Dante's Dilemma (34 page)

I marveled at Crow's ability to rationalize his cowardice.

“So you coached her about what to tell me?”

“Uh-huh. It must have been some blow to your ego when you figured it out. That's why you just couldn't let things be, isn't it? I looked you up after that other doctor got run over. White men, both of you. East Coast schools, the best of everything our country hands out to the privileged few. I admit it felt good pulling the wool over your eyes.” He chuckled and nudged me in the arm. “C'mon, you have to admit that's a good one. Laugh with me.”

“I would if I didn't feel the urge to vomit,” I said.

“That's right. Keep up the sarcasm. It'll only make things easier. Any last words before I put the gag on?”

I wasn't about to give him the satisfaction.

Crow herded us through the house, out the back door, and down a short flight of steps. With my wrists bound in front of me, I misjudged the last step and pitched forward into Hallie, pushing both of us down into a bed of crusted snow. Crow picked her up and then me. “Guide him!” he snarled. Hallie complied by coming over and leaning into my shoulder. When we resumed walking, she was limping. We proceeded that way a short distance farther on.

I had assumed Crow was taking us to a car but realized otherwise when I heard the scrape of wood on metal.

“Nnnnnn,” I heard Hallie protest through the tape sealing her lips.

“Yes, little lady, that's right. In you go.”

He shoved Hallie forward, and I heard her stumble. Her muffled protests grew louder.

“You too, four-eyes.”

He pushed me into an opening barely larger than I was. I stumbled over the threshold and landed against Hallie again, sending us both onto an uneven dirt floor. We stayed there, huddled in a heap while Crow shut the door behind us, cutting off the moan of the wind. In the sudden silence, I could hear Hallie breathing in and out. A bolt that might have been a two-by-four was put back into place with a thud. Moments later, I heard a car door snap shut and an engine growl to life.

It sounded just like Hallie's MG.

I realized then that Crow meant to leave us there.

As soon as the car drove away, I rolled over Hallie and then onto my side, coming up against a rough plank wall that tore at my sweater while I slithered into a sitting position. Crow had been stupid about one thing, leaving my fingers free. I set to pushing and pulling at the tape securing my mouth until I had worked a corner of it loose. It took a few more seconds to gain enough traction to tear it from my cheeks. “Keep still. I'm coming,” I said to Hallie, who in the interim had also maneuvered herself into a sitting position. I dug my heels into the dirt and scooted back over to her. Hallie gathered what I was up to and inched her face over to where I could grope it.

When she could move her lips again, I asked where we were.

“In some kind of shed behind Westlake's house, by the alley. Probably where he stored his firewood. I saw a pile of it in the back before Crow shut the door.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“You mean, like a set of keys? No such luck. But don't take my word for it. I'm as blind as you are right now.”

“Do you have your coat?”

“Uh-uh. Crow took it. And my phone. All I have on now is a jacket and slacks.”

Not nearly enough in such cold.

“You should stand up and move around, to keep your blood circulating.”

“I can't,” Hallie said. “I think I twisted my ankle when we fell down.”

With some difficulty, I got into a squat and slid my back up the wall until I was standing. Where it met the wall, the roof barely cleared my head. “Here,” I said. “I'm going to try to help you up.” I squeezed my bound hands together and braced them under her armpit to give her a boost. “Can you put any weight on it?”

“I'm trying,” Hallie said.

I felt her flinch in pain.

“No, I guess not,” she capitulated, sinking heavily back down.

“All right. Just sit tight while I do something else.”

“You're awfully relaxed for a person who's just been bound, gagged, and tossed into a coal bin,” Hallie said.

In fact, I
was
operating on the calm, if unjustified belief that finding a way out of there would be a cinch—as soon as I got my hands free.

Hallie's view of the situation was more practical. “Shouldn't we be screaming for help?”

“Save your lungs while I try some other things.”

Fortunately, Crow never noticed the shard of glass I had retrieved from the floor and tucked up my sleeve—with some risk to my brachial artery—after intentionally falling down in Westlake's living room. With some delicate shifting of my shoulders, I managed to work it back down to where I could grasp it.

“Stick your wrists out,” I said to Hallie. “And yell if I start to cut you.”

We took turns sawing each other's bindings off. When my arms were free, I pulled my sweater off and handed it to her. “Put this on while I take a look around. There's no light at all?” I asked, hoping for a window or a crack somewhere that I could leverage into an escape hatch. I knocked experimentally on one of the plank walls. Old lumber and probably as thick as my wrist.

“Uh-uh,” Hallie said.

The dryness of the hut confirmed it. Though it felt every bit like a freezer, the air held barely a hint of damp. I doubted there was even a mouse hole. Using the back of my knuckles as a defense against splinters, I went all the way around the walls without finding anything besides a pile of dry logs in the rear and a plastic tarp in a corner. I brought it back to where Hallie was sitting.

“Find anything?” she said. Her teeth had begun to chatter.

“Not even a termite,” I answered. “Here, wrap yourself up in this. It will help keep you warm.”

I'd saved the door for last. Unfortunately, it appeared to be constructed from the same heavy lumber as the walls. I felt all around the edges, but it was set solidly in its frame on hinges that were only moderately rusted. Using my shoulder as a battering ram, I made several runs at it without producing so much as a shudder.

“
Madone
,” I said, using a childhood expletive I resorted to when
shit
didn't seem nearly expressive enough.

Stubbornly I searched the floor and all around the walls again, finding nothing—not even an old nail—that I could use to pry us out.

“OK,” I said. “We yell for help now.”

But though we shouted ourselves hoarse for the next half hour, no one answered our cries. With all the warnings about staying inside, it was unlikely anyone was taking a stroll through the alley, and the shack's thick walls meant we probably couldn't be heard more than a few yards off.

“It's not working,” I said to Hallie, when the futility of our efforts finally sank in. I slipped down to the floor beside her and helped myself to a section of the tarp. “We need to save our strength.”

My next thoughts were about how to stay alive until help arrived.

You didn't live through a Chicago winter without hearing about them: the dozen or so victims who perished from the cold between the months of November and March. Though the risk was greatest for alcoholics and the elderly, it could happen to anyone. A slip and fall in an alley, a breakdown on a little-used road, a furnace that stopped working in the night. The next day, it would be all over the news, with renewed warnings about the deadly effects of prolonged exposure to severe weather.

As a doctor, I knew the progression only too well. Human beings are essentially tropical animals with few natural defenses against cold. When body temperature falls below normal, the nervous system, heart, and other organs react accordingly. Shivering is actually a good sign, because it means that the body is still trying to manufacture heat. But as core temperature continues to drop, the major blood vessels constrict, sending less and less oxygen to outer limbs and the brain. Lapses in judgment follow, along with a deterioration in motor skills and drowsiness. Eventually the victim loses consciousness, breathing ceases, and the heart stops.

When I was a Boy Scout, I'd also been drilled over and over about what to do if caught in a blizzard. Get out of the wind, remove wet clothing, cover yourself with blankets, leaves, or even snow. Don't waste energy, and wait quietly for aid to arrive. Good advice that only went so far. Though the walls of our prison reduced the danger of frostbite, they were no barrier to the steadily falling temperature. The cold was almost a tangible thing, penetrating the hut in ever-intensifying waves. Even under the cover of the tarp, the gelid air tugged at our skin, bit into our nostrils, and made breathing a chore.

I put my arms around Hallie and hugged her tightly to me. Two-thirds my weight, she seemed to be having a much harder time of it. Her limbs were wracked with tremors. Huddled together this way, sharing each other's warmth, we might survive for a few hours, but not indefinitely.

“How are you doing?” I asked her, through the staccato of my own teeth.

“All right. But the next time we go winter camping, remind me to bring some matches.”

“I could start a fire without them.”

“Hmmm. Smoke inhalation might be a problem.”

“As would being roasted alive.”

“Too bad we don't have any marshmallows.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

That was another problem, along with dehydration, both of which would hasten our end.

As the first hour passed into the second, and the second into the third, I grew more and more pessimistic about our chances. Even if we were reported missing, no one knew where Hallie and I had gone or would think of looking for us in the yard behind the deserted Westlake mansion. If Crow had half a brain, he would destroy our cell phones and abandon the MG in some faraway place, in a body of water or across state lines. It would be a simple matter to tell Winona to follow him in his car—as simple as coming up with an explanation the confused girl wouldn't question. If so, it might be months before our bodies were found, when the odor from our thawing corpses became too strong to miss. By that time, grass would have grown up over Brad Stephens's grave. Rachel Lazarus would have spent her first months in prison. And with no one there to remind him, Louis would begin to forget he ever had a natural father.

“Are we going to die?” Hallie whispered to me. In the last half hour, her speech had slowed and she had stopped shaking, a bad sign since it meant her body was giving up the fight.

“No,” I said. “Though it might be time to say our prayers.”

“I don't want to pray. I just want you to kiss me.”

I obliged her, feeling with a shudder another kind of kiss on her lips.

“Mark?” she said from far away.

“What?”

“If we don't make it—”

I put a finger over her mouth. “Don't talk. Just stay with me.”

Not long after, I stopped shivering too and my thought processes became muddled. Cold, I thought farcically. Why did cold have to feel so much like fire? Wasn't that an oxymoron? Cold burning me up while I was freezing. Cold that wouldn't go away. Cold that never relinquished its grip, that felt like a hot lick of flame on my cheek. Come to think of it, there
was
something on my cheek. I batted at it with numbed fingers, but it came back, sending a hot, foul smell into my nostrils. “Damn it!” I murmured, pushing it away again. “Why can't you just let me die in peace?”

The cold returned, pushing at my face with a tiny palm. A soft palm with disconcertingly rough edges. Pushing ever so slightly and then more insistently. I heard a sound like a clock ticking next to my ear and felt the sensation of something moving restlessly above my chest. The cold come to taunt me in my final moments. It hovered there, circling around and around, before landing like a barbell on my throat.

I shot up in shock, clawing at the air.

And being clawed in return as the equally surprised animal leaped over my ear and into the dark.

“Meow,” it said.

“What the—?” I said, my brain fog lifting ever so slightly.

“Meow,” it complained again.

No
, I thought. It couldn't possibly be. “Whiskers?” I said experimentally.

He—or she—responded by returning and rubbing my leg.

The sudden rush of adrenaline had put a temporary halt on my mental decline. I lowered my ear to Hallie's chest and felt for her wrist. She was still breathing, but her pulse was faint.

Curious about what I was up to, the cat drew nearer to where I could touch it. “Whiskers, or whatever you're called,” I said. “How the hell did you get in here?”

The cat swished its tail in response.

“Come on, show me.”

The cat trotted away to the woodpile at the back of the shed to where I could hear it scratching around. The only place I hadn't searched for an escape hatch was behind it.

Later, I would remember tearing at the logs with my almost comically useless hands, weeping real tears of relief when I'd pushed the last of them away and felt the current of fresh air on my face. It was only a hole near the ground, the size of a small animal, and the earth around it was too frozen to enlarge. But when I screwed my head into the dirt and pressed my ear to the opening, I heard footsteps crunching through the snow toward us and recognized the voice of Mrs. Esposito.

“Whiskers? Is that you? Bad boy, making me come out looking for you on such a dreadful night. I don't know what I'm going to do if you don't stop running away.”

THIRTY-ONE

“You got custody?” Hallie said in disbelief.

“Amazing, isn't it? I think what won them over was showing I could keep him at a healthy weight.”

It was the following Thursday and we were sitting down to dinner at a much-touted new restaurant in Bucktown specializing in all things brined, locally sourced, and hormone-free.