returned. It was pitch — black and smelled of mold and wet stone. She lay there for a moment, confused. Then it all came back to her and she groaned in terror. Her hands groped damp straw over a cold concrete floor. When she tried to sit up, her head protested fiercely and she lay back down with a wave of nausea.
She struggled with an impulse to scream, to cry out, and mastered it. Once again, after a few moments, she made the effort to sit up — more slowly — and this time she succeeded. God, she felt weak. There was no light, nothing, just darkness. Her arm was sore where the IV had been, and there was no bandage covering the injection site.
The realization settled in that she'd been kidnapped from the hospital room. By whom? The man in the orderly's uniform had been a stranger. What had happened to the cop guarding her room?
She rose unsteadily to her feet. Holding her arms out, shuffling cautiously, she made her way forward until her hands touched something — a wet, clammy wall. She felt around it. It was constructed of rough, mortared stones, powdery with efflorescence. She must be in some kind of cellar.
She began feeling along the wall, shuffling her feet. The floor was bare and free of obstructions except for patches of straw. She reached a corner, continued on, counting the distance in foot — lengths. Ten feet more and she came to a niche, which she followed — hitting a door frame, and then a door. Wood. She felt up, then down. Wood, with iron bands and rivets.
The faintest gleam of light shined through a crack in the door. She plastered her eye to the crack, but the tongue — and — groove construction defied her attempts to see through it.
She raised her fist; hesitated; then brought it down hard on the door: once, twice. The door boomed and echoed. There was a long silence, and then the sound of footsteps approaching. She leaned her ear against the door to listen.
Quite suddenly, there was a scraping noise above her head. As she looked up, a sudden blinding light burst over her. Instinctively she covered her face and stepped back. She turned away, narrowing her eyes to slits. After a long moment she began to adjust to the dazzling light. She glanced back.
'Help me,' she managed to croak.
There was no reply.
She swallowed. 'What do you want?'
Still no reply. But there was a sound: a low, regular whir. She peered into the brilliance. Now she could make out a small rectangular slit, set high into the door. The light was coming from there. And there was something else: the lens of a video camera, fat and bulky, thrust through the slit and aimed directly at her.
'Who… are you?' she asked.
Abruptly, the lens was withdrawn. The whirring noise stopped. And a voice, low and silky, replied. 'You won't live long enough for my name to make any difference.'
And with that the light was extinguished, the slit closed heavily, and she was once more in darkness.
Chapter 51
Kenny Roybal, high school dropout, sat on the baseball bleachers and gave the weed a quick cleaning, combing through it, flicking out the seeds and rolling the rest into a fat doobie. He fired it up and inhaled sharply, then passed it on to his friend, Rocky Martinelli.
'Next year,' said Martinelli, accepting the joint and nodding at the field beyond the dark baseball diamond, 'we'll harvest the pot growing down there.'
'Yeah,' said Roybal, with a sharp exhale. 'It's premium grade, too.'
'Fuck, yeah.'
'Word, homeboy.'
'Word.'
Roybal took another hit, passed it back, then exhaled noisily. He waited while Martinelli took a hit, the joint crackling and popping, the tip brightening momentarily, Martinelli's long, dopey face illuminated a dull orange. Roybal took back the joint, carefully tipped off the ash and reshaped the end. He was about to light it again when he saw, through the gathering dusk, a squad car oozing into the far parking lot like a cruising shark.
'Five — O. Heads up.' He dropped down behind the bleachers, Martinelli following. They peered out through the metal and wooden supports. The cop car stopped and a headlamp swiveled around, playing across the diamonds. 'What's he doing?'
'Who the fuck knows?'
They waited, crouching, while the light slowly slid over the bleachers. It seemed to hesitate as it passed by them.
'Don't move,' came Roybal's low voice.
'I'm
The light continued on, then came slowly back. It was blinding, shining through the bleachers. Could the cops see them crouching here in the back? Roybal doubted it, but they seemed uncommonly interested in the bleachers.
He heard a grunt and there was fucking Martinelli running like a jackass across the diamond and into the field, heading for the woods. The light jumped up, spotlighting him.
'Shit!' Roybal took off after Martinelli. Now the light fixed on him. It felt as if he were running to catch his shadow. He vaulted the low chain — link fence and pounded across the field into the woods, following Martinelli's dim fleeing form.
They ran and ran until they could run no more. At last Martinelli began to flag, then dropped, flopping heavily onto a log, his sides heaving. Roybal fell down beside him, gulping for air.
'They coming?' Martinelli finally gasped.
'You didn't need to flake out on me, man,' Roybal replied. 'That cop wouldn't have seen us if you hadn't jumped up.'
'He'd already seen us.'
Roybal stared into the wall of trees but could see nothing. Martinelli had run a long way. He felt in his shirt pocket. It was empty.
'You made me drop the blunt.'
'I'm telling you, we were
Roybal spat. It wasn't worth arguing about. He fished out the Zig — Zag papers from his pocket, along with the rest of the lid. He stuck two papers together, sealed them, and poured a little pot into the groove. 'I can't see a freaking thing.'
Nevertheless, there was enough faint moonlight filtering through the trees to allow him to tease out a couple of seeds, roll up the blunt, light it, and take a toke. He bogarted it for a moment, exhaled, took another hit, held the smoke in hard, exhaled again, then passed it along. He began to laugh, wheezing. 'Man, you took off like a rabbit chased by a hound dog.'
'Dude, the fuzz saw us.' Martinelli took the joint and looked around. 'You know what? That weird — ass place, the Ville, is around here somewhere.'
'It's way over by the mudflats.'
'Naw, man. It's straight down by the river.'
'So? You gonna run again? Woo — woo, here come the zombiis!' Roybal waved his hands over his head. '
'Shut the fuck up.'
They passed the joint back and forth in silence, until at last Roybal carefully trimmed the roach and put it in a tin lozenge box. Suddenly the muffled sounds of 'Smack My Bitch Up' floated into the darkness.
'I bet it's your mom,' said Roybal.
Martinelli fished the ringing cell phone out of his pocket.
'Don't answer.'
'She gets mad if I don't answer.'
'That blows.'
