I remember thinking that my investigation was a success, that everything was falling into place-on top of me.
Shell hit me again but I maintained consciousness.
"Where's Angelique?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"You don't know what?"
"Where Angelique is."
He struck again, doused me with water again.
I was getting colder. The iciness kept Patrick in my mind.
"You have to know her," Shell said. "You knew about me."
"I met her," I told him, "in a coffee shop. She told me her problem and I agreed to look into it."
He hit me twice.
"I followed the line of ownership for the Leontine Building…"
He hit me.
"… and found out that Regents Bank owned it. I figured that Shell, you, worked for Regents."
He hit me again.
I've been in boxing gyms regularly since the age of fourteen. I've been hit two hundred times in an evening by light heavyweights and heavyweights who know how to hit. I might've looked like shit, but you can't judge a book by its cover, or a boxer by his cuts.
"Where is she?" Shell asked.
I realized that my mind had been wandering, sent on its circuitous route by Shell's power shots.
"I don't know where she is."
"Then how did you know to come to Regents?"
"She told me about you, at least somebody with your name, about meeting this man at his office in the Leontine. I'm a detective. I followed it down from there."
Mammoth came over and hit me then. That threw the chair over and me into dreamland.
When I awoke I was sitting up again. Mammoth had moved back toward the fake-log wall, and the fireplace was blazing but throwing off very little heat.
"Where is she?" Shell asked from somewhere off to the left.
I turned to him.
"Don't let that guy hit me again," I said. That was the beginning of my plan. It wasn't much of a strategy but it was mine and I was sticking to it.
"Then tell me where she is."
"She had money on her," I said. "Three thousand dollars. She was going to take a bus out west. I told her to hang around, to go to a hotel and call my office after five days. She gave me five hundred and went to ground."
I thought my nose was broken after his next punch. It wasn't, but it sure felt like it.
"Where is she?"
THE BEATING WENT ON for a quite a while. It got harder and faster when they realized that I was going to hang tough. Unluckily for me these guys weren't sadomasochists. I say unluckily because if they had pulled out a knife, or even just a burning cigarette, I could have put my plan into action. But all they were doing was hitting me. I didn't want to make it too easy on them so I took the punishment until I figured they'd hit me enough to have broken someone not trained in the fistic arts.
I once studied the Method under a wonderful thespian named Anja Klieger. I had no intention of going onstage, but I figured that my profession demanded believable emotional pretense from time to time.
Anja had taught me to remember a time when I had the feeling that the character I was portraying felt.
I thought about my father walking out the door with his army-surplus duffel bag. I remembered his last hug and then the months of my mother's decline. At last I thought about a boy entering puberty, alone in the world for no reason that made sense.
I wasn't in a cabin in the woods. I wasn't being beaten by hard men. I was a child bereft of the only love he'd known. The tears began to flow and I cried for the first time in over a decade.
"I'll tell you," I said. "Just stop it. Stop it."
"Where's the girl?" Shell asked. He was a little winded from the exertions of beating me. I'm sure his knuckles were sore.
"I don't know where she is but I know who has her."
"Who?"
"A guy named Brennan. I told him that I'd call when it was safe."
"What's the number?"
I gave it to him. "But if anybody but me calls he'll hang up and run."
Shell brought out a gun and pointed it at my forehead. "Untie his hands, Leo," Shell said.
Mammoth did so.
"Hand our friend the phone," the cruel manager added.
I tried to take the landline receiver but it fell from my numb fingers.
"What the fuck?" Leo said.
"It's my hands," I said hastily. "They're numb from being tied for so long."
"Take your time," Shell said generously.
After a few minutes I entered a number. As soon as the phone started ringing Shell picked up an extension line.
The phone rang seven times before Hush answered.
"Hello?" he said.
"You got the girl, Brennan?"
"You know I do," he said easily.
"I need to see her."
"Sure."
"Where do you have her?"
"You know that private cemetery in Hicksville?"
"Yeah."
"Show up at the gate after the sun rises and I'll buzz you in."
He hung up and I took a deep breath.
I looked up into Shell's eyes. He was wondering, and I was, too, if he should kill me right then and there. That might have been much easier. It would have certainly been safer.
But he didn't know anything about the cemetery except that the gates were locked.
"Where's this place?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"I want out of this," I said.
"Who you working for?"
"The girl."
"You told the people at Regents that you were part of a group."
"Just me and Brennan, man. Just me and him."
55
It was daylight by the time we made it to Hicksville. We went in a dark-green Lexus. Leo the Mammoth was driving, with Shell riding shotgun. I was on the floor in the back, bound hand and foot and happy to be so misused.
Happy because the only alternative to my discomfort was death.
"Okay," Shell said. "We're at North Broadway. Where to now?"
"Go four more blocks to Lathrop and turn right. Follow the street past the houses and keep on going until you get to a big stone wall that has a gateway."
The number I had called was the number. I got the idea when Alphonse Rinaldo had given me that special 911 number for the elite NYPD SWAT team. I thought that I should have my own personal emergency number.
I got special phones for me and Hush dedicated to this purpose. We had come up with passwords, like little boys initiating a clubhouse. Mine were Tolstoy, Nikita, Dimitri, and John-John. Anything else meant, "Get me out of here!"
This was taking a big chance. I didn't want to be involved with killing, if at all possible. Hush knew this, but he was also a psychopathic killer, by nature and by trade-even if he was retired. We were friends and he respected me but still the urge to kill was a natural place for him to go and I had called that number for the first time.
The car came to a stop.
For two minutes there were no words spoken.
"I don't like this," Leo grumbled.
"Who is this Brennan guy?" Shell asked me.
"He does bodyguarding for me sometimes. His cousin manages this cemetery."
Actually the place was managed by a man who, after sizing him up for a week, Hush decided to let live. It was a long and convoluted story that had to do with a dog and a little girl. The man paid Hush a fortune and the assassin helped him to create a new identity.
"Do you trust him with your life?" Shell asked. "Because we're going to have guns on you."
"He'll have a gun too," I said. "But he'll talk before shooting."
These words paved the way to a few more minutes of silence.
I used that time to make my peace with what was going to happen to Mammoth and Shell. I wasn't angry with them. They tortured me, but I'd done the same to Patrick.