Mary was leaning against the tiled wall of the shower stall in the big first-floor bathroom of the farmhouse. They had finally left her alone, her right wrist handcuffed to the shower head so that she could never quite sit down. She tried to stand on her own, but she felt faint and unsteady. This was probably why they had chained her that way. If she fell she would hurt her arm, but she probably couldn't kill herself by hitting her head on the tiles.
When she looked down at her legs she could see the bruises were already a deep purple, and the welts were red and swelling. She had tried to kick out at them, but they had not grabbed her or tried to wrestle with her; they had simply clubbed the leg that came up at them, and when she kicked out again they would hit it again, until finally she couldn't get the leg to kick.
The two men had not spoken, even to each other. They went about it in a cold, impersonal silence, like people in a slaughterhouse working on an animal. They left the hood on her head the first time, but not because they didn't want her to see their faces; it was because they had no desire to see hers. Desire had nothing at all to do with it. The next time, when she was thinking that maybe it was better that she couldn't breathe, because dying was just going to sleep and being awake was every nightmare she had ever had, they took the hood off. She could see them doing it, their faces intent but detached, whatever they were feeling not comprehensible to her as emotion. Their faces were not like the faces of men having intercourse, but unselfconscious and empty, as though no other human being were present. She had always thought of rape as a crime of hatred, or the sick pleasure of exerting power over somebody who was helpless. But this didn't seem to bring them even that feeling of triumph; they were just using what was there because it was there.
At first she cried and screamed. She said, 'No, please. You're hurting me.' The one who was holding her tightened his grip, but the one who was doing it to her didn't pay any attention at all. He didn't seem to be able to understand. Her voice was the call of a bird or the bark of a dog, something he could hear but that carried no meaning at all.
When they left they chained her to the shower, still naked. She tried to take what was left of herself and put it back together, but she couldn't. She was torn apart, a lot of fragments that she couldn't seem to collect. After a long time she started to think again. Her mind kept ticking off an automatic inventory of hurts and injuries that kept being the same over and over, as though it were establishing the boundaries. Then she began to imagine herself telling Barraclough what they had done to her, and saw him decide to kill them for it. She was valuable. But even while she thought about it, there was a small, nagging voice somewhere just below hearing to remind her that she wasn't important. She wasn't really worth anything at all.
It was midnight when Farrell emerged from the back door of the building. He walked a hundred feet to the rear of the parking lot, opened the trunk of a dark sedan at the rear of the lot, took out a large hard-sided briefcase, and then turned and walked back into the building.
Jane waved to her lookout and pointed at the front entrance, then started her car. A moment later, Farrell came out the front door. A young man drove up to the curb in a white station wagon, got out, and stood on the sidewalk while Farrell took his place behind the wheel. Jane watched the boys she had hired. The lookout had been in the narrow space between two buildings, and already he was gone. He had waited long enough to see the car Farrell was driving, and now he was in the back of the building getting into his companion's car.
When Farrell started off and turned right, she saw the boys' black Trans-Am already on the right street, crossing the intersection after him. The second car, a sedate-looking brown Saturn, only joined in after she had counted to eight. She turned around in order to avoid passing the office building, went down the side street, and joined the convoy three blocks later.
She followed the three cars onto the freeway, fell back a quarter mile, and watched the Saturn's taillights. She had given the boys a short course on following cars while they waited for Farrell to move, and now she watched them work. On a freeway all they had to watch Farrell for was an exit. They stayed well back from him. When there were packs of cars on the road ahead they moved up and hid among them. They didn't change lanes when he did. They waited, showing a clear preference for the right lane, where it was difficult for him to notice them, and other cars entered the freeway and slipped in to put a new set of headlights in his mirror for a few minutes.
After they were north of the city and the traffic thinned out a bit, the second car passed the one in front and stayed there until it was possible that Farrell was getting used to the new set of headlights, and then it dropped to the rear again. Jane drove conservatively, watching the taillights of her decoys and holding herself in reserve. She was beginning to feel a little more hopeful now. Every minute that passed, Farrell would come closer to accepting the conclusion that he had not been followed.
Mary had been left alone in the shower stall for hours. She had begun to spend long periods trapped in her own mind. She would try to strengthen herself. 'I did this. I chose to trade my life for the life of a little boy. This is the best thing that I have ever done. It's the best that any human being ever does. I'm past the decision, the part where I'd have been weak if I had thought about it, so no matter what happens to me now, I can't fail. I can do this.' But there was another feeling, one that didn't respond in its own words. It was just like an echo that revealed the hollowness of the sounds Mary was making. She was a fraud. She was not brave enough. It was self-deception. She had stepped off a cliff and now as she was falling she was regretting it more every second. Then she would wonder. Priests said that if a person made a pure unselfish act of contrition at the very last moment, she would be forgiven, her whole life validated retroactively. But what if she did make the promise, the sacrifice, and then wanted to take it back much more sincerely with every single breath? She wished she had died before she had ever had that moment of madness.
Then there were sounds outside the door, men's voices, big heavy feet on the floorboards, and she tried to stand without holding on to the wall, but she couldn't. It wasn't that she was hurt, but her muscles didn't want to contract when her mind willed them to. They were quivering and weak.
When the door swung open she felt an impulse to scream, but even her throat was paralyzed. Just a harsh, raspy 'Huh' came out. The man came into the room and closed the door. It was Barraclough. She cringed and tried to disappear into the corner of the shower as he walked toward her. She tried to cover herself with the one arm she could use.
After a moment she realized that he was paying no attention to her. He walked across the tile floor, looked around, and stopped. He seemed only to be making sure she was alive. Then to her surprise he turned to go.
'Wait,' she said. 'Don't you want to talk?' She was fighting the fear that he was going out to let the other two come in again.
He said, 'What do you want?'
'They raped me,' she tried to say, but her face seemed to collapse and shrivel inward, and she couldn't control her voice, so it broke into a sob.
'Don't waste my time,' he said. It sounded like a warning. It didn't matter what they did to her because she wasn't a regular person anymore, a being who had the right to keep anything as hers, even her body. She had thrown her rights away. She was a criminal and she had been caught. She longed to change that, or at least hide it from him.
'Look, this has been a mistake. You seem to think I'm somebody I'm not. I didn't do anything or hurt anybody.' She pointed to the door. 'They hurt me. But I can understand; they didn't know they weren't supposed to. I'll just forget that it ever happened. Like a bad dream. We'll never mention it again. You let me go - anywhere you like. Drive me someplace so I don't know where this house was.'
He looked at her with an expression that froze her. It came from a vast distance. It seemed to detect everything at once: her abject fear, her guilt, her lying - no, not just that she was lying but that she was a liar. His expression showed that he knew all of it, and that it inspired disgust and contempt. For the first time he even seemed to contemplate her naked body, but not with lust. It was the way a god would look down at it from a great height. She was dirty, bruised, covered with sweat, and throbbing with pain, a small, unremarkable female creature who would have been unappetizing at any time but was now filthy and cowering.
It made her desperate, as though she were standing alone on a shore and the ship was drifting farther away.
'I'm not naive, and I know you aren't. Sure, I have money. That's what you want, and I've got it. You seem to forget, I didn't get caught. I came to you. Why do you suppose I did that? I know you want some money from me, but I also want something from you. I took lots of banks for lots of money while the time was right. And I wasn't alone. I know people you haven't even heard of who took a whole lot more than I did. I can bring them to you. I can deliver them here.'
His expression didn't change, and it made her more desperate.
