John Miller - Side by Side

“Smoot blood goes back hundreds of years. Our ancestors came here from England. No Smoot has ever ratted out another one.”

Winter figured the first Smoots came kicking and screaming, clapped in irons, straight from the bowels of some British penal institution.

“One way or the other, you’re going to tell me where the Dockerys are. That, Click, is a dead-certain fact.”

“You can’t make me tell you anything.”

Winter smiled.

“I bet you’ve never beaten anybody up or tortured them before. You don’t have the eyes for it. You didn’t even shoot back at Randall.”

“No need to make a racket that would have brought the cops.”

Click reached down, opened his robe, and pulled up the T-shirt. Even in the dimly lit cab, Click’s torso looked like Jackson Pollock had created a masterpiece on the young man’s canvas of skin by using a variety of blades and red-hot objects to get the desired effect.

He sneered. “Do anything you want to me. We have this family tradition that gets passed down from father to son. You can burn me with cigarettes, break bones, pull out my fingernails, or carve me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and all you’ll get for your trouble is your own sweat.” Click dropped his shirt and closed his robe. He said offhandedly, “Whatever you can do, I’ve already had. You might as well just shoot me and go on about your snooping business without wasting any more time than you already have.”

Winter thought about a man who would do such a thing to his own child. He thought then about his own son and his infant daughter, and deep inside he was on fire.

He intended to find Lucy and Elijah, but after he did, he wanted to kill Peanut Smoot.

Maybe Click truly believed he wasn’t going to rat out his father, but Winter knew differently.

The sign that had been suspended from a bar between the brick columns had been taken down. As a precaution Winter handcuffed Click’s wrists behind him before he got out of the truck. He opened the padlock and swung open the steel pole that stretched, from hedgerow to hedgerow, across the asphalt driveway. The No Trespassing signs on either post glowed in the headlights. Winter watched Alexa drive through, took his truck in, then locked the gate.

The parking lot had been cut into the side of a hill studded with pine trees. The building at the base of the hill stood on a flat beyond a rock-walled stream. Its dark roof, accented by pools of rainwater, looked every bit as large as a football field.

“What is this place?” Click asked.

“Isolated,” Winter said.

Winter led Click and Alexa down a long run of wide stone steps, across a wooden bridge over a rushing brook. The slopes and flower beds were buried under a carpet of rust-colored pine needles. A motion-sensitive light came on, illuminating the walkway and the front of the structure. The trio crossed an expanse of concrete, beneath a cantilevered awning, to arrive at a set of glass doors. Streaks of adhesive were evidence of logo graphics that had been removed from the inside of the glass at some point with a razor. Subtle lighting from a fixture over the reception counter, which was faced with wood veneer, allowed the arrivals a view of a lobby that had been stripped of all other furniture. Winter took his keys from his jacket and, isolating one, used it to unlock the door. As he ushered the others inside, a rhythmic beeping filled the space.

“What is this place?” Click asked again, sounding like a curious tourist.

Winter strode behind the reception counter and, using another key, opened a steel box and typed in the numbers to disarm the alarm system. He removed an odd-shaped key that hung inside the alarm box and came back around the counter.

Winter gripped Click’s arm and led him roughly through a door, into utter darkness.

“No!” Click screamed, whirling in the dark. Winter pressed him against the wall with his left hand while he located and flipped a switch. The lights in the wide hallway came on.

When Click yelled, Alexa had pulled her gun, and the lights caught her crouched with her back against the wall, aiming at Winter and Click. She blinked, frowned, straightened, and put her gun back in her handbag.

Click’s face had lost all its color and was twisted into a mask of horror.

They walked fifty yards to a steel door. Winter unlocked it and pushed Click into a narrower hallway, where four very solid doors ran along one wall. Each door had an eye-level, sliding peep panel. Winter unlocked the first door.

“This a jail?” Click said.

Winter hit the light switch on the wall beside the door, illuminating a bare bulb in a cage fixture high up in the ceiling.

“Get in,” he said. He shoved Click and the young man hit the cell’s back wall.

“What is this place?” Click asked, his eyes darting around.

“A padded cell,” Winter said.

“What’re you going to do to me?”

“Like you said, I can’t torture you into talking. So I’m going to shelve you and move on. Sort of like a private maximum security cell block.”

“You can’t leave me in here!”

“Why not?”

“It’s kidnapping for one thing.”

“Now, that’s ironic,” Alexa said.

“Your family kidnapped the Dockerys. I kidnapped you. I don’t know where they are. Your family doesn’t know where you are. I don’t find the Dockerys, they’ll die. The Dockerys die, so do you.”

“You won’t kill me.”

“You’re getting the worst side of the deal, because the Dockerys will die soon, but you won’t die for a long time.”

“Bull,” Click said. “You’re not a murderer.”

“You don’t want to split that hair. A man can live for weeks without food before his stomach acids dissolve his vital organs. Water is a different story. Three to four days without it and you’re done. But. .” Winter reached into his coat and took out an eight-ounce bottle about half filled with water. “If you conserve it, you can ration this for a long time. It’ll give you more time to think about what your family did to the Dockerys.”

Click said, “It’s the same as shooting me.”

“Think so?” Winter scratched his head. “Doesn’t seem that way to me. More like you’re committing suicide.”

“Screw you!” Click’s voice was fierce, but his eyes reflected a deep uncertainty.

“Once I close this door, we are going to walk out of this building. If we find the Dockerys and they are still alive, I’ll come back and let you out. Nobody but me will ever come back to check on you, and even if the hall out here was filled with people, they wouldn’t hear you if you had a bullhorn. This room was designed so patients going through DTs couldn’t harm themselves or disturb others with their screaming. After a few days in here you might decide on suicide. It won’t be easy, but you might be able to get that bottle cap lodged in your throat and block the air passage, if you don’t just swallow it.”

“This is wrong!” Click’s eyes narrowed to slits, his lips thinned. He looked around and up at the bare bulb in a steel-wire cage. “This doesn’t bother me.”

Winter reached over and flipped the light switch, plunging the cell into darkness.

“You turning out the lights?” Click sounded afraid.

“Tough old Ferny Ernest isn’t afraid of whips, chains, knives, hot wire. But he doesn’t like the dark.”

“Please,” the young man begged. “Just leave the slot open and the hall light on.”

“Click, people pay good money to spend time in sensory-deprivation chambers. All alone with just your brilliant mind for company. You can do math problems or figure out computer programs to pass the time. Some religions believe that hell is a dark void where you spend eternity alone with only your thoughts for company. In every religion, murder is a mortal sin that guarantees hell.”