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two, but he didn’t look nervous. His face was unshaven and patchy. His hands were dirty. His black jeans were ripped in the right knee. His sneakers, canvas high-tops from Converse, had seen better days.
    When the man was only two steps from the car, I pushed the bag up to the window and braced myself. I held my breath. Without breaking stride, the man took the money and swirled toward the van. He hurried his step now. The van’s back doors opened and he leapt in, the door immediately closing behind him. It was as if the van had swallowed him whole.
    The driver gunned the engine. The van sped off and now, for the first time, I realized that there was a back entrance onto a side road. The van shot down it and was gone.
    I was alone.
    I stayed where I was and waited for the cell phone to ring. My heart pounded. My shirt was drenched in sweat. No other car traveled back here. The pavement was cracked. Cardboard boxes jutted out of the garbage Dumpster. Broken bottles littered the ground. My eyes stared hard at the ground, trying to make out the words on faded beer labels.
    Fifteen minutes passed.
    I kept picturing my reunion with my daughter, how I would find her and pick her up and cradle her and hush her with gentle sounds. The cell phone. The cell phone was supposed to ring. That was part of what I was picturing. The phone ringing, the robotic voice giving me instructions. Those were parts one and two. Why wasn’t the damn phone cooperating?
    A Buick Le Sabre pulled into the lot, keeping a decent distance away from me. I did not recognize the driver, but Tickner was in the passenger seat. Our eyes met. I tried to read something in his expression, but he was still pure stoic.
    I stared now at the cell phone, not daring to look away. The tick-tick was back, this time slow and thudding.
    Ten more minutes passed before the phone grudgingly issued its tinny song. I had it to my ear before the sound had a chance to travel.
    â€œHello?” I said.
    Nothing.
    Tickner watched me closely. He gave me a slight nod, though I had no idea why. His driver still had both hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock.
    â€œHello?” I tried again.
    The robotic voice said, “I warned you about contacting the cops.”
    Ice flooded my veins.
    â€œNo second chance.”
    And then the phone went dead.

chapter 6
    There was no escape.
    I longed for the numb. I longed for the comatose state of the hospital. I longed for that IV bag and the free flow of anesthetics. My skin had been torn off. My nerve endings were exposed now. I could feel everything.
    Fear and helplessness overwhelmed me. The fear locked me in a room, while the helplessness—the awful knowing that I had blown it and could do nothing to alleviate my child’s pain—wrapped me in a straitjacket and turned out the lights. I may very well have been losing my mind.
    Days passed in a syrupy haze. Most of the time I sat by the phone—by several phones, actually. My home phone, my cell phone, and the kidnapper’s cell phone. I bought a charger for the kidnapper’s cell, so I could keep it working. I stayed on the couch. The phones sat on my right. I tried to look away, to watch television even, because I remembered that old saying about a watched kettle never boiling. I still stole glances at those damn phones, fearing that they might somehow flee, willing them to ring.
    I tried to mine that supernatural father-daughter connection again, the one that had insisted earlier that Tara was still alive. The pulse was still there, I thought (or at least, made myself believe), beating faintly, the connection now tenuous at best.
    â€œNo second chance . . .”
    To add to my guilt, I had dreamt last night of a woman other than Monica—my old love, Rachel. It was one of those time-and-reality warp dreams, the ones where the world is totally alien and even contradictoryand yet you don’t question any of it. Rachel and I were