Sisters - By Patricia MacDonald Page 0,90
a minute to read his signals. He wanted her to knock into the cart. For a moment she couldn’t comprehend why he would want her to do this. She looked at him helplessly, shaking her head. The man stood still for a moment, thinking. Then he pretended to lift a glass to his lips. He used his large fingers in a dainty fashion to indicate that it was a glass with a stem. A wine glass. She frowned as he pretended to hurl the glass to the ground. As Alex watched him closely, he pointed from his invisible broken glass to the top of the rolling bar cart. Then it came to her. There were glasses on the cart. He wanted her to knock the glasses off the cart so they would break on the tiled floor. Why? she wondered. She felt confused, the oppressive smell of the gas making it difficult to think.
The man seemed to sense her confusion. He patiently pointed to glasses on the cart and then to himself, pantomiming once again, the act of breaking the glass pane in the door. Suddenly Alex got it. Aha! she thought. She understood. When the glasses fell, their breaking would cover the sound of the door pane breaking. Alex sagged with relief that she finally knew what he meant. When Joy heard the glass break, she would rush into the kitchen. If her attention weren’t diverted, Joy would instantly see Alex’s rescuer opening the door. This diversion of breaking the glasses on the bar cart might give the man a short but necessary window of time to enter the house.
Alex got it. She nodded and shifted her chair slightly. Alex didn’t dare scrape it too far along the floor. If Joy heard that she would be in here in a flash, her lighter at the ready. She just moved a few inches closer to the cart so that she would be in position to knock the glasses off it.
The man raised three fingers. Alex understood. On the count of three. She nodded again. The man grimly mimed a fist bump. Then he raised one finger. Two. Three. On three, Alex used her shoulder, her side and even the back of the chair to crash into the cart.
There was the sound of smashing glass.
Joy came running in, still holding the phone in her hand. ‘What was that?’
Alex looked sheepishly at the broken snifters on the floor.
‘What did you do that for?’ Joy asked.
Alex looked down at the broken glass.
‘You think you’re going to cut yourself loose? Use them as a weapon maybe? Forget it, Alex. You can’t stop me. This is the end for us. Use your time to say your prayers.’ Joy turned her back on Alex and put the phone back to her ear.
‘All right, sweetie,’ Joy said. ‘I have to go now. But I want you to remember how much I love you. Don’t ever forget.’
The man on the porch reached through the door pane and unlocked the door. Alex made as loud a gargling sound as possible in her throat to cover the click of the lock.
The next moments seemed to pass in slow motion. The man pushed the door open as Joy turned and suddenly realized what was happening. Alex saw, as if from underwater, the door banging open. The man, who was wearing a midnight-blue uniform, lunged across the room and tackled Joy before she could react. Her phone skittered across the tiles, landing near Alex.
‘No,’ Joy wailed. ‘Let me go. I have to do this.’
But Mr S. Robinson, for Alex recognized him at last, was huge and strong, and in no mood to be blown sky-high. ‘Sorry, lady. Not gonna happen today.’ He pressed Joy’s face to the floor, straddled her and, with one hand, took his handcuffs off his belt and fastened them around her wrists. Then he stood up, dragging Joy to her feet, and hauled her out onto the porch where he shoved her roughly into a chair. She began to weep, crying out in frustration.
He came back inside, rushed to the stove and turned off the gas. He ran to the windows and threw them open. Finally he picked up Alex, chair and all, and half-dragged, half-carried her out onto the porch, leaving the door wide open. He removed her gag.
Alex gasped and drank in the air. Her lungs ached, but her heart rose up like a balloon. ‘Thank you,’ she gasped.
Joy slid from the chair to the floor,