The voice intruded on the man's discomfort, wresting his attention away from his self-absorbed contemplation of revenge, mayhem, murder, and onto what they wanted from him now. "Why?" he wanted to know. His voice sounded raspy from lack of use.

The blows came, as he had known they would, but he endured. Each little rebellion, even something as minor as questioning them, not being as fast as they wanted when they told him to do something, was a victory of sorts. The pain he could endure. It was the inactivity, the lack of control of his own destiny, and, finally, missing her, that tormented him.

"Now, sit the fuck up, you bastard, and hold this." Something was thrust into his bruised hands and he realized it was a newspaper.

"Oh, Christ - you don't bloody mean you really do this, do you?" He'd seen it in every B movie and bad television show since he'd been a kid. "Is it today's Morning Herald or something?"

Knuckles across the mouth, splitting his lip. He spat blood and grinned maniacally to where he knew the camera was. "I'm still alive," he announced to anyone who might be watching, listening. "Don't pay them a fuckin' cent."

This time, instead of knuckles, something hard crashed against the side of his head and sent him far down into the darkness.

"You have to help - the police haven't been able to do anything!"

Terry looked at Elizabeth - Libby, his cousin Devon's wife - Dr. Elizabeth Orr - and wished he could help. "Libby," he tried yet again, "I don't do K&R anymore, least of all, right here in Australia. They've got state investigators who do that - let me put you in touch with the bloke who can help you - he's a good man, trained him myself, actually.

Libby leaned across his big, glass topped desk and practically spat at him, "Fuck the state investigators - they don't know anything, either. They think he's gone back to the damned skinheads. You're my only hope, Terry - unless you're telling me you really don't have a bloody clue how to go about getting Devon back for me."

Terry and Elizabeth faced each other across his desk. He was determined not to take on something he sensed would be an abject failure, especially since the last video of Devon had shown he wasn't in that great a shape. He did not, when it came down to it, want to be the one to tell their grandmother, and Devon's wife, that Devon had been removed from them forever.

She seemed to read his thoughts, and she uttered a disgusted sound. "I never thought you were a coward, Terry - not after everything Devon told me about you." She turned, groping blindly for her handbag through a haze of tears that she didn't want him to see. Even now, weeks into this nightmare, she had some pride left. "I hope you can sleep nights," she added.

Long after the door slammed and the echoes of her footsteps had faded, Terry sat staring out the window at the Opera House and Sydney Harbour. Instead of the miraculous view, however, he saw his cousin's bruised and battered face, blindfolded, holding a Sydney newspaper, sneering and taunting whoever was making the tape until they had enough and smashed a wooden truncheon against his head.

Surely, Terry had thought, watching the video over and over, hunting for any clue, surely his cousin was dead by now. No ransom demands had come for almost a week now. The longest they'd gone before that last video was two days. Had they slipped up, hitting him a bit too hard, perhaps killing him? Was he watching his own cousin's death, recorded on a Memorex VCR cassette?

"God damn fucking bloody mother-jumping," he began a litany of cursing, then turned and began punching buttons on the multiline phone on his desk. He clicked in the familiar numbers and waited. When the phone was picked up, he barked unceremoniously, "Dino? Get your ass over here, I need you. Something's come up with my family - yes, that's right, I said with my family. My cousin Devon - the former skinhead, right - he's gotten himself kidnapped for ransom. I've tried to stay out of it, but the cops here have bungled it badly."

Staticky words through the receiver, then, "First flight out," and the line disconnected.

Terry hung up, returning to his contemplation of the Opera House once more. In a minute he would call Gram and tell her he was going to help and to stop sending Libby to shame him into it. First, he needed to gather his brain cells, gird up his loins, and think what the hell to say to her beyond that. Only last night, after he'd refused to get involved yet again, she'd called him a miserable poseur and shown him the door.

Okay, he could handle her now. He punched in her number and listened to the phone ringing on the other end. When she picked up, he spoke before she could hang up on him, "Gram, you can quit sending Libby down here - I'm going to help." He listened, finally interrupting the spate of words coming his way, "Yes, I know you're not happy with me, Gram, but I've explained until I'm blue in the face and since that obviously hasn't sunk in, I'm going to have to do as you ask, much as it gripes me."

He would never let her know that one of the reasons he didn't want to involve Thorne Enterprises was that he figured Devon was already dead and buried somewhere in a shallow grave. He didn't want to hear her cry, for one thing. For another, he didn't want to accept that, not really. He sighed, put on his jacket, and walked out of his office.