Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

One cop will ride the elevator; one will climb the stairs. They will converge on the room.

She backpedals too fast. The laptop slips off, forcing her to stop and balance it for a second time. Her eyes tear up, involuntarily responding to the pain. Despite dragging her injured leg, the groin muscles contract in partnership with her active leg and it’s like someone is pinching and squeezing her stitched wound. There’s no finding a rhythm, no doing this well. She’s a three-legged stool trying to carry a laptop while moving blindly backward.

The elevator dings: she’s not going to reach the toilet. She slides behind a cleaning cart, draws her wounded leg into a tuck, biting down on her lower lip to keep from screaming. The resulting noises tell her the elevator has arrived, the door to the stairs has come open. The swishing of the pressed uniforms implies running. A key turns. A door bangs open.

She wonders what they’ll make of the length of co-ax cable reaching up into the ceiling, or the bloodstained bedding, and the bloodied gauze in the trash can. Does it give her time to try for the toilet? Given the presence of the cleaning cart, is there a custodial closet unlocked and open? It must be closer than the toilet at the end of the corridor. She stays along the wall, screened by the parked cart, and tries for it.

The next sounds are of a struggle. Angry voices, barking out commands, first in Dutch, then in German.

No custodial closet, only doors marked with room numbers.

The struggle stops. Grace won’t make it to the toilet to hide.

She slams her back to the concrete wall, stretches out both legs and opens the laptop, immediately typing, a disgruntled roommate using the hall for privacy.

The two cops—a female and male—assist a pair of German boys whose wrists are tied off with plastic ties. They start for the stairs, then turn and head to the elevator. Both cops look directly at Grace. The male smirks apology. The boys are cussing in German. The skinny one uses an epithet on the female cop that results in the male driving his riot stick into the boy’s lower gut.

He looks in Grace’s direction a second time. A flicker of recognition. Is she making this up? Or has he realized he’s seen her face before?

The elevator doors close. A moment later, several residents poke their heads out of room doors and, seeing only a woman on the floor with a laptop, retreat back inside.

Grace moves the laptop to see the surgical pants she’s wearing are bloodstained at the crotch. Her automatic thought is: menstrual. It takes her several seconds to understand she has reopened the wound.

—

ACUTELY AWARE OF HIS SURROUNDINGS,having absolute confidence the dormitory will possess perimeter security cameras, head held down, Knox uses the pick gun to gain entrance to the adjacent garage. Penlight in his teeth, the semi-automatic in hand, he scans the interior: piled cardboard boxes, a baby stroller, a bike with training wheels. A tarp conceals a Suzuki GSX650. Knox searches it for a spare key, but comes up empty. Works through the junk to the shared wall and puts his ear to it. Takes him a moment to realize he’s hearing a movie or television sound track. Another few seconds to identify the canned laughter and kids’ voices—Disney or Nick. Tommy watches both stations incessantly.

Carefully moving a stack of boxes, one at a time, he clears access to the wall and pushes on it gently. It flexes easily—quarter-inch drywall, as cheap as it comes. He’s assuming the use of vertical metal studs—two-by-fours, a panel of drywall on each side. Like punching through tissue paper.

He wants badly to think this through, as Dulwich would ask him to. Moving too quickly can put the girls of the knot shop in danger, and Fahiz on the run. The responsible option is to put the garage under surveillance, to follow the white van in order to locate the sweatshop, if not Fahiz as well.

Knox squints his eyes closed, takes two powerful strides and lunges his shoulder through both walls. He ends the life of the guard in the chair across the room, trains his weapon on a second man to his left and moves through the hanging chunks of drywall looking wraithlike, covered in white chalk dust.

Ten doe-eyed girls on sleeping bags and bamboo mats look away from a small TV. Not one screams.

The guard goes for a weapon. Wanting to avoid another gunshot, Knox puts the sole of his size 15 double-Es in the man’s gut and manages to send him into the drywall that fronts one of the metal studs. A whoosh of air is expelled. The man can’t breathe, can’t move. He sinks on weakened sticks.

One of the girls grabs the man’s fallen gun and, before Knox can stop her, turns it on her captor and squeezes the trigger. The weapon is safetied; her thumb fails to find the small lever. Knox offers his open hand and the girl surrenders it.

There’s an open box of twelve-inch plastic ties used on the girls at night. Knox binds the fallen man’s wrists behind his back and gags him with a small T-shirt.

Ten expressionless faces stare at him with blank eyes. Sonia is not among them—he’d been secretly hoping to find her. She could be eating dinner at this hour, or arguing with an editor, or floating in a canal, but he’d expected her here. Berna is absent as well. He’d hoped for her, at least.

“You make rugs?” Knox speaks Dutch to the girl who wielded the gun.

She nods.

“Not anymore,” he says.

A bloodied woman drags herself down the hostel’s corridor, a laptop pushed on the carpet ahead of her. As she passes the stairwell door, it rattles. An insignificant vibration to anyone but Grace. The door’s movement indicates another door in the stairway has opened and closed, the airtight vacuum of the space responding to a slight change in pressure.

It might be anyone. Could be a guest leaving at ground level. But Grace’s internal alarm has sounded: it’s the cop. He’s come back for her, the flicker of recognition having blossomed into full suspicion. He takes the stairs knowing the elevator signals his arrival.

She’s no match for him; her only hope, flight. She pulls at the rough, industrial carpet, moving for the elevator. Only as she looks back toward the stairway door does she see the blood smear trailing her, pointing like an arrow.

A plan takes shape, the pieces all there. He last saw her down the hall in front of a different room. The blood arrow points to the elevator. She has to stand, no matter the pain. She claws her way up the concrete-block wall, her wounded leg throbbing and feeling like deadweight. She hops to her door, pain screaming through her. Feeling faint, she manages to get it open and drag her way through just as the stairway door opens, casting light across the hall. She eases the door shut. Locks it, and turns the deadbolt. Looks to the top bunk and the hung ceiling where Knox spliced into the co-ax.

Footfalls speed past her door. She hears a person slapping the elevator call button.

She slips the laptop between the mattress and the bunk bed’s plywood. Snatches her phone from the bed, texts 7-6-7 as she simultaneously climbs the back of the bunk, the pain so intense she can’t stop tears from running.

She looks up at the panels in the ceiling.

She hits SEND.

The solution of one problem brings us face to face with another,’” Dulwich quotes as he surveys a garage cluttered with ten teenage girls, a dead man and another man gagged and bound.