If she was the one sitting freshly dead in a parked car, would she want people to keep passing her by?

She taps on the window. He doesn’t move. She taps again. Nothing. Her stomach drops as she grabs the handle. The door is unlocked. She swings it open and places a few fingers on his neck, her wrist snapping the drool from his chin where it dangles over her arm like a strand of spiderweb. His skin is still warm but there’s no pulse, not there, and she shifts her fingers and . . .

He gasps deeply and pulls back. “What the fuck?” he blurts, blinking heavily to clear his vision. “Hey, hey, what the hell are you doing?” he shouts.

“I . . .”

“You goddamn thief whore,” he says, sounding nothing at all like her granddad—at least nothing like him before the Alzheimer’s set in—and he grabs her hand and pulls her in. “You were trying to . . .”

“I thought . . .”

“Whore!” he shouts, then spits on her. She can smell old man sweat and old man food and his clothes smell of old man and his bony grip is strong. She feels sick. Her back hurts from the angle, her back has hurt pretty much from every angle since the car accident last year, and she reaches for his hand and tries to break his grip.

“You were trying to steal from me,” he says.

“No, no, I work at the . . . the . . .” she says, but the words get caught up in the tears, “coffee and a . . . a scone and I, I thought you . . .” This close his breath is almost hot and humid enough to start her makeup running. She can’t finish what she’s trying to say.

He lets her go and slaps her across the face. Hard. Harder than she’s ever been slapped by anybody in her seventeen years on this earth. Her head twists to the side and her cheek is burning. Then his hands are on her chest, at first she thinks he’s trying to feel her up, but then he’s shoving her and the stars come into view and swirl overhead, and her back is hitting the pavement, her hands behind her breaking the fall.

The car door slams shut. The engine starts. He winds the window down and shouts something else at her before pulling away, but she doesn’t hear him over the car and over the blood rushing in her ears. He races toward the exit, hugging the wall too closely and clipping the edge of the dumpster there. It grinds a long dent into it, and she expects him to pull over and scream at her some more, but he carries on, racing out onto the street where there’s the squeal of another car’s breaks and somebody yells out “Asshole.”

She sits on the ground crying and angry, her handbag next to her, the contents in a puddle across the tarmac. Her first thought is to go inside and tell her boss what happened, but he’d tell her it was her own fault. Another thing about her boss is that everything is always somebody else’s fault, and in this case he would think she was somehow trying to blame him. She gets onto her feet and looks at her palms. The skin has torn on her right palm, the skin stretched up like a balloon. At least there’s no blood.

She wipes at the tears on her face. “Asshole,” she whispers. The warm wind pushes against her and tugs against the torn skin on her palms, puffing it out like small parachutes. She gets her handbag packed and then has to rummage back through it for her keys, but her keys aren’t there. She crouches back down. She was holding her keys when she was walking out to the parking lot, wasn’t she? She isn’t sure, but she starts to turn, then spots them behind the back wheel of a dirty and beaten-up Toyota. She moves over and bends down and reaches for them. At the same time footsteps race toward her. She looks up and can see a man silhouetted against one of the lights, thank God somebody is here to help.

“Thank . . .” is all she can say, then just utter panic as he jumps on top of her.

She has no idea what’s happening. She tries to fight him and he rewards her by pounding her head into the ground so hard the parking lot lights go dark. She can feel the world slipping away. She thinks she is fighting against it, but she isn’t sure because it feels like she’s falling into a dream. Her grandfather smiling at her, the old man in the car, dropping one of the coffees earlier in the day and getting told off from her boss, her boyfriend wanting to spend the night, then she thinks about Satan living in Christchurch, setting up residence and inflicting His friends upon the city before deciding this isn’t even happening, but for all her good hopes the world drifts away.

When the world comes back, it arrives without any reference to time. It’s just like last year when she had the accident. Back then she was hit by a car, but she has no memory of it. Can’t remember the hour before the accident, or the day following it. This time she can remember. She’s lying down on a mattress, but when she rolls to the side the mattress doesn’t end. Her wrists are painfully sore and are tied behind her, and her legs are tied too, they’re connected to whatever is keeping her wrists together. The headache is the worst, the pressure so strong behind her eyes that whatever is covering them is probably holding them in. She’s thirsty and hungry and the air is hot and stale. It must be ninety degrees. Everything is dark. She starts to cry. This isn’t a hospital. She’s tied up to bake in this oven of a room.

Footsteps. A floorboard creaking. A lock disengaging and then a door opens. Somebody approaches her. She can hear breathing. She tries to talk but can’t. She thinks of her parents, her friends, her boyfriend. She thinks of the old man at the café and she makes a promise to herself that if she gets out of this alive she’ll never help anybody again.

“Drink.”

It’s a man’s voice. The pressure is removed from her mouth. There has to be something she can say to get out of this. Something she can say to make him let her go.

“Please, please,” she cries, “please don’t hurt me. I don’t want to be hurt, please, I’m begging you,” she says, the tears soaking her face. She doesn’t think she’s ever cried so much. She knows she’s never been this frightened. This man is going to do bad things to her, and she’s going to have to live with what he’s done to her, it will haunt her and make her insane. The person she was is about to die.

But she will get through this. She will survive. She knows that because, because . . . this was never meant to happen to her. It’s not possible her life is about to end. It doesn’t add up. Doesn’t make sense. She cries harder.

“Please,” she says.

The plastic neck of a bottle is pushed against her lips.

“It’s water,” he says, and he tips it up. It pours into her mouth. She hates him, but the thirst is overpowering and she accepts the drink. He pulls it away before she can swallow more than a few mouthfuls.

“There’ll be more soon,” he says.

“Who, who are you? What are you going to do with me?”

“No questions,” he says, and the pressure is back on her mouth, some form of tape. “You’re going to need to keep your strength,” he tells her. “I have something very special planned for you over the following week,” he tells her, “and you won’t be needing these,” he adds, and she feels a blade slip beneath her clothes and he starts cutting them away.

chapter one

The dust from the exercise yard clings to the hot air. Flies and mosquitoes are trying to use my neck as a landing strip. Giant concrete walls separate me from the sounds coming from the other side where men are ticking through life, kicking a football or playing cards or getting stomped on. Cranes and scaffolding are off to the right, workmen creating additions to a prison that can’t keep up, dirt and cement dust hugging the air like an early winter’s fog, so thick the details are hard to make out, could be a stampede of cows just came through, could be a stampede of prisoners are trying to escape. My clothes smell stale and feel stiff; they’ve been folded and jammed inside a paper bag for the last four months, but they’re sure as hell more comfortable than the prison jumpsuit I worked, slept, and ate in. Sweat and confinement is still on my skin. Heat is radiating up from the blacktop pavement into my feet. When I close my hands, I can feel the metal and concrete walls that would isolate me from the world the same way an amputee can feel a phantom leg. My last four months have been all about isolation. Not just from the world, but from other prisoners too. I’ve spent day after day surrounded by cells full of pedophiles and other pieces of human trash that couldn’t be thrown into the general population for fear of having their throats ripped open. Four months that felt like four years, but it could have been worse. I could have had my teeth smashed out and made to play fetch-the-soap every night. I was an ex-cop in a concrete-and-steel world surrounded by men who hated cops more than they hated each other. I felt nauseous being surrounded by child molesters, but it was the better alternative. Mostly they kept to themselves, spending their days fantasizing about what it was that got them arrested. Fantasizing about getting back to that life.