Page 157 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Click-click-click-click.

The revolver’s cylinder spinning.

Andy tried to analyze Clara’s two different screams, the startled quality of the first one, the smack that had cut off the second one. Not a hand slapping or a fist punching. Paula had struck Andy with the revolver. Had Clara suffered a similar fate? Had she awoken dazed in her own kitchen, walked down the hallway and found Edwin lying dead?

Or had she never opened her eyes again?

Andy cried out as the car hit a bump in the road.

Paula slowed for a turn. Andy felt the change in speed, the pull of gravity. The glow of the brake lights filled the darkness. Andy saw the stub of the emergency trunk release that Paula had cut off so that Andy could not escape.

They were in a rental car with Texas plates. Andy had seen as much when she’d been shoved into the trunk. Paula couldn’t fly with the gun. She must have driven from Austin, the same as Andy, but Andy had been checking sporadically for Mike. Which meant that Paula had known exactly where Andy would eventually end up. She had played right into the bitch’s hands.

Andy tasted bile in her throat.

Why hadn’t she listened to her mother?

The car slowed again, but this time came to a full stop.

Paula had stopped once before. Twenty minutes ago? Thirty? Andy wasn’t sure. She had tried to keep count, but her eyes kept closing and she’d end up having to jerk herself awake and start all over again.

Was she dying?

Her brain felt weirdly indifferent to everything that was happening. She was terrified, but her heart was not pounding, her hands were not sweating. She was hurting, but she wasn’t hyperventilating or crying or begging for it to stop.

Was she in shock?

Andy heard the clicking of a turn signal.

The car wheels bumped onto a gravel road.

She tried not to remember all the horror movies that started with a car driving down a gravel road to a deserted campsite or an abandoned shack.

“No.” She said the word aloud into the darkness of the trunk. She would not let her panic ramp up again, because it would only make her blind to any opportunities of escape. Andy was being held hostage. Laura had something that Paula wanted. Paula would not kill Andy until she got that thing.

Right?

The brakes whined as the car stopped again. This time, the engine turned off. The driver side door opened, then closed.

Andy waited for the trunk to open. She had gone through all kinds of scenarios in her head of what she was going to do when she saw Paula again, primary among them to raise her feet and kick the bitch in the face. The problem was, you needed stomach muscles to raise your feet, and Andy could barely breathe without feeling like a blow torch was blazing open her side.

She let her head rest on the floor of the trunk. She listened for sounds. All she could hear was the engine block cooling.

Click-click-click-click.

Like the cylinder spinning in the gun, but slower.

Andy started counting to give herself something to do. Being stuck in the Reliant, then Mike’s truck, for so many hours had made her the type of person who said things out loud just to break the monotony.

“One,” she mumbled. “Two... three...”

She was at nine hundred and eight-five when the trunk finally opened.

Andy blinked. It was dark outside, no moon in the sky. The only light came from the stairwell across from the open trunk. She had no idea where they were, except for another shitty motel in another shitty town.

“Look at me.” Paula jammed the revolver underneath Andy’s chin. “Don’t fuck with me or I’ll shoot you again. All right?”