“What about me? I’m wounded, too!” Arash shouted after them. They didn’t so much as turn around and apologize. He would have chased them if he didn’t need to stay with the cab.
He fumed for a while. He nearly swore again. But Arash Borhan had nothing if he did not have a sense of practicality. He got in his cab and worked hard at getting it free of the wooden barrier. Metal shrieked and groaned, and the front fender did, in fact, fall off. But eventually he got loose from the pile of broken wood. It felt like the cab could still drive. Well, maybe this was not the end of the world, after all.
Then someone rapped on the glass of his window, and he sighed. In New York, people saw nothing. They wouldn’t care if his cab was half destroyed — they still had places to be. They would want to know if he was available for a new fare. Crazy! They were all crazy. He rolled down the window, prepared to tell some angry businessman that no, he was off duty, that he needed to get back to the garage for repairs.
The nose of a pistol came through the window and tapped Arash on his cheek.
Wonderful. This day was going to get even worse.
“I have no money,” he said. “No money!”
The man holding the pistol seemed to think this was very funny, because he laughed heartily at the thought.
Arash looked at him in horror. This laughing man was wearing a black suit and had the crew cut of a soldier. But much, much worse was the dead look in his eyes. Arash knew that look. It was the look he’d fled when he left Iran. The look of a man who had no conscience. No soul.
“You’ve got a new fare,” the man said, laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. “We’re going to Bed-Stuy.”
“Whatever you say,” Arash told him, because you did not argue with such a man. Not when he was holding a gun.
Still it got worse, though.
It could always get worse.
“Oh no, no,” Arash moaned as the laughing man loaded a dead body into the trunk of the cab. Arash recognized the dead man — it was the maniac who attacked him and forced him to drive his cab here. “No, please, no,” he said, when the laughing man told him to get in the cab and drive.
It was a long way to Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The laughing man kept laughing the whole way. When they reached the address he indicated, Arash saw it was an abandoned warehouse. The roof was falling away, and the interior was full of rat nests and the cardboard shelters of the homeless. This was not a good place, not at all. Arash maneuvered his cab around piles of rubble to reach the very dark heart of it.
“Good. Now get out and open the trunk,” the laughing man said, giggling softly to himself.
“God protect me,” Arash whispered. But he did as he was told. What choice did he have? He looked down at the body curled up in the trunk. Much of the maniac’s head was missing. What did this all mean? What could it mean?
The laughing man pointed at a red plastic gas can in the trunk. The dead man’s hand was resting on it.
“Take that,” the laughing man said, “and pour it all over him. Don’t be stingy.”
There was no doubt in Arash’s mind what was going to happen here. The laughing man was going to make him burn up his own cab. His livelihood, the only possession Arash had that was worth anything. This was terrible.
There was nothing he could do. He opened the gas can and poured it all over the dead man. The fumes of gasoline stung his eyes, but that was not the reason he started crying.
“You’re hurt,” the laughing man said, tapping Arash’s bloody temple with his gun. This he seemed to find only slightly amusing. “This guy? He hurt you?”
Arash nodded. He could find no words.
“Well, that’s a damned shame,” the laughing man said.
Arash looked at him through a haze of tears. Was he going to find sympathy here, in the unlikeliest of places? Arash knew such men as this — soulless men — could act unpredictably at times. They could even be charitable if it suited their whim.
“Get in there with him,” the laughing man said.
“I… what?” Arash asked.
“Get in the trunk with him. Come on. I’m in a hurry.”
“This I will not do,” Arash said.
“Yeah, you will. One way or another.”
Arash was a practical man. He knew what danger he was in, and that he had no options left. He tried to run.
The laughing man shot him in both legs. Then he dragged him back to the cab and threw him in the trunk. The blood and gasoline from the dead man soaked into his clothes, filling his nose and mouth and making it hard to breathe. The pain in his legs was unbearable, and his brain contained nothing but clouds of pure agony.
He could barely see, could feel nothing but pain. But still he heard the laughter.
“I can put a round in your head, so you don’t have to burn alive,” the man said, chuckling to himself. “You want that?”
Arash Borhan was a practical man.
He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded in agreement.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+10:52
“Hop up there,” Julia said.
Chapel looked around the room. It was a small examination room in the back of Julia’s veterinary office. A stainless steel table dominated the space, which was otherwise filled with cabinets full of medical supplies, jars of cotton swabs, dispensers for hand sanitizer, and, of course, pictures of dogs. A flatscreen monitor on one wall displayed a rotating screen saver of pictures of Portuguese water dogs.
“Do you have dogs yourself?” Chapel asked.
“I used to. Now my ex has them,” she told him. “Go on. Up there,” she said, pointing again at the stainless steel table. “It’s clean.”
“You’re divorced?” he asked, still not complying.
“No. Ex-boyfriend. We were together since grad school. It got to the point where I wanted to get married and have children. He disagreed. Now he lives on a farm upstate. With my dogs.” She looked at the flatscreen, which was showing at that moment a dog running across a field, its ears flapping behind it. She rubbed the corner of the screen as if she were petting the animal. “They’re better off up there, of course. They need space to run, and the city air is no good for dogs. Are you going to get on that table, or should I consider this a symptom of mental deterioration?”
Chapel smiled. He did what he was told. The table had clearly been meant to hold the weight of a big dog at most. It creaked under him but it held.
“There are two kinds of head injuries,” she told him, rummaging in a drawer to take out a small flashlight. “The kind that go away on their own, usually pretty quickly, and the kind that kill you. It can be hard to tell them apart. Open your eyes very wide and look straight ahead, not at me.”
Chapel complied. She shone the light into his eyes, dazzling him. He tried to remember the ride over here. He recalled her dragging him out of the gutted department store where he’d left the body of the detainee. He remembered being put in a cab, and then not much more until they’d reached this place. There had been a receptionist out front, but the office was mostly deserted — Julia had canceled all her appointments for the day after finding her mother’s body.
“I’m missing some time,” he said. “I don’t remember the ride here, really.”
“Blackouts like that are common with concussion. Do you feel nauseated?”
“No,” he told her. She brought out a tongue depressor and he obediently opened his mouth.
“Good. Now swallow for me.”
He gulped down some air. “I appreciate this, Doc,” he said.
She shrugged. “Just call me Julia. You may have saved my life, so that seems fair.” She smiled. Her face was only inches away from his. She put a thumb on his left eyelid and pushed it back, staring deep into his eye. When she let go, he had to blink.