One of the men, the lankier of the two, lazily balanced his chin on his fist in a thinker's pose. But instead of thinking, he looked more like a man trying to find a way to sleep standing up.
The squat hairy man next to him popped his knuckles while he passed an eye over Ayala. This man didn't look at Ayala in the manner of a professional, instead acting more like a school yard bully. He wondered if they spent their day intimidating all the workers like that. Ayala thought the answer to that question might make a good piece of journalism. He put a mental pushpin in his idea board, wishing he could pull his notepad from his fanny pack stowed in the Nissan and jot it down.
The one not trying to sleep gave Ayala a quick eye, but only for a moment before turning back to his partner and attempting to engage the man in whatever conversation Ayala's entrance had interrupted.
Past the man, Ayala stopped. He slowly turned his body with his hands on his hips like he was Superman overlooking a crowd of adoring fans. There was a crowd, but they weren't adoring fans. They were employees dressed like him moving about the floor of the orange juice bottling plant. Ayala's slow turn gave Hatch the needed surveillance information to make her best guess of where he needed to go next, which he heard through his earpiece a moment later.
"To the left, there's a door with that restricted access symbol over it. You see it? The yellow and black one."
He turned to the door, acknowledging he saw it without speaking. Hatch got the message because she continued a moment later.
"That's going to be our best guess now, and we'll go from there. I don't see a lot of activity by that door, so when you approach it, do so confidently, in a manner that won't draw any suspicion."
Ayala moved across the floor, doing his best to look as though he belonged, nobody in the cluster of workers on the main floor noticed or cared. Ten feet from the door, a security guard was dressed in similar colored overalls with a badge attached to his chest that looked like it was taken from a child's costume. He was not armed like the other two at the door. And unlike the two men in black, he did harbor ill will in his eyes. In fact, he gave a nod and slight tip of his hard hat in Ayala's direction, who did likewise in return. The two moved on at an equal pace, but in different directions.
"Excellent," he received Hatch's compliment as he got to the access door.
The red light went to green.
Ayala opened the door and slipped inside as the passing guard disappeared with its closing. Ayala faced a long, narrow hallway, several doors on both sides, and waited for instructions on what to do next.
Twenty-Eight
Angela sat in her dank cell, absorbing the world around her that was ticking by in a timeless fashion as she waited in anticipation of the next time the door opened. The bucket of cold water was now filled with her grime, or at least what she could get off with the dish sponge they'd given her to wash with. The sponge, once yellow, was now smudged a dark brown and set next to the bucket.
Angela had been given specific instructions from Pencil. The bucket and sponge had to be in the corner visible to the door when it first opened. He said they would open the door a crack and if it was not, they would not come in until it was placed in its proper place. Angela didn't want them in the cell, and so did not listen to the instructions.
An hour, or what felt like an hour, had passed since the thin sliver of light cut a path into the dark and Pencil's beady eye poked about, and when he didn't see the bucket and sponge, he shut and locked the door. Before his and Bigfoot's clamoring footsteps faded completely, she heard him yell back to her in English, "You just added an hour. Next time we come back, the bucket better be in the corner or your time will add up to a day. Not sure you're gonna last that long."
Angela knew there was no point in testing the veracity of the lanky captor's threat. So far, he'd proven to be holding strong on the one-hour thing. She thought about trying to figure out a way to attach her new clothes to her old clothes and knot the makeshift rope to the handle of the water pail. Angela had spent much of the time since the door last closed imagining if the rope-bucket-weapon would even work. After running several scenarios through her mind, none in the past hour seemed viable. The game was over. Her last-ditch hope of escape rested in a bucket and a heap of clothes piled in the corner in sight of the door.
She reluctantly accepted that this would be, as Bigfoot put it, the last stop on a long and winding road through this hellish nightmare. She kicked herself for ever listening to the woman at the bar, the woman with the long, jet-black hair who'd convinced her she was special. The same woman who would, after making promises of fame and fortune, walk Angela to the SUV where her kidnappers waited.
The hallway had been quiet since they’d left. Angela remained tucked into a ball, her shins held tight with her arms. With arms wrapped, she began rocking. The hard, foul-smelling floor of the cell waged a continuous battle against the scent of citrus emanating from beyond the door. Angela edged closer to the clean smell but kept a few feet between her and the door.
Facing the coming darkness, she worked to call forth her brightest memory. She had been stubborn, even at nine. Angela had taken a strange vow of silence made in a written decree to her parents in which she stated that from that point forward, she would only communicate through written word, and never speak again. She was young and full of childlike curiosity, and after watching The Little Mermaid, decided to try to understand what life could be like without a voice.
Angela’s maintained her stubbornness for three months. Those were three very long months for her parents, she remembered. Looking back now, it saddened her to think she lost out on three months of speaking with two people she loved more than anything else in the world. What she wouldn't give to have that time back now, knowing deep down, it was likely her parents would never hear her voice again.
But she didn't recall the memory to reflect on the negative, but instead on the moment she cherished as her all-time favorite. It was that drawing. Angela wished to see it one more time.
Her mother was in the kitchen making dinner while a young Angela was drawing in the living room, using the early evening's sunlight to warm her as the first snowflakes of winter began to fall.
She loved to draw on those days, she still did in fact, but it wasn't the memory of the drawing or the setting that made her happy. The reason Angela chose this memory to be her last before she gave herself completely away to despair was that while drawing, her father had been watching, unbeknownst to her. And being the loving, caring man that he was, and still is, wanted to communicate so badly with his daughter who had taken mute.
He crawled up alongside her, choosing not to speak, choosing not to write words, and picked up a piece of scrap paper. In a moment of artistic inspiration, her father, a man who had never drawn a thing before or after, picked up a brown crayon. The minutes of doodling quickly revealed why she had never seen him draw before.
The image was of a gas pump. The pump handle waved and the pump itself had circles for eyes. It looked more like a triple decker upside-down ice cream cone that had been in the sun for about a week, than anything resembling the image her father had drawn. It was the fact that, knowing he couldn't draw, he did, and he did it for the sole purpose of reconnecting with his batty, awkward, nine-year-old-daughter, who'd gone adrift.