Hostage

  I guessed she had watched a lot of crime shows on TV. I didn’t know if she was making things better or worse by talking to them that way. She couldn’t appeal to their hearts because they didn’t seem to have any, if they could so casually talk about disposing of us.

  “She’s right about one thing,” Cal said. “It doesn’t matter who actually drives the rig into the water. If they nail one of us, they’ll nail all of us. But they won’t if we keep our heads. There’s nothing to tie us to robbing that house.”

  “Except I wrote a description of the truck, and they’ve probably found it by now,” Mrs. Banducci said.

  Cal gave her a nasty smile. “But we stole the truck, and there’s nothing to tie us to that, either. We’ll wipe all the fingerprints off the inside of it, for when somebody finds it in the river, and our prints aren’t on file anywhere, anyway. Come on, guys, get rolling. We’re wasting time.”

  Buddy still looked uncertain, but I wasn’t concerned about Buddy. I didn’t know how far he’d try to drive before we and the truck went into the river, but it wouldn’t be very long. I’ve heard that when people are facing death, their entire lives flash before their eyes. All I could think of was that there had to be some way out of this, and I felt frustrated because I couldn’t think what it could be. Breathing had become an effort; it was as if I were paralyzed, so I had to concentrate on making the air go in and out, and I felt light-headed and kind of dizzy. I hoped I wasn’t going to throw up.

  Cal was already striding away toward the house. I hadn’t seen a car over there; maybe they’d hidden it back under the trees on the other side so nobody would notice it and wonder why it was there at an abandoned farm.

  Buddy, still frowning, reached down and grabbed hold of Mrs. Banducci’s thin arm, hauling her to her feet. “Come on, old woman. Back in the truck,” he said gruffly.

  Bo hesitated. “You want me to bring this one?” he asked about me.

  “Yeah, sure.” Buddy was being rougher than he needed to be, since he was much bigger and stronger than his victim. Bo wasn’t very considerate, either. I felt as if he’d dislocated my shoulder by the time I was on my feet, and my balance was off, so I nearly fell again.

  “Look,” I managed, “can’t you untie our hands? If you’re going to lock us in, what difference will it make? We can’t do anything to get away, and my nose is running and I can’t wipe it, and the rope is too tight! Please—”

  Bo didn’t even bother to answer. It was a few seconds before I realized why his jaw had first slackened, then tightened in anger. “Buddy! Cal!” he yelled, slamming me against the side of the truck.

  “What?” Cal called back, turning around halfway to the house.

  “She let the air out of another tire! We got another flat!”

  I’d almost forgotten that. I flinched from his angry grip, but I couldn’t get away from him. I’d been sitting long enough that my feet were half numb, to match my arms.

  There was more swearing as the three of them stood looking at the flat tire.

  “How’m I supposed to drive this to the river now?” Buddy demanded, rage sending blood into his face. “Anybody sees us limping along on the rim is going to make us stop. Call the cops, who knows? It’s too far to go without a tire, and we used the only spare there was.”

  “Boy,” Bo said sourly, “this is the last time we’ll trust you to swipe a vehicle. What a lemon.”

  Buddy let loose of Mrs. Banducci so fast, she fell against the side of the truck. He took a step toward his cohort with a fisted left hand ready to punch. “It didn’t have flat tires when I stole it, stupid! She let the air out of it, see, the valve cap’s there on the ground! It couldn’t have come off by itself! I’ll bet one of them did the same thing with the first tire, back at the house.”

  He glared at me. For once Mrs. Banducci held her tongue, maybe because she was finally afraid that they might physically hurt us since they were so upset.

  My mouth was dry, but I managed to swallow so my throat didn’t quite close up.

  Cal had the biggest vocabulary of profanity I’d ever heard. He kicked at the offensive flat tire. When he finally pulled himself together, he spoke through clenched teeth. “All right. We’ll have to leave it here. We can’t pull it into the barn without moving all that furniture, and we can’t risk taking the time for that. You can drive it flat as far as where we left the car. It won’t be quite so noticeable back there under the trees. Put them in the back of it, and let’s get going.”

  Buddy hesitated. “We gonna leave them alive? So they can describe us if anyone finds ’em?”

  The constriction in my chest really hurt. I glanced toward Mrs. Banducci, who was looking as if she might have a heart attack. She was, after all, pretty old and she’d been treated roughly for a long time now. On the other hand, I thought, maybe having a heart attack would be an easier way to go than locked into a truck that was slowly sinking into a river.

  I was convinced that for a matter of seconds Cal seriously considered murdering us in cold blood right where we stood.

  And then Mrs. Banducci spoke. If she was terrified and shaky, it didn’t show. “The cops are busy looking for you,” she told them. “Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better hurry up or it will be too late.”

  I closed my eyes for a blissful moment of not seeing those three enraged faces. Did she really want them to hurry up and do something, when the something was eliminating us?

  When I opened my eyes again, Cal still looked as if he could chew razor blades. “She’s right. We have to move. Put them in the back, drive the truck into the place where I have the car now, and we’ll go.”

  “Leave them alive?” Buddy asked once more.

  I was beginning to dislike Buddy excessively.

  “It’s too much time and trouble to do anything else. With any luck, nobody’ll find them in time to identify anybody.”

  “But what if they do?” Buddy persisted.

  “I’ve got a plan B,” Cal said curtly. “But I’m not gonna discuss it in front of them. Just in case they manage not to starve to death fast enough.”

  He turned his back on us and began to trot toward the house. Mrs. Banducci yelped a protest at the rough handling as Buddy grabbed her again and steered her toward the back of the truck where the double doors stood folded back.

  He didn’t bother to put down the lift to get the old lady into the truck. He picked her up and dumped her inside, eliciting another bark of objection from her, and then Bo did the same with me. At the same time, I saw the hidden car move out from behind the house.

  I recognized it immediately. The old black beater we’d seen cruising the streets at Lofty Cedars before we’d even moved in. So they’d been casing the neighborhood, looking for places where people were buying new stuff like TVs and computers and furniture they could get good prices for when they sold it.

  And then Bo slammed the doors on us, and we heard the bars falling into place, locking us in.

  For a moment we lay there, breathing hard, in the darkness. It was pitch-black, no crack of light showing anywhere.

  Moments after they shut the doors on us, the old vehicle began to move forward. We didn’t go very far. When we stopped, I listened intently for voices or the sound of the old black car, but I couldn’t hear anything.

  “Have they left us here? Are we alone?” I asked in a hushed voice. Though if we couldn’t hear them, they couldn’t hear us, either.

  And then Mrs. Banducci said, “Well, come on, Kaci Drummond. Roll over here and see if you can untie me.”

  For a seventy-eight-year-old lady, Mrs. Banducci was pretty gutsy.

  “Rolling’s not easy when you’re wearing a backpack and your hands have been tied together so long they feel like they’re going to fall off,” I said, deciding it would be more practical to maneuver onto my knees and then kind of scoot on my face toward her.

  “What’s in that thing, anyway?” Mrs. Banducci wanted to know. She didn’t sound as petri
fied as I felt. “You carrying any lunch, by chance? I only had coffee for breakfast because I was expecting my friend, and it’s long past lunchtime. My stomach’s rumbling.”

  Lunch. Food was the last thing I was concerned with, but I had packed a lunch for school, the way I always do. “I have a ham sandwich with mustard, an apple, and two oatmeal cookies,” I told her. “And a granola bar I was planning to eat on the way home.”

  She made a sound of approval. “Let’s get these ropes off and get at it,” she said.

  It took an interminable time to get Mrs. Banducci untied. The ropes were tight, I couldn’t see the knots, and my fingers were painfully numb. Once in a while she’d say something like, “I made an apricot coffee cake this morning. My friend loves it.” Or, “That Bo fellow has bad breath, did you notice?”

  Mostly I just sweated and grunted as I fumbled behind me while we sat back-to-back. At one point I broke a fingernail, and it stung where it tore down into the quick. I didn’t have the luxury of time to rest and wait for the pain to ease. I gritted my teeth and kept working at the knots.

  When they finally came free, I grunted in exultation, though of course we were still locked inside a truck that had been abandoned and hidden under some trees in the hope that nobody would notice it or investigate.

  “I haven’t been bound up that way,” Mrs. Banducci declared, “since my brother Tommy tied me to a tree when I was eight. We were playing Joan of Arc, and he went off to find kindling to put around my feet so he could burn me up. Mama wouldn’t let him take any matches out of the house, and he got hungry and stopped to fix a snack and forgot all about me. It wasn’t until suppertime when I didn’t come in to eat that he remembered where he’d left me. He got his butt blistered for that one, I’ll tell you. Served him right.” She moaned a little as she rubbed her chafed wrists, apologized for taking the time to do it, and began to work on my knots. “Speaking of suppertime, it might be easier for me to undo these ropes if we took the backpack off. Can I unfasten a strap or something and do that before I get you untied?”

  I agreed it would be a good idea, but hoped she wasn’t going to want to find my lunch and eat before she accomplished the important thing, and she didn’t. Since she was working with her hands in front of her, even though she still had to contend with pitch-blackness, she did the job much more quickly than I had.

  I brought my hands around front and rubbed circulation back into them. My torn fingernail hurt, and I sucked on that finger for a minute, then bit off the loose part of the nail as best I could. Finally I reached for the backpack, but Mrs. Banducci had already felt her way into it.

  “Ah, here’s the sandwich,” she said with satisfaction. “You don’t mind if I help myself to half of it, do you?”

  “Help yourself to all of it,” I invited. “I’ve always thought it was crazy to make a big deal out of a last meal before a prisoner is executed. What good is it? Whose stomach would be settled enough so you could swallow and not have it all come back up?”

  Surprisingly, Mrs. Banducci chuckled. “We’re not dead yet, child. Put that good young brain of yours to work and think of something. What else you got in this backpack thingy?”

  “Books, papers, and the rest of my lunch,” I told her. In the short time she’d been our next-door neighbor, I’d thought she was kind of a pain with her nosiness. And of course if she hadn’t been overly inquisitive this morning, she’d never have been captured after letting the air out of one of their tires and peeking in the windows of our house. But I was glad I wasn’t locked in the back of this truck by myself.

  “You sure that’s all? It felt heavier than that when I lifted it, unless you’ve got an awful lot of books. Why don’t you feel around it and see if you can’t find something else that might be useful. I’ll bet you’ve never completely emptied it out since you got it, have you? Hmmm. I thought you said this was a ham sandwich.”

  “It is. With mustard. I made it myself.”

  “It smells exactly like peanut butter.” She paused to take a bite. “Ah! Ambrosia for a growling stomach! Peanut butter and jelly.”

  “It can’t be,” I said, scowling to myself in the darkness. “I made it . . . oh, no!”

  “Nothing wrong with peanut butter and jelly,” Mrs. Banducci assured me. “Are you wrong about the apple and the cookies, too?”

  I knew what had happened. Mom had told Grandma she shouldn’t have picked identical backpacks for Jodie and me, because we’d mix them up. Grandma had responded, rather tartly, that they hadn’t had any pink ones for Jodie, so she’d had to get two red ones unless we wanted dirt-colored ones like the boys’.

  Mom still makes Wally’s lunches, but the rest of us do our own. We usually make them the night before and get them out of the refrigerator in the morning. And this morning—a million years ago!—Jodie had left the house before I did and picked up the wrong backpack. In fact, I thought she’d sneaked out early because she was up to something again and didn’t want to get caught or questioned. I hoped she hadn’t been hiding the fact that she was wearing my newest blouse. And then I remembered that it didn’t matter much, considering the circumstances. If she’d left anything in the backpack that would get us out of this, I’d forgive her for swiping anything.

  “It must be my sister’s bag,” I said. “I can’t imagine what there would be in it that would be of any use in getting out of this truck. Not even Jodie is likely to carry a can opener or a cannon to blow a hole in the side.”

  I could smell the peanut butter, and it was making me nauseous.

  “Well, it won’t be much comfort when they find our bodies,” Mrs. Banducci said cheerfully, “to find that there was something in that bag that would have kept us alive long enough for someone to rescue us. You sure you don’t want half this sandwich?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. But I took hold of the backpack she pushed toward me and reached inside to check it out.

  There was an apple. And a packet that was undoubtedly cookies. And a plastic bag with something squishy in it. A small tube of something I couldn’t identify. Had she borrowed some of Mom’s makeup? And then my fingers touched something that sent my spirits soaring.

  At my cry of triumph, Mrs. Banducci stopped chewing. “What?” she demanded. “What did you find?”

  Chapter Nine

  “A phone! Dad’s cell phone! I thought the thieves had taken it, along with our other phones, but Jodie had put it in her backpack! The little sneak!”

  I remembered how Jodie had wanted to go somewhere after school and asked to take the phone. “Mom wouldn’t let her use it. None of us is supposed to take it off Dad’s desk, but she knew neither Mom nor Dad would be using it today, so she just swiped it. She probably figured she’d put it back before they came home and they’d never miss it. She’ll be in real trouble when they find out.” I paused, remembering how glad I was that we’d found it. “Or maybe not, since it may save our lives this time. I hope!”

  “A telephone?” Mrs. Banducci was smiling. I could tell, even in the dark, that she was smiling. It was in her voice. “Well, get us out of here, girl!”

  I was holding the instrument in my hand and I could imagine it quite clearly. White plastic, with a blue button at the top to press to turn it on. I located the button and pushed. Immediately I heard the reassuring hum of a dial tone.

  I nearly cried in relief. Dialing a one would be easy enough. It was the first button on the left, just below the power button. The nine should be the last number on the right, at the bottom. From the top, down the right side of the pad of buttons, three, six, nine. I counted them out. I knew where the numbers were supposed to be, but it made me anxious not being able to see them. I dialed and hoped for the best.

  God does answer prayer. At the other end of the line, the phone rang, and a male voice said, “Emergency services.”

  “The police!” I gasped. “Please, don’t hang up just because I’m a kid! I’m in terrible trouble! My name is Kaci Drummond, and I’ve b
een kidnapped! Me and my neighbor, Mrs. Banducci! We both live in Lofty Cedars Estates, and . . .”

  “Kaci? Hold on, please.” There was a totally different timbre in his voice. “I’m going to turn you over to Detective Myrek, all right?”

  There were a few seconds of silence, during which I thought my heart would stop if we’d been disconnected. And then a different male voice, deeper, stronger.

  “Kaci? This is Detective Ross Myrek. Are you all right?”

  “We haven’t been injured, but we are locked up in the back of a truck—”

  “A yellow bob tail? License number VCT 7258?”

  Tears of gratitude filled my eyes. “Yes! You found my message on the wall!”

  “Your mother found it when she went to the house to check on you. And we found the note on Mrs. Banducci’s desk when her friend called. Can you tell me where you are?”

  “I’m not sure. They put tape over my eyes when we were partway here. But when we left our house and got on the freeway, we turned south. I couldn’t tell how far we drove, or for how long. It seemed forever. Then we left the freeway, went east over an overpass, and then on for a few miles, and then onto a gravel road. We’re on an abandoned farm, with a pretty big barn, where the thieves hid all our furniture and stuff.”

  “Can you make a guess as to how far south you went on the freeway?”

  “All I’m sure of is that when we turned onto Compton Street, maybe half a mile from the house, the odometer registered two hundred thousand forty-two miles, and we drove a total of thirty-seven miles altogether after that. Does that help? Can you find us?”

  His voice warmed. “With that kind of detective work on your part, we ought to be able to pick you up in a matter of minutes. State Patrol Cars are rolling in that area now. And the Channel Four helicopter is in the air, monitoring traffic. We’ll contact them, and they’ll search for you from the air.”

  “The truck’s almost hidden under the trees next to the house,” I said quickly. “But the other sides of the house are in the open. Old, rundown, peeling white paint,” I told him. “Two stories high, with a porch all across the front of it.”