Potboiler (14 page)

55.

Not wanting to frighten his daughter over what would surely turn out to be a giant misunderstanding, he used his call to phone his agent. Nobody answered, though, and after further processing he was shown to a cell occupied by a young gang member covered in tattoos.

“What about my phone call?” Pfefferkorn said to the guard.

“Ain’t my fault,” the guard said.

“But—”

The door slammed shut.

Pfefferkorn stood agape.

“Don worry,
ese
,” the gang member said. “You get use to it.”

Pfefferkorn avoided looking at his cellmate as he climbed up to the empty top bunk. He had a notion that it was unwise to stare at people in jail. They might take it the wrong way. He lay down and tried to think. His arraignment was scheduled for the morning. Where did that leave him for now? Locked up like some common criminal? What about bail? What about parole? What about time off for good behavior? He didn’t know how any of this worked. He had never been arrested before. Of course he hadn’t. He was a law-abiding citizen. He tossed and turned with indignation. Then he thought about Carlotta and his anger became anguish. Anything might be happening to her. If the police believed they had solved the case by arresting him, they were bringing her that much closer to death—if she wasn’t dead already. Time was slipping away. He felt as though he was buried up to his neck in sand. He moaned.

“
Ese.
Chill out.”

Pfefferkorn clenched his fists to keep still.

A little later, a buzzer sounded.

“Chow time,” the gang member said.

The dining room walls reverberated hellishly with the noise of men eating and talking. Pfefferkorn took his tray and sat alone, slumped, his arms crossed over his chest. He needed to make that call.

“Not hungry?”

Pfefferkorn’s heart contracted unpleasantly as his cellmate sat down across from him.

“So,
ese
, what you do?”

Pfefferkorn frowned. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Then why you here?”

“I’m being accused of a crime I didn’t commit,” Pfefferkorn said.

The gang member laughed. “Hey, what a coincidence. Me too.”

He flexed one forearm, causing the Virgin Mary to shimmy lewdly. Gothic lettering spanned the hollow of his throat.

“Ese,”
the gang member said, “you lookin at something?”

Pfefferkorn averted his eyes again. “No.”

The chow room clattered and boomed.

“You know what that means?” the gang member said.

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“Okay then,” the gang member said. He stood. “Eat up.”

56.

“Pfefferkorn. Derecho. Let’s go.”

“Rise and shine,
ese
.”

Pfefferkorn stirred. He felt god-awful. He’d spent most of the night awake. Rarely did the other inmates cease hollering and stomping, and anyway, he was too wound up from imagining Carlotta in various states of peril. He had nodded off shortly before daybreak. The color of the light told him it wasn’t much later than that now.

“Move it.”

Pfefferkorn and his cellmate stood in the corridor, facing the wall. The guards patted them down and escorted them out of the cell block toward the elevator.

“No talking,” a guard said, although nobody had said anything.

A van was waiting to transfer them to the central courthouse. They were shackled to their seats. The engine started and the van crept toward the security gate. The driver flashed a badge. The arm went up. They pulled onto the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

Pfefferkorn was immersed in one kind of anxiety, enough so that at first he did not realize the van had pulled onto the freeway. When he did notice, he was not in sufficient possession of his faculties to be surprised. Only after they exited the freeway and started driving uphill did it occur to him that they should have arrived at their destination some time ago, and a second kind of anxiety came to the fore. He couldn’t tell where they were, because the van’s back windows were blacked out, and the grate protecting the driver made it hard to see through the windshield. He glanced at his cellmate. The man appeared perfectly at ease. Pfefferkorn didn’t like it.

“Are we almost there?” he called.

Nobody answered.

The road got bumpy. Pfefferkorn glanced at his cellmate’s shackles. He reasoned that whatever was happening had to be happening to his cellmate as well—hence their common state of shackledness. He tried to make this make him feel better. It didn’t work.

The van pulled over. The driver got out and came around to open the back door. A blast of unfiltered sunlight caused Pfefferkorn to squint. What he saw did not compute. Instead of a parking lot or an urban street, there was barren hillside and a dirt road.

“Where are we,” he said.

The driver did not answer. She—it was a she—unlocked Pfefferkorn’s cellmate. Though Pfefferkorn was still half blind, he was able to detect a familiarity in her face.

“What’s happening,” he said.

“Relax,” Pfefferkorn’s cellmate said, rubbing his wrists. He no longer had a gangbanger accent. He got out of the van. The door closed. Pfefferkorn heard them talking. The gang member was complaining about being itchy. The driver murmured a reply and the two of them laughed. Pfefferkorn cried for help, his voice bouncing around the inside of the van. He jerked helplessly at his chains.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” the driver said, opening the back door. The gang member was behind her, clutching something sharp and glinting.

Pfefferkorn slid away from them in terror.

“Take it easy,” the gang member said. His jail uniform was gone and his entire mien had changed. The driver was also out of uniform. With their youthful freshness, they could have been students of his. Then Pfefferkorn saw: they
were
students of his. The young man was Benjamin, author of the pretentious short story about getting old. Pfefferkorn didn’t remember him having so many tattoos. Then again, Pfefferkorn didn’t remember him being a gang member at all, so perhaps his memory was not to be trusted. The driver was Gretchen, she of the robots. She took the syringe from Benjamin, who cracked his knuckles and got ready to pounce.

Pfefferkorn pressed himself back into the unforgiving wall. “No.”

Benjamin tackled him and pinned his arms. Pfefferkorn fought. He had no chance.

“I have a family,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Not anymore,” Gretchen said.

The needle sank into his thigh.

57.

He was in a motel room. He knew this upon opening his eyes, before he had moved. The moldy air, the cottage-cheese ceiling, the line of gray light crossing it: these were proof enough. He rose up on his elbows. For a motel room, it was below average. The television set was bolted crookedly to the dresser. The carpet was mangy. The bedspread was a rough synthetic fabric printed with pink hibiscus blossoms as big as hubcaps. He was naked. The thought of that fabric against his skin gave him the willies. He leapt to his feet and was hit with a wave of nausea. He staggered to the wall and leaned against it, taking deep breaths until he could stand on his own.

He stepped to the window and drew back the curtain a few inches. His room was on the second floor, overlooking a parking lot. A search turned up neither telephone nor clock. The dresser drawers were empty, the walls bare. The nightstand contained a Gideon Bible. The television’s power cord had been snipped, leaving a quarter-inch stub. He checked the closet. It was without so much as a hanger. Another wave of nausea sent him running for the bathroom. He fell to his knees and vomited up a caustic orange stream. He sat back, hugging himself and shuckling, his body damp and quivering.

The toilet rang.

Pfefferkorn opened his eyes.

The ringtone was an irritating and ubiquitous thirteen-note ditty. Coming from within the toilet tank, it assumed an echoey, sinister quality.

I must wake up, he thought. I must stop this nightmare.

Everything continued to exist.

Wake up, he thought.

The toilet rang and rang.

He pinched himself. It hurt.

The ringing stopped.

“There,” he said. He felt that he had attained a small victory.

The toilet once again began to ring.

58.

A phone had been duct-taped to the underside of the tank lid. He peeled it free. The caller ID said
WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW
. He was afraid to answer but more afraid not to.

“Hello,” he said.

“Sorry it had to be this way,” a man’s voice said. “I’m sure you can understand.”

Understand what? He didn’t understand anything.

“Who are you?” he yelled. “What is this?”

“It’s not safe to talk over the phone. You need to get moving.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You will if you want to live.”

“Goddammit,” Pfefferkorn said, “don’t you threaten me.”

“It’s not a threat. If we wanted to do something to you, we would have done it already.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s not about your feelings,” the man said. “It’s much bigger than that.”

“What is?”

“You’ll know soon enough. Now get moving.”

“I don’t have any clothes.”

“Look up.”

Pfefferkorn looked up. The bathroom ceiling consisted of foam tiles two feet square.

“You’ll find what you need in there.”

Pfefferkorn climbed onto the toilet and slid aside a ceiling tile. A plastic shopping bag fell out, hitting him in the face. He found brand-new khakis wrapped around a pair of white running shoes. One shoe held balled white gym socks, the other a pair of white briefs. Last, there was a black polo shirt. He held it up. It hung to his knees.

He heard the man talking and picked up the phone.

“—win any best-dressed awards, but it’ll do.”

“Hello,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Ready?”

Pfefferkorn pulled on the underwear. “I’m going as fast as I can.”

“Inside your nightstand is a Bible. Taped to page one hundred twenty-eight you’ll find three quarters.”

Pfefferkorn, one leg in the khakis, hopped to the nightstand. He was angry at himself for having missed the quarters. In unsticking them he took care not to tear the delicate paper. The verse revealed was John 8:32: “And ye will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

“In a minute you’re going to leave your room,” the man said. “Don’t do it yet. Down the hall to the left you’ll find vending machines. I want you to buy a grape soda. Is that clear? Once I hang up, this phone will cease to function. Drop it in the toilet tank before you leave.”

“But—” Pfefferkorn said.

He was talking to the air.

59.

The man had instructed him to go left, but Pfefferkorn turned right, toward the stairs, and went down to the first floor in search of a phone. There was movement in the window of the motel’s front office. He did not go in, concerned that the clerk might be in league with his abductors. He crossed the parking lot, hoping to get his bearings.

The motel was on the side of a freeway running through the desert. Baked earth kissed bleached sky. He could have been anywhere in the American Southwest. Setting out on foot was out of the question, so he waited, hoping to flag down a passing car. None came. He was left with two choices: solicit help from the clerk or obey the mysterious caller’s instructions.

A bell rang as he entered the office. A clock on the wall read six fifty-seven. Behind the desk, a small television set was tuned fuzzily to the morning news. Two well-formed people made light banter about a plane crash.

An obese young man emerged from a back room. “Can I help you.”

Pfefferkorn inferred from the clerk’s apathy that the fellow knew nothing of Pfefferkorn’s captivity. This was both encouraging and discouraging. On one hand, he could speak without fear of alerting the mysterious caller. On the other hand, everything he could think to say sounded insane.

“Would you mind please printing out a statement of charges?”

“Room number.”

Pfefferkorn told him. The clerk typed with two fingers. It looked as though the act required intense concentration. A graphic flashed on the television screen.

TOP STORIES

“Good morning,” the male anchor said. “I’m Grant Klinefelter.”

“And I’m Symphonia Gapp,” the female anchor said, “and these are our top stories. A renowned suspense novelist is sought by police.”

Pfefferkorn’s jacket photo appeared on the screen.

Pfefferkorn felt the blood leave his head. His knees began to jellify and he braced himself against the counter. Meanwhile the clerk was still typing, his tongue poking between his teeth.

“Following a daring jailbreak, best-selling author A. S. Peppers is wanted for questioning in connection with the brutal slaying of his Lambada instructor.”

Pfefferkorn listened as the news anchors cheerfully proceeded to implicate him in Jesús María de Lunchbox’s murder. The clerk finished typing and pressed a button. A printer whined. Pfefferkorn’s jacket photo was shown again, accompanied by the number for a tip hotline. A reward was being offered.

“Sad stuff,” Symphonia Gapp said.

“Indeed,” Grant Klinefelter said. “When we come back: more trouble on the Zlabian border.”

“And later: a local kitten does his part to win the war on terror.”

“Anything else?”

The clerk was holding out the statement. Pfefferkorn took it. The motel’s address was printed at the top of the statement. It listed a route number Pfefferkorn had never heard of, in a town he had never heard of, in a state adjacent to the one in which he had been abducted. The box marked
NAME OF GUEST
brought an unwelcome shock.

The room had been rented to Arthur Kowalczyk.

“Anything else,” the clerk said again.

Pfefferkorn shook his head absently.

The clerk lumbered out.

Pfefferkorn remained standing there, leaning against the counter, the jingle of the commercial fading away, the walls fading away, the dusty heat and the desert glare fading, fading away, everything canceling itself out. Only one sensation remained: a strange, nonphysical itch insinuating itself throughout his entire body, starting from his chest and spreading to the tips of his toes, the back of his throat, the hairs on the tops of his thighs. He was paranoid. It had happened that easily. Much like Harry Shagreen, or Dick Stapp, or any man ensnared in a tangled web of deception, treachery, lies, and intrigue, he did not know whom to trust. Unlike Harry Shagreen or Dick Stapp, Pfefferkorn had no experience upon which to draw. He headed back to the second floor.