would see that the woman still had the earphones on and was still staring at the computer screen. After a long time, Jane dozed off again.
When the doctor came in, he switched on bright overhead lights and talked loudly. 'You can assemble the bed over here, in the center of this room.'
As the pieces were brought in from the truck and assembled, the bed took form. It was the size of a twin bed with a steel frame. After less than thirty seconds they were going back out for the mattress. They set it on the steel-mesh spring.
The nurse took off her earphones and said something to the doctor in a language that didn't sound familiar to Jane, and he answered her in the same language. The nurse went to the truck; came back with a set of sheets, a pillow, and a wool blanket; and made the bed quickly. As soon as she was finished, the doctor said to his employers, 'You two are going to have to help us move her onto the bed.'
'How do we-'
'I'm about to tell you,' he snapped. 'It's important that you do exactly as I say. We're going to put the blanket under her partway.' He and the nurse unfurled the blanket and tucked it under her, then slid her onto it. 'Now lift the blanket.' Then the four lifted her again onto the new bed, and the nurse arranged her pillows.
The doctor said to his nurse, 'I need to have another look at the wound. Bring the dressing kit.'
The nurse laid out various implements and dressings, and prepared a hypodermic needle. Jane said, 'What's in the needle'
'It's a painkiller.'
'I don't need a painkiller,' she said.
'Yes you do. I haven't begun yet.' He injected the painkiller into her arm, and in a short time, she felt limp and sleepy, and then there was darkness.
When she awoke the doctor was gone, her mouth was dry, and her leg hurt a bit more than she remembered it hurting, as though the doctor had disturbed it somehow.
'So where is Jimmy Shelby' The voice sounded friendly. It seemed to her the voice was a little bit like the voice of a country singer. She opened her eyes and looked at the man who had spoken. He was ten feet away. He had the reddish skin that some pale-complexioned people had when they'd spent too many years in the sun. The sunburn never seemed to go away. He was tall and lanky, wearing a pair of boots, with the legs of his blue jeans down over them, and a black sport coat. His short blond hair was spiked on top, and it struck Jane as grotesque, because his face looked a generation too old for the style.
'I don't know,' she said.
He looked at her with an expression of mild surprise, which seemed to blossom into sincere curiosity. 'Now why would you say that'
'Because I don't.'
'You broke him out of the courthouse, left a car for him to drive, and then used delaying tactics to keep anyone from getting to him while there was still time. Are you denying that'
'No.'
'So you have to be a pro, somebody who has done this kind of thing before, and who knows the way things work. You knew there was a big risk, and you might be caught. You must know where he went.'
'I didn't want to. It wouldn't make either of us any safer. If I don't know, I can't tell.'
'I sure hope you're not telling the truth about that,' he said. 'If you don't know, you have nothing to trade. All you'll be is a woman who freed a man we put in jail, and hurt three friends of mine doing it.'
'That's all I am,' Jane said.
'Are you trying to get me to kill you'
'I'm just answering your questions truthfully right now at the start, to avoid a lot of fruitless conversation later. You'll make your own decisions.'
He looked at her closely, his brows knitted. Then he called out to his men, 'I think she needs to focus her mind. Ask her again.' He turned and walked across the big room and out the door. When it opened she saw that night had come. She heard the sound of a car engine, and then silence.
The man who had shot her and the driver came in from one of the doors along the side of the room. Each was carrying a bamboo stick about three feet long, and about the thickness of a cane. Without any preliminary - threatening, the man who had shot her simply raised his cane and brought it down across her shin. She squinted, and the other began to beat her too, hitting her across the stomach. She was strapped to the bed with only a man's shirt and a sheet over her, so the blows fell on her head, stomach, arms, feet, knees, and shins without padding to soften them. The men avoided hitting her right thigh, where the bullet wound was, but otherwise, they seemed bent on hurting her everywhere. She lost count of the sharp, stinging blows, but she could tell the two men had not. She suspected they must have orders to hit her a certain number of times. She turned her head to avert her face, but that was all she could do in her weakness. As though at a silent signal, the blows stopped.
'Where is he' It was the man who had shot her.
'I don't know.'
'You have to know his first stop,' the driver said.
'Why do I have to'
'He's hurt, has no money, no clothes, no shelter. You must have help waiting for him somewhere. Tell us where.'
'I offered to get him out of jail. He said yes, so I did. Since then he's been on his own.'
The driver hit her again, a sharp, sudden blow that was aimed at her knee, but which hit an inch higher. 'Which direction did he go East'
'I don't know.'
The other man's bamboo stick slashed across her ribs, and she glared at him, but refused to cry out.
The questions came, and after each one, a blow. After a while, they stopped waiting for her to say, 'I don't know,' and just hit her after each question.
As the blows fell, Jane withdrew her mind from the room where the men were beating her and concentrated on the past, on the wars of the forests her ancestors had fought. Often, when members of a war party were returning from a raid in a distant territory, they would be running to escape, and a much larger force would be pursuing them. Sometimes, if it became clear that they were going to be overtaken, a lone warrior would stop at a narrow, strategic spot on the trail and turn back to delay the pursuers. Most of the time he would fight until he died. But the enemies always wanted to take him alive. They would surround him and try to wound and exhaust him if they could. When all of his arrows were gone and he had swung his war club many times, they would rush him from all sides at once, drag him down, and subdue him.
The Seneca warrior would be brought back to the enemy village bound and wounded. He would be the only representative of the war party that had struck and probably killed a few of the enemy, and he had probably killed more in his fight to buy time for his friends to get away. He would know that the only thing in his future was pain.
But a captured warrior was still a warrior. It was his job now to be indifferent to physical torment. Before he died, he wanted to demonstrate his superiority so convincingly that his captors would be terrified of the next Seneca they saw.
She imagined that the first stages of his torment would be like what she was suffering now. As he was dragged in, the villagers would beat him with sticks, poke and pound him, teasing him with the taste of the pain that was to come.
He would give them no satisfaction. He would pretend that their blows were not frightening to him, and that his death meant nothing. The last, best thing he could do for all the Senecas who came after him was to plant in their enemies a secret, lingering fear that would make them timid and hesitant, so they could be struck down.
Jane felt the blows, and she knew the other torments that would be coming, probably better than these men knew. They were simply doing what they guessed might force her to talk, but she had already thought through all of the tortures that were likely to occur to them as they tried again and again to break her. Each attempt would be worse. Every form of cruelty seemed ready-made, tried long ago, but also reinvented in every human brain because when a person was afraid it took effort not to think of all the things he didn't want done to him.
What the men were doing was just like the entry into the enemy village-a prisoner with a debilitating wound, a beating to announce to her that they were willing to cause her more injury and pain. Probably only a day or two
