Pamela stood barefoot in the center of the room breathing heavily, her shoulders heaving, her head sunk low. She was terrified, afraid to utter a sound. No one moved.
Even though she kept her eyes on the floor, the captive was able to take in her surroundings for the first time: a small, high-ceilinged room, like so many of the old Victorians of San Francisco. Brightly painted in the upscale neighborhoods, and worn and shabby in the poorer ones, the big wooden houses defined the many faces of the City. This place had the temporary, nondescript quality of a cheap hotel room. It might have been one of those abandoned houses, hastily furnished, with a few items of shabby, secondhand furniture; the kind that gangs of hippy squatters once left boarded up while they happily moved in, coming tog
