'Of course you have to remember that you're my prisoner. I'm not your prisoner.'
'That's hard to forget.'
'But aside from my leaving myself some wiggle room, do we have a deal'
'No,' she said. 'I don't know where Shelby is.'
'I'm sure you do.'
'I got him a car and a change of clothes and some cash. If he doesn't make any mistakes and drives somewhere that's reasonably free of cops and people who hunt fugitives for a living, he can be invisible for months. He didn't tell me what his destination was, and I didn't suggest any.'
'Did you get him credit cards'
Jane saw the trap. 'No.'
'How about false ID A driver's license'
'No.'
'Why not'
'I didn't want to know what his new name would be,' she said. 'If people had his new name, they could eventually get his new address.'
He looked at her closely. His blue eyes had probably looked innocent to many people over the years, and that was why he was trying to use them again on her. But to Jane his eyes looked cold and opaque, like flat metal disks. He manufactured a half smile. 'I don't think I understand you yet. Is this about the money Is somebody paying you a bonus for each day Shelby stays hidden'
'No. Nobody's paying me anything.'
Suddenly, she understood what he was doing. After the captured warrior had been brought into camp, he would sometimes be bathed and his wounds would be bandaged, and he would be allowed to rest. That evening he would be brought to an important man's dwelling, fed, and treated as an honored guest. Some enemy peoples would even formally adopt him, so he would become a relative. In doing these things the captors were trying to make his body stronger and his will weaker, to force him to live through the cruelest treatment, all the time feeling the terrible contrast between the feast and the torture. Almost the minute after the feast was over, the captured man would face the first of the major torments that would end only in his death.
The tall man looked at her with a friendly, concerned expression, as though he genuinely cared about her. 'If you're not getting paid, then why would you put up with the kind of treatment you've been getting, and what's about to happen to you'
'As you've said, you've got me. I don't have you.' His hand shot out suddenly and slapped her face. She had watched for it and decided in advance to take the blow. If she did anything to deflect it or counter it, she would reveal how strong she really was, and this was a secret that might be important to her later. Her face felt hot and sore, and she knew it was probably turning red.
His smile returned. 'You just reminded me that I can do whatever I want.'
Jane heard cars pulling up outside the building, and her heart began to beat harder. The young nurse must have gathered enough nerve to call the police and say she had been hired to care for a kidnapped woman. Jane lay there, her eyes on the tall man. She knew that when the police came through the door he would either try to use her as a shield, or kill her. She would have to roll off the bed and stay low. Maybe she could deliver a kick to distract him for the police. She bent her strong left leg so she would be ready to push herself off the edge of the bed.
She heard the door swing open, and after a second he called out, 'It's about time you guys got here.'
The man who had driven the car when she was caught walked in carrying three bags against his chest. He said, 'It took us a while to find all this stuff.'
The man who had shot her said, 'You wanted to talk to her alone. Should we wait'
'She's buying time and bullshitting. We might as well get ready.'
The men brought in a folding table, opened it, placed it about six feet from Jane's bed, and then began to take things out of the bags and lay them out on the surface. Jane considered not looking, because the fear would only weaken her, but she reminded herself that she needed to see what implements were going to be lying where she might be able to reach them later.
There were assorted knives, some of them serrated and some smooth, a package of steel skewers for barbecuing meat, a small handheld blowtorch. So this stage of her ordeal was going to be what she had expected- cutting and fire. There was a car battery, and a set of insulated wires with alligator clips. Just another kind of fire.
The tall man disconnected the IV needle from the back of her left hand and wrapped the tube around the steel stand. 'Here. Roll her over on her stomach and use the restraints to secure her wrists to the bed.'
The two men turned her over roughly, and tightened the Velcro restraints on the bed frame around her wrists. She heard a cigarette lighter, and then a hiss. She turned her head toward the sound and watched the tall man holding the lighted torch, adjusting the feed valve until the flame was a small blue point.
The tall man used the torch to heat up a set of four steel skewers while the driver held them with a pair of long-handled pliers. Jane pictured the warrior, tied to a stake by now, watching the embers being heated, the torturers' eyes glowing like cats' eyes in the reflected firelight. The proper response was complete indifference. The warrior would pretend to be unafraid, would show calm when the pain came, would pretend that he felt no despair.
Jane could see that the skewers were red and glowing. The driver pulled the oversize man's shirt she was wearing up to her shoulders, and the tall man simply laid the skewers, one by one, across her back. Her muscles tensed, and her vision narrowed, with a red halo at the edges. Her eyes were wet, the tears spontaneously running as the hot steel seared her back. She believed she smelled her own flesh cooking, but she pictured the warrior's eyes staring into hers, silently urging her to endure the pain and the horror, and remained still.
The tall man picked the skewers up with the pliers. 'Hot enough, you think' She couldn't tell who he was talking to, and it no longer mattered. 'You know, that was a shame. You really did have a beautiful back. I hated to ruin it with those burn lines. Well, guys What should we try next'
Another voice said, 'We should have just killed her when we got her here.'
'You shot her. You could have fired again or just aimed higher and said it was an accident.' He was enjoying her ordeal, but it seemed to be making his friends uncomfortable. 'She has a lot of determination, doesn't she'
The driver said, 'Maybe she told us the truth. Maybe she doesn't know where he went.'
'Then she's really stupid. You should always have -something-one precious thing-that you can use to keep this kind of shit from happening to you.' He was heating the skewers again, and this time, he dropped all of them on her back at once. Jane's vision clouded red again, with only a small point of light in the center. The muscles in her arms and legs tightened in a spasm, but she held back the scream, kept the air moving in and out through her nostrils so it wouldn't pass her vocal cords and make a sound.
The burns on her back were now throbbing from the first attack, the air sweeping across them and making the pain flare again. She felt the bruises from the beating under her, and the burned flesh on her back, and together they seemed to overwhelm her nervous system until she was barely aware of the men and their movements.
'You know how to make this stop. All you have to do is give us back what's ours.'
It was getting harder to keep silent. The bullet wound in her leg hurt again. Her body was a raw, throbbing, aching set of nerve endings, all sending hot, screaming alarms to her brain at once, and she couldn't soothe herself, couldn't turn away, couldn't even move. Inside her closed eyes she had a vision of her husband, Carey-not wishing he could save her, not wishing him into this horror at all, just feeling the loss of him.
What the tall man did next came with no warning, no sound that reached her ears, but brought an explosion of pain, and then the red cloud in front of her vision closed the point of light in the middle, and went black.
At first the darkness was like being in a pocket, but then she sensed that it was big, like a starless, infinite space. She wondered for a moment if she was dead. Moving was impossible, and she couldn't feel her body touching anything. And then, without warning, she felt all of it. The skin of her back was on fire. Her eyes opened like a camera shutter, and closed again at the glare of the lights.
She tried to look at the men again, and saw that they had gone. She couldn't see them or their shadows or hear their voices. She was cold, and she suddenly realized she was wet. She looked around at the table, and saw that someone had attached the two insulated wires to the car battery. That was it. They must have given her a shock, and she had passed out. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. She tried to run an inventory of pains, but she didn't detect any she hadn't felt before. They had let her alone after she passed out. They wanted
