Randy White - Dead Silence

I said nothing. After a long silence, he began to cry. The man had pissed his pants, I realized. He pulled his knees to his chest, fetal position, then squinched his eyes closed until he remembered, then opened his eyes wide, as if looking up at me was his only defense. He began to moan, “I’m begging you, please… please. ”

I felt a mounting contempt for myself that was proportional to a rising respect for the man at my feet. He had handled the bullying better than most and taken longer to break than it might have taken to break me under like circumstances. Dying clueless, among garbage, on a dead-end road, is sufficient reason to beg.

But my assessment was premature.

My cell phone had a digital-recorder function. I pressed the RECORD icon and dropped the phone on the ground near the man’s head. “So talk. They won’t believe me unless I get it on tape.”

Myles opened his eyes. “ Sure. What do you want me to say? I’ll tell you anything.” His eagerness to survive, his clinging devotion to hope, summarized our species yet, oddly, also debased it.

“They want the truth.”

“Of course! I’m a cooperative person-you’ll see. But first, I think we’d be more comfortable if-”

I interrupted before he could mention freeing his hands, saying, “They’re looking for a missing kid. That’s all I know. You asked for a minute to figure it out. You’ve got it. So tell me: What’s the question you’re supposed to answer?”

“I don’t know. I swear it, I have no idea.”

I said, “Then we’re wasting time,” and leaned closer with the gun.

“Wait! Maybe I do know something.” I watched his face. When I saw his eyes rotate upward, I knew he was assembling a lie. I touched the gun barrel to his ear. He winced but offered the lie anyway.

“There are always questions when somebody’s kid disappears. No one’s to blame, it’s just the way it is. And let’s be honest, young girls disappear all the time. What I don’t understand is-”

“How do you know it was a girl?” I said.

When he replied, “Well… it’s only natural to assume-” I pressed the pistol into his ear.

He lied again. “You told me it was a girl! ‘They’re looking for a missing girl,’ isn’t that what you said?”

I began counting off seconds-“… thirty-nine… thirty-eight

… thirty-seven…”-and used my foot to pin him to the ground when he tried to wiggle away.

“Stop… stop, I’ll talk! But I need more information. Could be, the people who hired you got the wrong idea about the missing girl-boy-whatever. Did they say anything about finding something? Or about a type of radar-this was on a farm I own in New York where someone used ground-penetrating radar-”

I kept counting-“… thirty-one… thirty… twenty-nine. ..”

“Stop that! I’m trying to cooperate. I think what happened is, someone in that area heard about an incident, but the radar was wrong. False readings are so damn common with that sort of technology. I don’t expect you to understand. But if that’s what this is about, I’m sure the people who paid you-”

“You made me lose count, Nels,” I said. “So we start at ten. Ten seconds.

What’s the question? I won’t understand the answer unless I hear the question.” I was studying his eyes as I counted-“… nine… eight… seven…”

“Please don’t. One more minute…”

I leaned my weight on the pistol, and said, “One? Zero. ”

“No! You win!” He stopped squirming and lay in the sand panting. “I’ll tell you. The question would be… I guess what anyone would want to know is…” I watched his eyelids blink closed, then open. As he thought about it, his eyes rotated downward. “The question,” he said, “might be about a girl named Annie Sylvester. Where is the girl buried? I guess that’s the first question someone would ask.”

“The answer?”

It was several seconds before he could make himself say it. “She’s near the Hamptons, Long Island-that’s in New York. Annie is buried in a pasture. A horse farm called Shelter Point.”

Nine p.m. I battled the urge to rush as I drove the Range Rover south on U.S. 41 toward Venice Beach Road and Falcon Landing, governing my speed with cruise control and using the blinker to shift lanes. I didn’t know where Will Chaser was. Didn’t know if he was dead or alive, aboveground or below, and I was convinced Nelson Myles didn’t know either. But I now felt sure the boy was somewhere in Florida, probably close to Sarasota. It would be unwise to invite the attention of a traffic cop.

Myles hadn’t told me the whole truth-yet. But I believed him when he said he hadn’t seen the boy and didn’t know where he was. I did not believe him, however, when he said he didn’t know that he’d been helping the kidnappers. Too many holes in his story, too many headlines on the television news.

Myles said he didn’t know the men were Cuban until I told him. They had demanded money, transportation and shelter, no questions tolerated. That included questions about a crate the two men had off-loaded early that morning, after Myles landed them at Falcon Landing in his eleven-passenger Citation executive jet.

“They said they were smuggling illegal weapons. I didn’t ask what. Rocket launchers or an atomic bomb-my God, what do I care? My life was on the line. I didn’t even see their faces. That’s the truth. I didn’t want to see their faces!”

My opinion of the man continued its descent.

During the three-hour flight, Myles claimed he hadn’t opened the cockpit door. The only time he was face-to-face with the men was just before they boarded, but it was too dark to see details.

“The man I’d been dealing with, the one in charge, he was older. Late fifties, early sixties, and very neat. Silver hair, a collar that looked starched. The man with him was twice your size and three times as wide-freakish. He was younger, judging from his voice, in his twenties or early thirties. And he wore a weird knit cap. Pointed, sort of. I got the impression he wasn’t smart-retarded, even-just from the way the boss man spoke to him. But strong-my God, he handled that crate like it was filled with newspaper instead of-”

“Guns?” I chided.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “I swear.”

All other contact was by cell phone, Myles told me, or over the Internet.

“The man told me how much money he wanted, where to be, what to do, and I did it. Anyone in my position would’ve done the same. These people have been bleeding me dry for more than two weeks and I’m sick of it! They have no idea how far out of their class they are, but they’ll find out one day. You, too. That’s not a threat. It’s a fact.”

“Poor Nelson,” I replied. “You’ve had it rough, all because of a girl who wasn’t in your class either.”

The man’s story meshed with the bank records I’d found at Shelter House and also with what I already suspected: an interrogator from the Cuban Program had discovered that a wealthy American was a murderer-a story he’d probably heard from an American POW. Torture a man long enough and he will spill his own personal secrets, then volunteer secrets about everyone he knows, hoping to earn a break from pain.

Myles hadn’t yet provided the connection-who was the POW?-but I had a pretty good idea who it was. So I was backing off, letting him get to it in his own way.

Because it was safer to talk in a moving car, I’d been driving for about twenty minutes, making random turns, but gradually traveling southwest toward the Gulf of Mexico and Falcon Landing. Myles tried subtle manipulation to hurry me back to his gated community, implying he might talk more freely when he was close to home. I thought I understood his motivation. But I badly misread his intent.