Chapter 9

I tried to make the most out of the next hour and a half. Jeremy Saunders, my erstwhile client and source for the GHB I had used in the water that felled Victor/Courtney, had told me she'd probably be out between two and three hours. Lauren had been a bit surprised at Courtney's collapse, but she had obviously figured out ahead of time I was up to something, and I'm sure she could imagine all the reasons it would have been unwise to traipse willingly into the spider's den.

So by the time the combo of Courtney's body and Victor's mind were starting to stir back into wakefulness, we had entered the cabin, discovered a floor panel that hid a tunnel that Lauren vaguely remembered, and been all the way down to the end of it. A large steel door with what appeared to be a fingerprint scanner was there, the high-tech entry system defeated by a large branch that was propping the door open. I was highly reluctant to explore beyond this point because of my increasing paranoia that what we had achieved thus far was too easy, and that Victor would have set some sort of trap or mechanism that would give no end of grief to the unwary traveler that wasn't accompanied by Victor. At least, that's what I would have done in his shoes, and I was trying desperately to keep thinking a couple moves ahead of him. Lauren was also very nervous about going beyond the door, although I suspected she was reacting as much to the memory of what had happened to her there before as to the prospect of nefarious bobby traps now.

Back in the cabin, we had used one of the solid wooden Adirondack chairs we found inside as a combination seating and restraint system for Sleeping Beauty. I had propped her up in the chair and then duct-taped her wrists to the chair's arms. I had searched the cabin's interior but found little of any value. Except for the James Bondesque secret tunnel, it appeared to be a simple hunting-type cabin in the woods.

A search of Courtney's possessions had turned up an unmarked HID card — the same kind of card that is used in office buildings everywhere to wave in front of the sensor that opens key-card controlled door locks and parking lot gates. And it appeared that she was doing better than I was in the arms department; she had a loaded Ruger P-89 semi-automatic pistol, a large-frame 9mm in a stainless steel finish with two extra clips. She had a pouch with syringes and a short length of flexible rubber hose — what some of my clients would have called "works" — and a small vial of some unidentified substance that I was guessing probably wasn't vitamin B-12 supplement. All in all, it looked like Courtney/Victor was not lily-white, and I was doubly glad of my decision to strike first.

All of this was laid out in front of her, and Lauren and I were standing out of sight watching, as Courtney began to regain consciousness. We saw her move her head and test the strength of her duct-taping before we moved into view.

She saw us and froze, and I could see the calculations going on before she spoke. "I guess 'What is the meaning of this' isn't going to work?" she asked.

"No, not now," I replied evenly.

"What gave it away?" she asked.

"That's not important just now either," I replied. "What is important is where we stand. Or more accurately, for you to observe the fact that you don't stand anywhere. You are confined to a chair and secured with enough duct tape to keep a roof on a mobile home during a windstorm. And you are confined in a place where nobody but we two..." I indicated Lauren and myself "... even knows you're here, and you're in a body that won't be missed by anyone at all."

I paused. "I mention this to say that you are not exactly in a position of strength here vis-à-vis bargaining."

"Maybe so. But I have one or two bargaining chips." She looked at me standing next to Lauren, cocking her head speculatively. "She's really got you hooked into this, hasn't she? You just drugged a woman and tied her up, mister lawyer. That's kidnapping. She must have really sold you on this story to get you to do that. I figured she'd try to get someone on her side, but I have to admit... I never figured she could get anyone to cooperate so much, so quickly."

I frowned. "That's not really relevant to..."

"The question is, how'd she do it?" she went on as though I hadn't talked. "I mean, the damsel-in-distress routine can only go so far. Did she actually go so far as to give up the precious poontang? Did America's sweetheart actually spread her legs to get you hooked on this thing?"

Without a word I gestured to Lauren and headed towards the door with her in tow. I stepped outside and closed the cabin door behind us, then stepped across the dirt trail. Lauren's face was white with anger, and as soon as we were far enough away, she exploded, "That asshole! I can't believe..."

I held up my hand. "I can. He's trying to get us riled up. Angry people make mistakes. Angry people reveal things that they hadn't planned on revealing. Angry people leave themselves open to being tricked or manipulated."

Lauren exhaled and then looked at me. "Rick," she said, "I have no idea what our plan is, so I don't know what I can reveal that..."

I grinned at her. "Me, either."

"Wha... ?"

"My plan, such as it was, has officially run its course. I have no idea what we should do next, either. But one thing I am sure of: we can't concede any advantage to that person in there. At least some of what she told us in the coffee shop yesterday was bullshit. How much of it? I have no idea. Why did she want us, or you, specifically, back here? I have no idea. I want to find out those things without giving up anything. So — let's not get riled. Let's stay calm, and see what we can come up with from what she says."

She nodded. "OK. I trust you. And... you know that I would never... I mean, that I didn't... that what we did wasn't about..."

I held out my arms to her and she came into them. I held her tightly and said, "Yes. I know. And that's not going to be the last ugly thing she says to me about you, or to you about me. OK? So let's just tell ourselves now that we know how we feel, and no garbage from a psycho is going to have the slightest effect on us — OK?"

She nodded into my chest and then looked up and gave me a quick kiss. "Deal," she said.

"And remember it works the other way too, Lauren. In any effort to persuade him/her where his/her best interests lie, I may say some things that scare you. Remember it's just negotiation, OK? It's not the real me."

She nodded again. "I get it." A quick nervous smile flitted across her face. "Go get 'er, tiger."

"Him."

"Right." She looked puzzled. "Well, sorta."

I grinned. "The English language has no gender-neutral pronoun."

"Well," she replied, "in all fairness to our ancestors, how often did they deal with insane psycho rapists transferring their consciousness into bodies of the opposite sex?"

I nodded, and then, looking sideways at her, said, "All the time. It happens in Missouri all the time."

Without missing a beat, she looked at me and said, "It does? Well, bite my lip!"

I beamed at her. "You, my dear, are amazing." I started to head back, and then said, "Give me about thirty seconds before you come in, OK?"

I paused at the threshold and thought about how to play this. For all Lauren's adaptability and smarts, I didn't see a credible good-cop, bad-cop scenario. As cliché as it is, interrogation methods like that work, which is undoubtedly why they become clichés.

As I re-entered the cabin, I saw our prisoner had been trying to work her arms back and forth to loosen the tape. I chuckled and said, "You know how long that would take you?"

She froze for a moment, and then said, "It was just something to try to keep from getting bored."

I looked down at her. "The last thing you should be right now is bored," I said. "You need to think things through carefully. I just explained to you how you're in the middle of nowhere and no one would miss you. If I dug a grave out there in the woods for you, it would be years, if ever, before the body was discovered, and even then there'd be no way for the authorities to ID it, and no link to me at all. Remember? You don't exist." I paused. "At least, this body doesn't exist."

She (he?) was good. There might have been a flicker of concern on her face before it was replaced by an elaborately nonchalant expression. "OK, tough guy," she said. "Fine. You got it. I believe some lawyer is ready to kill someone he barely knows and bury the body in the woods next to Jimmy Hoffa. I'm shaking. But you're forgetting about your little fuck-buddy there. I die, there goes the last chance she ever has of getting her life back."

I stepped closer to the chair and whispered softly, "And why do I care? Think about it. How's a guy like me score a piece of ass like that? Right now, she's got nowhere to turn and no one to help her. Of course she's gonna give it up to me. I put her back on stage with fifty thousand people screaming her name, she's gonna be on stage so fast she'll leave skidmarks. She'll dump the $30,000 a year Legal Aid lawyer and be dating some band's front man or some NFL quarterback in a week. The way I figure it, the last thing I want to do is help her get her life back." I paused, and tried to look sufficiently skeevy. "All I have to do is make her think I'm trying to help her."