Part Fifteen
As soon as he was gone, she tried to put aside her physical complaints. She needed to assess the situation. Her hands were behind her back, rather than under the seat where they'd been when he'd drugged her. Her coat was on her as were her boots. Sick fuck must have wanted to play dress up with his life size Barbie doll. She forced herself to sit up, then move to her knees, trying to see out the tiny circular windows, finding them as blacked out from the inside as from outside. The inside door handle appeared broken, which probably explain why he'd chanced leaving it while he was waking her.
She figured there must still be a way to work it and so she struggled to turn herself around, her knees unhappy with the cold steel floor. She couldn't see behind her and fumble with the lock at the same time, but she tried looking at it to analyze what needed to be done to get it open and then trying to recreate the steps with her hands backwards and upside down.
Luckily, she heard the key sliding in the lock and so was able to shift herself back around to not look quite so guilty when he pulled open the door. He smiled at her, a silent greeting that she nearly returned, except that there was tape over her mouth and she was his prisoner and she kind of wanted to kill him. She didn't even necessarily want him dead; she just wanted to kill him. And as fun as killing him sounded, castrating him while he was awake and aware sounded damn near irresistible.
"You're up. I thought you'd pass back out as soon as I left." He set a few plastic bags next to her. "I got you a toothbrush. Figured you might regret not packing one."
She rolled her eyes, turning her face away so he wouldn't see.
But he saw anyway. "I'm not going to hurt you, remember? And you might want to brush your teeth at some point." He looked around behind him, past the van door. "There's no one around, so can I possibly convince you not to scream if I take that off?"
She wanted to say no, except that her head was still throbbing from shouting at him and she wasn't sure she'd survive a scream. So she nodded, lowering her eyes, hating that she had to be so cooperative with him, uneasy with the idea that she was no longer his equal after so many years.
He nodded to the side. "Move over." When she did as instructed, he climbed in the back, pulling the door closed behind him. "Damn, it's cold out there." He leaned closer, narrowing his eyes when she tried to move away. "Will you stop that shit already?" Satisfied that she was staying still, although it was only due to the fact that she'd reached the far side of the van, he leaned over again and snagged the tape. Rather than the other times, he removed it completely, throwing it aside.
Instinct made her want to rub her cheeks to soothe the sting, but her hands were still bound behind her. Instead she rubbed her cheek against her shoulder, then turned the other way and repeated the action. He pulled off his gloves, then reached out with both hands, pressing his palms against her face, soothing the burn from the tape.
"Sorry about that." After a moment, he pulled back and offered her a soda out of one of the bags. "Thirsty?"
She was, desperately so, if only to calm her displeased stomach. Tentatively, she tried her voice. "Where are we?"
"Not much further than we were an hour ago. The fucking roads aren't plowed up here. Or maybe the snow's just coming down too fast to keep up."
Coughing to clear her throat, she wondered why she felt like days had gone by since she'd been in her apartment, being attacked by her former partner. "An hour? Are we out of Manhattan?" She'd gotten home right around rush hour, so an hour of driving in the snow would still have them close to the city, if they'd even escaped the gridlock that bad weather produced. Except it was really fucking quiet, the sort of quiet that creeped her out. The sort of quiet that didn't happen in New York. The sort of quiet where a murderer might take his victim.
He laughed as he opened her drink, holding it to her lips while she took a sip. "No, we're a little further north of Syracuse." He set the soda next to her, sitting back to stare once again. "I'd have thought you'd at least listen to me what with all the trouble I went through to get you here."
"Syracuse? We got north of Syracuse in a blizzard in an hour?" It wasn't possible. He was obviously lying to her, trying to make her insane, as though he hadn't already succeeded in that. "Where are we going?"
His eyes narrowed. "I know we just went through this an hour ago."
She didn't like the certainty in his voice. She didn't like the concern in his eyes. And she really didn't like the feeling that she'd missed something. But she shook her head emphatically, not realizing until it was too late that the motion would make her head hurt worse. Damn near blinded by the pain, she closed her eyes and waited for the worst of it to subside. "No, you just shoved a damn pill down my throat and that was it."
"That wasn't an hour ago, Liv." He checked his watch. "More like six."
"Six hours?" That must have been some potent fucking pill he gave her; she never slept that long, not without waking up a couple of times. "I was out cold for six hours? What the hell was that pill?"
Laughing, he shook his head. "No, I woke you about an hour ago. Gave you half a sandwich, told you where we're going." He waited for a beat, watching her carefully. "None of this is ringing any bells, is it?"
"No." The thought of having eaten, let alone having had him feed her a sandwich, reminded her that her stomach was pretty fucking angry at her.
"You weren't as pissy then." His brow furrowed and he leaned closer, staring at her eyes. "You know, you really look like you drank yourself stupid last night." Before she could even respond, he continued. "And you don't have any recollection of an entire conversation we had."
"So?"
"So I take one of those pills to get to sleep just about every night, which might explain why you seem to think I've developed a drinking habit."
"I personally scraped you off a bar last week, Elliot." Despite her own argument, his words made sense and explained a hell of a lot.
"I never have more than one drink when I go out. I can't afford it." But a rape mobile appeared within his budget.
Still, she felt rather guilty for having allowed Chuck to swindle him out of a hundred bucks. Then something occurred to her. "Wait, you went out for a drink after you took a sleeping pill?"
He shrugged. "Yeah, so? I usually wash them down with a beer."
She couldn't help but laugh. "You can't mix alcohol and sleeping pills. You're lucky you're not in a fucking coma!"
He ducked down, his cheeks red enough that she could see it even in the dim light coming in through the windshield. "How the hell was I supposed to know?"
She kind of wanted to smack him for his stupidity. "The entire planet knows not to mix alcohol and sleeping pills. That's how rock stars accidentally kill themselves."
He glared at her. "Then apparently, the rock stars aren't aware of it either."
Laughing, she shook her head. "My god, you're a fucking moron sometimes."
He rolled his eyes at her. "Oh yeah, you're real fucking scared of me. Scared to fucking death, aren't you? That's why you're calling me a moron."
His words, apparently meant in jest, brought her back to reality, to the fact that he had her handcuffed in the back of a van in the process of kidnapping her ostensibly to rape and or murder her. The shock of the change stunned her.
It wasn't that she trusted him.
It was that she'd forgotten she didn't trust him.
She felt dumber than she ever had in her life. How had she managed to forget that he couldn't be trusted and joke with him? It was the pill. It had to be. The damn things had apparently turned him psycho, or so he said, so she could easily blame them for her behavior as well.
With all traces of humor gone, she looked up at him. "What do you want with me?"
He closed his eyes, drawing in a deep breath slowly, the same way she'd seen countless authority figures do over the years when she'd annoyed them beyond measure. When he looked at her again, she could tell he was exceptionally mad at her even though his voice gave nothing away.
"I'm taking you to a cabin in the Adirondacks where I can keep you safe until I can figure out what to do with the son of a bitch who came after you and tried like hell to make me look guilty." He reached out, a motion that he'd made more than once in recent days, stroking his fingers lightly against her cheek. "I'm not going to hurt you. With the way things were going, Liv, I just didn't have time to sit you down and convince you." His hand dropped away from her skin. "I don't even know what the fuck I could do to convince you. This way you're safe and I'll have to let you beat the shit out of me later for scaring you."
She tried to hold his stare, to dissect the emotions she saw there, but she couldn't. He sounded so much like the man she'd believed him to be for so long, so much like the man she'd started to believe hadn't existed, so much like the man she'd missed so desperately. It would be so easy to believe him. And so dangerous. There were facts, immutable evidence, that he was guilty. Even the whole thing about the sleeping pills, he could have made the whole thing up just to fool her. If he was really sick psychiatrically, trying to make sense of his motives was a futile exercise. Hell, for all she knew, he was hearing voices that told him to stalk her.
There were things he couldn't explain, like how he'd gotten her key and how her thong wound up on his car. Even his wedding band in her bed – the best he could give anyone was that he didn't know or that someone was framing him. One thing she'd learned after so many years as a cop was that there was rarely, though she wouldn't say never, a brilliant, gifted criminal pulling the strings of hapless individuals who appeared guilty. Usually, the dumbass holding a gun and a stolen credit card was the one who'd used the gun to steal the credit card.
Her brain understood that Elliot was guilty, that, for whatever reason, he'd chosen to harass her and stalk her and try to rape her and kidnap her. The facts were there, the evidence as solid as Cragen had claimed. Had it been any other case, she wouldn't have looked twice. It was that obvious. She was there, after all, bound in the back of a van staring at the man who'd abducted her from her apartment at gunpoint.
Her heart was a different story altogether. A single glance in his eyes assured her that he was telling her the truth, that he was a good man, that he cared for her, that he wouldn't hurt her, that he was doing what he had to do to keep her safe. There were other things that made no sense at all if Elliot were guilty – like the flowers someone else had given his name to buy and the thong that had most likely disappeared while Elliot was accounted for somewhere else. And the fact that he'd already overpowered her several times, yet gone out of his way to make her comfortable, done nothing more harsh than he absolutely needed to in order to keep her with him.
Olivia was ruled just as much by her heart and pure instinct as she was by her head. The only way for her to arrive at a final, decisive answer was to gather more information. Unfortunately, she wasn't going to get her hands on any as long as her hands were cuffed behind her. She knew that the seesawing in her perception that had started before he'd kidnapped her was going to continue, driving her insane, allowing her to let her guard down with the man she loved only to panic for having been suckered in by a nutcase and trying to protect herself from further harm to her fragile, of late, psyche.
Either Elliot was already crazy or she would be soon.
He sighed, realizing not only that the conversation was over, but why it was as well. "We need to get back on the road before the weather gets any worse." Without any further explanation, he stood up, folded over at the waist, and climbed over the back seat and behind the wheel.
Judging from the fact that he'd opted not to open the door, Olivia decided the lock really was busted. He was over six feet tall and wouldn't have gone twisting himself around like that if he could have gotten out the door like a normal person. It seemed that Elliot, for whatever fucking reason, was deeply convinced that he wasn't doing anything wrong; therefore, reasoning with him probably wasn't going to work. Which left her with one option: escape. If she wasn't going to be able to talk her way away from him, she was going to have to run.
She tested the cuffs, finding that they were a little loose, but not nearly loose enough to pull off without losing her thumbs. Luckily, she knew there might be another option. She'd always been tall, long legs, long arms. Her lanky frame, and utter lack of an ass, had drawn no end of criticism in her high school years. Though she'd never tested it, she thought it might work to her advantage.
Keeping her head turned to watch Elliot, she tried shifting herself around. In a matter of seconds, she wound up on her back. The soda he'd given her had helped with her stomach, but not the headache, and so falling and smacking her head into the floor hurt quite a bit. But she didn't have time to waste. She'd never been that good with geography outside the city streets she knew like the back of her hand. She had no idea how much further there was to go.
"You ok back there?"
She froze for a minute, wondering if he could see anything, unable to remember if there'd been a rearview mirror or not. It wouldn't make much sense to have one in a van without any back windows, but that didn't mean shit under the circumstances. He hadn't sounded angry, though, so she decided he must simply have been checking on her.
"It's a little bumpy."
"Yeah, sorry about that."
Pleased that he'd bought her excuse and lapsed into silence, she concentrated on working her hands around her skinny little butt. It hurt like hell, the steel of the cuffs tearing mercilessly at the tender skin of her wrists as she pushed, but she refused to give up. Running would be hard enough with her hands cuffed. As she'd discovered in the alley, running with her hands cuffed behind her wasn't going to work out well.
Finally, with an amount of effort that made her head feel like it might explode once again, she managed to pull her hands and battered wrists down behind her thighs. Then it was just a matter of contorting her legs in such a way that she could pass them one at a time through her linked wrists. Only when her hands were resting, throbbing painfully, on her stomach did she put her head back and rest.
Less than five minutes later she had another unhappy revelation. Every fucking minute that she let him drive north was a minute further away from New York. She'd never been to the Adirondacks, but she doubted they were quite the bustling metropolis that Manhattan was. She infinitely preferred the concrete jungle to forests that hid all sorts of hairy creatures with claws. She'd learned the hard way in Oregon that she was truly a city girl. Just the thought of the cabin he'd mentioned made her shiver at the image of a shack with no insulation or running water.
"Uh, El?" She wished she had the time to wait until the pill induced hangover was gone, but it was better now than never.
"Yeah?"
"I need to use the bathroom." She sort of did, and it was only way she'd come up with that might convince him to open the door. The bonus was that he might stop at a gas station rather than turn her loose, or worse stand guard, behind a bush.
"Ok. I'll look for something."
As he drove, she carefully slid herself over, working her way behind the door that opened. There would only be a short time between when he opened the door and when he realized she'd altered the playing field. Knowing her legs packed far more of a punch than her hands, she shimmied down so her feet were just inside the door, her legs bent. She was ready to strike.
"This place is closed down, but we can probably get the door open." He paused while he turned the van and slowed it to a stop. "And I doubt it was anywhere near clean enough for your standards when it was operating, but there isn't too much up here."
With a pounding heart, she listened as he shifted into park and opened his door. She heard the crunch of snow and ice as he walked around to the back door, saying a quick prayer, in case there was a god and he was interested in winning her trust. And then she waited for the click of the door handle.
She didn't give him the moment he would have needed to realize what she'd done. She struck as soon as she saw him, planting her feet squarely against his chest, kicking with all the might in her legs. As he fell back, she blessed the StairMaster at the gym, the one she'd despised and cursed so many times. And then she leapt to her feet, running for all she was worth.