Death Trap Page 14

  Danny nodded, his focus on the rake he was twisting in one hand.

  “Look at me when I talk to you,” Doug demanded. “It’s a very narrow line you’re walking here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Danny agreed, presenting a serious face to his father.

  “Good. Now get busy.”

  By ten o’clock the lawn was mowed, and Danny was busy with the rake when Jill Tabor came out the front door, purse and car keys in hand, pausing on her way to the garage.

  “I’m going to the grocery store,” she told him. “I won’t be gone long. There’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some orange juice on the kitchen counter. Take a quick break, then get back to it, okay?”

  Still holding the rake, he crossed to where she stood on the front walk. “Thanks, Mom,” he said with a smile.

  She reached to lay a hand on his shoulder. “You’re doing a good job, Danny.”

  “Thanks.”

  Continuing to the garage, she raised the door and backed the car out, leaving the door open. Danny could see his bicycle just inside, where his father had stashed it—off-limits as long as he was grounded.

  When she had driven away, he went inside to claim his reward and took the food back outside, where he sat down on the front step to eat it, beside the rake he had dropped there. The peanut butter was crunchy, his favorite. While he chewed, he thought about the elephant ears he and Mr. Monroe had eaten for breakfast at the fair and decided he liked the sandwich better and that his mom must not be so mad at him now.

  A whole month of being grounded would be a long time, but he knew his father hadn’t been unfair in setting it. Had it been worth it? He thought it had. The old man had been a lot of fun, really. A grin spread across his face as he remembered being a scarecrow and how the goat had jumped and bleated when Mr. Monroe poked it with his cane. The grin faded as he thought about talking to Jessie about being responsible enough to earn a dog of his own. He guessed he probably wouldn’t be able to start counting good behavior until his month of being grounded was over.

  As he daydreamed of playing with a dog, the sound of a vehicle intruded, and he looked up to see a pickup driving up the street. In front of his house, it slowed. The window was down on the driver’s side, and the driver, a man wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses whom Danny didn’t recognize, gave him and the empty garage a long look. Though the sunglasses weren’t the reflective kind, they reminded Danny unpleasantly of the man who had chased him at the fairground. The way the man in the truck was staring made him uneasy as well.

  Then the pickup stopped completely, and the driver leaned his head out. “Hey, kid,” he called. “Do you know where Pioneer Street is?”

  Stuffing the last bite of sandwich into his mouth, Danny raised an arm and pointed down the street.

  “Where? I’ve been down there and couldn’t find it.”

  Danny chewed and swallowed. “Two blocks,” he called.

  “Do you know if the Jordans live down there?”

  “No,” said Danny, picking up the glass of orange juice.

  “What?”

  “No, I don’t,” a little louder this time and followed by a sip of juice. He wished the man would go away.

  “I can’t hear you.” The man put the gears in park, opened the door, and stepped out onto the street, leaving the engine running. He trotted swiftly up the walk toward Danny. “What did you say?”

  The speed at which he came alarmed the boy, who jumped up and dropped the half-empty glass of orange juice, which broke on the cement walk. One step back brought him up against the front door, but there wasn’t time to open it and escape into the house.

  The man lunged at him, hands outstretched to grab, and Danny dodged under the one on his right, left footprints in his mother’s flower bed, and leaped onto the lawn. The man spun around and came after him, but the boy was already halfway to the garage. Seizing his bicycle, he threw himself onto it and pedaled away down the drive. Determined fingers plucked at his shirttail, but lost their hold and slid ineffectually away as he accelerated. He could hear swearing behind him as he swerved into the road, then, almost immediately, came the sound of the engine’s roar as the driver turned the pickup around in a rattle of flying gravel.

  By the time it was speeding after Danny, he had left the road, fleeing between two neighbors’ houses, and was riding hard across the same vacant lot he had traversed in running away from home the first time.

  “You are not to leave the yard without permission,” he remembered his father’s dictate of the night before.

  A month might be nothing compared to the punishment that would be forthcoming when his mother came home and found him gone again. I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life, he thought, but didn’t know what else he could have done.

  Who was this guy anyway, and what did he want? It couldn’t be the bag. They’d given that to the police, hadn’t they?

  Reaching the next street, which ran parallel to his own, he glanced to the left and saw the pickup turn the corner, coming in his direction in a hurry. But riding bicycles with his friends had given Danny firsthand knowledge of the shortcuts in the neighborhood. He rode straight across the street, up a driveway, and into another vacant lot. Halfway across it, the path he was following turned abruptly down an embankment toward a road at a lower level. Going too fast, he sailed over the edge and was airborne for several yards before hitting the packed ground at the bottom. The bicycle tilted dangerously, but he managed to right it and allowed the momentum to carry him over several rolling hillocks that were easy to ride at a lower speed but jarred his teeth in the struggle to keep from crashing the bouncing bike. Coasting out onto the road, he followed it in a wide curve until, some distance behind him, he could hear the roar of the pickup engine, coming fast.

  Abandoning the road again, he swung into another driveway, past a house, and into a backyard where a woman was sitting at a picnic table reading a newspaper.

  “Hey!” she shouted. But anything else she said was blown away in the breeze of his passing.

  Another street, this one a dead end with a barrier, around which Danny swerved. Pedaling frantically on, he tried to think where to go so the threatening stranger in the truck couldn’t find him. There had to be somewhere—and someone who would help.

  Then suddenly he knew exactly who to find—someone who already knew all about it. Maybe on the way he could lose the man in the pickup that he could still faintly hear somewhere out of sight.

  And you came home to an empty house and yard?” Timmons turned to Jill Tabor.

  “Yes. I saw the broken glass on the front walk, and at first I thought maybe he was in the house, getting something to clean it up. I took the groceries inside and called, but he wasn’t there. When I went back out I noticed that his bicycle was gone, and I knew he wasn’t supposed to be riding it. Doug was due home for lunch, and I knew he’d be furious, but there wasn’t much I could do. I thought about going to look for Danny in the car, but I had no idea where to go—which direction he’d gone. I couldn’t understand why he would take off again. He’s a good kid, and it didn’t make sense.”

  “So you came home and were furious?”

  “I sure was,” Doug Tabor affirmed. “I thought he was being obstinate and playing some game again, though I had to agree that it didn’t seem like Danny. Jill said he’d been working hard all morning and that broken glass worried both of us.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got back on the road and drove around the neighborhood looking for him—asking if anyone I knew had seen him. That was when April Shepherd—she lives a couple of streets over—said that he’d streaked through her yard on his bicycle less than an hour earlier like a bat out of hell and looking scared. That’s when we decided to call the police.”

  “We didn’t get the word until we showed up thinking we’d find Danny at home and instead ran into a couple of worried parents,” Jensen said. “So another APB went out for Danny. But after finding Wease
dead, we had other things on our minds. And there was growing concern for Jessie because it was then that Lynn Ehlers’s call came in from out the road.”

  CHAPTER 20

  In a wilderness cabin, far from anything familiar, Jessie Arnold sat on the floor where she had been for a day, a night, and most of another day.

  The ramshackle cabin exhibited evidence of having been abandoned for years, long enough for the low sod roof to collapse in one rear corner and a ragged hole or two in the rest to give it a decidedly unstable appearance, though the horizontal beams and rafters appeared strong. The small amount of light that fell through the holes in the roof and inadequate windows had allowed Jessie to study a fraction of the walls, floor, and disintegrating ceiling. She would have given anything to be able to examine it all more closely—better still, to free Tank and walk out of the trap in which she had spent the last day and a half. But it seemed that, with precision and shrewdness, her captor had anticipated every escape she might possibly attempt and had obstructed it by the very nature of her imprisonment.

  From where she sat on the floor, she could see through the narrow windows, empty of all but a few fragments of glass, that spruce trees surrounded the cabin. Although it was the end of August and the sun was lower than it had been in June, their thick branches prevented light from finding its way in, and the interior of the ancient building was damp and chilly. The dusty tattered lace of small spiders clung in the corners and between the logs where chinking had long ago fallen away, leaving gaps up to an inch wide. The scent of moldering wood hung in the air like an invisible fog, reminding her how improbable it was that anyone would think to look for her in this evidently remote location.

  A chain padlocked around Jessie’s wrists held her arms and shoulders, aching with cramp, over her head. Her hands felt as if they were made of ice, and the fingers of the right, with which she kept a grip on the chain, were numb. Soon she would have to stand up again in order to lower them for a few minutes’ ease, though she knew she must take care to keep tension on the chain in doing so. It was not a heavy chain. A pair of bolt cutters would have severed it. But the lack of such a tool made it as effective as one much more massive and stout. Her abductor must have considered that links of larger size could hang up on the rafters above, allowing relief, or escape, and had used the smallest size necessary to assure her confinement and continued attention. Not for the first time she examined the line of links that went up from her wrists to the beam overhead. From there it hung horizontally across the gap between it and another such beam, then went down and was securely fastened to the nearby platform that, with tension on the chain, she was attempting to keep level.

  Attention and alertness were imperative given the circumstances. She was tired, and with nothing to do but wait, she was more than a little afraid she would fall asleep and fail to keep the chain at the essential tautness. She was also thirsty and so hungry she felt slightly sick.

  Her head ached from the unexpected blow that had knocked her unconscious before she could see who had slipped up without her notice to deliver it. But she remembered standing by a shed in a wretched and unfamiliar dog yard near the Parks Highway north of Wasilla, visually checking each of the dogs tethered with similar chains to iron stakes driven into the ground next to their dilapidated boxes. She recalled with disgust that the unkempt kennel had been ripe with the filthy odor of more than twenty canines existing in the squalor of their own waste. Though she was used to the barks and yelps of her own dogs if a stranger entered their yard, these had lunged against the restraint of their chains, howling, baying, and baring their fangs in savage snarls, some crouched to spring if given an opportunity to reach her. Jessie had noticed they were thin to the point of emaciation, several bearing scars from fights and beatings, when she heard someone move close behind her.

  She remembered nothing until later, when she became aware of some kind of plastic covering her. She was bound so tightly she could only lie helpless, facedown on a vibrating metal surface. It wasn’t hard to deduce that she was in the back of a pickup truck in motion. But there was no way to figure out why, who was driving, or where they were headed. She had no way of knowing where she was, or how long the drive had been before she came to, but her head ached, and she longed for the vibration to stop. Considering the silencing tape that covered her mouth, her main objective was to focus enough willpower to keep from throwing up against it. Then she passed out again and woke in the cabin with a blindfold covering her eyes, but the tape that had covered her mouth was gone.

  “You feel this?” a rough whisper had said in her ear. She felt a jerk on the chain that held her wrists over her head, heard and felt it vibrate with tension. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t keep it tight. Don’t move or you’ll be very, very sorry. You can get that off your eyes when you hear the door shut. Understand?”

  Dizzy and bewildered, she nodded and sat still, feeling the tension of the chain.

  “Answer me,” the whisper demanded. It was a faintly familiar whisper, but dizzy and sick, she hadn’t been able to think where she had heard it before—or if she actually had.

  “Yes. I understand.”

  Footsteps crossed the room. Then she heard the squeal of protest from metal hinges and the thud of a wooden door closing.

  For a minute or two Jessie remained where she was without moving. There had been threat in that voice, and she had no way of knowing what it meant. It would be best, she decided, to move as little as possible until she could see and assess the situation. Carefully keeping the chain taut, she rubbed one side of her face against her outstretched arm, and the blindfold, a loosely tied piece of dark fabric with ragged edges, fell away more easily than she expected. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the dim light. At first she was confused by what she was seeing. Then, as she appraised her position and what it meant, fear and anger followed swiftly.

  Now, taking a deep breath, Jessie refused to think about it anymore. Slowly, cautiously, she began the harrowing process of getting to her feet. Intent on not allowing even one link of the chain to slip against the wooden beam, she kept her wrists at a constant height from the floor as she straightened her legs. With great care, she raised herself until she was finally upright, and her wrists now maintained the chain’s tension at waist level. The motion resulted in a sharp complaint from the knee she had injured earlier in the summer, and the pain in her arms, neck, and shoulders increased with the motion, then subsided slowly into more tolerable aches. Hooking her thumbs into the belt loops of her jeans, she held the chain steady and alternately rotated her shoulders in small circles against the hurt. Though the motion was guarded, one link made a metallic click as it slid across the beam. Immediately Jessie increased the tension on the chain until that single link slid back in her direction.

  Across the room, Tank, awakened by the small jerk and click of the moving chain, raised his head to look across at her. Seeing his mistress standing up, he waved his tail and started to pull his legs up under him, plainly intending to get up as well.

  “No!” Jessie said sharply. Her dry voice cracked, but fearful, she ignored it. “Lie down, good boy. Lie down.”

  He cocked his head but relaxed and stayed where he was, six feet above the floor, watching closely to see if this time she was inclined to action and to leaving this place. But he obeyed her command and continued to lie still as she insisted. He lay on a four-foot-square rectangle of ancient plywood that rested horizontally, one end supported by a single, tall sawhorse, the other by the chain that was nailed to it, which Jessie supported with opposing tension.

  Fastened with a slipknot around his neck was a yellow nylon cord, flexible and perhaps a quarter of an inch thick. The length of it was tied to the overhead beam with only a few precious inches of slack that were not enough to allow the dog to reach the floor. If he attempted to jump from his plywood platform, the cord would tighten relentlessly and he would hang suspended until he strangled. If Jessie failed to maintain the tension on the c
hain that kept it level, or tightened it so it tipped the platform in the other direction, he would slide off. If any of these things happened, restrained by the chain and the weight of the plywood attached to the other end, she would be unable to cross the room in time to save him. As had been clearly planned by her abductor, this knowledge had kept her all but motionless as the long hours passed. She was frustrated and tense, but still searched for a solution to the situation—a way out of the trap that had been so cleverly and effectively designed.

  “Good boy,” she crooned to her dog. “Be still. I know you’re as hungry and thirsty as I am, but you’re a good dog to stay—a very good dog. It’s okay. We’re okay, you and me, and I won’t let anything bad happen.”

  Inactivity was difficult for an active animal. Unaware of his peril but increasingly restless and tired of staying where he was, Tank whined softly, but once again obeyed and laid his muzzle back down on his forepaws.

  Gingerly, Jessie raised her knees alternately toward her chest, working them to alleviate tired muscles. She was cautious with the injured one, bringing it up only until a twinge of pain warned her to stop, then lowering it again. There was no way to sit on the hard wooden floor that did not result in discomfort, and as it was impossible to lie down, her whole body protested the punishment. Straightening her back, she rolled her head, then brought her chin down to touch her chest, trying to relieve the strain in her shoulders and neck. It helped a little, but not much.

  In fact, nothing helped much. And time, she knew, would only make it worse. Slowly, carefully, she sat back down, forced to adjust once more to the pain that tension created in her arms. She tried again to think who could have brought her here—and why. She remembered standing in an unfamiliar dog yard, but little after that. Why was she confined here so carefully? The arrangement seemed to indicate prior planning, but how could her abductor have known where she would be? What did he want? And when would he come back? Or would he?