Companions of the Night Read Free

His eyes were blue—she'd noticed that when he'd first looked at her. Dark hair, blue eyes, fair skin. His coloring emphasized the redness of the blood that had spattered his white SUNY Brockport sweatshirt Of course, the shirt wasn't proof that he actually went to the college.
    But he looked like he might Probably a freshman—she guessed he wasn't that much older than she, maybe nineteen, which would put him at about half the age of the two men Kerry had never seen before: Roth, who looked like a football player, and the hair puller, who had the football jacket. N EW Y ORK G IANTS , it read. The laundry owner had to be in his fifties.
    And none of them—
none
of them—fit Kerry's picture of gang members or drug lords or international terrorists.
    The owner went to the pay phone on the wall behind the desk, where he dialed a number without having to look it up. Whoever he was calling must have been asleep or away from the phone, for it took the interval of several rings before he said, "Marcia?...Yeah We've got one of them....At the laundry. Ken's dead I'll explain later.... Marcia, there's no time for that now. Come around the back—the doors're locked." There was a longer pause, during which Kerry thought she was going to faint from fear: somebody was dead already. Then the owner sighed "Of all the ... Well, hurry up about it.... Yeah, I know." He hung up.
    "What now?" the man named Roth asked.
    "She needs to stop for batteries for the video camera."
    "Dimwit." Roth said it with resigned lack of enthusiasm, as though they were used to this Marcia—whoever she was—being a dimwit.
    On the other hand, judging by the look the laundry owner gave Roth, maybe Marcia was Mrs. Quick-Clean.
    "I think," said the New York Giants fan, "we don't need the camera to get started."
    Everybody turned to look at the prisoner.
    Kerry thought he was holding up a lot better than she would have. His eyes, above the gag, looked scared but defiant. She would have been crying and trying to let them know that she was willing to do or say whatever it was they wanted of her. Of course, she thought, that was easier for her to think, since she didn't know
what
they wanted of him.
    "Take the gag off," Roth said.
    "He isn't going to cooperate," New York Giants said. Despite what they'd said earlier, he sounded like he was looking forward to the prisoner not cooperating.
    "I think we should wait for Marcia," the owner suggested "Maybe closer to dawn he'll be more reasonable."
    New York Giants took the gag off anyway.
    He's waiting for him to say something,
Kerry thought,
something like "butthead" or "asshole," and then he's going to beat the hell out of him.
    But the young prisoner didn't lash out at his captors. He spoke, all in a rush, to Kerry: "My name's Ethan Bryne. When you get out of this, tell the police—"
    New York Giants kicked him, hard, in the stomach.
    He doubled over, gasping for breath.
    "Don't give her any of that bull," New York Giants said. "You don't want the police in this any more than we do. Less, even."
    "Tell them—"
    He kicked the boy again, this time in the ribs, since he couldn't get to the stomach. Then he drove his elbow into the kid's back, between his shoulders.
    Kerry put her arms up over her head to avoid seeing. And for protection. "Stop it or I'll scream!" Though she recognized the safest course was not to get involved, Kerry was screaming already—or as close to it as she could get, with her throat constricted by terror. "
Stop it, stop it, stop—
"
    She was expecting that they would kick her, too, and she was expecting it to be in the face, because she'd just finished with her retainers after two and a half years of braces, and getting her teeth broken was close to the worst thing she could imagine after all that.
    But Roth was yelling at New York Giants, "Geez, not in front of the kid," and—even though New York Giants was yelling back, "See, I told you she was one of them"—the laundry owner did nothing