'This is not a deal where you get to ask questions, asshole. You tell me what you know, then I decide what to do about it.'
'I don't know anything. I'm a fuck-up. I never score.'
Nix's cell phone rang. He answered. 'Nix.' A pause. 'Yeah, they got him, sir. Zapped him on the Santa Monica Pier. Lately these guys are fuckin' outta control. I have two agents down there now, laying down some counterintelligence. Finding witnesses who saw it and telling them the guy just had an epileptic seizure.
So far so good. But we've got a problem with the big guy. You or Iggy are gonna have to deal with this now. Sammy needs to go home. We need to put him on a plane tomorrow.' Nix paused, then added, 'Okay.. fine. .' Then he disconnected.
'How's Mr. Virtue?' I said, trying to sound self-assured and in control while a little puddle of flop sweat was forming under my ass.
'Okay, Scully. Here's the deal. I want to know what you know, what Broadway knows, what Perry knows, what your wife and Lieutenant Cubio know. You're gonna debrief me completely.'
'None of us knows anything. We're just local cops. We're slow and stupid.'
'Right now, even though you're sitting up and breathing, you're just a corpse that hasn't been buried yet. The question here, as far as you're concerned, is how you die, not if you die.'
'I don't know anything.'
'I think you're going to change your mind and come up with something. You can buy your way out of a very painful ending with a little useful information. Stonewall, and I'm gonna let Sammy fuck with your psyche.'
I looked over and saw the silhouette of Samoyla Petrovitch standing in the doorway, leering with that horrible face.
'Igor, get the box,' Nix said.
A moment later, Iggy Petrovitch returned carrying a black metal suitcase. He set it down and opened it.
There was a strange looking device inside that had all kinds of wires and clips attached.
'What the hell is that?' I asked in panic.
'It's a polygraph,' Nix said. 'We're going to debrief you on the box. That way we know everything you say is righteous.'
'Doesn't look like any polygraph I ever saw.' There was no graph, or stylus, but it had an LD screen on the back.
'State of the art,' he said softly. 'You don't need to give yes or no answers on this. It reads the truth in sentences.' He looked at Igor. 'Hook him up.'
Iggy Petrovitch grabbed my shirt and ripped it open. Buttons flew off and danced across the concrete floor. He spoke to me softly as he hooked up the skin sensors and finger clips. 'You make big mistake coming to our office. There is nothing there. So you will find nothing. You say you make a project of us, now we make a project of you.'
'You can't just kill a cop,' I said.
'Yes we can,' Iggy said softly. 'We do it all the time.' Once the box was connected, he stepped back.
Nix took his place in front of me. 'We're going to start with your partners, Broadway and Perry. How much of this do they know?'
I sat strapped to the chair feeling like a death row inmate.
I'd once taken a weeklong capture and survival course at Fort Bragg where we spent a day working on anti- interrogation techniques and polygraph deception.
I knew if I was going to get through this, I had to lock my mind on something other than my imminent demise because fear of death would cause me to produce excessive amounts of adrenaline. Polygraph machines operate on body chemistry. A lie produces a physical response that speeds the heart and sends an impulse down your nervous system causing sweat and increased skin electricity.
If I could get my mind and emotions to quiet down, I had a better chance of focusing on a deceptive thought that would allow my responses to register as inconclusive on the machine. But everything in me wanted out of here, wanted to survive this, so I wasn't having much luck. I tried a slow breathing technique to bring my heart rate down.
'You are going to be debriefed,' Nix said. 'You should also be advised, I'm not beyond using extreme techniques.'
With Sammy standing in the doorway, I didn't even want to speculate as to what 'extreme techniques' might include.
'Answer me. How much information do Detectives Broadway and Perry have?'
If I talked, I would be signing Roger and Emdee's death sentences. If I didn't talk, I was going to go through a very bad session here. Not a great choice, but since I was probably a lost cause anyway, I knew I'd feel a lot better about going down if I didn't give these guys anything. I set my jaw and said nothing.
'Sammy,' Nix said. The big man moved out of the doorway and over to the black Cadillac. He opened the trunk. A moment later he slammed it shut and walked toward me carrying a short-handled tree limb cutter.
'What the hell is that for?' I asked.
Nix stepped aside and without warning, Petrovitch placed the limb cutter over the index finger of my taped down left hand at the first joint near the fingertip.
'You can't be serious,' I managed to say as the horror of what they were about to do dawned on me.
There was no further discussion.
Sammy simply bore down with the gardening tool and cut off my fingertip. It flew off the end of my hand liked a discarded cigarette butt and hit the floor. A second later, the pain hit.
I howled. My mouth was open and somebody stuffed a rag into it, choking off my screams. I watched in horror as my mutilated finger spurted blood. As my blood mixed with the dried blood under the chair, I wondered how many people before me had sat here and gone through this.
My senses were on overload. When Nix leaned in to speak, I could smell his breath. 'I ask you again,' he said. 'What do Detectives Broadway and Perry know?'
He nodded to Iggy, who pulled the rag out of my mouth.
'Go fuck yourself,' I wheezed through gritted teeth. Nix stepped forward with a roll of surgical tape and a gauze pad. He carefully wrapped and taped my finger stemming the flow of blood so I wouldn't pass out.
'We can get Samoyla to clip you apart one piece at a time,' Nix said. 'How 'bout a toe, or the last two inches of your dick? I can make this last all night.'
I tried to hold on, but I could feel my resolve weakening. Then suddenly, my eyes filled with water, and though I made no sound, I knew I was crying.
'Sammy,' Nix said, and the giant stepped forward, this time, placing the clippers on my right index finger.
'No. . no, don't,' I said. The panic and desperation in my voice surprised me.
'Talk,' Nix said.
'We. . I. . I think Davide Andrazack was an Odessa mob hit. Martin Kobb, too.'
Then the dam broke and I was spilling my guts, telling about the cold hit and how we wanted to use the 5.45 slugs from the PSM automatic to tie both murders to Sammy. I said that Broadway and Perry knew about all this, but that we couldn't prove it without the gun. Basically I puked up our whole case.
When I finished, Nix checked the LD screen on the polygraph, then sat down on the bumper of the car and regarded me carefully. 'You see, you could have saved yourself a lot of pain if you just told me that earlier.'
He speed dialed a number on his cell. After a minute he said, 'Okay, I think we can contain it. Sammy has to ditch his little assassination pistol and he definitely needs to go visit his family in Russia tomorrow. These guys have the gist of a case, but they can't make it without Sammy's gun or a witness. I think we can make this go away.'
There was a long pause as I sat with my head on my chest, feeling lower than I ever had in my life. You like to hold the idea that you can withstand anything-that you can take torture, or the worst man has to offer and not break. But I hadn't been able to do it. I had a much lower threshold than I had imagined. I'd fallen short, and now, even though I was probably not long for this world, I had to live with that uncomfortable knowledge until they killed me.
Nix said into the cell phone, 'Fine. I'll go with them and make sure it's done right.'
