Most of the time Cyrus ignored me, but he would talk to me about movies. He was stunned and pleased to learn that
The Bridge on the River Kwai
and
The Planet of the Apes
had been written by the same man. I remarked that he seemed young to be a fan of such old movies, and he laughed. ”Mama had a boyfriend,“ he said. ”All that guy did was watch HBO and TNT Classics. He never worked, man. He had a job as a bag man for a guy who ran numbers, but that was it. He’d just watch movies and drink. I’d sit there with him all day long, eating fish sticks and watching movies. I got to liking them. Like meditation, you know? That’s why I run them all the time, the way most people listen to music. Movies are my drug, man.“
He showed me a newspaper article with a picture of my father above it. He said Dad had hired private experts to mount a search for me. I asked if I could read the article, but Cyrus refused.
”You just keep cool,“ he said. ”Pretty soon the jury’s gonna convict the doc, and you can go home to your little girl.“
I peered into his eyes, searching for deception. ”Why wouldn’t I be a fool to believe that?“
Cyrus grinned. ”Good question. But you got people on your side you don’t even know about.“
”What do you mean?“
”Let’s just say the word’s out in the community that I might have you. And I’m hearing things about making sure you don’t get hurt. Del Payton’s widow’s making some noise, for one.“
Althea Payton is the widow of the factory worker whose murder I solved five years ago. In the matrix of Natchez society, she’s the equivalent of Coretta Scott King.
”Then there’s the preacher of Mandamus Baptist,“ Cyrus goes on, ”where your maid went to church. Quentin Avery’s put in his two cents’ worth. And then there’s your daddy’s patients, which seems to be about half the black people in this town.“
This gave me some real hope. ”What about Shad Johnson?“
Cyrus laughed hard at that. ”I think he’d be fine if you didn’t make it.“
I laughed with him, trying to foster some sense of comradeship. Cyrus might be a monster when it came to his business, but he seemed sincere about letting me go. If he wasn’t, why hadn’t he killed me the first day? My best strategy was to wait out Drew’s trial and do nothing to upset my captor. Drew and Quentin would have to make it on their own.
As always, when the effects of the heroin began to fade, manic anxiety began building in my mind. But Blue returned and injected me again, and again I felt content to wait out my term in the wilderness.
Soon, Cyrus and Blue left to ”make a run somewhere,“ as they often did when I was on the nod, so I decided to make a trip to the restroom. I threw off the top half of my sleeping bag and forced myself to get up. I told my feet to walk, but they refused. They were asleep. I stood there for a while, waiting for my circulation to normalize. Then I tried to walk again. No progress. I looked down at my feet. They looked strange. They were the wrong color. Almost blue, really—especially the toes. I reached out for the wall to stabilize myself, then slowly rose up and down on my toes. After about a minute of this, the feeling slowly returned to my feet. As my toes woke up, the blue faded away.
I figured it was no big deal.
Chapter
36
I’m going to die here.
I’m going to die because Cyrus White has no real knowledge about the human body, and because in the end—as he told me in the beginning—he doesn’t really care if I survive or not.
Three days ago, as best I can remember, my feet began to burn. Around the same time, my hands and face began to tingle. I wrote this off to the heroin, but the symptoms didn’t abate between fixes. They got steadily worse. Two days ago, when I sat on the commode, the underside of my thighs began to burn. I tried to ignore the stinging pain, but after thirty seconds I had to stand up. A half hour later, I tried again. Same result. My skin couldn’t tolerate the pressure of the toilet seat without intense pain. That’s when the paradox hit me: I was mainlining a powerful painkiller, yet I was feeling pain.
That night, my chin went numb and stayed that way. Then the hair on my head began standing up in different places, like a fear reaction—only I wasn’t afraid. This erection of small groups of hairs coincided with the onset of shooting sensations in my face, much like electrical shocks. They weren’t acutely painful, but they were icy cold and they left numbness in their wake. By morning I had to sit on the commode to urinate, because I got dizzy trying to stand. I couldn’t stay seated long enough to finish, so I squatted over the bowl like a girl in a nasty bathroom.
What the hell was happening to me?
If I stood erect for any length of time, my hands would grow painfully heavy, as though overfilling with blood. When I held them up to my face, I was shocked to see that my palms were dark red with a bluish cast. Only by holding my hands above my head could I get the blood to drain out of them.
Cyrus and Blue thought I was crazy to be afraid, that I was freaking out over normal drug effects. I prayed they were right, but the next time I sat on the john, the tip of my penis began to sting so badly that I had to roll onto the floor. It took several minutes for the pain to ease. When I examined myself, I saw that the tip of my penis was blue. Though the skin eventually pinked again, two tiny black pinpoints remained.
Dead tissue.
My extremities weren’t getting enough blood. As the symptoms worsened, I began to experiment. Every time I stood erect, blood gathered in my feet and hands until they ached and pounded. The veins around my ankles bulged with pressure. Sitting on the john caused the blood in my torso to collect in my abdomen, and also in the only extremity attached to my abdomen. After a few hours of experimenting, I realized what was happening. My extremities were getting adequate arterial flow; the problem was my
veins.
They weren’t carrying away the deoxygenated blood fast enough.
Something was interfering with my venous circulation.
Cyrus quickly tired of hearing me catalog my symptoms. When I showed him my red hands and bulging veins, he shrugged and returned his attention to
Das Boot.
He muttered that he’d never seen heroin cause problems like that, or at least not so quickly. Plus, he assured me, the batch he was using on me was exceptionally pure.
I told him I was probably having an allergic reaction of some kind. An immune reaction, possibly. Something in the heroin was causing inflammation in my blood vessels—probably an adulterant used to cut the drug. Cyrus told me to shut up and let him watch his movie. It was usually best to let him alone, but panic had begun gnawing at my brain. When your skin starts to die before your eyes, your common sense gets a little out of whack.
My plea to be spared further doses of heroin produced exactly the opposite result. When the sound of Cyrus’s little blowtorch filled the room, I scrambled into the corner and put up my fists. Cyrus called in Blue and another guy and ordered them to hold me down, then began prepping the dose. I marshaled my fear and tried to channel it into strength. Something in the heroin was killing me, and one more dose might finish the job. But I was no match for Blue and his companion. Cyrus was still laughing when he popped the needle into my vein.
I screamed in rage and terror, but within ten seconds the Jesus Dust performed its magic. A rush of warmth bathed my soul, and my health concerns suddenly seemed rather academic in nature. The shooting pains in my face became interesting events, like lightning bolts across a summer sky. The black pinpoints of flesh on my penis became decorative tattoos, aboriginal art that some unknown artist had added to my manhood during my sleep. But hours later, as I began to come down, I knew I’d been right about having a reaction to something in the powder.
Whenever I changed position, I felt tidal shifts of blood in my body. When I laid down, my stomach would pound for two or three minutes—not my heart, but my abdominal aorta. When I tried to stand, consciousness flickered, my face went numb, and the inside of my left thigh would throb. My femoral artery was trying desperately to shunt adequate blood through a system crippled by clogged veins. Cyrus laughed as I wavered on my feet, assuming I was still stoned.
I knew then that if I didn’t get out of the factory, I would die in it. I had to find a way out. That, or a way to kill Cyrus and Blue.
I curled into my sleeping bag and waited for them to leave.
Hours later, after Cyrus and Blue disappeared on a run, I struggled to my feet and began to inventory the lab. Despite my pain and fear, I quickly discovered a reason for hope. I didn’t know much about battery production, but I knew a lot more than Cyrus and his crew. The lab contained quite a few leftover parts and other materials—materials that knowledgeable men would not have left lying around. There were boxes of lead plates stacked against one wall, and also rolls of electrical wire. The cart I’d seen when I first awakened in the lab had a trickle-type battery charger sitting on it.
I forced myself to stay calm and proceed methodically.
Ten minutes later, I found two glass bottles among some plastic ones containing floor cleaner. When I removed their cork stoppers, I smelled nothing, but I had a feeling that the cloudy liquid in the bottom of one of the bottles wasn’t water. To test it, I dropped a bit of wire I found on the floor into the bottle.
The wire began to steam. Five minutes later, it was gone.
Sulfuric acid.
The presence of acid in the lab was no big surprise. It’s one of the two main components of lead-acid batteries—the main product of the Triton Battery Company. But how could the acid help me? If I flung it into Cyrus’s eyes, it would cause intense pain, but it wouldn’t stop him from shooting me. Strong acid could burn through the metal lock on the door, but a cursory examination revealed dead bolts in addition to the lock in the doorknob. To eat through those bolts, I’d have to slosh acid through the narrow crack again and again. I didn’t have enough acid to do that, and even if I did, someone outside might notice what I was doing. In the end I used the acid to further my exploration of the lab.
The bank of cabinets that Cyrus used for a TV stand had padlocks on its doors. If the cabinets were locked, I reasoned, there must be something worth protecting inside them. The question was, did they contain something Triton Battery wanted to protect? Or something Cyrus had stashed here? I held the glass bottle over the padlock and carefully dripped sulfuric acid on the curved metal shackle of the lock. The metal hissed and bubbled. It took eight minutes to eat through the shackle. When it was done, I pried the lock from the doors and pulled the cabinet open.
Inside were several lead-acid batteries stacked in a metal frame. The batteries appeared to be wired together in series. Their presence in this room was a violation of federal environmental law on the storage of hazardous materials, but as Quentin Avery would know, such laws are honored more in the breach than the observance. Even the thought of law made me laugh, so comically irrelevant was it to my quest for survival. But what about the batteries? Could they be of use? At first, I thought not. After all, they would be dead after two years in storage. But then I remembered the battery charger on the cart. If the batteries still contained their lead plates and acid, they could be charged. I popped the cell caps off two batteries on top of the array and found fluid inside.
Trying not to get ahead of myself, I sat on the edge of Cyrus’s recliner and stared at the batteries. I felt like I’d gone to sleep and awakened in an episode of
MacGyver.
Only I didn’t have MacGyver’s knowledge of all things mechanical. I had, however, spent a summer working in this plant. On the loading dock, it’s true, but I’d talked to a lot of people in other jobs. Something tickled the back of my brain.
What?
Batteries could be dangerous, of course. Everyone who worked at Triton Battery knew that. But it wasn’t the acid that was dangerous, as most people thought. Acid could burn you, but it couldn’t explode. It wasn’t even flammable. No, the explosive danger came from…
hydrogen.
Every rechargeable battery in the world produces hydrogen gas. Usually it’s produced in small amounts that remain sealed in the battery case. But because of its light molecular weight, hydrogen is more prone to leak than any other gas. Hydrogen is what kills people who get careless when jumping off the dead battery in their car. If they connect the negative jumper cable to the dead battery rather than elsewhere on their car, they create a spark above the battery. And if hydrogen is present—
boom
—it’s lead plates through the skull and a corrosive acid bath.
There were warning signs all over the Triton plant when I worked here.BEWARE! HYDROGEN GAS IS INVISIBLE. I remember a safety guy walking slowly through the loading dock with a straw broom, trying to detect a hydrogen fire. In open air, hydrogen burns almost invisibly, giving off only a faint blue light. The old black guys on the dock called that straw broom the Witches’ Broom.
As I stared at the batteries, the excitement in my chest grew swiftly, but with it came fear. I’d wanted a weapon, and I’d found one. But that weapon was not controllable. It was the kind of weapon that could only be used by someone with nothing to lose.
Someone who was going to die anyway.
As I searched for some other way out of the lab, a realization hit me with nauseating certainty:
You have no alternative. You can wait to die here, or you can kill yourself trying to get out.
That was twelve hours ago.
For the past eleven hours, I’ve lain on my sleeping bag in a worsening state of heroin withdrawal. Cyrus and Blue left the works for me this time—substituting a book of matches for the blowtorch—a merciful gesture in their minds, a salve for the burgeoning junkie. But I can’t use that white powder to ease the aching hunger in my jaw muscles and back. The blood pounding like a second heart in my abdomen tells me that. If my veins continue to become inflamed, I could stroke out or go into cardiac arrest. A more immediate risk might be kidney failure. That’s a common cause of death in people with malignant high blood pressure, which is what my condition resembles.