Mary, Mary - James Patterson [94]
I turned toward the rented car and started to walk with my head down against the wind. It was getting nippy up here. A few feet away from the car, I looked up and stopped dead in my tracks.
I had company.
James Truscott was sitting in the car’s passenger seat.
Chapter 117
THIS MADE NO SENSE TO ME, not at first anyway. What the hell was Truscott doing here? Obviously, he’d followed me again. But why?
I was seeing red as I yanked open the car door on his side. My mouth was open to start to yell, but nothing came out, not a word.
Truscott wasn’t here to cause me any trouble—at least not now. The writer was dead, propped up in the front seat like a statue.
“Just get in the car,” said a voice from behind me.
“Don’t cause a scene out here. Because then I’ll have to go in and shoot the nice old biddy who runs the country store, too. I really wouldn’t mind, y’know.”
I turned and saw Michael Bell.
Bell appeared haggard and disturbed, and he’d lost a lot of weight since I’d last seen him at his house. He looked like hell, actually. His light-blue eyes were badly bloodshot; with his ragged, bushy beard, he looked like a local woodsman.
“How long have you been following me?” I asked, trying to engage him if I could, feel him out, gain some kind of leverage.
“Just get in the car and drive, will you? Don’t talk to me. I see through you.”
We both got in, Bell in the back, and he pointed out to the road, the direction heading away from the interstate. I started the car and drove where he wanted me to, my mind racing backward and forward. My gun was in the trunk. How could I get to the trunk? Or how could I get inside his head in a hurry?
“What’s the plan, Michael?”
“The plan was for you to go back to Washington, and for everyone to go on with their pitiful lives. But that didn’t work out so well, did it? You should thank me for taking out the reporter, no? He begged and sobbed for his life, by the way. Great performance. I believed him. What a wimp he turned out to be.”
I was surprised he knew I was from D.C., and also about Truscott. But then, he was a watcher, a plotter. There was probably a lot that Bell knew.
“So what now?” I asked.
“What do you think? You’re supposed to be the expert, right? So, what happens now?”
“It doesn’t have to go like this.” I was just talking; saying anything that came into my mind.
“You gotta be kidding. What other way do you think it can go? Let me hear all of the choices. I can’t wait.”
Meantime, he had burrowed the barrel of his pistol into my neck. I leaned away, but only so far. I thought it was best if I knew exactly where his gun was. I wondered if he was executing a plan now, or if he was improvising at this point. Mary Smith had been known to do both.
And this was Mary Smith, wasn’t it? I’d finally met the real killer.
We drove for a few miles on an unlit secondary highway. “This looks good here,” he said suddenly. “Go that way. Make a left. Do it.”
I turned off the pavement onto a bumpy dirt road. It sloped upward, winding away into the woods. Eventually, the fir trees closed around the car like a tunnel. I was running out of time, and it didn’t look as if there was any way for me to escape. Mary Smith had me, just the way she’d gotten all the others and killed them without fail.
“Where are we going, Bell?”
“Somewhere they won’t find you right away. Or your pen pal, either.”
“You know, they’re already looking for you in L.A. I made a call.”
“Yeah, well, good luck to them. I’m not exactly in L.A., am I?”
“What about your girls, Michael? What about them?”
He pushed the gun barrel harder into my neck. “Not my fucking girls. Marti was a cheap little whore before I married her. Before I made her into something. I was a good father to those ungrateful kids, all for Marti. She was a runaround when I met her, and she stayed a runaround. Okay, pull over. This is good.”
This was definitely not good. The car headlights showed where the road dropped off to a wooded slope on the right. I had to be real careful not to go over the edge.