The telephone rings so loudly, piercing the silence, that they both jump.
He crosses the room and reaches for the telephone, mostly to quiet it, without thinking about who’s on the other end. His thoughts are still a storm of uncertainty, his body reacting by reflex. He puts the earpiece to his ear without taking his eyes off the magician.
But when he hears Iris’s voice, soft and hesitant, his world cracks open wide.
“Virgil?” is all she says at first.
“I’m here,” he says. “It’s me, yes, I’m here. Is everything all right?”
Iris says, “I was afraid you wouldn’t be there. You weren’t there before.”
“I should be home with you.” He sits down in the chair behind the desk, hard, as it hits him. All this time, she’s been waiting, wondering. He owes her more than that. The magician’s story reminds him how fragile this all is, but also how important.
“You should. I was worried.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
He can tell she’s crying but trying to hide it, and that touches him more deeply than he can say. He’s been holding her at arm’s length and it was all wrong. He can spend all his time with Iris in fear that she’ll leave him, or he can spend that time telling her how important she is to him, how much he needs her. Now he knows which he’d rather do.
He says, “Oh, darling, I love you. You must know how much.”
Her voice is soft, and he has to lean in to hear it. He leans hungrily, pressing his ear against the warm black horn-shaped metal.
“What did you find out?” she’s asking. “Tell me. Tell me the doctor can help you. Tell me everything will be all right.”
He can’t find the words to answer her. There’s no guarantee of a future, but how could he say that? He needs to live the life he can live.
Her voice comes down the line again, passionate. “Tell me you’ll be here for me.”
“I will. I will.” He says it and believes it.
***
Arden watches him closely. Watches to make sure that his attention is fully elsewhere. She’ll be fast, but it will take a few long moments. Misdirection. She didn’t create the opportunity, but she’d be a fool if she didn’t take advantage.
It would be better if it were only one pair of cuffs, but she can do it with two. It will just hurt more.
***
Half turned away from the magician with his head down, straining to listen to his wife’s words, Virgil Holt doesn’t hear the cracking, wrenching sounds.
All he hears is Iris, so happy to talk to him, relief plainly evident in her voice. “Thank the good Lord. I want you home,” Iris says. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” he says. “So much.”
“Will you please come home to me?”
He says, “In the morning.”
“Isn’t it morning yet?”
“Almost. Once the sun comes up. I promise. There’s one more thing I have to do first, and when I get home, I’ll tell you all about it.”
Iris says, “That sounds ideal.”
Then he catches a blur of motion off to the side. Sequins and flesh. He sees the blur move and shift, rising up. She’s getting up out of the chair. It’s almost like he’s imagining it. He’s so tired now.
He turns to look at her, and he isn’t imagining it at all. It’s real. She is real, and free.
Both pairs of cuffs swing free from her left wrist. Her right hand looks awful, scraped and bloody, from being shoved against the metal. The thumb hangs off to the side of her hand almost like it isn’t connected at all. And he realizes suddenly, it isn’t. The bone, there’s something wrong with it. The skin is all that’s holding her thumb on.
In training, they told him that there were only two ways the average person could get out of cuffs. One was to pick the lock, which was harder than it seemed. The other was to break the thumb to make the hand small enough to fit through the cuff, which no one was foolish enough to do.
But she’s done it, and she’s not foolish. She just knows her limits, which aren’t the same as other people’s.
“You broke your hand,” he says.
“Whatever it takes,” she says and bolts for the door.
Dropping the telephone and leaping out of the chair, he goes after her. The chair clatters madly, falling to the floor. He grabs for her and catches hold of a fistful of her skirt.
He thinks the locked door will stop her, but even as he has the thought, she has already flung the door open and is lunging out. It should have been locked, but it wasn’t; belatedly he remembers the knock at the door, the click that didn’t come, too late to regret that now. He holds tight. The fabric of the skirt rips with a shriek and comes off in his hand, scattering beads, so he topples over backward onto the floor of the station, landing on her discarded boots, and it takes him a moment to scramble to his feet before he can follow her outside.
It only takes a moment to spot her. She’s easy to see, her long white limbs pale against the darkness, all alone on the empty road. He gathers his strength and gives chase.
She is running fast but barefoot, and he is sure the roughness of the road will slow her down before long. The loose cuffs bounce with every step, striking her bare skin; it must hurt almost as much as her broken thumb. She’s thirty paces ahead of him and he can hear her panting. She’ll never be able to keep up this speed. He’s a good runner, and it should be an easy matter to catch her, but with every step he remembers the bullet, unsure whether it’s drifting away from his spine or toward it, and a strip of sunlight is just beginning to peek over the horizon, and it’s just the two of them sprinting down the gravel road through the last minutes of the night.
He doesn’t count on the third.
A young man with dark hair leans forward out of the darkness, and before Virgil Holt can think anything other than Yes, just how she described him, a fist comes forward and strikes him between the eyes and he goes down like a felled cow at a Chicago slaughterhouse.
Virgil lies in the roadway on his back.
“Sorry,” says the man’s voice, but it is already faint. The man is running away in the same direction as the escaped prisoner. The two sets of footsteps grow quieter and quieter, until Virgil can’t hear them anymore.
Maybe it’s better this way, he thinks. Would he have let her go? He thinks he would, that his belief in her innocence would have overcome his need for the security her capture would win him, but he still isn’t sure. He wonders if he would have really put the key into the lock when it came down to it. If after it all, he could let her get up and walk away.
But the magician was right. Everyone has will. It’s time for him to start using his. He has a wife at home who loves him and wants him with her, and nothing else matters in the same way. He should be with Iris as long as he can, whether that’s a day or a year or a decade. If a slip of a girl can live through more abuses than he can count, through misfortune and abandonment and fire, he can endure this one little knot of metal slumbering under his skin. And he is so exhausted by everything, by the uncertainty of the bullet and the long night and the long story and the girl who has fought so hard against her enemies, including him, that it takes him a long time to rise.
Woozy at first, he pulls himself up to sit and then to stand. He’ll take it one slow step at a time. He looks in the direction he heard the suspects running, east toward the sun, already out of sight. Once he feels strong enough, he puts one foot forward, then the other, and walks west instead, toward Iris, toward home.