But the passenger door opened onto a wall of solid Appalachian rock, slick with October dew. There was nowhere to run. He stood up, turning back toward the road like a man facing a firing squad, raising his hands up to his chest.
“Come around. Nice and slow.”
James walked. His mind had gone numb. Someone pushed him face down onto the Chevy. The heat of the engine soaked through his shirt as the cop wrestled his wrists into the cuffs. He thought wildly of Tommy’s radiant warmth in the moment before he was slammed to his knees in the road.
Tommy was lying beside him. He rolled his face up toward the stars and for a moment their eyes met, but Tommy’s gaze slid away, unfocused and confused. Possible concussion.
“The third gentleman too, Deputy. If you please.”
James heard rather than saw Abel pulled out of the back seat. “You can’t do this!” he brayed. There was a hollow thump as he was thrown back against the door. “We’re human beings! We have rights!”
“Shut up.” The cop turned to his partner. “What now? We all done here?”
There was silence for a moment, and then a chilling chuckle from Officer Shadow. “Yes, I do believe our business is almost concluded.”
“Good. What you want to do with these other two?”
“An excellent question.” The man in the shadows paused in deliberation. “A Negro is always useful, of course. If only for brute labor. But I have no use for a Jew. Especially one with poor vision.”
The pistol cracked in the cold mountain air. Tommy rolled himself up and screamed. And his scream went on, cracking up into sobs as he floundered forward on his belly and knees, arms still buckled behind his back, across the broken asphalt to Abel.
James was moving forward himself, dragging his knees over the rocks, until he felt a stinging pain in his shoulder. He turned his head and saw a needle flicker away like a sliver of blue light, quick as a dragonfly.
He looked up directly into the cop’s sallow face in the blazing headlights of the police car. A lumpy white man in his forties, cheeks and jowls decked with stubble, blue eyes rimmed with red.
“Your name is Andrew,” James told him solemnly. He looked back toward his friends, his vision swimming. Tommy was still crying. Abel Feinman stared up into Appalachian night, his glasses askew and speckled with red. His last three breaths came in tiny quick pants, and the rich bloom of ruptured bowels and blood filled the air.
James Aaron Locke toppled forward into blackness, listening for a fourth breath that never came.
He woke again to voices raised in an adjoining room.
“You said you’d let him go.”
James breathed in the thick smell of disinfectant and rubber. His throat hurt. He tried to rise, but there was a tremendous weight bearing down on him. Paper crackled under his back.
I’m naked.
He opened his eyes in a pitch black room. His head was pounding, his mouth cotton-dry.
“I done everything you said.” He recognized Officer Andrew. There a sulky note of protest when he spoke—a boy complaining that adults were unfair. “You told me you’d leave him be if I—”
“And indeed I shall, Deputy. But your Sheriff weighs over two hundred pounds, and you’re in no condition to carry him far. We wouldn’t want to aggravate that hernia, would we?” Officer Shadow sounded playful—enjoying himself cruelly, a cat toying with a bird.
“No sir.”
“I’ll walk him to your car, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Yes sir.”
James swallowed and felt a spasm of agony in his throat. He winced and listened to the heavy boots moving away, the whine and wheeze of a door opening and then slowly swinging shut. The rattle of iron and the moan of a hydraulic lift soon followed.
He tried to sit up again, fighting back a surge of nausea and disorientation, but he was held fast. There was a leather strap across his forehead. Another pulled tight and buckled across his chest. When he tried to flex his hands, he could feel the soft cuffs on his bare wrists and arms as well. More straps and cuffs below, when he tried to kick his feet.
“Help.” The attempt to use his vocal chords was agony, and the word came out a ragged whisper. Somewhere to his right, he heard a gasp.
“Aaaaezz…?” Tommy’s questioning voice, broken and shapeless, followed by a wet, gagging cough. He heard Tommy panting for breath and another crackle of paper. “Aaaeez…? Iiizh aa ooo…?”
“Tommy.” Something was wrong with Tommy’s mouth. Something was wrong with his own throat as well—it hurt terribly, and now he tasted a little blood. He twisted his head toward the right. Tommy was across the room on a long table, naked and strapped down with medical restraints. James could see the glitter of steel, the shine of wet teeth.
Tommy tried to speak again, tongue flapping helplessly in his gaping mouth. There was machinery holding his jaws open--a dental gag strapped around the back of his head. “Aaez, ai eeeah…”
“I understand.” He rasped the words out painfully, trying not to swallow too much. Oddly enough, he did understand. He was the son of Aaron Medgers Locke, the finest dentist in Harlem, and he had earned his allowance for years mopping the floor and replacing the lollipops in his father’s office. It was no trouble at all to understand English spoken by someone who couldn’t close his mouth.
James? Is that you?
James, I’m here…
He tried to turn his head the other way. “Where are we…?”
For answer, Tommy started to cry.
“Ai oh awe ee…Aaez…” I’m so sorry…James…
“Don’t be a fool.” James wheezed the words out angrily, despite the pain. “These people are crazy. We have to get out of here.”
There was a sudden noise in the next room, a wet gurgling like a sink full of sludge pouring down a narrow drain. It was followed by a spastic thump, rattle and squeak—like an animal struggling in a cage, or someone having a three-second seizure.
A moment of silence.
The unmistakable noise of someone passing wind, long and slow.
A scuffle and scratch. Wheels creaked. To his left, beyond his field of vision, a door opened, and a shaft of light sliced across his torso. Someone had thrown an ivory sheet over him like a shroud.
Tommy huffed silent tears beside him. “—Oooh…” he moaned softly.
No.
“Good evening, gentlemen.”
James jumped. The tone, the accent was unmistakable—it was Officer Shadow. But the vocal chords were no longer those of a strong, middle-aged man. This vocalization came from a much older person--someone whose throat creaked with age, lungs rattling with every breath.
“Thomas, since you are unable to make a proper introduction, I will have to do the honors myself.” The wheels rolled forward, and fluorescent tubes overhead buzzed and blazed into blinding light.
James clenched his eyes shut, stabbed with twin spears of new pain. When he could open them a crack, he found himself looking up at a mummy—a human head wrapped in brittle crepe, bald pate sporting a few random strands of grey. The old man had a pug nose, swollen to a red carbuncle with two ugly nostril slits. The eye sockets were mottled with brown bruises, the skin covered with liver spots and lesions. The eyes were milky blue and veined with blood.
The skull smiled at him, chapped lips peeling back over yellow tusks.
“How d’you do, Mister Locke?”
James kept his mouth clamped shut. He stripped us buck naked. Of course he’s seen our wallets and all the cards…
“My name is Ezekiel Baird.” The skull was speaking in that aristocratic drawl, the one that made his stomach clench. “Ezekiel Abadiah Baird. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”