Page 59 of Ticket Out

His head feltlike someone had jumped up and down on it.

James knew he had to put that aside. Had to turn things around, somehow. Because the way things were going was not good. At all.

They were back in the van, neither of them tied up, but the man who’d hit him over the head stood wide-legged at the back, holding onto a handle above his head and blocking the door. He had a knife, and it was pointed in their direction.

It was dark in the van, and their guard had wrapped a scarf around his lower face to disguise his features. He said nothing, hanging on as the van rumbled over uneven ground.

There was a definite tension between the two men who had abducted them. One wanted to dump them on a street and let them go, the other didn’t seem to know what he wanted.

The compromise they had reached had been done out of earshot, so James had no idea what was going to happen now.

The van came to a stop, although the engine wasn’t switched off, and the whole vehicle rocked as the driver got out and then James heard the rumble of a retractable garage door.

He felt the dip of the van as the driver got back in and then it reversed a short way and stopped again.

A bang came through the wall from the driver’s side, and their guard opened the door, revealing a dark space with a musty smell beyond. He dropped down and pointed the knife at them.

“Get down and go to the back of this garage. If you don’t, or if you try to run, I’ll be waiting to stick you, got it?”

The man left the doors open and stepped to the side.

Gabriella rose to her feet behind him and walked to the door, jumping down and turning with her hand out to help him.

But even that was beyond him. He scooted forward on his behind and carefully lowered his legs to the ground and stood, swaying with dizziness as soon as he was on his own two feet.

Gabriella slid under his shoulder again and helped him move away from the van, which had already started moving forward.

He just had time to see their guard, reaching up to grab a handle, and then the rumble of the door drowned out any other sound, enclosing them in darkness, until he heard the snick of a padlock being attached.

He expected it to be just as dark as the van, but somehow it wasn’t. He couldn’t work out how until Gabriella urged him over to a far corner and helped him sit down on what turned out to be a pile of stiff, ancient canvas covers.

“Look,” she said, pointing up. “Stars.”

There were indeed stars. Shining down on them from a large hole in the roof.

It was a good thing it hadn’t rained for quite a few days, or James guessed the canvas sheets would have been damp as well as stiff and foul smelling.

Still, it was good to have a slice of open sky above them, and while the light of the stars was minimal, it was comforting, somehow. Less like a cell.

“Did you see where we are?” He hadn’t been able to, but she was more alert than he was right now.

She shook her head. “I thought I heard buses and traffic. It took about thirty minutes to get here from the warehouse. I did see a row of garages on the other side to us just before he closed the door. I don’t think we’re near any houses.”

So a storage facility, or garage space. There were hundreds of them dotted through the city.

Gabriella had been standing, looking up through the hole in the roof, but now she crouched down in front of him. “How are you feeling?”

“Not good.” He had to be honest, because he could barely stand upright, and that meant he could do nothing to help get them out.

“Just lie still. I’ll see what I can find in here.”

She moved away, walking the perimeter of the garage. There was a clang of metal and he heard hopping.

“I kicked over a bucket,” she whispered. She emerged beside him again, holding it. “Maybe I can get up on the roof,” she said, setting the bucket upside down right beside the canvas sheets where he was lying, as close to the hole as she could get. She carefully stood on it, balancing as she looked up, and then shook her head. “Too low.”

She got down, and went back to her search, but eventually she came back to the canvas sheets and sat beside him, tucking her short skirt primly beneath her. “I can’t find anything in the dark.”

She settled back, her face tipped up to the star-lit sky.

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