whims of the staff. I parked with ten minutes to spare. Being inside the bar was like being punched in the face with music, so I got a bottle of Ybor Gold and took it onto the terrace out front instead.
I drank the beer. Twenty-five minutes later, Warner hadn’t arrived. I got another Gold. I drank that one, too. Warner still didn’t show. The beers were, however, doing what beers do the night after too much wine: making me feel a lot better.
So I had one more. By the time that was done it was coming up on eleven o’clock, and I was done, too. I considered calling Melania again but dismissed the idea. All that would achieve was showing that her boss had no compunction about standing me up again. The blogs all say that people take you at your own estimation, and that’s true, but people sure as hell take you at other people’s estimation as well. Melania didn’t need to know I’d been stood up a second time—not from me, anyway.
I paid my tab and drove carefully home.
When I got to the house, the lights were on Steph’s I’ve-Gone-to-Bed setting. I stood for a moment in the living room, wondering whether I’d gain any material advantage from having a swim. I decided not. Instead, I gently let out the burp that had been building since the last beer and caught a tiny hint of mandarin on my breath.
I went to the kitchen to get a couple of glasses of water for the bedroom—Steph never bothered to do this for herself, but liked it when I did—and tramped upstairs. She was still awake, propped up in bed reading.
“Hey, babe. Success?”
“No. He didn’t show.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So what have you been doing all this time?”
“Waiting.”
“Where?”
I got into bed beside her. “Outside his house, then at Krank’s—where his assistant said he’d be.”
“Kind of a busted evening, hey.”
“Say that again.”
She turned out the light, and rolled onto her side.
CHAPTER SEVEN
His abductor has only one question. The man understands perfectly well what it means. He gets what the guy wants to know. He also realizes that once he answers the question, he’s probably going to die.
And so he hasn’t answered it.
Yet.
He woke several hours before. Consciousness crept upon him slowly, as if unsure how good an idea it would be to get reinvolved. Eventually it stabilized. His eyelids seemed broken, too heavy to lift, and so initially he left them closed. His head felt stodgy, as if after a long evening of turgid red wine. He was aware of businesslike alerts from various other angles of his body, as if they’d collided with something hard. He was not hungry. He was very warm.
These impressions came to him in an orderly procession, as if presented on burgundy-colored velvet cushions held up by tiny, deferential servants. For a moment, in fact, he believed he could actually
Somebody had punched his right thigh, above the knee. Either that, or hit it very hard with a hammer.
This hadn’t occurred recently—it didn’t have the raw edge of the this-just-happened—but the pain was still very large. It was large in a measured, I-can-keep-this-up-forever style.
It was large enough for the man to feel it was probably time to open his eyes.
The first thing he sees is his own lap. His head has, he realizes, been lolling forward. He sees blurred images of gray sweatpants, now mottled, and the crumpled front of a lilac shirt. He recognizes these. They belong to him.
He pulls his head up, dislodging drops of sweat that had been hanging off his nose. His head whirls. After a moment of confusion, things start to fall into place. He sees the bare walls of some octagonal space thirty feet across. There are four blue patches, like windows—except you can’t see through them. Tarpaulins. Around the edges you can see the outside world, where it is bright and very sunny. A flapping sound from the tarps says there’s a light breeze outside, but it’s not reaching the inside. The man can also hear, distantly, the sound of the sea. A standard concrete cinder block, eight by eight by sixteen inches, lies against the wall.
He looks back down. He sees now that an area of his sweatpants above his right knee is stained reddish brown. In parts this stain is very thick, and hard, suggesting that a lot of blood was involved.
Ah. He remembers now.
He was shot.
The wound feels like some eternal moment of impact, but he understands that it maybe still hurts less than it should. It seems likely he’s on some serious kind of painkiller. Possibly he’s also coming out of a dose of something used to knock him out, a narcotic presumably.
None of these are reassuring ideas, especially when the third and most salient detail of his situation finally announces itself. His wrists are tied to the arms of a very heavy wooden chair. They are bound by thick canvas straps. So are his ankles. There’s a similar strap around his waist, and another around his shoulders.
They are all very tight.
He tries to pull himself forward in the chair, but he cannot move more than half an inch. This is enough for him to notice, however, that someone has chalked a question on the gray concrete floor in front of him. The letters are about a foot high, and the chalk is red.
There are just two words:
He tries shouting. His voice is thick and coarse, barely loud enough to rebound off the walls. After a few minutes he’s able to get up to a good loud bellow. Nothing happens except that he gets hotter and starts to panic.
He stops, takes deep breaths, evaluates what he knows. He’s been brought to a building—either a private house or a condo—in the early stages of construction. He gets the feeling he’s on a second or third story, because when he gets a momentary glimpse around the edge of one of the tarps, it only shows sky. The building has been mothballed, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to tarp the window gaps in a building that hasn’t got to first fit stage. The structure has been built out of cinder block that was given a quick cement render. The man in the chair knows about these things, having been involved in many a development in the last decade.
This doesn’t enable him to work out where he is, however, as he’s aware of at least six big condo projects currently in hibernation, waiting for the market to get more frisky. He’s a stakeholder in two of these himself, but he knows this building isn’t in one of those. He’d recognize it. He might be able to work out a little more if he were able to move, but the strapping is irrevocable. If a point comes when he needs to relieve himself—it hasn’t yet, but that might be a temporary aftereffect of whatever drug he was given—he’s going to be doing it where he sits.
The chair is very heavy. He tries rocking from side to side. He could probably
The second, as he’s now realized, is that though there’s floor space in front of him—where the two-word question is written, for example—there’s none to either side. This octagonal space is evidently intended as an observation lounge, designed to be accessed by a showy spiral staircase from below. That staircase isn’t in place yet. From what he can make out, only half the octagon has a floor. The chair has been placed on a stubby rectangular platform that juts out into a space not much larger than the footprint of the chair itself.
Causing the chair to tip over to the left, right, or backward will make it fall at least one story, to crash onto a
