She heard a door open, and when it did, she heard water, like a toilet tank refilling. The door closed again and a woman in hospital scrubs and a pair of white sneakers walked to the computer. The woman had very dark, curly hair gathered into a bushy ponytail behind her head, and she wore glasses with rectangular lenses and black frames.
Jane tried to evaluate her features. Did she look cruel or dishonest Jane saw no sign of either. She might be foreign and might not speak English well enough to know that Jane had been kidnapped. But then, what could she imagine had happened If she was a nurse, she knew Jane's wound was from a gunshot, and she certainly knew this industrial space wasn't a hospital.
Jane decided the woman in scrubs couldn't be much help. Then it occurred to her that the nurse and the doctor might help her unintentionally. At some point, the men who had brought her here were going to try to force her to tell them where Jim Shelby had been heading when he'd left the courthouse. Maybe having the medical people here would restrain them a little.
And the doctor and nurse had medicines and drugs. The doctor had injected Jane with a couple of things-an antibiotic and a very strong painkiller that had put her to sleep. She wondered if it was the same kind she had stolen from Carey's office and used on the guard in the courthouse. She had filled the syringe she'd gotten from a diabetes kit, then broken the bottle and left the pieces inside the cardboard box, as though it had been dropped in shipping. A mixture of Midazolam and Fentanyl, it was an anesthetic used for minor surgeries, or as a pre-op sedation before a general anesthetic. She had read on the Internet that it was safer than most of the drugs used for that purpose, and a full dose wore off in about two hours.
Jane kept looking out into the room, taking in the small bits of information that her eyes brought her, and then turning them around in her head to examine them from different perspectives. But she was careful not to move. The sooner the woman she thought of as a nurse knew she was conscious, the sooner she would notify the men who had kidnapped her and the really horrible stuff would begin. Every minute Jane could lie on the couch pretending to be asleep, Jim Shelby got farther from Los Angeles, and farther from the people who were looking for him.
And perhaps every moment, the police were coming closer to finding her. She had been taken in a busy place. Many of those big public buildings had multiple security cameras going all the time. There were also the subway entrance and the major intersections around the court buildings and government offices. One of these cameras must have caught her fake arrest on tape.
Jane lay there counting each minute as a point for her side. Whenever she partially opened her eyes, she would see that the woman still had the earphones on and was still staring at the computer screen. After a long time, Jane dozed off again.
When the doctor came in, he switched on bright overhead lights and talked loudly. "You can assemble the bed over here, in the center of this room."
As the pieces were brought in from the truck and assembled, the bed took form. It was the size of a twin bed with a steel frame. After less than thirty seconds they were going back out for the mattress. They set it on the steel-mesh spring.
The nurse took off her earphones and said something to the doctor in a language that didn't sound familiar to Jane, and he answered her in the same language. The nurse went to the truck; came back with a set of sheets, a pillow, and a wool blanket; and made the bed quickly. As soon as she was finished, the doctor said to his employers, "You two are going to have to help us move her onto the bed."
"How do we-"
"I'm about to tell you," he snapped. "It's important that you do exactly as I say. We're going to put the blanket under her partway." He and the nurse unfurled the blanket and tucked it under her, then slid her onto it. "Now lift the blanket." Then the four lifted her again onto the new bed, and the nurse arranged her pillows.
The doctor said to his nurse, "I need to have another look at the wound. Bring the dressing kit."
The nurse laid out various implements and dressings, and prepared a hypodermic needle. Jane said, "What's in the needle"
"It's a painkiller."
"I don't need a painkiller," she said.
"Yes you do. I haven't begun yet." He injected the painkiller into her arm, and in a short time, she felt limp and sleepy, and then there was darkness.
When she awoke the doctor was gone, her mouth was dry, and her leg hurt a bit more than she remembered it hurting, as though the doctor had disturbed it somehow.
"So where is Jimmy Shelby" The voice sounded friendly. It seemed to her the voice was a little bit like the voice of a country singer. She opened her eyes and looked at the man who had spoken. He was ten feet away. He had the reddish skin that some pale-complexioned people had when they'd spent too many years in the sun. The sunburn never seemed to go away. He was tall and lanky, wearing a pair of boots, with the legs of his blue jeans down over them, and a black sport coat. His short blond hair was spiked on top, and it struck Jane as grotesque, because his face looked a generation too old for the style.
"I don't know," she said.
He looked at her with an expression of mild surprise, which seemed to blossom into sincere curiosity. "Now why would you say that"
"Because I don't."
"You broke him out of the courthouse, left a car for him to drive, and then used delaying tactics to keep anyone from getting to him while there was still time. Are you denying that"
"No."
"So you have to be a pro, somebody who has done this kind of thing before, and who knows the way things work. You knew there was a big risk, and you might be caught. You must know where he went."
"I didn't want to. It wouldn't make either of us any safer. If I don't know, I can't tell."
"I sure hope you're not telling the truth about that," he said. "If you don't know, you have nothing to trade. All you'll be is a woman who freed a man we put in jail, and hurt three friends of mine doing it."
"That's all I am," Jane said.
"Are you trying to get me to kill you"
"I'm just answering your questions truthfully right now at the start, to avoid a lot of fruitless conversation later. You'll make your own decisions."
He looked at her closely, his brows knitted. Then he called out to his men, "I think she needs to focus her mind. Ask her again." He turned and walked across the big room and out the door. When it opened she saw that night had come. She heard the sound of a car engine, and then silence.
The man who had shot her and the driver came in from one of the doors along the side of the room. Each was carrying a bamboo stick about three feet long, and about the thickness of a cane. Without any preliminary -threatening, the man who had shot her simply raised his cane and brought it down across her shin. She squinted, and the other began to beat her too, hitting her across the stomach. She was strapped to the bed with only a man's shirt and a sheet over her, so the blows fell on her head, stomach, arms, feet, knees, and shins without padding to soften them. The men avoided hitting her right thigh, where the bullet wound was, but otherwise, they seemed bent on hurting her everywhere. She lost count of the sharp, stinging blows, but she could tell the two men had not. She suspected they must have orders to hit her a certain number of times. She turned her head to avert her face, but that was all she could do in her weakness. As though at a silent signal, the blows stopped.
"Where is he" It was the man who had shot her.
"I don't know."
"You have to know his first stop," the driver said.
"Why do I have to"
"He's hurt, has no money, no clothes, no shelter. You must have help waiting for him somewhere. Tell us where."