AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In the daytime anyway. In the nighttime, I still dreamed of Kid rescuing me.
“Ouch! Goddamn it! Either my bum is getting skinnier, or these springs are getting sharper!” I jumped off Emilie’s cot and rubbed the sore spot on my ass. We had been playing a game of Crazy Eights when the spring shot up and bit me. It had madea boingnoise for real like one of those crazy cartoons, and I couldn’t help but let out a low tense laugh. But Emilie didn’t laugh. Ever since I had tried to unlatch the door with the card trick, she had been quiet and contemplative. She put the cards down, settled with her back against the wall, and closed her eyes. Although it spooked me to see how introspective Emilie had become in the last few hours, she was certainly entitled to her own thoughts. But I worried that she was sinking into a depression beyond what we were already experiencing. We relied on each other for strength to get us through, and to think that she lost or was losing some of that mental fortitude scared me.
Maybe she just needed to rest. The lengths that we went through to keep our minds occupied had become mentally exhausting. And I was feeling like shit again anyway. I gave her knee a gentle squeeze and went over to lie down on my own cot. It seemed like just a few minutes later that I was roused from my sleep.
“Ah! Leedy!” She yelped.
My eyes flew open and my heart beat hard in my chest. When I saw Emilie standing over her cot, safe and sound, I let out a huge sigh of relief. Then I immediately felt annoyed at her. “Damn. Do not scare me again like that!”
She stepped forward and pointed to the cot. “Voila!”
“Voila?”
“I know do!” She practically voiced the words out in song she looked so happy.
“You no do?” I shook my head totally at a loss.
Emilie pointed to the jutted-out spring that had poked me in the ass.
“If you’re tired, you can come rest with me.” I moved myself over on the cot. “But it’s going to be tight,” I added with a grumble.
She grabbed my hand and pulled me down to kneel at her side. Then Emilie began to work to uncoil the long spring. When I sat back on my haunches and stared, Emilie looked at me with frustration.
“Help Leedy!”
“Okay. Okay.” I mumbled still annoyed.
Once the coil was straightened Emilie bent it down, so it was sitting at a right angle. My hands were sore and red from the effort it had taken to uncoil that metal, and hers were worse. But when she began to move the angle clockwise like the turn on a handle, I understood her goal was to tease the straightened part of the coil from the rest of it. It took a while but eventually, the turning action weakened the spring enough so that it snapped off.
The moment it did, Emilie let out a squeal of delight and put her arms around me in a tight hug. Then she dragged me to the door and pulled me down next to her until we were both at eye level to the lock. Then to my unending shock and delighted surprise, Emilie stuck the spring into the lock and began to move it around.
Emilie Leveque, it seemed, was a genius. And also, apparently a minor criminal.
“Is difficult, no?” Emilie frowned after a solid twenty minutes of trying to jimmy the lock.
Okay, so maybe she wasn’t a minor criminal after all but if the spirit was willing… and after all, what the hell did we have to lose?
“Is difficult yes.” I said, “But maybe we can do it.” I grabbed the coil and started to tease it into the lock. It slid in and I could feel it moving around so maybe we could do it with lots of luck.
“My cousin Phillipe. He can do.” Emilie told me with a mixture of pride and frustration in her voice.
“Well, then if Phillipe can do…Emilie and Liddy can surely do.”
“Yes?”
“Hell yes!”
Then the two of us got busy on that lock.
We worked on it for hours. I was becoming more and more angry, frustrated, and furious with myself and with Emilie. I was mad at her for giving me hope and mad at myself for giving in to that hope. Was I really so stupid that I thought that we could Macgyver our way out of this situation? Just to do something to relieve my frustration, I started on another coil with vengeance. I twisted and tugged and turned that coil until it was free and there was a pointed, sharp, piece of strong metal in my hand.
And I wanted to stick it right through Kid Harding’s heart.
Because where the hell was he? And how was it possible that he couldn’t find me? Big bad Silver Sinners, my ass. I knew my girls were up to their necks with Boo and work and they knew I was with Betty so us going a while without talking wouldn’t raise suspicion. Betty wouldn’t want to worry them with this until she had to. But she would have gone to Deke immediately after calling the police, or maybe even before. So, where the hell was Kid and why was I still here? If my crude calculations were correct, our jailers would be coming to get one of us any time now. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe instead of taking us, they would leave us to rot or execute us both here on the spot. And now there was something else bothering me, a growing suspicion that made escaping this hell all the more important.
When I heard a small yelp from Emilie, I turned to look, and damn if that door hadn’t opened.
Except it wasn’t Emilie who opened it.
