Down on the field
the Sausages had looked tiny, but up close they were eight feet tall. And
creepy. There was something chilling about Polish’s expressionless sunglasses
and Hot Dog’s wide, painted-on grin. These were not friendly sausages. These
sausages gave off evil vibes. These sausages, I was willing to bet, were the
Janitors!
I
wheeled and tried to run, but they sprang forward and in one synchronized move
plunked Chorizo over my head and slid it down over my body. It was like being
swallowed by a python. I was instantly blind, struggling to breathe. The head
had a kind of interior harness that pinned my arms. The costume was straight
and narrow—sausage shaped, naturally—and the serape shirt bottom
came down nearly to my ankles. I lost my balance and began to pitch forward,
unable to brace myself. Clawing through the harness binding, I punched one arm
through a side opening and flailed wildly for something to hold on to. I latched
onto Hot Dog’s leg and we both toppled to the floor, rolling around, trading
blows, our blubbery foam muffling our grunts of pain. Muffin was barking
insanely from inside the backpack.
Eventually Polish
separated us, hauled me upright, and set me on my feet. “Behave,” he snarled.
“Walk.” At least that’s what I think he said. He sounded as though he was
speaking from inside a sofa. Somehow my costume had twisted around so that now
I could see out through the eyeholes, which were located in Chorizo’s mouth and
provided all the clarity of a Vaseline-smeared window.
Yanking my arms,
they hustled me along so fast my feet left the ground. Customers at the food
stands in the arcade waved and smiled at us, everyone assuming we were putting
on an act for their benefit. We came to an exit door; Polish held it open while
Hot Dog shoved me through into a stairwell. We climbed down endless flights of
stairs, Polish handling the backpack as though it were a sack of potatoes,
roughly jostling Muffin, who was barking furiously. Finally we emerged from the
stairwell onto a loading dock. The green Lincoln was parked there between a
beer truck and a potato chip van. Hot Dog opened the trunk and tossed my
barking backpack in while Polish roughly yanked the Chorizo costume off me.
Before I could open my mouth to scream, he picked me up and tossed me in the
trunk. A moment later the trunk lid slammed down, plunging me into blackness.
I
felt as though I was back in the grave.
Escape tip #25:
Blood is thicker than water,
but slicker than duct tape.
“Tell
me about this key,” ordered Kim Jong, his eyes drilling into mine as he held up
Luis Ruiz’s key.
I was lying
faceup on a rubber-coated conveyer belt, my wrists and ankles strapped to its
surface with duct tape. We were in a vast, echoing room, walled with grimy,
crumbling brick and strewn with old crates and boxes. Dust motes danced like
tiny swarming insects in the fading light. The place smelled smoky, like a
barroom at closing time. Close behind me, an enormous steel contraption threw
off heat, its dull roar punctuated with thunks and clunks. I had a bad feeling
about the roaring thing.
The Janitors,
who’d ditched their Racing Sausages costumes, had hauled me out of the
Lincoln’s trunk and into what appeared to be an abandoned factory, dragging me
along miles of rubble-strewen corridors until we’d reached this room. They’d
roughly patted me down, snatching up Luis Ruiz’s key as well as Labeck’s keys
and all my spare change. Most devastatingly, they’d found the Instamatic
snapshot, the photo that had started this whole bizarre sequence of events.
When they’d
unzipped my backpack, Muffin had burst out like a canine commando, biting,
slashing, and inflicting puncture wounds on both men before they’d finally
managed to wrestle him into a slatted wooden crate. He was still furious,
rampaging around inside his prison snarling threats about how he was going to
rip out their throats at the first opportunity.
“How
did you find me?” I croaked.
Jong smirked. “Oh, we got our ways. A
whole network of snitches. That bratwurst vendor at the ballpark spotted you
and phoned us. So we hustled on over and watched you guys until we decided it
was time to move in. ’Course we can’t have everyone in the stadium seeing us
drag off Mazie Maguire or the crowd’s going to tear us limb from limb.”
“I
was the one thought of the Sausages,” said Custer. “We find the kid in charge
of the costumes, tell him we want to borrow ’em to play a joke, hand him a
couple C-notes, and—bada bing—we’re the Racing Sausages, everybody
loves us! Anything we do, the fans think it’s part of the act.”
He
fished a sack of ballpark nachos out of his jacket pocket, took out a chip and
poked it through a slat in Muffin’s crate, making little kissy sounds. Muffin
lunged like lightning and Custer jerked back just in time to prevent his arm
from being shredded. “Hey—you mad at me, poochie? I wike dogs. Yes I do,
I wike widdle doggies wike you.” He was crooning; it was sickening. Muffin’s
hackles rose. He growled deep in his throat, sounding like an entire troop of
Irish boarhounds.
“Knock off the
kissy-poo,” Jong told him. “You’re supposed to kill the little fucker.”
“Screw
that! I’m gonna keep him. He’ll get to like me. I’ll be his daddy.”
“He’ll
bite your balls off.”
“Maybe
I ought to sell him. Them purse-sized poochies are hot stuff with the babes.
Bet I could get two grand for him. This here is a purebred shih tzu-bichon
frises.”
“I don’t care if
it’s a shits-on-your-shoes. Get over here. You got work to do.”
Reluctantly
Custer left the crate and approached me. “What’s the little dude’s name?”
Tactic three
for staying alive when kidnapped by psycho killers: find common ground.
“Muffin,” I said,
forcing my dry lips to move. “He won’t really bite you. He’s just scared. I
think he likes you.”
Jong wrenched my
head around so that I was facing him. “Luis Ruiz took something that belonged
to our boss. We need to know where he put it.”
Custer chuckled.
“Yeah. We barely started slicing on ol’ Luis before he went into cardiac whatchacallit.
Kicked the bucket before he could tell us anything useful.”
“Who knew he had
a weak heart?” Jong shook his head glumly.
“Took all the fun
out of it,” Custer said, reaching into his pocket and drawing out something
metallic. He touched a button and five inches of razor-edged steel flicked out.
It was a switchblade, sleek, elegant, and evil, eager for blood sacrifice. My
flesh puckered into goose bumps at the sight.
Jong pried my
right fist open. Custer’s bright blue Indian-killer eyes gleamed with
anticipation. He grinned, his teeth orange from nacho gunk
“So where’s the
locker, Mazie?” Jong’s voice sounded like oiled icicles.
“I don’t know.”
My heart was stutter-stepping.
“You’re ly-ing,
Mazie,” Jong singsonged. “That’s going to cost you a fing-er!”
Stall, stall.
Maybe
if I stalled long enough, the cavalry would arrive. Blue-coated soldiers
galloped across my mind, bugles blaring, swords flashing. Oddly enough, the one
leading the cavalry charge was none other than Ben Labeck! He was brandishing a
Ninja sword the size of a guillotine, lopping off heads left and right, freeing
me and sweeping me away in his arms.
The vision
disintegrated. Labeck wasn’t coming to the rescue. Nobody was coming to the
rescue. If I was going to be rescued, I’d have to do it myself.
I took a deep,
quavering breath.
Time for tactic number four, the one inmates used against
the nastiest guards: divide and conquer.
I looked up at
Custer, forcing my stiff, dry lips into a smile. “Did anyone ever tell you that
you look like George Armstrong Custer?”
He paused, ran a
finger over his mustache. “Yeah, all the time. Happens I’m a distant relation.
He was my great-whumpty grand-uncle or something.”
“That’s amazing!”
“Get on with it,”
Jong snarled.
Custer ignored
him. He picked a piece of scrap iron off the floor and began grinding his knife
blade against it with a fingernails-on-blackboard scritch that jangled my
frayed nerves. “People think General Custer was an idiot, getting ambushed by
the Sioux,” Custer said. “But he was actually a real brave guy. He was in the
Civil War, fought at Bull Run.”
“I know,” I said.
“I saw that on the History Channel.”
We were establishing a rapport here.
Custer was starting to like me.
“Yeah, I saw that
show, too,” he said.
“Did you know
George Custer was once a schoolteacher?”
“No shit?”
“It’s true. He
taught in a one-room schoolhouse. I’m a teacher, too.”
“That right? I
had a crush on my sixth-grade teacher.”
Then, without
changing expression, Custer brought the knife slicing down across my unprotected
hand.
I screamed in
shock.
We all stared at
my hand, which was spurting blood from the pads of tissue beneath the fourth
and fifth finger. Miraculously, Ring Man and Pinky were still attached.
“You missed!”
Jong screamed, wheeling on Custer.
“You said
a
finger.
A
means
one.
So I do what you say, shoot for one finger.”
“You did
zero
!
Zero isn’t one, dumbass!”
“She got small
hands. I can’t
do
just one.”
“You’re supposed
to be this hotshot shank artist and you can’t cut off a fucking finger?”
“She moved. You
didn’t tape her good.”
“The fuck I
didn’t.”
“The tape is
loose. She jerked away.”
“A three-year-old
could do better with a butter knife.”
“Stop picking on
him,” I yelled at Jong, thinking this divide and conquer stuff might still
work.
“Shut up,” Jong
growled at me. His small mouth pursed into an anus shape. “I’ve got better ways
to make her squeal.” He knotted his fingers into my hair and yanked my head so
I was looking at him. “Know what this place is, Mazie?”
I was barely able
to see him through the tears blurring my vision. My hand throbbed and burned. I
set my jaw against the pain, trying to slow my panicked breathing.
“It’s a brewery,
ain’t it?” Custer said.
“I wasn’t talking
to
you,
dickbreath,” Jong snapped. He turned back to me. “This place is
a brewery,” he said.
Of
course. This must be the old Brenner brewery, unused for years since the
operations had been switched to the suburbs. The buildings were scheduled for
demolition next year, but at the moment the brewery was conveniently empty, an
ideal site for torture and murder. Bear must have ordered them to use this
place.
“Know what goes
into beer?” Jong asked.
“Some stuff
called
wort,
”
Custer
said.
“I had this beer-making kit once—”
“That was a
rhetorical question,” Jong said, glaring at him. “Rhetorical is when I get to
answer the question myself.
Malt,
that’s what! Malt goes into beer. They
used to roast the malt in the furnaces here. They still got the electricity and
gas turned on in this end of the building. We got malt oven number five turned
on. See?”
He
jerked my head backward, wrenching my neck. I got an upside-down view of the
thing behind me, a great beast of a furnace, towering to the ceiling, sprouting
iron pipes like tentacles. Set into its belly was a square door, its outlines
glowing red-orange. It seemed to have grown hotter in the short time I’d been
strapped to the conveyor. It pounded out heat in pulsing waves.
“That
is one hot mother,” Custer said admiringly. He went over to it and plinked his
index finger against the temperature gauge set into its side.
“Don’t
screw with it. I got it set where it’s supposed to be,” Jong snapped.
“It’s
getting too much gas. You let that thing get out of control, it’s gonna blow.”
“It’s
not out of control, asshole.”
Jong
jerked my head back to face him again. He took a Zippo lighter out of his
pocket and began flicking the flame on and off. “Those malt furnaces get to
twelve hundred degrees, Mazie. Hot as a crematorium.”
Flame
on. Flame off.
I stared at the lighter flame, hypnotized. Rigid with fear,
I strained against the tape holding me to the conveyer, angling my mangled hand
so the blood dribbled toward the tape.
“A body going
into that furnace will burn to ashes—bones and all—in fifteen
minutes,” Jong said. “When they tear this place down, all someone looking
inside an old furnace will see is a heap of greasy ashes. So here comes my
deal, Mazie, baby—onetime offer only—you tell me what I need to
know and I make sure you’re dead
before
you go in the furnace.”
He
kept flicking the Zippo, as though he had a nervous twitch.
Flame on, flame
off.
Why was I so cold, shivering and shaking, when it was Sahara-hot in
this room?
“Let me give you
a little taste.” Jong moved the flame toward my hair, close, closer—and
then the stink of my own burning hair filled my nostrils.