Side by Side

28

Lucy Dockery had been certain for hours that she could sense rain in the air, but she had yet to hear it hitting the trailer’s roof. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her.

She wondered if this going off and leaving her was a ruse on the woman’s part to see if Lucy did try to escape. She doubted the woman would stay gone long, or leave her totally unguarded. If the woman believed that Lucy was a frightened and helpless dilettante who would do as she was told, it still didn’t explain why she would allow her to try to escape. Could she be that crazy or that dumb? Well, thought Lucy, this might be the only break I get. People do escape from their captors.

With Elijah clinging to her, she hurried through the trailer, looking for anything she could use.

The main room-open kitchen and den-was decorated with stuffed deer heads. A layer of red dust seemed to cover every flat surface.

It was immediately apparent that anything with an edge she could use as a tool had been removed. The spoons, knives, and forks in the kitchen were all plastic. Cast-iron pots and pans were stacked under an island with a granite top with stools on the ends and along one side. Next to the gas range a potbelly stove sat on a bed of bricks. There was not even a steel poker or shovel for the stove.

Patterns made by the soles of boots and shoes covered practically every square foot of the filthy floor. In the den area a single couch with a wool blanket draped over it was shoved against a wall. Aside from that there was a playpen, and a new TV set perched on a coffee table.

A door opened into a room on the end of the trailer with two bunk beds and a stench reminiscent of high school locker rooms. Hunting clothes, pairs of mud-encrusted boots, grimy underwear and socks were in piles over the floor. There were no guns in evidence, and that was just as well since Lucy knew she could never use one. The idea of killing horrified her to the core. She had always been anti-capital punishment, antiwar; she didn’t even believe abortion was all right.

Maybe this was the sort of hunting camp Walter and his friends had sometimes stayed in. Walter had been a hunter and she’d been bored to tears when he and his hunting friends talked about it.

Lucy had never gone camping or even to the woods with her husband. Now she desperately wished she had become involved in that part of his life.

Lucy picked up a huge camouflage jacket with a hood and put it on to protect Eli and herself from the cool weather. She found an olive-colored compact flashlight that worked, which was good because it was dark outside. She put her bare feet into a pair of absurdly large leather boots and quickly wrapped the long laces around and cinched them at the ankles so they wouldn’t fall off. Anything was better than going outside in her bare feet.

Cautiously Lucy opened the outside door to the trailer and discovered that it wasn’t dark because it was night; it was dark because the trailer was parked inside an enormous building. It looked to be a warehouse with walls of fabricated steel. There were industrial fixtures connected to the beams, but all were unlit. Daylight illuminated narrow seams where some of the sheet metal panels joined.

The roof was supported by the kind of steel girders you would see in one of those warehouse stores.

Rain! Muted by layers of tar, rain beat down on the building’s flat roof. The floor was coated with the flour-fine red dust that had found its way inside the trailer. The trailer itself, standing on piles of cinder blocks, its flattened tires gone crocodilian with dry rot, had been backed into the building. There were two matching steel-frame doors, each at least sixteen feet tall and twelve wide. The steel hinges, three per door, were each a foot tall. The doors were diagonally across from each other on two connected walls. If the trailer wasn’t there, a large vehicle could drive in through one door, turn around the storage room that took up exactly one quarter of the space, and go out through the other one without stopping. The giant door facing the trailer’s door had a normal-sized door built into its corner so people could come and go without having to open the giant ones. This accounted for the sound she had taken for a shed door opening and closing.

Using the light, she quickly looked around. The end of the trailer, where her cell was located, was maybe three feet from a warehouse wall. The other end, where the bunks were, was ten feet from the door that the trailer entered through.

What she figured was a storage room had corrugated walls and a large rusted steel door with crudely made hinges. A run of wood steps led up to the storage room’s flat roof, where bales of hay, some ratty-looking furniture, and wooden crates were stacked. On the ground level, rolls of rusted barbed wire hung like Christmas wreaths on the walls.

The large door was before her; to her right several fifty-gallon drums-two of which had pumps in the tops with hoses ending in nozzles-lined the wall. Several plastic gas cans stood beside those drums. Between the drums and the trailer was a stack of firewood piled in a small trailer made from a truck bed.

She carried Eli down the trailer’s steps, her free hand gripping the flashlight. Lucy took a few steps out into the space toward the inset door, heard a loud squeak, and spun back toward the storage room. Her heart lurched, imagining Scaly-hands or the woman about to jump out into the warehouse. She played the light beam over the door. As she watched, the hinges squeaked and what looked like a gloved hand waved at her through the slowly opening door.

Lucy ran to the outside inset door and tried to open it, but to her horror she saw a massive padlock hanging there. The lock secured two rings that held a steel bolt to the iron frame so it could be opened either from inside or outside the warehouse. The woman hadn’t locked the trailer, or tied Lucy up, because she’d known Lucy could only escape from the trailer into a larger trap. And this was a trap where she and her son were not alone.

Panic rising, Lucy clutched Eli to her and backed toward the trailer. The flashlight’s beam told her that what had appeared to be a hand was a blunt muzzle. The heavy door had moved due to steady pressure of powerful shoulders.

First one, then several block-bodied dogs poured into the larger space. Soundlessly, they spread out as a pack and formed a low wall before her of hungry red eyes, sculpted muscle, and bared teeth.