Stirred (2 page)

“I think I’m all done.”

Rob paid their tab with a big wad of cash and then stood and helped her into the pre-owned Martin Margiela jacket that still embarrassed her when she thought about what she’d spent on it.

“Thank you, Rob,” she said.

“My pleasure, Jessica.”

She could feel the awkward moment coming as they made their way through the empty restaurant, the servers already setting the tables with fresh linens and clean glass and silverware for tomorrow. In ten seconds, they were going to be standing on the sidewalk, the question of whether the night was over or just beginning hanging in the air.

She wasn’t going to sleep with him—she knew that.

But maybe a quick nightcap back at his place or hers? No harm there.

Rob opened the door, and then they were out on the sidewalk in the cool spring night.

Jessica stopped near the street, her hands in her pockets, half-looking for a cab, half-wondering if she needed to.

“I’m really glad I took a chance asking if I could sit next to you,” Rob said.

“Me, too,” Jessica said. “It was a really lovely evening.”

Come on, continue it. I’m sending you the signal. If I’d wanted our time together to be over, I would’ve already said good—

“Any chance I could interest you in a late-evening walk?”

Rob extended his arm, the boldest move he’d made yet, and she melted a little bit.

“That sounds very nice.”

She took his arm, felt a cord of muscle under his shirt.

“I was thinking maybe we’d walk toward the river,” Rob said. “It’s so beautiful at night.”

They headed east on West Fulton, the clouds glowing with the reflection of the city lights.

“It’s funny,” Rob said as they walked under the Kennedy Expressway, “past three Mondays I’ve gone out, just like tonight. You’re the first woman who invited me to sit down.”

“And I’m glad I did,” Jessica said. “I go out a lot, too.”

“By yourself?”

“Yeah. It’s just…well, you know…so hard to meet people.”

“To meet the
right
people.”

“Exactly.” She laughed. “Everyone’s so fake.”

“It’s an epidemic,” Rob said. “People never say what’s really on their mind. It’s all a game these days.”

“I’m right there with you, Rob.”

The streets were quiet, the last of the revelers stumbling out of bars in search of their cars or a late-night cab.

Straight ahead, the downtown rose into the night like a range of luminescent mountains, and Jessica could smell the river. The breeze had taken on a cold, dank component as it swept toward them across the water.

They walked up North Canal, the river flowing like liquid glass.

Halfway across the bridge on Kinzie Street, Rob stopped, and they leaned against the railing.

Watched the current pass beneath them.

Watched the lights of downtown twinkling in the dark.

A comfortable moment of silence, she thought. And a good omen, perhaps, that they could share one on a first date.

Rob pointed toward the old Kinzie Street railroad bridge. “You ever see it up close?” he asked. “From the shore, I mean?”

“I’ve never walked over to that side of the river.”

“Well, come on.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

He took her by the hand, his grip firm and dry, and they moved at a brisker pace across the bridge and then south down the river walk. His stride was brisk, purposeful, and it challenged Jessica to keep up with him.

“Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?” she asked.

“Of course. The city is ours.”

It was two fifteen when they arrived at the base of the old railroad bridge. It soared into the sky, locked open in a raised position at a forty-five degree angle over the Chicago River.

Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance, but otherwise the city stood as quiet as one might ever hope to hear it.

Snowstorm quiet.

Not another car nearby except for a white van parked near the path.

Rob put his arm around her.

She let her head tilt over and rest against his shoulder, wanting to kiss him, thinking if it was going to happen, now was the moment—standing by the river and feeling like they were the only two people still awake in this gorgeous city.

He was staring up at the steel girders of the bridge, and if she could only get him to look down at her, she felt sure it would happen.

The perfect culmination to this glorious surprise of an evening.

“A penny for your thoughts?” she said. She could feel her heart thumping—hadn’t kissed a man in more than six months.

Finally Rob looked down at her.

“I was thinking,” he said, “how beautiful you’re going to look hanging from the end of that bridge over the water.”

The wine buzz vanished.

She stared up at Rob, trying to replay what he’d just said, certain she’d misunderstood, but his grip on her shoulder tightened.

“Wondering if you heard me right, Jessica?”

A strong, metal ache filled her mouth, her heart pounding now, something clenching up inside her chest as the strength flooded out of her legs.

“Happy to repeat myself,” he continued. “I said, you’re going to look so beautiful hanging from the end of that bridge.”

“Rob—”

“That’s not my name. I’d prefer you call me Luther.
Luther Kite
. Perhaps you know me by reputation? I’ve killed a lot of people.”

She screamed for less than a second before his hand covered her mouth, everything happening so fast and with such brute force, her head caught in the crook of his arm as he muscled her toward the base of the old railroad bridge, toward the shadows.

Mace. I have Mace
.

The can was in her purse, probably buried at the bottom. She hadn’t even touched it since she’d bought it two years ago after taking that self-defense class with Nancy and Margaret.

He dragged her into the shadows, and Jessica felt him lift her—airborne for two seconds—and then her back slammed hard into the ground, the breath driven out of her.

Motes of light starred her field of vision, pure panic and oxygen deprivation, but her left arm—thank God—was free. She felt her purse underneath her, got two fingers on the zipper, tugging it open as he whispered in her ear, “No more screams, Jessica. You understand me?”

Frantic nodding.

“Screaming will only make it worse on you. So much worse.”

She jammed her hand into the purse, the back half inaccessible, crushed into the grass under the weight of her and this monster.

“If I take my hand away from your mouth, will you be quiet?”

She nodded again as her fingers grazed the top of the canister, fighting for a workable grip, her chest blitzing up and down. Even her hardest workouts, when her pulse redlined for several agonizing minutes, could never achieve this level of cardiac frenzy.

The man took his hand away, and she stared up at him, her fingers clutching the top of the canister, straining to pull it out from underneath her.

He clamped one hand around her throat, still pinning her under his weight, and with the other grabbed something out of a black duffle bag that she’d failed to notice until now. He couldn’t have had it with him. Which meant he’d planted it here.

“I’ll let you do whatever you want to me,” she said, trying to steady the quiver in her voice. “Just don’t hurt me. Please, God, don’t hurt me. I won’t tell anyone, I swear to you. I just want to live.”

Luther grabbed her right wrist and said, “Give me your hands.”

He was reaching for her left when the canister of Mace broke free.

She found the trigger.

Swung it up in a single, fluid movement, and then she was pointing it in Luther’s face, her finger squeezing, not even certain if she had the damn thing pointed in the right direction, just praying she wouldn’t Mace herself.

A burst of pepper spray exploded sideways out of the nozzle as the man swatted the canister out of her hand.

Luther smiled down at her, Jessica so frozen with concentrated terror that she didn’t even react as he turned her over and bound her wrists together with a thick loop of plastic.

When he rolled her back over, she said, “Please…is there anything I can do?”

She was crying now, and the acrid stench of urine in the air belonged to her.

“Try not to throw up. You’ll choke to death and miss all the fun.”

He reached into the duffle and took out a roll of duct tape.

Tore off a strip, slapped it down over her mouth just as it occurred to her to scream again.

For a moment, the tears blinded her.

When she blinked them away, she saw a knife with a curved blade, and on some plane of consciousness removed from this moment, it occurred to her that it resembled the talon of a bird of prey.

Moaning through the tape now, begging him not to do this, making desperate promises.

He sat on her waist, her hands bound behind her back, and no amount of squirming could jolt him off.

Luther glanced over his shoulder—a quick look up and down the river walk.

She turned her head as well and through the blades of grass saw the path still empty.

“Like I told you,” he said, “the city is ours.”

He grabbed her chin, turned her head back toward him. She stared into his eyes, trying to make some connection through the pitch black, but there was nothing in them approaching compassion or sympathy or anything human.

“It’s coming,” he said. “Are you ready?”

She shook her head, tears welling again.

“Fighting it isn’t going to stop a thing. This is your last moment. I suggest you try to meet it with grace. If it helps, I didn’t pick you because of any perceived flaw. You were a nice woman, and I’m sure you’d have made Rob, or anyone else, very happy. Just your bad luck is all. You were just one of many that I’ve been watching. If any of the other Shedds had been receptive, you and I would never have met.”

But all she could think was,
I’m sorry
. For the things she’d failed to do or been too scared to try. For the people she’d mistreated, for the relationships her pride had destroyed, for the stone wall of a daughter she’d been to her parents over bullshit that didn’t matter, but mostly for the years she’d wasted waiting for someone to complete her when she should have been working on completing herself.

The tears came freely now, and Luther’s dark eyes crinkled.

“I wept not, so to stone within I grew,” he whispered.

His voice ripped her away from all the stunning regret, and raw fear enveloped her. She began to scream, her eyes closed, her voice gliding out over the river, becoming lost in the gentle water.

“They’re going to write about you tomorrow,” he said. “They’re going to make you famous.”

She opened her eyes and saw him pointing that talon toward the glowing
Chicago Sun-Times
sign, looming above the both of them like a neon cloud.

Then he turned the knife on her.

And the cutting began.

March 31, 9:15 A.M.

“N
ervous?”

I glanced over at
Phin
, sitting next to me in the ER waiting room, and then back down at my gym shoes, my toe tapping so fast the Velcro straps were a blur.

I hated these shoes. Velcro was a way of shouting to the world,
“I give up! I don’t care about my appearance anymore!”

But it was true. I’d traded a four-hundred-dollar pair of Yves Saint Laurent pumps for some thirty-five-dollar Keds because my feet were too swollen to fit into anything remotely sexy. Worse than that was the XL T-shirt stretched taut over my waist, pulled over the no-belly shorts, which were still so tight I had the first two buttons undone. My body had become a hideous travesty, courtesy of the alien living inside of me.

An alien that was also trying to kill me, apparently not satisfied with mere physical ruination.

“Why should I be nervous?” I said. It came out clipped and more high-pitched than I would have liked. The air-conditioning was lukewarm, and the smell of lemon bleach was giving me a headache. “I either got better or I didn’t. Either way, I still look like Humpty Dumpty.”

“You look beautiful,
Jack
.” Phin reached over and took one of my sweaty hands.

“I hate when you say that.”

“You do. You’re glowing.”

His blue eyes shone in a pure, wholesome, loving way that made me want to smack him in the mouth. I turned away, staring at the other unfortunates in the waiting room.

ERs were the worst. An impromptu collection of people brought together by bad news and circumstance. Not that I preferred my ob-gyn’s office. Her waiting room was filled with women half my age who liked to chat. Invariably their first question was always, “How old are you?”

Old enough to have known better than to get pregnant this late in life.

Phin’s fingers caressed my hand and then sneakily rested on my wrist.

I pulled away.

“Just checking,” he said.

“You don’t need to check again. That’s the reason we’re here, isn’t it?”