An arm pulled in hard against his windpipe. He dug his fingers into powerful, rigid muscle that was slippery with sweat. He tried to yell, but the sound bubbled and choked off in his throat.
He felt the bench turn, topple under him as he was dragged bodily backward over the slatted wood. And far away, as though his legs were fifty feet long, he could feel and hear his heels sliding through gravel, then down through warm sand. Leaves whipped over his face.
When he opened his eyes, he found that he was lying on damp earth in the dark. He heard insects, but nothing else, except once a dog barking, but that sounded a long way off.
His body throbbed when he moved a little. After that he lay there for what seemed hours. He was afraid to move.
When gray light slid through the cracks of dry wood and a dirty burlap curtain over a window, he still lay there looking dazedly at the unpainted boards, the shingled roof with holes in it, and a rusty, potbellied stove. A cabinet made of three orange crates had several cans of beans in it.
He got up stiffly. He was so freightened he could scarcely stand, but he forced himself to try the door. It was locked, but so flimsy he could have pushed it open.
“Don’t make any noise,” he heard a voice outside say. Through the cracks he saw a vague form move a little. Twigs crackled. “Don’t make a noise in there, Morten. Don’t try to make a break either. If you do, I’m coming in there and kill you.”
Morten sat quickly down, slid backward until he was pressed tight up against the wall.
“One little peep out of you, Morten, you’re dead, and I mean it.”
The voice seemed muffled, disguised, Morten thought dully. And then he stopped thinking. He had to stop thinking, stop feeling. His thoughts could go only one way, and he couldn’t stand to go that way.
Hours later, Morten felt paralyzed from sitting rigidly in one place. He moved slowly so as not to make any noise. Then after trying several times he finally managed to whisper. “I’m hungry.”
“Eat beans,” the voice said.
A can opener was beside the cans and Morten opened a can and ate the warm tasteless beans. He drank from a can of water. There were drowned mosquitoes in the water, but after awhile that didn’t bother him.
That night he heard mice squealing near him, felt fear, disgust. He thought of Rose. Something broke inside of him then and he crawled through the darkness to the door and struck it with his small fists.
The door swung open. He felt incredible shock as a fist caught him under the chin. He tried to scream and gagged on his own blood. The blows continued, but after awhile he didn’t feel them. All he felt was sickening fear and after that he lay frozen in the darkness.
“The next time, I’ll brain you,” the voice warned him.
Two days later, in the late afternoon, he lost control of himself. He ran into the door. It was the only time in his life, since vaguely, remembered temper tantrums in front of his mother when he was a kid, that he had ever really completely lost control. He had screamed out several times before he realized the screams were his. And then he ran into the door, beating it with his fists, kicking and screaming. The door opened.
He stood looking, waiting. He knew for the first time in his life that there was something worse than the freezing fear of pain. He felt as though some abscess had broken after years of infectious swelling.
He waited, whimpering a little, expecting the brutal lunge, the shocking horror of kicking feet and drubbing fists. But nothing moved anywhere in the darkness. The only sounds were mosquitoes humming. Once from way down the river through the willows he heard the musical murmuring of Mexican voices, and a guitar strumming. It all faded out. There was nothing else anywhere, but Morten standing, waiting, sobbing.
No one was there. No one guarding the shack. There had been someone here guarding it two days ago. No one now. He leaned against the side of the shack and closed his eyes. Something burned in his throat. He started to cry, openly, like a woman. He was sure that whoever had been here had left at the end of the first day. Only his own sick fear had held him in the shack. His own jailor. That, he thought, is the story of my life.
He recalled a story he had once read about some fish in a pool. The fish had been kept in one section of the pool by a shadow cast down from above. The fish thought the shadow was real, something solid. And they lived and died, afraid to swim through nothing but a shadow.
It was over five miles back into Barstow. None of the trucks rolling in there for a night’s layover stopped to pick Morten up. He walked with a raw feeling underneath, like glass about to crack. He felt like a bottle with pressure building up inside. He felt all the things he had never allowed himself to feel before. He felt a strange, burning joy, a wild anticipation.
As usual, the clerk at his hotel didn’t recognize Morten and he had a disgusted look on his face as he eyed Morten’s dirty rumpled suit, his once-white shirt. By way of identifying himself, Morten told the clerk the date on which he had checked in.
“Where you been, Mr. Morten, out hunting uranium?” the clerk asked.
Morten looked at the clerk as though he had never seen him before either. “No,” he said. “I was waiting for a shadow to go away.”
The clerk shrugged.
“I had a case, a square case,” Morten said. “Is it here?”
“Oh sure, I put that down in the basement. We got a storage room down there. I figured you just went off and forgot it.”
“I want it now please,” Morten said. “And you can hurry getting it.”
The clerk shrugged again, went through a door across the lobby. Morten looked at the door as though he was looking at something else. His eyes ached. His stomach still felt nauseous, but the fear was no longer there. He went into the men’s room, threw cold water on his face. He straightened his tie, combed his hair.
When the clerk brought the case back up, Morten lifted it. It weighed the same, felt the same, but he knew it wasn’t the same. He paid the clerk, tipped him a dollar, and walked out onto the almost empty sidestreet. A Mexican sat on some steps cuddling a bottle of wine. A woman was yelling out of a window. He opened the case and took a quick look into it.
A bus would not be fast enough. A train would not be fast enough either. Maybe nothing would be fast enough. Maybe the three days he had been kept in the shack had been enough. But they knew him well, or they thought they had known him well. Well enough to know he was so afraid, so compliant, so cooperative that he could be put in a shack, threatened once, beaten up once, and left there safely without a guard long enough for them to get into his hotel room, take 70,000 dollars worth of jewelry, and replace it with pebbles. They figured they knew him well enough to be certain he would be imprisoned in that shack by the shadows of fear, long enough for them to get the stuff to a Los Angeles fence and get out of the country with the money.
Maybe they had been right. But he had an idea that they had expected him to stay in that shack even longer, and that afterward he would be so shocked and shattered by the experience he would be incapacitated for an additional period of time.
To save time, Morten rented a car in Barstow from one of those companies that have representative agencies in practically every city in the country. You may rent the car in one city, drive it, and, if you wish, turn it in another city.
He drove fast into Los Angeles. On the way, he stopped once for gas, and one other time to pour the rocks out of his sample jewel case and check the secret compartment in the side to make sure that the revolver was still there.
He had kept it because it had been a gift from a friend, and it had been in that compartment for over a year. Every jewelry salesman carried one. This one was covered with opals and garnets, and Morten had never thought of it as something that could kill anything. He stopped on the outskirts of Pasadena, at a hardware store, and bought bullets for the gun.