I knew I was underground, but that was pretty much all I knew.
I had been battered. Dragged out of Free White Housing, kicked with boots and hit with batons, and thrown into an armored car. Pushed through a door and tossed onto an elevator. Same manufacturer, I noted dully, as the one in headquarters. Murdock Elevators of Murdock, Louisiana. Someone shocked me in the midsection with a Taser or stun gun, and I fell down.
Now I was lying on a steel floor. There were tender spots, budding bruises, on my arms and legs. The metal I was on was cold. I was naked. My hands were shackled to each other, my feet were shackled to each other, and a loop of chain was drawn between the two sets of shackles and then through a metal loop bolted to the floor.
I passed in and out of consciousness one or two times.
Who did I think I was? I was just gonna waltz out of there? Ride out shotgun, like the man said?
Who did I think I was?
For a while I kept thinking there was someone else in the room with me. A dark figure, huddled in the corner.
“Is that you?” I even said one time, whispering, reverential, but nobody answered, and when I managed to move my head around, there was no one. I was alone.
When I woke again, though, I could hear someone breathing. Shallow breaths, and a light tapping—tap, tap, tap.
“You up?”
I shifted my weight, and the chains rattled.
The man who spoke, whoever he was, was on the far side of the room. Still making that soft noise, tap, tap, tap.
I turned my head, fought back a rolling spasm of pain, and saw him. He was inside my cage with me, leaning against the thick steel door with his arms crossed, bored. In one hand he held my envelope, Kevin’s envelope, five by seven, with a small bulge in the middle. He was holding it in his right hand and tapping it, tap, tap, tap, against his left bicep.
The man was familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place him. A wide neck, very pale skin. Dull eyes.
“Come on,” he said. “Get up.”
I knew where I’d seen him. The Fountain Diner, my first meal in Indianapolis. Cook’s partner, thick-necked and red-faced. Officer Morris, who wouldn’t know he was on fire unless a pretty girl told him so. I guess someone had told him something.
“Up,” he said again. “Time to go.”
Part Three
North
Compromise is not the worst of sins, but it is the busiest. The only one we’re all of us doing, twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.
—Reverend Kevin Shortley,
On the Urgent Necessities, 1982
You are not alone
I am here with you
Though you’re far away
I am here to stay
—Michael Jackson, “You Are Not Alone,” 1994
1.
One more hotel room.
Motel, maybe. I don’t know. Morris drove for a while, some dull collection of dark hours, with me in the back of the unmarked silver sedan he had shoved me into by the top of my head, and then I saw neon that said VACANCY. I saw a squat one-story building, and then I was at a door with a number 4 on it. One more ugly hotel room, facing one more deserted parking lot, in one more invisible town.
Morris knocked on the door marked 4, and it was Willie Cook who answered—Cook with his shark’s smile, his dancing eyes. He was out of uniform, sleeves rolled up, chewing a piece of gum and holding up his hands as if to welcome an old friend.
“Well, all right,” he said. “You made it.”
“Oh, my God,” said Martha behind him. “Oh, my God…” Her voice reminded me what I must look like, battered and bandaged and chained. Cook, without turning, said, “Now, you stay where you are, baby.”
I watched Martha sit slowly back down on the edge of the bed. I formed my mouth into a smile. It’s fine, I thought, just as loudly as I could. Not as bad as it looks. Morris had taken me out of the leg shackles, at least. At least I had my pants back on.
I let Morris push me into the room, and I stood where he placed me: in front of the rickety little motel table between the kitchen area and the bed area. Cook settled into the table’s one wooden chair and put his feet up, like a working man relaxing at the end of his hard day. There was a gun on the table, too—not his service weapon; some snub-nosed thing—and a laptop showing a screen saver of the Indy 500, colorful race cars moving in patterns on the sleeping monitor.
Morris tossed Cook the envelope, and he caught it, held it a second, then set it down on the table. His big gold class ring made a hollow knock on the cheap wood.
“Well, all right,” he said again. “Nicely done.”
Morris fetched himself a beer before settling with a sigh into an overstuffed chair beside the window. He had the bottle in one hand and his service weapon in the other, pointed at Martha.