FORTY-SEVEN
I
didn’t black out completely. I was pretty fuzzy at first, no doubt about it. But I could hear things, like when you’re having an afternoon nap on the couch but are still distantly aware of things going on in the house around you.
I heard someone say, “Fucker!”
A second voice said, “Got him good.”
Male voices.
After I hit the driveway, I slapped my palms onto the asphalt and woozily tried to push myself up, but a sharp kick to my side hindered my efforts, knocking the wind out of me. I dropped and rolled over onto my side. I could hear pitiful moaning.
That was me.
I opened my eyes, saw them looking down on me like a couple of skyscrapers. Hard to judge how tall they were from my vantage point. They could have been five one and still looked like giants. Stocky builds, thick arms. Their faces remained a mystery. They wore ski masks, so all I could see was their eyes and mouths. One wore a red mask, with knitted snowflakes on it, while the other had pulled a solid blue one down over his face.
Red Mask said, “How do
you
like it, huh? You like that?”
Blue Mask said, “You better check and see if he’s got a gun on him.”
Red Mask said, “Shit, yeah, okay.”
He dropped to his knees, patted me down. “Nothing,” he said.
Just as well I’d decided not to carry the Glock today. I stood a chance of surviving a beating, but a shot to the head was a lot harder to recover from. I made an unsuccessful attempt to punch Red in the face, but he deflected the blow. Then I went for his mask, trying to slip my fingers under the bottom edge. Stubble under his chin rubbed against my fingers like sandpaper.
“Fuck off!” he said, ripping my arm away and hitting me backhanded on the cheek.
“Sit on him,” said Blue. “Hold him down.”
I was straddled. He grabbed my wrists and with his weight pinned them to the pavement. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of duct tape being torn off a roll. Next thing I felt was tape being wound around my ankles, binding my legs together.
“Hold him!”
“I’ve got him. Work fast before someone comes.”
Blue moved up by my head. While his partner crossed my wrists, Blue taped them together. He wound the tape around half a dozen times, did a pretty good job of it. What he hadn’t thought of was, when I brought my arms down, my wrists would be in front of me. That was a lot better than having them bound behind my back. He tore off a couple more strips and slapped them over my mouth.
“Okay, asshole, stand up.”
They had to help me to my feet, then bent me over the hood of my car so I all I could see was metal. Blue held me there while Red ran off. Seconds later, I heard a car start up, then the whining noise of a car backing up speedily. I managed to turn my head enough to see the car back in right behind me. I couldn’t see what make it was. A trunk popped open.
Red jumped out of the car and with Blue’s help they hauled me off the hood and turned me around. Suddenly, I raised my arms in front of me, wrists still crossed, and attempted to bat Blue across the head. Got him, too, but not hard enough to hurt him. That was when he got the roll of tape again, making several turns around me at waist height, pinning my arms down.
Shit.
They shuffled me over to the back of their car, the trunk yawning open to receive me.
“Yeah, see how you like it,” Blue said. The two of them loaded me in. I lay on my side, looking up.
“The fun’s just beginning,” said Red.
And then everything went dark.
* * *
I
heard some muffled chatter through the trunk lid, then both doors opening and closing. We shot out of the driveway like a sprinter coming out of the blocks. I was tossed around, hit my head.
The car accelerated, made several turns, and within five minutes we were traveling steadily at what I guessed to be sixty or more miles per hour. We were on a highway. Most likely the Robert Moses, but heading where, I could only guess at this point.
The dumb-asses had searched me for a gun, but they hadn’t grabbed my phone, which told me I wasn’t exactly dealing with professionals. Although I had to concede they’d been smart enough to get the drop on me.
My cell was still tucked way down in my inside jacket pocket, but it was of little use to me now. I couldn’t get at it, and even if it somehow slipped out and landed on the floor of the trunk, I was going to have a hard time manipulating it.
Most cars made in the last few years are equipped with an escape latch in the trunk that can be pulled from the inside. I’m not sure the manufacturers were thinking primarily of kidnap victims. They just wanted kids who’d accidentally locked themselves in a trunk to be able to get out before they suffocated.
I didn’t know how recent this car was or whether it had such a latch. And even if it did, I didn’t know where it was located. If I could untie myself, I could start patting around trying to find it. I couldn’t exactly roll out while the car was moving, but someone traveling behind us might see the trunk pop up, spot me in here, and call the cops. Failing that, maybe I could get myself into position, wait until the car stopped and they opened the trunk, and see if I could drive my heels into the face of one of these sons of bitches.
The tires hummed on the pavement below me, the noise much more audible than if I’d been behind the wheel. There was a rhythmic
thunk
as we drove over pavement seams. But then the sound changed, became more hollow. We were crossing a bridge.
Then we were back on solid pavement.
I didn’t know where we were going, but I had an inkling. I also had an idea who my two kidnappers were.
They were my chickens coming home to roost.
The car slowed, turned, sped up, turned again. We were off the highway, and had been traveling for about twenty minutes.
My cell rang. I felt it vibrating against my chest. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I wondered if the phone’s ring could be heard inside the car, whether it would prompt them to pull over, pop the trunk, and take it away from me. But I could detect a lot muffled chatting in the two front seats, and when they didn’t pull over, I figured they hadn’t heard it.
I was still struggling with the tape, and while I felt like I was making headway, I wasn’t making it fast enough. If could free my wrists first, I could remove the rest of the tape in seconds. If I could break the tape wrapped around me, I could get my hands to my mouth, peel off that tape, and bite my way through the tape that held my wrists.
The car slowed. We were on gravel now, rubber crunching on stone.
I continued to shift and flex my arms. My body was soaked with sweat. Some of it had run into my eyes and stung like hell.
The car stopped and the engine died. The two doors opened and slammed shut.
“This place is good,” one said.
“I like it.”
“Put your mask back on.”
“Oh yeah.”
Although the engine was now off, I could hear something. A dull kind of roar. Not traffic on a nearby highway. Something else. Something not far away.
I made one last effort to break the tape wrapped around my body.
No joy.
The trunk popped open. A hand slipped under the edge to swing it wide. Red and Blue stood there, looking in on me.
“He’s almost got loose,” Blue said.
“I’ll get the roll.”
He was gone ten seconds. When he returned, the two of them swung my legs out over the bumper, then sat me up, my butt still parked on the trunk floor. Red ran more tape around my body, then added more to my wrists.
Once that was done, they hauled me out of the trunk and stood me up. We were in a wooded area, maybe a park. I blinked a couple of times, having spent the better part of half an hour in the pitch-dark trunk.
I recognized where we were. I had been here a couple of nights ago. It all made sense now. I knew what that roar in the background was.
Water.
Millions upon millions of gallons of it. Moving very, very quickly.
A river. The Niagara River. Just a short distance upstream from the falls.
“You’re going to have to hop,” Blue Mask said. “Either that, or we’re going to have to drag you to the railing.”
“Let’s just drag him,” Red Mask said. “Hopping’s going to take for-fucking-ever.”
And that’s exactly what they decided to do. They each grabbed me under an arm, and hauled me toward the river.
FORTY-EIGHT
“I’ve
been thinking,” the woman says, having unlocked the door and entered the man’s room.
“About what?” he says groggily. He is on the bed, covers pulled back, an open magazine on his chest. He’d fallen asleep reading. He sleeps more and more these days.
“Maybe it would be a good thing for you to get some fresh air.”
He looks at her warily. “Are you serious?”
“Of course. You’ve been cooped up in here so long.”
“I don’t even—I don’t even know how long it is anymore
.”
“The time does kind of fly by,” the woman says. “It seems like only yesterday.”
“I’d love to sit on the porch. Could I sit on the porch?”
“Oh, I was thinking of something much better than that. I was thinking that we could go for a drive. Not just you and me, but all three of us.”
He sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Where would we go?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“I . . . I don’t even know. Just getting out of the house, that’d be so wonderful. Just to go for a drive and—you know what I’d love to do?”
“What?”
“I’d love to go for an ice cream.” He frowns. “But I guess we can’t go any place where I’ll be seen.”
“I don’t know that we need to worry about that. If you could get some ice cream, what kind would you get?”
The man thinks. “I guess chocolate. I’d get chocolate.”
“You could have more than one flavor, you know. You could get a big bowl of it. You could have two or three kinds.”
He looks like a child who’s been promised a trip to Santa’s Village. “What other flavors are there?”
She laughs. “Where to begin? There are so many. Jamoca Almond Fudge. Strawberry. Heavenly Hash. They have ice creams with crumbled-up candy bar in them.”
“They do?”
“Cookies, too.”
He shakes his head, like it’s all too much. “Chocolate. That’s all I want. If I can have three scoops, I’d want them all to be chocolate.”
“It’s settled then,” she says.
“When is this going to happen?” he asks.
“Soon. Very soon. There are just a couple of things to work out.”
The man smiles. It takes a lot out of him. The muscles that are employed to make a person smile have not been used by the man in some time.
“You’ve made my day. That’s great news.” He puts his hands together. “I can almost taste the ice cream on my tongue.”
“You just keep thinking about that,” the woman says as she retreats from the room and relocks the door.
FORTY-NINE
I
put up as much fight as I could.
I writhed and twisted and kicked and made a general pain in the ass of myself. Trouble was, even if I could break free, they still had my ankles bound. I wasn’t going to be able to make a run for it. Best I could hope to do was delay the inevitable.
At one point Red lost his grip on me and I tumbled to one side. Blue couldn’t hold me alone, and I hit the dirt path.
“Dickwad,” Blue said. I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing me or his partner.
I looked back where the car was parked. A red Civic. I was expecting a silver Hyundai, thinking that whoever’d been following me around had to be these two.
They got their hands under my arms again and dragged. I could see where I’d been, but not where I was going. I forced my heels down into the dirt, trying to create more resistance.
The roar of the water grew louder.
Then they stopped, hoisted me up, spun me around, and pushed.
Jesus.
They scared the living shit out of me. They threw me right up against the railing, bars pressing into my knees and chest. Below, and ahead of me, the rushing waters of the Niagara River.
The sound was nearly deafening.
They both got behind me, pinning me to the railing. Red put his mouth to my ear and said, “Pretty fucking scary, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
Then it was Blue’s turn. I could feel his breath on the side of my face. “You know what someone once told me?”
I waited.
“Some asshole once told me that unless you’re going over in a barrel—and even then your chances aren’t good—you’re pretty much fucked. You might try to grab onto a rock before you get to the edge, but you’d hit it so hard, it’d probably kill you anyway.”
He said to Red. “Whaddya think?”
“I guess now is as good a time as any.”
Together, they knelt down, grabbed me around the knees, and lifted.
I made a hell of a noise of protest behind the tape. I forced my hands, bound together in front of me, up slightly, just enough to catch under the uppermost railing.
“Let go!” one of them shouted at me.
I hugged the railing as hard as I could. They dropped me a few inches and tried to hoist me up again, but I managed to do the same thing again.
The water sounded like a low-flying 747.
“Fuck!” Red said.
They put my feet back on the ground. “Turn him around,” Blue said. “We’ll send him over on his back.”
But this time, as they bent down, I pitched myself forward. I hit the ground and rolled.
“Goddamn it!”
They came at me from either side, corralled me, and hauled me back up onto my feet one more time.
“Okay,” said Blue. “This time we just keep hanging on to his arms and lift him over.”
“Asshole.”
Seconds later, we were at the railing again, my back pressed against it. But because the railing came up to our chests, they couldn’t get any leverage with their hands positioned so high on me.
“Okay, this isn’t working,” Blue said. “On three, we get him around the knees and again heave him over.”
They pulled their hands out from under my arms and quickly got them around my knees.
“One . . .”
“Two . . .”
I started bucking and writhing again.
“Three!”
My feet came off the ground. With my back to the railing, there was nothing I could even attempt to grab onto. My head and shoulders began leaning out over the railing.
I thought of Scott.
I guess I’ve mentioned this already, but it bears repeating now. I’m not a particularly religious guy, but in that moment, I thought,
Maybe I’ll see my son again
.
Maybe not in heaven. But in some kind of ethereal place, some otherworldly dimension. I figured, wherever it was, I wouldn’t be long getting there. If I wasn’t dead before I went over the falls, I’d be dead soon after.
I thought of Donna. Wondered if she would ever know what happened to me. Wondered what that would be like, the not knowing.
I’d miss her. At least until she came to join Scott and me.
I was wondering what it would feel like, actually going over. Would you feel that you were falling, or would it be more of a floating sensation? Did you get your name in the history books if you went over as a murder victim, or did that honor go only to daredevils who went of their own free will?
These thoughts and others were flashing through my head at such a speed I can’t tell you what, exactly, I was thinking of when the shot rang out.
Just one shot. And then someone yelling.
“Put him down!”
Augie, I figured. Somehow, he knew. Maybe he’d been coming by the house just as these two clowns grabbed me. Followed us here.
“Shit!” said Red.
“What the—” Blue said.
They didn’t just put me down. They threw me onto the ground, hard. I rolled over, craned my neck around to get a look.
I couldn’t make him out at first. It was dark, and the man was silhouetted against the moonlight. But I could see the gun in his hand.
“You dumb fucks,” he said.
“We weren’t gonna do it!” Blue shouted. “We were just scaring him!”
“That’s right,” Red said. “Just wanted to scare the shit out of him!”
“Didn’t look that way to me.”
He came a few steps closer. Close enough that I could now make out who it was.
It wasn’t Augie.
Almost didn’t recognize him with a gun in his hand. Last time I’d seen him, he was wielding a meat cleaver.