CHAPTER TWENTY
PAULINE WAS HUNGRY, BUT SHE COULD HANDLE THAT. SHE understood the pains in her stomach and lower intestines, the way the spasms reverberated through her gut as they grasped for any type of nourishment. She knew it well, and she could handle it. The thirst was different, though. There was no way around the thirst. She had never gone without water for this long before. She was desperate, willing to do anything. She'd even peed on the floor and tried to drink it, but it just made her thirst even wilder so that she'd ended up sitting on her knees, baying like a wolf.
No more. She couldn't be in that dark place for long. She couldn't let it get to her again, envelope her so that all she wanted to do was curl into a ball and pine for Felix.
Felix. He was the only reason to get out of here, to fight, to stop the fuckers from taking Pauline away from her baby boy.
She lay on her side, arms pinned to her waist, feet sticking straight out, and lifted her upper body, straining her neck so that she could line herself up right. She held herself like that, muscles tight, sweating, the blindfold rubbing her skin, as she took aim. The chains around her wrists rattled from exertion, and before she could stop herself, she reared back her head and pounded it into the wall.
Pain streaked through her neck. She saw stars—literal stars— swimming through her vision. She fell onto her back, panting, trying not to hyperventilate, willing herself not to pass out.
"What are you doing?" the other woman asked.
The bitch had been lying on her back like a corpse for the last twelve hours, unresponsive, uncaring, and now she was asking questions?
"Shut up," Pauline snarled. She didn't have time for this shit. She rolled over onto her side again, lining up her body to the wall, moving down a few more inches. She held her breath, squeezed her eyes shut, and pounded her head into the wall again.
"Fuck!" she screamed, her head exploding with pain. She fell onto her back again. There was blood on her forehead, sliding underneath the blindfold, getting into her eyes. She couldn't blink it away, couldn't wipe it. She felt like a spider was crawling across her eyelids, seeping into her eyeballs.
"No," Pauline said, and she found herself wrapped in a full-on hallucination, spiders crawling across her face, digging into her skin, laying eggs in her eyes. "No!"
She jerked up to sitting, head spinning from the sudden motion. She was panting again, and she bent her head to her knees, touched her chest to her thighs. She had to get hold of herself. She couldn't give in to the thirst. She couldn't let the dementia settle into her brain again so that she lost where she was.
"What are you doing?" the stranger whispered, terrified.
"Leave me alone."
"He'll hear you. He'll come down."
"He's not coming down," Pauline snapped. Then, to prove it, she screamed, "Come down here, you motherfucker!" Her throat was so raw that she started coughing from the exertion, but she still screamed, "I'm trying to escape! Come stop me, you limp-dicked motherfucker!"
They waited and waited. Pauline ticked off the seconds. There were no footsteps on the stairs. No lights turned on. No doors opened.
"How do you know?" the stranger said. "How do you know what he's doing?"
"He's waiting for one of us to break," Pauline told her. "And it's not going to be me."
The woman asked another question, but Pauline ignored her, lining herself up to the wall again. She braced herself to pound into the wall again, but she couldn't do it. She couldn't hurt herself again. Not right now. Later. She would rest a few minutes and then do it later.
She rolled onto her back, tears streaming down her face. She didn't open her mouth, because she didn't want the woman to know she was crying. The stranger had heard the sobbing, heard Pauline sliding around in her own piss. That show was over. No more tickets would be sold.
"What's your name?" the stranger asked.
"None of your goddamn business," Pauline barked. She didn't want to make friends. She wanted to get out of here any way she could, and if that meant walking over the stranger's dead body to freedom, Pauline would do it. "Just shut up."
"Tell me what you're doing and maybe I can help you."
"You can't help me. You got that?" Pauline twisted to face the stranger, even though they were in total darkness. "Listen up, bitch. Only one person is going to make it out of here alive and it's not going to be you. You understand me? Shit rolls down hill, and I'm not going to be the one smelling like a sewer when this is over with. All right?"
The stranger was silent. Pauline fell onto her back, looking up at darkness, trying to brace herself for the wall again.
The woman's voice was barely a whisper. "You're Atlanta Thin, aren't you?"
Pauline's throat tightened like a noose had been put around it. "What?"
"'Shit rolls down hill, and I'm not going to be the one smelling like a sewer,'" she repeated. "You say that a lot."
Pauline chewed her lip.
"I'm Mia-Three."
Mia—slang for 'bulimia.' Pauline recognized the screen name, but still insisted, "I don't know what you're talking about."
Mia asked, "Did you show them that email at work?"
Pauline opened her mouth, just tried to breathe a while. She tried to think of the other things she had told the pro-anna Internet group, the desperate thoughts that raced through her mind and somehow ended up being typed onto the keyboard. It was almost like purging, but instead of emptying your stomach, you were emptying your brain. Telling somebody those awful thoughts you had, knowing they had them, too, somehow made it easier to get up every morning.
And now the stranger wasn't a stranger anymore.
Mia repeated, "Did you show them the email?"
Pauline swallowed, even though there was only dust in her throat. She couldn't believe she was tied up like a fucking hog and this woman wanted to talk about work. Work didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. The email was from another life, a life where Pauline had a job she wanted to keep, a mortgage, a car payment. They were waiting down here to be raped, tortured, murdered, and this woman was worried about a fucking email?
Mia said, "I didn't get to call Michael, my brother. Maybe he's looking for me."
"He won't find you," Pauline told her. "Not out here."
"Where are we?"
"I don't know," she answered—the truth. "I woke up in the trunk of a car. I was chained. I'm not sure how long I was in there. The trunk opened. I started to scream, then he Tased me again." She closed her eyes. "Then I woke up here."
"I was in my backyard," Mia told her. "I heard something. I thought maybe a cat . . ." She let her words trail off. "I was in a trunk when I came to. I'm not sure how long he kept me in there. It felt like days. I tried to count away the hours, but . . ." She went into a long silence that Pauline didn't know how to interpret. Finally, she said, "Do you think that's how he found us—on the chat board?"
"Probably," she lied. Pauline knew how he had found them, and it wasn't that damn chat room. It was Pauline who had led them here—Pauline's big mouth that had gotten them into trouble. She wasn't going to tell Mia what she knew. There would be more questions, and with the questions would come accusations that Pauline knew she wouldn't be able to handle.
Not now. Not when her brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton and the blood dripping down her eyes felt like the tiny, hairy legs of a million spiders.
Pauline gasped for breath, trying to keep herself from freaking out again. She thought about Felix and the way he smelled when she bathed him with the new soap she picked up at Colony Square during her lunch break.
Mia asked, "It's still in the safe, right? They'll find the email in the safe and they'll know you told the upholsterer to measure the elevator."
"Bitch, what does it matter? Do you not understand where we are, what's going to happen to us? So what if they find the email? Some fucking consolation. 'She's dead, but she was right all along.'"
"More than you got in life."
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They shared a moment of commiseration. Pauline tried to remember what little she knew about Mia. The woman didn't post much on the board, but when she did, she was pretty on point. Like Pauline and a few other posters, Mia didn't like whiners and she didn't take much bullshit.
"They can't starve us," Mia said. "I can go nineteen days before I start to shut down."
Pauline was impressed. "I can go about the same," she lied. Her max had been twelve, and then they'd put her in the hospital and plumped her up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Mia said, "Water is the issue."
"Yeah," Pauline agreed. "How long can you—"
"I've never tried to go without water," Mia interrupted, finishing the sentence. "It doesn't have any calories."
"Four days," Pauline told her. "I read somewhere that you can only last about four days."
"We can last longer." It wasn't wishful thinking. If Mia could last nineteen days without eating, she sure as hell could last longer than Pauline without water.
That was the problem. She could outlast Pauline. No one had outlasted Pauline before.
Mia asked the obvious question. "Why hasn't he fucked us?"
Pauline pressed her head to the cool concrete floor, tried to keep the panic from building up inside of her. The fucking wasn't the problem. It was the other stuff—the games, the taunting, the tricks . . . the trash bags.
"He wants us weak," Mia guessed. "He wants to make sure we can't fight back." Mia's chains rattled as she moved. Her voice sounded closer, and Pauline guessed she'd turned onto her side. "What were you doing? Before, I mean. Why were you hitting the wall with your head?"
"If I can punch through the sheetrock, maybe I can get out. It's standard building code that the two-by-fours have to be sixteen inches apart."
Mia's tone filled with awe. "You have a sixteen inch waist?"
"No, you dumbass. I can turn sideways and slide out."
Mia laughed at her own stupidity, but then she pointed out something that made Pauline feel equally as idiotic. "Why aren't you using your feet?"
They were both quiet, but Pauline felt something welling up inside her. Her stomach twinged, and she heard laughter in her ears, honest-to-God, all-out laughter as she thought about how fucking stupid she was.
"Oh, God," Mia sighed. She was laughing, too. "You are such an idiot."
Pauline twisted her body around, trying to spin on her shoulder. She lined up her feet, bracing them together so that the chains wouldn't throw her off, and kicked. The sheetrock caved on the first try.
"Dumbass," she muttered, this time at herself. She slid back around to face the opening, using her teeth to bite off the broken chunks of sheetrock. There was poison in the dust, but she didn't care. She would rather die with her head poking six inches out of this room than be trapped here while she waited for that fucker to come for her.
"Did you get it?" Mia asked. "Did you break—"
"Shut up," Pauline told her, biting into foam padding. He had soundproofed the walls. That was to be expected. No big deal. She just grabbed it with her teeth, taking chunk after chunk out, aching for the feel of fresh air on her face.
"Fuck!" Pauline screamed. She inched around so that her waist was lined up to the hole. She reached out with her fingers, which barely went past the broken sheetrock. She tore out the foam, then her fingers brushed something that felt like a screen. She arched her back, reaching her hands out as far as they would go. Her fingers traced along crisscrossed wire. "Goddamm it!"
"What is it?"
"Chicken wire." He had lined the walls with chicken wire so they couldn't break out.
Pauline angled herself around again and jammed her feet against the wire. The soles of her shoes met solid resistance. Instead of the screen giving, the counterforce moved her several inches across the floor. She inched back to try again, rolling over onto her stomach and placing her sweaty palms to the cement. Pauline reared her feet back and kicked with all her strength. Again, she met solid resistance, her body sliding away from the wall.
"Oh, Jesus," she gasped, falling onto her back. The tears came, the tiny spider legs encroaching on her vision. "What am I going to do?"
"Can your hands reach?"
"No," Pauline cried. Hope drained out of her with every breath. Her hands were too tight to the belt. The chicken wire was attached to the back of the two-by-four. There was no way she could reach it.
Pauline's body shook with sobs. She had not seen him in years, but she still knew how his mind worked. The basement was his staging ground, a carefully prepared prison where he would starve them into submission. But, this was not the worst of it. There would be a cave somewhere, a dark place in the earth that he had lovingly dug out by hand. The basement would break them. The cave would destroy them. The bastard had thought of everything.
Again.
Mia had managed to inch her way over. Her voice was close, almost on top of Pauline. "Shut up," Mia ordered, pushing Pauline out of the way. "We'll use our mouths."
"What?"
"It's thin metal, right? Chicken wire?"
"Yeah, but—"
"You bend it back and forth and it breaks."
Pauline shook her head. This was crazy.
"All we need is for one piece to give," Mia said, as if the logic was clear. "Just grab it in your mouth and pull back and forth, back and forth. It'll break eventually, then we can kick it. Or we can just break every single piece off with our mouths."
"We can't—"
"Don't tell me can't, you fucking bitch." Mia's foot was chained, but she managed to kick Pauline in the shin.
"Ouch! Jesus—"
"Start counting," Mia ordered, inching toward the hole in the wall. "When you get to two hundred, it'll be your turn."
Pauline wasn't going to do it because she would be damned if she let this bitch tell her what to do. She heard something then—teeth on metal. Grinding, twisting. Two hundred seconds. Their skin would rip open. Their gums would be in shreds. There was no telling if it would even work.
Pauline rolled over, sat up on her knees.
She started counting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FAITH HAD NEVER THOUGHT OF HERSELF AS A MORNING PERSON, but she had gotten into the habit of going into work early when Jeremy was a child. You couldn't not be a morning person when there was a hungry boy to feed, dress, scrutinize and send off to the bus stop by 7:13 at the latest. If not for Jeremy, she might have been one of those late-night people, the sort who rolls into bed well after midnight, but Faith's usual bedtime ran closer to ten, even after Jeremy was a teenager and his waking hours were few and far between.
For his own reasons, Will was always at work early, too. Faith saw his Porsche parked in its usual space as she pulled the Mini into the lot under City Hall East. She put the car in park, then sat there trying to get the driver's seat back where she could reach the pedals and the steering wheel at the same time without being impaled by one while having to stretch to reach the other. After several minutes, she finally found the right combination and briefly thought about having the seat bolted into place. If Will wanted to drive her car again, he'd have to do it with his knees around his ears.
There was a tap at her window, and Faith looked up, startled. Sam Lawson stood there, a cup of coffee in his hand.
Faith opened the car door and wedged herself out, feeling like she'd put on twenty pounds overnight. Finding something to wear this morning had been a near impossible task. She was carrying enough water weight to fill a tank at SeaWorld. Thankfully, her giddiness over Sam Lawson had been a twenty-four-hour virus. She did not relish having a conversation with him now, especially since her mind needed to be focused on the day ahead of her.
"Hey, babe," Sam said, looking her up and down in his usual predatory way.
Faith got her purse out of the back seat. "Long time no see."
He gave a half-shrug that implied he was merely the victim of circumstance. "Here," he said, offering her th
e coffee. "Decaf."
Faith had tried to drink some coffee this morning. The smell had sent her rushing to the bathroom. "Sorry." She ignored the cup, walking away from him, trying not to get sick again.
Sam tossed the cup into the trashcan as he caught up with her. "Morning sickness?"
Faith glanced around, afraid they'd be heard. "I haven't told anyone but my boss." She tried to remember when you were supposed to tell people. There had to be a certain amount of weeks before you were sure it took. Faith must be coming up on that mark. She should start telling people soon. Should she get them all together, invite her mother and Jeremy to dinner, get her brother on speaker phone, or was there a way to send a bulk, anonymous email and perhaps jump on a flight to the Caribbean for a few weeks to avoid the fallout?
Sam's fingers snapped in front of her face. "You in there?"
"Barely." Faith reached for the door to the building just as he did. She let him open it for her. "I've got a lot on my mind."
"About last night—"
"It was two nights ago, actually."
He grinned. "Yeah, but I wasn't really thinking about it until last night."
Faith sighed as she pressed the elevator button.
"Come here." He pulled her toward the alcove on the other side of the elevator. There was a vending machine with three rows of sticky buns, which Faith knew without having to look.
Sam stroked her hair behind her ear. Faith pulled back. She wasn't ready for intimacy this early in the morning. She wasn't sure she was ever ready for it. Without thinking, she glanced up to make sure there wasn't a security camera watching them.
He said, "I was an ass the other night. I'm sorry."
She heard the elevator doors open, then close. "It's all right."
"No, it's not." He leaned in to kiss her, but she pulled back again.
"Sam, I'm at work." She didn't add the rest of what she was thinking, which was that she was in the middle of a case where one woman had died, another woman had been tortured and two more were missing. "This isn't the time."
"It's never the time," he said, something he'd often told her years ago when they were seeing each other. "I want to try this again with you."