The apartment complex was sprawling. It seemed to go for blocks and blocks, and from the outside all the apartments were identical. Meredith had never seen the complex before, or if she had she didn’t remember it, for there was nothing memorable about it. It had taken them only fifteen minutes to get there from the school, but part of that was on the highway, at least two or three exits, so she wasn’t exactly sure where they were. His was a ground-floor apartment with an outdoor entrance; they passed two other drab brown doors on the way to his drab brown door. His hand was tucked in his jacket. He pushed them inside.
It had dawned on Meredith way too late that she and Lisa had broken one of the cardinal rules of abduction by allowing themselves to be taken to a second location. She knew this was a rule because one afternoon the spring before she’d spent a harrowing two hours reading every single pamphlet in the hospital lobby. The pamphlets, hundreds of them on a wide array of subjects, were all distributed by the same company, so essentially the same cartoon people faced hardship after hardship, with a very limited number of facial expressions. By the end of that afternoon Meredith knew about every terrible thing that might possibly ever happen to her and suggestions on how to go about avoiding the terrible thing (or, if unavoidable, like acne or menopause, at least how to gracefully manage it). She got the cartoon lowdown on cervical cancer, meth addiction, miscarriage, colonoscopies, cystic fibrosis, tinnitus, STDs, domestic abuse, and athlete’s foot. And abduction. She actually remembered the drawing that accompanied the second-location rule, a stick man and stick woman standing beside a car, and a big X drawn through the car. Once you got to a second location, the pamphlet informed her, your chances of survival dropped by over 50 percent. But who could stop and think of that in the moment, when the flow of events (not to mention a gun) was propelling you across a parking lot? And what were the other rules? There had been at least five more, perhaps as many as ten. But Meredith could not recall what they were. Would she only remember each one as it lay broken behind her?
They shuffled into the apartment and the man closed and locked the door behind them.
“Sit on the couch,” the man said, pointing at the couch with his gun. “Just sit there and let me think.”
Meredith sat. Lisa did not.
“Let us go,” Lisa said, riding high on her triumph from the car. “Let us go right now. Just open the door and we’ll walk out and you’ll never hear anything from either of us again.”
“Shut up,” he said. He seemed to have remembered that he was the one in charge. Maybe because he was in his own home. “You shut up now.”
“Make me,” Lisa said.
The man punched Lisa in the face. The sound reminded Meredith of leaping from the monkey bars onto the playground sand—some smack, some give. Lisa fell backward over the arm of the couch and landed on top of Meredith.
“Now you just sit there and shut up,” he yelled. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Meredith said. She winced as Lisa’s elbow dug into her stomach. “We understand you.”
Lisa rolled off Meredith and into a kneeling position on the floor beside the couch, holding her face. There was blood seeping through her fingers. There was blood on her white blouse and on the couch and on Meredith’s leggings. The man sat down at a chair at a little table and set the gun down in front of him. He closed his eyes and took some deep breaths and rubbed his mustache with his left index finger, rubbed it hard, like he was trying to make sure it was firmly attached. Meredith could tell he was thinking. He was trying to decide what to do. Things had not gone as planned. He had told them to get up—a split-second decision, the disappointment of so little money—and now here they all were in his apartment, the snotty one already covered in blood. In thirty seconds he’d gone from armed robbery to two counts of kidnapping, and now here they all were and he was going to have to figure out what to do with them. And he was going to have to figure it out fast. And the first thing he was going to have to figure out was just how far he was willing to go.
?
Crushed ice would have been better, but at least it was something—big cubes with sharp edges that Meredith wrapped in the cuff of her sweater sleeve to hold on Lisa’s swollen face. Lisa hadn’t said anything for a half hour, only tensing up when Meredith moved the ice. The whole bottom half of her face was purple and swollen. Looking at it, Meredith was now more afraid of getting punched than getting shot. She wondered if something in Lisa’s face could be broken.
The man was sitting at the table again. He’d given them the ice and then he’d gone into the bathroom. He hadn’t closed the door and she heard him peeing and then the water in the sink ran for a long time. Then he’d come out and gone into another room and changed his clothes. Now he was back at the table with the gun still in front of him. He fingered it absently and appeared lost in thought. If he had wanted to kill them, really wanted to, maybe he would have done it already, Meredith thought. Maybe he would have killed them in the car instead of going to the trouble of bringing them back here. Maybe thinking about things was a good sign.
Outside it was dark. It must have been after 7:00. Her parents would be frantic by now, would have called the police. It made her stomach hurt to think of her parents. She was sorry she had caused them this trouble. They did not deserve this, first Evan, and now this.
Yes, Evan. What she needed was Evan, precisely, always her imagined partner in this kind of scenario. Lisa was a shit partner because she had no experience with peril. She thought she could boss this guy around like he was one of her Parkway North bitches, and it had worked, incredibly, for a couple minutes, until the guy remembered that she was the hostage, and now it wasn’t going to work again. Ever. But Evan would know what to do. He would not have made the mouthy mistake, not have started things off on that note. She needed him to intervene, to rescue her (well, them), and not in any showoff-y Superman way, not bursting in here and wrestling the gun away and beating the guy to a bloody pulp, but something clever, something no one else would think of. He would come dressed as a pizza delivery guy. He would appear to be no threat, due to his dark lens. It would be the dark lens that would gain him access into the apartment, just a foot in, six inches, one step, just enough to catch sight of them out of the corner of his good eye. And then—what? He’d send her some sort of message, somehow. Maybe with the pizza?
“I’m hungry,” Meredith said softly.
“Shut up,” the man said.
?