The nasally-voiced one I’d finally learned was Steve laughed. “Don’t really seem like nobody cares if you live, now does it?” he snarled.
Well, crap. That didn’t sound good.
“Yeah,” his buddy sniveled. “All you can do now is hope you got something worth selling.”
Selling? They obviously knew I didn’t have anything with me, because they would have already taken it. They seemed unlikely to be talking about sex trafficking given that I hadn’t been molested in any way. Maybe they wanted the drugs we had at the rescue? I gave a mental shrug. It seemed unlikely but I was running out of ideas, so what the hell? I asked.
“What do you sell?”
They were quiet for a minute, making me think I had startled them but Steve finally answered. “We sell lots of shit but all we think we can get money for with you is information.”
Information? Really? I was in my early twenties, had a two-year community college degree in business management, and ran a non-profit animal rescue that sidelined in rehabilitating injured wildlife. Unless they wanted my notes on the daily care of the mom opossum, I was clueless.
“What kind of information? All I know about are animals.”
Steve snorted. “Not that kind of information, dumbass. We’re thinking maybe there’s someone out there who would pay to have you adjust things you’ve said in the past.”
A terrifying thought took hold and began to grow. The only person they could possibly be talking about was my father, and if they offered to sell me to someone he associated with, I was screwed.
“Nothin’ to say?” Steve taunted me, shoving me over onto my back with his boot.
I kept my mouth shut and focused on my breathing, ignoring the burning pain where his foot had connected.
“Not like it matters what he says,” the other one said with a nasty laugh.
Steve snarled at his partner to shut up and then yanked the headphones back down over my ears, leaving me back in total silence.
I counted to five hundred in my mind before risking a small movement of my legs. When nothing happened, I shifted again, this time rubbing my ear against the floor to dislodge the headphones and was greeted with silence.
Knowing that my time was up, I shifted gears from wait-and-see to escape-and-survive, rolling over onto my stomach to maneuver to my knees, and then struggling to my feet. While blindly exploring my prison, I’d found a few options that could work for cutting my bindings. The fear of being caught trying to escape stopped me from doing more than mentally cataloging the finds, but with an expiration date looming in front of me, that was no longer a deterrent.
Shuffling over to the metal shelf in the corner opposite the door, I started by leaning down and rubbing my face against the bracing strip on the side, promptly knocking the headphones the rest of the way off and ridding myself of the hood in the next movement. The shelf creaked lightly as I pulled back and I froze, blood pounding in my ears as my eyes struggled to adjust to the dim light filtering in through a tiny, dirt-caked window only large enough for a cat.
When there was no sign that anyone had heard, I looked down at my ankles, confirming my suspicion that they were bound with good old-fashioned zip ties. And if my ankles were bound with zip ties, the best odds said that was probably also what kept my wrists trapped behind my back andthatwas something I could work with. The strongest standard zip ties usually have a tensile strength of fifty pounds per tie and while my captors had doubled them up, they had made the rooking mistake of using one single tie to attach the two doubled-up ties to each other. All I needed to do was find an anchor and then apply more than fifty pounds of pressure to it.
Easy peasy. In theory, anyway. And in reality too, actually, as I caught sight of an old-fashioned coal chute with a heavy cast iron door held closed with an oversized hook and eye.
Easing onto my knees with the chute behind me, I spent several long, agonizing minutes trying to get my numb fingers to lift the hook out of the eye and then more trying to catch the loop between the zip tie cuffs on the hook. When I was fairly certain I was in the right position, I threw my body forward, trying to land my body weight against the hook. The first two times, the hook slipped free and I landed hard on the concrete floor, but the third time it caught and held, snapping the plastic and freeing my arms as I fell to my knees again.
I was sore and battered, but almost free and that made me jubilant. With the hard part over, I dropped to my butt and was able to hook and break the ankle ties on the first try. It’s amazing how much easier it is to do virtually everything when you can see.
Yep, that was definitely sarcasm.
Finally free, I took a minute to rub my wrists and ankles to restore the blood flow. After all, if I had to run, I needed to be able to use my feet. I stood and began searching for anything I could use as a weapon, impressed that I only wobbled slightly when I heard the telltale creaking of the steps outside my prison.
Grabbing the first thing I thought might work, the wooden handle broken off of some old tool or broom, I scrambled to hide behind the door before it opened, hoping for the element of surprise.
When the door opened, it wasn’t with the slow, controlled movement that Steve and his crony always used. Nope, it slammed open hard, driving me into the wall behind me and knocking the breath from my body and the wooden handle to the ground, leaving me to stumble to my knees when it rebounded as hard as it had opened.
Gasping for air, I stared up into a pair of frighteningly familiar eyes that were colder and harder than I’d ever seen them before. A slender hand extended toward me, a compact stun gun gripped in slender fingers.
Just before the gun sparked to life, she clucked her tongue in irritation. “Honestly, Mitchel, it never occurred to you that there would be cameras in here?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dane
The employee door at All Things Wild was swinging open in the wind -concerning in itself as the calendar didn’t show any volunteers scheduled to work- so we didn’t have any problem getting in but the camera lead was a bust.
