she could even have trouble with her shiny new Vette.”
“And meet up with bad guys.”
“Or, if she’s lucky, good guys.”
Keeping her determined silence, Patience heard but couldn’t match voices to faces. She didn’t try.
A beer bottle glinted in the moonlight as it was sucked dry and tossed away. The drinker hitched his pants and smiled blearily. “Hey, Snake, are we good guys or bad guys?”
“That depends on what Red here wants.”
Another chorus rose in concert. Obscene speculations echoed, one after the other. In them Patience heard the howl of roving wolves stalking the first kill of the night.
She felt sick, her eyes burned in the unrelenting blaze of lights pouring at her from the darkness. She was afraid, but, oddly, fear had become a source of false strength. Like a spotlighted doe she was paralyzed, frozen in place, too frightened to tremble or cry for their pleasure.
The rider on Beauty’s hood squirmed and turned, sliding his massive body over the glass, craning his neck to see inside. “I don’t care what she wants,” he declared with a lecherous grin baring broken teeth. “I’m in love. Sweet Red has skinny hips. I love red-haired women with skinny hips.”
Patience clung to the steering wheel. Her palms were sweaty, her throat dry as she fought dread and despair. There was no way out. If she had a chance, it was to outlast them.
“Hear that, Sweet Red?” Custer’s voice was soft, cajoling. “Blue Doggie loves you. Why don’t you come out to play with him?”
Patience sat as she had from the first, rigid, unresponsive.
“Hot damn!” Blue Doggie giggled and pounded the hood. “I love it when a skinny-hipped woman plays hard for me to get. Makes it so much better when I do.”
“Sweet Red,” a new voice wheedled. “Come out, come out.” The singsong wheedle took on a hard edge. “If you don’t we’ll just have to come get you. Be nice, save us the trouble and save yourself the wear and tear on this nice shiny car.”
A fist slammed the car. “Dammit, Red, do you hear me?”
The vicious undercurrent in their banter was surfacing. Her time was running out. Feverishly she thought of the derringer in the console at her side. It was loaded and ready. The rifle lying in its case beneath her luggage would be better. The bikers wouldn’t expect a rifle, but she hadn’t a prayer of getting to it, taking it from the case and loading it before they got to her.
Maybe she hadn’t a prayer, but she would fight. As hard as she could, for as long as she could. But not until she had to.
Blue Doggie squirmed on the hood, trying to catch her attention. She stared blankly, her vision focused on a distant point through and beyond his bulging belly. Angrily he reared over her, arms spread, bare chest filling her vision, a snarl hissed through jagged teeth as he planted an obscene kiss on the glass.
Patience bit down on her lip to keep from turning away. He hadn’t touched her, yet she felt as soiled as the sweat-smeared glass. A coppery taste of blood was on her tongue. She ignored it, returning her stare to that distant point in her war of wills.
In frustration or anger, she didn’t care which, the giant slammed a ringed fist into the glass. Cracks radiated from the point of impact in a crazed star. The ruined glass held. Blue Doggie snarled a coarse promise and swaggered away for another beer.
She saw him then.
The seventh rider.
An ebony shadow caught in a swirling haze, etched against the paler darkness of the night. A remote figure, as watchful and mysterious as the desert. Only the bike he rode gave back the light of the rising moon. Not even the churning dust of ancient and forgotten trails could dim the subtle gleam of the excellently maintained Electra Glide. Were it not for that reflection, a small light in the blackness of the moment, she wouldn’t have seen him.
Riding alone a distance behind, the sound of his single engine masked by the throb of paired riders, his coming had been virtually silent. In her panic and in the frenzy of maniacal heckling she’d neither seen him nor sensed his presence.
Seeing him now, a rider apart, a man on the fringes and uninvolved, sent a frisson of something she could only call hope rushing through her. Like a blush it bathed her cold body in a glow of warmth. It made no sense, one more rider would not alter her fate. She was still a woman lost and stranded on a little used desert track. A woman with evil tearing at the door of her last sanctuary.
No, she thought as cold reality swept foolish hope from her heart, there would be no help from that quarter. No help from anyone or anything but herself.
Gripping the steering wheel tighter, without regard for cramping fingers and the mounting ache in her elbow, she stared vaguely ahead, denying her tormentors the pleasure of panic.
She didn’t intend it, didn’t want it, but he was there in the line of her unfocused vision. The seventh rider.
She couldn’t see his face, nor his eyes. But she knew he watched her. She felt the power of his stare keeping her from the oblivion she sought, forcing her to focus on him. Caught up in the erratic moods of terror, she hated him then. More than the others. More than anything. For the frisson of hopeless hope, for watching dispassionately and uninvolved. For engaging her emotions, intruding on her thoughts, and stripping away her one refuge.
She hated him most for destroying the last precious moments of sanctuary before the wolves tearing at her fortress destroyed her.
The slap of a palm against the windshield should have torn her from her bitter thoughts, instead she discovered newfound hate brought with it newfound strength. She was done with hiding. Tearing her gaze from the shadowy apparition, she stared coldly at Beauty’s assailant, her eyes seething with anger.
“Hot damn!” a new heckler crowed. “There’s life here, Blue Doggie. She may be dumb, but she ain’t deaf or blind. She moves, she hears, she sees. If looks were lethal, I’d be road kill.”
Wearied by his prancing and crowing, Patience turned away, her attention drawn again to the source of her strength.
As the moon chased across the sky, beneath its canted light the desert came alive, shifting, hiding, revealing, leaving nothing ever the same in the eye of the beholder. Only he hadn’t changed. Only he was as before, sitting astride his bike, legs bent, feet braced in dust. His hands lay lazily across chrome handlebars, his shoulders were back, his head up. Eyes hidden in shadow were turned to her. Watching.
“Hey.”
Patience didn’t react to Blue Doggie’s return.
“Hey! Look at me,” he demanded.
She didn’t turn.
“I said look, damn you!” Spreading his feet and bracing his hands on the top of the door, he rocked the car as he spoke. “You look at Hogan, you look at me.”
Which was Hogan? Was he the dwarf? The silent one with the scarred throat? She didn’t know, she didn’t care as she clung to the steering wheel to keep her balance.
Abruptly Blue Doggie stepped back, hands raised in an air of surrender. Startled by the conciliatory gesture and mistrusting peripheral vision, she turned to him in time to see his face contort into a rictus of rage. That slight turn saved her eyes, her face, perhaps her life, as a chain crashed down on the damaged windshield.
Glass cracked, breaking free at the point of impact, sending great deadly shards flying into the car. Before the chain whipped down again she scooped the derringer from the console, palming it with cool-headed expertise.
Curbing his swing, Blue Doggie deflected the path of the chain, letting it fall in a clatter over Beauty’s hood. He peered through the gaping hole. First he scowled, then he laughed. “The lady’s packing. A two-shot peashooter, no less.”
“Back