“Mark?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
She thought no more of the odd clothing as she started to talk.
“Thank you for meeting me like this,” she said.
“Don’t mention it,” Mark said, and pulled a large wrench out of the carpenter’s loop on the side of the coveralls. Without hesitation, he drew his arm back and hit her.
It was so unexpected and so fast that Marsha never realized what was happening until it was too late.
She went down like a rock.
Mark saw the deep indentation in the side of her head, as well as the blood beginning to seep from the wound. He grabbed a greasy rag from his pocket and clamped it on top of the blood as he picked her up in his arms. Without looking at her face, he carried her to the open door of the helicopter. There was a large sheet of blue plastic on the floor behind the pilot’s seat. He laid her on it and then rolled her up.
He drove her car inside the hangar to hide it, then got in the chopper, checked to make sure that he’d loaded what he would need for later and revved up the engine. There was no flight plan to where he was going, but it didn’t matter. He knew the way by heart.
Marsha floated in and out of consciousness several times, and each time she came to, she found it difficult to breathe and impossible to move. She tried to call out, but her lips wouldn’t open. There was something wet and sticky on her face and an indescribable pain in her head. She could hear a loud roar, and she could feel a sense of motion.
Fear was swallowing her so fast that she couldn’t keep herself focused. She knew she was hurt. She knew Mark had done it. She also knew that he meant to kill her.
Anger swept through her, knowing he was going to get away with it. She’d been so damned vague about her personal business with Cat. If only she’d called her and told her where she was going. At least Cat would have had a starting place from which to find her body.
At last Marsha’s focus began to waver. She knew she was going to pass out again—this time, maybe for good—and she couldn’t let Mark Presley get away with her murder.
But what could she do? Surely there was something….
Suddenly she remembered her cell phone. It was in her coat pocket. If only she could reach it.
Her fingers felt numb as she tried to move her arms. Whatever Mark had rolled her up in was so tight she could barely breathe, let alone move. Still, she had to try.
Slowly she managed to ease onto one side just enough to give herself room to maneuver. As she did, her arm slid downward, almost of its own accord. She tried not to panic and focused on the baby she was carrying, knowing that the child deserved justice, even if she did not. It was her own foolishness that had gotten her into this mess. It broke her heart to know that her baby’s life was going to be over before it had a chance to begin.
Again and again, she tried to find the opening of her coat pocket, but with no success. Just as she was on the point of giving up, her fingers slid into the void. The contours of the phone were so familiar. She slid her fingernail between the flip-top and bottom, then pushed upward, revealing the tiny buttons beneath.
Her hands were shaking horribly as she tried to picture the numbers on the keys. Finally she punched in the numbers to Cat’s home phone, knowing that, as long as the line was open, the answering machine would record everything.
She tried to count off the time it would take for the call to go through, then for the phone to ring a certain number of times before the answering machine would come on, then the time it would take for Cat’s message to play before it would pick up her call.
She was still counting when she passed out.
Time was a word without meaning, but when she next came to, the sound of the roar had changed, as had the sense of motion. It was then she knew they’d been flying and now they were descending.
When the motion stopped, she tried to call out, but intent never got past thought. She felt herself being dragged for what seemed like forever, and then, abruptly, everything was still.
Before she could think, she was being unrolled. Her arms and legs were like rubber as her body was ejected into a blistering cold. The drastic change in temperature was a metaphoric slap in the face, the push she needed to open her eyes. She did, only to see someone leaning over her. In a last desperate attempt, she reached up.
“Help me,” she whispered.
Mark Presley had flown all the way from the airport to an oil lease he owned in East Texas without a thought in his head beyond what he still had to do. When he dragged Marsha’s body from the chopper and then started pulling it through the woods, he made himself think of what he was going to buy Penny for Christmas instead of what he had yet to do.
He’d never killed anyone before or even imagined being in a predicament where it might be necessary. But there was no way he could have gone through with what Marsha had asked. He was too afraid of what Penny would do, should he be found out.
By the time he got to the edge of the gully, his legs were shaking from the effort of dragging the body. He started to just toss her over, then stopped. The bright blue plastic sheeting in which she was wrapped would be too visible, especially from the air.
Determined to do this right, he began to unroll her. She flopped out face down onto the cold, wet ground. When he gave the sheeting a last hard yank to get it out from under her, it rolled her over onto her back.
When she suddenly opened her eyes and looked at him, reached for him, he was so shocked she was still alive that he staggered and fell backward.
“God damn, why aren’t you dead?”
For a few seconds they were on their backs and lying side by side. Her hair and face were soaked with blood, and yet he saw his own reflection in her eyes, saw her lips move. When he realized she was asking for help, he panicked.
With a spurt of adrenaline born of nothing but fear, he picked her up and threw her over the rim into the tree-lined gully below. The pop and crack of the breaking limbs echoed loudly as they gave from the weight and momentum of her falling body. He was sick to his stomach and shaking in every muscle as he waited for the sound to cease.
Finally it was over. He leaned forward and finally saw a tiny blotch of red through the trees.
“Damn. Her coat. I should have taken it off,” he muttered, but it was too late.
Suddenly, the enormity of what he’d done swept through him. Desperate to be gone, he turned, grabbed the blue plastic sheet and ran through the trees, back to where he’d set down. The still spinning rotors were stirring up a tornado of dust and leaves as he reached the chopper. Frantic now to get away, he ripped off his coveralls, as well as the baseball cap he’d been wearing, wrapped the clothes and the wrench, which was now a murder weapon, in the plastic sheeting, and tied them up along with a couple of nearby rocks he would need for ballast.
When he took off, he went straight up, then headed for a nearby abandoned rock quarry holding more than forty feet of dark, murky water. He circled it once, then dropped the entire package into the middle of the quarry, circling overhead as he watched it sink. Once it was gone, he took off like a bat out of hell, bound for Dallas. He’d only gone about a half mile when he saw a small plane and recognized it as one belonging to a pipeline company in the area. They often flew the path of the buried pipelines searching for leaks, and that was obviously what they were doing today. Too late to take another course, he could do nothing but fly on, knowing full well they’d seen him.
He’d intended to fly straight back to Dallas, but now that he’d been spotted, the only thing he could do was what he did every time he came out to his leases. He turned the chopper toward Tyler, a small town not too far away, then landed on a heli-pad often used by oil and gas companies, and started walking.
There was a barbeque joint a couple of blocks away that he visited each time