In anticipation of her stop, she scooted to the edge of the seat. “You know what? You never answered my question. Your house is in the other direction. What are you doing on my bus?”
He looked slowly and deliberately around the bus: at the woman muttering to herself in the very back, a middle-aged couple talking excitedly about their winnings a few seats ahead of them, a dealer and a waitress in uniform near the front. Finally he leaned close to her—so close to her shoulder that awareness rushed across her all over again—and whispered, “I’m kidnapping you.”
They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time while the air between them vibrated with shared energy. Holly had the slightest suspicion that Elijah was serious, and that he was crazy. She didn’t want to be kidnapped by a crazy Elijah. Neither should she want to be pretend kidnapped by a sane Elijah. Almost against her will, she found herself saying, “That sounds like fun.”
Just as in Glitterati three nights before, his pupils dilated, expanding to the very edges of his intense green irises before bouncing back ever so slightly.
Her body stiffened with shock at a movement from the bulging pocket of his jeans, where he’d slipped his hand.
“No, Holly,” he said gently, “I’m serious. Don’t move, don’t scream, but I have a gun, and it’s pointed at you.”
9
Her panic whirled so vividly in his mind that he grew afraid of panicking himself, abandoning the gun, and dashing from the bus. He had to keep a grip on himself and whatever sanity he had left, for his sake and for hers.
“Do what I say and you won’t get hurt,” he whispered, because that’s what people said when they were kidnapping somebody. He spread one hand on her bare thigh to exercise more control over her, and also to convince the other passengers, should they glance in Elijah and Holly’s direction, that they were a couple, and that it wasn’t strange for him to keep close to her with his hand in his pocket.
Then he wished he hadn’t touched her, because her thoughts only intensified in his head. She shivered like a frightened rabbit as she tried to puzzle out whether he was crazy or she was crazy, and whether both of them being crazy would make one sane person. And whether he was going to kill her.
He took a breath to say, I told you I’m not going to hurt you—what do you take me for? Just before he said this, he remembered that he’d borrowed Shane’s gun to threaten her. It was important for her to suspect he might hurt her. That’s what the gun was for, stupid!
Instead of discussing the situation with her and getting himself in more trouble, he gripped her thigh harder and squinted out the window. There was her street sign, and the bus brakes squealed. “Get off in front of me, slowly,” he murmured into her ear, a perfect, petite ear with one tiny beauty mark on the lobe. His breath swayed the sparkling rhinestones of her long earring.
He stood and let her edge past him. He cringed as she went over his words in her mind. Get off in front of me, slowly. He meant the bus, right? Or was he asking her to masturbate? She took a few slow steps in her high heels, half expecting him to order her to shove her hands down her panties right then and there.
Elijah couldn’t very well whisper another order in her ear. All he could do was wait for her to figure it out and keep moving forward. This was his luck. Of all the tortures, he had to believe he was able to read a beautiful girl’s dirty mind.
Finally she proceeded up the bus aisle and down the steps, her visible shaking accentuated by the trembling of the baubles on her bikini bottoms. Elijah glanced around, but the other passengers and the driver didn’t seem to take undue notice of him and Holly. Gorgeous, scantily clad girls pursued by dangerously unbalanced losers with guns in their jeans pockets were a dime a dozen in Vegas, apparently.
Standing above her, he wasn’t in a position to help her off the bus, but he watched her for signs she was tottering in her heels. He would have jumped forward to keep her from falling in that case. But Holly was a showgirl, never wavering on her feet, keeping her balance without touching the handrail despite the blind fear Elijah felt coming off her in waves. She hopped down the stairs and then half turned on the sidewalk, waiting for instructions.
Elijah watched the bus roar up the street, careen around the corner, and disappear behind the palm trees. A café faced the main road at the edge of the quiet neighborhood, with Holly’s apartment complex a block down. The café was closed at ten thirty at night, and it had no surveillance cameras in back. He’d checked. No witnesses. “Walk behind the building,” he ordered her.
She obeyed. As she clacked across the parking lot in her heels, her hairdo bobbed. Holly fashioned her thick brown hair in many different ways. After she’d broken her prom date with him, the highlight of Elijah’s sad excuse for a high school life had been to get to class before her so he could watch her walk in and see what she’d done to her hair that morning. Currently the top section puffed in a bouffant bun while the lower half was gathered into a curly ponytail that swayed against her back and occasionally caught in the sequins on the straps of her top. It was very retro, and as they approached Shane’s Catalina, Elijah had the feeling they’d stepped out of a 1960s gangster movie. The only thing that didn’t fit in was Elijah. He needed a tux like Shane’s work costume, yet he was schlepping along in jeans and a UNLV LACROSSE T-shirt, as usual. He couldn’t even commit a felony in style.
Holly didn’t care. She was terrified, bouncing between sympathy for him because he was sick and horror at what this might mean for both of them. In her mind they were both dead already, facedown in the puddles of this parking lot, rainbows of gasoline floating around their heads. Glancing around curiously, Elijah didn’t see any puddles. It hadn’t rained since May. But he told himself that whatever her mind conjured, it was good for his plan if it kept her afraid.
Suddenly she snapped out of her visions of death and stopped short a few feet from the car. “This is Shane’s car,” she cried. Now Shane lay facedown in the puddles in her mind.
“I stole it.” Elijah had planned to say this—not because it had occurred to him she might think he’d murdered Shane, but because she might be less likely to try to escape if she thought the police were already after Elijah and would be coming to rescue her shortly. In reality Elijah had asked Shane if he could borrow his car and his gun to kidnap Holly Starr and drive to Colorado to get their medicine. Shane had said, “Sure,” and had given Elijah a crash course in driving and gun safety.