Ransom X

  Chapter 37 Give Away

  CLUNK, the door slammed behind him. Panic hit Mac like a bucket of ice water. He had seen Vorest deal with people before, he was known for his enjoyment of putting people through pain.

  There was a time in Mexico where he cut up a courier to get the drugs out of his stomach. He did it without killing the man. Vorest split the vertebrae with the man lying on his front, tapping into his stomach with the accuracy of a surgeon. The man used his hands to drag himself to a river and drown himself. The pain of exposing that many spinal nerves raw was the kind of torture that brought a hum to Vorest’s lips, all the way back to the Rockies in that particular case. In fact, it had become his tell. Any time one heard him hum a tune; they knew it was from fresh brutality.

  Mac could hear Darci’s scream mixing with that sadistic hum in his head.

  Mac sped off, down the old dirt trail that led into the dark steep logging road through the woods. His headlight shone yellow coloring a world bathed in the grey blue light of a sliver of the moon. It didn’t matter how bright a light was in this landscape, it soaked it up and left deep shadows lingering in all directions away from the source.

  He heard a predator’s heavy tread as it scurried though the underbrush on side of the dusty track. It must have been big, because the throaty Harley engine wasn’t the most subtle accompaniment to the stillness of the remote mountain night. After about five miles twisting and turning downward, the road leveled. A single neon rod twisted into the name of a bar cracked the colorless landscape. Mac let his engine unwind with a fire that he could never express himself. He needed the speedometer to climb above one hundred, partly because it felt like his task was urgent, the other reason was that it was his entire fault.

  Mac knew that it was selfish bringing her to the camp the first time, and when he saw what they put Darci through during her stay, he wished he’d never met her. She was so much prettier and more fragile than anything he’d ever seen before. She’d told him that sharing her body was the way that they could be together, and he’d agreed to it. He remembered the first time he’d known that she was better than anyone he’d ever met; she’d grabbed his huge arm and looped it around her and said that she felt like she should thank him every time she curled up in his arms. She went to sleep whispering thank you in his ear over and over. That was when they were on the road together, before they’d come to this hell in the Rockies.

  He owed her.

  The bike rocked against the kickstand as Mac pushed his weight off of it before coming to a complete stop. He took all three stairs in one jump. The warped boards creaked under the strain.

  He slapped a twenty on the bar and told Burly that he needed the phone, all night maybe. He needed to find someone. Burly looked him up and down and pushed the twenty back at him while laying an old rotary phone on the bar. It was a Monday; the bar was empty, which made it the largest phone booth in the west. He dialed information for the Provo area.