Hostage

by Willo Davis Roberts

  I didn’t have any confidence that I wouldn’t be hurt no matter how cooperative I was. From where I sat, I could see the broken glass in a window over the sink, confirming my guess about where they’d broken in. The table wasn’t heavy; I could have dragged it with me toward the sliding doors onto the rear deck, but then what? I couldn’t get loose, and I couldn’t get untied to be free of the chair.

  For a person who’d read so many adventure stories about people who rescued themselves from dangerous situations, I was doing a terrible job of coming up with any kind of solution to my own mess. The rope was digging into my wrists, and I wondered how quickly the circulation would be cut off enough to do real damage. Tentatively, I tried to slide my chair across the vinyl floor. It made a horrible screeching sound, and I stopped, heart pounding, afraid Bo would hear it and come back.

  For a moment or two I heard their voices, and then I figured they’d gone out the front door and were either too far away or were being quiet to avoid attracting attention.

  It was very quiet in the house. I tried to control the hammering of my heart, tried again to think clearly. There must be something I could do that would help.

  A shadowy movement at the sliding door that opened onto the back deck brought my head around so fast that my neck cracked painfully.

  There was a figure out there, small and in a flowered dress. The woman pressed her face against the glass, her hands up on each side so she could peer into the kitchen more easily.

  Mrs. Banducci!

  I sucked in an excited breath. “Help!” I called out, hoping she could hear me. The sliding door wasn’t the glass that was broken, however, and I didn’t think I’d caught her attention. It was shadowy in here, and bright sunshine outside, making it hard for her to see into the kitchen.

  Then I realized she hadn’t seen me. She tried the slider, which of course was still locked. I was afraid to yell any louder for fear of attracting the attention of the thieves. “Run for help!” I urged, unsure of whether or not my voice could reach her.

  The old lady pulled back from the glass with a scowl on her face and turned away with no indication that she’d spotted me there, tied to a chair. I didn’t dare yell any louder. I could hear the men coming through the house. I could even make out their words.

  “What are we going to do with that kid?” one of them asked. “She’s seen our faces. She can describe us to the cops.”

  I shook my head at Mrs. Banducci, hoping the movement would make it easier to see me. “Run!” I said, but softly because I didn’t want them to hear me. “Get help!” But I knew she didn’t hear me or see me, either one.

  She withdrew from the sliding-glass doors and disappeared, leaving me ready to fly apart in all directions.

  The voices were coming nearer. “Are we going to have to shut her up permanently?”

  My throat closed, and I was begging silently, Please, God, please God, let her have seen me! Let her get to a phone!

  “Nobody has a gun,” the reply came, just outside the kitchen door. “How you want to do it? Drown her in a bathtub? Burn the house down around her?”

  I’d been gasping for breath. Now I stopped breathing at all.

  “Starting a fire’s the quickest way to get somebody here in a hurry. There may not be anyone left in the subdivision, but there are plenty of people only a few blocks away who would report smoke.”

  “So what do we do, then? Strangle her with our bare hands? You want me to do it?”

  I forgot my wrists were hurting. How quickly could Mrs. Banducci locate a phone? Would she be in time? And all the time I was thinking, she didn’t even see me.

  My chest was burning, and I finally thought to take a gulp of air before my lungs burst. They were here now, two of them, staring at me as if I were a pig they were about to butcher, and with no more emotion than if that were the case.

  “We’d better ask Cal,” Buddy said, and now I knew all their names, or at least their nicknames. For all the good it was going to do me. They weren’t planning to give me a chance to tell anybody.

  “Where’d he go?” Bo asked, turning to look behind him.

  “I don’t know. He was right behind us.” Buddy was studying me in a way that made my skin crawl.

  “Well, we’ve already been here longer than we expected to be. If we want to get this stuff unloaded and get back to another house yet today, we’ve gotta move.”

  The one called Buddy wiped his arm across his mouth. “This place may be full of good houses, but it’s beginning to spook me. We weren’t supposed to run into anybody during the day, and I don’t like it. Cal said there wouldn’t be anybody in the whole subdivision.” He continued to glare at me as if I’d deliberately upset their plans and deserved to be punished for it.

  Far off in the distance, we all heard the sudden wail of a siren.

  Hope leaped in my chest. Had Mrs. Banducci managed to get to a phone after all? Were the police on the way?

  Hope wasn’t what I saw on Buddy’s and Bo’s faces. Consternation instantly turned them from tough guys to cowards.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Buddy said. “Before it’s too late!”

  I prayed with all my heart that it was already too late, and then I realized that the siren wasn’t getting any louder. It wasn’t coming any closer.

  Buddy realized it, too. “It’s not for us,” he said. “It’s going away.”

  At once they turned mean again. For a moment I thought I was going to be stabbed when the knife came out; instead, Bo cut me loose from the chair, with my hands still tied behind me. He jerked me to my feet, wrenching my shoulder so that I cried out involuntarily.

  “Shut up,” he told me gruffly, and shoved me ahead of him toward the front of the house.

  “Cal, where you been? What’re we gonna do with this kid?”

  Cal looked as if somebody had just stomped on his big toe. “We gotta fix a flat before we can get out of here.”

  Shock was etched on the other two faces. “It was okay when I drove in here,” Buddy asserted. “You sure?”

  Cal practically snarled, “You think I can’t tell when a tire goes flat? You’re the idiots who stole the truck, you get out there and fix it while I finish up in here.”

  “There is a spare, right?” Bo asked. “And a jack? Okay, we’ll get it fixed. I don’t know about you guys, but I want out of this place. I’m not sure I even want to come back for the next house, after finding this kid in here. There might be somebody home in the other places, too. You gonna take care of her?”

  Bo headed out the front door, but Buddy still stood there, glowering. “We gonna have to kill her? I didn’t sign up for no murder, you know. Stealing’s something else. They don’t put you in prison for life or execute you for taking a truckload of furniture. They probably wouldn’t even catch us for that. But killing a kid . . .” He swore again. “They’d never stop looking for us if we kill her.”

  I was wilting with fear; only his brutal hand kept me from falling. I was dizzy and sick to my stomach, yet if I keeled over he might finish me off right that minute.

  “No, we’re not gonna kill her,” Cal said. He was looking right at me, but his countenance was no friendlier than it had been earlier. I was not misled into being reassured.

  It was a wonder that my eyes could even track at that point, but suddenly I caught a flicker of movement behind Cal, through the dining room window.

  Mrs. Banducci again!

  Her face was pressed to the glass, with her hands shielding her eyes from the sides as she tried once more to see into the interior of the house.

  I must have reacted, though I tried not to, because Cal and Buddy both twitched and turned toward the window. They both cursed at the same time. I didn’t know whether Bo meant to slam me against the wall again or not, but the pain that shot through my elbow made me go blind and numb for a few seconds.

  “It’s that old witch next door,” Cal said thickly. “I thought one of you was gonna check and ma
ke sure she was still up to her behind in the water you turned loose in her garage. Go after her! Don’t let her get to a phone to call the cops! I’ll take care of this one!”

  I slid down the wall when Bo let go of me, curling forward as my head got banged, too. I felt the tears seeping out of my eyes and couldn’t get my hands free to wipe at them or rub my elbow. My nose was starting to run disgustingly, and I couldn’t do anything about that, either.

  Cal looked down on me contemptuously. “This should have been a good gig, but you and that stupid old woman have spoiled it all. We’ll be gone as soon as they get that spare tire on. I’ve got a few more things to throw in this last box, and then we’re out of here. And if you try to move while I’m doing that, you’ll be sorry, sister.”

  I wished I could tell him what I thought of him, but even if I could have found enough voice to do it, I was afraid of him. From where I was sprawled on the floor, I could see those size twelve combat boots and I imagined them kicking into me while I lay helpless.

  He turned his back on me, confident that he’d cowed me into submission. I could see him through the archway between the dining room and the living room, tossing things carelessly into the last of the cardboard cartons. He was even including the embroidered pillows that Aunt Kathie had given Mom for her last birthday. As I watched through a blur of tears, he took down the full-length mirror that hung just inside the front door so people could check their appearance at the last minute as they left the house.

  My tears had initially been because of pain, but they were gradually encompassing another kind of suffering. I knew Mom was going to be devastated when she saw all the things missing from her wonderful new house.

  And when I thought about it a moment longer, I realized she and Dad and even Jeff and Jodie and Wally most likely would grieve for me, too.

  Cal had said they weren’t going to kill me, but did that mean not right now, or never? I had a dismal conviction that I’d be lucky if I ever saw any of my family again.

  It hurt to be in the position I was in, with my hands still tied behind me, twisting sideways. I tried to shift, hoping to ease a cramp in my ribs. Something small fell out of the backpack onto the hardwood floor of the dining room, rolling under me.

  Cal immediately paused in the act of picking up the box he’d finally filled and gave me a suspicious look.

  I swiveled my head around and wiped my nose on the shoulder of my T-shirt. Gross, but preferable to letting it run down into my mouth.

  “Stay put,” Cal said in a hard voice, and carried the box out and loaded it into the yawning back of the truck. He slammed the double doors shut and secured them with a bar, then walked up to the side of the truck to where Buddy was almost finished with replacing the flat tire.

  I could see the license plate quite clearly. VCT 7258. I wondered if I could memorize it, and then remembered that I wasn’t going to be around long enough to relay it to the police.

  Whatever had fallen out of an outer pocket of the backpack and rolled under me was hard, unyielding. I tried to shift my position again to get off from it, and saw a pencil. A nice new number 2 yellow pencil, with a sharpened point.

  It would write the truck’s license number, I thought, heart quickening. If the men stayed away long enough. If I could find anything to write on quickly enough.

  There was nothing but a smooth, freshly painted white wall beside me.

  Pain shot through my arms when I pushed into a sitting position and scrabbled behind me for the pencil. I had to ignore pain, I told myself. This was life or death, and I didn’t have to remind myself whose death it would be, or how quickly it might come.

  Cal was still talking to his cohort beside the truck, neither of them looking toward me. My heart pounding, my breath coming in gasps, I maneuvered around so my back was to the wall, the pencil awkwardly gripped in my right hand even though my elbow was still throbbing.

  I tried to figure out how to write so it would be right side up, and couldn’t. My mind was racing so hard, it was a miracle I could think with any logic at all. Okay, write it upside down. If anyone saw it, they’d be able to make sense of it, anyway. I hoped.

  Behind me I felt the sharp point break off the pencil lead. I was pushing too hard. I was suffocating, as if someone had put a bag over my head and cut off my air. I tried again to write, hoping that not all the lead had snapped.

  “Take your hands off me, you ruffian!”

  The screeching female voice made me jerk on the last number. I’d probably left a trailing mark up the wall; I couldn’t see it without squirming into a different position, and with the men outside in plain sight, I didn’t dare try. I couldn’t do anything about it, anyhow.

  Mrs. Banducci, her hair wildly disarranged, came into view with Bo propelling her. She was kicking backward, and she connected with one of his shins, so that he yelped and called her an unprintable name. “Cut it out before I have to really hurt you,” he told her, giving her a shake that knocked her glasses askew.

  “What do you want me to do with her?” he demanded in exasperation. “Stick her in the back of the truck, or do we have to dispose of her, too?”

  I didn’t miss that “too.” I pushed the pencil behind me up against the baseboard, afraid that it would show up, bright yellow against white, when I had to be moved. There was nothing else I could do about that.

  “Yeah,” Cal said. “And stay back there with her.”

  Bo scowled. “Hey, why do I have to be in the back where I can’t see what’s going on?”

  “Because,” Cal said, angry at being challenged, “there’s only room for three of us in the front.”

  “So since when am I not one of the three of us?” Bo was getting mad, too.

  “Since we need to keep the kid up front,” Cal told him. “She’s no use as a hostage if we can’t get at her if the cops stop us. Come on, the tire’s fixed, let’s get on the road.”

  He was so furious that when he reentered the house and jerked me to my feet, he didn’t see the pencil against the baseboard, or the message I’d written on the wall above it.

  He dragged me out the front door, shut it behind us, and hauled me up into the front of the truck. Buddy got into the driver’s seat, Cal squeezed himself against my right side, and Buddy turned on the ignition.

  Hostage.

  The word echoed in my mind as the truck began to move.

  I was a hostage. I crumpled inwardly and was unable to stop the tears that welled up, blurring my vision.

  That meant that if they had a confrontation with the police, they’d hold me up in front of someone so the officers couldn’t fire at them.

  It was about as terrifying a situation as you could get.

  Chapter Seven

  I didn’t know whether to hope the police would stop us going out of Lofty Cedars Estates or not.

  I’d seen lots of movies where hostages were held in front of gunmen so the cops didn’t dare to shoot for fear of hitting the victim. Yet I knew that the farther we got from the scene of the crime, the poorer my chances were of escaping alive.

  And poor Mrs. Banducci, what about her? She was undoubtedly as much at risk as I was. She, too, had had a good look at them and could identify them. Once they were sure they’d gotten away with their thefts and unloaded their loot, would they see any reason to let either the old lady or me stay alive?

  I’d scribbled the license number on a wall, but the chances of anyone coming home and finding it before the end of the school day were practically nil. Wally usually had some kind of practice when he got out, and if there was a day when he didn’t, he went to day care until it was time for the rest of us to get home. Jodie, at ten, was allowed to come home alone, as long as she checked in with Mom at the clinic. She wasn’t allowed to have other kids over unless one of our parents was there. She had a few chores to do when she was home alone. She was more likely to check in with Mom to see if she could go to someone else’s house for a few hours, as long as it was okay with
her friend’s mother, who was expected to be present.

  Jeff, then, would usually be the first one to get home, and that wouldn’t be for hours yet. He’d know the minute he walked in that the place had been robbed; he’d call Dad, and then the police, but who knew how long it would be before anyone noticed my scribble on the wall?

  It didn’t seem likely that this scenario was going to play out in a promising way. I wondered what time it was. Noon, at least, surely. My stomach rumbled the way it does when I don’t eat at the time I’m used to. I was supposed to check in with the nurse when I got back to school. Would Mrs. Burton notice that I hadn’t come back after going home for my allergy spray? Would she call Mom if she did remember? And what would Mom do? Come looking for me, or just assume that I was on my way?

  Actually, Mom wasn’t much for assuming that everything was all right without checking on us. Usually it was annoying, because we’d only forgotten to call, or gotten held up for some innocent reason.

  Today, I prayed she’d check. In person. And bring in the police.

  We eased out of the driveway and drove slowly toward the exit from the subdivision without a sign of a police car and not very many pedestrians and private cars. Nobody paid any attention to us.

  I heard Cal’s exhalation of relief as we turned onto a main street that led to the freeway. And after a minute or so I noticed that Buddy’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel had loosened a little bit.

  Did it make it better or worse that he was less nervous?

  “I hope this bucket of rust holds together until we can get rid of it,” Buddy commented, shifting gears with an effort. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it fell apart before we get it unloaded.”

  “You’re the one who picked it out,” Cal told him unsympathetically. “I said an older truck that wasn’t likely to be noticed, not one that had over two hundred thousand miles on it and looked like nobody ever changed the oil.”

  At the mention of the mileage, I glanced down and spotted the figures on the odometer. Two hundred thousand and forty-two miles. Maybe, I thought hopefully, it would break down before we reached our destination and they’d have to abandon it, leaving me with it. It wasn’t likely, but it seemed a better thing to imagine than any of the alternatives that came to mind.