by Phoef Sutton
Crush stared at him. Maybe it was the concussion, but that almost made sense.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was the boredom more than anything else that made him do it. Zerbe would have thought, if he’d heard about someone who had done this thing, that they would have done it out of desperation or terror. But the terror he’d felt earlier had exhausted him, and he’d lapsed into a state of dull anxiety. So he did it, really, just because there was nothing else for him to do. The darkness and the silence were so all-encompassing that the only thing he had to think about was the plastic strap that tied his wrists together behind the metal chair and how to get out of it.
At first he just tried to slide it down his wrists, but his hands, of course, stopped it from going any farther. Then he tried to pull his hands apart to snap it. When that didn’t work, he tried to twist his hands in such a way as to break it. When that didn’t work either, he tried to pull his right hand out. Then his left.
It occurred to him that he could have gotten it off if it weren’t for his thumb. His right thumb or his left thumb. If either one hadn’t been there, bulging out the way it did, he felt sure he could have slipped the damn plastic zip tie off and freed his hands.
And then what could he do? He could scratch his nose, for one thing. That would be great. And he could reach the table in front of him. See if that cell phone was still there. If it was, then he could call for help. But he’d have to lean awfully far forward to get it. Maybe he couldn’t reach it after all.
But wait! What an idiot! If he reached down with his freed hands and worked on the straps that tied his legs to the chair, he could get them free, too. And then? Then he could stand up and walk to the table. Hell, he could walk to the door and get out of this damn van. He could dance all the way home.
If it weren’t for his fucking thumbs. But what could he do about them? He couldn’t cut them off. No…but he could dislocate them. Or just one, anyway. It would only take one, right? But which one? Well, he was right-handed, so the left one would make the most sense, right? He tried to think what he used his left thumb for and couldn’t come up with much. So he decided to try it.
Using the slats of the chair, he tried to push his left thumb out of its socket. It hurt so much that he stopped after only a few seconds. But then the boredom got too much for him and there was nothing else to do. He might as well try it again. It still hurt, but somehow it didn’t feel as bad as it had the first time. And he kept working it and working it. It took a long time, but what else did he have to do?
He thought he’d hear a sound when his thumb popped loose, but instead it just got limp and sore and very swollen. At first he was afraid that it was so swollen that the plastic strap would be harder to slide off, not easier. But he went on trying to pull his wrist free. He tried for what seemed like hours and hours. After all, how else could he pass the time?
The rhythmic moving of his wrist was hypnotizing to him, and he’d almost fallen asleep when…what was that feeling? That feeling of the strap slipping off him? That feeling of…freedom? He’d done it! He’d gotten loose from the zip tie! He gasped.
Now what the hell was he supposed to do?
He tried to move his arms from around the back of the chair but found that they were only so much dead weight. He realized that the smartest thing about his recent maneuvering wasn’t that it would help him escape; it was that it kept the blood flowing to his arms and hands. Otherwise, he might have lost them. He had a mental image of his hands growing green and black and having to be amputated. Could that happen? He didn’t want to find out.
Concentrating hard on his right arm, he hoisted it over the top rail of the chair. Then he brought his left arm around to join it. He rubbed his hands together and enjoyed the tingling feeling of the blood rushing back to his fingers.
His dislocated thumb started hurting more. In fact, it was throbbing with a blinding pain. To distract himself from the agony, he bent over and reached down to examine his legs. His ankles were securely zip-tied to the legs of the chair. He tugged at the plastic bonds but knew he couldn’t break them. He gave up and thought he’d try to stand.
He lifted his butt from the chair. It felt good to stretch his legs, to flex his buttocks, to slowly stand upright. But before he could straighten up all the way, he bumped his head with a crack on the ceiling of the van. He stood there, bent over, stretching his legs and tightening his glutes. It felt good, but not good enough. He had to get his ankles free. He had to get out of this fucking van.
He tried to think of what his heroes would do in this situation. James Bond would cut the strap with a laser beam hidden in his watch. Maxwell Smart would have a small bomb in his boot heel. Jack Bauer would probably tear his own feet off and run away on the stumps.
Get a little closer to home, he told himself. What would Crush do?
Crush would think.
So Zerbe thought.
When Crush and Gail and Noel got to the Zerbe mansion, Donleavy greeted them at the door. They went into the ornate dining room, where Angela and Emil were sitting at opposite ends of a long table, looking like the protagonists of a gothic novel.
Emil, eating calmly from a bowl of soup, looked up and said, “That will be all, Ms. Donleavy. We have private matters to discuss.”
Donleavy cast a disapproving eye at Crush and went out, shutting the door behind her. Crush knew Donleavy’s Rules for a Bodyguard, and for once he was thankful for them. Rule No. Two: Do Whatever the Principal Says. The Principal in this case was Emil Zerbe. Of course, Rule No. One was: Don’t Let the Principal Get Himself Killed. The two rules often conflicted with each other.
Emil glanced at Gail. “And who’s this?”
“My sensei,” Crush said.
Emil gave Gail a one-sided leer. “I approve,” he said, returning to slurping his soup.
Angela turned to them in exasperation. “What’s the point in talking to him? He gives me nothing! He hasn’t even told me what that weird message meant. He won’t agree to give the kidnappers whatever it is they want.”
“They’re bluffing,” Emil said, sipping from his spoon. He looked up with that stroke-twisted face of his. “They’re too cowardly to hurt my son.”
“They just tried to kidnap your other son,” Gail said. “If it hadn’t been for Crush and me, they’d have gotten him, too.” She recounted the story as succinctly as she could. After she was done, Emil sat in silence for a moment.
He shrugged it off. “If the two of you could stop them, they couldn’t have been very vicious,” he said. “Why didn’t they just shoot him in the truck? And shoot you afterward? No, they’re bluffing. I can feel it.”
Angela pushed away from the table. “It’s the stroke. It’s made him crazy. He’s not thinking clearly.”
Crush pulled out a chair and sat at the table facing Emil. “No, the stroke hasn’t changed you, has it? You’ve always been a stubborn asshole, haven’t you?”
“An asshole, perhaps,” Emil said. “But stubborn? I prefer decisive.”
“Right. I guess you still have those Bob Dole campaign buttons?”
“Dole would have made a fine president, mark my words.”
“And you still think Nixon was railroaded out of office?”
“He should have held out a little longer.”
“And you think the wrong side won World War II?”
Emil’s good eye slid over to stare at Crush. “Hitler was bad. Stalin was worse. Are you going to argue with that?”
“I’m not going to pick one genocidal maniac over another.”
“Roosevelt and Churchill did,” Emil said.
Crush had a feeling he was getting out of his depth. Before he had to reply, they were interrupted by the loud ringing of a telephone. Crush, Angela, and Gail pulled out their phones. Nobody’s phone was ringing. They were puzzled for a second. Then Angela spoke up. “It must be the landline.”
“Well, answer it, why don’t you?” Emil said, not realizing how rare
it was to get an actual call on that piece of antique technology.
“It’s just a sales call, Dad,” Angela said.
Crush spotted the telephone on a side table. It was an old black rotary thing, so he had to answer it blindly, without knowing who was on the other end. Just like the old days. Plucking the receiver from its cradle, Crush held it to his ear. “Hello.”
“Will you accept a collect call from Kendrick Zerbe?” an operator said.
“Yes,” he said quickly. “Of course.” When was the last time he’d spoken with an operator?
Another voice now. A familiar voice. “Um, is Emil Zerbe there? This is his son. Would you tell him to send somebody to come pick me up? I’ve escaped.”
“Are you okay, Zerbe?”
“Yeah,” Zerbe said, in a faltering tone, “No. I don’t know.”
“Where are you, Zerbe?”
“I don’t know that either.” Then there was only silence on the line.
“Hello!” Crush’s voice came from the dangling receiver. “Zerbe, are you there?”
Zerbe was sitting in a crumpled heap at the bottom of a phone booth, watching the phone as it swung back and forth, like the blade in “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
Clearly he was hallucinating. He was still, he assumed, back in that white van, tied to that metal chair, imagining this daring escape. And Crush’s voice, yelling at him from the tinny speaker, was just wish fulfillment. Oh well, at least this illusion was a way to pass the time.
He remembered his dream of escape pretty lucidly. He remembered how, with his legs still zip-tied to the chair, he’d been clever enough to reach up and explore the ceiling of the van. He remembered the cracking sound his head had made when he stood up. How it hadn’t sounded solid. It had sounded crinkly. Like plastic. Crush would investigate, and so Zerbe would, too.
He felt around up there until he found it. The ceiling light. With a plastic lens covering it. And he had an idea. Not exactly a MacGyver idea, but an idea nonetheless. He tried to crack the light fixture with his elbow. When he couldn’t strike it with enough force, he used the top of his skull, slamming it repeatedly against the lamp until it cracked. He sat back down after that, his head throbbing and spinning from the impact. Once his brain had cleared, he stood back up and reached for the light fixture, feeling the broken shards of plastic with his fingers, trying to pry one loose. One he could use as a tool.
Once he had it in his hands, he brought it down to his lap. He examined it with his fingers in the darkness. It was sharp enough. But it was sharp on every side, and he had nothing to protect his fingers. Well, if he was going to do it, he’d better do it soon. He wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the broken piece of plastic and bent over to saw at the zip tie that held his right leg in place. He sawed at it for a long time, the shard cutting into his fingers faster than it cut into the strap.
The blood from his fingers made them slick, and the plastic slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor. He searched for it in the dark but couldn’t find it, so he had to reach back up to the lamp for another.
It took him a long time to cut through the strap on his right leg and even longer to cut through the one on his left. By the time he was finished, both of his hands were useless: strained, dislocated, and bleeding. He sat with them cupped in his lap and wanted a long rest.
But no. He was free from the zip ties and he needed to make his move before his kidnapper returned. Then he realized he had no plan. No strategy. No blueprint for escape.
Well, he could sneak out of the van. Open the doors and creep out. But what would be waiting for him outside? He might find an army of kidnappers waiting for him. There had to be another way. He could stay right where he was until his kidnapper came back in. He could feign being tied up and when his abductor came close enough, he could…he could what?
He tried to picture himself struggling with a live human being, wrapping his useless fingers around a throat of flesh and blood and choking it until…until what? No, he couldn’t do it. He doubted that he could do it physically and he knew he couldn’t do it emotionally. He would have to sneak out now, regardless of what dangers he might walk into.
Lifting himself to his unsteady legs, he moved slowly across the floor of the van, bracing himself against the table. He explored its surface with his hands, hoping against hope that the cell phone had been left there, that he could make a call for help. But no. The table was bare.
Making his way to the doors of the van he felt for the handle with his mangled fingers, took a deep breath, and pulled it. The door swung open. He poked his head out.
The van was parked inside a Quonset hut with a dirt floor. Sunlight streamed through gaps in the corrugated metal walls. He could see that, except for the van, the building was empty. No squads of kidnappers were waiting to leap on him. They were probably right outside the hut. Waiting to leap on him.
Climbing out of the van, he stumbled and fell in a heap in the dirt. His head throbbed and his hands burned with a searing pain. Using the bumper, he pulled himself to his feet and limped around the inside of the hut. He was looking for a hiding place, but realized that that would just be delaying the inevitable. It occurred to him that he might have been better off staying tied up in the van and being a good hostage. After all, his kidnapper hadn’t actually said he was going to kill him. Well, it was too late to go back to that now. Better to just go outside and face the music.
Walking over to the door, he swung it open. Outside he saw nothing but scrubby hills and a two-lane road snaking off into the distance. He waited by the door for a few minutes, not knowing what to do, then made a circuit around the outside of the hut. He found himself oddly disappointed to find no one. Unable to think of anything else to do, he started walking down the narrow road. The temperature was comfortable, in the mid-seventies, but the sun beat down on him and he squinted and sweated. He wasn’t used to being outside.
He didn’t know which direction was north, south, east, or west. He just walked forward. His hands hurt, and he couldn’t put them in his pockets, so he held them out in front of him like Frankenstein. That made him laugh so hard that he tripped and nearly fell down. He sat by the side of the road and laughed and laughed until he started crying.
He wiped off his tears, got up, and kept on going. After about fifteen minutes it occurred to him that he shouldn’t be walking along this road in broad daylight. The kidnapper could drive past him, stop, and load him right back into the van. But no matter. He was too tired to walk off-road. He trudged on.
A few cars sped toward him, and though he tried to stick out his swollen thumb to hitch a ride, they just drove on. He thought he should have checked to see if there were keys in the white van before he left it. He could be driving down the road, listening to music, singing along, instead of walking drearily on. Oh well, he thought, I’ll remember that next time. The next time I’m kidnapped.
As he walked, he began to sing, just to pass the time. “To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump,” he sang. “To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump. To the dump! To the dump, dump, dump.”
Then he saw it. Like the monolith from 2001, it stood there in the lonely desert, a beacon for wandering travelers.
A phone booth.
It was then that he thought he must be experiencing delirium. What the hell was a phone booth doing out in the middle of nowhere, in the early years of the twenty-first century? He slowly approached it, expecting it to fade into the horizon like a mirage. But it remained solid and substantial, right until he reached out with his bloody fingers and touched the door.
It was real.
Either that or his hallucination was very concrete. He pushed the folding door open and stepped inside. The phone was there. The cord was attached. He lifted the receiver and heard the dial tone. It worked! He could call Crush. He could go home! Back to his beloved loft. He could leave the real world behind!
Then he realized—he didn’t have any change.
Change! When do you ever need change nowadays? Never! He never did until this instant, when his life depended on it! He felt like Burgess Meredith breaking his glasses at the end of that Twilight Zone episode. He would be perfectly happy if he had that one thing! A fucking quarter! Without it, he was as good as dead.
He looked at the receiver. Maybe if he explained, it would let him place a call. But explain to what? It was just a machine. It couldn’t understand how desperate his situation was. He thought of all those old songs where people sang to operators and explained their sorrows. But did they still even have operators?
He pressed the “0” repeatedly. A voice came over the line. “What number do you wish to call?”
“Operator! Thank God. I don’t have any change. What can I do?”
“Would you like to place a collect call?”
Of course, a collect call! Zerbe remembered collect calls. Collect calls didn’t require change! He was saved!
“Yes, yes! A collect call. I’d like to place a collect call.”
“And what number would you like to call?”
His face fell. What number? He didn’t know any phone numbers. Who knew anyone’s number anymore, with the memory on your cell phone? Who used their real memory for anything?
“What number would you like to call?” the operator repeated.
Think, Zerbe! You must know a phone number. Any phone number. Think. Think of a goddamned phone number. But the only number he could recall was the one he’d memorized in childhood. His old home number. His father’s number. He didn’t really want to talk to his father now, but what choice did he have?
He gave the number and waited.
It was when he heard Crush’s voice on the end of the line that he really started thinking this was only a dream. What would Crush be doing at his house? Crush wouldn’t be caught dead there. No, this was all just an illusion. Before long, his kidnapper would come back in the van, wake him up, and start beating on him again.