“Oh, is it your dinnertime already?”
He retreated before his instinct to swing at her got the better of him, locking the door behind him as he left. She’d considered killing him while he was proximate, but decided it would be easier to escape cleanly if he thought she was safely locked away.
She looked around the room and moved to a plain metal desk in one corner that looked like a castoff. Her impression was confirmed when she opened the drawers and found them empty. Thinking furiously, she knelt down and examined the underside for anything that might help her, but came up empty.
Jet studied the ceiling before climbing onto the desk and reaching overhead to push on the ceiling tiles. They moved easily, as she’d suspected they would, and she felt along the edge of the rim. Metal. With any luck, sufficiently strong to support her weight.
She dropped from the desk and crossed to the light switch mounted on the wall by the door. She flipped it off, and the room plunged into darkness. Jet waited as her eyes adjusted and felt her way back to the desk. Standing on it again, she peered up into the cavity she’d opened and saw dim light filtering through from the area of the hall.
Pulling herself up into the space between the drop ceiling and the structure above with her wrists bound proved challenging but not impossible, and seconds later she was crawling carefully along the metal grid, avoiding the tiles, using the frame to support herself. She resisted the urge to sneeze from the dust and stopped when she reached a ventilation duct.
Reaching to one of the wires holding the false ceiling in place, she worked at one end until it snapped off, leaving her with several inches of stiff, rusting wire in her hand. She bent one end and slid it into the handcuff lock and, after shifting it around for half a minute, was rewarded with a snick. She pulled the cuff free and repeated the job on the other one, and then continued toward the hall light, keenly aware that she was on borrowed time.
Chapter 14
Matt strode down the tree-lined street a block from Hannah’s school, eyeing the windows of the parked cars for anything unusual as he approached. The area was congested with vehicles, parking spots at a premium during business hours in mixed zone areas like this one, which would make getting in and out of the school without being observed difficult.
He’d already circled the block once on his bike before leaving it in a tight spot next to a dumpster in the alley that ran behind the buildings, where hopefully it would go unnoticed if there was anyone watching for him. It didn’t feel like there was, but he knew he was rusty, and just guessing the coast was clear wouldn’t cut it. He knew from experience that you could be right ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and it was the one error in judgment that would kill you. He didn’t have the latitude to be wrong today – not with Hannah hanging in the balance.
High clouds drifted across the azure sky, shielding him from the sun as he neared the school and continued past it. To anyone who might have had it under surveillance, he’d be nothing more than a disinterested pedestrian talking on his cell phone. The device was a useful prop as he carried on a muttered conversation with himself, the sort of thing a preoccupied businessman would naturally be focused on as he made his way to a meeting.
Once past the school, he turned the corner and ducked into the alley that ran behind the buildings and proceeded without hesitation to a fire escape ladder suspended from a platform a story above the street. Using a move that Jet had taught him, he took a running start at the brick wall and seemed to run up the side before flinging himself at the lowest rung and locking onto it with his hands.
He pulled himself onto the platform and climbed quickly, painfully aware of his years as his entire body protested the exertion. At the third story he stopped and glanced down the length of the empty alley to confirm that he hadn’t been spotted, and then continued up to the flat roof and dragged his body over the lip onto the gravel and tarpaper surface.