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I needed to focus.
I had to be sharp.
As soon as that trunk lid opened, I had to start looking for chances to get away. Watch to see if she got distracted. See if there were weapons to pick up.
I’d seen enough movies to know that once she got me in the house, she was going to bind me somehow. And then the chances of escaping were greatly diminished.
I heard the crunch under her shoes as she made her way toward the back of the car.
There was a pause then. A long one. One that gave me hope that she was genuinely feeling a little regret or uncertainty.
But then, the trunk was opening, and I was left damn near blinded by the bright light behind her after being in the darkness for so long.
Her face was in shadow, making it harder still to make out her features, to see if there was any emotion displayed on them.
Before I could even blink enough to be able to see properly, I felt something slap on my wrist and tighten. Cold. Metallic.
A handcuff.
I moved then, trying to wrench away, but I watched almost as if in slow motion as the other bracelet clamped around my wrist.
So, there went my idea of maybe trying to fight her off.
I mean, I still had use of my hands. She’d bound me in the front. If I came across a weapon, I could absolutely use it to cock and swing. Or maybe even stab if said object was of the pointy variety.
“Come on. Get out,” she demanded, grabbing my arm, but I was surprised that her grip wasn’t bruising, just demanding that I did what she said.
Not seeing much of a choice since I had no chance of fighting the woman off while buried in a trunk, I swung my legs out, then gained my feet.
It was then that I finally got a chance to look around.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting.
I mean, in the movies, you were always tossed in, like, a basement or a shipping container when you were kidnapped. But this was Florida. Almost nowhere had basements. And we were far from a shipping yard.
But… there was a certain familiarity.
I mean, you just knew the Everglades when you were in them.
There was the smell, a mix of mud and water and a slight fishiness.
The ground was lush green up until where it disappeared into the water, which seemed to surround us on three sides.
Confused, I turned to look, not sure where she was taking me.
Surely she didn’t kidnap me just to… drown me.
But then I saw it.
Out there in the water, surrounded and half-hidden by tall trees poking out of the water.
A small cabin.
On stilts.
It had a wrap-around porch and a staircase that led down onto a platform that seemed to serve as a dock of sorts. There was even a small rowboat sitting in the water, tied to the dock with a rope.
There was no bridge, no way to get to it.
Save for the airboat that was sitting up on the grass several yards away from us.
That was where she was taking me? To a house over predator-infested water.
I mean, I almost wanted to give her credit. It was actually a brilliant spot to hold a kidnapping victim.
But as said kidnapping victim, I felt my stomach dropping.
I had no idea how to use an airboat, even if I could manage to overpower her and escape. The rowboat seemed… self-explanatory. But I was just uncoordinated enough that there was real potential for me to upturn the damn thing, leaving me flailing in murky water, drawing the attention of all the alligators and crocodiles who were probably hungry for a good meal.
As if I conjured one up out of thin air, a chunky crocodile pulled his weighty body out of the water to rest on the ground.
I get that I was a Florida native. But I never quite, you know, got used to the damn things. I once watched someone corral one of them into a garbage pail, shut the lid, then relocate him.
I’d have just… let him have the house.
I didn’t mean to jump, to let out a gasp, to show any weakness. But the damn thing surprised me. And I had what I considered a healthy aversion to things that could death-roll me and then eat me.
“That’s Carl,” the woman said, shrugging a dainty shoulder. Like his presence wasn’t menacing.
“You named it?”
“Him,” she clarified. “And yes.”
Was that an accent?
She wasn’t speaking much at a time, but there seemed to be just a hint of an accent on some of her words. But I wasn’t really good enough at accents to tell what hers might be.
“He waits for the birds,” she said, as if I was supposed to understand what that meant. “To clean the teeth,” she said, and I had vague memories of hearing about these little black and white birds who did actually do that. “And he eat the…” she said, flicking a wrist over toward the tree, where I could see a pretty giant iguana hanging off a branch.
