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Jerry?"
    Still no answer.
    Mark leaned over the counter and nearly choked on his own saliva. There, behind the counter, lying prone on the cement
floor, was Jerry Detweiler.

    Mark rushed around the counter and rolled the large man
over. Jerry's empty eyes, like two blank TV screens, bulged
toward the ceiling, mouth open, a trickle of blood curling
around his nostril. Mark pressed his fingers against Jerry's
carotid but felt nothing. No life-giving blood pumping through
the artery. No steady pulse throbbing under his fingertips. A
groan escaped from somewhere deep in Mark's chest, and he
clenched his jaw tight, cursing under his breath.
    Jerry was dead. But it couldn't have happened more than
five minutes ago. Mark had just talked to him, and the drive
here only took seven minutes tops. He reached for the phone
on the counter and punched in 911. Then, with phone jammed
between his ear and shoulder, he placed both hands on Jerry's
barrel chest, one on top of the other, and started compressing.

    RIGHT RAYS OF WARM MORNING SUN SLICED BETWEEN
the planks and landed on Amber, stirring her out of a
deep sleep. She rolled to her back, opened her eyes, and
focused on the rafters high above. A family of bats hung silently,
adjusting their wings to settle in for a day's worth of slumber.
Birds sang a cheerful melody from a nearby tree, but other than
that it was still and quiet.
    Wait a minute. Quiet. No dogs. She rubbed her eyes, sat up,
and scooted over to the wall. Leaning her face against the planks,
she searched the outside for any sign of the Dobermans.
    A gentle breeze rustled through the treetops. Long, cirrus
clouds stretched across a bright sky. The pasture glistened like
glitter as morning light danced on the dew. It was chilly, and
her skin puckered with goose bumps. She remembered the
weatherman saying the overnight temperatures were going to
be in the upper forties all week.
    But all was quiet. Maybe her four-footed prison guards had
wandered away in search of food.
    She had no idea what time it was, but from the low position
of the sun in the sky, she figured it to be about eight or nine.
She did know it was Monday morning, though. She'd been in
the barn for two full days with no sign of her abductor. Judge,
he called himself. Odd. Would he ever come back? Or was he just going to leave her here to dehydrate and rot? Trapped in
this musty old barn-a wooden tomb. The first day, Saturday,
she'd screamed and screamed until her lungs burned and her
voice was hoarse, but no help had come. She truly was in the
middle of nowhere. Where nowhere was, though, she hadn't a
clue. Was she still in Maryland? Did he take her to some remote
farm in West Virginia? Or Pennsylvania? Either way, no matter
where she was, she would surely die here.

    Suddenly, an attempt at escape didn't sound so bad. She
didn't know how much longer she could survive here. She tried
to drink the water and eat the apples sparingly but found it
harder than she thought. Her growling stomach had been very
persistent. The result was less than half a gallon of water and
two apples left. Add that to the fact that she had no toilet paper,
no blankets to keep her warm during the cool nights, a bed of
uncomfortable straw she shared with a nest of mice, and the fact
that the Dobermans, those demon dogs from hell, were always
waiting, and she didn't know how much longer she could hold
on to her sanity.
    She climbed to her feet, ignoring the pounding headache that
only intensified whenever she was upright. The lumps on her
head had gone down but were still very tender. She'd concluded
the first day that she probably had a concussion, and all kinds
of images of blood clots and slipping into a coma swam through
her cloudy mind. When she was sixteen, her brother fell from
the loft of their barn and landed on his head. He was in a coma
for three weeks, then in rehab for three months. The doctors
said the only thing that