The automobile bay was huge, and the walk to the far bulkhead seemed endless. Bonnie marched stolidly, her hands clasped over her belly.
She knew better than to struggle against the cuffs pinching her wrists. She was pretty familiar with handcuffs. She’d practiced getting out of them often enough. Cops were trained to double-lock a cuff, first clicking it shut and then locking the ratchet in the swing arm so it couldn’t be inadvertently tightened as the prisoner struggled.
Out of stupidity or sadism, the driver hadn’t bothered with that step. If she twisted her wrists or tugged against the chain, the cuffs would only clamp down harder.
Flanking her, Zamir and Timir kept up a vigorous dialogue in their native language. The word kurvë kept coming up. It seemed to have something to do with her. It didn’t sound complimentary.
Senseless radio chatter boiled up once from the walkie-talkie in the driver’s back pocket. He answered and clicked off. There was no other contact with the larger world, no reminder that other human beings existed. The emptiness of the vast space was unsettling. The three of them might have been ghosts on a ghost ship.
Not the most sophisticated ghosts, however. The guy who’d ridden shotgun apparently had some kind of digestive disorder. Every so often he would crack off a volley of noxious farts almost loud enough to rip his trousers. Whenever this happened, the driver greeted the event with appreciative chortles.
In addition to the knife on his arm and the radio in his back pocket, the driver had a Glock .44 snugged into his waistband, Mexican-style. Not a great idea. A Glock’s safety was part of the trigger mechanism. Toting it around in your pants was a good way to shoot off your own genitals. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be any tragedy if a professional torturer with weapons-grade BO was unable to reproduce.
She’d glimpsed a gun tucked into the other man’s belt, too, but because it was on his right side, she couldn’t get a good look. Not that it mattered. One firearm was as good as any other at this range.
She still didn’t know which one was Zamir and which was Timir, but she had to call them something. The smelly one, she decided, was Elvis. The farty one with the bad-smelling cig sticking out of his beard was Ringo. She’d made friends with a couple of mangy stray cats in the days when she lived on the street, and those were the names she’d given them. These two were even mangier, and probably a lot less intelligent.
Finally they reached a door that opened on a basement corridor lit by overhead rails of fluorescent light. The hallway took them out of the hold and past the engine room.
An elevator approached. Ringo pressed the button.
On the fly she came up with a plan. She didn’t do a lot of thinking about it. Her philosophy was that thinking was highly overrated.
In the elevator, she would stun Ringo with a knee to the nads. The pain would force him to release her. Then all she had to do was snatch Elvis’s Glock out of his waistband, and she could make some noise. Even with her hands manacled, she could point and shoot, and in the confined space she wouldn’t need to aim. She would take care of Ringo before he could fire, then finish off Elvis with his own weapon.
A lot of things could go wrong. Ringo could be quicker on the draw than she expected, or Elvis could wrestle the gun out of her hand. But with any luck she could take out at least one of them, maybe both. The worst that could happen was she would end up getting shot, and that was still better than playing torture games without a safety word.
The door opened. They hustled her inside. Ringo pressed a button labeled Main Deck. He did not heed the No Smoking sign. The stench from his cigarette was even more headache-inducing in a closed space.
She waited. The elevator shuddered into motion, climbing. Neither man was looking at her. Neither suspected an attack.
Now.
She pivoted and rammed her knee into Ringo’s groin.
He winced, but his hold on her arm didn’t weaken. He didn’t double over, didn’t collapse, didn’t do any of the things he was supposed to do.
“Te qifsha, kurvë,” he muttered, and delivered a backhanded slap across her face.
She staggered, almost falling against Elvis. He smiled down at her and dragged his finger slowly across his throat.
Fuck.
She wasn’t fighting her way out of this. What this pair lacked in social graces, they made up for in animal strength.
She turned away, tasting a warm trickle from her lip. She’d drawn blood, at least. The bad news was that it was her own.
Behind her, Ringo once again broke wind, eliciting new chuckles from his partner. Between the stink from his cigarette and the odor from his blood, the guy was a walking compost heap.
The elevator opened on a different kind of corridor, one with white walls and short nap carpet. It could have been part of a hospital wing. She guessed it belonged to the high superstructure that dominated the freighter’s profile near the stern.
The hallway was narrow, not wide enough for two people to walk side by side. Elvis led her, with Ringo at her back. They passed a stairwell and what looked like a kitchen—a galley, she guessed it was called—before emerging via a side door onto the open deck.
The deck was slick with river water blown by the wind. A mountain of containers sat on the closed lid of the nearest hold—big steel boxes, red, green, orange, gray, some with manufacturers’ names stenciled across them in huge letters. Building blocks for a giant child.
To her left was the shore, still busy with activity as more crates were lifted aboard the ship. There were people around, but they couldn’t help her. In the darkness she would never be seen, and in the racket made by the giant gantries stacking the containers, she wouldn’t be heard.
Roughly the two men pulled her in the opposite direction, toward the starboard side of the freighter, where she was hidden from sight behind the deckside containers. A walkway lined by a steel railing edged the ship’s perimeter. Beyond the railing was the river, a spread of black water. The air was chilly, and for the second time she wished she still had the windbreaker.
She considered her options. If she broke free of her captors, she might be able to vault the railing and dive into the drink. It would be a long drop, a hard splash, and swimming with her hands cuffed wouldn’t be easy. Probably she would drown—unless Elvis or Ringo managed to shoot her first.
Even so, it would be a better exit than what they had planned for her. She was tempted. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her whole being rebelled against it. For her, there was always a way out. Always.
They led her forward, past a giant hold with an open lid, still being loaded with towers of steel crates. The next bay was closed, and more crates were being piled on the cover. Alongside the bay ran an elevated walkway accessible by a short ladder. Elvis climbed the ladder, and she and Ringo followed. Kneeling, Elvis spun off a pair of twist locks that secured a hatch lid in the floor. With a grunt he lifted the heavy lid out of the way.
The open lid exposed a vertical shaft plunging into darkness. A series of yellow rungs embedded in a wall of the shaft led down.
Elvis pointed. He was ordering her to climb down the shaft.
This was not something she wanted to do. She had a fair idea of what lay at the bottom, and she was in no hurry to get there.
Seeing her hesitate, the two men lost their composure. Elvis leaned into her face, screaming. Ringo slapped the back of her head nearly hard enough to knock her over.
“Okay, okay.” She gave in, raising her hands. “I’m going.”
She knelt by the hatchway and swung her legs into the shaft, her feet finding the rungs. Before descending, she took a last breath of the breeze off the river—a fresh breeze, cold but clean. Then she lowered herself into the airless dark.
Down the rabbit hole, she thought. This time for real.