Got the Look by James Grippando

Author:James Grippando
Format: epub, mobi, pdf

37

Her days were beginning to bleed together.

Mia had struggled desperately to keep track of time. It was a huge challenge, especially since her captor had moved her to this new room. She was no longer blindfolded twenty-four hours a day, but there were no windows, and he allowed the light on for only short periods of time. Perhaps most disorienting of all—and the reason, she surmised, that she’d been moved to another room—was the complete absence of external sounds. Even when she pressed her ear to the floor or wall, she heard nothing to distinguish night from day. It was like living in a soundproof cocoon, no traffic noises outside the building, no television newscasts playing in the next room, not even the sound of water passing through pipes. In the old room, at least, she’d been able to discern something beyond her own four walls, even if it was just a dull, throbbing sound in the background. It was impossible to know what those faint, distant noises might have been, but she’d settled on a construction crew working on a road or a building, which at least let her conjure up images of daylight and civilization. Without those sounds, the best gauge of time was the number of meals her captor served and the number of bathroom breaks. That worked for a while, but he seemed wise to her counting. Meals started to come irregularly, sometimes not until she was famished, other times when she wasn’t hungry at all. She would be forced to endure a long stretch without a bathroom break, and then he’d give her two in a row, almost back to back. If his intention had been to thwart her efforts to keep track of time, it worked. She was now officially clueless as to how long it had been since her abduction.

This guy has kidnapped before, she realized.

She checked her injured toe. A scab was just beginning to form, which told her that it had probably been a few short days since he’d moved her from the old room—since he’d crushed her toe and videotaped her screams. It seemed like weeks.

Can this go on for months? Or even years? She wondered if she would eventually come to measure the passage of time by the hours or days between his sadistic urges, if someday her only frame of reference between attacks might be how long the bruising took to subside. The very idea made her nauseous, and she forced herself not to think such dark thoughts. In a way, she’d been lucky so far. Horrible as it had been, the mangled big toe was her only physical wound. Apart from that one violent episode, her captor seemed content to videotape her sponge-bathing or defecating in a plastic bucket, all exercises in breaking her spirit, total humiliation. She feared, however, that it was only a matter of time before he became bored with the voyeurism and psychological games. He would want something more.

Money, she prayed silently. Lord, let it be money he wants.

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