The detective who feels sorry for herself might as well write her own funeral oration. The next time the truck halted, I made a ferocious effort and sat up. I twisted so my feet were at right angles to where they’d been. Now I was leaning with my back against the back of the truck. The next time the wheeled thing came at me, it rammed into the soles of my boots. I felt the jolt all the way up my spine. No good, V. I., no good, a few more hits like that and you’ll be paralyzed.

We stopped again. Wherever we were going, we were on city streets, I guessed, with a lot of stop signs, and my captors were obeying traffic laws—they weren’t going to risk ticketing for running a red light.

I fell forward onto my knees and managed to move them, just a little, just enough to crawl forward until I ran into the wheeled thing. The top was about thigh high, and I flung myself onto it as the truck rocked forward again.

It felt like a victory, a triumph as big as scaling Everest. Yes, I was Junko Tabei; what she’d done, scaling the big mountain, didn’t compare with this scrabbling with bound hands and feet on top of something I couldn’t see. I lay across the wheeled thing, my head throbbing, but the pleasure of getting away from the rollers kept me from losing consciousness again.

We made an abrupt hard turn and the truck bounced. The trailer went up and down on its eighteen wheels and then rocked from side to side. I rolled helplessly up and down with the cart, slamming crazily from one end of the truck to the other, trying to hold my head so it wouldn’t bang up and down with the motion.

I knew where we were going. The knocked-over fence, the track through the marsh, I could picture our route, the gray sky and grass and the end, the end in a pit. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the darkness, not wanting to see the end.

When we halted, I lay on my face panting shallowly, feeling the motor rumbling underneath me, too exhausted to brace myself against the next jolt forward. I heard a crash to my right and slowly moved my head to look. The doors to the truck swung open and I was dazzled by light. I thought it was daytime, thought it was the sun, thought I’d go blind.