As her heartbeat slowed from its frenzied hammering, Chyna leaned back against the cushion, still breathing hard, and surprised herself by laughing. Musical, unexpectedly girlish laughter burst from her, an astonishing giggle part delight, part nervous relief.
She blotted her sweat-stung eyes on one sleeve of her cotton sweater, and then on the other sleeve. With her cuffed hands, she awkwardly smoothed her short hair back from her brow, across which it had fallen in damp licks.
As a softer, more subdued trill of laughter bubbled from her, Chyna detected movement out of the corner of her right eye. She turned to the window, happily thinking, The elk.
A Doberman was staring at her.
Few stars and, as yet, no moon shone between the torn clouds, and the dog was oil black. Yet it was clearly visible, because its pointed face was only inches from hers, with nothing between them except the glass. Its inky eyes were cold and merciless, sharklike in their steadiness and glassy concentration. Inquisitively, it pressed its wet nose against the pane.
A thin whine escaped the Doberman, audible even through the glass: neither a whimper of fear nor a plea for attention, but a needful keening that perfectly expressed the killing passion in its eyes.
Chyna was no longer laughing.
The dog dropped from the window, out of sight.
She heard its paws thumping hollowly against the boards as it paced rapidly back and forth across the porch. Between urgent whines, it made a low quarrelsome sound.
Then the dog jumped into view, planting its broad forepaws on the window stool, eye-to-eye with her once more. Agitated, it bared its long teeth threateningly, but it didn't bark or snarl.
Perhaps the sound of the water glass shattering on the floor or the crash of the table tipping onto its side had carried into the backyard, and this Doberman had been close enough to hear. The dog might have been standing at this window for a while, listening to Chyna alternately cursing her bonds and encouraging herself as she had struggled to be free of the table; and certainly it had heard her laughter. Dogs had lousy eyesight, and this one would not be able to see more than her face, nothing of the wreckage. They had a phenomenal sense of smell, however, so maybe the beast was able to detect the scent of her sudden exuberance through the barrier of glass-and was alarmed by that.
The window was about five or six feet long and four feet high, divided into two sliding panels. Obviously not part of the original architecture, it appeared to have been installed during a relatively recent remodel. If there had been numerous smaller panes separated by wide sturdy mullions of wood, Chyna would have been a lot more confident. But either of the two sheets of glass was large enough to admit the agitated Doberman if it tried to smash through at her.
Surely that wouldn't happen. The dogs had been trained to patrol the grounds, not to assault the house.
The bared teeth were pearly, vaguely luminous, gray-white in the gloom: a wide but humorless smile.
Rather than make any sudden provocative movements, Chyna waited until the Doberman dropped from the window again before she reached to the floor and picked up the loop of excess chain to avoid tripping over it. Listening to the dog padding back and forth on the porch, she rose into the Rumpelstiltskin crouch that the burdening chair imposed. She edged around the kitchen, staying close to the walls and cabinets, feeling her way as best she could while cuffed and holding the loop of chain in one hand. She shuffled her feet more than her shackles required, hoping to shove the broken drinking glass and the fragments of the plate aside rather than step on them.
When she reached the doorway between the kitchen and the front room, she found the light switches but was reluctant to flip them up. Glancing back and seeing the Doberman at the window again, she wished that she could leave the kitchen dark.
She needed to search the drawers, however, so she snapped on the overhead lights. At the window, the Doberman twitched, flattened its ears to its skull, immediately pricked them again, found her with its eyes, and fixed her with its gaze.
Ignoring the Doberman, Chyna bent forward as far as her fetters would allow, hoisting the chair on her back. She strove to reach the carabiner that linked the shorter chain between her leg irons with the longer chain that had encircled the table pedestal and that still wrapped the stretcher bars of the chair. But even free of the table, she was trammeled in such a way that she could not put her fingers on this coupling.
She retraced her path along the cabinets. She opened one drawer after another and studied the contents.
When she passed the telephone jack in the wall, she paused to stare at it, frustrated. If Edgler Vess had a life other than that of a "homicidal adventurer," actually held a job and maintained any social life whatsoever as a cover for his true nature, he would have a telephone; the jack wasn't merely a dead plug left by the previous owners of the house. He must have hidden the phone.
For a psychotic killer, raging out of control on one level, Vess was surprisingly careful and methodical when it came to covering his ass.
An agent of chaos, leaving behind rubble in the lives of others, he nevertheless kept his own affairs tidy and avoided mistakes.
She opened a few of the cupboard doors and peered into cabinets, but she found only pots, pans, dishes, and glasses. She soon gave up on the phone when she realized that Vess, having taken the trouble to unplug and conceal it, would have hidden it outside the kitchen and in a place where she was unlikely to find it even if she'd had hours to devote to the search.
She continued opening drawers. In the fourth, she discovered a compartmentalized plastic tray containing a collection of small culinary tools and gadgets.
She parked the chair beside the open drawer and sat down.
Outside, the Doberman was pacing again, paws thumping faster than before, all but running back and forth on the porch, back and forth, and whining louder as well. Chyna couldn't understand why it was still so agitated. She wasn't breaking dishes or overturning furniture any longer. She was quietly looking in drawers, minimizing the clatter of her chains, doing nothing to alarm the dog. It seemed to realize that she was escaping, but that was impossible; it was only an animal; it couldn't understand the complexities of her situation. Only an animal. Yet it raced worriedly from end to end of the porch, jumped to peer in the window again, fixed her with its fierce black eyes, and seemed to be saying, Get away from the drawer, bitch!
She plucked a wooden-handled corkscrew from the drawer, examined the spiraling point, and discarded it. A bottle opener. No. Potato peeler. Lemon-rind shaver. No. She found an eight-inch-long pair of heavy-duty tweezers, which Vess probably used to extract olives and pickles and similar items from tightly packed jars. The gripping blades of the tweezers proved too large to be inserted into the tight keyholes on her handcuffs, so she discarded them as well.
Then she located the ideal item: a five-inch-long steel pin, which she believed was called a poultry strut. A dozen were fixed together by a tightly wound rubber band, and she pulled one loose. The pin was rigid, about a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, with a point at the end of the shank and a half-inch-wide eye loop at the top. Smaller struts were made for pinning shut roasting chickens, but this one was for turkeys.
The thought of succulent roasted turkey brought the smell of it immediately to mind. Chyna's mouth watered, and her stomach growled, and she wished that she'd eaten some of the ham and cheese sandwich Vess had made for her.
She held the strut between the thumb and the middle digit of her right hand, sparing her swollen index finger, and slipped the point into the keyway on the left handcuff. Probing experimentally, she produced a lot of small ticking and scraping sounds, trying to feel the lock mechanism in the gateway of the cuff.