KILLING SARAI(19)

His grip around my wrists, now with both of them restrained behind me, tightens harshly and I can’t help but believe it has everything to do with me calling him by his name, rather than my struggling against him. With one side of my face pressed into the mattress, I feel the rope wind around my wrists and then he ties it into several firm knots. After he’s satisfied that I’m unable to get my hands free, he stands up from the bed and grabs my ankles next. I pull one foot back and manage to kick him square in the stomach, but it doesn’t faze him. He just looks at me, catches my leg in mid-air on the second attempt and binds my ankles together with one hand.

Tears barrel from my eyes. But I stop fighting.

He carefully rolls me over onto my side, facing me toward the wall with my back to the bed where I know he’ll be sleeping. The thought of him being behind me like that all night and unable to see him unnerves me to no end.

The lamp between the bed switches off, leaving the room bathed in partial darkness. It’s still early, just after sundown, but I’m exhausted enough that it feels like it’s two o’clock in the morning.

I cry softly into my pillow for a little while. Thinking about my mom and all of the things Victor forced me to remember. And I think about Lydia and Mrs. Gregory who lived two trailers over from me; they are really the only family I’ve ever had. And when the uncomfortable position my arms have been put into becomes painful, I roll my body awkwardly onto the opposite side. I peer through the darkness to see Victor on the other bed lying on his side with his back facing me. He’s still fully clothed. I notice that he did at least take his shoes off, but his feet are covered by thin black dress socks. I wonder if he’s still awake.

“Victor?”

“Go to sleep,” he says without moving a muscle.

“When you take me back to Javier, will you at least give me a gun?”

Silence filters through the space between us.

“Will you?” I ask again, stirring that silence. “It will give me a fighting chance. I’ll either kill Javier myself, or I’ll die knowing that I tried.”

Victor’s shoulder rises and falls slowly as if he’d just taken a deep breath.

“I’ll think about it. Now go to sleep.”





CHAPTER EIGHT





Victor





I’m awoken at 3:42 A.M. staring down the barrel of my 9MM.

“What’s the password?” the girl demands.

She’s keeping a respectable distance. Impressive.

“The password,” she repeats sternly, motioning her head toward the table where my iPad sits.

I don’t move. She may have guts, but she’s still fidgety and it would be unfortunate if she shot me by accident.

“Uppercase F, six, eight, lowercase ‘k’, three, zero, zero, five, uppercase L, uppercase P, lowercase ‘w’, six.” I could easily take the gun from her before she got a shot off, the angle she’s standing, but I’m not ready to. Not yet.

She tries to recall each character precisely the way I said them. Without her having to ask, I repeat it for her and even that gesture seems to confuse her.

Carefully, I lift my back from the bed and she grips the gun tighter. If she happened to pull the trigger, she’d only hit my cheekbone. The bullet might pass through my jaw. I’d be disfigured, but I’d live.

“You don’t want to see what’s on that computer,” I say.

“You admit it, then,” she says nervously. “Something happened. You found out while I was in the shower.”

I’m standing up now. She still hasn’t shot me. She’s not going to unless I try to go after her. Though I’m not so impressed anymore. If I was her, I would have put a bullet in my skull by now.

I nod my answer. I’m only mildly surprised that she figured that much out. I should never have asked about her mother. She’s a smart girl, this one, though still far too sympathetic and human to get out of this by herself alive.

Leaving the gun in her right hand and keeping her eyes on me, she takes three and a half steps backward and reaches for the iPad, glancing between it and me, one second each, long enough to type in the password. After one full minute of frustration, unable to find anything, the girl points the gun at the iPad and steps away from the table closer to the wall.

“You pull it up,” she demands. “Whatever it is.”

Her hands, both gripping the gun handle now, are shaking.

“I will tell you one last time, you don’t want to see it.”

“Just show me!”

She’s crying now. Tears roll down her cheeks. I notice her lip quiver on the right side. She’s probably sick to her stomach, her nerves frayed to nothing. I glimpse the ropes I tied her up with lying on the floor. They haven’t been cut. She has small hands, small wrists. Quite the escape artist to have worked herself free from those knots. I glimpse the clock between the beds. But it took her far too long to pull it off, I see.

“Hurry!”

Her eyes are red and glistening with moisture.

I turn the iPad around on the table to face me. Using my finger, I open my private email account and then the folder where I filed away the attachment message I received last night from my liaison:



“What have you done?” Fleischer inquired the night before through the live video feed. “The girl was not part of the deal.” His German accent always bleeding heavily through his English.