Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [82]
I craned my neck around and looked up at the bridge’s tinted window. The captain was gone. Before I could figure out any of this, the door to the bridge opened a moment later. There was a jingle and a click-click-click sound, and then a cute little dog appeared on the deck. It was a Jack Russell.
Chapter 104
I WASN’T SURE if it was ten minutes or ten hours later when my eyes snapped open in the dark.
I was on my back. I lay there, blinking and breathing rapidly, as my weak, disoriented mind struggled to remain conscious.
My face felt like someone had used it as a hammer. My stomach was one large, acidic sour knot. The taste in my dry mouth was vaguely medicinal. My entire body felt strange and puffy, as if I were wrapped in a cotton ball cocoon.
Accident? was my first coherent thought.
Then the below-deck cabin I was in tilted and creaked, and my eyes went wide as I remembered everything. An aha moment straight from hell.
I remembered Charlie, facedown on the deck beside me. The champagne had been doctored, I realized.
“No,” I said weakly. I tried to move my right arm. I turned my wrist maybe a centimeter before it rolled back like a too heavy log. I was still drugged. Was it anesthesia?
I was trying to move my other arm when I heard something in the distance: a hollow thump followed by a tremendous splash.
I closed my eyes as panic bloomed in the pit of my stomach. It began to rise into my throat like the numbers on a thermometer in a blast oven when I heard the close sound of heavy footsteps above.
Think! I urged myself. I tried to. But there was nothing except the dark. Nothing but the accelerating beat of my heart. Finally, a wave of temptingly sweet exhaustion passed through me like a last hope.
Of course, I thought. I needed to go back to sleep. Figure it out later, much later.
I heard the opening of a door, someone coming down the stairs.
Stop it! Wake up! some other part of me thought. Stand up! I frantically began to beg myself.
The other lazy part was having none of it. I free-fell back toward the safe oblivion of sleep with a sigh, as if that would save me.
A moment later, my eyes bolted open as the reek of ammonia scoured my nostrils like a serrated knife.
“Haven’t I seen you someplace before?” the Jump Killer said as he lifted me into his arms.
Chapter 105
THE JUMP KILLER carried me into a bright room that looked like a library. There were dark, varnished, oak-paneled walls; leather-bound books on shelves; an expensive wooden globe; a cigar humidor; a fully stocked bar. Above the bar, a signed collector’s baseball bat was lit like a painting in a gallery.
But instead of furniture, in the room’s exact center was a massive four-poster bed. The incongruity of it reminded me of the gurney they’d strapped Justin Harris to in the death chamber. That wasn’t the only similarity, I realized. From all four posts dangled dark metal circles. Handcuffs, I realized, as I was dropped onto the bed.
“Welcome to the Jungle Room,” the Jump Killer said. “This is where all the magic happens.”
I noticed what I was wearing for the first time as my wrists and then my ankles were cuffed. I stared down at myself and began to weep.
I was in some kind of see-through bra and underwear, a garter belt, stockings. My arms and legs had been moisturized with a sickeningly sweet cherry-scented lotion. I realized then that I was wearing makeup. Gobs of it were greased onto my cheeks, smeared on my lips, caking my eyes.
“Please,” I said through my slimy lips. “Please don’t… don’t kill me.”
“That’s funny. That’s exactly what Tara Foster said all those years ago. Right before I strangled her to death with her bra,” the Jump Killer said, folding his meaty arms. “Maybe if you’d been smart and let Harris take the fall for it, you wouldn’t be in this pickle.”
That’s when I noticed there was another door in the room’s corner. From behind it suddenly came