Free Poison Flower by Thomas Perry Page B

buildings and stopped to listen. There seemed to be streets on two sides, with the whispery sound of cars passing, and ahead of her was the glow of electric light. Jane picked the street away from the lot entrance and headed for it.
    At the end of the passage between buildings, she looked out and saw that the street she'd chosen had no pedestrians and only an occasional car. She looked down at her bolt cutters. One end was a pair of steel shafts with rubberized handles and the other was two steel blades like a parrot's bill. She knew the men had brought the bolt cutters here in case they decided to cut off fingers or toes. Now that she was outside in the air and could see sights that had the dull normalcy of any other city street, the horror of the men's plans struck her in the stomach like a physical sensation. She felt an impulse to drop the bolt cutters. No, she told herself. It was too early to feel, too early to allow herself any weakness. She must think only about what she had to do. The throwaway cell phone she'd had in Los Angeles had gone with her purse in the fight, and so had the false identification she'd brought. She had a sudden thought. Maloney and Gorman must have had cell phones, but she hadn't taken them. How could she expect to live if she didn't think of things like that No, she thought. Taking them would have been foolish. If she'd called the police she'd go to jail forever. And she couldn't wait in Los Angeles for Carey to come and get her. She had to get moving away from this place.
    The old warriors came back to her. If one of them ever managed, after the torture had begun, to see a second chance to fight, how precious that would have been to him. She must not waste this chance. She knelt and rolled up the bottoms of the oversize pants she had taken, pulled out her shirt to cover the gun in her belt, put her bolt cutters under her left arm, then stepped out onto the sidewalk.
    Before her was a four-lane thoroughfare, with a traffic signal hanging on a wire in the center of the intersection, and a long row of industrial buildings and businesses. Across the street she could see a place that sold marble and granite to builders, a fence company, and farther down, a United Rent-all. None of the buildings had any lights on except a few overhead floods on their parking lots.
    Jane kept to the shadows as she walked to the United Rent-all. She stepped to the side of the chain-link fence, where the light was dim, used her bolt cutters to cut five links in the fence, ducked, and entered the lot. There were a few cherry pickers for high work, a Caterpillar tractor, two plain white vans, two white pickups. The doors of the vehicles were all locked.
    She looked at the front of the rental office, then approached and stared in the window. She saw a counter, a clock that said twelve thirty-five, and a door that led to a back room. She could also see an electric-eye alarm system at the doors and a set of metal alarm tapes in the windows. She moved farther back along the building and, in the dim light, saw that the back room was lined with shelves that held every kind of power carpentry tool she had ever seen, plumbers' equipment, and a few electronic boxes that could have been anything. Where was the dim light coming from Overhead. She put her face close to the window and looked up to see that there was a large skylight above the storeroom.
    She kept moving back toward the rear of the building. At the back was a roofed-in area that held a decorative fountain for fancy parties, a collection of lawn chairs and tables, and finally, a row of ladders of all sizes.
    She came closer to the ladders. They were all locked up for the night with a chain running from a rung in the wall, through each of the ladders, and then padlocked to the last one. She fitted her bolt cutters to the chain, set her hands at the very ends of the handles, and cut it. She pulled out an aluminum extension ladder and leaned it against the roof of the