The Siege (40 page)

Lisa started down the corridor, moving with a curious stiffness, as though her knee and hip joints had rusted. The sound her paper slippers made on the freshly waxed floor was as harsh and abrasive as sandpaper; it hurt her ears. She had no idea where she was going, but hoped to find someone who could tell her where she could get some food. What she craved
—
right now
—
was something like a thick, juicy hamburger!

B
ack in Lisa’s room, Angie awoke with a start, and when she saw Lisa’s bed empty, a cold fist punched her stomach and made her sit bolt upright.

She had trouble in the night
, Angie thought in a flood of panic as she stood up and looked around the room, frantic with fear.
She died, and they’ve taken her away!

Glancing at her watch, Angie saw that she couldn’t have been asleep more than ten minutes. Mrs. Appleby should have been back from Admissions by now. And where was the duty nurse? What had happened to Lisa? Angie stumbled into the corridor as she tore the door open. Two nurses coming back to the nurses’ station saw Angie stumble out of the room. Words were tumbling from her mouth so fast they couldn’t tell what she was talking about.

“What have you done with her? Is she all right? I must’ve just fallen asleep for a minute or two, and when I woke up she wasn’t there. Why can’t you tell me what happened?”

Both nurses quickly came over to her. They were as confused as Angie was when they went back to Lisa’s room and saw that her bed was empty. One of them immediately called security. The other nurse forced Angie to sit down with her and drink a glass of juice until she calmed down. She told her, over and over, that nothing had happened to Lisa. It would take them only a few minutes to find her; she couldn’t have gotten far, the nurse said and certainly she couldn’t have left the hospital.

As it turned out, it took five nurses, four security guards, and two janitors almost thirty minutes to find her, and when they did, they couldn’t believe what they saw.

Lisa had gotten into the hospital kitchen unobserved.

The door to the walk-in refrigerator was wide open, and she was sitting, cross-legged, in the middle of the floor, completely indifferent to the cold. In both hands, she held thick clumps of raw hamburger. Red streaks of meat juice were running down both arms and dripping onto the floor, and thick chunks squeezed between her fingers. Her hospital johnny was splattered with red, and her fists were clenched. Hamburger was oozing out between her fingers. Her mouth and chin were smeared with pieces of raw meat.

“Sorry
…
” she said, looking up at them and avidly chewing a mouthful. “I couldn’t help myself. I was
wicked
hungry!”

III

W
hen Winfield opened his eyes, he wasn’t even sure he had opened them. He was surrounded by a black so thick he could feel it pressing against his skin like a weight. It was that sensation and a tight pressure on his arms and legs, that convinced him he wasn’t really dead.

As he struggled to awareness, he felt like a spent swimmer whose lungs are burning as he looks up at the rippling light of the surface so far away, straining and struggling to make it up to the light, back to the air.

Time meant nothing to him in this well of blackness, but the longer he thought about it, the more he remembered what had happened. There was a crashing pain on the back of his head, and where that had come from he had no way of knowing; it came like a freight train out of the dark.

Kitchen
. The word sprang into his mind, and he remembered, yes, he had been in someone’s kitchen. It had been dark; he remembered holding a flashlight as he checked through the house.

Whose house?
he wondered, and what in the name of God was that pressure on his arms and legs? He expected the pressure to disappear as he came more fully conscious, but it was still there, binding his arms and legs.

He tried to bring one hand to the back of his head to feel if he had been shot—or cut.

But his arm wouldn’t move. He tugged, first gently and then as hard as he could, but all he felt was something biting deeply into his wrists. The blood flow was restricted, and his hands prickled with pins and needles.

“What in the name of Christ…?” he muttered.

He leaned his head back, and felt cold stone, gritty with age, rub against his scalp. His eyes had been open long enough for them to have adjusted to any light, if there had been any; but wherever he was, it was as dark as a pit.

Winfield decided, if his eyes wouldn’t help, that he would stretch out with his hearing. It was an effort to fight back the waves of panic that threatened to sweep him away, but he took several deep, even breaths and listened.

At first, there was nothing but silence as thick and solid as the darkness. But after a moment—how long, he wondered, having no sense of time passing—he heard a low, creaking sound. It reminded him of the sound his grandmother’s rocking chair used to make when he was a little boy, and she used to read to him. It was the slow, steady thread of footsteps.

Someone was walking on an old, creaky floor above him!

Winfield concentrated on bringing the sound closer, but then the sound simply vanished. As soon as it was gone, he wondered when he had heard it. How long ago? There was no time in this thick darkness.
Maybe I am dead!
he thought, wishing he could move just an arm or a leg to prove he wasn’t dead.

He was getting closer to remembering, but the pain on the back of his head pounded rhythmically like a horse’s hoof beats.

“Caught from behind,” he said out loud, his voice no more than a choked whisper. And suddenly a much larger piece of memory snapped into awareness. He had been going through the old LaPierre house, checking on a complaint Donna LaPierre had made that someone might have broken into the house.

Winfield snickered softly in the darkness, surprised by the odd, disembodied sound. Well, there had been someone in the house. No doubt on that score. But who? He could hear soft, shifting sounds in the surrounding darkness.

Was there someone there in the dark with him? Winfield worried. He let out a low whimper as he imagined he wasn’t the only one down here.

“Hello?” he called out softly.

His answer came just a few seconds later. A door opened up at the top of the stairway, and a sliver of light darted down. (
Yes, down
, he thought feeling a flood of relief.
I must be in the cellar!
) The light hit him squarely in the eyes, hurting as if it had been a bullet; it slammed into his eyes, and with a pained shout, he turned his head away as footsteps hurried down the stairs.

The beam of light got stronger as it came closer, and Winfield saw a man and a woman, hurry toward where he sat, propped against the stone wall in what looked like an old coal bin. The man and woman were huffing with the effort of carrying a load of unrolled sleeping bags and camping gear.

Winfield got dizzy, trying to follow the light as it darted back and forth. The man approached him and shined the light directly into his face. Winfield turned away from the lance of pain, but in the glow, he recognized his own service revolver aimed directly at his forehead.

“Listen, asshole,” the man said in a harsh whisper. “We got some more company upstairs. If I hear one tiny little peep out of you, I’m gonna splatter your brains, however few, all over this wall. You understand me?”

Even though it pained him to move, Winfield nodded his head, mindful not to make a sound.

“Get over here,” the man said to the woman. He handed her a second flashlight and a smaller gun. Not for a moment did he take his eyes or his flashlight beam off the cop.

“He’s tied nice and secure,” the man said. Turning to Winfield, he added, “Don’t you like the fit of those handcuffs? You should. They’re your own!” Then to the woman, he said, “What I want you to do is sit here. Keep the light off, but if he makes the tiniest sound, turn on the light and shoot him.”

The woman shook her head slowly. “I can’t do that,” she said. “You can’t expect me to kill someone in cold blood.”

The man laughed with a deep, hollow sound. “I’d say it’s either him or you at this point. Don’t fuck it up.” With that, the man shielded his own flashlight in the cup of his hand and went back up the stairs. The girl kept her light on for a few seconds, and then snapped it off, plunging the room back into the darkness. The silence fell back into place like a lock, only now it was broken by the shallow sound of the girl’s breathing.

Winfield began to speak.

“Shush,” the girl said, her voice trembling. “I don’t want to have to kill you. But I will. I’ll
have
to if you make any noise.” She sniffed loudly. Winfield wasn’t sure if she was crying or simply trying to catch her breath.

“You know,” she said after a short pause, “I’m sorry I had to kick you like that today.”

“It was
you
?” Winfield said with a laugh. That pain had been all but forgotten in the wash of pain he felt now in his arms, legs, and the back of his head.

“Sorry,” the girl said. She was about to say more, but there came a loud noise from upstairs. Tasha and Winfield fell quiet and listened in silence, trying to figure out what was going on upstairs. There was the sound of feet on the porch, and then the roar of a car’s engine followed by a shattering crash. It sounded as though it was happening directly above them. The girl cried out softly and, covering her flashlight lens with her hand, snapped on the light to make sure they weren’t about to be crushed to death.

For the next several minutes the sounds of shattering wood and breaking glass, the racing whine of the car, and muffled shouts filled the cold black of the cellar.

“You know,” Winfield said, fighting to keep the desperation out of his voice. “I have a spare key to the cuffs in my left shoe.”

“Quiet,” the girl said, pointing the gun at him. It wavered, but not much.

“If you cut these ropes and unlock the cuffs, I promise I’ll get you out of this. I can tell you’re hooked up with a very bad guy here. I can tell you’re too smart to be his girlfriend. If you let me go, I’ll make sure you get out of this. What do you say?”

She obviously was considering it because as minutes passed, she didn’t say “no” and she certainly didn’t shoot him.

“Come on. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Tasha… Tasha Stewart,” she said softly.

“Well listen here, Tasha. I can tell you’ve made a few mistakes along the way. My guess would be that you’ve run away from home, right?”

Tasha nodded.

“And my next guess would be that, since you’ve teamed up with what’s his name?”

“His real name’s Roy Moulton,” she said, “but I call him Hocker ’cause he spits so much.” She chuckled to herself.

Winfield chuckled too, but not so much at the joke but to relax her even more, to get her to lower her guard. He knew, once he got her comfortable and talking, it might all come out: the rotten home life; no friends at school; maybe a little experimenting with drugs and sex, out of rebellion more than interest; the “dreams” that life would be better anywhere but where she was. It was the typical pattern for a runaway.

But try as Winfield might to put her at ease, the sounds coming from upstairs were distracting and downright scary, and she seemed to be paying more attention to the noise than to what he was saying. It sounded like Hocker and someone else were tearing the goddamned place apart! “I mean it, Tasha,” Winfield said, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice. “The key’s in my left shoe. Do it, and I’ll help get you straightened around.”

“I don’t need to be
straightened
around,” she said, suddenly flaring with anger. Winfield was positive he had unwittingly used a catchphrase her mother or, more likely, her father had used on her once too often, and he was pissed at himself. He could sense the steel coming back into her resolve.

“And if you keep talking,” she said, low and dangerous, “I will shoot.”

“No you won’t,” Winfield said calmly. “Because I know, no matter what you and this Hocker character have done, you sure as hell don’t want to add murder of a policeman to your list. Do you?”

“Just be quiet!” she demanded. She jabbed the gun in his direction.

“You know, that name… Roy Moulton. Seems to be I’ve seen it somewhere before. Do you happen to know if he’s wanted for anything?”

Tasha was silent, but Winfield was relieved to see the muzzle of the revolver drop.

“I’d swear I saw his name on a teletype or something. Isn’t he the… I’ve got it!” If his hands had been free, he would have slapped them on his thighs. “We got an APB on him a couple of weeks ago. I remember it because it struck me kind of funny when I read it. He escaped from a mental hospital somewhere down South. Alabama was it? No, Georgia. Yeah, Georgia. And I remember thinking why the hell would someone, even someone from a mental hospital be heading up this way? With winter coming on, you’d
have
to be nuts to come to Aroostock County this time of year!”

“Knock it off, will you?” Tasha said. She didn’t brandish the gun or shine the light in his eyes to intimidate him, so Winfield knew what he was saying was working on her—at least a little. Now, if he could get her to free him before that commotion upstairs stopped and Hocker rejoined them!