23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(72)

Unless that person happened to know that the calm, reasonable person in front of them was, in fact, a drooling drug fiend underneath.

“You did methamphetamine outside, right? How’d you do it? Snort it? Inject it? Pills?” Caxton asked.

Gert’s face didn’t betray her at all. She didn’t look embarrassed or like she’d been caught out when she said, “You know, however it came. I wasn’t particular.”

“And now you have bad teeth. At the age of twenty-two. You’ve probably got all kinds of health problems—liver, kidneys, pancreas. How long have you been clean?”

“Since I been inside. I had a little party, I guess, the night before my trial date came up.” Gert twisted her head around until she wasn’t looking at Caxton. “Listen, I heard all this stuff before. Every day I’m clean is a day of freedom, right? But that’s a f*cking joke. You can’t be free if you’re locked up. So what does it matter? I’ll be clean outside, then I’ll really be free. I will show you, I will show the world, that I can do it. And then I will find some nice guy, some guy with green eyes, maybe. I always wanted a baby with green eyes and red hair. And I will be the best mother who ever lived. But that’s all in the future. That’s if we survive through the night. Right now, I’m looking at almost certain death. I’m looking at the inside of a prison, still, even though we kinda broke out. I cannot imagine why I would try to be squeaky clean right now.”

“No,” Caxton said. She pulled a strap through a buckle and pulled it tight with a loud snap.

“It’s just headache medicine!”

“No. Come here.”

Gert shuffled closer. She threw the box of Excedrin down on the cot next to Caxton. Caxton grabbed it and shoved it inside her jumpsuit. It was important not to leave it out where Gert could see it. Where she might try to grab it again.

“Here,” Caxton said, and handed a pair of restraints to Gert. “Look at this. It’s pretty simple. Just a nylon strap, about twenty-eight inches long. Holes all down its length. On one end there’s a buckle.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Gert said.

“Good. This is a restraint. They used them to keep the prisoners in their beds while they were here receiving treatment. There are a whole lot of them in this box.” She kicked the cardboard box at her feet. It was big enough to hold a wide-screen television set. “Watch what I do.” She took two of the restraints and fed the loose end of one through the buckle of the other. She closed the buckle on a hole about six inches along the restraint, then tied the dangling end in a tight knot around the buckle. When she was done she held up the joined restraints and snapped them. “As good as a climbing rope, right?” She repeated the process with a third restraint. She already had six good lengths going. When she joined them together they would form a rope twenty feet long. “We need about fifty or sixty feet. Help me.”

Gert sat down hard on the cot and picked up a couple of restraints from the box. Caxton watched her carefully as she put them together.

“Good.”

“You know, caffeine can improve your manual dexterity,” Gert suggested. “I could do this a lot faster if I—”

“No,” Caxton said, and snapped another pair of joined restraints.

Eventually they had a rope.

Caxton led Gert out into the hospital ward, where the empty beds lay on either side of a narrow aisle. Together they looked up at the ceiling. The hospital wing was the same height as the other buildings that comprised the prison, but unlike the other buildings only had one floor. That meant the ceiling of the ward was twenty-five feet above their heads. A complicated tangle of pipes and lighting fixtures ran along the ceiling, suspended from thick metal brackets every few feet. Almost hidden among the lights were a row of skylights. There were no bars on the skylights—the architects of the prison had probably thought no prisoner would ever be able to get up there, not without a stepladder. Caxton had searched the infirmary from end to end and had completely failed to find a stepladder of any kind.

Her rope was going to have to do instead. She hoped it would hold her weight.

“Find me something heavy but small to use as a weight,” Caxton said, unreeling her makeshift rope length by length. Gert came back with a metal bedpan. “Fair enough,” Caxton said. There was a hole punched in one side of the bedpan, perhaps so it could be drained or attached to a catheter. Caxton fed the end of her rope through the hole, then tied it tight.