by Glenn Roug
into a narrow driveway and came to a halt in a small parking lot. This was a modest motel, cheaper-looking than mine, with room for only ten cars in the adjacent lot. There were three standing there when we arrived. One of them was a 1970's light green Mazda truck with a covered bed.
I shifted my gaze from the truck to agent Rodriguez. The expression on his face did not change. I know mine did. My first instinct was to open the door and run as quickly as I could down the street. I understood the futility of this and instead let out a frustrated moan. "What's going on here?" I said after a while, when I saw that he remained silent.
He still said nothing, instead pointing at the green truck. It was parked two spots away from us. There was no one in the cab. "What?" I said.
"He's staying here, at this motel."
"Who?"
"The driver of the truck."
I brought my face closer to his. "Are you with them? Tell me the truth." I had no strength left to continue with this game. I wanted it to be over with, whatever that meant.
He smiled again. "No, I'm with you."
"But you knew this truck would be here. The truck I was kidnapped in."
He seemed to enjoy not giving me more information than he had to. "Of course."
"Of course what? Are we here to arrest them?"
"Nope."
"Did you bring me here to turn me over to them?"
"I told you I'm on your side."
"Then why the fuck are we here?"
"The driver of the truck would like to talk to you."
"You mean the man who abducted me?"
"That would be him."
I put a hand on the door handle. "How are you on my side if you bring me back to my abductor?"
"Relax," he said. Then he took out a phone and dialed a number and put it to his ear. "We're here," was all that he said before he hung up.
The last lingering threads of resistance left me at the sound of his confident tone. I let go of the handle and sank deep into my seat. My eyes went down spiritlessly to the floor of the car and from there up again to the sky outside and the building and the green truck. A door opened at the front of the motel and a man walked out and approached us. It was a long moment before I could recognize who it was; so persistent is our mind in rejecting what seems to be the impossible, even when the evidence stares us right in the face.
"Hello, wuss," he said as he peered inside the car. He did not smile or show any emotion, but then, when did he ever do either? Instead he put one of his half cigars in his mouth and opened the door and asked us to join him in his room.
XVI.
Doc Minus Two was a bad host on the best of days. Being far from home did little to improve his manners. He did not invite us to sit down and did not offer us anything to drink, and did not close the door to the bathroom when he went in to take a leak, and did not ask us if we minded that his dirty laundry was strewn about the entire floor and the furniture and the bed. We had to remove socks and underpants from the small wooden chairs before we could sit on them — without invitation — and waited for him to be done in the bathroom so he could take his place on a third chair.
Only Doc's gruffness prevented me from bursting into emotional expressions of relief. "I thought you were dead."
"You thought wrong," he said apathetically. "I never was dead, not even for a minute. I can produce witnesses who will swear to it."
"What did they do to you?"
"Nothing."
He was worse than Rodriquez. "But you disappeared," I persisted.
"No, I was simply away from my cabin after they broke into it."
"So they did make an attempt on you."
He shook his head. "They knew I wasn't there. They only wanted to plant listening devices under the pathetic guise of a burglary. But I have some surveillance equipment of my own in there, and so I knew about it and stayed away from the cabin for awhile."
"You went into hiding."
He shook his head. "Nope, just stayed away from the cabin and ignored your phone calls. I had a lot of work to do."
His lack of consideration was grating on me. "You could have at least told us. Nat and I were worried sick."
"Nat was never worried sick about anything in his life except his imaginary VC. He helped you just for the distraction. As for you, you don't count because you're a wuss. If you didn't worry about this you'd have worried about something else."
"You're the most insensitive person I have ever met. I'm sorry I was ever worried about you. It won't happen again even if I see you drown with my own eyes; I can promise you that."
He dropped his head forward to show that he was exhausted by my touchiness. "I'm sorry," he said mockingly. "Next time I disappear I'd let you know with a note written on a pink greeting card with a picture of a bouncing baby and some chocolates on the side."
I did not let him insult me. I had a bigger bone to pick with him, anyway. "Why did you abduct me?"
"To keep you from committing suicide. You were about to go into that cave."
"Were they waiting for me inside?"
"Death was waiting for you inside."
"Couldn't you just warn me?"
"No. You'd have gone in there anyway as soon as my back was turned. You're a stubborn little man with delusions of grandeur. We've already established that."
I was not satisfied with this explanation. "But to scare me half to death like that, tying me up like a pig, taping my mouth shut. You could have suffocated me."
"I know what I'm doing; I'm a doctor."
"A lousy doctor."
"I tied you up loosely. Made sure you could escape if you wanted to and even came back to make sure that you did."
"Ah, so that's why the truck came back to the shed. Regardless, that was still a nasty thing to do. I thought that was the end of me, first from you, whom I believed to be one of them, and then from him." I pointed at Rodriguez. "I had hundreds of scenarios running through my head, all of them bad, some even a little crazy. You shortened my life by a year. That's not very doctor like."
"I couldn't take any chances. I needed just one more day to make absolutely certain of something, and until then I wanted you out of the way. Then I was planning to track you down and tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"Who's behind the whole thing."
"Well, who is it?"
He took a long drag from his cigar. "Can't tell you yet. I still need to confirm something. There is one more thing I need to do tonight. I was in the middle of planning it when you had to disturb me again by going to the police." He took his cigar out of his mouth and used it to point at me. "I got to hand it to you, that was a brilliant idea to get the local police to go with you to the cave. I never thought you capable of independent thinking of this caliber. I expected you to go into hiding for a week or so, like the coward you are."
That was the closest thing to a praise Doc Minus Two was capable of delivering, and I accepted it as such. It mollified me to an extent, but there was still much more I wanted to know. I turned to Rodriquez. "And you, a federal agent — you just sit there and let him do these things to me?"
Rodriquez smiled again. "We had bigger fish to fry. Besides, he didn't tell me about the kidnapping until after the fact. By then you went to the police."
I turned to Doc Minus Two. "How did you know I went to the police?"
He got up and opened a window to let the cigar smoke out. "I couldn’t know where you'd wind up after you untied yourself and escaped from that tool shed. So, I asked Danny here to put in an official request to detain you if you ever turned up as Ben Durand. I figured this way we'd know if you got into trouble. And sure enough, you did."
I forced myself to laugh. "And you took my passport away to make sure I don't leave the island."
"What passport? I don't remember any passport."
"That's right, you don't," Rodriquez interjected. "Because if there was a p
assport belonging to someone else on you the two of you would be in big trouble."
"Why are you here, anyway?" I asked Rodriquez.
The FBI agent shook his head slowly. That annoying smile of his reappeared. "I can't tell you but you'll know soon enough."
I leaned back in the chair for the first time since I sat down. "So what now?"
"Now we go to the cave," Doc Minus Two said.
"I thought you said death was waiting for me in there."
"It's the same death I'm hoping to meet tonight," he said. "And cheat it. I wasn't planning on taking you with us cause we both know you're going to be as useless as a map of Belgium in the Sahara, but seeing as you're here anyway, you may tag along." He put out his cigar. "If you promise to do what we tell you."
I promised, and Doc Minus Two pointed at me and then at the shower. "You look like a scarecrow that's gone through a cow's intestines. Hit the shower and then get some sleep. We leave after dark."
"It's hard enough to find the cave entrance during daylight," I said.
"It's not the entrance I'm concerned about." But he refused to elaborate and I did what he told me and showered and went to sleep on one of the two narrow beds in the room. It was easy to drift off to sleep: Rodriquez had disappeared by the time I got out of the bathroom, and Doc Minus Two was not one to make noise unless he had to.
At eight Rodriguez came back. With him were two officers from the local police. I looked at him with bewilderment. "We're not allowed to make arrests in Crete," he explained. "That's why they need to escort us."
We took the green Mazda truck — I rode in the cab this time — and Rodriguez's rental and drove off to the cave. We must have stopped some distance away because once we parked the cars and continued on