Page 55 of Fear and Desire

No one came to offer her food or drink, despite the gnawing of her stomach and her parched lips. She slept and woke, and slept and woke, as the flight went on and on. Eventually she had to pee, and she tried to attract attention by yelling, but the noise of the plane made her efforts pointless. With a sob, she let go and watched the urine fall to the floor below, running in a stream towards the back of the plane.

The sun had disappeared and the compartment was dark and cold when the plane began its descent. She lay in the cage in a fog of misery and pain. Her butt ached under the bandage, and since she couldn’t lie on that side, she’d spent the entire flight lying on the arm that had been cut open.

The plane touched down and immediately decelerated. The unsecured cage slid forward and slammed into the bulkhead. Her head, which had been resting against the forward bars, hit the solid surface as well, and she cried out in pain.

The plane had scarcely taxied to a stop when the door was flung open.

“Fuck, it stinks in here! Did you take a piss?” It was Pitir’s voice. There was nothing she could add to the conversation that would help her, so she stayed silent. The cage shuddered and moved. Suddenly, it tipped to one side, and she hit the bars again as it went down an incline and onto the tarmac. Voices in a Slavic language called out overhead, and she slumped in the cage, defeated. She was so far from home that Dan would never find her.

The cage tipped up and rolled into a vehicle. DeLeo’s voice drifted into the cage from outside.

“Fuck! Goddammit! I knew something was wrong! That’s why I went early. They got every single one of them?”

A voice mumbled something in reply.

“You covered our tracks the usual way, right?”

The voice replied and asked a question.

“We go home,” DeLeo said. “We lie low, and in a month or so we reach out to a friend we can trust, to get a feel of the situation. We’re safe here—there’s no extradition treaty and I pay all the authorities well to keep their noses out of our business.”

Another question from the muffled voice.

“Hmph. She doesn’t begin to make up for what he did to me, but she’s a start. She’ll be paying for his deception for the rest of her life.”

Apparently, her circumstances could be worse than they were right now.

Herexhaustedbodydozedoff as the vehicle rocked back and forth. At last it stopped, the doors were thrown open, and the cage was pulled out. This time, she braced herself. She was rolled over rough dirt, and then hoisted up the stairs by three men, all muttering curses in their language. The cage glided down a hall, through several doors, and finally slammed to a stop, once more tossing her against the bars.

She’d finally had enough. “Goddammit!” she yelled. “Stop throwing me around like a fucking sack of flour!”

The cover was whipped off the cage, and she blinked against the sudden brightness. Three large men glared down at her. One of them leaned over and unlocked a small door at the narrow end of the cage. He threw it open and gestured for her to crawl out. They’d placed the cage so that as she exited it, she would crawl through a doorway into a small room. Afraid that if she entered the room she’d never leave, she refused to move.

One man grabbed the bars of the small cage, lifted the back end, and spilled her towards the open end. She tried to hold on, but the other men pried her fingers loose from the bars, and she was dumped onto the floor just inside the door. The cage was pulled away, and before she could move, they shoved her further into the room. The door slammed, and she was alone.

The cell was concrete, about eight feet long and six feet wide. In one corner was a platform with a pallet. In another corner, the floor dipped down. A faucet stuck out over the depression, and under that was a drain. A tiny barred window, well above her reach, gave her nothing more than a glimpse of blue sky. The door was heavy and metal with a small peephole.

She forced herself to stand up, to get the blood moving in her cramped limbs. Cool, clear water gushed out of the faucet when she turned the handle. She drank greedily, then used more to scrub her hands and face clean of the stickiness she didn’t really want to think too much about. She’d been very close to Marco when DeLeo had blown his brains out.

She dropped onto the pallet, forgetting about the brand on her hip, and cried out with pain. Despair rolled through her, and though she tried to keep it at bay, to think of a plan, she gave in and cried.

Dan:

Dan rubbed his hands over his scruffy face. It had been a long time since he’d gone unshaven for even a day. He hadn’t slept in way too many hours, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hands shook from the nonstop coffee he’d been consuming.

All five women he’d had to sell over the last few months had been rescued, thank god. They were all in decent health. Dan could scarcely believe it, and he hoped that eventually his conscience would let him off the hook.

Claire’s wound wasn’t serious, but Josh was still in critical condition. The bullet had ricocheted around his abdomen, doing horrible damage to his liver and spleen. Dan had kept in touch with his doctors, but hadn’t been to visit him yet. He’d been up all night with the task force, debriefing, following the rescue of the other women, and following any thin lead they could come up with on the location of DeLeo. A large part of him was biding time until the locater activated, about 4am.

As the clock swept past 4:10, the base unit sprang to life. Dan leaped upon it, then frowned in confusion. It couldn’t be right. It said she was only ten kilometers away. With a nod to his team, he leaped into a car, and three vehicles drove out of the strangely empty compound.

The tree-shrouded roads wound around and doubled back on each other as they descended the mountain. The darkness was giving way to the dawn, but in the close woods there was still little light. As the signal got closer, Dan’s heart sank. They were headed towards the sparkling river that ran deep and wild a mile downstream from town. When the signal showed that the locater was off the road, his car skidded to a stop on a bridge, and he threw the door open. The swirling waters hissed and swooshed below. He ran to the railing, but the sky hadn’t lit the waters enough yet to force it to give up any secrets, and Dan slapped his hand on the metal in frustration. The damp railing gave off a funny smell, and Dan looked down at a reddish-brown smear on his hands that smelled like copper pennies.

“Laura,” he whispered in agony. His men were beside him instantly, shining huge spotlights down to the dark waters, but there was nothing. There was a swirling area of water called a ‘keeper’ just around the bend that Dan recalled from his kayaking days, which caught anything that drifted near. He motioned to his men, and they scrambled down the muddy embankment, making their cautious way along the side of the river through the underbrush. Dan could hear the keeper before he saw it—a roar that was louder than the roar of the river behind him. He picked his way closer to the boiling circle of water that was trapped by the rocks on either side, and was full of debris that had drifted down the river, like branches and logs—and today, something else. Something that protruded straight up and looked exactly like a foot.

He climbed out onto a rock, then jumped to another, until he was a few feet from the rushing circle of water. He waited until the mass of timber floated nearer again, then reached out to grab the object. Itwasa foot. A bare foot. The current ripped it away from him, but he’d seen enough. It was broad, and the trousers on the leg above it were the same muddy yellow that Marco always wore.

“What did you finally do, you fuck?” Dan’s yell was lost to the wind. That meant that the blood on the railing could have been Marco’s; it wasn’t necessarily Laura’s. But he couldn’t escape the fact that the locater signal was telling him she was right here.

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