Stress Test (2 page)

Beads of sweat stung Lou’s eyes. He blinked them away and peered into the night. He slowed the car to navigate the narrow streets behind the hospital, but his mind was working full-speed.

Edgar’s voice interrupted Lou’s thoughts. “Where are we going now?”

Lou steered the car through a stop sign with only the slightest tap on the brakes. “A quiet place where we can put a bullet into this guy.”

Beside him Edgar fidgeted but kept silent. Edgar didn’t look like much, but he was good with a gun and knife. Lou knew Edgar was anxious to do his thing, but Lou planned to do the honors himself on the man in the trunk. He’d let Edgar take care of the next one. This one was too important.

Lou clutched the wheel and leaned forward to follow the headlight beams through the warren of dark streets. The lights of downtown Dallas rose up ahead of them, bright in the inky sky. Lou took a sharp left, away from that glare.

The neighborhood’s few functioning streetlights only accentuated the gloom that lay beyond their dim glow. Lou drove by bars, strip clubs, and hole-in-the-wall stores peddling XXX-rated videos, all of them silent at this hour, and most secured by burglar bars or steel shutters. Nobody in his right mind would be here at this hour of the morning—at least, not without a weapon of some sort.

Lou saw the pothole too late to steer around it. The car bounced crazily before settling down on protesting springs.

“Hey, watch it.”

Lou heard a click as Edgar fastened his seat belt. His reply was a growled, “Sorry.” Lou slowed and scanned ahead for more holes in the pavement.

“You sure you know where we’re going?”

“Yeah, but whoever laid out these streets must have been drunk. Let me concentrate.” Lou squinted to read the street signs in the faint light. Finally he found the one he wanted and steered the car in a sharp turn. It lurched as one wheel bumped the curb.

“Did you hear something back there?” Edgar asked.

“Relax. He’s not going anywhere.” No, for the guy in the trunk, this would be his last ride ever.

Matt lay curled in a fetal position. Not even the faintest glimmer of light penetrated the tape over his eyes. All feeling was gone from his bound hands, and his feet tingled with a thousand needles. He tumbled about as the car swerved, slowed, accelerated, stopped, started. At times, what must have been huge potholes sent him bouncing against the trunk lid. The muscles in his back cried out with every bump and jolt. His injured ribs made each breath torture. Although he knew there was enough air in the trunk, he felt as though he was suffocating.

Matt summoned all his strength and strained at his bonds. He figured he’d been immobilized with duct tape, the modern equivalent of baling wire. For all the good his struggles did him, his restraints could have been welded steel bands. There was no way he could part them with brute force.

Sometime in the distant past Matt had read about Houdini’s escapes from handcuffs. Now he tried to recall the tricks the master illusionist used.
First, get the hands in front
. If Matt could do that, maybe he could use his teeth to tear through the tape.

He bent his back, trying to ignore the pain it caused. He tucked his legs up behind him and strained every muscle, but without success. He took a deep breath and paid the price for it as pain coursed through his chest. He tried rolling over onto his stomach, but that was worse. He returned to his side.

He struggled and strained to no avail. Despite regular exercise and an athletic body, Matt was unable to duplicate Houdini’s maneuver. Apparently what worked with handcuffs didn’t translate so well when your wrists were bound together with tape that left no slack for movement.

Matt’s mind churned. Was there something in the trunk he could use to free himself? Maybe he could saw through the tape with the slotted end of the jack handle. No, the jack was stowed, along with the spare tire, under a cover screwed down with a wing nut, forming the floor of the trunk.

As he kicked about in his efforts to escape, Matt’s feet hit a blanket stuffed into the corner of the trunk. He heard a dull
clunk
and remembered the sack of emergency tools. He’d bought them after one of Jennifer’s faultfinding comments, this one about him being unprepared for a road emergency. He pictured the contents in his mind’s eye. A pair of jumper cables, a fire extinguisher, a can of Fix-a-Flat, a roll of duct tape, and two road flares. Not much to work with and not a sharp edge in the bunch.
Except
. . . The only flares he’d found in the store were a version favored by police and highway patrol, flares with a spike on one end to be stuck into asphalt. If he could get one of those flares out, he might scratch through the tape on his wrists.

Matt squirmed and turned his body with agonizing slowness until his bound hands reached the bundle. His shoulders ached, his back muscles cried out, and every breath brought fresh pain in his ribs. He strained against his bonds, cutting off the last bit of circulation to
hands already numb. When the car hit a bump, he was thrown back and had to start the process again. As he reached the point of total exhaustion, Matt got one hand inside the folds of the blanket. He flexed his fingers in a vain effort to restore feeling, then explored the contents of the sack.

Jumper cables. Duct tape—like he needed more duct tape. Where were the flares?
There! There’s one!
His hand closed down on a spike, puncturing his palm in the process. He felt blood coursing down his fingertips. His slippery fingers lost their grip twice before he could grasp the sharp end of the flare.

Matt sawed at the tape on his wrists. Time after time, the point of the spike went beyond the tape and gashed his wrists, adding more blood to the flow from his palm. Soon the work became mindless repetition, leaving Matt to ponder whether he might eventually free himself, only to bleed to death from his self-inflicted slashes.

As he labored, Matt wondered if praying would help. He was a little out of practice. A
lot
out of practice, if he was honest about it. But he figured if there was ever a good time to pray, it was now.
They
say there are no atheists in foxholes
. He was pretty sure the same thing went for persons bound hand and foot, locked in a car trunk, on their way to death. There was nothing to lose.
God, I don’t know how to ask
this, so I’ ll just say it. Please help me
. Was there something else he was supposed to say? Oh yes.
Amen
.

Matt’s aching shoulders cried out. Nothing was working. He was about to give up when he felt the tape’s grip on his wrists loosen. Had one strand separated? He worked furiously now, sawing through more layers, until at last he felt his hands come free.

Matt pulled the remaining tape from his wrists. Sharp stabs of pain signaled the resumption of blood flow into hands too long and too tightly restrained. He struggled to move his fingers, but at that
moment they might as well have belonged to someone else. He flexed them and bit his lip in pain as restored circulation brought fire to his fingertips.

Now Matt fumbled with the tape that encircled his head. He took a deep breath, winced at the pain it caused, and steeled himself against what he knew was next. He ripped away the tape with a continuous unwinding motion that felt as though it took not only his day-old beard but also a layer of skin and a good portion of his hair. Tears coursed down his cheeks. His face felt like a pound of hamburger. But this was no time to stop and feel sorry for himself.

He reached down to free his ankles and felt more of the painful, electric tingle as blood flowed to his feet again. He’d done it. He was free. But how was he going to get away?

The car moved slowly now, probably taking side streets. Matt was certain that once his captors stopped, his chances of escape were somewhere between slim and none. He had to do something and do it quickly.

He could think of only two options. He could arm himself with something like the spike end of a flare or the fire extinguisher and fight his two assailants, counting on the element of surprise to help him overpower both of them. The second option was to try to escape before his captors reached their destination. As far as Matt was concerned, the choice was obvious.

But how was he to escape his steel prison? He remembered that, when he bought the car, the salesman reached into the trunk and pointed out the emergency release. Matt hadn’t thought much about it then, just recognized that it could be a lifesaver for a child accidentally locked in a trunk. Well, he wasn’t in this trunk by accident and he wasn’t a child, but that release just might save his life . . .

He groped above him in the darkness until he could wedge the
numb, blood-soaked fingers of one hand into a crevice in the under-surface of the trunk lid. With the other hand, Matt searched until he found a T-shaped lever. He pulled, but his bloody fingers slipped off the slick plastic. He wiped his hand on his pants and tried again. This time he was rewarded with a satisfying
click
as the latch released.

Matt eased the trunk open just far enough to glimpse his surroundings. The car was moving along a paved street, slowing and occasionally swerving to miss a pothole, then speeding up again. There were no other cars in sight.

Matt figured they were somewhere in the Trinity Industrial District. The occasional dim light from deep inside the buildings around did nothing to keep the darkness at bay. The few streetlights that hadn’t been shot out or succumbed to target practice with rocks provided little illumination.

The car slowed again. It was now or never. Matt released his hold on the trunk lid and rolled over the sill and out. When he hit the pavement, there were new waves of pain, and he clenched his teeth to keep from crying out. He thought he heard another crack from his injured ribs. He forced himself to roll to the side of the road, then scrambled to his feet and made for the nearest buildings. He glanced back in time to see the car move ahead for perhaps fifty yards before the brake lights came on and two forms piled out.

Matt didn’t wait to see what they would do next. He already knew what he was going to do.

Run for his life.

THREE

Lou glanced up at the rearview mirror and looked away. His eyes snapped back as his mind processed what he’d seen. The trunk lid was open, bouncing with each rough spot in the road. He brought his foot off the accelerator and hit the brake pedal hard enough to make the chest strap of the seat belt cut into him. He jammed the gear lever into park and was out the door while the car still rocked on its springs.

Behind Lou, Edgar’s door slammed. “What happened?”

“He got out,” Lou rasped. “But he can’t go far.”

The headlights lit an empty street ahead. Lou pivoted to look behind him. The industrial district was deserted. Buildings were dark. The only illumination came from a distant streetlamp and an occasional security light shining dimly through dirty windows. Alleys, black as the inside of a coal mine, divided each building from its neighbor. Lou completed a full turn but saw nothing except Edgar, motionless beside him, his eyes darting left and right. He cocked his head to listen.

There were no cars around; no sign of life anywhere. Their captive couldn’t have gone far. They’d find him—they had to.

Lou heard a faint metallic scrape to his left. He swung around and cupped his hand over his ear, the way he’d seen his almost-deaf aunt do. There it was again, coming from that alley. Lou pointed first to Edgar, then to the source of the sound, and jerked his head. The little man nodded once and together they edged slowly forward.

Lou’s snakeskin Gucci loafers, although elegant and guaranteed to impress the ladies, were not designed for this kind of activity. The leather heels clicked with every step; the leather soles slipped and slid over oily patches in the road. At that moment, he would have traded his five-hundred-dollar shoes for a pair of Converse high-tops. He forced himself to slow his pace and tread carefully, like a hunter moving through the jungle.

At the entrance to the alley, Lou stopped and looked back at Edgar, who stood five yards behind him, his head on a swivel. Lou pointed first to himself, then into the alley. He indicated Edgar and gestured for him to stay put. His cohort pulled a revolver from his waistband and nodded his understanding.

Lou opened his coat and drew his own gun from its shoulder holster. He cursed himself for not taking the time to search the car for a flashlight. Maybe the lighter in his coat pocket would do. If he lit it after he was in the alley, it might spook the fugitive into running. Lou would fire as soon as he saw the man. If he missed, Edgar was ready at the mouth of the alley. Either way, they had him dead to rights. Lou chuckled silently at the pun.

He thumbed the safety of his Beretta to the firing position and cocked the hammer. He had ten rounds in the semiautomatic. The fugitive had nothing. Nothing fair about this fight, but then again, Lou gave up any pretensions of fighting fair long ago. He held the pistol firmly in his left hand, finger inside the trigger guard. He stretched his right arm in front of him, stuck out his foot, and, like someone
walking through a minefield, took a careful step forward.
Ready or
not, here I come
.