The pair of them pulled her to her feet and twisted her arms behind her back as the one with the tape wrapped a strip of it around her wrists. They then frog-marched her back where she’d been working, the man holding the gun prodding her every few steps with the barrel. Once there, the former waiter who’d taped her up threw her to the ground and sat on her legs as he cinched them together at the calves and ankles. The muzzle held at her head by his friend made her hold off any attempt to kick him where it would hurt. Then he got up and continued on to the building, disappearing around the corner. Seconds later he reappeared, carrying something about four feet long, and Lucy heard the clank of a chain.
Oh, my God!
The shape of an anchor became clearer as he brought it closer.
“No!” Lucy screamed into her gag, and started to buck and kick against her restraints.
For her trouble the armed man shoved the barrel of his gun into her ribs. “Behave!”
Still she writhed and tried to scream.
The man with the anchor dropped it at her feet and wrapped the chains tightly around her ankles over top of the tape. Reaching into his jacket he took out a padlock, secured it through the links, and snapped it closed. He walked back to the building and returned with a coil of rope, which he tied to the anchor. “She’s ready,” he said.
They left her lying there and tramped off a few yards, shuffling their boots through the snow as if trying to find something.
Lucy increased her struggle to at least free her arms and tried harder than ever to scream,
“Found it,” said one, leaning over and lifting a plywood sheet out of the snow. The black mouth of a well yawned beneath it.
Her terror rocketed.
Jesus Christ, stop!
She started to hyperventilate. The tape made it hard to breathe. Her fine-toned muscles quivered the length of her body as she strained to break free.
They returned, picked her up, anchor and all, and carried her with monstrous deliberateness toward the opening.
No! Oh, God in heaven, please, no!
Without so much as a second’s pause for a last thought, word, or prayer, they threw her in, feetfirst.
Chapter 19
Mark woke and felt for Lucy in the darkness. His hand patted nothing but a wrinkled sheet.
He sat up. “Lucy?”
The house was silent.
What the hell?
He threw on his robe and ran downstairs. “Lucy-” Through the front door window he saw that her car was gone. So was the warm clothing she’d laid out earlier on the coatrack, and where he’d hung two caving headlamps there remained only one.
His insides turned to ice. In less than a minute he dressed and headed out the door. The headlamp, he remembered, and grabbed it. He also took his bat, just in case. His watch read 4:36.
Sure enough, all the tools were gone from his Jeep.
He turned the ignition, hit the wiper switch for front and rear to clear away the snow, and accelerated down his driveway. Christ it felt slippery. He braked for the turn onto the road, but too late. He started to skid across it, right into a two-foot bank the graders had left from previous plowings. “Shit, shit, shit!” he muttered as he jockeyed the vehicle back and forth, delicately working the accelerator so as not to spin his wheels.
She’s probably perfectly okay, he had to keep telling himself.
By the time he got free, the dash clock read 4:42.
He forced himself to drive more slowly, peering through the dazzling swirls of flakes highlighted in his low beams. What time she’d gone out there, he’d no idea, but already the storm had filled in her tire tracks.
After five minutes of crawling along, he turned on the radio to keep from screaming in frustration at the slow pace. Normally he would there by now.
“I’m gonna be all right…” Jennifer Lopez sang.
He had less than two miles to go when he spotted the glow from the high beams of an oncoming car.
Lucy careened once off the stone sides before the anchor crashed through a thin layer of ice and pulled her into the frigid darkness.
The descent accelerated. Water streamed up her nostrils and through the back of her throat. She started to choke and heard bubbles pouring out her nose but couldn’t see them, couldn’t see anything now. The pressure on her head and ears squeezed in until she thought the end would come when her brain burst. Even greater weight crushed her chest and expelled more bubbles, those in a deafening gargle from where the tape tore free of her mouth. Searing pain burned through her limbs and her mind issued frantic alerts that they were in flames; that lactic acid bathed the tissues inside and out, that she had the metabolic consequence of no oxygen – the sorts of clinical snippets she might have used to save another, but not herself.
Yet her superb condition prolonged her dying. Her heart, trained to endure on near anoxic blood, continued to beat, her brain to think.
And down she went.
Finally, the inky darkness from without seemed to spill into her mind, and she knew her ordeal would soon end. She felt her entire body stiffen against its restraints and begin to undulate in the jackknife movements of a tonic-clonic seizure, the last bequest from a nervous system gone mad for want of air.
No white light awaited her. No final flash of memories comforted her. Rather the hurt subsided, and she seemed to take leave of her body. But instead of rising peacefully upward, she stayed suspended in the water looking down at herself, watching her remains continue to jerk through the dark in a desperate, never-ending dance.
The white glare hung just over the horizon, the way extraterrestrial events are portrayed in movies, then became very ordinary as the headlamps crested a low hill, and the dark shape of the vehicle drove slowly toward Mark at a cautious speed equal to his own.
Let it be her.
He hadn’t met any other vehicle on the road.
Sure enough, as they closed the gap between them, he made out the familiar shape of her station wagon.
Thank God, he thought, relief flooding through him.
He flicked his high beams at her.
And saw two men driving.
“What the hell!” he yelled.
He must have taken them by surprise as well; the night immediately lit up with the red illumination of brake lights, and the station wagon skidded out of control.
Caught in the glare of his lights, they both gaped at him, their features coarse, white, and garish as they glided closer.
He saw the man on the passenger side reach down and come up with a gun.
Mark floored the accelerator. The much-heavier Jeep rocketed forward and smashed into them head-on. For the second time in a week he was surrounded by the impact of crumpling fenders and exploding air bags, but this time he was ready. Gripping the steering wheel, he’d pushed himself well back in his seat and barely felt the blow against his chest. Better still, his windshield stayed intact.
He held his foot on the accelerator. His tires whined, the Jeep shook, but shuddered ahead, pushing the lighter car before it. Not that its two occupants were about to cause him much trouble. They must have been the kind not to wear seat belts. Both looked to be slumped on the dash, asleep on big white pillows. One had blood pouring out his nose.
Mark kept the pedal to the floor, aimed for the ditch, and, continuing to shove Lucy’s car until its rear end lifted up over a snowbank, stranded it so nothing short of a tow truck would set it free. Throwing the Jeep into reverse, he shot back to the right side of the highway. Despite the body damage, it still drove fine. Sick with fright over what they’d done to Lucy, he slammed the gearshift into drive, ready to speed away and find her at the home. But wait. She might be in the back of the car tied up on the floor. Or they could have already taken her somewhere else.