Blind Pursuit

10

A long-held breath shuddered out of her. She sagged in the chair, fumbling weakly at the blindfold until it came loose.

On the other side of the door, a key rattled in a keyhole. A moment later, footsteps thudded up the stairs. Creak of floorboards overhead; the distant closing of a door.

The house was empty. She waited, straining to hear, until faintly the growl of an engine reached her from far away. It grew slightly louder, perhaps as the vehicle pulled out of the garage, then quieter again; seconds later, it was gone.

Her abductor didn’t live here, it seemed. His home was somewhere else, and this place was simply a holding pen for her.

She stood, then sat again, surprised at the loose, watery trembling of her knees. Silently she counted to twenty, drawing slow, measured breaths. When she felt strong enough, she crossed the room to the door.

No doorknob on her side. The smooth sheet of wood mocked her.

On tiptoe she looked through the peephole. The fish-eye lens revealed only darkness.

Crouching, she examined the clearance between the door and the jamb. It was wide enough to expose part of the bolt drawn into place by the turning of the key.

A dead bolt? Or a latch bolt, the kind with a beveled edge?

A latch bolt could be defeated with a credit card. There were some in her wallet. The cash had been removed, but not the plastic.

She tamped her MasterCard out of its acetate pouch, then knelt by the door. Her heart kept up a hard, steady beat as she inserted the rectangle of plastic into the crack between the door and the frame.

The MasterCard’s leading edge slipped past the gain of the faceplate and bumped up against the bolt. She pushed, trying to make the card flex. The trick was to snake it along the angle of the latch bolt, between the faceplate in the door and the striker plate in the jamb. Pop the latch, and the door would open.

“Come on,” she breathed, jiggling the card. “Come on, please, just do this for me, and I’ll never complain about the finance charges again.”

Nothing.

The card wouldn’t do the job. She removed her laminated driver’s license from the wallet and tried that. It was thinner than the MasterCard, more flexible, but it had no greater success.

Finally she gave up. The door must be secured either by a dead bolt or by a latch bolt with the diagonal edge facing away from her. Regardless of which was true, loiding the lock was impossible.

She wasn’t surprised, really. The man holding her prisoner was smart-too smart, possibly, to leave the charge cards and license in her wallet if they could be useful in opening the door.

There was a way of defeating a dead bolt, though. She had learned of the technique years ago, while living in a low-rent district near the university, earning her graduate degree. The other unit in her duplex had been broken into, her neighbors’ place cleaned out. She remembered the T.P.D. detective at the scene explaining how the dead bolt on the front door had been released.

Simple enough, he’d said. They just pried the bolt open with an ice pick. Happens all the time.

All she needed was an ice pick. Too bad she didn’t happen to have one available.

Of course, any long, needlelike tool would do. She searched her purse, her suitcase, the box of foodstuffs.

The item nearest to what she needed was the ballpoint pen. But it was too big to fit between the door and the frame.

She unscrewed the pen’s metal casing, thinking that perhaps the ink cartridge inside might work, but although the tube was narrow enough, it was made of cheap, flexible plastic that would afford her no leverage.

One last point of attack presented itself. The hinges. Could she lift the pivot pins out of the barrels and simply detach the door from the wall?

The pins were in tight. Their caps were smooth and featureless, offering no grooves in which to fasten the tip of a screwdriver, even assuming she had one. If she could grip the caps with a pair of pliers, she might be able to tug the pins free. Pliers, however, were another item her abductor had neglected to leave in her possession.

Could she smash the hinges? They were old and rusty, vulnerable to a sharp hammer blow. She searched the room for a blunt instrument, found none. The sillcock would make a powerful weapon, but she saw no way to liberate it from the wall. A loose brick would serve almost equally well; frustratingly, a thorough patting of the walls established that all the bricks were mortared firmly in place.

Hopeless.

The bolt could not be loided or picked. The hinges could not be disassembled or broken. Unless she could flatten herself to the thinness of a pancake and ooze under the door, she was stuck.

It crashed down on her then-the full weight of her captivity. Strength left her. She sank to her knees, planting her hands on the floor to keep from falling prostrate.

Head lowered, eyes squeezed shut, she felt her shoulders shake with soundless sobs.

The patter of dampness on her knuckles was a steady rainfall of tears.

To lose her composure like this was humiliating, entirely unlike her, but she couldn’t help it. Her life, her world, her daily routine, so carefully ordered and meticulously maintained-all of it had exploded like a bomb, and screaming chaos was the aftermath.

What she wouldn’t give right now to be safe at home in her comfortable, familiar apartment, enclosed by walls that were not a prison, locked behind a door to which she held the key.

Her eyes burned. She heard herself sniffling miserably and dragged a hand across her nose.

“Help me,” she whispered to the unhearing room, the empty house, the vast stillness around her. “Help me, somebody. Help me, please.”