Chapter Sixteen
“You, Teagan Ray, are brilliant,” Bryson told her.
“I’ll try the lock first, but I was worried this metal will be too soft for this.
The hinge pins will likely be our ticket out of here.
But we have to find something to use to pop them out.
” He motioned toward the stove, which was only about three feet from the door, and beyond that to the handful of cabinets that formed the tiny kitchenette.
“Look through this kitchen, in the bedroom, under the couch. We’ll need something we can either wedge under the end of the pin to pull it or something to stick in the hinge on the bottom to push it. ”
“I’m on it.”
She moved past him and started slamming open cabinets and drawers. He could follow her progress through the tiny shack by the sound of her cursing and the sounds of her either kicking or hitting walls.
He blocked all that out and focused on trying to pick the lock using the underwire.
After half a dozen attempts, he realized it wasn’t going to happen. The metal was just too soft and kept bending. He tossed it aside as she ran to him holding up a long metal rod and a foot-long piece of wood.
“Will this work?” She was breathing heavily from exertion. “I figure you can stick the metal up the bottom of the hinge and use the wood like a hammer to push out the pin.”
“Do I even want to know where you got the steel rod? And why it’s wet?”
“Probably not.”
“Were you in the bathroom?”
“Like I said. You don’t want to know.”
He grimaced. The rod looked like one of those old-fashioned toilet-tank float rods that controlled how the toilet flushed. As to the wood, it was either a piece of baseboard or a piece of the floor itself. Judging by the dilapidated shape of the building, neither would surprise him.
The steel rod was the perfect size and slid in place beneath the middle hinge pin with ease.
Hope flared in his chest as he slammed the wood against it.
He slammed it over and over and over, but the pin wasn’t moving.
He finally stopped and leaned in close, trying to see if there was something keeping it in place.
Then he took a closer look at the hinges in the door frame and cursed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Locking hinge pins.”
“Never heard of them. But I don’t like how that sounds.”
He tossed the wood and rod on the floor and wiped his hands on his dress pants.
“I thought our captor made a mistake with the hinges on the inside. But he didn’t.
There’s an extra screw that prevents the pin from being backed out.
We’d need an Allen wrench and a screwdriver to get it out.
No homemade tools are going to back out that screw.
It’s drilled into the wrought-iron frame. ”
Her shoulders slumped. “That’s why he didn’t try to drug us, or tie us up. He knew there was no way to escape.”
“Don’t give up on me now. I haven’t thrown in the towel just yet.”
She nodded. But he could tell she was rapidly losing hope.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me how you escaped the last time while I see what else is in here.”
“There’s nothing. Just the couch and a few aluminum pots and pans. The utensils in the drawer are plastic or rubber. There’s nothing we could use to stab or hit him.”
“He’s got a gun. Nothing much trumps that. We need to get out before he returns. We have to think outside the box.” He limped past the front door and the stove, then yanked open one of the cabinet drawers in the kitchenette. “Tell me about the shack, and how you got out.”
“It’s basically the same. Well, the bars are new.
And the iron front door. There isn’t a back door.
He tied me up when he left, with cloth. He didn’t use handcuffs.
Mostly he used drugs to keep me docile. He’d knock me out for hours, and I wouldn’t wake up until he was back.
I was in detox for weeks after I got away. ”
He pulled the hardware, tested the corners of the drawer boxes. “Go on. What else.”
She sighed heavily. “I was blindfolded whenever it was light outside. And he wore a hooded mask most of the time. That always gave me hope, thinking he’d eventually let me go because he was keeping his identity secret.
But I don’t know that he ever would have.
He was just extra cautious, in case something happened and I got away.
He’s not worried about us identifying him. He’s going to kill us.”
He’d just started into the bathroom but turned around when she said that. “Not if I kill him first. Do not give up on me.”
Her eyes widened, but he didn’t stand around talking. The sense of time passing was making him feel edgy and nervous. He couldn’t imagine that whatever their captor was doing would keep him gone much longer.
The bathroom was a total bust. It was pitch dark, for one thing, but tiny without even a cabinet under the sink to hide anything.
No bleach or cleaners that he could toss in the gunman’s face.
He didn’t know how Teagan had managed to think about the toilet rod or even how she’d gotten it out of the back of the tank in the darkness.
He had to give her a lot of credit for ingenuity.
The bedroom was much the same as the rest. Bars on the lone small window. An empty closet. No bed, just a mattress lying on the floor. It looked new, thankfully. Not the one that had been here two years ago.
He paused in the tiny hallway outside the bedroom.
As run-down as the place was, maybe they could push through a wall like Teagan had teased about earlier.
He doubted it, but he sent her off to look for weaknesses in the walls while he returned to the kitchen corner of the main room.
With her distracted, he leaned down to study the two-burner gas stove.
It had caught his attention earlier as he’d considered what he could do given the lit pilot light and the fact that the gas line ran through the wall to a propane tank on the outside.
Filling the cabin with gas and causing an explosion would likely burn the dry-rotted cabin like kindling.
And the fire could be seen for miles around.
It would get first responders out here for sure.
But being blown apart in the explosion or burning alive were both wholly unappealing.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Nothing helpful. I’m going to check the bedroom again. Did you find any weaknesses in the walls?”
She followed him as he limped into the bedroom.
“No. But I’m no expert at building construction. And it’s still so dark in here that I might have missed something. Unless you want more baseboards.”
He straightened from his study of the wood beneath the window where he’d been hoping moisture might have rotted out the frame. “Baseboards. That’s what you handed me to use as a hammer. Where did you find it?”
She pointed toward the closet. “In there. The board was broken already so I was able to kick out that piece I gave you.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “He’ll be back soon, won’t he?”
The wobble in her voice had him longing to hold her, to try to comfort her. Instead, he dropped to his knees to study the baseboards, grimacing at the jolt of pain that sizzled through his hip.
“You didn’t finish telling me how you got away.” He felt along the bottom of the closet as she talked behind him, telling him how her captor had missed the vein the last time when he’d tried to drug her.
“He was going on one of his supply trips,” she said.
“The injection made me groggy but didn’t knock me out like usual.
I pretended to be unconscious. After he left I shoved the blindfold up and used my teeth to loosen my bindings and got myself untied.
The old front door was mostly rotten so I kicked it until it split away from the frame.
Then I took off. Nothing amazing. I just ran until I couldn’t.
Then I walked. Then I crawled. A hiker found me several days later.
Not that any of that matters. Our situation is different. We’re good and stuck here.”
He tugged on the board he’d been testing, pulling as hard as he could. It broke in half with a loud crack.
She jumped beside him. “What was that?”
He glanced over his shoulder. “The walls might be solid. But the floor isn’t.
Those baseboards came out easily for you because the whole floor in this section has been eaten up with termites.
” He waved toward a foot-long, four-inch-wide hole he’d made in the floor.
“That’s dirt down there. The crawl space under the cabin. This is how we’re going to get out.”
She was shaking her head before he finished. “No, Bryson. That’s not the sound I heard. There was something else, out front.”
He lurched to his feet, then limped as fast as he could into the main room. She ran after him and they both stumbled to a halt when they saw the headlights bouncing crazily across the trees. A vehicle was coming up the gravel road toward the shack.
They were out of time.