Love Game by Elise Sax Page A

claustrophobia obviously kicking in. A couple of rollers flew out of her hair and beaned Luanda in the head. “Very funny, Rellik,” Ruth hollered. “Open the door!”
    If Rellik was playing a practical joke, he was taking his own sweet time with the punch line. Ruth calmed down long enough to put her ear against the door. But the only sound was the low-level buzzing.
    “This is not happening,” I said. Denial has always been my first line of defense. Unfortunately, my second line is chocolate, and there was none in the panic room. My third line is a lime margarita with extra salt, but I wasn’t seeing any of them around, either.
    Ruth threw her arms up, making her housedress rise to reveal her knobby knees. “Trapped!” she yelled. “Trapped like a rat on a ship!”
    “I’m sensing negative energy,” Luanda singsonged, stating the obvious.
    “I’ll show you negative energy, you man stealer,” Lucy threatened.
    “Really?” I asked Lucy. “You’re going there now? When we’re locked in a tin can?”
    “Why are we locked in the panic room?” Bridget asked.
    “Isn’t it obvious, darlin’?” Lucy responded. “There’s no way to get out.”
    “No, I mean, why would he do that? Why would he lock us up?”
    Bridget had a point. Why would Rellik the flipper lock six people in a panic room in the basement of his remodel? What was the point? Even serial killers killed one at a time, didn’t they?
    “Maybe it’s a mistake,” Bridget said. “Maybe the door closed by accident, and he can’t get it open. It’s a panic room, after all. Maybe he can’t get in. Maybe he’s yelling on the other side, telling us he’s getting help.”
    “Oh,” Ruth said. Her body visibly relaxed, and our communal freak-out went down a few notches. Bridget made a lot of sense. Maybe it took a diehard atheist not to jump to conclusions. I sat down on the cold cement floor with my back up against the wall.
    “I guess we’ll be here awhile,” I said.
    “Call for help on your phone,” Ruth told me. But I didn’t have my phone. My phone was at the bottom of a canyon. Bridget’s phone was dead in Grandma’s kitchen, next to Lucy’s phone, which she had left in her Birkin bag. Ruth was still in her housedress, and I doubted she even owned a cellphone. Our eyes shifted to Remington.
    “Off duty,” he said, and patted his naked, hard six-pack to show he was pocketless.
    “How about you, witch lady?” Lucy asked Luanda. “You got a phone hiding in that getup?”
    “I don’t need phones,” Luanda said. “I commune on a deeper level.”
    “We’re at a pretty deep level now,” Ruth said.
    “I guess we’ll have to be patient,” said Bridget. She took a seat next to me, sitting cross-legged on the hard floor. She wore wool slacks and a cotton sweater with a stain on her chest. Coffee, by the looks of it. Big circles under her eyes were outlined in the red light.
    My legs lay stretched out in front of me, a slip-on sneaker on one foot and the nylon boot on the other poking out of the bottom of Grandma’s tracksuit. We weren’t the most fashionable group. Except for Lucy, we looked like a group of homeless people or perhaps a circus troupe. It occurred to me that the other panic room was the well-dressed room.
    “Do you think the other room has recliners and cable TV?” I asked Bridget.
    “I don’t know. My panic-room experience is limited.”
    “It would be typical to get trapped in the
Silence of the Lambs
room while the other group is lounging in the lap of luxury, free to come and go as they please,” Ruth grumbled.
    We let that thought hang in the air for a minute. “Trapped in the
Silence of the Lambs
room” didn’t sound all that appealing, and, again, the mystery of just what was happening outside and why we were locked in weighed heavily on us. The mounting anxiety was palpable. It wasn’t easy to be patient and even less easy to remain calm.
    I caught Ruth eyeing the door. I hoped she wasn’t