May 3
9822 Watchung Road
Essex County
Short Hills, New Jersey
2:39 P.M. EDT
Katie Casey heard voices from the outer room and rose to a seated position on the bed of her designer-decorated cell.
The room was somewhat darker than it was before, if now by perhaps only forty watts. Katie hoped her captors would not notice the discrepancy—or her hand at her side, tucked under the crease of the Horchow quilt where it curved back to cover the Martha Stewart encased pillows.
She need not to have worried. Denim Man stepped into the room, and Katie saw the Ray-Ban sunglasses he had donned, mask-like.
“Come,” he said, impatient. “Get up, now.”
When Katie did not move, his lips tightened. He stepped to the bed with purpose, accentuating the aggressive action by bending forward and snatching her left arm in an iron grip.
“I said to come—” he began, just as Katie’s right arm swept up in a hard arc, smashing the florescent tube high across his cheekbone.
Shards of glass and an explosion of gray-white powder—the latter, to Katie, an unexpected bonus: her own eyes had closed with the intensity of her effort—pelted both of their faces. She felt her arm released as her captor staggered backward, cursing.
She pushed herself up from the quilt, stood.
Less than a foot of glass tube was left in her hand; Katie had hoped for more, but in desperate times one counts one’s blessings. Katie’s foreshortened weapon blessed her with a shattered tip as jagged as a lamprey’s teeth—and, she hoped, as sharp.
Denim Man had wrenched off his Ray-Bans and was pawing at his eyes. Blood flowed, freely and copiously, from a deep gash that ran diagonally from cheekbone to lower jaw.
Katie turned and lunged through the door.
The second man—the one now wearing a suit different from, if equally as well-tailored as, the one Katie had clawed at the night before—stood beside the billiards table.
“I’ll cut your fucking head off,” Katie suggested, in what likely was not a reasonable tone.
She saw the stairs at the far end of the room.
“Don’t get in my way. I’d love to see your balls rolling across the floor.”
Suit Man leaned against the edge of the gaming table, casually rolled one of the white billiard balls down the length of the deep-green velvet.
“I value mine far too much to risk such a calamity.” He smiled calmly, with no trace of irony.
She edged around him, keeping the table between, her eyes locked on his as she backed toward her escape.
Her bare heels had just bumped against the first riser when two hands caught her: the first, clamping hard around her wrist and wrenching the weapon from her grasp; the second, seizing her hair and jerking her head back painfully.
She looked up wide-eyed into the lined face of an older man, his skin olive and featuring a wisp of gray beard.
He spoke, but not to her.
“And this is the daughter?” he said. “Yes. She will suffice. A daughter for a daughter. She will be allowed the honor of dying in his place.”