He remembered what he’d done and the nerves kicked in. The taller man leaned down into the trunk to look at how he had kicked through the tail-light. As he did, he shielded the sun so Tom could see him.
Mr Stanley. The Honolulu leg-shaker.
Fear gripped Tom like something physical, holding his throat shut in an iron fist, and clutching his chest.
‘Fucking little shit! Look what he did to my car!’
Stanley punched him. Tom saw it coming and turned, but it still connected with his ear, making it ring like a fire bell. Then Stanley started to drag him out of the trunk, careless of the metal and plastic biting into his flesh.
Tom screamed as pain shot through his leg, panicked that Stanley might just keep pulling and twisting until the muscle was stripped clean off the bone and left behind in the trunk of the Thunderbird.
‘Hold on.’ That was the other man. Thank God for him, whoever he was.
Stanley let him go and stepped back. The other man leaned over him. He was older than Stanley, but wider in the shoulders. He had a shaven head and wore a dark blue suit with a pale blue tie. He peered at Tom’s leg, then up at his face. ‘What a goddamn mess,’ he said, and grinned. Tom saw he had strange, sharp little yellow teeth that made him think of a weasel.
He stepped away again and Tom’s fear rolled back that Stanley would be left to his own devices. But Stanley stood and glared at him while Tom felt a door of the car open and then shut. The Weasel came back with a tyre iron. So they were thorough, not careless. Somehow, having the answer to his earlier question failed to delight Tom.
The Weasel inserted the iron into the tear in the metal housing, and levered the edges away from Tom’s leg. Tom bit his lip and groaned, but held as still as he could while the sharp metal worked back out of his flesh.
‘You pull it out now?’
Tom nodded enthusiastically. He welcomed any non-interventionist policy now that those tin-can edges were out of the way. He pulled his leg slowly and carefully back inside the trunk, trying not to notice the amount of blood that had soaked his jeans from the knee down. He hissed as an errant movement made a fresh gouge in the top of his ankle, but finally he was free and lay panting with relief.
The Weasel reached in and grabbed his arm, and Stanley helped him pull Tom roughly over the tailgate, his ribs, hips and knees banging hard against the metal. He half fell into pale, sandy dust that immediately took him back to the Karoo, and from there it was only a half-synapse-fire from thinking of Pam and the others, screaming in a blaze that had been ‘bound to happen one day’.
But it had happened that day.
And this was happening now.
And he didn’t believe in coincidences.
The men were obviously waiting for him to get up, so he made the effort, holding onto the back of the Thunderbird, then sagging against it, resting his injured leg, his head hanging over his chest.
‘What do you want?’
The Weasel smiled sharply. ‘You’ll find out.’
Tom wished he hadn’t bothered asking. Wished he’d saved his energy and dignity, what little of both he had left.
Stanley grabbed a handful of his T-shirt and twisted it up and under his chin so Tom had to look him in the eyes. He saw Stanley’s desire to hurt him writ large there and, with his wrists still cuffed behind him, felt the vulnerability of his exposed abdomen and groin. He turned and brought his injured leg up reflexively in a weak gesture of protection. Stanley laughed and jerked him forward, making him walk.
Tom watched the barn approach with spiralling apprehension. This was the place where whatever was going to happen would happen. And he was limping towards it, complicit in his own fate.
He glanced around. Gum trees pressed over the barn, with scratchy yellow grass between them. Rattlesnake grass and low scrub. He could be anywhere between Santa Ana and Mexico. If he ran now they’d catch him before he got ten feet.
Having only just got used to the light, he was stopped dead by the darkness just inside the barn. Before his eyes could adjust, Stanley shoved him forward and he stumbled to his knees.
‘Have a seat, Mr Patrick.’ The Weasel was in control now, it seemed.
Tom saw a lightweight wooden chair, and sat in it. The Weasel slid a plastic tie around one of his wrists and fastened it to a strut at the back of the chair.
In the shadows he made out farm equipment. An old tractor and indeterminate bladed implements to hitch to it, their formerly bright-painted surfaces faded to dirty blues and dull reds. He could smell hay somewhere. How he knew it was hay, he had no idea. He couldn’t remember ever having seen a bale of hay, but somewhere in his brain the smell of hay was stored and recognized.
The floor under his feet was dirt, just the wilderness cleared and built over with no concession to improvement.
Tom was almost embarrassed by the cliché it presented. He’d been kidnapped and was about to be interrogated or killed in a barn. It was so cheap Hollywood. Okay, a warehouse would have been worse, but once you realized a barn was just a warehouse for hicks, all the shame of predictability returned.
‘Mr Patrick,’ said the Weasel.
For a crazy second Tom wondered if there was any mileage in denying that he was Mr Patrick, but one brief look at Stanley convinced him otherwise: the man was just itching for an excuse to get physical with him.
‘Mr Patrick?’ said the Weasel again, with a little note of impatience.
‘Yes, what?’ said Tom, even more impatiently. He wanted to know what they wanted to know so he could start to make decisions about his own future. Or lack thereof.
The Weasel blinked in surprise and threw a sardonic glance at Stanley. ‘Little feisty, ain’t he?’
Stanley didn’t laugh.
‘I don’t think he knows what feisty means,’ said Tom, and instantly cursed his mouth to Hell and back. This was not the time or the place to make snappy remarks.
Stanley hissed through a tight jaw but the Weasel only shrugged.
‘Mr Patrick, we wanted to make something clear to you.’
Tom nodded. He was on board.
‘When you’re asked to play cards, you play cards.’
