Poison Flower (8 page)

Just as Jane was about to move, Maloney stirred. He sat up, took off his coat, and tossed it onto the arm of the couch, then slipped off his pants and draped them over the coat, then lay down full length. He pulled the spare blanket that had been left on the couch over him and immediately went back to sleep. Jane waited for what seemed to her like an hour.

After a time Jane raised her head. Maloney was deep asleep now. She was so eager as her time approached that her breaths were becoming shallow and her thoughts were scattered, tumbling over one another. So many things had to be done before Wylie got back, and he could be stepping up to the door right now. She was badly hurt. Would she even be able to do those things She clenched her teeth and thought. First she had to get out of the bed.

She slowly, carefully removed her single Velcro restraint, trying to muffle the skritch sound by pressing the pillow over it. Then she pushed herself up so she was on two hands and her left knee. She eased to her right, then lowered her tender right leg to the floor. It would have to hold her weight for a few seconds. If it collapsed, she would fall and wake Maloney. She shifted her weight to the right leg while her left was lowered to the floor beside it. The leg held. Then she was kneeling on the floor beside the bed.

Maloney had taken off his coat and pants to sleep. She touched the pants pockets for the gun, then searched the coat pockets. Where was his gun The gun must be here where he could reach it. She reached out and slowly, gently slid her hand into the small space beneath the cushion he was using as a pillow and the couch. It wasn't there.

Jane began to crawl. Crawling was quieter and easier right now than putting all her weight on her legs. She crawled to the table where Maloney had been drawing. She lifted his paper slightly, and caught sight of a black, chunky object. She reached under the paper, encountered the cool steel and then the knurled handgrips of the Beretta M9F, and felt her face forming itself into a smile.

She had Maloney's gun in her hand. The gun was a huge step. She had accomplished a wonder. At the worst, Jane wasn't going to have to lie in bed helpless until the time came to let the next set of captors torture her to death. She could take at least a couple of the tormenters with her, and then end her own life. Her heart was pounding with exhilaration.

Jane crawled toward the door of the office where Gorman slept. When she was nearly there, she came to a steel support pole rising from the floor and used it to pull herself up to a standing position. She took a step with her injured right leg and realized it was much stronger than she had expected. The twinge she felt was bearable; and, even better, the leg held her weight.

She stepped to the steel door of the room and tested the knob. It turned smoothly. She held it. There was a raised circular dead bolt at eye level, with a key slot. She stared at it as she prepared herself to open the door. In a moment she would have to spot Gorman in the darkened room. She might have to fire and kill him before he found his gun and aimed it. She stood slightly to the side, held the gun in her right hand at chest level, and turned the knob the rest of the way until it stopped. She pushed the door inward and saw Gorman.

He was across the room lying on his side on a couch. Near him was a big wooden desk. He was still asleep, his mouth open and his jaw slack, breathing deeply. It would be easy to shoot him from here, but she would have to be positive he was dead, and that meant three or four shots, and then trying to make it back on her bad leg to a spot where she could shoot Maloney before he was awake, up, and dangerous. She had his gun, but she didn't know if there was another one in this building.

Jane took another step into the room, and then turned a bit to close the door behind her, but she stopped, staring at the inner side of the door. Right in front of her was the inner side of the dead bolt. It was a four-inch circle of brass exactly like the outer side. The dead bolt was the kind that had keyholes on both sides, and this side had the key in it.

She quietly extracted the key from the lock, backed out, and closed the door. She stuck the key in the lock and turned it to lock the dead bolt. Gorman was locked in. When he woke up he wouldn't be able to get out. She put the key in her shirt pocket and turned her eyes toward Maloney. He was still sleeping.

It took her a long time to walk to the couch, taking each step with care to be sure that it was silent and that it didn't strain her injured right leg. The time seemed to be passing too quickly. She must not waste her last chance by taking too much time. Wylie could be pulling into the parking lot at any second.

When she came near the couch she could see the items laid out on the table near her bed. There was the blowtorch they had used to heat the skewers; there were the bamboo sticks they had used to beat her, the skewers, a big pair of bolt cutters with two-foot handles, and a pair of big steel rings with screws attached so they could be embedded in a support beam and made to hang heavy objects. She saw a coil of rope and knew that the heavy object was to have been her. They must have planned to hang her up for the next torture session. There was a roll of duct tape, with a pair of scissors. She supposed they would have taped her mouth when the screams got too loud to tolerate. There was a set of handcuffs and a key.

Jane picked the handcuffs up and stepped to the spot between the couch and the bed. She touched the muzzle of the gun to Maloney's head and gave it a hard push. He flinched, and his eyes opened and focused on Jane.

She whispered, "If you move or make a sound, I'll kill you. Do you believe me"

He nodded.

"Get on the bed and lie on your stomach." She kept the gun aimed at him as he moved from the couch to the bed. She closed one handcuff on his right wrist and the other on the steel bed frame. Then she used one of the Velcro restraints to fasten his left wrist to the other side.

She limped to the table, took the duct tape and scissors, then returned and wrapped the tape around his head and across his mouth three times before she cut it.

She went to the couch where he'd been asleep, and put on his pants. They were too wide and too long, but she cinched the belt as tightly as she could. Then she found her flat black shoes under the bed, and stepped into them. She bent close to Maloney's ear. "I'm not going to harm you or Gorman. I'm just going to leave. But don't ever let me see you again."

Her anxiety was shifting into hope. She had the two men locked up. She had the gun, and now she was taking steps toward the steel door at the end of the building. And then she saw the chain. There was a thick, heavy chain running through a bolt hole in a vertical I beam, then across the door, around the nearest support pole, and back. It was fastened there by a big padlock. She lifted the padlock and looked beneath it. There was no key. It was obviously intended to keep someone from forcing the door from outside, so there was no reason for the key to be gone. Where was it She looked everywhere nearby-any sort of small ledge created by the structure of the building, or by the floors. She went into the bathroom and looked there, too.

For the first time, Jane's eyes began to water. She was so badly hurt, so weak and tired after the past few days. She had dared to feel some faint hope, and now this. No. No weakness. She blinked her eyes clear, gripped her pistol, and walked back to the table that held the tools they'd used to torment her. She put the gun in her belt and snatched up the pair of bolt cutters with the long handles. She brought them to the chain on the door and closed them on the shaft of the padlock. She squeezed the handles as hard as she could, but they made no impression on the lock.

She knelt and examined every link of the chain, looking at the weld that closed each oval. At last she found a weld that looked a bit thinner than the link, so it formed a small indentation. She fitted one blade of the bolt cutters into it, then tried to bring the two handles together to cut it. She kept trying, but she wasn't strong enough. She stopped to catch her breath and let her muscles relax. Sweat had made her hair damp and streaked her forehead. The various pains in her body seemed worse. She set down the bolt cutters and examined the weld of the link she'd been attacking. It did show some signs of wear, a slight distortion.

Jane got up, went back to the table, picked up the blowtorch and the plastic cigarette lighter, and returned. She struck the lighter and then turned the knob on the blowtorch. It hissed for a second and then ignited. She adjusted the flame to make it smaller, a deep blue point that was hot and intense. She set the bottle-shaped torch down so the point of the flame was on the weld of the link.

She waited for a long time, watching the link get hotter and hotter, then red-orange, then cherry red. She decided it was time. She lodged one handle of her bolt cutters against the wall of the building, opened its jaws, and set one blade in the red-hot weld. She stepped out of her shoes so her bare left foot was set against the floor, and grasped the other handle near the end with both hands. She pushed, hard. She used her strong left leg and her back and shoulders and arms. She thought she felt movement, but it wasn't enough to cut through. She knew she had to use her injured right leg. Even if it could exert only a hundred pounds of pressure, it would help. And if she died later tonight, she would know that she had used everything.

She used both legs, she pushed harder, and the blade cut through and the handles came together. She pushed the red-hot link against the hinge of the steel door and used the leverage of the bolt cutters to bend it, so the opening widened. A length of chain slipped through and fell to the floor. Jane pulled the bolt cutters away, turned off the blowtorch, and stepped into her shoes.

She walked to the door and reached for the knob. She was relieved that the knob turned and the door opened. She held on to the bolt cutters as she stepped through the doorway into the night.

The air was cool and moving, and she loved the sweet taste of it. There were no cars on the asphalt outside. The lot was shielded from view on three sides by other buildings sharing the same parking lot, and on the fourth by the building where she had been held. She had a bad feeling about limping along the street that Wylie would use to enter the lot, so she slipped between two of the buildings and stopped to listen. There seemed to be streets on two sides, with the whispery sound of cars passing, and ahead of her was the glow of electric light. Jane picked the street away from the lot entrance and headed for it.

At the end of the passage between buildings, she looked out and saw that the street she'd chosen had no pedestrians and only an occasional car. She looked down at her bolt cutters. One end was a pair of steel shafts with rubberized handles and the other was two steel blades like a parrot's bill. She knew the men had brought the bolt cutters here in case they decided to cut off fingers or toes. Now that she was outside in the air and could see sights that had the dull normalcy of any other city street, the horror of the men's plans struck her in the stomach like a physical sensation. She felt an impulse to drop the bolt cutters. No, she told herself. It was too early to feel, too early to allow herself any weakness. She must think only about what she had to do. The throwaway cell phone she'd had in Los Angeles had gone with her purse in the fight, and so had the false identification she'd brought. She had a sudden thought. Maloney and Gorman must have had cell phones, but she hadn't taken them. How could she expect to live if she didn't think of things like that No, she thought. Taking them would have been foolish. If she'd called the police she'd go to jail forever. And she couldn't wait in Los Angeles for Carey to come and get her. She had to get moving away from this place.

The old warriors came back to her. If one of them ever managed, after the torture had begun, to see a second chance to fight, how precious that would have been to him. She must not waste this chance. She knelt and rolled up the bottoms of the oversize pants she had taken, pulled out her shirt to cover the gun in her belt, put her bolt cutters under her left arm, then stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Before her was a four-lane thoroughfare, with a traffic signal hanging on a wire in the center of the intersection, and a long row of industrial buildings and businesses. Across the street she could see a place that sold marble and granite to builders, a fence company, and farther down, a United Rent-all. None of the buildings had any lights on except a few overhead floods on their parking lots.

Jane kept to the shadows as she walked to the United Rent-all. She stepped to the side of the chain-link fence, where the light was dim, used her bolt cutters to cut five links in the fence, ducked, and entered the lot. There were a few cherry pickers for high work, a Caterpillar tractor, two plain white vans, two white pickups. The doors of the vehicles were all locked.

She looked at the front of the rental office, then approached and stared in the window. She saw a counter, a clock that said twelve thirty-five, and a door that led to a back room. She could also see an electric-eye alarm system at the doors and a set of metal alarm tapes in the windows. She moved farther back along the building and, in the dim light, saw that the back room was lined with shelves that held every kind of power carpentry tool she had ever seen, plumbers' equipment, and a few electronic boxes that could have been anything. Where was the dim light coming from Overhead. She put her face close to the window and looked up to see that there was a large skylight above the storeroom.

She kept moving back toward the rear of the building. At the back was a roofed-in area that held a decorative fountain for fancy parties, a collection of lawn chairs and tables, and finally, a row of ladders of all sizes.

She came closer to the ladders. They were all locked up for the night with a chain running from a rung in the wall, through each of the ladders, and then padlocked to the last one. She fitted her bolt cutters to the chain, set her hands at the very ends of the handles, and cut it. She pulled out an aluminum extension ladder and leaned it against the roof of the building. With her injured right leg, she wasn't sure if she could climb. She tested herself, using her left leg to go up, then pulling her right to join it on the same rung, then holding most of her weight with her arms as she lifted the left again. It worked once, so she did it again.