Marquette dug his HTC Thunderbolt out of his pocket, handed it over.
“Thinking about getting one?” he asked.
“No, I don’t like the Droid operating system. More of an iPhone guy myself.”
Siders’s window hummed down halfway, Marquette watching in astonishment as he tossed the phone outside and then held the button to scroll the window back up into the door.
“Why the hell did you do that?” Marquette said.
Siders’s black eyes remained hidden behind a pair of shades.
He stared straight ahead through the glass and drove on without speaking.
“Stop the car. I want out.”
Marquette reached down to unbuckle his seatbelt and found no button. Just a smooth, square face of metal, inset with what appeared to be a hole for a small-gauge Allen wrench. And the belt remained tight when he tugged on it, no play at all.
He glanced at the door—no handle, no mechanism for lowering the window.
The blast of fear hit him like a freight train.
He turned and looked at Siders.
“What do you want with me?”
“Let’s just say, I love your name.”
The man shot him a quick, smirking glance, and Marquette noticed for the first time the black curtain that separated the two front seats from the rear of the van.
“Curious to know what’s back there?” Siders asked. “Go ahead. Have a look.”
Marquette swept the curtain back as Siders flicked a button in the ceiling.
A dome light illuminated the back of the van under a hard, clinical glare.
Dark windows.
No carpeting.
The ceiling and the sidewalls had been reinforced with black soundproofing foam.
In the center of the white metal floor, he spotted a drain capped with a large, rubber plug.
Along the driver’s-side wall, a tool cabinet had been bolted into the floor, holding shelves of surgical tools—forceps, saws, scalpels, steel retractors, clamps.
He looked back at Siders.
“You’re him, aren’t you? The man who hung that woman off the railroad bridge.”
Siders smiled. “You saw that, huh?”
“That was you?”
“That was all me.”
Marquette squirmed in his seat, attempting to slide out of the lap belt.
“Don’t do that,” Siders warned.
Marquette cocked his left arm back and punched the passenger’s-side window, crying out as his hand bounced off, leaving a blood smear across the glass.
Siders began to laugh.
Through the fear, Marquette managed to blurt, “I can take you to an ATM right now.”
“Yeah? What’s your daily limit?”
“Two thousand. And I won’t tell a soul, I swear to God.”
Marquette knew his knuckles were broken, but he scarcely felt the pain. The overriding sensation was a tightness like a dumbbell sitting on his sternum, turning each breath into a quick, shallow gasp that was making him dizzier and more lightheaded by the moment.
“I have a family. A wife…” Tears beginning to sheet over his eyes. “A daughter.”
“Good for you. Will they miss you?”
“Very much.”
Siders gave him a sideways glance. “It’s a good thing to be missed, don’t you think?”
“Please.”
“Don’t you beg me. That’s the only warning you’ll get. And don’t try to hit me.” Siders showed him the pistol in his left hand.
Marquette looked out his window, saw that they were heading south on Lakeshore Drive. A few strands of sunlight had finally broken through the cloud deck, slanting down into the surface of the lake. Subjected to the onslaught of the sun, it didn’t even resemble water. More like a field of shimmering jewels.
They skirted Solider Field.
Traffic was light.
Marquette considered his life. He had family, friends. His feelings for them were pure, but nothing extraordinary. Nothing about his life was extraordinary. He’d spent endless hours at a liberal arts college, teaching uncaring teenagers who needed the credit to graduate, and in his spare time he’d studied the writings of people who had died hundreds of years ago.
Still, it was his life. Marquette had lived it as best as he could. Made some mistakes, had a few regrets, but there were still things he wanted to do. Stand in a castle in Scotland. Swim with dolphins. And though it was cliché, he’d always planned to get around to skydiving someday.
But now, all he wanted was to see his family. One last time.
“Can I call my wife?” His lower lip quivered, the tears starting to come. “Tell her goodbye?”
“No.”
Siders parked near Adler Planetarium and killed the engine. The sun coming through the windshield made it tough to see anything.
“There is some good news here,” Siders said.
“What?”
“All those scary-looking tools you saw back there? That’s postmortem entertainment.”
“What are you talking about?” He was having a hard time following, his thoughts coming at him in fractured streams of fear and sorrow and regret.
“You’re getting off easy is what I’m saying. See this?” Siders held up a cheap-looking paperback book with a garish cover. The title was The Killer and His Weapon. “The girl on the bridge? She became intimately familiar with another book by the same author. Ever read him?”
Marquette squinted at the writer’s name. “Andrew Z. Thomas? No, no I haven’t.”
Siders smiled. “Trust me. This one will really get under your skin. Look here.”
Marquette looked at the man’s other hand, saw he was holding a syringe.
“What’s that?”
“One hundred milliequivalents of potassium chloride. It’s the final stage of state-sponsored lethal injections.”
Marquette looked at the needle. At the clear liquid in the cylindrical tube.
“What does it do?” he asked.
“Stops your heart.”
“How long does it…” He couldn’t get the words out.
“To die? Between two and ten minutes.”
“Does it hurt?”
“I’m not going to lie to you. Having your heart stop hurts. But not nearly as much as what’s behind the black curtain.”
This conversation had gone from surreal to positively insane. “Will…will I be conscious after my heart stops?”
“I don’t know, brother. That’s part of the mystery of what lies beyond, that you’re on the verge of knowing. It’s kind of exciting, actually.”
Marquette looked out over the harbor, the skyline standing indistinct in the haze.
“I’m not ready,” he said.
His heart beating so fast.
“No one’s ever ready,” the man said. “I could’ve done this anywhere, you know. Figured you loved this city. That you’d want to go sitting back, staring at the skyline across the water.”
“I haven’t talked to my daughter in two years. A stupid fight.”
“Most fights are.”
“Do you…have family?”
“Not for a long, long time.”
“I need to apologize to her.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
Marquette turned away from the window.
“I’ll let you call her.”
“You’re serious?”
The man pulled an iPhone out of an inner pocket in his jacket, glanced at it. “Sure, we’ve still got a little time. And a friend of mine once told me that murder shouldn’t be without its little courtesies. What’s her number?”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you.” He had to think for a moment, years since he’d dialed it.
As the man punched it in, he prayed for the first time in ages.
Prayed her number hadn’t changed. Prayed she’d answer.
The man held up the iPhone screen, her number displayed.
“You understand what the purpose of this call is not, correct?”
“Yes.”
“If you try to save yourself, give away our location, anything like that…”
“I understand. Completely.”
The man pressed the green call button and handed him the phone.
“One minute.”
It rang.
Twice.
Three times.
On the fourth, he heard his daughter’s voice, and he had to fight with every atom of his being not to break down.