Judson Carmichael - The Scared Stiff

“I had this bag,” I said, slapping it, “in case I found a place to go swimming, you know.”

Briefly he closed his eyes. Even for a Northerner, my stupidity was amazing. “No,” he said. “You do not find places to go swimming. But never mind. You had this bag.”

“I hit the first one in the face with it,” I said, “and I ran. The rest were on the other side of the car. I ran into the woods and hid, and after a while I heard my car drive away. I went back to the road and the truck was still there, but I couldn’t get it to start, so I started walking. When I saw your lights, I thought you were them again.”

The driver, who stood on the other side of the car with the spotlight still aimed at the spot where I’d been hiding, said something, and I thought I picked up the word camion. Rafez replied briefly, not looking away from me.

“Did he say something about a truck?” I said.

“We have seen the truck,” he told me. “It is out of gas.”

“Oh,” I said. “So that’s why I couldn’t get it started.”

“You are very lucky, Mr...?”

I was so busy making up stories, it was hard to go back and repeat an older one. At the Casa, who the hell was I at the Casa? Not Garry Brine, that’s who I really am. Oh, shit. “Emory,” I said. “Keith Emory.”

“Mr. Emory,” he said, not offering to shake hands. “I am Inspector Rafael Rafez of the national police.”

“Oh, am I glad to see you!” I cried, and I did offer to shake hands. He seemed bewildered by the gesture but accepted it. “Am I lucky you came along!”

“You are,” he agreed. “It happens I was at a conference in Tapitepe this evening on the very subject of the banditry along this road; otherwise you would have found no one out here tonight. That is, if you were lucky you would have found no one. But are you all right?”

“Now I am,” I said.

He said something to the driver. I didn’t realize what he meant to do until suddenly the spotlight turned to catch me in its glare. Not the full glare, just enough so Rafez could see me clearly, search my face for bruises and scratches.

And recognition. He frowned at me. “But I know you,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d remember you, I’m sure.”

“And you say your name is—?”

“Keith Emory.”

“Keith Emory.” He tasted the name, like a dubious recipe. He squinted at me, and then faintly he smiled. Gently, he said, “Why don’t you sit beside the driver, Mr. Emory, and I will return you to your hotel.”

Except he didn’t. In the dark, despite this car’s intensely bright high beams, I hadn’t noticed that modest Casa Montana Mojoca sign as we whipped by it, so I didn’t realize we’d already passed the turnoff to the hotel until I saw a dim city glow out ahead of us, smudging the black sky with ocher, like a poor erasure. I said, “Isn’t that Marona?”

“Yes, we’ll be there in ten minutes,” Rafez told me. He was still being pleasant.

I said, “But we missed the turnoff. For the hotel.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Didn’t you understand? The hotel ferry is idle until six, and of course you wish to make a report about the theft of your automobile and the attack by the bandits. There’s a police substation in Marona. We’ll go there, we can be comfortable, perhaps have a cup of coffee, you’ll make your statement, and then we’ll drive back when the ferry begins its work again.”

That’s when I knew I was in trouble. Up to that point, we’d had merely an hour and a half of pleasant chat, with long periods of silence, as though there were no suspicious elements in my story or appearance at all. Rafez had asked me where I was from, and I said New York, and he told me of his hopes to visit there someday, but didn’t tell me, as he’d told Lola, that he intended to be a policeman in New York eventually, because of his special knowledge of fighting criminals who speak Spanish.

He had also asked me how I liked Guerrera, and I’d told him it was just fine except for tonight’s unfortunate events, and he smoothly apologized on behalf of his entire nation. He then told me some anecdotes about crime fighting in Guerrera, most of which concerned his brilliant intuitive deductions — he was apparently the Sherlock Holmes of 221B Calle Panadero — and I told him some stories about crime in the greater New York area that I remembered from newspapers and television and that had nothing to do with me.

But now this wasn’t after all just a pleasant chat to kill time until I was dropped off at my hotel. It was the beginning of an interrogation.

I was sure I wasn’t going to like this.

Marona at three in the morning is not a happening place. The downtown shops are sealed behind solid metal gates, there are no moving cars or pedestrians, and the only illumination is the streetlight at every intersection. The Marona police station, on a downtown corner, is a three-story adobe structure with bars on every one of its small windows — from which very little light leaked — and an overhead garage entrance on the side street, which opened upward when our driver touched the control hooked to the visor in front of him.

Inside, a black ramp curved steeply down to a basement parking area, while the garage door clanked downward behind us with a certain finality. This concrete space below-ground could have held a dozen cars but contained only five, including something that looked a lot like a smallish tank; armored personnel carrier is what they call it, I believe. In case the muggers ever get nukes, I suppose.

The driver stopped us at a parking slot near a red metal fire door, and we all got out. The driver was a uniformed cop, not tall but bulked up, with a sidearm and a certain flat way of looking at things.

“The elevator is out of order, I’m afraid,” Rafez said. “We’ll have to walk.”

“That’s okay.”

It was the top floor we were going to, so it was up three clanging metal flights of stairs, inadequately lit by low-wattage bulbs. At the top, we went through another red metal fire door into a hallway even less adequately lit; one overhead fluorescent in the middle of a thirty-foot-long corridor.

“This way,” Rafez said, and we three walked past several closed doors until we found the one he liked. He opened it, flicked on fluorescent ceiling lights inside, and gestured smilingly for me to go in.

I didn’t like Rafez’s smile. I didn’t like anything about him. I was glad Lola had punched him in the nose.

I stepped through the doorway, and this was clearly nothing but an interrogation room. Under the flat fluorescent lighting, a gray metal desk stood in the middle of the black linoleum floor, not facing the door but sideways to it. A padded swivel chair was to its right, behind the desk, and an unpadded wooden armchair faced the desk on the left. Four armless wooden chairs were ranged at unequal intervals along the left wall, behind the wooden armchair. There was nothing else, no filing cabinets, no wastebasket, no telephone, no calendar on the wall — in fact, nothing on the walls.

Well, at least there wasn’t blood on the walls.

I hesitated, as though unsure which chair was supposed to be mine, and Rafez courteously gestured me toward the interrogatee’s place, saying, “Have a seat, why don’t you?”

“Thank you.”

We positioned ourselves traditionally, Rafez at the desk, me facing him, the driver out of sight — but not out of mind — behind me.

Rafez opened a desk drawer to take out a long yellow pad and a ballpoint pen. Placing them on the desk, he smiled at me and said, “This automobile. From whom was it rented?”

“Pre-Columbian Rent-A-Car.”