounded her. Her breath was shaking, her soul was shaking, but it wasn’t fear, it was a surge of adrenaline. A need for retaliation had come alive inside her that she barely understood, yet it was as familiar as breathing.

He moved, and she snarled like an animal,
“I’ll kill you.”

“Do it,” he rasped. “Cut my goddamn throat, because
if I get another chance at that knife, I’m taking it. And if I get a chance at you, I’m—”

She yanked his head back as far as it would go and glared into his hot blue eyes. “Bastard!” she whispered. With two words he’d taken control.
Do it.
If a hostage didn’t fear death, there was nothing to hold over his head. Threats were pointless, and it was the captor, not the hostage, who was stripped of his power. He’d called her bluff.

She ought to kill him for that alone. Instead, she flung the knife away and sprang to her feet, walking, pacing, thinking that if he said one word, one bloody word, she would rip a death mask off the wall and beat him with it.

“Maybe we could
talk
?” Sarcasm burned out of him as he struggled to get back to his knees.

She ignored his efforts and pretended not to hear him. She didn’t want him dead; she wanted him gone as if he’d never existed. He had called her bluff. He was winning. He was tied up, flat on the floor, and he was
winning
.

“I know it’s a foreign concept,” he said, “but it has to be more productive than this.”

“I can talk; you can’t. I thought we’d established that.”

“Then I guess you wouldn’t care to know the most common trait of lust murderers?”

She knew exactly where he was going with that one. Serial killers were almost universally pathological control freaks, but she was about to disabuse him of that notion. She hadn’t gone into detail about who she was or why she was at his house partly because of concerns about security. Most of SmartTech’s studies were classified secret or sensitive, and employees were not allowed to discuss them, but that hadn’t been her chief concern. Angela had decided not to give Jordan Carpenter any more information than suited her purposes. Now it did.

“I hate to disappoint you, Doctor,” she said. “But I’m not a serial killer
or
a lust murderer. I’m a scientist, and
until you assaulted me, I was involved in a double-blind study in which you yourself consented to participate.”

He was already shaking his head. “I didn’t consent to participate in anything.”

“You couldn’t have been included without your knowledge and consent. It’s a remote brain imaging study, and each subject has to drink a radioisotopic solution to activate the sites under observation.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The only solution I drink is beer, and I could use one right now.”

There wasn’t any possibility she had the wrong man. He knew too much about her, and he’d clearly been lying in wait for her when she got to his house. If he wasn’t a legitimate study subject, then he had to be part of the conspiracy against her, which was why she had him here—to get the truth out of him one way or another.

“I could prove everything I’ve just said to you with one phone call,” she informed him coldly, “but since you’re the one who’s tied up, I don’t have to prove anything, do I? It’s you who’s going to talk, and I’m—”

“And you’re going to make me? How? Use defib paddles on me until I confess? You must get a real
charge
out of that.”

He almost laughed, and she whirled on him, furious. How could he joke about something like that? He’d wanted to believe the worst about her from the beginning. Apparently, it fascinated him to think she was a siren who seduced men and then
slayed
them. Perhaps she should give him what he expected.

Angela’s thoughts brought a frightening calm to her voice.

“I’m not going to murder you, Dr. Carpenter, but when I get through with you, you’ll wish I had.”

A tactical error,
she thought.
A very bad tactical error, and he had made it.
She now had a mission that was far
more interesting than making him cease to exist. She was going to make his existence
intolerable
. There were as many ways to torment a man as there were to please one, and some of them were the same. Even more interesting, she knew what they were. She knew how to make him sweat. Oh, God, yes, she did. She’d been taught and taught well by someone. But who? Brandt? Sammy? Silver? Someone she didn’t remember?

Who had trained her in the ways of erotic torture and taught her to get what she wanted from a man? Anything she wanted.

“What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”

“Making sure you stay put, cowboy.”

Inspired, Angela had rolled him onto his belly, and she was untying his feet. One of his feet, to be exact. When she had it loose enough, she neatly crossed his ankles and cinched him back up. The next thing she crossed were his wrists. And the last thing she did was lash him to the nearest piece of furniture, a heavy rattan couch. She also pushed, pulled, and shoved him back to his knees, then propped him up against the couch so he wouldn’t miss a minute of the action.

She was trembling from sheer determination as much as from physical effort. But it was right about then that the adrenaline wore off and she started to shake for real. Her arms and legs floated like phantom limbs, and the room went white and patchy, despite the darkening sky. Everything was giving out at once. Her body refused to support her, but she had to stay on her feet. Hurricane lamps had to be lit and shutters secured. There was a long and frightening night to get through, so why did it feel as if her greatest challenge at that moment was to return a bound man’s angry glare?
Crazy
.

“Are you hungry? Good,” she croaked without waiting for an answer. “You can watch me eat.”

She steadied herself once she got to the kitchen and
was thankful he couldn’t see her sink to the floor. The half-size refrigerator ran off a solar generator, as did the other appliances. It wasn’t cold enough to make ice, but the moment she opened the door and the bracing air hit her, she knew she needed to remain still. The chilly blast settled around her like a cloak. Eventually, it began to clear her head, but she couldn’t spend her life in streams and open refrigerator doors. The cold was beginning to give her goose bumps.

This wasn’t exhaustion, exposure, or hunger. She was sick.