Hell of a way to get together…
Lucas put his hands on her waist. "Just how late can you go in?" he whispered.
"Men are animals," she said, moving closer.
When she went to sleep, Lucas, relaxed, warm, moved against her. She snuggled deeper into her pillow, and pushed her butt out against him. The best time to ask her to marry him, he thought, would be now: he was awake, articulate, feeling romantic… and she was sleeping like a baby. He smiled to himself and patted her on the hip, and let his head fall on his pillow.
He kept the ring in the bottom of his sock drawer, waiting for the right moment. He could feel it there and wondered if it made black sparkles in the dark.
CHAPTER 5
The room was a concrete-and-stone hole that smelled like rotten potatoes. Four fist-sized openings pierced the top of one wall, too high to see through. The openings reminded Andi of the holes that a child would punch in the top of a Ball jar, to give air to his insect collection.
A stained double-bed mattress lay in one corner, and the girls slept on it. John Mail had been gone for three hours, by Andi's watch. When he'd left, the steel door banging behind him, they'd all crouched on the mattress, waiting wide-eyed for his return.
He hadn't come back. The fear burning them out, the girls eventually curled up and fell asleep like kittens in a cat box, too exhausted to stay awake. Grace slept badly, groaning and whimpering, Genevieve slept heavily, her mouth open, even snoring at times.
Andi sat on the cold floor, with her back to the gritty wall, taking inventory for the fiftieth time, trying to find something, anything, that would get them out.
There was a light socket overhead, with a single sixty-watt bulb and a pull-chain. She hadn't yet had the courage to turn the light off. A Porta-Potti sat in a corner, smelling faintly of chemical rinse. The portable toilet was meant for small sailboats and campers, and was made of plastic. She could think of no way to use it as a weapon, or as anything other than a toilet. A Coleman cooler sat next to the door, half-full of melting ice and generic strawberry soda. And beside her, on a low plastic table, a game console and a monitor. The console and monitor were plugged into a four-socket power bar, which was plugged into an outlet above the light bulb.
And that was all.
A weapon? Perhaps one of the cans could be used as a club… somehow? Could the cord could be used to strangle him?
No. That was all absurd. Mail was too big, too violent.
Could you wire the door, somehow? Strip the wire out of the cord to the computer, connect it to the door handle?
Andi knew nothing about electricity-and if all Mail got was a shock, he'd simply turn off the power, and then come down, and… what?
That was what she couldn't deal with: what did he want? What would he do?
He'd obviously planned for this.
Their cell had once been a root cellar in a farm house, a deep hole, well below the frost line, with walls of granite fieldstone and concrete. Mail had knocked out part of an interior wall and had rebuilt it with concrete block to accommodate a steel fire door. The wiring was all new, nothing more than a cord run in from the outside.
Although the walls were old, except for the part Mail had redone, they were solid: Andi had pushed or kicked at every stone, had probed the interstices with her fingernails. Her hands were raw from it, and she'd found no weaknesses.
Overhead, between two-by-ten joists, was a plank ceiling. They could reach it by standing on the Porta-Potti, but when they beat on it, the sound was frighteningly dead: Andi feared that if they somehow pulled out a board, they'd find themselves buried underground.
The door itself was impossible, all steel with a simple slide latch on the outside. No amount of patience with a hairpin would pick the lock-if she'd known how to pick a lock in the first place, which she didn't.
She did the inventory again, straining to think of ways out. The chemical in the toilet? If it were harsh enough, perhaps she could throw it in his eyes and slip past him up the stairs?
He would kill them…
Andi closed her eyes and relived the trip out of the Cities.
They'd rattled around the back of the van like dice in a cup-the cargo space had been stripped and was no more than a steel box, without handholds or comfort. Mail had apparently rigged the steel screen and removed the door handles for the kidnapping.
When they'd left the school, Mail had dodged from street to street, watching the rearview mirror, then took the van onto I-35, heading south, Andi thought. They were on I-35 for several minutes, then exited to an unfamiliar two-lane highway, out through the whiskey billboards and into the pastel suburbs south of the Cities, as the kids screamed and beat at the sides of the truck and then fell into an alternating, spasmodic weeping.
Andi was still bleeding; inside her mouth, where her teeth had cut into her lip. The taste of blood and the smell of exhaust nauseated her; fighting to get to her hands and knees as Mail dodged through the side streets, she eventually crawled into a corner and vomited. The stench set Genevieve off; she began to retch, and Grace began to weep and shudder, shaking uncontrollably. Andi took all of it in but was unable to focus on it, unable to sort it out and react, until finally, dumbly, she simply took the children in her arms and held them and let them scream.
Mail paid no attention.
After a while, they all got to their knees and looked out the windows as the suburbs dwindled, and the truck entered the great green sea of corn, beans, and alfalfa outside the Cities.
Up front, Mail punched buttons on the radio, seemingly without purpose: he went from Aerosmith to Toad the Wet Sprocket to Haydn to George Strait to three, four, five talk shows.
Listen, most of these criminals are weaklings; the only thing that makes them anything is that we give them a gun. Take the gun away, and they'll crawl back to the gutters where they came from…
They spent five minutes on a rural highway, bumping over long, snaky tar joints in the cracked concrete; then Mail took them off the highway onto a gravel road, and they left a spiraling cloud of gray dust in their wake. Red barns and white farmhouses flicked past the windows, and a black rural mailbox in a cluster of orange day lilies, dusty from the gravel.
Grace staggered to her feet and grabbed the chain-link fence separating them from Mail, and screamed, "Let me out of here, you fuck, let me out of here let me out…"
Genevieve panicked when her sister began to scream and wailed, a high, sirenlike keening, and her eyes rolled up into her head. She fell back and Andi thought for a moment that she'd had a stroke and crawled toward her, but Genevieve's eyes rolled and got straight and she started again, the keening, and Andi put her hands over her ears and Grace shouted, Let me out of here…
Mail put a hand over the ear closest to Grace, and, without looking back at her, shouted, shut up shut up shut up, and spit sprayed down the length of the windshield.
Andi grabbed her daughter and pulled her down, shook her head, held her daughter's face close and said, "Don't make him mad," then gathered up Genevieve and held her, squeezed her until the keening died away.
Then came a moment, just a moment, when Andi thought something different could happen, a streak of possibility rolling through her bloodied mind. They'd turned off the gravel road and started up a dirt lane.
Ragweed and black-eyed Susans grew in the middle of the track, and along both sides; farther away to the right, ancient, gray-barked apple trees stood with branches crabbed like scarecrow fingers.
An old farmhouse waited at the end of the lane: a dying house, shot through with rot, the paint peeling off the clapboard siding, a front porch falling off to one side. Behind it, down the far side of the hill, a barn's foundation crouched in a hollow. The barn itself was gone, but the lower level remained, covered by what had been the floor of the old structure, and by a blue plastic tarp tied at the corners with yellow polypropylene rope. An open doorway poked into the dark interior, like the entrance to a cave. Around the barn foundation, two or three other crumbling outbuildings subsided into the soil.