“‘S what I said.”
“For sure? You ain’t joshing us, Custer?”
“Red-gold and curly,” the biker called Custer assured them. “And lots of it.”
Patience stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed, focused on nothing. She refused to turn, refused to acknowledge him.
“Hey! I said.” Custer slapped a hand against the window again. The report rivaled the sound of a gunshot in the murky interior of the car. “What’s the matter, Red?” He bent closer, his goatee brushing the window. “Are you deaf? Blind? Cat got your tongue?”
Another rider joined him. Another face to peer at her. Patience didn’t turn, didn’t look.
“Funny,” the second observed, “she don’t look deaf.”
“How can you tell?”
“She’s wearing earrings. Deaf people don’t wear earrings.”
“Who says?”
“I dunno, me, I guess.”
“Maybe she’s not blind, either.” A third rider, a gross giant of a man running to fat, leapt to the hood, draping himself over it as he pressed his forehead to the windshield to smirk down at her. “Nah. She ain’t blind, I saw her blink.”
“Of course she’s not, dummy,” a fourth voice interjected. “Who do you think drove out here?”
“Who you callin’ dummy?”
“You, dummy. Who else?”
“That’s it.” Custer snapped his fingers, interrupting the budding altercation as if an idea just occurred. “She’s crazy. Gotta be. Only a crazy woman would drive in the desert alone at night.”
“Yeah, who knows what might happen?”
“Why she could even have trouble with her shiny new Vette.”
“And meet up with bad guys.”
“Or, if she’s lucky, good guys.”
Keeping her determined silence, Patience heard but couldn’t match voices to faces. She didn’t try.
A beer bottle glinted in the moonlight as it was sucked dry and tossed away. The drinker hitched his pants and smiled blearily. “Hey, Snake, are we good guys or bad guys?”
“That depends on what Red here wants.”
Another chorus rose in concert. Obscene speculations echoed, one after the other. In them Patience heard the howl of roving wolves stalking the first kill of the night.
She felt sick, her eyes burned in the unrelenting blaze of lights pouring at her from the darkness. She was afraid, but, oddly, fear had become a source of false strength. Like a spotlighted doe she was paralyzed, frozen in place, too frightened to tremble or cry for their pleasure.
The rider on Beauty’s hood squirmed and turned, sliding his massive body over the glass, craning his neck to see inside. “I don’t care what she wants,” he declared with a lecherous grin baring broken teeth. “I’m in love. Sweet Red has skinny hips. I love red-haired women with skinny hips.”
Patience clung to the steering wheel. Her palms were sweaty, her throat dry as she fought dread and despair. There was no way out. If she had a chance, it was to outlast them.
“Hear that, Sweet Red?” Custer’s voice was soft, cajoling. “Blue Doggie loves you. Why don’t you come out to play with him?”
Patience sat as she had from the first, rigid, unresponsive.
“Hot damn!” Blue Doggie giggled and pounded the hood. “I love it when a skinny-hipped woman plays hard for me to get. Makes it so much better when I do.”
“Sweet Red,” a new voice wheedled. “Come out, come out.” The singsong wheedle took on a hard edge. “If you don’t we’ll just have to come get you. Be nice, save us the trouble and save yourself the wear and tear on this nice shiny car.”
A fist slammed the car. “Dammit, Red, do you hear me?”
The vicious undercurrent in their banter was surfacing. Her time was running out. Feverishly she thought of the derringer in the console at her side. It was loaded and ready. The rifle lying in its case beneath her luggage would be better. The bikers wouldn’t expect a rifle, but she hadn’t a prayer of getting to it, taking it from the case and loading it before they got to her.
Maybe she hadn’t a prayer, but she would fight. As hard as she could, for as long as she could. But not until she had to.
Blue Doggie squirmed on the hood, trying to catch her attention. She stared blankly, her vision focused on a distant point through and beyond his bulging belly. Angrily he reared over her, arms spread, bare chest filling her vision, a snarl hissed through jagged teeth as he planted an obscene kiss on the glass.
Patience bit down on her lip to keep from turning away. He hadn’t touched her, yet she felt as soiled as the sweat-smeared glass. A coppery taste of blood was on her tongue. She ignored it, returning her stare to that distant point in her war of wills.
In frustration or anger, she didn’t care which, the giant slammed a ringed fist into the glass. Cracks radiated from the point of impact in a crazed star. The ruined glass held. Blue Doggie snarled a coarse promise and swaggered away for another beer.
She saw him then.
The seventh rider.
An ebony shadow caught in a swirling haze, etched against the paler darkness of the night. A remote figure, as watchful and mysterious as the desert. Only the bike he rode gave back the light of the rising moon. Not even the churning dust of ancient and forgotten trails could dim the subtle gleam of the excellently maintained Electra Glide. Were it not for that reflection, a small light in the blackness of the moment, she wouldn’t have seen him.
Riding alone a distance behind, the sound of his single engine masked by the throb of paired riders, his coming had been virtually silent. In her panic and in the frenzy of maniacal heckling she’d neither seen him nor sensed his presence.
Seeing him now, a rider apart, a man on the fringes and uninvolved, sent a frisson of something she could only call hope rushing through her. Like a blush it bathed her cold body in a glow of warmth. It made no sense, one more rider would not alter her fate. She was still a woman lost and stranded on a little used desert track. A woman with evil tearing at the door of her last sanctuary.
No, she thought as cold reality swept foolish hope from her heart, there would be no help from that quarter. No help from anyone or anything but herself.
Gripping the steering wheel tighter, without regard for cramping fingers and the mounting ache in her elbow, she stared vaguely ahead, denying her tormentors the pleasure of panic.
She didn’t intend it, didn’t want it, but he was there in the line of her unfocused vision. The seventh rider.
She couldn’t see his face, nor his eyes. But she knew
