Millie heard the door open. She hunched over her ankles, franticially jabbing the point of the door hinge into the stretched expanse of her duct-tape shackles. She had already punched ten, twelve, fifteen holes in the thing, but it still wouldn’t tear apart.
“Millie?” It was Randy, of course. “Still back there?”
“I told you I’d wait right here,” she called back, her voice as lighthearted and reassuring as she could make it. It wasn’t as if she could go anywhere else. Still, if she could just separate the tape before he walked back and discovered what she’d been doing while he was away… “Hey, when Shaun Reid brought me here, he said something about a box of wine near the door. Why don’t you find it, and we’ll have a drink? I don’t know about you, but I could use one.”
“Okay.” The thin beam of the flashlight appeared. It bounced around near the narrow door Randy had used to leave and enter. In the light’s backsplash, she could make out his silhouette. He had shoulders like a freaking gorilla. She thought of herself as a strong woman, but she didn’t have any illusions. He could do just about anything he wanted to her. If she didn’t get to him first. She redoubled her efforts, poking and tugging at the holes in the duct tape.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Try by the big door, the one that has the loading dock outside,” she called.
“Are you okay? You sound kind of winded.”
She took a deep breath. “Just feeling a little stressed. The wine will help.”
The flashlight beam tilted toward the front of the building. Millie poked another hole into the tape. She thrust her fingers through and pulled, her arms shaking, her thighs cramping from the strain of keeping her ankles as far apart as possible. She felt something yield. She pulled harder. There was a moment’s catch, and then a tearing sound, and her fetters fell into two pieces of tape, the ragged ends fluttering between her ankles.
She bit her lip to keep from howling. Then, for the first time all day, she stretched her legs wide, wide apart. The painful stretch was the most wonderful thing she had ever felt.
“Hey, I found it. Lemme see if I can get the lid off the box.”
Millie slowly rose from the floor. She straddled a crate, rolling her pelvis forward and back, cracking her spine and flexing her arms. From near the flashlight’s glow, she heard the distinctive sound of nails screeching out of wood.
“Phew! I hate to tell you, but this wine smells way bad. Like somebody stuffed old garage rags inside.”
“Nevermind, then.” Now she was free, she was anxious. She wanted to do what she had to do and get out. “Would you come back here, please? I’m feeling a little scared, all by myself in the dark.”
“You want me to find some water or something? I got a couple bottles in my backpack.”
“No. Please, I don’t want to sit here alone.”
“Okay.” His voice had the resigned tone of every man baffled by a woman’s changeable mind. “If that’s what you want.”
She wiped her palms against her pants. She wanted them to be hard and dry for this. “What did you and your wife decide to do?”
His voice, and the light, came closer. “Uh… she thinks you’d be better off coming home with us. In case Mr. Reid, you know, comes after you.”
She thinks we need to keep you under lock and key, Millie translated. She brought her ankles together and hunched over so that her hands, folded in her lap, weren’t visible.
The light played over her. “You okay? You look like you might be sick.”
She nodded her head. “I think I might.” She tightened her grip around the iron hinge pin. Its point, sharp and hard, pricked against her thigh. “Would you help me to the washroom?”
“Sure,” he said. He was close enough so she could smell him, gasoline and sweat and the strong, cheap detergent his clothes were washed in. He opened his arms to lift her, and she sprang forward, her thighs, her back, her arms all working together, and she drove the iron spike into his gut.
For a moment, they stood like lovers, his arms half embracing her, his face inches from hers, staring into each others eyes. Then, afraid she had only lightly wounded him, she shoved against his chest. He let out a noise like a chainsaw caught in a tree bole and fell to the floor.
The flashlight bounced off the uneven wooden boards at an angle and smashed against the metal footing of an ancient pulping machine. Instantly, the unrelenting darkness swallowed them.
“You… stabbed me.” Randy’s voice held more amazement than pain.
Millie was shaking so hard she could barely move. She backed away from the voice below her. She tried to think of something to say to him, something to justify what she had done, but in the end, her justification was that she was free to leave, whether he or his wife or Shaun Reid wanted her to or not. She backed away another step.
Randy groaned. “Holy crap.” He breathed shallowly, as if the movement of his lungs was painful. “Hurts.”
“I’ll call for help as soon as I’m away.” She skirted around him as best she could, bumping into crates and feeling her way past tarp covered machines.
“Lisa,” he moaned.
She moved toward the front of the building by touch and memory, fixing the location where she last saw Randy’s light when he had found the wine bottles. She caught a whiff of something, something that smelled like mildewed cloth and crankcase oil, and remembered Randy’s description of the case of wine. She must be getting close. “Don’t worry,” she called to the man in the darkness behind her. “We’re both going to get out of here alive.”
Russ was watching Clare make her way back to the table when his phone rang. “Excuse me,” he said to his dinner companions. “I have to take this.”
“You didn’t even check the number,” Linda said in an undertone. “Can’t they do without you for a couple of hours?”
He opened his mouth to explain that with two major investigations and a missing person, he shouldn’t even be at the party, but he bit off the words. What was the use? “I’m sorry,” he said, then retreated to the entryway and opened his phone.
“Van Alstyne here,” he said.
“Hey, Chief, it’s Eric, up to Haudenosaunee.”
“Eric. How’s it going? Find anything?” Russ watched as Clare arrived at the table. Instead of sitting down, she bent over and said something to Parteger. The view was so good he almost missed McCrea’s next sentence.
“We found a few more of those Planetary Liberation Army pamphlets.”
“Any correspondence? Anything that might be a threat to van der Hoeven?” Hugh rose from his seat and stepped back, gesturing for Clare to precede him. They began maneuvering between the tables, headed toward the entryway.
“No. It’s all pretty generic stuff. But,” Eric stressed, “we found something very interesting in the cellar. They were stacked up, nice and clean, but there were a dozen bleach jugs, the same number of empty detergent boxes, fifteen dry gas cans, and-get this-a half of a box of sawdust.
The ingredients for homemade napalm. “Holy shit,” Russ said. Clare and Hugh walked past him. “Hang on,” he said to Eric. He clamped a hand over the phone. “Are you leaving?”
Clare shook her head. “Hugh’s helping me get the wine out of my car. We’ll be right back.”
“I want to ask you about your conversation with the housekeeper this morning.”
Her eyes brightened with curiosity. “Okay.”
Russ turned back to his phone. “Eric? Good work. I’m going to call Harlene and have her alert the state police and the Feebs that we have a possible terror weapon on the loose. I’m going to give out the number at Haudenosaunee. Stay within earshot of the phone, in case anyone needs to ask you questions.”