Free Fall (10 page)

He continued to watch helplessly as the well-dressed legs turned and walked back toward Darby. As the man moved away, the rest of him slowly became visible: the perfectly pressed wool slacks, the blinding white of his shirt, the red tie loose at the neck. He could see the quiet confusion on Darby's face as she examined the man approaching her.

Obviously, not the flannel-clad West Virginia native she had expected.

"You didn't really think this one through, did you?" The man was looking at Darby, but his words clearly weren't directed at her. One of his gloved hands suddenly moved up and grabbed hold of Darby's face as he spoke. In one explosive motion he threw his weight forward and drove the back of her head into the passenger side window of the van.

She didn't make a sound. Tristan heard only the dull crack of the safety glass and saw her slide down the door, struggling to get her arms to work well enough to use them to cushion her landing.

He felt the bile rising into his throat as he watched Darby try to remain in a sitting position. She didn't seem to want to fall completely to the ground but didn't look like she knew why.

"No!" he shouted.

He'd seen Darby being blown wildly into a rock face at the end of hundreds of feet of rope, he'd seen her fall into a deep crevasse on a remote Himalayan peak, but watching someone purposefully hurt her ignited something in him that he'd never felt before.

The man holding him must have seen or felt it, because he moved the barrel of the gun to Tristan's mouth. The pressure of the metal against his teeth created shooting pains that went through his gums and into his head. There was nothing he could do. He opened his mouth and tasted the metal as it slid against his tongue.

"Take a look, boy," the man on top of him said, pushing the end of the barrel against the inside of his cheek and forcing him to turn his head back toward Darby.

He did as he was told when his cheek was pinched painfully between the gun barrel and the hard dirt beneath him. The man with the flash light crouched down in front of Darby and took hold of her face again.

She reached up and closed a hand around his wrist, but her normally uncanny strength was gone.

"No, you didn't think this through at all."

This time his words were punctuated by the sound of Darby's skull denting the metal door of the van.

Darby had felt this way many times before. Clinging to some nearly nonexistent handhold or standing on a dangerously unstable cornice of snow and ice. The feeling that the slightest move, the tiniest muscle twitch would send her hurtling into space. But those situations had a certain familiarity, an almost comforting simplicity. Right now, she felt lost--like the world she found herself in was no longer her own.

Darby let her eyes move slowly across the small room, taking care to keep her head completely motionless. The walls were covered with yellowed and peeling paper that had once depicted blue horses ridden by red soldiers. The furniture seemed too well cared for to belong: a small bed with a delicately worked quilt bedspread, a child's writing desk of expensive and exhaustively polished hardwood, a richly painted dresser, and a deep chest that she imagined was full of a little boy's toys.

She had no idea where they were or how long it had taken to get there.

She'd woken up in the back of a windowless van with a splitting headache that had continued to grow in intensity as she was pulled from the vehicle and marched into this old farmhouse.

The medical-looking white straps that had bound her wrists during the trip had been removed, leaving her free ... to do what? Stand helpless and confused in the middle of the floor?

Darby let her gaze wander to the only door in the room, afraid to focus directly on the man standing next to it. He didn't look much older than she was, despite the fact that his hair was turning prematurely gray at the temples. He was thin, athletic, and clearly, extremely uncomfortable. His weight shifted from one foot to the other every five seconds or so and his eyes darted back and forth to the heavy closed door next to him, the bed in the corner, the window but never at her or the other people in the room.

Darby strained her eyes left until she could see Tristan. He looked so scared and angry; naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. There was blood running from the corner of his lip, a bright streak of color set off against the dull brownish-red splatter patterns drying across his face. He was struggling uselessly as the man who had knocked her senseless at their campsite looped a rope through his canvas handcuffs and secured him to the chair he was sitting in. She hadn't actually seen the man clearly until now, and her strained examination of him just confused her more. He had a solid, stocky build and a strangely square face, topped by close-cropped dark hair that made him look kind of military.

Tristan stopped thrashing and let his chin drop toward his chest in defeat as the man gave the rope binding him one last tug. The desperation and pain etched across his face made her turn her eyes away.

They'd spent two years together maybe her two favorite years so far.

He had been so fired up about everything all energy and no judgment.

But his kindness and enthusiasm had been infectious and she had always been there to keep him from doing something stupid and getting himself killed. Until now. In the end, it looked like she was going to be the death of him after all.

It had taken a while to learn to think around the razor-sharp pounding that was tearing at the back of her skull, but after some effort, she had managed to string together a few coherent thoughts.

There was only one possible reason this was happening to them. It had to be something she'd seen, somewhere she'd been. These men, conservatively dressed and disciplined, had government written all over them. Could it have been the old plane she'd come across in the Laotian jungle? The thick plastic packaging of its cargo had mostly been reclaimed by the indigenous vegetation, but where it hadn't, the heroin was still very much in evidence. The plane had been an old Dehaviland, and judging by what was left of their clothing and other personal belongings the two skeletons in the cockpit had been American. She had taken photographs and delivered them to the U. S. Embassy along with the general location of the plane.

Then she'd never thought it about it again. Beyond hoping to ease the pain of the dead men's families, the plane meant nothing to her. A decaying relic from a time in history to which she felt no connection. A forgotten monument to a world she chose to live at the very edges of.

Tristan shouted something at the man standing behind him, the rage in his voice registering with her though the actual words didn't. She moved her eyes slowly to the opposite corner of the room and the man standing in it. As far as she could tell, he hadn't moved an inch in the last five minutes. His eyes were glassy and unblinking, and seemed to be aimed directly at her right hip. She decided to take a chance and tilted her head down slightly so that she could try to see what he was seeing.

That nearly imperceptible move, as she somehow had known it would, broke the man from his trance. His head came level and he pushed him self from the wall he was leaning against, starting toward her. She could hear Tristan shouting again. Something about her.

"Hello, young lady," the man said. He stepped close, breathed in deeply and held it. His head nodded forward and he raised it slowly, care fully inspecting the black sandals on her feet, the deep brown of her legs, her green cotton shorts, her white T-shirt. Only then did he exhale. His breath didn't smell like anything.

"We have some questions we want to ask," he said, tilting his head forward again and focusing on her crotch.

"They won't be hard. No, not hard at all." The thin red mustache under his nose barely held onto the tiny droplets of clear fluid forming on it as he spoke. Darby wasn't sure whether they were spit, sweat, or both.

All she knew was how this thin, twitchy man made her feel. She had to fight to resist the urge to step back away from him and tug at her shorts to cover more of her bare legs.

"I think we can get to the bottom of things, don't you?" he said, stepping in even closer and brushing his chest against hers. For some reason, he tried to make the contact look accidental, a product of his careful examination of the scars that ran along the edges of her nose.

She'd noticed him crouch slightly before they'd touched, though, so that their nipples would make contact. His were hard, He turned briefly toward the man standing behind Tristan, careful to stay as close as possible to her.

"Gag him."

The stocky man didn't immediately follow the order.

"Sir, don't we want him tota "

"Gag him!" His shout was almost as high pitched as a scream. Darby heard Tristan start to struggle again, but kept a watchful eye on the man in front of her as he refocused on her crotch.

"How close are those other houses?"

His voice was quieter now but thick with excitement. For a moment, she wasn't sure if he was talking to her or the man she could see out of the corner of her eye, yanking Tristan's head back and forcing his mouth open.

"I don't know," was the answer.

"A half a mile, maybe."

"Are they occupied?"

"I don't know, probably."

"You don't know much, do you?" the man in front of her said coldly.

A sad look crossed his face.

"I'm afraid we aren't going to be able to listen to that beautiful voice of yours either. And it is beautiful, isn't it? Say something. Go ahead.

Do it. Say something."

She hesitated for a moment.

"Why don't you let him go? He doesn't have anything to do with this."

The man looked delighted. His thin mustache curved along his upper lip as he smiled, revealing tiny little teeth and finally dislodging a few of those unidentifiable droplets.

"He doesn't? What makes you say that?"

There was a playful lilt in his voice that was infinitely more frightening than his angry scream a moment before.

"He doesn't know anything about the plane," Darby said, hoping to get things out into the open.

"The plane," he repeated, and turned to the man who was busy securing whatever he had stuffed in Tristan's mouth.

"Isn't she precious?" He looked over at the old bed in the corner.

"Tie her down on that no, wait. Wait. We need something to cover it. I have a blanket in my car.

That will do. Yes, that will do."

Darby was too focused on his face as he stepped back to notice his hand coming up between her legs. He pinched her there hard and she yelped at the sudden pain and jumped back. The man who had finished gagging Tristan ran forward and got between them as Darby closed her right hand into a fist and started pulling it back.

"Yes, we'll need that blanket. We'll need it," he said, hiding behind his much larger associate and walking backward toward the door. Darby made a move to get around the bigger man but he held an arm out and stopped her. She watched through her anger as the red-haired man continued backward toward the door, registering that her fury just seemed to excite him further. It was clear through his slacks that it wasn't only his nipples that were hard.

"Can I get anyone anything?" he said as he reached behind him and opened the door.

"A glass of water, perhaps? I believe we may be here for a while."

As he disappeared though the door and closed it behind him, Darby saw the horror on the face of the young man standing guard near the wall.

For the first time, their eyes connected. She couldn't find any cruelty or hardness there in the brief moment before he turned away. In fact, he looked closer to panic than she was.

The door clicked shut and the man in front of her closed his thick fingers around her shoulder, shoving her hard in the direction of the bed.

What was happening? Suddenly the theory that had brought some small bit of reality to this situation started to slip away. Why would any body care this much about an old Air America plane? Could it have been something else she'd seen but hadn't registered? In the former Soviet Union? Cambodia? Afghanistan? Was it all a mistake?

The man pushed her again, and she looked behind her at the bed. The bright colors of the quilt seemed to burn through the thoughts clogging her mind, leaving the image of her tied helplessly to the head- and foot boards, and that odorless little man free to do whatever he wanted to her.

That wasn't the way she was supposed to die.

She allowed herself to be pushed back another foot or so, feigning a loss of balance and adding a short whimper of fear. She looked over at Tristan for a moment he was fighting so hard against the ropes that the chair was coming fully off the floor. Then she shot her hands out and wrapped them around the thick neck of the man in front of her.

Darby had the unusual ability to support her entire body weight with any one of her fingers. When all ten suddenly dug into the skin and muscle of the man's neck, he gagged with enough force to cause spit to fly from his mouth. They both froze for a split second, him from surprise and the sudden interruption of blood flow to his brain, and her because she had never hurt anyone before in her life.