Pressure. The pressure weighed down heavily on him.
The room was small, dark and cramped. It struck Josh as vaguely reminiscent of a madhouse's cells. Unfortunately for him, this madhouse was run by the patients. And one of them was atop him now.
Alice Pierpont's macabre maroon eyes stared down into his with lunatic passion. Her lips, oddly red against her pale skin, curved up in a pleased grin. Her flesh was warm against his, but damn if he wasn't scared shitless. One of his wrists was handcuffed above him; the other ankle was roped neatly to the bedpost.
She'd brought him up here, tied him down like a sacrificial victim, and then cut his clothes off with great care and a queer sort of neatness. Not a scratch on him. After that,she'd pounced on him.
"Oh, Josh," she breathed. "This just...brings it all back. I've missed you." She leaned down, breathing against the hollow of his neck. He could smell perfume on her but couldn't identify it. His tongue was dry and his mind was racing, seemingly in circles. Sociopaths were damned hard to figure out anyway, and he'd never been able to figure out Alice that well.
"Look," he said, struggling to maintain his calm. "Alice, I don't know...what you think you're going to do to me, but...,"
She leaned in close and pressed her lips to his nose. "Silly boy," she said. "I'll give you three guesses what I plan to do to you. You had a hint. It won't hurt."
His mind spun. What was he supposed to do now? Well, it was obvious what she wanted from him. Was there a way out? He flinched as she bent down to kiss him. Her face quirked.
"Josh," she said thinly, "if you keep doing this you'll upset me, and when I get upset I have the tendency to do something nasty, which you know I'm capable of doing."
"Alice," he said quickly, and swallowed. What were you supposed to say to a psycho who had fallen in love with you? Clarice might know. Then the idea occurred to him that Clarice might've helped her somehow.
"What?" Alice said, and seemed interested.
"You're...you don't understand. I--," his voice seemed choked. Things seemed pretty grim. Clarice was somewhere down below, and there were plenty of hostages.
"What don't I understand?" Alice asked, sounding quite reasonable.
"You...you can't do this," he said, his mind still reeling. "You've got to...to understand, you can't keep this up forever."
"Yes, I can," Alice said promptly. "Well, for as long as I need to. I don't know if I'm going to hang out forever with Teek, but for long enough. Allow me to remind you, Josh. We brought you here. You didn't catch us." She smiled brightly, as if all this mayhem and destruction had been great fun. Which, it occurred to him, it had been. "Things have been great since I got out. I've been feeling better than ever before. Higher and higher, Josh, it's never been like this. You being here is...the icing on the cake."
Uh-oh. Off her meds and royally jazzed. This wasn't a good thing. She pressed herself down on him and smiled.
Possibilities ran through his mind. None seemed good. He didn't know what to do next. The gravity of his situation was not lost on him. If he got her angry, God only knew what she might do. The lives of innocent people might rely on what he did, and that wasn't lost on him either.
Still, maybe he could buy some time.
"Alice?" he asked.
"What, honey?" she asked coquettishly.
"Did Clarice...did Agent Starling ever...help you break out?"
Alice stopped. "She took me to the funeral," she said, as if confused. "Why? Who cares about Reesey? I promise you she's just fine. She's in her dressing room. I'll get her some Pringles when we're done. She likes Pringles, you know."
He swallowed. He didn't think Clarice liked Pringles at all, but somehow Alice had gotten that idea. The crazed image of Clarice bound in a chair while Alice rammed salty chips down her gullet by the tennis-ball-canful arose in his mind and he had to blink to force it away. "Well...yes, but...did she ever help you escape beyond that? Or give you information?"
Alice blinked at him for a moment, clearly puzzled. "No," she said slowly. "Reesey didn't help me escape. Not willingly. She just took me to the funeral, that's all. Reesey has been chasing me just like you have. But now I got you and I don't want to talk about Reesey any more. It's you and me time now."
"Have you talked to your father since you got out?" he persisted.
Her face darkened. "Joooosh, I do not want to be thinking about my father right now. You gotta create the mood."
"Just answer the question...and...don't hurt anyone," Josh said slowly. "If you agree to do that...I'll...," he sighed. "I'll try."
"No. Haven't seen hide nor hair of the man," she said petulantly. "There. Are you satisfied?"
He sighed. He didn't want to be this monster's plaything, but he couldn't think his way out of this. She frightened him. She'd captured him so easily whenever she chose. His brain was a sodden lump in his skull. No answers came from the back of his mind, the way they had so many times before.
"You know I would never hurt you, Josh," she said indulgently. "Now just relax, okay? I've been waiting for this." He felt her hand snake between their bodies and tensed. Alice chuckled and sang merrily.
"And that's just one small fraction....of the maaiiiin attraction....you need a friendly hand...and I need action..."
...
Pressure. The pressure weighed down heavily on her.
Everything had been most hunky-dory up until now. They'd made a movie, sent it on, moved on. She'd had the chance to show her creative vision. Alice and Colin had been compliant with her needs. It was necessary! She had to create her art, and for that she needed them. She had been the leader, but she had been a fair and just leader.
Now it was all coming apart. All of it, just because of those fucking FBI agents.
Chatiqua had known that they would pursue from the moment she set Alice free. She'd manipulated them like pieces on a chessboard. Of course they would pursue. But it had been Alice's idea to put them in the next movie. Once they'd gotten them there, Alice had stopped thinking like an actress. She didn't seem to care about Chatiqua's vision any more. All she cared about was the demands of her loins.
"Dammit, dammit, dammit," Chatiqua muttered under her breath. She pounded her coffee-colored fist against the wall. She sat down with the digital camcorder. None of these scenes were usable. Not a goddam one. Before, they'd gotten everything in one take, sometimes two. Before, everything had been just great. Now, the FBI agents had ruined everything.
She didn't see what it was Alice saw in Josh Graham. He wasn't very tall or muscular. Alice had said he was smart. He might've been, but Chatiqua was smarter. He had taken direction fairly well, Chatiqua had to give him that.
Get ahold of yourself, girl. In a few hours, Graham and Starling will be dead. Alice will go back to helping with your vision again. You let her scratch her itch, and everything will be cool.
How could Alice betray her like this? They'd been friends for years. Now some FBI guy came along and Alice was oozing for him. Everything she had built was at risk now. Everything!
She had to kill them. If Colin was too freaked out to do it, she'd do it herself.
Colin was another matter. She had known for a while that he was getting to like Alice. To an extent, that was okay. Actors who liked each other had better screen chemistry. And Alice and Colin had screen chemistry in spades. The 'Hot Hot Hot' video would be one for the history books. Film schools of the future would show that, in a time to come when her work would be recognized for its brilliance.
But if he liked Alice too much, then they might not listen to her anymore. They might want to go off and do their own thing. How could they? How dare they? Her vision came over everything. She'd risked her life and limb for it.
Nothing has happened, girl. Simmer down. Alice is upstairs with him...and she'll get over it. She'll understand. My vision is what matters. My vision is all that matters.
She could feel it pressing in on her. Pressure. Pressure. Everything slipping out of her grasp, the fine gears and rotors of the machine she had built to do her work falling into disrepair. She heard a creak from upstairs and barely swallowed the shriek.
Chatiqua Miller put her hands to her face and drew in a sharp, shuddering breath through her nostrils. She let it out slowly. Kill them and it will be okay. It was a soothing thought, like a mantra. She repeated it to herself, hoping to gain back her inner peace. Kill them and it will be okay.
Kill them and it will be okay.
...
Pressure. The pressure weighed down heavily on him.
The pressure was of two origins. Heart and head, the oldest in the human condition.
Head was by far the easier of the two to look at rationally. By its nature, his heart was hard to examine critically. His rational concerns were far easier to enumerate and examine.
Chatiqua wanted to kill the FBI agents. Colin could understand that, but he believed it was a mistake. Right now, they weren't really that high on the FBI's list of priorities. There were two agents after them. It was a pain in the ass, but it hadn't gotten in their way. They'd been able to get away with a lot, all things considered.
If they killed the FBI agents, though, things would be a lot different. They'd move up on the FBI's scale of bad guys to catch. Instead of two agents, there would be many more. Twenty, thirty, forty, maybe a hundred. He didn't know.
The point was, capturing the FBI agents had been a mistake to begin with. Killing them would only compound that mistake. Colin didn't see any other way out of it, though. A few ideas sprang into his head – tie them up and leave them somewhere, knock them out, or something – and all died weak deaths like small fish flopping on a bank. If the FBI agents were let go, they'd come after them with double force. The woman seemed like the type who would be death on wheels if she was humiliated the way she had been. Colin didn't want to be around her when the handcuffs came off.
That thought led irretrievably to his heart. The male FBI agent. Graham. Josh Graham. Special Agent Joshua Fucking Graham.
Alice had fascinated him from when they had first met. Colin wasn't terribly experienced with women; he never had been. Most women didn't seem interested in him after realizing what he was. Once he'd gone to prison, he'd taken another step down on the desirability scale, even though the only thing he'd actually been caught for was the felony B&E. The other things he had done remained undetected.
He didn't think he loved her. All that had been a crock of shit to him. The world had a lot more pain in it than it did love; such he had learned as a small boy bouncing from foster home to foster home. But he liked her, sure. She was the only woman other than Chatiqua who knew what he was and accepted him. Chatiqua was too bossy for him to ever consider her that way. And Alice was prettier and had a better body, in his opinion.
So once Josh Graham came into the picture, Alice ran off to screw herself silly with him and Colin was just so much chopped liver. It was disappointing. He knew he didn't have any reason to get angry. Alice wasn't his girlfriend. They hadn't ever tried to do anything. But dammit, he didn't like it.
Heart and head colliding. His head said not to kill the FBI agents. He still didn't want to kill the woman; she seemed cute and Alice had asked that she be spared when they'd gotten her out. But Josh Graham was a much different story. Colin's hands flexed, imagining the sheer brutal satisfaction that snapping his neck would bring. He touched the heavy pistol at his side and imagined Graham sniveling beyond the sights for a heartbeat before a bullet spread his brains on the wall. Colin could close his eyes and see it easily; he knew what brains looked like when you shot someone in the head.
Why did she like him anyway? He was this short little guy, prissily neat. Colin was taller and better built. Josh Graham reminded him of the chess-club or math club types in school, the sort who wore sweaters and clutched their books to their chest. He was shy and didn't strike Colin as the type who would even go into the FBI.
Colin left the weird little house that they'd found. Some rich guy had built it like a hundred years ago. Chatiqua had found it and decided it would make a perfect movie set. It was open to the public now, like a museum, and it hadn't been too hard to plug the curator and take it over.
They were in Indiana now. Were they ever going to make it to California? And what were they going to do there? They had to keep moving if they wanted to keep from getting caught.
He wasn't sure what to do anymore.
The night air was cool, even though the day had been warm. Colin heaved a sigh and wondered what would come next. Would he do what Chatiqua wanted? Usually he did. It was easier to give her what she wanted than it was to fight her. And killing Graham would be very pleasurable indeed.
The snap of a stick interrupted his reverie, and he drew his pistol. A shape coalesced out of the darkness, approaching the house. A faint snick came on the night air. Down by the body he could recognize the curve of a blade deploying. Not FBI, there'd be more of them and they'd have had machine guns.
Colin aimed his pistol at the figure, still twenty feet away. Center of mass, just like the cops did. The figure stopped and seemed to examine him.
"Don't even think about it," Colin said calmly.