James Siegel - Detour

“Okay.”

“Okay? What about that’s great, Miles? That’s terrific? I’m positively overjoyed at the news? ”

“I’m positively overjoyed at the news.”

“You don’t sound overjoyed at the news.”

“I’m worried.”

“Okay, you’re worried. Of course you’re worried. Who wouldn’t be in your shoes? Have some faith, I’ll lend you mine if you like—no charge. I told you. We’re going to get this done. He’s going to call back, we’re going to deliver the coke and get out of Dodge.”

“It’s something else.”

“ What something else?”

“What if we give them the drugs?”

“Okay?”

“But they still don’t release them?”

It was the obvious question, of course. The same question Joanna had asked him back in that room. The one he’d been avoiding looking at too closely or too often. Something that was easy enough to do when he was dodging U.S. Customs inspectors and drug-dealing kids.

Not now. Not when he was finally about to get two million dollars’ worth of drugs into the right hands.

Miles shrugged. “I don’t know how to answer that. I think trusting them’s the price of admission. Sorry, that’s pretty much the way it is.”

TWENTY-TWO

They took her somewhere else without warning.

The middle of the night? The middle of the day? She didn’t know. Only that she’d fallen into one of those bottomless slumbers and was happily in the middle of a sweet dream. The sweetest. She was home with Paul on what seemed like a lazy summer afternoon. A Sunday maybe, where they’d stumble out of bed around ten or so to secure a Sunday Times and two iced Starbucks.

The dream had that Sunday feel.

Then the door slammed open—she perceived it as a thunderclap outside their 84th Street apartment. Rainstorm to follow.

What actually followed was someone pulling her up off the mattress and directly out of her dream. Accompanied by the acrid odor of nervous, sweaty men. And the sound of harsh orders delivered in a quasi English they must’ve picked up from kung fu videos.

“Chop-chop,” one of the men—boys really—said to her. “Vamos.”

Then the ski mask came down over her head, only backward, so that the eye holes were somewhere behind her, and all she could see was blackness.

She wondered if this was it. The end. The first steps on her way to a shallow grave in the middle of nowhere in particular. A candidate for one of those gruesome pictures in the newspapers. She tasted her own fear—a sour tang on the back of her tongue.

She’d been thinking a lot of her own death lately. Ever since Galina had summarily informed her of Paul’s failure to come through. It had the power and solemnity of a death sentence being read by a hanging judge.

Not that.

Not only that. It was the demeanor of her guards. The boy who brought Joanna her daily breakfast no longer acted like a room service waiter hoping for a tip. There was no smiling good morning . Someone had gotten the message to him: She was no longer a cash cow, but a sacrificial lamb.

The other guards too. Gruff, sour, pissed off. They spoke to her with barely restrained anger and thinly disguised contempt.

She could smell the menace in the air.

Now this. She was being pulled out the door, along a hallway, then suddenly down some steps—one, two, three—she stumbled and nearly fell. They’d tied her hands together with rope—the harsh fibers dug into her wrists.

“I can’t see, ” she said. She hated the panic in her voice—the helpless-victimness of it.

She was a veteran of H.R. departments. She was used to victims parading before her desk, please-don’t-hurt-me kind of girls—they were almost always girls, sobbingly relating one abuse or another. She would nod, smile, and comfort, but there was always a small part of her that wanted to say why didn’t you stand up for yourself? Why?

Now she was like them, reduced to naked pleading. Her wrists were already burning and she was still inside the house. She could smell the odor of burned grease, butter, pineapple. They had to be walking through the kitchen. Not walking—stumbling, tripping, flailing.

No one had answered her. Or maybe they had. When she said I can’t see, whoever was pulling her forward had tugged sharply on the rope. She banged her shoulder into the wall.

This was their answer. Shut up .

She knew she was outside from the sudden sharp smell of pine, the sweet scent of hibiscus, and the familiar if nauseating smell of gasoline. The air felt different—that too. It had the texture of night, already swollen with morning dew. It felt painfully sweet to be outside again. To breathe the cool air and feel a soft breeze against her throat. Only she was being taken away—from what she knew to what she didn’t.

From Joelle.

A car door opened.

But it wasn’t a door. She was pitched forward into a trunk. No gentle hands to break her fall. Her cheek met the car trunk floor flush. She cried out from the sudden pain in her jaw.

“Silencio,” one of them said.

The car trunk shut. Panic bound her tighter than the rope around her wrists. There was only so much air in a car trunk. She would run out of it sooner rather than later. It didn’t help that she was breathing too rapidly, her chest heaving, as if she’d just come back from a good morning run.

Slow down, she told herself. Stop it.

The car started with a loud rumble—she heard two car doors open and close. Then she was moving. Gently at first, like a boat drifting away from a dock. The car turned right, then left in a slow circle, before quickly picking up speed.

They seemed to be going more or less straight.

A highway?

To where? From where?

At least she wouldn’t be dead of suffocation when they arrived; as soon as the car accelerated, streams of chilled air rushed in against her face. They’d removed something from the underside of the trunk so she’d be able to breathe.

This heartened her a little. If they were concerned enough to keep her alive for the trip, maybe they wouldn’t kill her when they got there. Maybe.

Stay strong.

They traveled for at least an hour, possibly two. The worst part was her cramped position—her bound arms pinned underneath her body. They quickly went numb. Her shoulders were a different story—every time they hit a bump, a stabbing pain shot from her shoulders down the middle of her chest. The car needed new shocks almost as much as the highway needed new paving. A few times it felt as if they were falling into a hole.

The men had turned on the car radio. It sounded like some kind of ball game—a soccer match maybe.

Whatever it was, it had engaged the men’s attention. They were laughing, muttering, cursing. There were three of them, she thought—three distinct voices.

As long as she was surrounded by blackness, she could imagine somebody else was there with her.

Joelle.

She’d thought about having a child for five years, was consumed with it, yet when it finally happened, when she’d finally walked into the Santa Regina Orphanage and was handed this extraordinary little girl, she’d been humbled by the power of baby love. Umbilical cords were severed. This connection, she was certain, was for life.

I’ll bring her back, Galina had promised.

What was a kidnapper’s promise worth? Especially now that Joanna was being driven somewhere else? She felt tears running down her cheeks, only to be blotted up by the ski mask. The wool tasted like dust.

Stop it.

After a while she must’ve drifted off.