door and locked it.
Wylie was gone all morning, so Gorman went out to buy hamburgers and french fries and milk shakes for lunch. Jane had been fed intravenously, and it had been days since she had eaten solid food, so the lunch caused cramps, but then, hour by hour, she felt better and stronger. Wylie didn't return by dinnertime, and Gorman and Maloney grumbled. Maloney went out to buy the food this time. They let Jane sit in her bed and eat without restraints. Jane ate quickly. She knew now that this was going to be her last night before these men sold her. Once she was in the hands of any of the likely bidders, her chance of survival would end. She saw Gorman get up to throw away his trash, so she lay back in her bed. When Maloney went to the bathroom, she lay on her stomach and wrapped the Velcro restraint around her left wrist to tie it to the bed frame, then lay on her stomach. She put her right hand under the sheet so it couldn't be seen. She hoped that both men would glance in her direction and assume the other had made her secure. Then she arranged herself so she could open one eye a slit and see the rest of the big room.
After Maloney, Gorman, and Jane had eaten, the two men went to the steel door, looked outside, then locked it. She could hear them fiddling with something that clanked, but she closed her eyes. They were more worried about the bidders taking Jane than about her making an escape, and she had to keep them confident.
They came closer to her. Jane caught sight of Gorman's watch, so she knew it was ten in the evening when Gorman and Maloney made an agreement. Each of them would stay awake to keep watch for four hours. The first shift was to be Maloney's. He sat at the table near Jane's bed drawing pictures on the backs of some medical papers that the nurse had left. Jane could see the drawings were the sort that ten-year-old boys drew, fighter planes diving low toward a stronghold made of piled-up boxlike structures, strafing them with machine guns. A second wave came in higher, releasing large bombs from their bellies. After a while he obliterated the defenders with a couple of large, puffy explosions.
Next Maloney drew a few pictures of women, all with exaggerated breasts and bottoms, and impossibly thin waists. He wasn't very good at hands or feet, and when he got to the faces, he drew big, lipsticked mouths and cowlike eyes, but kept drawing bad noses and erasing them until they were gray smears. At last he tired of making art. He sat on the couch near Jane and stared at the closed door to the office where Gorman was sleeping, then at his watch. After a time his head tipped backward, his eyes closed, his mouth gaped, and Jane heard him snoring.
Jane waited. Gorman had retired to one of the offices along the side of the building, and he had been snoring for an hour. She knew she would move quietly but could not make herself perfectly silent. She had to let Maloney reach the stage of sleep that Gorman had already reached. If he heard a small noise now, his mind would try to remain asleep by incorporating the noise into his dream.
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.
