In Dark Places

Chapter Twenty-eight

"Inside," Gabe said again, as Meg hesitated on the threshold of the doorway.

When she didn't react, he hustled her through the door, into a large open space lit by narrow windows and skylights high overhead. In the middle of the room were two long conveyor belts, rusted and useless. Crates tied shut with twine were scattered around the dust-caked concrete-floored room like islands in a gray sea. Doorways at the far end of the room hinted at side passages that perhaps branched into a warren of halls and offices, lavatories and lunchrooms, all the places used by the employees who were now only ghosts.

"What kind of place is this?" she breathed.

"Bottling plant. Some soft drinkDr Pepper, maybe. Shut down in the seventies, around the time this whole part of town was going belly-up. Been stripped of everything valuable."

"How did you know about it?"

"Years ago when I'd just started working patrol, we got a DB call here." He smiled at her incomprehension. "DBshort for dead body."

"Oh."

"Some bum had been squatting in here. OD'd or stroked out or something. Other vagrants found the body. I remembered it because the dead guy had been here a long time. Seemed like a good place to stash a body."

Is that what I am? Meg wondered. A body?

"So you really are a cop," she whispered.

"Real as steel. Were you starting to doubt it?"

"I'd like to think a cop wouldn't amp;"

"Commit the occasional felony? Sweet meat, you got a lot of growing up to do."

"Will I get the chance to do it?"

He didn't answer. She hadn't thought he would.

In silence he led her across the cavernous room to a metal door in the far corner. When he opened it, the feeble daylight from the windows and skylights illuminated a flight of stairs, descending into darkness.

"Go down," Gabe said.

Meg looked at him. "No."

"It's only for a little while." He shifted the gun in his hand, just enough for her to become aware of it. "I need to stash you somewhere."

"You'll kill me down there."

"It's a holding area, that's all." He gestured with the gun. "Now go down."

"Please," Meg said.

"I don't have time to argue. Get the fuck down there. Do it."

There was no pity in his face, no memory of affection.

Heart pounding, she reached out for the metal handrail and made her way down the staircase with Gabe at her back. The treads were steel, and there were no risers, only gaps between the treads that threatened to catch her foot and pitch her forward into blackness.

At the bottom she turned to look at him. He was right behind her, smiling. "Give me your hand," he said.

"My hand?" she said blankly.

He grabbed her left hand, not asking again. Something glinted in the semidarkness. Handcuffs. He fastened one cuff to her wrist, the other to the handrail at hip level.

"Sit tight," he said. "I'll be back for you. That's a promise."

He mounted the stairs. She reached for him with her free hand. "Please, Gabe amp;"

He laughed, shrugging free of her. "That's not even my name, you dumb bitch."

She watched him climb to the top, becoming a silhouette against the daylight. She expected him to look down, say something more, acknowledge her in some way, but he just closed the door. Darkness slammed down like an anvil.

She hugged the handrail, listening as his footfalls receded into silence.

Alone. She was alone in this place, this basement in a deserted bottling plant.

She rattled her cuffed wrist uselessly against the handrail and tried not to cry. She prided herself on not being a crier, and normally she wasn't, but these circumstances weren't normal, and she decided she could cut herself a break.

She cried because she was alone and scared, and because she would probably die soon, and because Gabe had called her an immature kid and worse things, and because she wanted to be out of here, home and safe, and she wanted her mom.

Not Robin, not anymore.

Her mom.