She remembered a movie in which the greatest psychotic killer and criminal genius of his age fashioned a handcuff key out of the metal ink tube from a ballpoint pen and an ordinary paper clip. He sprang one cuff and then the other in about fifteen seconds, maybe ten, after which he overpowered his two guards, killed them, and cut the face off one to wear as a disguise, although he used a penknife for the surgery, not the homemade handcuff key. Over the years, she had seen many other movies in which prisoners picked open cuffs and leg irons, and none of them had any more training for it than she did.
Ten minutes later, with her left cuff still securely locked, Chyna said, "Movies are full of shit."
She was so frustrated that her hand trembled and she couldn't control the strut. It jittered uselessly in the tight keyway.
On the porch, the dog wasn't pacing as fast as it had paced earlier, but it was still disturbed. Twice it clawed at the back door, once with considerable fervor, as if it thought it might be able to dig its way through the wood.
Chyna switched the strut to her left hand and worked on the right cuff for a while. Ticks, clicks, scrapes, and squeaks. She was concentrating so intently on picking the tiny lock that she was sweating as copiously as when she had been struggling to overturn the heavy table.
Finally she threw the turkey strut on the floor, and it bounced ping-ping-ping across the tiles, across a piece of the broken plate, and off a shard of the water glass.
Perhaps she could have freed herself in a wink if she had been the greatest psychotic killer and criminal genius of her age. But she was only a waitress and a psychology student.
Even as inconveniently sane and law-abiding as she was, she might be able to pop the handcuffs off her wrists and the larger shackles off her ankles with a more suitable tool than the turkey strut, but she would probably need hours to do it. She couldn't dedicate hours solely to the job of freeing herself from the chair and chains, because once she was unfettered, there were many other urgent tasks to be done before Vess returned.
She slammed the drawer shut. Holding the chain out of her way and hauling the chair with her, she got to her feet.
With a jangle worthy of the Ghost of Christmas Past, Chyna went to the door between the kitchen and the living room.
Behind her, at the window in the dining area, a weird screeching arose. She looked back and saw that the big Doberman was scratching frantically at the glass with both forepaws. Its claws squeaked down the pane with a sound as unsettling as fingernails dragged across a chalkboard.
She had intended to find her way into the dark living room by the light spilling through the open door, but the dog spooked her. While she'd picked at the cuff locks, the Doberman had grown slightly calmer, but now it was as disturbed as ever. Hoping to calm it before it decided to spring through the window, she turned off the overhead fluorescent panels.
Squeak-squeak-squeak.
Claws, glass.
Squeak-squeak.
She eased across the threshold, leaving the kitchen, and pushed the door shut behind her, blocking out the squeaking. Blocking out the damn dog as well, in case it proved to be crazed enough to burst through the glass.
She felt along the wall. Evidently the only switches were on the other side of the room, by the front door.
The living room seemed to be blacker than the kitchen. The drapes were drawn over one of the two expansive windows that faced onto the front porch. The other window was a barely defined gray rectangle that admitted no more light than had the double-pane slider in the kitchen.
Chyna stood motionless, taking time to orient herself, trying to recall the furnishings. She had been in the room only once before, briefly, and the space had been clotted with shadows. When she had entered from the front porch this morning, the kitchen door had been somewhat to her left in the back wall. The handsome sofa with ball feet, covered in a tartan-plaid fabric, had been to the right, which would put it, now, to her left as she faced toward the front of the house. Rustic oak end tables had flanked the large sofa-and on each end table had been a lamp.
Trying to hold this clear image of the room in her mind, she hobbled warily through the darkness, afraid of falling over a chair or a footstool or a magazine rack. Swaddled in chains and under the weight of the chair, she would be unable to check her fall in a natural manner and might be so twisted by her shackles that she would break an ankle or even a leg.
Whereupon, Edgler Vess would come home, dismayed by the mess and disappointed that she had damaged herself before he'd had a chance to play with her. Then either there would be turtle games or he would experiment with her fractured limb to teach her to enjoy pain.
The first thing she bumped into was the sofa, and she did not fall. Sliding her hand along the upholstered back, she sidled to the left until she came to the end table. She reached out and found the lamp shade, the wire ribs beneath the taut cloth.
She fumbled around the shell of the socket and then around the base of the lamp itself. As her fingers finally pinched the rotary switch she was suddenly certain that a strong hand was going to come out of the darkness and cover hers, that Vess had crept back into the house, that he was sitting on the sofa only inches from her. With amusement, he had been listening to her struggles, sitting like a fat, patient spider in his tartan-plaid web, anticipating the pleasure of shattering her hopes when at last she hobbled this far. The light would blink on, and Vess would smile and wink at her and say, Intense.
The switch was a nub of ice between thumb and finger. Frozen to her skin.
Heart drumming like the wings of a frantic fettered bird, the beats so hard that they prevented her lungs from expanding, the pulse in her throat swelling so large that she was unable to swallow, Chyna broke her paralysis and clicked the switch. Soft light washed the room. Edgler Vess was not on the sofa. Not in an armchair. Not anywhere in the room. She exhaled explosively, with a shudder that rattled her chains, and leaned against the sofa, and gradually her fluttering heart grew calmer.
After those gray hours of depression during which she had been emotionally dead, she was energized by this siege of terror. If she ever suffered a killing bout of cardiac arrhythmia, the mere thought of Vess would be more effective at jump-starting her heart than the electrical paddles of a defibrillation machine. Fear proved that she had come back to life and that she had found hope again.
She shambled to the gray river-rock fireplace that extended from floor to ceiling across the entire north wall of the room. The deep hearth in the center wasn't raised, which would make her work easier.
She had considered going down to the cellar, where earlier she had seen a workbench, to examine the saws that were surely in Vess's tool collection. But she had quickly ruled out that solution.
Descending the steep cellar steps while hobbled, festooned with steel chains, and carrying the heavy pine chair on her back would be a stunt not quite equivalent to leaping the Snake River Gorge on a rocket-powered motorcycle, perhaps, but undeniably risky. She was moderately confident of making her way to the bottom without pitching forward and cracking her skull like an eggshell on the concrete or breaking a leg in thirty-six places-but far from entirely confident. Her strength wasn't what it ought to have been, because she hadn't eaten much in the past twenty-four hours and because she had already been through an exhausting physical ordeal. Furthermore, all her separate pains made her shaky. A trip to the cellar seemed simple enough, but under these circumstances, it would be equivalent to an acrobat slugging down four double martinis before walking the high wire.