Chris Jordan - Torn

“Enjoy,” Shane says, picking up his briefcase. “You might have better luck on your own.”

“Maybe so,” says the investigator wistfully. “I really thought he’d take one look at the size of you and pee his pants.”

“The little shit is waterproof.” Shane offers his hand. “Thanks for this. Sorry we got off on the wrong foot. My personal observation, you’re good police.”

Chumley shrugs. “We’ll see about that.”

They kick him loose at dawn, twenty minutes after his public defender drags her saggy, underpaid butt onto the premises. No arrest, therefore no hearing, no bail. Nothing more than a stern warning not to leave the area.

Right.

“Why would I leave?” He smirks on his way out, not even bothering to thank the P.D., who stands there with her jaw slack and her eyes still sleepy.

Screw ’ em both. Cops and lawyers, two sides of the same stupid coin. Why should he be grateful? Because she mumbled a few words, did her job?

F-bomb that.

G-Man’s very jaunty as he strolls into the big bad world, heading for his wheels, his breath coming in cold little puffs of steam. Thinking he will have to quit his job, stay away from the airport. Hanging around, taunting that pig of a cop would be fun, but he’s no fool. Out of sight, out of mind, that’s the way to go. Also he needs to be careful with the money. His crew finds out he’s green, they’ll be all hands out gimme some of that love.

The money is for personal use. It’ll buy him four or five sessions in a real studio, let him find the right beats, put down his flow, do his own slim shady thing.

His wheels, a faded box of dents that used to be a Chevy Impala, waits in the employee lot under an inch-thick dusting of fluffy snow. He’s thinking if the mutha won’t start he can always ask the public defender bitch for a jump start.

G-Man unlocks the door, creaks it open as fluffy snow cascades to the ground. Cold and dark in there, he’s thinking, but before he can climb behind the wheel something happens. Something big crushes him into the seat. Hands like steel grappling hooks shove his face so deep into the cold, tattered foam-stink of the seat that he can’t breath. Steel hands that lock on his jaw and squeeze so hard that he feels the lower half of his face dislocating, creating an explosion of pain so totally awesome that he wants to scream like a girl, if only he could.

Twenty seconds later he’s wrapped like a mummy in silver duct tape, arms pinned to his sides, everything but his eyes and one nostril slathered in wraps of adhesive. Then he’s rudely flipped into the backseat, crashing faceup, unable to do anything but squirm in a writhing panic.

“My advice, don’t fight it,” suggests the big dude, looming over the seat like a neatly bearded monster, all angry eyes and flashing teeth. His big steely hands encased in surgical gloves. “All your air has to come through one little nostril. Concentrate on that. Fight it and you’ll smother.”

The big dude chilling next to the fat cop, didn’t say much. Big dude holding up the roll of duct tape.

“Love this stuff,” he says. “Better than cuffs. Way more effective. With handcuffs the victim can still scream, maybe even bite. Did you know the human bite can be more deadly than a dog bite? Fact. Comes to biting, your average human being is more dangerous than your average pit bull.”

G-Man bucks and shivers, getting nowhere. Strangled little yelps coming from deep beneath the duct tape.

“Gordon,” says the big dude. “Calm yourself. You have limited air. Just enough to keep your brain conscious, not enough for a struggle. Besides, the struggle part won’t work.”

The big dude tears off a strip of tape.

“See this? This is the final frontier. If you don’t stop squirming, I’ll tape up your last nostril and that will be that. The only remaining question, will they find your dead body before it freezes solid. G-Man, The Human Popsicle.”

Unable to control his fear, G-Man bucks and whimpers for a while. Then he stops. The stench of urine permeates the already rancid interior of the old Impala.

“It happens,” the big dude says with a shrug. “Sphincter’s next, if you don’t relax, concentrate on getting all the air you can through that one little nostril. Try it. See? Better already.”

G-Man weeps as he carefully inhales through a single, snot-encrusted nostril. It’s like sucking air through a too-small straw.

“Here’s the deal,” says the big dude, in words that fall like shards of ice. “You’re going to tell me what happened to Haley Corbin. The lady with the missing kid. The one you called. The one you set up. You’ll be giving me all the details. Every little thing.”

The big dude slips a hand around G-Man’s neck. “Are you ready? You’ll notice I have really big hands and you have a really small neck. Feel that? That’s me squeezing just a little. If you scream when I pull back the tape, I’ll squeeze a lot.”

The big dude peels back the duct tape. G-Man tries to scream.

The big dude pastes the tape back down over his gaspy little mouth, heaves a deep sigh of disappointment.

“I was hoping you weren’t a slow learner,” he says. “Oh well. We’ll just have to take our time.”

“Sorry about the dog kennel,” the woman says, not even pretending to sound apologetic. “It’s all we could think to do.”

My captor is a slightly built, extremely nervous female with a tidy little mop of curly, dyed-blond hair and small, darting eyes that never seem to settle on anything. She’s crouching at the locked grill of the kennel, exuding an air of ironic detachment, like isn’t it faintly amusing that we, two women of the world, find ourselves in this position, you inside the cage and me outside laying down the rules?

Me, I’m not feeling ironic. More like enraged and terrified and helpless and more enraged, that combination, in that order. Keenly aware of how a trapped animal must feel, caged and in motion, unable to see where its tormentors are taking it. When the bumpy acceleration first threw me to the back of the kennel, I assumed I was in a runaway van, about to smash into something at high speed-as if my captors were staging a fatal accident. Then, abruptly, we were airborne and rising rapidly, and my trip-hammer heart began to ease.

I was in a plane, probably in the cargo compartment. I had assumed it must be a commercial airliner, something big enough to have a special place to stow pets, but when Miss Ironic crawled in and turned on the lights, it became obvious that I was aboard a relatively small aircraft.

“Gulfstream G- 450,” she tells me. “Owned, not leased. In this configuration we can carry six passengers, three crew. Tonight all we’ve got is me and Eldon and the one pilot, with the cockpit door sealed from the inside. So if the pilot has like a stroke or something we’re all screwed. Eldon thinks he could fly the thing, because he helped develop this flight simulator software? But really he couldn’t. And besides he can’t get through the cockpit door with the pilot down, can he? No way.”

Still not quite looking at me as she chatters away, naming various options on their aircraft, as if it were a luxury automobile. Leather seats, individual climate control, exotic hardwood trim, even “a totally amazing wine chiller that also works on champagne bottles.” Mostly staring at her shoes as she babbles on. Blahniks, slightly scuffed, which is probably a crime in her zip code.

“Who the hell are you?” I finally demand, hooking my fingers in the cage door. Resisting the impulse to bare my teeth like some rabid canine. “Where are you taking me?”