C. Box - The Highway

Legerski nodded, agreeing. “You take care of her.”

“When? Tonight?”

“How long do you want her to keep talking?”

Pergram saw the logic in it. “I’ll never get to sleep,” he said, moaning.

“Neither will I,” the trooper said, gesturing to the phone.

“I need to get all the texts and e-mails off of it so I know what she knows and who I’m dealing with. Then I’ll flush the SIM card and trash the phone. There won’t be a trace of Cody Hoyt to be found. Believe me, I know how to do this.”

The Lizard King nodded. Then, softening his voice, “We could go to the basement now and see how those girls are doing. Before the sun comes up and things start happening.”

Legerski started to object, but caught himself. He seemed to be considering the idea. Pergram felt buoyed.

At that second, the phone in Legerski’s hand lit up and a text message chimed. He looked at it and spat a curse, then turned it toward Pergram.

It read, CASSIE: I’M ON MY WAY.

4:56 A.M., Wednesday, November 21

“Do you know what time it is? What day, even?” Gracie asked Danielle.

“I’m not sure,” Danielle said in a soft, slurred voice.

“He took our phones.”

“Yeah.”

Danielle had awakened an hour before and had been sick to her stomach, like Gracie had been. Gracie had cradled her sister, supporting her, while she threw up in the far corner of the room. There was nothing to clean up the mess, though, and the stagnant air was sour.

There was no light and no seepage in the walls to indicate whether it was morning or night. Gracie had become used to the gloom. The single space heater hummed and glowed orange, creating long dark shadows. It didn’t throw out enough light to illuminate the corners of the room but, like an open fire, it had become the center of their world and she found herself staring at it; thin red coils stretching from left to right, the warm air pushed out by a tiny humming fan. Gracie and Danielle sat cross-legged a few feet from the heater, which was positioned next to the ragged woman. She didn’t give any indication that she planned to move from her spot. The concrete beneath them never really warmed up. They shared a thin blanket. Gracie found herself constantly shifting her position as her buttocks and legs got cold. The blanket was too short to double over so both of them could sit on it, and cold seeped through the fabric.

Danielle slumped forward with her arms wrapped around her knees and stared straight ahead. Her face was slack and her mouth was parted. When Gracie reached over and turned her sister’s face toward her, Danielle’s eyes looked frightening-as if there was nothing behind them. And her sister didn’t resist Gracie’s gesture, or blink.

“Danielle?”

No response.

“ Danielle. ”

Danielle leaned back and pulled away. Her sister had always been annoying, but in a superconfident, bubbly way. She’d never seen her like this, even in Yellowstone.

Gracie closed her eyes. The situation they were in seemed like a horrible dream. Her head was foggy and she didn’t feel fully conscious. She wondered if she were in shock, and she preferred the sense of cushion of unreality to what it must really be like to be half-naked and imprisoned in a dark cold room with a frightening one-legged woman.

“I feel sick,” Danielle said, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. “I feel like I could throw up again.” She shot a glance over her shoulder toward the dark corner.

“Try to hold it,” the woman said. “It reeks enough in here as it is.”

The woman’s voice was grating; scratchy and louder than necessary in the small room, as if she could only speak at one level: annoying. It was the kind of harsh voice that penetrated walls.

“Do you know what time it is?” Gracie asked her.

The woman snorted. “You lose track after a while when it’s dark all the time. I don’t have a fucking clue.”

“I’m worried about my sister,” Gracie confessed.

“She’s sick because of the roofies,” the woman said to Gracie. “They usually inject you with roofies. You’ll both be feeling it for a while. My advice is to enjoy it while you can.”

When the woman spoke, her face seemed to collapse in on itself because of her missing teeth.

Gracie nodded, remembering the driver leaning into the car with the needle. Feeling the sharp pain of the needle prick.

“You know,” the woman said, “the date rape drug.”

Gracie nodded, unsure. She feared with Danielle it was something much worse.

Gracie said, “They?”

“What?” the woman asked.

Danielle looked over, confused.

“You said they. We only saw one guy, the truck driver. Are you saying there’s more than him?” The idea terrified her. Not just that there was more than one, but that what the woman suggested was that they were organized. That this wasn’t a first-time thing. That Danielle and her and the woman weren’t the first victims. This room, this terrible place, was a victim factory.

No, Gracie almost yelled out. She couldn’t let it happen to her and her sister. She’d step up and figure out a way to fight back. First, though, she needed more information in order to help form a plan.

“What’s your name?” Gracie asked the woman, taking her off guard.

“What’s your’n?” the woman asked back, cocking her head suspiciously.

“I’m Gracie Sullivan. This is my sister, Danielle.”

“She don’t say much.”

“That isn’t normal, believe me.”

“Danielle and Gracie,” the woman repeated, trying the names out as if they were a foreign language. “I’m Krystyl. That’s spelled K-R-Y-S-T-Y-L. It’s the second y that fucks people up. Krystyl Meecham. I go by my given name, not the name of the asshole I used to be married to.”

Gracie nodded. She’d never met a real person named Krystyl, and thought if she ever did she would probably look like the skeletal one-legged woman a few feet away. But she didn’t say anything, and wanted to get the conversation back to where she’d left it.

“I’m from Salt Lake,” Krystyl said. “Originally. That’s where my family is from. My dad used to say we’re just a tribe of wild-ass redneck jack-Mormons who wouldn’t come to no good. I guess you could look at me and say he was right.”

“You said they,” Gracie prompted.

“Yeah,” Krystyl said, screwing up her face in obvious revulsion. “There’s two of them most of the time, but sometimes there’s three. All of ’em are repulsive fuckers.”

Gracie felt a chill run up her back and it wasn’t from the cold room.

“What … what do they do?” Gracie asked in a whisper.

She couldn’t tell if Krystyl was smiling or grimacing when she said, “What don’t they do? Whatever they can think of. Whatever they want to. You’re just a piece of meat and they do whatever.”

Krystyl sighed and readjusted herself and leaned forward. When she did her body blocked half of the grille panel of the space heater and Gracie felt the absence of heat immediately. “They ream you everywhere. They make you bleed and then they yell at you for bleeding. They put things into you they brought along with them. They’ll laugh and make you feel like a piece of trash until you beg them to just kill you. And they got a camera. They play to the camera.”

Gracie thought Krystyl sounded almost perversely pleased to tell them, and she was physically repelled. Krystyl seemed to have accepted her fate. Gracie couldn’t conceive of giving in.

“I got to admit,” Krystyl said, “I just shut myself off now. I don’t think about what they’re doing to me and I try to think of something nice. I let my mind go far away. Dad used to take us fishing for catfish. I didn’t like it much but that’s what I think about while they’re goin’ at it. Another time and place.”