"Wait a moment. It can't be true." he said to nobody. He was alive and kicking. The writer bended his back and could read the smaller letters:
The renowned novelist Richard Castle (45) passed away in a car accident yesterday, while driving to his own wedding in The Hamptons with police officer Katherine Beckett (34)...
Castle thought Beckett would kill the journalist who had been the courage to post her age. He kept reading...
... His vehicle was found on fire off the road. Accident reconstruction specialists with the Highway Patrol wrote that it was caused by speeding. His burned body...
"Wait. It's impossible. It can't be my body. I'm here. I'm alive!" he said to an imaginary listener.
...his burned body confirmed his identity after being tested for DNA. According to trusted sources, both family and his fiancée ordered a counter analysis directly to forensic headquarters in NY, that only served to corroborate the results...
This was a living hell. DNA tests rigged or maybe true DNA samples that Tyson had taken from him when he was unconscious and he had swapped it. A little piece of burned meat... But what about the dental test? This situation was crazy. Tyson was clever but this could not be happening. No!.
Tyson could cheat everybody but Beckett, right?
Beckett.
Kate, his daughter and his mother thought he was dead. Right now, somewhere outside, they were thinking that he had truly died in a car accident.
Dead.
No! No! No!
Castle felt his breath speeding and a severe headache starting. He was in shock.
Until now, he expected that Kate was out there investigating his kidnapping or whatever this was, and that she would find him soon or later. Shit. Now he was realizing that he was alone in this hell. He had no idea about how Tyson had cheated everyone, he just stuck to the facts: he was alive in the hands of a psychotic murderer and nobody know it.
He shook desperately and pulled the binding ropes. He stopped when the skin around his wrists started bleeding. The writer waited a moment and pulled the string again until he cried out in pain, the blood was dripping down the floor. Castle stopped again. He was loosing his mind because of desperation.
Now he must focus. He needed to escape. He had already done it, dozens of times, when he was looking for inspiration for his novels or just for playing: imagine an impossible situation and get away ingeniously.
He looked around him. Conveyor belts, control panels, a newspaper close to him...
The part of his mind that was always joking thought that this situation was like a video game, a graphic adventure, where the hero would find a way to activate a mechanism, the chains would move and... he would use the newspaper in a surprising way... a surprising way that he can't imagine right now.
Another part of his mind, the more realistic one, the part which Beckett had stimulated after years working together, focused in fill his lungs with air and shout for help.
After a few minutes with no response Castle chose another tactic. He thought: What would Beckett do? And nothing came to his mind. Ok, another question: What would he do if Beckett was with him now? It would be like they were cuffed two years ago...Well, he would try to entertain her. Yeah... And she would order him to shout up and... she would have the great idea of use the dammit control panel to pull down the fucking chain. Obviously.
Well. Castle had an objective now, the only question was 'How?'. Maybe if he swung rhythmically and stretched one leg, he could press with his foot the button Tyson had used. Which one was? Never mind, he would press everything he could. The writer made an attempt but his painful wrists can't support his weight. At this moment he wished to be the athletic Ricky Castle (25).
He thought that maybe standing on tiptoes, he could grab the chain with his hands and support his weight. He made a superhuman effort to stretch. The rehabilitation exercises for his back pain came to his mind, they were child's play compared with this. The writer managed to catch the last link in the chain with his numb fingers. He grabbed with all his strength.
Well, now the hardest thing, support his weight... "OOOOHHHHHMMMMPPPFFF"... Damn Richard Castle (45)!. He had conformed with the 'not-so-chubby' Rick Castle (35). He breathed and puffed, then gritted his teeth and finally he get keep his feet in the air. Now the writer moved his legs slowly forward and backward, puffing with each swing.
Not so bad. After four or five swings, he thought that he was close enough to stretch one of his feet and... when he tried it, Castle heard a crack in his shoulder. His scream of pain could be heard from a mile around. Maybe somebody could heard it, but the writer, groggy because of the ache, vomited and lost consciousness before he could check it.