The Doll (22 page)

Instead there was a sniffle.

Munroe ran a mental reconstruction, prepared her own backup, readied to speak it, but Neeva started first. Tears in her voice, the girl said, “Can you at least ask?”

Actress or not, it didn’t matter, the words were perfect.

“A little fasting won’t kill you,” Munroe said. “I don’t expect it will be more than five or six hours if we continue to push through the night, midmorning our time if we stop for rest. After that, you’re no longer my problem and you can whine for food from whoever takes you next.”

Munroe stole another glance at the phone. Two minutes and fifty seconds. The voice drop would allow recording for three minutes and then cut off. She killed the connection and slid the phone back under her leg. Everything she would have articulated on her own through more hours of dialing had been covered by those minutes.

This would be her last attempt at contact until Logan was safe or the girl delivered, and that would certainly help extend battery life.

From behind, Neeva’s hushed crying picked up intensity, the first true tearful breakdown since the beginning of the ordeal, every bit about it genuine and heartrending. Empathy threatened to well from within and overcome reason. Munroe punched the emotion down, fist to rising dough, until the compassionate lump was small and easier to control.

Neeva’s sniffles grew louder, more frantic, and in counterpoint Munroe more frustrated, more angry. This journey was
that which must be done to stop the hurting
. Eyes ahead, she held her silence. In order of priority, there was Logan, and that was all.

Neeva’s crying went up another notch. Munroe reached for the phone—Lumani’s phone—and dialed.

He picked up on the first ring.

“I’m stopping for five minutes,” she said. “I need to shift the package to the front seat and give her food.”

Lumani said, “No.”

“Don’t push me.”

“If you do this,” he said, “and she runs again, Logan will die.” His voice had an edge to it that under other circumstances she would have marked as concern.

“She won’t run,” Munroe said.

A long pause, and Lumani said, “It’s on your head.”

“Understood,” she said, knowing more from Lumani’s words than anything he could have consciously allowed: The best of the Doll Maker’s men was the weakest link in the chain.

Neeva continued to sniffle the stuffed-nosed, puffy-faced sound track of tears. Munroe slowed and pulled off to the side where field met road-fill, which in turn met road. Hit the emergency lights, then stepped out and around the front of the car to the passenger’s-side rear door.

She tugged the blanket off Neeva and said, “Show me your hands.”

Neeva shifted, struggling against the odd angle, and with one shoulder twisted, held her wrists forward and as high as possible.

With the improvised scrap of metal blade, Munroe cut her loose, reached for a hand, and pulled her upright. “Scoot over,” she said, “don’t move, and whatever you do, don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve.”

Wordless, still sniffling, Neeva nodded. Munroe handed her the blanket. “Use that,” she said, and Neeva reached for it, rubbed it along her face, and in the process of drying her eyes and blowing her nose, smeared and smudged mascara and took off most of her makeup.

Munroe sighed.

One more arbitrary act of failure for which someone would pay a price.

She fished along the floor for the items she’d thrown aside during the tussle and snagged the strap of the bag with food and water, pulled it out of the car, reached a hand toward Neeva, and said, “Come.”

Hobbled, and with the blanket clutched tightly and trailing behind, Neeva slid along the backseat bench to the door and swung her legs to the ground. Munroe helped her into the front seat and handed her the food bag.

“Help yourself and don’t get dirty,” she said. “And don’t drink anything because there’s no way we’re making another bathroom stop.”

Neeva nodded, still sniffling, though the tears had mostly stopped.

Before Munroe had shut the door, the girl was already digging through the bag, pulling out a packet of dried fruit. Once more behind the wheel, Munroe checked the rearview mirror. Faint in the twilight, forty meters back, without headlights and almost to the point of being invisible, another car had pulled off the road.

They’d been stopped for four minutes.

She studied the reflection, searching out shape, begging for make, model, and color. Instead she found only shadow.

Emergency flashers off, Munroe pulled back onto the road. In the rearview, the second car vanished completely; headlights never powered on, she never found it following.

Neeva finished the bag of fruit, fished out crackers and ate those, too, and kept going until the bag had been mostly emptied. She took a swig of water, just a swig, recapped the bottle, put everything back in the bag, and shoved it down on the floor beside her feet.

“Thank you,” she said, and Munroe nodded.

Hands folded, demure and ladylike, in her lap on top of the blanket, which had absorbed the crumbs and spills, she said, “How much longer?”

“I don’t know,” Munroe said. “If we stay on these roads we’ve got about another hour until we reach Verona, but after that I’m not sure.”

“You know,” Neeva said, and her voice dropped an octave into that same husky whisper that had become her trademark on film, “maybe we could run away together.” She ran her fingers caressingly over the blanket and then readjusted the top of her dress, smoothing out the wrinkles over her chest. “Or, you know, at least we could make a pit stop—something that would take the edge off. We’ve been driving for an awfully long time—they should let us have that at least, right?”

Had the situation been anything else, Neeva’s antics would have been funny. “I’m not here to be your friend,” Munroe said, “and put your boobs away, I’m not interested.”

“You don’t find me attractive?”

“You’re a stunning girl, Neeva, but no, I’m not attracted to you.”

The navigation kicked in turn by turn as they passed through a small village and continued along a road that would have surely been scenic in daylight. Eventually, Neeva broke. “Are you gay?” she said.

Munroe checked the rearview. “No,” she said. “Not gay.”

Neeva reached toward Munroe, traced her index finger along the back of Munroe’s hand. Munroe resisted the urge to smack her away, and with the lines of her mouth set grimly said, “Cut it out, Neeva, I’m not interested.”

Neeva batted her eyelashes with the look of a wounded child and, with Munroe’s refusal to acknowledge the display, crossed her arms and huffed back into her seat. Arms tight against her chest, she tipped her head against the window and finally said, “What is it about me you find unattractive?”

Munroe forced back a bark of laughter. She wanted to dislike the girl. Would prefer to see her as weak or stupid because that would make resentment more emotionally palatable, but she couldn’t find it in her.

“You’re just not my type.”

Neeva sulked. “I’ve never heard that one from a straight guy before. What’s your type?”

“Tall, dark, and handsome,” Munroe said, and turned from the road just long enough to catch a glimpse of Neeva’s scowl.

“You said you’re not gay.”

“I’m not.” And then with a smirk that welled from an evil sort of satisfaction, Munroe said, “I’m a woman, and I like guys.”

The girl’s hands dropped to her lap and she stared, mouth formed into a tight O, while behind those baby blues the world appeared to shift. Like a snake uncoiling, everything about Neeva relaxed, as if, in spite of herself, she wasn’t able to see a woman as the enemy, as if what she now knew changed
everything
—almost as if because of this one revelation the fight had left her.

After several kilometers of silence, Neeva said, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why everything.”

“I don’t have the patience for games,” Munroe said. “Say what you want or, better yet, don’t. I like the quiet.”

“Why are you dressed as a man?” Neeva said. “Why do you act like …” She paused. “Why do you act like … like one of them?” Her voice rose, challenging and accusatory.
“Them,”
she said again. “Where women aren’t human, aren’t people, just things—objects.
Them
.” She jabbed a thumb toward the rear window, where surely one of the Doll Maker’s men followed unseen. “Oh, they’ll show you a real man. They’ll turn you into a real woman. They’ll fuck you hard, you’ll
want
it, but what you want never actually matters because everything is about their own ego.
Them
.” Neeva stopped for air; a long, greedy inhale. “Why?” she said. “Why would you—a woman”—she spat out the word—“you who should know what it feels like to be called a cunt and a bitch and a whore just because you voiced an opinion, to be told you’re fat or ugly as a way to make your argument worthless, that you’re stuck-up, repressed, and in denial of your true feelings when you find
them
repulsive. Why would you be one of them? What’s
wrong
with you?”

Neeva’s words added weight to a history of scars the girl would never know, and cut deeply across time and continents, dragging Munroe in the emotional direction she wanted least to travel. When she didn’t answer, Neeva turned away toward the window.

Another few kilometers down the road, Munroe said, “I’m not one of them. I never have been, never will be. I’m only here to save a life.”

“I’m a life.”

“It’s a fucked-up choice, isn’t it?” And then, to change the subject
before the conversation went any closer to that long-dormant mental place where the lines between want and savagery blurred Munroe said, “Why don’t you get some rest?”

Neeva didn’t bite. “What about the man disguise?”

“A man and woman traveling together doesn’t attract the same attention as two women,” she said. “As a man, I make us less visible.”

Neeva faked a laugh, folded her hands in her lap, and head still tipped against the window said, “In that case, why not just send a man?”

Munroe smiled. To herself. Humorously. Regretfully. At the history of survival and instinct that had made her who she was, and the unique set of skills both inborn and man-made that, once combined, had both blessed and very nearly destroyed her life. “None of their men can do what I can do,” she said.

Under the fluorescent lights of the gas station overhang, Munroe refilled the Opel’s tank. The proprietor stared out from beyond the glass of the mom-and-pop-style convenience store with arms crossed, as if he was prison guard and she the only convict in this otherwise empty station.

She had no cash, no credit, nothing with which to pay for the fuel she was taking, only the word of Lumani and the instructions he’d given when he’d called ahead. She followed the details exactly, certain from the moment she’d reached the location and had kissed the lips of the nozzle to the mouth of the tank that the man-boy was out there, perched somewhere in the dark with the scope to his eye, watching through the crosshairs.

Munroe turned from proprietor to pump and, seeing without really seeing, watched the numbers on the display click upward. Neeva, who’d drifted off an hour earlier, hadn’t woken when they’d stopped, making it possible to handle the refueling without having to also guard against another episode of violence. The girl had slept a good deal since her failed bolt for freedom, and with any luck, she would stay under for a while.

The shut-off kicked in and, the tank full, Munroe replaced the nozzle.

In the window, the station owner still stared. Munroe tightened the gas cap and then stared back. He uncrossed his arms and waved her on. She knew the look: He didn’t want her inside, didn’t want to risk conversation or questions; wanted her gone as quickly as possible; a man caught up in the machine, blackmailed and browbeaten into submission just as she was.

She stepped around to the driver’s door and, once more, traded the cool of outside air, the taste of freedom, for the stale of the four-wheeled prison. Made yet another turn of the ignition, and Neeva slept on; another return to the dark and the roads and the trancelike hum of wheels against the pavement.

Along the empty kilometers, routing from one address to another, one random sleepy town after the next, Neeva’s words returned.

The rant about the
them
.

The obvious self-defense training.

The vicious refusal to quit even when she was outclassed.

The complete change when the girl realized she wasn’t dealing with a man—all of it part of a history that hadn’t shown up in any of the documents the Tisdale parents had forwarded to Bradford’s office, and Munroe puzzled over whether the catalyst had happened when the girl was still Grace Tisdale or after she’d become Neeva Eckridge.

Then she pushed aside the thoughts. Didn’t want to know, didn’t want to care.

The primal urge to fight, to win, to survive, was alive and well, but so was the darkness, licking at the edges, begging to come out and play again.

She really, really, didn’t want to care.

The emotional waters were muddied enough as they were.