Michael Prescott - In Dark Places

A couple of feet away lay the man who'd tried to kill her, Detective Tomlinson, LAPD. He was still sprawled on his stomach, unmoving, showing no sign even of a rise and fall of breath. But he was alive. The moaning that issued from his open mouth was proof of that. Maybe he'd pulled free of the syringe before its entire contents could enter his bloodstream. Maybe he was big enough to absorb a dose that would have proven lethal to her. Or maybe he really was dying, but slowly.

She hoped not. She didn't want to take a life, even in self-defense. On the other hand, if he stayed alive, he might eventually awaken from his blackout or coma or whatever it was. And even if he didn't, Gabe or someone else was bound to stop by when Tomlinson failed to return.

One way or the other, she couldn't afford to be here. She had bought herself a reprieve, nothing more.

The cellar door was open. Escape was so close. The only thing holding her back was the handcuff on her wrist, the handcuff Tomlinson had claimed he would unlock.

She blinked with a new thought. Cops really did carry handcuff keys. And Tomlinson must have brought a key with him if he intended to move her after she amp; after he had amp;

She pushed away that idea. What mattered was the key. It had to be somewhere on his person. In one of his pockets, probably.

She moved closer to the unconscious man, as close as the short tether of the handcuff chain would permit, and reached out to the side pocket of his jacket. Some residual fear or distasteperhaps the simple reluctance to touch a body that was so nearly deadmade her hesitate before actually slipping her hand into the pocket.

She shut her eyes and did it. Her fingers closed over something small and metallica coin, not a key. She dug deeper. More spare change. Nothing else. His pants pocket, maybe. She didn't want to touch him there, so close to his groin, his crotch, but then she remembered that she'd already had his private parts in her hand.

Somehow the thought made her smile, and the smile made it easier for her to explore this pocket also. She touched a wad of cloth, probably a handkerchief. A few crumpled dollar bills. That was all.

His belt, then. Sometimes cops wore keys and stuff clipped to a belt. She reached under his jacket, running her hand along the belt, feeling cracked leather, brittle and old, but found no keys, no equipment of any kind.

There was still the other side of his body to check, but she couldn't reach it. She grabbed the dead weight of his arm and tried dragging him toward her.

No use. He weighed easily two hundred pounds. With both hands free and the proper leverage, she might have been able to drag him. As it was, she had no more hope of shifting his position than of breaking the steel chain of the handcuff by sheer strength. And what if the key was in his vest pocket or the pocket of his shirt? She would have to turn him over, onto his back, an impossible task.

"So I'm screwed," she whispered.

Tomlinson groaned in answer.

There was one other possibility. The syringe.

She'd dropped it on the floor by her feet. Picking it up, she studied the slim needle as it caught the flashlight beam. She knew nothing about picking locks except what she'd seen on TV. It looked easy enough on cop shows.

Still, it might be possible to use the needle as a locksmith tool. Insert it in the handcuff's keyhole, try to jigger the thing open.

She gave it a shot, working the cuff on her wrist. She probed with the needle, having no clear idea of what to do.

How did locks work, anyway? She'd never even thought about it. Something about tumblersor was that only the kind of locks they had on safes?

She was a moron. She didn't know the simplest practical thing. She had spent her time learning history and English lit when she should have been teaching herself street skills, survival skills. It was her mom's fault. If Robin hadn't sent her to that private school amp;

"Yeah, blame her," she whispered. "Real mature."

She struggled with the lock for what seemed like a long time. One thing was clear: The TV shows had lied. It was not easy to pick a lock. It was, as far as she could tell, impossibleat least without the right tools.

Finally she gave up. Her efforts had failed. She couldn't find a handcuff key in the detective's clothes, and she couldn't pick the lock. She couldn't do anything except wait for Tomlinson to regain consciousness and kill her, or for Gabe to come back and kill her, or for some other bad guy to drop by and kill her.

The bottom line was that she was going to die. She had delayed her execution for a short time, but it was coming, and she was out of options. She would die in the factory, a dead place suitable for the dead.

Gabe had to get rid of her. And he was no angel. She knew that now. She knew how he'd used her. She knew how stupid she had been. She knew it alltoo late.

Gray circled the office building in the dark, his headlights off, only the parking lights shining. If there were cops staking out the place in a slickback, he needed to know it now, before he tried going inside.

Inside. He shook his head. Fuck, he must be a candidate for the puzzle factory to be even thinking about pulling this shit. Here he was, having just eluded the police back on the boulevard, and what was he doing to celebrate? He was cruising the corner where Doc Robin had her office, so he could commit a little after-hours B 'n' E.

Nuts. That's what it was. He wondered about himself sometimes. The people who thought he was crazy for killing high school girls had gotten it all wrong. There was nothing crazy about some good old-fashioned all-American blood sport. But what he was doing now, risking his freedom for a look in the doc's office amp; that was crazy, no two ways about it.

He was going to do it, though. Hell, he'd already decided. If he changed his mind, it would be like backing down from a fight.

He saw no black-and-whites in the neighborhood. No TV trucks either. He'd been worried that the newspeople might be hanging out here, but they'd gone. When he arrived, he'd seen the last couple of news vans hightailing it out of the area like they had a hot tip.

Where to stash his car was a problem. Couldn't leave it too close to the building. If any cops came along and saw it there, they'd know he was inside for sure. On the other hand, he couldn't park too far away. Might need to make a quick escape. Suppose there was an undercover car in the vicinity. He hadn't spotted any action like that, and he was pretty sure he could sniff a stakeout, but there was a chance someone was waiting for him to return to the scene. If so, he would have to run for it, and his wheels had to be close.

He compromised by parking the Firebird in the alley beside the building. He eased the car against a brick wall, maneuvering it behind a trash bin. The car was invisible from the street. Unless a patrol unit went down the alley itself, there was no way his ride would be spotted.

He left the car unlocked with the key in the ignition, ready to roll. Nobody was going to steal the fucking thing in the next ten minutes, and ten minutes was all the time he planned to spend inside the office building.

With the deputy's gun stuffed in his waistband, he headed out of the alley and crouched by the fence that surrounded the parking lot. He took a minute to suss out the area. If any watchers had eyeballed him driving into the alley, he would expect them to be moving in on him now. He saw no movement, heard no footsteps. More important, he got no sense of trouble. Sensing itthat was a street thing, a knack he'd picked up somewhere along the line. He knew when the boys in blue were around. It wasn't like the short hairs stood up or anything. He just knew.