“If I start throwing this around,” I asked Tatiana, “will they hear me?Do they go to sleep, or does one of them stay awake on guard?”
One of them stayed awake and on guard.Of course.“But this,” she glanced around the room, “is sound proof.If the landlord sends someone here—for the bugs, maybe—they can’t hear us if we scream.”
That was disturbing.Yuri and Konstantin seemed to have thought of everything.
However, now that attention to detail benefited us.If I started tearing at the drawer, they shouldn’t be able to hear me.
I lifted it, experimentally.
It was well made.Old enough that the joints were dovetails, and the two pieces of wood were not just nailed together.Although the dovetails were neat enough that they’d probably been cut by a machine, not by hand.
I decided that the bureau was old, but not so old that destroying it would be a crime.And between you and me, I would have taken a Sheraton apart if I thought it would get me out of here in one piece.
It took time and some hard work.At first we tried to pull the drawer apart.It didn’t work.We either weren’t strong enough, or the glue between the dovetails was too strong.But after Tatiana and I hung off one side, and the other two girls (still up on the top bunk) held onto the other, and the drawer still didn’t budge, we gave up on that idea.
“You’re sure they can’t hear us?”I panted.
Tatiana nodded.
“Even if they can, I guess it won’t be a big deal.We want them to come down here.And if it’s just one of them, to see what’s going on, maybe that would actually be better.”
“They can’t hear us,” Tatiana said.
Fine.I took a better grip on the drawer and swung it, straight at the upper corner of the bunk bed.
The girls shrieked.The drawer held.
And nothing else seemed to happen.Nobody came running down from upstairs to see what was going on.
So I did it again.And again.And one more time, for good measure.
By the time the drawer splintered into pieces, I was out of breath and sweaty, and it’s possible I may have strained a muscle in my upper back.But I had four dangerous-looking, jagged pieces of wood.Nothing I personally would want to run afoul of.The splinters alone would be enough to take out someone’s eye.
I distributed them among the girls.“When the door opens, be ready.”
They looked dubious, but nodded.Rachel was dozing, and I left her alone, although I made sure to poke her every now and then, just in case she did have a concussion.The last thing I wanted was for her to slip into a coma.If we had to fight our way out of here, I wanted her alert and able to move under her own steam.
The girls drifted off to sleep one by one.They’d probably had a long and hard night, no pun intended.I should have been worn out myself too, after the day I’d had, but by now I’d gone beyond tired and was as wired and twitchy as if I’d downed a gallon of cappuccino.Instead of getting drowsy from the dark and the closed-in room and the regular breathing of everyone in it, all the little noises made me hyper alert.
And so it was that, an hour or three later, I was the first to hear the tiny scrape of the key turning in the lock.
A slight miscalculation on my part.I’d thought I’d be able to hear someone coming down the stairs.But if the room was sound proof—and it seemed as if it was—of course I wouldn’t be able to hear anyone moving around outside any more than they’d be able to hear me screaming my head off in here.
By now it was too late to try to wake the girls.By the time they woke up and got ready, the door would be open and our chance gone.I had to deal with this myself.So I took a better grip on my part of the bureau drawer and raised it above my head as I moved into position next to the door.
The knob turned.
On the outside, I mean.We didn’t have a knob in here.But the door started inching open.I held my breath as I prepared to bring the piece of oak down on a Russian head.
The door swung back, and a figure stepped into the doorway.I braced myself for attack.
“Gina?”a voice said.
I brought the drawer front down in a whistling arc, half an inch from Mendoza’s perfect nose.
Seventeen
He was not pleased.I wouldn’t have been, either, had it been my nose.
