Gerald's Game(73)

"Get over here, you bastard."

In no time at all he had been fumbling the cuffs onto her wrists and then attaching them to the bedposts. There were no slats on the headboard in the master bedroom of the Portland house; if he had suffered his heart attack there, she could have slipped the cuffs right off the tops of the posts. As he panted and fussed over the cuffs, one knee rubbing delightfully against her down below while he did it, he talked. And one of the things he had told her was about M and F, and how the latch-locks worked. He had wanted Fs, he told her, because the female cuffs had latch-locks with twenty-three notches instead of seventeen, the number most male cuffs had. More notches meant the female cuffs would close smaller. They were hard to come by, though, and when his courthouse friend had told Gerald he could get him two sets of men's hand restraints at a very reasonable price, Gerald had jumped at the chance.

"Some women can pull right out of men's cuffs," he'd told her, "but you're fairly big-boned. Besides, I didn't want to wait. Now... let's just see..."

He had snapped the cuff on her right wrist, pushing the latchlock in fast at first but slowing down as he approached the end, asking her if he was hurting her as each notch clicked past. It was fine all the way to the last notch, but when he had asked her to try and get out, she hadn't been able to do so. Her wrist had slipped most of the way through the cuff, all right, and Gerald had told her later that not even that was supposed to happen, but when it bound up along the back of her hand and at the base of her thumb, his comical expression of anxiety had faded.

"I think they're going to do just fine," he had said. She remembered that very well, and she remembered what he'd said next even more clearly: "We're going to have a lot of fun with these."

With the memory of that day still vivid in the front of her mind, Jessie once again began to apply downward pressure, trying to somehow shrink her hands enough so she could yank them through the cuffs. The pain struck sooner this time, starting not in her hands but in the overtaxed muscles of her shoulders and arms. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, bore down harder, and tried to shut out the hurt.

Now her hands joined the chorus of outrage, and as she once more approached the outer limit of her muscular leverage and the cuffs began to dig into the scant flesh which covered the backs of her hands, they began to scream. Posterior ligament, she thought, head cocked, lips drawn back in a wide, spitless grin of pain. Posterior ligament, posterior ligament, motherf*cking posterior ligament!

Nothing. No give. And she began to suspect-to strongly suspect-that there was more involved than ligaments. There were bones there as well, a couple of pukey little bones running along the outsides of her hands below the lower thumb-joint, a couple of pukey little bones that were probably going to get her killed.

With a final shriek of mingled pain and disappointment, Jessie let her hands go limp once more. Her shoulders and upper arms quivered with exhaustion. So much for sliding out of the cuffs because they were M-17s instead of F-23s. The disappointment was almost worse than the physical pain; it stung like poisoned nettles.

"Shit and f**k!" she cried at the empty room. "Shit and f**k, shit-and-f*ck, shittenf*ck!"

Somewhere along the lake-farther off today, by the sound the chainsaw started up, and that made her even angrier. The guy from yesterday, back for more. just some swinging dick in a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt from L. L. Bean's, out there playing Paul Kiss-My-Ass Bunyan, roaring away with his Stihl and dreaming about crawling into bed with his little honey at the end of the day... or maybe it was football he was dreaming of, or just a few frosty cold ones down at the marina bar. Jessie saw the dork in the checked flannel shirt as clearly as she had seen the young girl in the stocks, and if thoughts alone could have killed him, his head would have exploded out through his ass**le at that very moment.

"It's not fair!" she screamed. "It's just not f-"

A kind of dry cramp seized her throat and she fell silent, grimacing and afraid. She had felt the hard splinters of bone which barred her escape-oh God, had she-but she had been close, just the same. That was the real wellspring of her bitterness-not the pain, and certainly not the unseen woodcutter with his blatting chainsaw. It was knowing that she had gotten close, but nowhere near close enough. She could continue to grit her teeth and endure the pain, but she no longer believed it would do her the slightest bit of good. That last quarter to half an inch was going to remain mockingly out of her reach. The only thing she would manage to do if she kept on pulling was to cause edema and swelling in her wrists, worsening her situation instead of bettering it.

"And don't you tell me I'm toast, don't you dare," she said in a whispery, scolding voice. "I don't want to hear that."

You have to get out of them somehow, the young girl's voice whispered back. Because he-it-really is going to come again. Tonight. After the sun goes down.

"I don't believe it," she croaked. "I don't believe that man was real. I don't care about the footprint and the earring. I just don't believe it."

Yes, you do.

No, I don't!

Yes, you do.

Jessie let her head droop to one side, hair hanging almost down to the mattress, mouth quivering abjectly.

Yes, she did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

She started to doze off again in spite of her worsening thirst and throbbing arms. She knew it was dangerous to sleep-that her strength would continue to ebb while she was out of it-but what difference did it really make? She had explored all her options and she was still America's Handcuffed Sweetheart. Besides, she wanted that lovely oblivion-craved it, in fact, the way a hophead craves his drug. Then, just before she drifted off, a thought which was both simple and shockingly direct lit up her confused, drifting mind like a flare.