Page 54 of The Chain

“We’ll get her back. We’ll do everything we can. If I have to kill every one of those scumbags, we’ll get her back.”

29

Saturday, 5:38 a.m.

It’s still dark out but perhaps it’s a little lighter in the east. Kylie can’t sleep. She hasn’t slept at all since she managed to get the wrench.

The adrenaline has been pumping all night and sleep was impossible. She’s going to get one shot at this and she’s going to have to take it.

The plan is simple. All the best plans are simple. Aren’t they?

Get in the boat, find the whale, kill it.

Get in the boat, find the shark, kill it.

The man or woman is going to come down the steps with a tray holding a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. He or she is going to bend over to set down the tray. Then he or she is going to take the cereal bowl and orange juice off the tray.

That’s when Kylie is going to hit him or her with the wrench.

A blow as hard as she can on the top of the head. A two-handed blow that will render him or her unconscious.

That person will then be on the ground and down for the count. If she gets lucky, he or she will have the handcuff key. Kylie will uncuff herself, run up the steps, and head for the nearest road. If, however, there is no handcuff key, the gun will come into play. The gun is the crucial part of it. Without fail, every time they have come down here, they have been armed.

If there’s no key, Kylie will take the gun and wait until the man or woman wakes up and then she’ll point the gun at that person’s head and call for the other one and tell them both to give her the handcuff key or she’ll shoot.

If they don’t believe she’ll shoot, she’ll plug whoever she’s got in the kneecap. She’s gone shooting in the woods with her uncle Pete a couple of times. She knows how to fire a revolver. Safety off, check the chamber, pull the trigger. The partner will get the key and give it to her, but if either of them balks, she’ll make a deal with them: after she gets home to her mom, she’ll claim she can’t remember where she was held. She won’t remember for a full day. That will give them twenty-four hours to get out of the country.

Kylie is pleased with the plan. It’s logical and rational and she can’t see any reason why it won’t work. The hardest part will be the first step, and that will be over in a second.You can do it, Kyles, you really can do it,she tells herself. But she’s shaking with fear in the sleeping bag.

Shakingisn’t the right word.Convulsingmight be closer to what’s going on. But courage runs in the family. She thinks about her mom going through all those chemo treatments. She thinks about her grandmother fighting NYU for all those years to stay in faculty housing after Grandpa ran off with one of his students. And she thinks about her great-grandmother Irina, the determined little girl who browbeat and bullied her family onto a donkey cart and drove them east with the retreating Red Army to a train that transported them to a strange domed city called Tashkent. Four years they’d spent there as penniless outcasts, and when they got back to the shtetl in Belarus in the fall of 1945, they discovered, of course, that every single person who had stayed there had been murdered by the Germans. But for her great-grandmother’s courage, Kylie wouldn’t be here today.

That’s what she needs now, the courage and determination of little Irina and her mom and her grandma. All the women, all the way back. She examines the wrench again. Heavy. Seven inches long. Someone probably left it there after fixing the boiler. More likely a workman than one of the house’s owners. They don’t seem like the boiler-fixing types. It isn’t the sort of wrench that will help break a chain, but it’s maybe big enough to break someone’s head.

She’ll soon find out.

30

Saturday, 6:11 a.m.

Rachel checks for Amber Alerts and police reports and breaking news about a missing child, and she keeps one eye always on the mirror of the Dunleavys’ home PC.

Wee hours. Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour. So late. So tired.

Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep…

She closes her eyes for the briefest of moments.

Void.

Sunlight.

Birdsong.

Shit.

What day is it?

The hours are like years and the days are decades. How many millennia into this goddamn nightmare is she?

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