27
The Ladder
Our one escape route was almost as suicidal as sitting on the couch and waiting for the police to barge their way in. Nathan shuffled across a ten-storey drop between the pink apartment block and another building painted custard-yellow.
We were aiming for another open window on the opposite side, the pane smashed out.
Now, the big problem wasn’t the drop itself. But the decrepit wooden ladder we had to climb across to get to the other side.
I didn’t have time to let Nathan cross first, meaning the sagging, spindly ladder had to take our combined weight at the same time.
“Go,” Pablo said to me.
I made my first tentative moves across the ladder, shuffling out over the void on all fours.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Pablo run to join Jenny at the door, hearing the f
