Chapter 29 #2
The man came back and wrenched her arms around behind her and secured her wrists with a zip tie, like the ones on Karen’s, then wrapped them in duct tape so she couldn’t rub the release tab against something to loosen them.
Jane’s optimism waned, but she told herself that nobody bothered to bind a person if he intended to kill them.
She still had the pocketknife. It would be harder to reach, but she’d find a way.
Then he grasped her ankles, probably to tie them too.
He stopped. Jane lay there, holding her breath, not fighting him.
He held down her leg, jerked up the pant leg, and took the knife out of her boot.
He held it up and said something in Russian.
The woman took the knife, opened and closed it, and then pocketed it and held the butcher knife close to Jane’s face, snatched a fistful of her hair, and tugged it so her head was lifted, and said, “What else do you have?”
“Nothing.”
The woman released her hair, patted her down all over, nodded to the man, and got up, the big knife still in her hands. She said, “When we get you to Boston, I’m going to advise the Pachan to blind you so you can’t hurt anybody and get away again.”
While she stood over Jane, the man went out and came back with blankets and bedspreads taken from other rooms. He went out again and returned with an armload of towels.
He made a body bag for each dead man by covering the man’s top half with one plastic trash bag and his legs with another and taping them together.
He rolled the two bodies over onto the blankets and wrapped them up, dragged them onto the bedspreads and wrapped them again, and dragged them out into the hallway.
He returned and went to work cleaning up the two pools of blood on the hardwood floor with the towels, wiping it up and putting each soaked towel into a big plastic trash bag, and taking another, and tying each bag when it was full.
He was a hard worker and he had stamina, so the work went quickly.
When he had finished with the towels, he went downstairs carrying them in the plastic bags and returned with a mop and bucket.
He cleaned the bedroom for some time before he was satisfied.
He had a whispered conversation with the woman, and then went out the door again.
Jane expected to see him return immediately, but this time he didn’t.
Jane watched the woman, using every moment that the woman wasn’t looking at her to strain and twist her body to put more pressure on the duct tape and the zip ties that held her to the bed’s steel frame.
She had to be watchful, because she knew that if she managed to break a tie she would be committed.
If the woman noticed, she would get nervous and think she had to do something sadistic and debilitating to make Jane too weak and intimidated to fight.
Jane couldn’t see the ties because her wrists were behind her, but she suspected the ties were the kind that the police used, not the ones people used to bundle wires and things, because she’d worked at it for an hour but wasn’t making much headway.
She felt anxious because she had noticed that the woman seemed to have completely forgotten about Karen.
The woman had brought her men out to California to find Karen, presumably to get her to tell her how to find Jane, or maybe to hold her hostage.
It occurred to Jane that maybe the plan had been to lure Jane into a futile attack and capture her, which was exactly what had happened.
The way the woman was behaving now worried Jane.
If she wasn’t interested in Karen, it might mean that she had no further use for her.
If that was true, then she would probably kill her.
Jane heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. Too late.
It was dark outside when the man came back into the room.
He talked to the woman in Russian again, and then turned his attention to the two wrapped-up bodies in the hallway.
He took the roll of duct tape and ran it around the bottom ends of each corpse, then the middle, then the top, so each was like a cocoon.
Jane wondered what they were going to do with those two bodies.
Would it give her more time to work her way out of the ties and tape?
He dragged the first body along the hall to the staircase.
Then she heard a bump-bump noise as the body slid down the stairs to the first landing.
She heard the man go down the stairs and drag the body to the second flight and launch it the rest of the way to the foyer.
He came back up the stairs and repeated the same process with the second body, sending it bumping down the first flight of stairs, and then the second.
The woman never left the room except when the man was there to watch the captives.
When he was, she busied herself with searching the upper rooms of Karen’s house for cash and valuables.
The world outside had been in full darkness for hours when she and the man had their next conference in Russian.
Their faces were serious, maybe even anxious.
Then the conference was over and they became active again.
The man and woman wiped down the smooth surfaces in the room, and the tools for torture that she had used, and then she raided Karen’s closet for extra clothes. Rather than search for suitcases, she put the clothes in the same kind of trash bags the man had used to wrap the bodies.
The last thing they did was to cut Jane and Karen loose from the bed and make them stand.
Then they herded them down the stairs to the foyer.
The two wrapped corpses were lying together beside the front door.
The man went out the door while the woman kept the knife blade pressed against Jane’s side so she could feel the prick of the tip against her skin.
They heard an engine noise and some scraping. The woman turned off the light.
When the door opened again Jane could see that he had backed a rental truck up over the curb nearly to the house so its tall, broad cargo section was blocking the view of the house from the street.
He’d opened the cargo bay doors and extended a metal ramp down to the ground.
The man said to Jane and Karen, “You two, drag the bodies over to the ramp. Now! Get going!”
The two women were tired and hurt, but they had no choice. Jane did most of the dragging. The man stayed within a few feet of them while they worked to move the body. “Get it up the ramp. You pull it up, and you push.”
When they had strained and dragged it up onto the floor of the truck, he said, “Pull it all the way into the back.” That part was not as difficult, so Jane did it herself, and then came down. The second body was easier for them, but it felt a bit heavier.
After that, they had to lift the trash bags full of bloody towels and rags and things into the bay. Their captors were determined to leave as little as possible in Karen’s house to be found by the police.
During this labor, the woman hovered near them so that she and her knife were never far from Jane and Karen. Either she or the man would be able to kill at least one of them in any struggle.
The man ordered Karen and Jane to get inside the truck, and he zip-tied their hands behind them again.
He went down the ramp, pushed it back into its place under the truck bed, and closed the rear doors.
Jane listened while he turned the lever to seat the lock bar into its socket.
A moment later the engine started, he eased it down the front lawn, and bumped it down off the curb to the street.
He swung it around and made a series of stops and turns that she could not keep track of, while she sat in the locked cargo bay in the dark.