Page 84 of The Trap by Catherine
Christ, it was thrilling!
He felt as if the air in the room was crackling with the electricity of the moment,sizzlingwith it. It took everything he had not to react. To hold himself perfectly still, to steady his breathing, to keep his expression somewhere between mildly curious and totally neutral.
And it got him thinking.
The hardest part, by far, was getting them in the car. The second hardest part was finding someone suitable at the right place and time, and under the right conditions. That was also the stretch of proceedings that carried the most risks.
But what if there was a woman who’d just get in the car? One who was willing?
“I just want to talk,” she was saying on screen, voice cracking, eyes glistening. “I just need to know... Tell me what you did... Show me. Please. Come get me. I will go with you if you take me there.”
She was so fucking desperate. And desperation made people do very silly things. Stupid things. Like push for the summit even though they knew they didn’t have enough left in the tank to get down the mountain, literally and figuratively. Or get into a car with a man who, for all they knew, was a goddamn serial killer, just because they had to know what had happened to their sister even if the only way to find out was to have the same thing happen to them.
Because she couldn’t possibly think she was going to survive it, could she?
Unless...
This could be a trap. A ruse. A set-up. Some hare-brained scheme courtesy of the guards running that three-ring circus—what did they call it again? Operation Tide? What the hell did any of this have to do withtides?—that was designed to force him out of the shadows, so they could pop out swinging their gun-dicks around and arrest his arse.
He’d be rightly done for then.
He felt fairly confident that he’d made himself extremely difficult to find if you worked backward from the scenes, but if they werestartingwith him, if they had a name and an address and a registration number and property records, they’d have no trouble making their case.
It’d be all over. No more climbing.
He wouldn’t even be able to trek to bloody Base Camp then.
And yeah, OK, he had never been trying to get away with all this indefinitely, but that didn’t mean he wanted to serve himself up on a platter like a right fucking idiot either.
When her interview finished, there was this whole other segment, something the voiceover referred to as “our special investigation” several times that, in summary, made it clear the guards were far too lazy and stupid to come up with something as elaborate as that, let alone carry it out.
It even suggested that the reason the guards hadn’t found the missing women was because they hadn’t even managed to identify the right ones.
A fact which he knew to be true.
So he decided that he would take one last risk and approach this sniffling, desperate girl. To call her bluff. To see if she’d get into his car.
If she refused, he’d just revert to his usual methods.
But it had been even easier than he’d hoped. She was in the back now, behind him, and he was telling her everything.
He was going to tell her the whole story, from beginning to end, and in chronological order so there’d be a little twist in the tale.
It felt good to talk.
What was even more surprising to him than her getting in was how docile she’d been since they’d driven away. How calm. Not resigned exactly, but accepting of what was going to happen.
Unless she didn’t quite realize what was in store.
Or maybe she thought that pathetic little bunch of keys in her pocket was going to save her.
Surely, he thought, at some point, she’d realize what she’d done, what was happening to her, and the penny would drop. She’d have second thoughts. Start thinking clearly. Panic.
And that’s exactly what happened. After they left the amber glow and car horns of suburbia, and the intermittent bright lights of increasingly infrequent villages and crossroads. When they finally plunged into the deepest dark of the countryside—that was when she came to her senses.
It could’ve also been because, beneath the car, the ground was rising and had been for some time.
It must have occurred to her that they were heading into the mountains.
