Chapter 3 #2
He's right. I'm still wearing my work clothes, a wool skirt and a blouse. My coat is gone and so are the heels I didn't bother changing out of before leaving the office. I don't know when he removed them.
He reaches for me again. This time I hold still, because he's right and I know it and the fury of that knowledge burns brighter than the fear. He cuts the restraints with a small blade he produces from his pocket, and the blood rushes back into my hands with a tingling that borders on pain.
"Out," he says.
I climb out of the van on legs that barely hold me.
The ground is gravel, then frozen dirt, and the cold cuts through my stockings and into my feet immediately.
We're in front of a house, old, with a sagging porch, dark high windows, on property that disappears into trees.
There is nothing else. No other buildings, no other lights, no road visible beyond the one we came in on.
He takes my arm, not roughly but not gently, and walks me up the porch steps and through the front door.
Inside, a space heater sits in the corner of a room that smells like dust and old wood.
There’s a table, two chairs, and a couch that's seen better decades.
A kitchen is visible through an opening, lit by a single bulb.
A hallway leads to what I assume are bedrooms.
He leads me down the hallway and opens a door. The room beyond is small, with a bed that looks like it has clean sheets and a single window with the frame nailed shut. On the bedside table sit a bottle of water, a granola bar, and a flashlight.
"Your room," he says.
I almost laugh. The phrasing is so polite, so procedural, as if this is a hotel and he's the bellhop, as if I checked in voluntarily and tipped him on the way up.
"My cell," I correct him.
He doesn't respond to that. "There's a half bath through that door." He nods toward a narrow door in the corner and then to the window. "The window is nailed shut from the outside, so don't waste your time."
"How considerate."
"There's food in the kitchen. I'll bring you something in the morning." He pauses in the doorway, and for a moment something shifts in his expression, a crack in the professional mask, so brief I almost miss it. "I don't want to hurt you."
"Then take me home."
"I can't do that. Not yet."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to drop the case against my brother."
There it is. The reason I'm standing in a cold room in the middle of nowhere with no shoes and residual sedative turning my thoughts to fog. Not revenge or punishment but leverage.
"Your brother is guilty," I say.
"So I've been told."
"Not told but proven. In a court of law, by a jury of his peers, beyond a reasonable doubt.
I didn't invent the evidence. I didn't fabricate the testimony.
Your brother ran a drug operation that poisoned an entire borough, and I proved it, and a jury agreed, and no amount of kidnapping me is going to change that. "
He listens to all of it without interrupting or reacting. When I finish, he nods, as if I've confirmed something he already suspected.
"We'll talk in the morning," he says, and closes the door.
I hear the lock engage from the outside. It is a deadbolt, heavy and solid and definitive.
I stand in the middle of the room and shake.
This time it's not adrenaline but the full-body tremor of a woman who has just been abducted from her own street, drugged and transported to a place she probably couldn’t find on a map by a man who makes people disappear, and the only reason she's still alive is that she has something he wants.
When I stop being useful, I will stop being alive. That's how this works. That's how it always works with men like him.
I sit on the bed. The sheets are clean. The water bottle is sealed.
The granola bar is wrapped. He prepared this room for me the way you'd prepare a guest room, with thought and care, and the dissonance of that, the violence of the taking versus the gentleness of the keeping, is what finally breaks through the last of my composure.
I cry. Quietly, because I don't know if he's listening, and I will not give him the sound of my fear. I cry into the pillow that smells like laundry detergent, and I let myself be terrified for exactly five minutes.
Then I stop. I wipe my face. I drink the water.
I eat the granola bar because I need fuel if I'm going to think my way out of this, and I am going to think my way out of this because that is what I do.
I think. I plan. I build cases out of evidence and I find cracks in impenetrable walls and I do not give up.
The window is too high and nailed shut. The door is locked from the outside. The walls are solid. There is no phone, no computer, no way to signal anyone.
But there is a man on the other side of that door who believes his brother is innocent, and that belief is a crack in the wall. I've spent my entire career finding cracks and wedging them open until the whole structure collapses.
I close my eyes and start building my case.