There was a gasp of outrage and Sandy apparently turned to a colleague to complain about Tom. There was a muffled response – and then the unmistakable sound of her hanging up on him.
‘Fuck!’
Tom hurled his phone against the wall – and wished he hadn’t, even as it left his hand. He heard a crack as it hit and bounced across the floor in two pieces.
‘Shit. Fuck. Asshole!’
His neighbour banged on the wall and he yelled, ‘Up yours, Shaeffer!’ at the stucco as he examined the phone.
He’d killed it.
*
Tom removed the Sim card and slipped it into his pocket. From his landline, he called the Sawmill in Santa Ana, without any great hope that they’d give him Lucia’s number. He told them it was NTSB business but the woman on the phone sounded mightily bored by his so-called business, Lucia’s alleged dead sister, and any further attempts he would ever make to wangle one of her dancers’ personal numbers out of her. In some underused recess of reason in his mind, Tom couldn’t blame her, but that didn’t stop him swearing as he slammed the phone down and grabbed his car keys.
He stopped at the door and went back to put on his NTSB jacket, cap and badge. They gave him the right to demand information from multi-national corporations and government agencies. Fucked if he was going to let a sleazy strip joint off the hook.
Tom came off the Garden Grove freeway on Euclid and headed south. He took a left onto the road bordered by strip malls that became progressively more downmarket. Ralph’s was a beacon of corporate success surrounded by a hundred Thai cafés, copy shops and pawnbrokers. He passed the Motel 6, which looked even sadder in daylight than it did in the dark, and swung into the parking lot of the Sawmill. It was at the back of the club – a clever ploy so that the men who went there were hidden from the road when they got out of their cars.
Tom noticed a dark blue ’67 Thunderbird pull into the lot behind him. He tugged on his cap, checked his ID and got out of the Buick.
Swift, strong hands on his upper arms propelled him forward, making him stumble even while they held him up.
‘Hey!’ He tried to dig his heels into the pitted surface, but the two men who had him were strong and professional.
Even given the circumstances, Tom couldn’t bring himself to yell, ‘Help,’ but he did yell, ‘Fuck!’ very loudly as he tried to twist away, and felt the side of his face explode in pain as something hit him. He didn’t pass out but it took all the fight out of him in a second, and he could only stagger and drag between the men as they cuffed his hands behind him, then hurled him roughly into the trunk of the Thunderbird and slammed the lid.
23
RIDING IN THE trunk of a car was bad in lots of ways that Tom had never imagined it would be. For a start, it stank of gas, a smell that Tom had always quite liked, as he had those of dog food and garlic. But he’d tried dog food and it tasted like boiled garbage, and garlic was only okay in your food, not in anyone else’s. In this concentration, when he couldn’t just walk away, the smell of gas made him feel sick and dizzy. Although that sock in the jaw hadn’t helped, he was pretty sure.
Tom felt around with his hands and feet and touched a plastic gas can behind his back. Great. He managed to manoeuvre it down to his feet, but the smell was barely less pervasive.
Then there was the comfort factor. Until you took the up holstered seat out of a car and lay down with only a strip of thin felt between you and bare metal, you couldn’t really appreciate how rough the ride was. He couldn’t get comfortable. There was a lump right in the middle of the trunk which could have been the bolt holding the spare tyre, and he didn’t have enough room to move away from it completely. He could feel it now, digging into his hip.
Without visual warnings of sudden turns and stops so he could brace himself, he was rolled back and forth like a pebble in a can, now with the top of his head pressed against the side of the car as they swung left, then thrown forward against the seat-backs as the driver braked, and banged against the lumpy metal of the lock and tail-light housings.
To distract himself, Tom tried to concentrate on where they were going – like people did in movies – but soon gave up. Who gave a shit anyway? He’d find out where they were taking him when they got there.
With his hands cuffed behind him, Tom fiddled with the trunk’s lock but without a lever it was pointless. He managed to lift the thin felt lining but all he found were a couple of metal cavities that had probably once held the car’s jack and toolkit. These guys were thorough. Or had lost their jack and toolkit. Either way it was bad news for Tom.
But the lights … In modern cars, the tail-light housings were sealed modular units but in older cars … Maybe there was something there.
In complete darkness, rolled and rocked by the vehicle’s movement, Tom’s fingers found the catch that released the left tail-light access hatch. He prised it off, and was faintly illuminated by the daylight filtering through the coloured plastic of the brake-light and indicator covers. The light was filtered again through the bulb surrounds, but he had enough to work by.
He could see now that the Thunderbird was a pretty rudimentary piece of assembly with gaping holes and flimsy wires. Even his shitty Buick had a more solid-looking back end. Thank God for low-tech cars.
Tom curled himself round so that his feet were against the brake-light assembly and his shoulders braced against the back of the rear seat. For the first time in his life, he wished he wasn’t six two.
With a sharp movement, he kicked hard into the brake light, crunching the connectors and bulbs, and buckling the thin metal plate against the coloured plastic. His head was pressed up and against the seat as the car stopped. Tom prayed they weren’t at their destination yet – prayed he’d get another chance at kicking out the light. He made a hurried pact with a God he didn’t believe in … He heard a couple of muffled voices inside the car, but couldn’t make out the words.
Lights changed or the road cleared, and the car lurched forward again, making Tom’s knees bend as his feet pressed back against the rear of the trunk.
He uncrossed the mental fingers that had kept him vaguely honest in the eyes of non-God, and went back to work.
He shuffled away from the lights to get the maximum leverage and kicked again. This time the plate broke and cracked the glass. It sounded cacophonous to him and he held his breath. But the car didn’t slow, and he didn’t hear any surprised tones from the men up front.
He kicked again and yelped in pain. His foot had gone right through this time, smashing the brake light out, but the sharp edges of the plate – curved outwards by his assault – tore into his ankle and shin like a bear trap. Trying to pull his leg back only made the metal dig more deeply into his flesh.
A new wave of nausea washed over him and he swallowed. The last thing he needed in this trunk was a puddle of nice hot vomit.
Tom breathed hard. He peered down and saw that his All Stars sneaker was now protruding from where the brake light used to be. If they were in traffic, surely someone would see it. Surely – having seen it – they’d report it. He hoped and hoped and tried to wiggle his foot around so that it might attract attention, but only his foot was outside the car. If his leg up to the knee was hanging out there, the chances of it being seen increased exponentially …
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Tom braced himself and shoved his leg further out of the car. The jagged metal sliced a red-hot groove up his shin almost to the knee, and the shattered plastic of the brake light ripped into his calf. Tom’s head and back went cold and prickly with the pain, and he felt a clammy sweat break out on his forehead.
He lay there on his hands in the dark, one leg crooked against the back of the trunk, the other dangling bloodily out of the taillight, his jaw aching and his ribs heaving. He felt pathetically small and weak, and wished someone would make all this go away. What a fucking baby.
He made a poor – and painful – effort to wave his injured leg around.
Nobody saw.
Nobody reported it.
Nobody came to his rescue.
*
‘What the fuck is this?’ The man’s voice was bemused, angry – and unnervingly familiar. Tom blinked back to consciousness in gushing sunlight as the trunk lid rose. At first, he could see the men only as silhouettes, blinded as he was by the brilliance of daylight.
