Page 6 of To Have and to Hold

I reached, the tips of my fingers brushing the plastic handle, but he pulled, wrenching my right arm behind me, muscles and bones crunching together.

A door came into view—metal—handle on this side, and he yanked it open and threw me in.

It happened with such ferociousness that I let out a kick, a slap, before I was airborne and then contained. The door boomed shut, the lock clicked, and the loud scrape of whatever barricade hid this door guaranteed my immediate future.

His ski-masked face burned through my memories and into my present as I sat here, cataloguing, assessing, inventorying my chances. But he hadn’t worn one initially, in the streets of the financial district where he’d taken me. He was bold enough to bare partial features under a hood. Blazing eyes, the lower half of his face covered by a navy scarf—why can I remember the color of his scarf but not his eyes?

Though he was wise enough to take me on one of the coldest nights of winter in February, when most people were cloistered in their heated homes, waiting out the dead freeze.

Please, let there be witnesses.

The fact that I saw half his face—he let me see it—was one of those facts better left unrealized. My instincts had other ideas, clicking away, ticking, prodding, sucking up all my saliva and leaving the dryness of desperation to do the problem solving for me.

I recognized him. Where had I seen him before?

Didn’t matter now. The footsteps above moved to the right, then distanced and muffled as they descended.

He was coming back.