(LB2) Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris Page A

was making a heroic struggle to keep his face still.
    “I felt them when I gripped your shoulder in class last week, but I didn’t know they were so…”
    “Extensive?” I asked savagely. I would not let him look away.
    “Are your breasts cut, too?” he asked, with a creditable attempt at keeping his voice neutral.
    “No. But all around. In circles . In a pattern .”
    “Who did this?”
    What had happened to me had cut my life in two, more deeply and surely than the knives that had traced bloody festoons on my skin. Unable to stop, I remembered once again, descending into a familiar hell. It had been hot that June….

    IT HAD ALREADY been hot for a month. I had graduated from college and had been living in Memphis for three years. I had a nice apartment in east Memphis and a desk job at the city’s largest maid and janitorial service, Queen of Clean. In spite of the stupid name, it was a good place to work. I was a scheduler. I also did spot checks on site and made courtesy calls to customers to see if they were satisfied. I earned a decent salary, and I bought a lot of clothes.
    When I left work that Tuesday in June, I was wearing a short-sleeved navy blue dress with big white buttons down the front and white leather pumps. My hair was long and light brown then, and I prided myself on my long, polished fingernails. I was dating one of the co-owners of a bottled-water supply company.
    My worst problem was the transmission of my car, which had already required extensive repairs. When I left work, I began to worry that it was going to eat up more of my money.
    The car made it down the freeway to the Goodwill Road exit before I had to stop. There was a service station in sight on Goodwill, and lots of traffic, people everywhere. I walked down the exit ramp, nervous about how narrow it seemed when it had to accommodate a woman on foot and cars. Unexpectedly, a van coming slowly down the ramp stopped beside me. I thought, They’re going to offer me a ride to the service station.
    The passenger door was thrown open by someone sitting in the back, who immediately retracted into his crouch behind the passenger’s seat. The man in the driver’s seat was holding a gun.
    When I accepted it for what it was, rather than trying to imagine it was something else, my heart began racing, its thud so loud, I could hardly make out what he was saying.
    “Get in or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
    I could jump off the exit ramp and get hit by a car speeding on the road below, or I could tell him to shoot, or I could get in the van.
    I made the wrong decision. I got in.
    The man who had picked me up, I found out later, was an accomplished kidnapper named Louis Ferrier, called “Nap” by his customers in acknowledgment of his expertise in stealing women and children, most of whom vanished forever. The abducted victims who did resurface were without exception dead, either mentally or physically. Nap had done jail time, but not for his specialty.
    I was handcuffed the minute I got in the van by the man crouched behind the passenger’s seat, an occasional accomplice of Nap’s named Harry Wheeler. Harry reached around the seat, grabbed my hands, cuffed them, and held the chain that led from the cuffs. Then he blindfolded me. The windows of the van were heavily tinted. No one noticed.
    During that dreadful ride out of Memphis, they just talked as if I wasn’t there. I was in such a state of terror, I hardly knew what they said. I could feel death sitting in my lap.
    At the end of the ride, which had led north from Memphis, Nap and Harry exited the highway and met with a representative of a biker gang at a prearranged rendezvous. Nap had rented me to the gang for one night, though I didn’t know that.
    Four men and one woman took me to an abandoned shack in the middle of some fields. One of the men had grown up around there and was familiar with the place. They attached the chain through my handcuffs to the metal head rail of an