The Lonely Mile(37)
Bill found this apartment after a brief search, and immediately rented it. It featured everything he was looking for in a residence—location. It was close to Carli. The building was ancient, with creaky stairs and cracked linoleum and crumbling plaster and undoubtedly substandard wiring, and Bill didn’t care about any of that. It was all irrelevant. The place was close to Carli, and that was good enough for him.
And now Carli was gone.
Bill sipped a soda, not because he was especially thirsty, but because he needed something to occupy his hands as he paced the kitchen floor, over and over, back and forth.
Carli was gone. It was his fault.
He had to do something. He looked at the clock. Five thirty a.m. Ten minutes had passed since he last checked the time. He was miserable.
He had to do something.
CHAPTER 33
CARLI SAT WITH HER right hand cuffed to the bed, trying to force cold, greasy, veggie pizza down her throat. She wasn’t hungry, but knew she should eat, if for no other reason than to keep up her strength. Her dad would be coming for her, of that she was certain, and she had to be prepared. Her kidnapper had confiscated her watch, so she had no idea what time it was. She slogged through the pizza and washed it down with water from a greasy plastic cup.
Carli guessed the kidnapper had been gone forty-five minutes to an hour before returning with their food. When he came back, he had been carrying a gigantic pizza box and a couple of paper plates, a big smile stretching his face. They had shared the pizza sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bed, awkward silences punctuating stilted conversation. The man didn’t seem to notice.
He hadn’t raised the subject of her “training” again, but Carli knew the time would come soon enough. She dreaded it, and tried her best to drag dinner out as long as possible. It wasn’t hard to do. Despite the fact her stomach was empty, she wasn’t hungry, and the thought of eating pizza made her want to gag. She managed to choke down most of one piece while her kidnapper wolfed down three or four.
Finally he stood and terror bloomed in Carli’s chest. “One piece?” he said, shaking his head. “You should eat more than that, my angel. You’re going to need energy for your training!” His smile was ghastly. “I’ll leave another piece for you to work on.” He lifted a slice of limp pizza from the box and plopped it down on her plate. Carli tried not to puke. Then, he picked up the box. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said, “and we can begin getting to know each other better.”
He climbed the stairs and left her alone again. Where her kidnapper was right now and what he might be doing she had no idea and no real desire to find out. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good for her. She wondered how long her body could continue dealing with the sky-high stress level she felt before it finally crashed. Adrenaline coursed through her, not that it was doing any good.
As soon as her captor retreated up the basement stairs, Carli had set to work, twisting and turning the handcuffs, probing for a weak spot, searching for a way out. One side of the bracelets was fitted snugly around her slim wrist, and the other was attached firmly to the headboard of the bed frame, which was stark and depressing but made of iron and, as far as Carli could tell, very solid.
A short length of metal chain connected the two bracelets. The links were thick and solid, way too strong for her to break. She knew because she tried, yanking her hand insistently, succeeding only in tearing her skin and raising a painful bruise on her wrist.
She bent to examine the cuffs more closely, squinting, concentrating on those three metal links, certain that, if there was any weakness at all, it would be here. But there was nothing. The steel was shiny and strong, with no rusting metal or gaps that could be pried open.
Her cuffed hand, sweaty and throbbing from trying to snap the links, slipped suddenly off the iron post of the headboard and fell behind the bed. Ow! Her knuckles scraped the cement blocks of the wall and bruised her wrist even more as the cuffs snapped her hand back at the end of the chain.
Tears filled Carli’s eyes, and she pulled her hand reflexively, covering the scrape with her free hand. Blood stained her palm when she stopped. She would have to be more careful because the same thing would happen if her hand slipped off the heavy iron post again, that was how close the headboard was placed to the stupid cement wall. The scrape burned, and her skin stood no chance against that rough surface.
Then a thought occurred to Carli, and with it was the barest glimmer of hope: If the rough concrete surface could damage her skin so easily, why couldn’t it have the same effect on the shiny silver steel of the handcuffs? There was very little play in the bracelets, just a couple of inches, but she had already proven—painfully—that she could reach the wall. Now, all she needed to do to test her theory was to twist her arm so that her wrist faced the wall, then rub it back and forth, scraping the small round circle of steel against the cement blocks.
It was extremely uncomfortable, with Carli’s wrist bent at an unnatural angle, but she smiled as she felt the cuff’s metal ring come in contact with the wall. She eased her arm downward and felt friction, heard a tiny whispered scraping sound. In less than a second, the chain had been pulled taut, sending a pulse of pain radiating outward from her already injured wrist.
She hissed involuntarily between her clenched teeth and pulled her arm back through the bars of the headboard, looking down and studying the metal of the handcuff. Still strong, still shiny. But—there! A little scratch, almost invisible but definitely there, on the steel ring where Carli had run it along the cement. It was tiny—nowhere near enough to allow Carli to snap the cuffs apart.