“Do it now.”
“Oh,” Brian said, and looked at the phone. “Right.”
Picking up the receiver, he noticed for the first time that some of the phone’s buttons were much dirtier than the others. His hands were always dirty when he was working here, so, of course, those buttons must be dirtier because the number he most often called was his own home, to speak to Edna.
Yes; he tapped out the sequence on the dirtier buttons, and on the second ring Edna answered: “Three seven five two.”
“Edna, it’s me. I gotta stay and work late tonight.”
“Wha’d, you find a tootsie?”
“Sure. We’re going to Miami Beach together.”
“Without your supper? That’ll be the day.”
“Well, that’s the thing. Dr. Hertzberg, you know, he’s gotta go to a wedding tomorrow down in Pennsylvania, he’s got some real coolant problems here in that clunker he drives, I promised I’d have it for him first thing in the morning.”
“I’m doing chicken curry.”
“It’ll reheat.”
“Men. How late are you gonna be?”
“Maybe nine, ten.”
“Why not just trade him a new car?”
“Listen, I’m not gonna argue with Dr. Hertzberg. He wants to go to that wedding.”
She sighed, long and sincere. “And the man’s a saint, I know, I know. I’m not gonna reheat it with you, I’m gonna eat it when it’s ready and tastes like something.”
He knew she wouldn’t, she’d wait for him, and he found himself hoping very hard she wasn’t going to have to wait forever. Just keep going along with the guy, just be grateful the guy was professional enough he didn’t start blasting away the first time he saw an amateur with a gun, and a little later on tonight that chicken curry, reheated or not reheated, would be the most tasty thing he ever ate in his entire life.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll get there just as soon as I can.”
“Say hello to the good doctor for me.”
“Oh, yeah, I will.”
It wasn’t till he hung up that his hands started to tremble, but then they did a real dance. He was inside this sudden airless bowl here, and he’d made contact with the normal world outside the bowl, and it had shaken him much more than he’d guessed.
The hardcase, standing over by the door, said, “That’s good, you did that fine.”
“Thanks.”
“Now I want the laces out of those boots.”
“Sure,” Brian said, knowing what that meant. It meant, unless something brand-new went wrong, he was going to live through this.
What he wore at the garage, because he was surrounded there by large, heavy, dirty things in motion, some of them also sharp, was steel-cap-reinforced boots, laced up past the ankle. He bent now to strip the laces out of the boots, and the hardcase said, “You got a Closed sign?”
“Over there, tucked in behind that file cabinet.”
He went on stripping out the laces, and then the hardcase said, “You use this sign?”
“Every night.”
“It says ‘Closed’ on one side, ‘Open’ on the other. How come you don’t use the Open side?”
“People know if I’m here.” The truth was, and Brian knew it, he didn’t use the Open side because he thought it sounded like an invitation for a whole lot of people to come in and chat and fill up his day; who needed it?
The hardcase said, “Where do you put it? Window or door?”
“It goes in the bottom right corner of the window. It slips in a space between the glass and the wood there. Here’s the laces.”
“Put them on the desk. Suzanne, get up. Slow! Come over here, pick up one of those laces. Brian, put your hands behind your back. Suzanne, tie his wrists together and then tie them to the metal crossbar on the chair. Go ahead.”
“I don’t know why you’re doing—”
“Now.”
Brian felt the rough movements of the shoelace wrapping around his crossed wrists as the hardcase said, “Not so tight the blood stops, but not loose. I’ll check it when you’re done.”
“I was a Girl Scout,” she said. “I know knots.”
It felt to him she was doing it pretty tight. Had he read in a book somewhere where people could defeat being tied up by tensing certain muscles here and there? Well, maybe somebody could.
“All right, Suzanne, stand straight, wrists crossed behind you.”
“I don’t want somebody to tie me up.”
“I tie you up, or I kill you. Kill you might be easier for both of us, you won’t be tense any more. I only do it this way because it gives the cops less motivation.”
The silence seemed to Brian to go on too long. If the guy shot Suzanne, wouldn’t he have to shoot Brian, too? The cops would already be motivated, anyway.
Suzanne, wake up! Don’t you know what we’ve got here?
But then the silence changed in quality, and it seemed to Brian he could hear the little sounds of the laces moving against flesh. No more discussion followed, no more argument; all to the good.
“All right, Suzanne, you’re gonna sit against the wall here, I’ll help you down. Fine. Legs out straight.”
Brian’s chair was on small casters that didn’t work very well, but he could push himself back from the desk and turn just enough to see Suzanne seated on the floor, back straight, against the side wall, and the hardcase now down on one knee in front of her, tying her ankles with a brand-new set of jumper cables. Finishing, he looked over at Brian and said, “That chair rolls. I don’t like that.”
“I’m sorry,” Brian said.
The hardcase got to his feet and went into the shop, where they heard him rummaging around. When he came back, he had some tools in his hands and a long roll of black electric tape. Putting it all on the desk, not saying anything else now, he moved Brian, chair and all, into the front right corner of the room, next to the door, with Suzanne on the floor to his other side. From here, of course, nobody out by the pumps looking in here would be able to see either of them.
The hardcase checked Brian’s wrists and must have been satisfied, because then he used the electric tape to tie Brian’s white-socked ankles to the chair legs, and used screwdrivers as chocks to keep the casters from moving. Finally he fastened the screwdrivers to the floor and the casters with more electric tape.
He was done with talking, apparently, and barely looked at them any more as he went about his work. Finished, he stepped back to look at what he’d done, while they both mutely watched. Then he went over to the key rack on the back wall, considered the keys and the identifying cards, and chose one. From where he sat, Brian thought he’d picked Jeff Eggleston’s Infiniti, the best car he had here right now.
That was all. The hardcase came over to open the door, figure out the push-button lock arrangement, and, without giving them a glance, he left. From his position, Brian couldn’t tell if he drove off in the Infiniti or Tom Lindahl’s SUV.
“The arrogance of that man!” Suzanne cried. “To do a thing like this to perfect strangers, no excuse, no reason, no— I’ve never seen such a horrible, horrible . . .” She couldn’t seem to figure out how to end the sentence.
“Suzanne,” Brian said, trying to be kindly, to calm her down, “who he is, the situation he’s in, he’s gonna do pretty much what he wants.”
Now Suzanne turned her outrage on Brian, as though it were all his fault (which it almost was). Voice dripping with scorn, caustically she demanded, “Oh, yes? Why? Is he supposed to be somebody famous?”
Brian stared at her. He thought, It’s gonna be a long night.
3
Cal glowered out his side of the windshield as Cory drove the pickup truck. “If he was the guy, we’d be dead now,” he quoted, twisting the words as though he wanted to spit. “That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.”