James Siegel - Detour

Paul had to restrain himself from raising his hand.

“Me. I’m Paul.” They’d stopped about five feet from each other. The black bag seemed to be growing heavier by the second.

The driver nodded, slapped his neck. “Fucking mosquitoes. I’m gonna get West Nile.” When he took his hand away, there was a blotch of bright blood on his neck.

He looked at Miles. “Who are you, my friend?”

“His lawyer,” Miles said.

“His lawyer?” He laughed and turned to his companion. “Fuck me, I don’t have a lawyer.” He turned back to them. “Are we going to have to sign papers or something?”

Miles said, “No papers. If you could just make sure they give him his wife and daughter back.”

“Hey, don’t know what you’re talking about. Not my job, ” he said, affecting a thicker accent for comic effect. No one laughed. “I’m here to sight the white, okay?”

“Okay,” Miles said.

Paul remained silent. Good thing. He was too scared to speak.

“So, boss?” the driver said. “You here to give me the bag or ask me to dance?” The other man laughed.

Paul held the bag out at arm’s length.

“Open it,” the driver said. “I like to see what’s inside first.”

Paul laid it on the dirt ground and zipped it open. When he bent down, he felt light-headed and nearly tipped over. Something began humming in the swamp, an überhum, the biggest insect in the pond.

The driver stepped forward and gazed down at the bag.

“Huh? Looks like fucking rubbers to me.” He had a lazy left eye; he seemed to be looking in two directions at once.

Paul started to explain. “They’re filled with—”

“Shit, I know what they’re filled with. I’m goofing with you, boss.” He smiled. “Let’s take one out and make sure, okay?”

When Paul hesitated, the man said, “You do it. No offense, but they were up your ass.” He turned to his pal. “ Culero, eh?”

The insect hum had gotten louder—Paul’s ears were ringing. Paul reached into the bag and took out a condom, neatly tied in a knot by one of those women back in Colombia. He held it out in his now seriously sweating palm.

The driver pulled something out of his pocket.

Click. A sinuously shiny blade caught the light. Paul tensed, and Miles took one step back.

“Relax, muchachos .” He gripped Paul’s hand, almost gently, and pointed the blade straight down. Paul wondered if the man noticed his hand was shaking.

He did.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Paul. “I’ve only slipped a couple of times.”

He flicked the blade at Paul’s palm. When Paul twitched, he laughed and did it again. The other man—the one wearing the Izod with the little green alligator—said something in Spanish. He had a thin, almost whispery voice.

The driver jabbed the end of the blade into the condom, opening up a tiny slit. He was reaching down to scoop up some of the white powder onto his finger when something happened.

It was that hum.

It had grown even louder, annoyingly loud, as if it were causing vibrations in the ground itself. You wanted to shout shut up, to swat whatever it was with a newspaper, to crunch it under your shoe.

It would have been useless, though. Using your shoe.

The two cars plowed out of the cattails at about the same time.

Jeeps, the kind with fat, deeply treaded tires and juiced-up engines. They were belching black smoke and closing fast.

The man looked up and slapped his neck again. And just like last time, his hand came away with smeared blood.

“They shot me,” he said.

He grabbed the bag and ran. The other man too. They vanished into the cattails. Polo and Izod.

Paul felt frozen to the spot. It took something whizzing past his ear and puck-pucking into the ground about a foot from his left shoe to actually get him to move. That, and Miles, who grabbed his right arm and yelled, “Run.”

He scrambled after Miles into the weeds.

He could hear this behind him: the sound of rumbling engines being shut off, of car doors slamming, of shouts and screams and war whoops. He thought westerns again: the outlaw band riding into town on a Saturday night intent on letting off a little steam, firing their six-shooters into the air. Jeep Riders in the Sky.

Only they were shooting semiautomatics, and they were shooting them in their direction.

Paul ran straight through the cattails, dry thin stalks whipping his face and arms. He followed the shape of Miles’ disappearing body. The ground wasn’t conducive to running for your life—it was wet, thick, and mucky. Ten seconds into the weeds his socks were soaked to the skin.

Behind him the men were still screaming. They were still shooting too—cattail heads were disappearing like airborne dandelion spores.

And something else, something that had become uncomfortably and chillingly clear.

The gunmen were following them.

The cattails, Paul gratefully noticed, were as high as an elephant’s eye. Wonderfully, gloriously high. High enough, Paul thought, to completely swallow them. He could barely make out jittery patches of blue sky overhead. The dealers had chosen an impenetrable place that would be hidden to just about everyone.

They stood a chance.

He remembered something. In the childhood game of rock, paper, scissors—paper, the most fragile substance on earth, always won out over rock. Why?

Because paper can hide rock.

Somehow the thought didn’t comfort him.

He kept running, panting after Miles as if he were a faithful hound out duck hunting. He tried not to dwell on the fact that they were the ducks. His feet churned up dollops of mud, his blood jackhammered into his ears.

The men were behind them and gaining.

Paul wasn’t certain whom it occurred to first—Miles or him. It seemed like they both stopped running at almost the same moment. They turned and stared at each other and made the same unspoken decision more or less in unison. They dropped straight to the ground.

If they could hear the men chasing them, then the men could hear them.

Lie down and do nothing.

Their pursuers would have to get lucky.

Do the numbers. He imagined it as an actuarial problem that had been dropped on his desk. The square mass of two bodies, divided into the square mileage of this swamp, divided by six or seven people looking for them. What were the odds of being found? Substitute the cattails for hay, and they were the proverbial needles.

They hugged the ground.

It soon became apparent that Izod and Polo had different ideas.

They were still running. Somewhere off to the left—the sound of two small breezes whipping through the weeds.

But behind them a kind of tornado.

Run, Paul thought. Run, run.

They had the drugs. They were carrying Joanna’s fate in their hands. They had to make it out of the swamp.

But the sounds of separate footsteps seemed to converge into one dull roar. Then someone screamed, and suddenly all sound stopped. Even the insects seemed to bow their heads in a moment of silence.

After a minute or so it picked up again, like a skipped record finding its groove.

What happened?

Paul received his answer almost immediately.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “ Hey! We got your dancing partner here. He looks kind of lonely.”

They’d captured one of them. Izod or Polo. Just one . The other one was still out there. He was probably lying low like them—being a needle.

The sound of the gunmen searching wavered in and out, like a faulty shortwave signal. Once Paul glimpsed a red Puma sneaker about ten feet from him—that’s it. He shut his eyes and waited for the bullet in his back. When he opened his eyes and peeked, the sneaker was gone.