Obsession (5 page)

“Katharine.
You’ve got to do this, understand? Tear the duct tape around my wrists with your teeth.”

The fierceness of the whisper penetrated the fog that was clouding Katharine’s mind, sapping her muscles of their strength, turning her limbs to lead. Lisa’s words finally registered, and Katharine deliberately widened her eyes and took a deep breath and fought for clarity. Then, before she could otherwise move or reply or do anything else at all, a loud thud from the direction of the den, followed by a string of vicious male curses, made her heart leap.

“You dropped it!” The roar rose accusingly over the cursing.

“Well, shit, it was heavy!”

Lisa, who’d been in the act of kicking her again, froze with her heels scant inches from Katharine’s thigh.

Katharine froze, too.

Fear shoved out the last of the fog as realization burst on her like a bomb: They didn’t have much time. The bad guys were still there, just a room away. They could be coming back for her and Lisa at any moment.

She
really
didn’t want to be here for that.

“Do it.”
Lisa completed the kick.

Katharine still felt as if half her brain had turned into cotton candy, but now that she remembered what had happened and that both their lives were at stake, the other half of her brain, along with the rest of her, was definitely with the program.

If she and Lisa didn’t get out of there soon, they were going to die. It was as simple—and as galvanizing—as that.

“Yes, okay,” Katharine whispered.

Focusing required painful effort, but Katharine did it. She attacked the duct tape around Lisa’s wrists with her teeth, ignoring the shaft of fire that shot through her excruciatingly sensitive nose as she accidentally brushed it against the warm firmness of Lisa’s forearm. The pain was bad, bad enough to make her want to pull back and lie very still for a very long time, waiting for it to subside. However, death was worse. With that thought lodged at the forefront of her mind, Katharine ignored the pain and went after the tape with a ferocity born of desperation. Lisa kept her arms as stiff and still as possible, stretching them backward, straining against the tape with all her strength to take advantage of the tiniest rip.

There wasn’t one. Despite Katharine’s best efforts, the tape remained intact. It was gummy and acidic-tasting and just plain nasty. Getting any kind of purchase with her teeth was difficult. She kept hitting her nose on Lisa’s arms. The resulting pain would have been disabling under any less dire circumstances. The appendage was as sensitive as an exposed nerve. It was so damaged that she couldn’t breathe through it; she had to gasp for air through her mouth. She was almost positive it was broken.

Not that the state of her nose mattered at all under the circumstances. They had only this brief window of time. . . .

“Hurry,”
Lisa breathed.

It seemed like hours passed. Days. Weeks. Months. But when she caught a glimpse of the microwave’s clock, she realized that she was wrong. It was only one-fourteen. Impossible to grasp that only seven minutes had passed since she had last looked at those glowing numbers.

No matter how it felt, she couldn’t have been chewing on the tape for longer than a minute or two.

“Don’t do that,” one of the bad guys snapped, loud enough so that Katharine jumped as if she had come into unexpected contact with a live wire.

“You got a better idea?” came the growled reply.

Heart pounding, Katharine quit with the tape for long enough to shoot a nervous glance over her shoulder toward the door. They sounded so close—terrifyingly close. Still, nothing more than the sliver of dining room that she’d been able to see before met her gaze: a corner of the glass-topped dining table, part of an upended gray-and-chrome upholstered chair, the painting of the single lily in a vase lying where it had been flung on the carpet. There was no sign of the men, thank goodness. They were in all likelihood still in the den; obviously, they had no idea what was happening in the kitchen.

Fright flooded like ice water through her veins as she arrived at the unavoidable conclusion: probably not very long.

“Hurry,”
Lisa breathed.

Oh, yeah.
Recalled to herself, Katharine attacked the tape with renewed desperation. Her heart thumped. Her pulse raced. Her stomach twisted itself into a pretzel. At any moment—at any second—one of the men could come back into the kitchen.

Then she had no doubt at all that she and Lisa would die. After all, the bad guys had found the safe. They didn’t need either of the women anymore.

Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.
The word formed an urgent chorus in her brain.

“Where you going?” The raised voice belonged to the bad guy who had slammed her face into the floor. Even as she nearly had a heart attack, Katharine recognized it without a doubt. There was a roughness to it, a hint of New York or New Jersey street in the accent. He was clearly talking to his partner, who was just as clearly no longer nearby.

Oh, God, where was he? Her heart thumped like a piston in her chest as her every sense strained to find out. She couldn’t tell; she could hear nothing, no footfalls, no sounds at all, to locate him.

Panic gave her strength. She got a grip with her cuspids, ripped downward. Miracle of miracles, the tape tore.
Yes.
The moment was electric, and Lisa felt it, too, Katharine could tell by the triumphant clenching of her fingers. It was just the smallest rip, but it gave them hope, made success seem not so impossible after all. She kept at the tape like a terrier, the taste metallic in her mouth. Or maybe that metallic taste was blood. She didn’t know, didn’t care.

Muscles straining, using short, sharp jerks that caused the tape to snap taut each time, Lisa tried to yank her hands apart as Katharine kept feverishly ripping at the layers of tape. Slowly, slowly, way too horribly slowly, it tore. . . .

Lisa forced her arms apart and suddenly her wrists were free. As Katharine, panting, let her head sag down onto the tile, their eyes met in a single brief moment of triumph. Then Lisa, loose strips of tape dangling from one wrist, jackknifed into a sitting position, yanked the tape from her mouth, and bent to claw at the tape around her ankles.

The sound of a flushing toilet answered at least one urgent question: the location of the second bad guy. He was in the powder room off the entry hall. For about half a heartbeat, knowing where he was even made Katharine feel better.

Then she realized that the kitchen could be his next stop. All he had to do was turn left and walk about a dozen paces straight down the hall. The arched opening that led from the entry hall into the kitchen didn’t even have a door on it. He would be able to see them long before he reached it.

Lisa moved, and Katharine watched with her heart in her mouth as Lisa scooted on her butt across the kitchen floor. Katharine only realized her intended destination as Lisa grabbed the handle on the cutlery drawer and pulled it open. The soft slide of the roller mechanism sounded loud as thunder to Katharine’s ears, and her heart pounded in answer as she shot a terrified glance at the door. The clinking of the cutlery as Lisa reached inside the drawer made her jump and brought her gaze flying back. A second later, Lisa’s hand, which was still lost in the depths of the drawer, reappeared, triumphantly clutching a serrated steak knife. She sliced down with it, sawing with fierce sweeps through the duct tape binding her ankles.

“You wanna give me a hand with this?” the first bad guy called out. Katharine almost swallowed her tongue as she glanced around again: nothing.

“Thought I’d go ahead and take care of the ladies,” his partner answered. Katharine’s breathing suspended. She looked wildly back at Lisa in time to see her pull the tape off her ankles. “Get that out of the way.”

From the sound of his voice, he was close. Way close. Steps away.

Panic broke over Katharine in an icy wave. Her whole body was suddenly bathed in a rush of cold sweat. Her heart kicked into triple time. Her stomach went into freefall. Her eyes locked with Lisa’s, then widened in horror as Lisa stood up and she realized that Lisa was free—but she was not.

Knife in hand, Lisa scrambled toward her, bent over her, sliced savagely at the tape around her ankles.

“We got plenty of time for that.” The first bad guy sounded impatient. “Come here and help me with this first.”

The footsteps paused for what seemed an interminable amount of time, then resumed in a changed direction.

Phew.
Katharine felt as if she might collapse from relief.

The knife went through the tape around her ankles like it was tissue paper.

As the grip of the tape eased, Katharine frantically tried to pull her ankles apart, and suddenly she was free, too.

“Let’s go,”
Lisa whispered. She grabbed Katharine’s upper arm just above the elbow, propelling her to her feet, hacking at the tape around Katharine’s wrists at the same time. The tape split, and Katharine tore her wrists lose from their sticky confinement. Coming upright so fast made her head feel as if it would explode. A knifelike pain from where she had been kicked shot through her side, making her fear that she had at least one cracked rib. Pins and needles attacked her blood-deprived arms as they moved. Sucking in air, she tried to run and discovered a terrible truth: Her legs did not want to work. Dizzy and weak, battling a sudden attack of nausea, Katharine forced herself into motion anyway, her legs heavy and her feet clumsy as she lurched crouching after Lisa, who was already darting away toward the far side of the kitchen. A small laundry room was located there, and in that laundry room was the back door.

Moonlight slanted through the not-quite-shut blinds on the two small double-hung windows behind the washer and dryer. The yellow glow of a streetlight in the alley beyond the small backyard and row of detached garages shone through the glass set into the top half of the door, making it fairly easy for them to see where they were going even though the laundry room light was off. Set into the wall just a few feet from the back door was the calculator-sized panel for the security system. The tiny light on it gleamed green, Katharine saw as she reached the door of the shadowy room seconds behind Lisa. Her thinking was slightly fuzzy, she knew, but that seemed to indicate that the system still worked. So why hadn’t the alarm sounded when the intruders had broken in? Had she forgotten to turn it on? Or had they somehow known the code? Then she realized that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the panic button at the bottom of the control panel might still be functioning, too.

It was connected directly to the police department. All she had to do was hit that button and cops would be on the scene within minutes.

If it still worked, that is.

Flying across the room in Lisa’s wake, she detoured slightly and stabbed the button hard just as Lisa reached the back door.

What she heard next made her forget about everything except the need for immediate escape: the quick slap of footfalls walking into the kitchen.

They sounded as loud as an alarm to her ears.

There was a split second in which her heart shot into overdrive. Her stomach clenched. Her blood turned to ice. Her eyes instinctively swiveled toward the rectangle of light that was the door to the kitchen.

For a terrible moment, nothing happened. Then . . .

“Hey! Where are they?” At first the man sounded confused, as if he thought he might just be overlooking his captives. A second later he managed to put things together and yelled, “They’re gone!”

Their escape had been discovered.

The frantic breath of sound came from Lisa as she fought to open the back door, twisting the knob, tugging at it without result. Katharine heard it as she reached her friend, who cast a hunted look back over her shoulder.

Frantic with terror, not understanding anything except the need to
get out that door NOW,
Katharine pushed Lisa’s hands aside, grabbed the cold metal knob, turned, and pulled, too.

To no effect. The knob turned, but the door didn’t budge.

Then
Katharine understood.

The door was equipped with a dead-bolt lock that required a key to open. It had been designed that way to counteract the security risk posed by the window set into the top of the door. The key that fit the lock was at that moment hanging from a slender length of blue satin ribbon on the Peg-Board beside the dryer.

Some six feet away.

Her eyes flew to it, and then she leaped for it just as a man’s tall silhouette appeared in the laundry-room doorway.

3

T
rapped. We’re trapped.

At that awful realization, adrenaline shot through Katharine’s veins. Her heart gave a great leap. Her breathing suspended. Her pulse raced. If they didn’t find a way out
now,
they were going to die.

“Hold it right there!”

The shout, coming as it did as she snatched the key from the Peg-Board and whipped back around with it, made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. This was the second bad guy, the one who had searched the place, Katharine realized from his voice. She could hear the other one coming, his footsteps a quick, continuous drumbeat of sound as they pounded across the kitchen.

Panic clutched at her heart.
Time’s up.

This guy’s gun was in his hand now. He had pulled the weapon out from behind his back. She saw the moving glint of it as the light from the kitchen touched the metal. In a moment of dreadful clarity, she realized that he was raising it, positioning it, aiming at Lisa, whose back was turned to him as she tugged frantically at the door.