Page 112 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

"But Darcyhadfigured it out, put it together, hadn't he?"I was right.Her tone was a deliberate goad.

Collingwood’s eyes burned. "Almost. But he thought I would be there in person. I wasn't."

"Your lieutenants died?"

He did not answer other than to flick his eyes toward the rearview mirror, the anticipation of revenge visible in them.

She tried to keep the priest talking. "WhyThe Wicker Man? Why use that name? That movie?"

Lizzy had a tight fist now on the ballpoint pen. Her fingers were wrapped around it, her thumb locked down over the non-writing end. Leo shifted in his chair. He hadn't noticed her hand in her pocket. He was looking at Collingwood, not Lizzy. Listening. She took another quick glance at her mother and made herself continue to wait. Mrs. Bennet's temple did not seem to be bleeding much. There was just a crooked stain of drying blood discoloring her cheek. Although Lizzy was worried about her and worried about Fitzwilliam, she had to choose her moment.

Collingwood slowed for a red light. Traffic signals had become rarer in this part of the city, outskirts that Lizzy had never visited, not even as a child. He sighed, but in preparation rather than frustration. "I've lived my life…nailed to a religion I do not believe, that I detest," he said finally, in a quiet, convincing whisper that was just audible over the engine. "I did it because it allowed me to pursue what I do believe, to pursue a life of rebellion against it.” Reaching up, he pulled his white collar loose, removed it, and tossed it in the passenger seat. "The movie appealed to me when I first saw it, the pagan against the Christian, the idea of appeasing the old gods, the bloodthirsty ones—not the new, weak, bleeding, crucified God of Christianity.”

As the light changed, he turned to her. "I want a different world, Agent Bennet, one ruled by the old gods. A pagan world where only strength and pleasure are respected, notpersons." He spit the last word as the van moved under the green light. "A world ruled by natural justice, nature red in tooth and claw, as the saying goes. Not by the love and surrender, the milquetoast bromides of theNew Testament.The Sermon on the Mount.” He spit on the van floor. “I can't bring that world into beingex nihilo, of course, but I can destabilize these"?he gestured out the windshield at the empty warehouses now surrounding them?"these remnants of Christendom further. I can fan hatreds until the whole God-rotten system collapses under its own weeping, bleeding, self-righteous weight. All this backward belief in equality, in each person as an end, will finally die, and people willsubmitto their natural masters, to strength and pleasure."

Lizzy stared. "You mean—to the pleasure of the strong…"

He turned his head for a second and gave her a smile, horrifying in context. "It's Nature’s way, isn’t it? We all, including we strong, submit toHer—because She is strongest of all."

When his head turned back to the road and the van started to gain speed, Lizzy acted.

My moment.

She turned in the seat and, at the same time, yanked the ballpoint pen from her pocket. She lifted it and swiftly whipped it down, driving the pen’s point into Leo’s neck. It sank sickeningly into him. Blood gushed hot around her hand, fountaining into her face. He fell off the bench, his gun going off and firing toward the top of the van. As he landed on the floor, blood continued to gush out of his neck, and he gurgled in distress.

Even before he hit the floor, Lizzy had reached into her other pocket and grabbed the rolled tape measure. She let it unspool as she pulled it out, leaped forward, and wrapped the tape around the priest's throat. He had been reaching toward his gun when she yanked him backward by the neck, and then she quickly whipped the tape around it again, pulling as hard as she could, one foot braced against the back of his seat.

He stopped groping for his gun, instead trying to steer in sudden jerks to throw her off balance. The van leaped up onto the sidewalk and careened toward a faded blue postal mailbox. They smashed into the side of it, creating an explosion of envelopes and boxes. With one hand, Collingwood attempted to slip his fingers beneath the doubled tape, trying to loosen Lizzy's noose around his neck, resist the chokehold. With the other, he continued to whip the steering wheel. The van ramped back off the curb and onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing an eighteen-wheeler that whipped past, horn blaring.

By this time, he was gasping for air. Lizzy pulled on the measure with all her strength, thankful her aunt had the good sense to buy the unbreakable kind. Collingwood turned the wheel again just before he collapsed forward. The van crossed the opposite lane, went up and onto the opposite sidewalk. It barreled through a chain-link fence, rusty and dirty in the bouncing headlights, bare earth and dark buildings beyond it.

The impact threw Lizzy forward against the back of the driver's seat. A shed or outbuilding was ahead of them, and they plowed into the corner of it, the sound of splintering wood filling the night as the van continued to lurch forward. She tumbled over the driver's seat, landing partly onto the seat-belted Collingwood. Then she was thrown to the side as the van's left side climbed a stack of cinder blocks. The van tipped…tipped…almost tipped over. Then it fell back, rolling like a shipon a stormy sea before finally stopping in a cloud of dust made visible by the headlights.

Lizzy ended up on her back, wedged between the seats. As she put down a hand to scramble to her feet, she felt a gun on the floor. She didn’t know whether it was Collingwood’s or Leo's—she grabbed the grip, lifted it, and shot the priest twice point-blank. He slumped heavily against the steering wheel, his breath escaping in a long involuntary sigh, the two ends of the tape measure hanging down from his neck, a yellow replacement for his white collar.

The engine had stopped, and an eerie silence filled the air.Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

Lizzy's ribs were aching, her body bruised. What she had done, the surrounding stink of blood, made her sick to her stomach.

Ignoring the pain and the odor, she stood quickly and, after putting the gun in a pocket, checked on her mother. Mrs. Bennet was still unconscious, seat-belted safely in place, a parable of the drunk escaping injury in a wreck.

Leo lay on the floor in a pool of blood with a backdrop of blood spatter on the wall of the van. His eyes were fixed open, the ballpoint pen still protruding from his neck. Lizzy released Collingwood’s seat belt and, fueled by adrenaline, she pushed his body over the space between the front seats, angling it so he landed atop his henchman on the opposite side from her mother.

She slid into the driver's seat. Somehow, Collingwood’s phone was still in its holder and the GPS was working. She turned the key, holding her breath. The engine fired, coughed, coughed again, and miraculously began to run. Exhaling, she turned the van around, punched the gas, and accelerated through the hole it had created in the fence on entry.

"Hold on, Fitzwilliam," she whispered fiercely, her eyes forward. "I'm coming! I'm coming!"

The GPS showed her a right turn, and she took it.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Loyalty

Lizzy drove, keeping her eyes and mind fixed on the road without looking back except to occasionally check her mother in the rearview mirror and without looking forward beyond the reach of the headlights. The van's front-end alignment had been badly damaged by the cinder blocks, causing it to pull hard to the left, so she fought the steering wheel to stay in her lane.

The GPS still guided her.Thank God it is still working! Thank God Collingwood didn't know Rochester and needed directions.She was banking on it taking her to Fitzwilliam.

She tried not to think about what she might find.He has to be alive.Everything Collingwood said had implied it. But maybe he’d lied to keep Lizzy compliant, knowing she would hope to see Fitzwilliam and have a chance to save him when he was already dead.

Dead.The word echoed in her heart in different directions each time she thought it, the many echoes throbbing down many hallways. It seemed not like one word but like a squad of words on the move—a death squad of words. Dark-uniformed and final. The van's reeking of blood did not help. Rivulets of it ran across the van's floor, some of it pooling under the gas and brake pedals.

---