For Bonnie, it was a long descent through the dark. The smells of mildew and machine oil closed over her. In the claustrophobic space she found it hard to breathe.
With her hands chained together, she could hold on to only one of the two side rails. She made slow progress. Elvis and Ringo, descending after her, yelled incomprehensible things at her, obviously demanding more speed.
Her sneakers slipped on a rung. She clutched the railing tighter to keep from falling. Above her, the driver let loose a new stream of Albanian curses to encourage her in her efforts.
“Eat shit, Elvis,” she muttered.
She had wondered why they’d made her go first. Now she realized that if one of them had preceded her, she could have dropped down on top of him, dislodging him from the ladder and maybe breaking his legs. Apparently they weren’t complete morons.
And they’d done this before. Like Ed and Edna Goodman, they were experienced at this sort of thing. But the Goodmans, at least, had killed their victims without pain. A little laughing gas, and it was lights out.
No laughing gas this time.
The shaft ended at a metal landing lit by a fluorescent bulb in a wall sconce. A metal stairway like a fire escape dropped from the landing to a lower story, which in turn would lead to a still lower floor. The landing itself extended to matching doors on both sides, affording access to a walkway that ran the length of the bulkhead. There must be a whole series of those walkways, one for each level in the descent.
The landing looked out at the interior of the cargo hold, fully loaded, a subterranean city crowded with eight-story skyscrapers of corrugated steel, the rectangular boxes lashed together at the corners by orange webbing, nested inside crosshatched metal frames welded to the hull. A lightless city, or nearly so, illuminated only by the scattered auras of fluorescent tubing.
From above came creaks and groans and the clank of chains, as still more containers were piled atop the closed lid of the hold. Down below, there was no sound and no movement, only a vast haunted stillness.
She must have stood gazing at the scene for a long moment. Ringo, impatient, planted his hand between her shoulder blades and gave a hard shove, directing her to the stairway. “Kreni!”
She went deeper into the belly of the ship. Staircase after staircase, a succession of landings that all looked the same, until finally she was at the bottom, standing on the floor of the hold with columns of crates towering over her.
Between the bulkhead and the first row of crates lay a narrow stretch of open floor. The doors of all the crates were secured with locking bars—except for one, which was unlocked. The men led her toward it, Elvis threw open the double doors, and light spilled out. Her accommodations for the voyage.
Her heart sped up. Her mouth was dry.
The container was a utilitarian steel box, maybe eight feet wide and twenty feet long, painted a dull green. The walls and roof were corrugated sheet-metal. The floor was plywood.
Its interior was raised off the floor by six or eight inches. She had to step up, lifted by the two men.
No cargo inside. Instead they’d turned the shipping container into a kind of man-cave. Folding chair, card table, scatter of dirty magazines. Boombox on a mini-fridge. Long fluorescent tube affixed vertically to a wall near the doors, an electrical cord snaking through a drilled hole to an outlet outside.
And against the back wall, a tool chest on rubber wheels. Many drawers of different sizes. She didn’t want to know what was in those drawers.
Elvis gave her a vicious shove that knocked her to the floor. She landed heavily, skinning her palms.
The floor was dotted with rust-colored stains. They predominated near the center of the room. She looked up and saw a large eyehook embedded in the ceiling, directly over that spot. A long beltlike strip—one of the orange packing straps—ran from the hook to an identical hook on the wall.
She didn’t need them to draw her a diagram to see where this was going.
The boombox came on, brought to life by Elvis, and some awful Eastern European hip-hop spilled out. Jiving to the music, Ringo pantomimed a drumbeat against the scuffed metal wall. Elvis playfully punched his arm. Kids joking around.
There was something unreal about it all. The container with its blood-flecked floor, the disco beat and stupid laughter, Elvis with his monster BO and Ringo with his noxious cigarette and swamp-gas farts. Being killed was one thing, but to go this way, a prisoner in a fucking tin can, worked over by brain-dead mopes until her heart gave out—
It wasn’t right. It was fucking unacceptable.
She thought about that, and she felt something stir inside her, something roused from long sleep.
Something familiar.
Elvis quit messing around and yanked her to her knees. Ringo grabbed the strap that dangled from the ceiling and passed it under the handcuff chain, then tied it into a loop in a series of complicated knots. She stayed very still, putting up no resistance. There was nothing she could do.
The webbing must be the same stuff that was used to lash down the containers. Some kind of woven polyester, flexible as rope and tough as steel. She could never cut through it, even if she had something to cut it with, and she was sure she couldn’t undo Ringo’s knots. The guy must’ve earned some serious merit badges.
When he was done, he said something to Elvis, who’d positioned himself by the hook in the wall. Elvis took hold of his end of the strap and drew it in, hand over hand, winding it around the hook. Bonnie had known what was coming, but somehow it still took her by surprise as the strap tautened, pulling her arms up over her head, then lifting her off her knees in a series of stops and starts.
The steel cuffs bit into the sides of her hands. She arched her back against a pulse of pain. Her legs straightened. The floor dropped away. Bright lines of burning heat shot through her shoulders.
Now her feet were barely touching the plywood. She could just balance herself on the toes of her sneakers. It was the only way to get any relief from the stretched agony in her arms.
This kind of thing had looked like a lot more fun in Fifty Shades.
Now she was really starting to wish Elvis had double-locked the cuffs. As it was, downward pressure would move the ratchets, drawing the cuffs progressively tighter until her wrists were painfully squeezed, the blood circulation to her hands cut off. The only way to relieve that pressure was to keep herself precariously balanced. Even then, the edges of the cuffs sawed into her wrists, chafing and biting, drawing blood.
Elvis tied the strap in position. She was left dangling from the ceiling with her feet just barely in contact with the floor.
Ringo gave her a little push. She began to revolve, the room wheeling around her. He blew a gust of noxious cigarette smoke in her face.
She hung there, slowly spinning. Her feet sought purchase on the plywood but kept missing it. She was forced to grab hold of the strap to prevent the cuffs from notching tighter on her wrists. But her hands were sweaty and their purchase on the strap was tenuous at best. She felt one of the cuffs click down another notch.
Probably they wanted her to scream or cry. She wouldn’t. Fuck them.
Finally she steadied herself. She touched the floor and made the slow revolutions stop. Head lowered, she struggled to breathe.
She’d been suspended like this for only a minute or so. Arian had said she might last ten days. Ten days before it was over, before her body went into the ocean.
Elvis stepped away from the wall. He and Ringo studied her, grinning like jackals.
Then Ringo raised her shirt—the short-sleeve tee emblazoned You Can’t Handle This—and removed the cigarette from his mouth. He pressed the burning end against her bare abdomen, twisting the cigarette, stubbing it out on her flesh.
Still she didn’t scream. Teeth gritted, she bit back any protest. But her eyes watered, and she knew her face was streaked with tears.
The cigarette came away, leaving the ragged blister of a burn mark.
Elvis leaned up against her and pantomimed humping her with loud grunts and big thrusts of his pelvis. Ringo laughed, and Elvis laughed, and Ringo farted, and they both laughed louder, and the music throbbed and blared.
And all the while the thing inside her grew, taking shape, as it had in a mobile home in the desert.
Ringo slapped her ass. His buddy gave one of her tits a hard squeeze. Big fun. Wild hilarity.
“Laugh now, assholes,” she muttered.
She would be the one laughing later. How she would manage it, she had no idea. But she wasn’t going to die in a damn shipping crate, dangling like a side of beef.
Elvis unsheathed the knife on his arm. He turned it in his grip, letting the blade flash in the fluorescent light. Letting her see it, admire its sharpness.
She watched almost without interest, feeling no fear, only the strange calm of pure and perfect rage, the unblinking eye of a storm.
The knife traveled to her side, then descended, slitting her pants leg, not yet cutting flesh.
The flaps of fabric parted, exposing her bare leg from her hip to her ankle. Ringo whistled. Elvis leered, breathing his bad breath into her face. She stared back.
“Bring it,” she said slowly. “Bring everything you got.”
He might not understand English, but he knew she was issuing a challenge. Daring the two of them to hurt her. To do their worst.
Elvis raised the knife again. He licked his lips. He had ideas now. He wanted to get busy.
“Ti ndal,” Ringo said. Anxiously he pulled his partner aside to confer with him. Bonnie could guess the gist of the conversation. These two were expected on deck. Kyle had said Arian wanted all his men to take part in the ambush he’d planned for Shaban.
Ringo’s argument carried the day. Grudgingly, Elvis sheathed his knife. Ringo silenced the boombox.
In the doorway Elvis paused to blow her a wet kiss before flipping down the light switch. Ringo followed him outside, releasing a final burst of intestinal gases as he went.
The double doors clanged shut, sealing her in darkness. She heard the slide of the lock bars, the clicks of padlocks. After that, fast footsteps retreating across the floor, and the distant clang of footfalls on the metal stairs.
She was alone. Locked in. Chained like a prisoner in a dungeon.
She knew how it would be when her new friends returned. They would strip her naked and then use the knife and cigarettes and whatever they had stowed in that tool chest. And there would be more rust-colored stains on the floor.
She could take it. Whatever they did to her, she wouldn’t die. She would find a way to work herself free. She’d done it before.
She would get loose and she would arm herself and she would hunt them down and kill them—all of them—Elvis and Ringo and the crew from Brighton Cove and old Arian Dragusha himself.
And Kyle Ridley. Oh, yes.
Definitely Kyle.