Chapter 14: Real Steel

The cuffs were nothing like the game.

Nico's cuffs had been a weight on his wrist, a chain he could shift and a key he could name.

These bit.

The steel sat flat against the bone, and when he pulled, the ratchet teeth took another notch and the metal closed up a hair tighter.

He stopped pulling.

The pipe was cast iron, about as thick as his forearm, running from a boiler the size of a car up through the beams.

His hands were behind it, locked at the wrists.

He could stand, or sit with his arms stretched back, or kneel.

He knelt, to take the weight off his shoulders, and made himself breathe.

Upstairs the floor creaked once, twice.

Then it was quiet.

They had left him alone, which meant they thought the cuffs would hold.

He ran through what he knew.

The tall man had checked the double lock.

The heavy man had taken his belt and his boot knife and the little penknife from his coat.

They had not looked at the shelf over the furnace.

They had not looked at the thing by the wood stack, which Nico had kicked down the cellar stairs as they dragged him past.

Ray had seen it land.

He had seen it out of the corner of one eye while a man hit him.

A green canvas duffel bag.

Nico's duffel, with the spare key to the cuffs in the side pocket.

Police-pattern cuffs.

A police key opens any police cuff of that pattern, and Vera's men had bought theirs from the same supplier.

Ray knew that as surely as he knew his own name.

He had taught a class on it, in the Army, to a room of twenty-year-olds.

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