Chapter Forty-six

It took Meg a long time to come back to herself. She felt as if she had gone away for a while, into a dream world of radiant peace.

She hadn't wanted to return. It was the moaning that had brought her back, a low, dismal sound like a foghorn.

She opened her eyes and found herself huddled on the bottom step of the cellar staircase, her handcuffed wrist suspended at shoulder height, her right arm wrapping her waist in a tight embrace. The flashlight still shone down from the landing, dimly illuminating the room.

A couple of feet away lay the man who'd tried to kill her, Detective Tomlinson, LAPD. He was still sprawled on his stomach, unmoving, showing no sign even of a rise and fall of breath. But he was alive. The moaning that issued from his open mouth was proof of that. Maybe he'd pulled free of the syringe before its entire contents could enter his bloodstream. Maybe he was big enough to absorb a dose that would have proven lethal to her. Or maybe he really was dying, but slowly.

She hoped not. She didn't want to take a life, even in self-defense. On the other hand, if he stayed alive, he might eventually awaken from his blackout or coma or whatever it was. And even if he didn't, Gabe or someone else was bound to stop by when Tomlinson failed to return.

One way or the other, she couldn't afford to be here. She had bought herself a reprieve, nothing more.

The cellar door was open. Escape was so close. The only thing holding her back was the handcuff on her wrist, the handcuff Tomlinson had claimed he would unlock.

She blinked with a new thought. Cops really did carry handcuff keys. And Tomlinson must have brought a key with him if he intended to move her after she amp; after he had amp;

She pushed away that idea. What mattered was the key. It had to be somewhere on his person. In one of his pockets, probably.

She moved closer to the unconscious man, as close as the short tether of the handcuff chain would permit, and reached out to the side pocket of his jacket. Some residual fear or distasteperhaps the simple reluctance to touch a body that was so nearly deadmade her hesitate before actually slipping her hand into the pocket.

She shut her eyes and did it. Her fingers closed over something small and metallica coin, not a key. She dug deeper. More spare change. Nothing else. His pants pocket, maybe. She didn't want to touch him there, so close to his groin, his crotch, but then she remembered that she'd already had his private parts in her hand.

Somehow the thought made her smile, and the smile made it easier for her to explore this pocket also. She touched a wad of cloth, probably a handkerchief. A few crumpled dollar bills. That was all.

His belt, then. Sometimes cops wore keys and stuff clipped to a belt. She reached under his jacket, running her hand along the belt, feeling cracked leather, brittle and old, but found no keys, no equipment of any kind.

There was still the other side of his body to check, but she couldn't reach it. She grabbed the dead weight of his arm and tried dragging him toward her.

No use. He weighed easily two hundred pounds. With both hands free and the proper leverage, she might have been able to drag him. As it was, she had no more hope of shifting his position than of breaking the steel chain of the handcuff by sheer strength. And what if the key was in his vest pocket or the pocket of his shirt? She would have to turn him over, onto his back, an impossible task.

"So I'm screwed," she whispered.

Tomlinson groaned in answer.

There was one other possibility. The syringe.

She'd dropped it on the floor by her feet. Picking it up, she studied the slim needle as it caught the flashlight beam. She knew nothing about picking locks except what she'd seen on TV. It looked easy enough on cop shows.

Still, it might be possible to use the needle as a locksmith tool. Insert it in the handcuff's keyhole, try to jigger the thing open.

She gave it a shot, working the cuff on her wrist. She probed with the needle, having no clear idea of what to do.

How did locks work, anyway? She'd never even thought about it. Something about tumblersor was that only the kind of locks they had on safes?

She was a moron. She didn't know the simplest practical thing. She had spent her time learning history and English lit when she should have been teaching herself street skills, survival skills. It was her mom's fault. If Robin hadn't sent her to that private school amp;

"Yeah, blame her," she whispered. "Real mature."

She struggled with the lock for what seemed like a long time. One thing was clear: The TV shows had lied. It was not easy to pick a lock. It was, as far as she could tell, impossibleat least without the right tools.

Finally she gave up. Her efforts had failed. She couldn't find a handcuff key in the detective's clothes, and she couldn't pick the lock. She couldn't do anything except wait for Tomlinson to regain consciousness and kill her, or for Gabe to come back and kill her, or for some other bad guy to drop by and kill her.

The bottom line was that she was going to die. She had delayed her execution for a short time, but it was coming, and she was out of options. She would die in the factory, a dead place suitable for the dead.

Gabe had to get rid of her. And he was no angel. She knew that now. She knew how he'd used her. She knew how stupid she had been. She knew it alltoo late.