by Paul Bishop
I was lying on the concrete floor of what appeared to be a small utility storage area. I was still naked, and the reason I couldn't get my arms to respond was because they were handcuffed around a concrete-filled steel pipe that was anchored between the concrete floor and the room's concrete ceiling.
The pipe was about four inches in diameter and showed as much promise of being moveable as I did of becoming a prima ballerina. There were two other similar support pipes in the room, which on second glance appeared to be little more than a six-by-ten-foot concrete womb.
One wall sloped outward at about a forty-five-degree angle, and there was a metal door set into it that gave the whole setup a surreal effect. A rough blanket had been slung on the floor underneath me, but it did little to hold back the cold that was seeping up through the concrete.
At the base of the pipe, near my hands, were two one-gallon plastic jugs of water. There was no food that I could see, and I literally didn't have a pot to piss in. I felt a wan smile touch my lips. If my brain waves were still producing bad puns, then perhaps there was hope.
At the furthest end of the room there were several coiled hoses and two wheelbarrows. Next to them was a small, paint-splattered, wooden shelf unit filled with pots and cans. Some of the cans had thin wire handles attached. Others had their contents liberally splashed over their sides. What looked like a well-used sandblaster was tilted over on one side where its axle was missing a rubber wheel. There was nothing tangible to identify the room, which was lighted from above by a naked, low-watt bulb encased in a metal cage.
I yelled out "Help!" and felt stupid. My voice seemed to flatten against the walls and go no further, and there was an odd feeling of being in a pressurized chamber.
I yelled again, and again, and then realized that I had been put here because I was safe from discovery. No self-respecting kidnapper would put his victim somewhere where they could be rescued simply by calling out. I laid back and thought for a minute, and then yelled another dozen times to be sure. I was still too befuddled to think of anything more constructive to do.
Sleep overcame me again, and when I woke up next my mind was clearer. I was thirsty as hell, and from somewhere I found the strength to sit up and open one of the jugs of water. I took slow sips, finding it awkward to drink with my arms wrapped around a pole. The chloroform-induced nausea had passed and the construction crew in my head appeared to have knocked off for the day. I decided to make another inspection of my surroundings.
The handcuffs around my wrists were not tight, but there was no way to slip my hands backwards through them. They had been double locked so they couldn't tighten up on me either, which was a small blessing to be thankful for. The pole I was attached to was as solid as first impressions had indicated.
On the floor behind me, I discovered another rough blanket folded into a square. On shaky legs, I stood up and used my feet to pull the blanket closer to the pole. I then stooped to pick up the blanket I had originally been lying on and wrapped it around my shoulders. Wearily, I dropped down to sit cross-legged on the second blanket. Being folded, I hoped it would keep me better insulated from the cold concrete floor. Exhaustion overcame my efforts and I leaned my left shoulder forward into the pole for support. I wanted to take another nap, but sleep was now elusive, so I sat and thought. Again, there was not much else I could do.
I thought a lot in the next few hours. I also worried quite a bit. How long was I going to be kept here? Would somebody come to bring me food and more water? Was I going to have to sit in my own waste? Was anybody coming back at all? Did anybody know I was missing yet? Why the hell had I been kidnapped in the first place? And what the hell had I gotten myself into? To relieve the boredom and take my mind away from the aches of my body, I concentrated on trying to think up answers.
Somebody hadn't wanted me to come to Los Angeles in the first place and had sent Sean Brody and Liam Donovan to discourage me. Whoever was behind that attack must have had some kind of a tie to the IRA—how else would they have known how to contact Brody and Donovan? They must also be tied to the Ravens and, possibly, to Maddox's murder.
Donovan had twice attacked me in the vicinity of the Acropolis, and I was still sure it was his motorcycle I had seen behind the Golden Harp on the night Terranee Brisbane had spoken there. If Donovan was tied to the Acropolis, was he also tied to Terranee Brisbane? Or was he possibly tied to the Acropolis through Pat Devlin?
After all, it was Devlin who had caused all the trouble in the pub. Donovan could have been one of the other hooded troublemakers. Devlin was violently anti-IRA, but Donovan was also against them since he had changed his allegiance to the Sons of Erin. Pat Devlin was a loose end that would need tying up if I ever got clear of this mausoleum in which I was currently interred.
Archer and his firm were another puzzle. At the Golden Harp, they had appeared to be working as muscle for Terranee Brisbane, but why would Brisbane want them to kidnap me? Had they killed Maddox? I certainly had the bruises to prove they were capable of it. The autopsy report showed Maddox had been kicked to death by a pair of steel-toed boots and two different pairs of soccer cleats. That factor also pointed to Archer and his firm of Hardbirds.
But if the Hardbirds had killed Maddox, why not simply kill me too? Why kill one goalkeeper and not another? The fact that two water jugs had been provided for me indicated there was at least a possibility I would be released in the future. How long till that future, though, I wondered?
This thought brought me to Caitlin Brisbane. Now there was a viper done up with a pretty bow. She definitely knew how close to the edge her sister's sports franchises were. By pushing one or another of them over the edge, Caitlin, according to the edicts of Terranee Brisbane's plan, would gain control of her father's vast sports empire. Her own teams were in deep trouble also, and she was bound and determined not to lose the power and money of the Brisbane fortune to Nina.
Three times, that I knew of, she had tried to put the fix in with the Ravens. Caitlin had tried to buy me off, and at the same time had admitted to paying off Maddox to blow games. When she couldn't buy me off, she bought herself a referee. Was she blowing wind about Maddox to impress me, or had he really been in her pocket?
I wondered if, perhaps, Maddox had been stringing Caitlin along. Taking her money to pay off his gambling debts, but not blowing the games as he had agreed. After all, the Ravens had made it into the play-offs. If Caitlin had had her way, they would never have made it that far. Perhaps Caitlin had Maddox murdered because he was double-crossing her.
I didn't particularly like that scenario because, while Caitlin was an underhanded bitch, she was not adept at crime. I didn't see her putting the boots to Maddox herself, and I didn't see her having access to the type of people who would. Unless, of course, she had access to Archer and the Hardbirds firm through her father. The Hardbirds could be dancing to the tune of more than one master; protecting Terranee Brisbane when he wanted to put on a display of muscle and running murderous errands for Caitlin in their off hours. Now there was a thought that brought me full circle back to square one. I wasn't getting anywhere.
I stopped the whirl of my brain for a moment and took a few more swigs from the first water bottle. I put the bottle down and closed my eyes again. This time sleep came.
Cold haunted my dreams, and I awoke at one point in a semi-delirious trance to find I had fallen sideways off of the pole and onto the floor. I had also twitched off the blanket which had been around my shoulders. Still feeling spaced-out, I reorganized the folded blanket beneath me into a larger, but thinner, rectangle on which I could lay in a fetal scrunch. Battling the frustration of having my hands restricted, I pulled the other blanket over me. I trapped it beneath my body as best I could and allowed the delirium to fully consume me again.
Later, I came back to consciousness feeling as cramped and slimy as a snail who had outgrown its shell. I had no way to tell how much later it was. It could have been five minutes, five hours, or five
days, as my surroundings were timeless. I thought depressing thoughts about loneliness and starvation, about dying, and about love.
I concentrated on love because love is supposed to keep you warm. I thought about Bekka and what I had felt when I first saw her. Was that love, or was that simply a stirring of lust set off by a glandular reaction? Could love be an instant response, bursting into life in full bloom, or could love only be looked at in retrospect, after time had proven the emotion existed?
One thing I was certain about was that love is never convenient. It never pays attention to circumstances or considers the consequences of its actions. It is an emotion that is both animate and inanimate. Those it strikes are filled with joy and life, yet in and of itself love possesses no feelings.
In that lonely room, on the cold floor, I thought about love. I was from a loving family. I had felt love from them, the type of love that goes beyond platonic because it deals with the pull of bloodlines and creation but stops short of the depths of love that a man and a woman can feel for each other. I wondered if I had the beginnings of that kind of man-and-woman love with Bekka? I thought yes, and that scared me.
Time passed. Relentlessly. Slowly. Infinitesimally. At least I think it did. I felt like a lab rat in some kind of existential experiment. Did the world outside my concrete womb exist, or did it only exist while I experienced it? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it does it make a sound?
Beyond driving myself to distraction with unanswerable philosophical questions, I had come back to the conclusion that I was to be kept in captivity until after the Ravens-Gulls semifinal game on Wednesday. It was the only scenario that made sense.
If ransom was the goal, there were a lot of other more appropriate targets for kidnapping. Ransom did not make sense in my case. If Archer and company were out for ransom, they could have gone after Caitlin or Nina, or Terranee Brisbane himself. Those targets would have the ability to command a high price.
However, by keeping me away from the game on Wednesday, the chances were that the Ravens would blow the game. The team was already in a state of upheaval over Maddox's murder. My disappearance would only add to the pressure. That thought put Caitlin back on the top of my suspect list as to the power behind Archer since she appeared to have the most to gain.
Or did she?
Somewhere in the back of my brain the evil shadows of another idea began to germinate. There was somebody else who would benefit from my absence at the semifinals. Somebody who was as impatient as Caitlin to reach the heights of fame and fortune.
I had tried to fit Donovan into the overall scenario. He was like apart from another jigsaw puzzle which had been inadvertently put in the wrong box. His presence niggled at me and niggled at me, and then suddenly the clarity of inspiration struck me.
I had been trying to put all of the puzzle pieces I possessed into one picture. This was not the brightest of moves since life itself rarely presents us with one picture at a time. In all of our lives there are many different scenarios taking place, connected only by the single thread that they are taking place in our lives.
Perhaps the puzzle pieces I had been given to play with could not all be put together to form one pretty picture. Perhaps I had pieces from two or more separate puzzles, connected only by the factor that the Ravens organization was a part of each picture.
I brought my manacled hands up to eye level and took a close look at the handcuffs themselves. I had to get out of this tomb. I was tired of letting events happen to me. It was time to stop playing defense and to go on the attack. A renewed determination was welling up inside of me despite, or perhaps fueled by, the cold and my discomfort. I closed my eye and tried to conjure up a mental image of how handcuffs worked.
In my mind, I imagined the ratchet end of the handcuff that slides into the locking section of the cuff. If there is no wrist inside the cuff, the ratchet end can be pushed straight through and brought around again. However, once into the locking part of the cuff, the ratchet end catches on a pin and can't be pushed backward unless the pin is raised by unlocking the cuff. I wasn't Houdini, but there still had to be a way out of the cuffs.
An SAS instructor once demonstrated to me how anything, from a piece of paper, to a credit card, to a paper clip, could be turned into a weapon. I didn't need a weapon at the moment, but I needed a key or a tool, and I wondered if the same principal could be brought to bear.
While I mulled this over, I stood and began to jog in place to warm up. I had avoided exercise before because I knew I would only cool down again and end up colder than when I started. Now, though, I had the beginnings of an escape plan and I needed to get blood and warmth to my fingers to make it happen. Calling my thoughts an escape plan was perhaps a bit grandiose. They were more like the glimmerings of an idea borne up on the wings of hope, but I needed all the confidence I could muster.
To begin with, I felt like an idiot dancing around with the pole as my partner. I must have looked like an ugly, oversized, naked nymph circling a maypole, but the blood began to course through my veins, and my battered and scarred fingers began to tingle as I flexed them painfully open and closed. The warmer I became, though, the better I started to feel.
I still had no way of telling how long I had been in captivity. My body was out of sync and there was no way to judge time by my usual bodily function schedule.
I'd finished drinking the contents of one of the water bottles before I had been forced to start filling it up with my bladder voiding. Now I looked at the remaining bottle of water. It was still three-quarters full. If I emptied it out, I would have no water left to drink. I could have emptied out the waste in the other bottle, but what I had planned would involve chewing, biting, and tearing the plastic container.
The prospect of using the refilled bottle didn't sit well with my fastidious habits.
I weighed the pros and cons of my escape idea and decided there were definitely more cons than pros. I drank my fill, and then emptied out the rest of the clean water bottle anyway. The idea would simply have to work.
I sat down on my blanket and stuck my index fingers into the top of the empty plastic gallon jug and tried to tear it apart. The area was reinforced, and it didn't give. My hands and fingers are battered, knobbed, and prone to arthritis, but they are strong, so I tried again. It still didn't tear. I had kind of expected it wouldn't, but I could have done with the break.
I bit into one of the rounded plastic corners and chewed. The plastic flattened out, but it didn't split. I chewed on it some more to no effect. I bit into a different part of the plastic, and then another part, and then another. I worried the plastic jug like I was a dog with bone. My jaw began to ache and my gums to bleed. I chewed on. I returned to previously chewed parts and chewed on them again and again.
After what seemed like hours, I felt one area of the plastic puncture under pressure from my right canine tooth. I felt a surge of relief and began to chew furiously. Before long, I had made a hole big enough to stick my fingers through. This time when I pulled, the water bottle split wide open.
I went back to chewing and tearing with my teeth. The torn edge of the plastic cut into my tongue and lips until blood was flowing freely. Eventually, though, I chewed free a rough rectangle of plastic about three inches long by one inch wide. I held my newly fashioned possession in my hand and closed my eyes to rest.
Not only did my mouth hurt, but my shoulder, arm, and side had been rubbed raw by their constant contact with the pole to which I was shackled. I'd tried using a blanket as a buffer, but it constantly slipped down, or bunched up, until I preferred the chafing over the effort of keeping the blanket in place. I was exhausted again, and I would have loved a swallow of water. However, I now had a tool.
When I could rouse myself again, I folded my strip of plastic in half and in half again. I used my teeth to flatten the creases of the folds. The plastic was now a sturdy strip that was thin enough to slip into the hole of the handcuff where the
ratchet end entered. My idea was to push the plastic strip in over the top of the ratchets, raise the pin which stopped them from backing out, and then slide the cuff open.
It was a good idea. It should have worked. But it didn't.
I tried everything. I tried pushing the plastic strip through from either end. I wiggled it. I twisted it. I screamed at it. I prayed to God about it, and God answered. He said, "No."
Finally, I gave up. In frustration I threw the plastic strip across the storage room and wept. I was cold to my bones, and I ached in every joint. Tears coursed down my face in a lopsided torrent because I only had one eye to cry from. I was angry and frustrated and feeling sorrier for myself than I ever had before. God had said no to my prayers.
Or had He just said, "Not that way?"
Had he simply told me I was trying to open the cuffs the wrong way? There was a new idea in my head. I had no idea where it came from. Had God said, "Not that way; this way," and then put the new way into my head?
I looked for my plastic strip. There was no way I could have faced biting off another. It was about four feet away from me to one side. I stretched out one leg and tried to reach it with my toes. I was a few inches short, so I laid down on my side and stretched out. By performing like a circus contortionist, I brought the offending piece of plastic back to where I could pick it up with my hands.
I kissed it. "Oh, you little darling," I told it. My voice sounded strange in the room, and I realized it was the first time I'd spoken actual words since I'd recovered consciousness.
"You're going to work this time, my love," I told the plastic. I was talking to build my confidence. At least that's what I like to think.