Warning Signs

CHAPTER 42

She didn't like being bound.

She despised being gagged.

It was obvious that he hadn't planned for this step, either. The gag he fashioned was a clean white sock stuffed partway into her mouth and held in place by a long strip of duct tape.

The ambivalence she was feeling when he left the trailer ambushed her. She found herself wavering back and forth between wishing that Ramp wouldn't be gone long and hoping that the next person she saw walk through the door of the construction trailer would be the job site foreman stumbling in shortly after the eastern sky was streaked with bands of orange and blue. He'd be carrying a cardboard cup of gas station coffee and his brain would be brimming with the assorted headaches that he'd have to solve before lunch. Lucy imagined that he'd drop the coffee at the sight of the woman duct-taped to his sofa.

But Lucy was also hoping that Ramp wouldn't be gone long.

There was a name for what she was feeling. She tried to remember what she'd read about it. It was something Scandinavian. The Copenhagen Effect? No. The Stockholm Syndrome? Yes, that was it. The Stockholm Syndrome. Something about a train hijacking. The psychological phenomenon where hostages begin identifying with their captors.

Was she identifying with him? Lucy didn't think so. His rationalizations for the next day's terror rang hollow for her.

But she liked Jason Ramp Bass. She liked his charm. She liked his respectful manner. She liked the fact that he adored his mother. She even admired the way he'd managed to subvert his rage into something concise and, well, neat.

She wished she could see a clock. She wished she could roll onto her side. She wished she could empty her bladder. Mostly she wished she could call Sam and tell him to send in the cavalry.

People were going to die tomorrow. Nobody knew but her. And she couldn't do a thing about it.

Lucy had dozed off and didn't realize the door to the trailer was opening again. She didn't even hear Ramp enter or approach her.

He touched her gently on the cheek and said, "Hey, gotta get up. Plans have changed. Lucy, Lucy."

When she opened her eyelids, the soft blue of his eyes filled her vision like the sunlight fills the morning sky. Behind him the room was dark but the picket fence shadows still lined the ceiling.

"Hi," she said into the gag. Her heart pounded in her chest and the tape around her body suddenly seemed too tight to allow her to draw a breath.

Part of her response, she knew, was terror about what was going to happen next.

Part of it wasn't.

He removed the duct tape but not the gag and neither the wrist nor the ankle restraints, and he helped her to her feet.

"I'm going to carry you outside to the truck. You want to use the bathroom first?"

She nodded definitively.

She guessed he was only five ten or five eleven, maybe one hundred sixty pounds, but he lifted her effortlessly and carried her out the door the way a new husband lifts his bride over the threshold. She would have hooked an arm around his neck if she could, but she couldn't.

He stood her up outside the chemical toilet and opened the door. She held out her wrists for him to cut her plastic cuffs. Instead, he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her inside the plastic door. "I don't have time to free your restraints. You want help or can you do this yourself?"

She spoke into her gag and nodded her head. He reached up and stretched the sock away from her lips. She spit cotton before she said, "Undo my pants and pull them over my hips."

He hesitated.

"I can do the rest. Do that much." She held up her bound wrists. "I'm not going to slap you, don't worry."

He fumbled with the belt on her pants and had even more trouble with the button. The zipper he mastered quickly.

She wriggled her hips to help him get the tight pants over her butt and hips and stood still while he yanked the waistband all the way down to her upper thighs. Even through the gag, she figured he could tell that at that point she said, "Okay. That's enough."

She thought she saw his gaze focus momentarily on the lime-green triangle of her exposed underwear before he stepped back and gently closed the door of the chemical toilet.

A minute or so later she knocked the door back open with her shoulder. The top of her pants was at mid-thigh, as high as she could get them on her own. "Help me," she said.

She watched as he moved his eyes quickly from her upper legs and crotch to her face, and then back down.

He didn't hesitate this time. As he tugged her pants into place, his fingers grazed the soft skin that was exposed below the hem of her underwear. She felt his knuckles press against her belly as he buttoned her jeans, and she found herself holding her breath as he pulled up the zipper and closed the belt.

With an arm around her waist, he lifted her from the toilet and carried her to a different truck than the one she'd ridden in a few hours before.

This one was a small flatbed with welding supplies strapped into place in the back. The sign on the driver's door read "JT Welding Supplies."

"You're going to have to curl up on the floor. Can you do that? The alternative is that box in the back of the truck. But that will get hot tomorrow, I promise."

Lucy tilted her head at the cab. More despair. Tomorrow seemed like a long way away.

"Good choice," he said.

Once she was curled up on the floor of the cab, Ramp said, "While I was gone, I talked to your doctor friend. I think we're cool. And, for what it's worth, I think he's worried about you."