After about forty-five minutes the car came to a stop. The left rear door opened. Hummel bent low and peered in. He wore mirrored sunglasses and held a long-nosed chrome-plated Colt.45 parallel to his leg.
Behind him was cement flooring. Sepia-tinged darkness. I smelled auto fumes.
He raised his other hand to his crotch and unbound his shorts. “Transfer time, son. Gonna have to cuff you again. Bend forward.”
No mention of the fact that I’d removed the blindfold. I stuffed it behind the seat and did what he asked, the good little prisoner. Hoping compliance would buy me the privilege of vision. But the moment my hands were bound, on went the elastic.
I said, “Where are we going?” Stupid question. Helplessness does that to you.
“For a ride. C’mon, C.T., let’s hustle.”
A door slammed. Trapp’s voice said, “Let’s move this turkey.” Amused. A moment later I smelled Aramis, heard the buzz of his whisper in my ear. “Fucking butler did it. Isn’t that a hoot, faggo?”
“Tsk, tsk,” I said. “Bad language for a born-again.”
Sudden bee-bite pain behind my ear: a finger flick. “Shut the fu-”
“
“All right.”
Double arm-grip. Footsteps echoing. The auto fumes stronger.
An underground parking lot.
Twenty-two paces. Stop. Wait. Mechanical hum. Gears grinding, something sliding, ending with a clang.
Elevator door.
A push forward. Slide shut. Click. Rapid climb. Another push. Out in the heat, the stench of gasoline so powerful I could taste it.
More cement. A loud whoosh, growing louder. Very loud. Gasoline… No, something stronger. An airport smell. Jet fuel.
Propellors. A slow chug picking up speed. Helicopter rotor.
They dragged me forward. I thought of Seaman Cross, driven blindfolded to a landing strip less than an hour from L.A. Flown to Leland Belding’s dome. Somewhere out in the desert.
The rotor noise grew deafening, scrambling my thoughts. Gusts of turbulence slapped my face, plastered my clothes to my body.
“There’s a step here,” Hummel shouted, putting pressure under my elbow, pushing me, lifting me. “Step up, son. There you go- good.”
Climbing. One step, two step. Mother, may I… Half a dozen, still more.
“Keep going,” said Hummel. “Now stop. Put your foot forward. There we go. Good boy.” Hand on my head, pushing down. “Duck, son.”
He placed me in a bucket seat and belted me in. A door slammed. My ears clogged. The noise level dropped a notch but remained loud. I heard radio stutter, a new voice from the front: male, military-flat, saying something to Hummel. Hummel answered back. Planning. Their words drowned out by the rotor.
A moment later, we lifted off with a surge that bounced and buffeted me like a pachinko ball. The copter swayed, rose again, gained stability.
Suspended in midair.
I thought again of Seaman Cross’s nose dive from celebrity to death. Missing notes in a public storage vault. Books recalled. Locked up, raped. Head in the oven time.
The copter kept climbing. I fought the shakes, worked hard at pretending this was an E ride at Disneyland.
Up, up and away.
We’d been traveling for more than two hours by my slow count when more radio noises burped from the front of the cabin and I felt the copter take a drop in altitude.
More radio stutter. One decipherable word: “Roger.”
We dipped for landing. I remembered reading somewhere that copters cruised between 90 and 125 knots. If my counting was near-accurate, that meant a 200- to 250-mile trip. I mentally traced a circle with L.A. at its center. Fresno to Mexico longitudinally. From the Colorado desert to somewhere over the Pacific on the east-west axis.
No shortage of desert in three directions.
Another sharp drop. Moments later we hit solid ground.
“Smooth,” said Hummel. In seconds I felt his breath, hot and spearminted, on my face, heard him grunt as he loosened the belt.
“Enjoy the ride, son?”
“Not bad,” I said, borrowing someone else’s voice- some Milquetoast’s quavering tenor. “But the movie stank.”
He chuckled, took hold of my arm, guided me out of the copter and down.
I stumbled a couple of times. Hummel kept me upright and moving, not breaking half a step.
The old heave-ho march- he’d probably used it on a thousand Vegas drunks.
We walked for a slow-count of four hundred. The air was very hot, very dry. Silent.
“Stay here,” he said, and I heard the horsey clump of his departing boot-steps, then nothing.
I stood there, unguarded, for a three-hundred count. Three hundred more.
Ten minutes. Left to my own devices.
Another five minutes and I started to wonder if he was coming back. Three more and I hoped he was.
His walking away meant escape would be folly. I tried to picture where I was- at the edge of a precipice? Playing target at the end of a shooting range?
Or simply dropped in the middle of nowhere, gift-wrapped brunch for the scorpions and the buzzards.
Donald Neurath’s obituary came to mind… unspecified causes while vacationing in Mexico.
Maybe Hummel was bluffing. I considered moving. Uncertainty locked my joints. I was a man with one foot on a land mine, immobility my life sentence.
I stood there, counting, sweating, trying to maintain. Enduring the molasses drip of time slowed by fear. Finally I forced myself to take a single step forward- a baby step. Mother, may I? Please?
Solid ground. No fireworks.
Another step. I swung one foot out in a slow arc, testing- no tripwires- was inching forward when an electric whine sounded from somewhere behind me.
Stop and go. Whine stop whine.
A golf cart or something like it. Coming closer. Footsteps.
“Cute little dance, son,” said Hummel. “We could use the rain.”
He put me in the cart. It had shallow seats and no roof. We rode under a blazing sun for about fifteen minutes before he stopped, eased me out, and led me through revolving doors into a building air-conditioned to frigidity. We passed through three more doors, each one opening after a series of clicks, then made a quick
