In any case, it combined with my headache and activated a mean streak I didn't know I had. "No, it wasn't that great," I said. She looked at me now, with an expression that actually approached anger, but she didn't say anything, and after a moment she looked away again, and I took a last stretch and rub at my neck muscles and stood up.
"There has to be a way out of here," I said, more to myself than her, but of course she answered anyway.
"No, there doesn't," she said. "It's secure. They keep people here all the time, and nobody ever gets out."
"If they're always drugged, did anyone ever try?"
She half closed her eyes and slowly shook her head to indicate that I was stupid, and looked away. And maybe I was stupid, but not enough to sit and wait for them to come and eat me-not without trying my best to get away.
I went once more through the trailer. There was nothing new to see, but I looked at everything a little more carefully. There was no furniture at all, but down at the far end there was one built-in bench that had obviously served as a bed. It had a thin strip of foam rubber on it, covered by a ratty gray sheet. I lifted the mattress onto the floor. Under it there was a square of plywood fitted into an opening. I pulled up the plywood. Underneath was something that was clearly a locker. There was a very flat pillow inside, covered with a case that matched the sheet. The locker seemed to run the whole width of the trailer, although I could not see into the darkness on either side.
I pulled out the pillow. There was nothing else inside except a short length of an old two-by-four, maybe a foot and a half long. One end of it was cut to a very dull, flat point and there was dirt all over the tapered part. At the other end there were notches cut into each side, and a groove worn into the wood, possibly by rope. The wood had been used as a stake for whatever arcane reason, hammered into the ground to hold something or other with rope tied to it. There was even an old and bent nail stuck in the top to tie off the rope. I took the stake out and laid it beside the pillow. I stuck my head into the locker as far as I could, but there was nothing else to see. I pushed on the bottom and felt a little bit of give, so I pushed harder and was rewarded with a whump-ah of flimsy metal bending.
Bingo. I pushed harder, and the metal visibly bent. I pulled my head out and stood up, stepping into the locker with both feet. I just barely fit into the opening, but it was enough, and I started to jump as hard as I could. It made a very loud booming sound, and after about the seventh boom! Samantha came to see what all the noise was.
"What are you doing?" she said, which struck me as silly as well as annoying.
"Escaping," I said, and gave an extra hard jump. Boom!
She watched as I jumped several more times, and then shook her head and raised her voice, very thoughtfully, so I could hear her negativity over the noise. "I don't think you can get out like that," she said.
"The metal is thin here," I said. "Not like the floor."
"It's the tensile strength," she said in her loud voice. "Like surface cohesion in a cup of water. We did this in physics."
I took a second to marvel at the kind of physics class that taught its students about the tensile strength of a trailer's floor when one is escaping from a cannibal coven, and then I paused in midjump. Perhaps she was right-after all, Ransom Everglades was a very good school and they probably taught things that never made it into the public school curriculum. I stepped out of the locker and looked at what I had accomplished so far. It wasn't much. There was a noticeable dent, but nothing that could really inspire hope.
"They'll be here way before you get out like that," she said, and somebody who lacked charity might have said she was gloating.
"Maybe so," I said, and my eye fell on the two-by-four. I did not actually say, "Aha!" but I certainly had one of those moments when the lightbulb goes on. I picked up the chunk of wood and worried out the old nail. I wedged the head of it into a crack on the point of the stake, and placed the point in the center of the dent I had already made. Then, with a significant glance at Samantha, I pounded on the top of the stake as hard as I could.
It hurt. I counted three splinters in my hand.
"Ha," Samantha said.
It has been said that behind every successful man there is a woman, and by extension we can say that behind every escaping Dexter is a really annoying Samantha, because her happiness at seeing me fail spurred me to new heights of inspiration. I took off my shoe and fitted it over the top of the stake and smacked it experimentally. It didn't hurt nearly as much, and I was sure I could hammer it hard enough to make a hole in the locker's floor.
"Ha yourself," I said to Samantha.
"Whatever," she said, and walked back to where she had been sitting in the middle section of the trailer.
I went right back to work, pounding on the sole of my shoe with all my strength. I paused after a couple of minutes and looked; the dent had gotten much deeper, and there were signs of stress at the edges. The point of the nail had gone into the metal, and a few more minutes could very well see a small hole; I went back at it with a will. After two more minutes, the tone of the thumping seemed to change, and I pulled out the stake and had another look.
There was a small hole all the way through, just large enough to see daylight under the trailer. With a little more time and effort, I was sure I could punch through, enlarge the hole, and be on my way.
I wiggled the point of the stake back into the opening as far as I could and pounded even harder. I could feel it sinking slowly through, and then suddenly I pounded and the stake dropped several inches. I stopped pounding and began to work the wood back and forth, stretching the metal back, making the hole as big as possible. I worked it and worried it and jammed the stake sideways and even put my shoe back on and kicked at it, and for twenty minutes the metal of the trailer fought back, but at last I had a way out.
I paused for a moment, looking at the hole I had made. I was exhausted and sore and soaked with sweat, but I was one step away from freedom.
"I'm outta here," I called to Samantha. "This is your last chance to get away."
"Bye-bye," she called back. "Have a nice trip." It seemed a little bit callous after all we had gone through together, but it was probably all I would get from her.
"Okay," I said, and I climbed into the locker, pushing my legs down into the hole I had made. My feet touched ground and I wiggled the rest of me downward. It was a very tight fit, and I felt first my pants and then my shirt catch on the metal edges and tear. I held my arms up above my head and kept wiggling and in just a moment I was through, sitting on the warm and wet dirt of the Everglades. I could feel it soak through my pants, but it felt wonderful, much better than the floor of the trailer.
I took a deep breath; I was free. Around me was the trailer's concrete-block foundation, holding it several feet off the ground. There were two gaps in it, one of them close by and opposite the trailer's door. I rolled onto my stomach and crawled toward it. And just as my head poked out into the light of day and I began to think I was going to get away, a massive hand came down and grabbed me by the hair. "That's far enough, asshole," a voice snarled at me, and I felt myself lifted almost straight up with only a short pause to bang my head against the trailer. Through the bright lights bursting in my already painful head I could see my old friend, the bouncer with the shaved head. He threw me up against the side of the trailer and, as he had when he knocked me out in the refrigerator, he pinned me with a forearm across my throat.