Page 117 of Coach
I’d kneed my way over toward the dining table when there was another crash upstairs, making my belly twist.
He was really, really angry.
I didnotwant to be the punching bag for all of that.
Closing in on the kitchen cabinets, I brought my bound wrists up, yanking open the drawers and digging around in the contents, looking for anything I could use to free—or defend—myself.
Any hopes for knives faded. Not even a single butter knife was in one of the drawers.
With a frustrated growl, I inched my way across the room toward the bathroom cabinet.
There was a loud thud above me, and I could have sworn that was the sound of a grown man falling.
Good.
Maybe he’d knock himself unconscious, and I’d get more time to work on an escape plan.
“Yes!” I cheered when, in the back of the drawer, I found something sharp.
Okay, fine. It was a pair of nail clippers. And not even a full-sized one—just one of the tiny travel ones for your purse.
I didn’t care.
It was something.
I dropped down onto my butt, pulling my legs in as close as possible, then sliding the zip tie into the loop.
I clipped across the thick plastic millimeter by millimeter, praying to at least get through one of the cuffs so I could stand and walk around.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I cried as I heard the groaning sound that must have been some kind of door blocking the basement staircase.
I snipped again, and the loop cut free.
But the clippers slipped from my fingers, shooting halfway across the room in the process.
Okay.
I needed not to panic.
I could just tell George that I had to pee, that I didn’t know what else to do but try to free my ankles.
If he tied me up again and tossed the clippers, I could find something else. Not to cut. He probably wouldn’t be that stupid again. But zip ties could be taken off without cutting them.
My grandfather had been frugal about them, refusing to buy new ones if he could pull ones off an old project.
“You just need a shim against the pawl here,” he’d tell me as he demonstrated the movement. “And it pulls right out.”
If George didn’t know a lot about tools, I was sure he didn’t know much about zip tie functions. He probably just knew what he saw criminals and cops doing on TV to use them to restrain people.
It wasn’t hopeless.
Not even as he was coming down the stairs.
I braced myself to throw myself at his mercy.
“Este!”
Saul.
