Irontown Blues

Seventeen

“If I see that fucking dog again, I’m gonna kill it.”

“Don’t talk like that. We had our orders.”

“Yeah? Did you hear anyone warn us about the hound from hell? Did anyone mention that I might lose my balls?”

“Shut up. The dog never bit you on the balls. It would have been a lucky bite, anyway. How would he have found them?

“Very funny. You’re not the one who’s still bleeding.”

“Don’t be a crybaby. You’re barely scratched.”

“Barely scratched? Fuck you, Tom. That fucking monster bit right down to the bone. Soon as we get this joker squared away, I’ll show you.”

“I think I’ll skip that great pleasure.”

“Besides, who is it that stuck the knife into the dog?”

“That was a mistake, I’ll admit it. He surprised me.”

“You think it wasn’t a surprise to me, when he clamped down on my thigh, right up near the scrotum?”

They went on like that for a while. They couldn’t seem to stop bickering.

All I was getting was sound. I couldn’t seem to open my eyes. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, either. I was blind and paralyzed. I guess my ears were the first thing I got back because there is no muscle movement involved in hearing.

I was scared. What had they done to me?

I later learned their real names, but I won’t reveal those. Let’s just call them Tom and Jerry.

I was being carried, with Tom at my feet and Jerry at my shoulders. I had all the strength of an overcooked noodle. I could feel myself flopping around uselessly. It’s a terrible feeling.

I understand that back in the days when blindness was usually permanent, either from birth or disease or accident, blind people were said to have developed very sensitive hearing. I can vouch for that. Even having been blind for probably no more than ten minutes, I found that I could detect more things about my surroundings than I would have thought possible. Different spaces produce different reverberations. When I first woke up I was sure I was being carried down a standard corridor, possibly the very one I had traveled to get to the apartment where I had been gassed. That went on for a while, then we moved into a larger space. I’m not saying that my ears could tell me just how big it was, but I knew it was significantly bigger. There was background noise, but I couldn’t identify any of it except that I got the impression it was industrial.

Then we were back in a corridor, and it felt like this one was narrower. Then we entered what I was sure was a room. Not a corridor, not a public space, not a factory. A room.

I was thrown unceremoniously onto a soft, yielding surface. A bed or a couch. I managed to crank one eye open a little bit.

“He’s coming to,” Tom said. I could see his head hovering over me, a blurry cartoon balloon with features badly painted on it. Or maybe it was Jerry. Then the other one leaned over me. Two cartoon balloons.

“Hey, asshole,” the balloon said. “Don’t you know there are laws about keeping vicious dogs? I should have killed the damn thing.”

“If you do,” I said, “I will skin you alive and throw the rest of you into a garbage compactor.”

Or that’s what I intended to say. What I actually said was more like “Goo poo skurkle booty goo foo goo!” I could only hope that the tone of my voice made my meaning plain.

“Screw you, too, asshole,” he said back.

“Let’s get out of here. We got more work to do.”

“Fine, as soon as I make a trip to the walk-in medico. I’ve lost a lot of blood. I’m feeling faint.”

“Don’t you pass out on me; I’m tired from schlepping his deadweight. No way I’m gonna carry you.”

And with that, the comedy team of Tom and Jerry left. I heard an old-fashioned key turning in an old-fashioned lock. And me without my handy private eye set of picklocks.

I felt like crying. I wondered where I was. But that was secondary.

Mostly, I wondered where Sherlock was.

It was hours before I could get up and move around my prison cell. I spent them looking around, first by moving my eyes, then my whole head, then actually sitting up.

I say prison cell, but it actually wasn’t all that bad. It was nothing like the cells you see in old film noir. It looked old. There were rivets holding the metal sheets together. The paint was battleship gray, and flaking off in places. Later, when I could get up and walk around, I tried picking at those places within my reach, but it was no good. The metal underneath was perfectly sound. I would need a cutting torch to get through the walls.

Though still weak and woozy I got up and paced out the dimensions of my cell. It was an odd shape. Tom and Jerry had thrown me onto a bunk that would have looked right at home in a children’s camp cabin in one of the disneylands. It was the bottom bunk of three, and there were four other three-deckers around the room. There were twelve lockers, and a kitchenette with a microwave and a coffeemaker and a can opener and basic tableware in drawers. A small door, the only one that would open, led to a toilet, sink, and shower all squeezed into a small space.

There was one peculiarity that it took me awhile to understand. The furniture and even the kitchen counters were built so that they could be removed and attached to the walls. The bathroom was mounted on a gimbal arrangement. It could rotate through ninety degrees.

I was in a cabin on a spaceship.

It took ten minutes to learn all there was to learn about my quarters. After that, time stretched out. I had very little to do.

First, I satisfied myself that the door was not going to be opened with a harsh look. It was solidly set in its frame. It was a pressure door, fitting seamlessly into its rubber gaskets. I tried looking through the keyhole, but the lock was not that old-fashioned. There would be no through-and-through hole in a pressure door.

I took a metal fork from the kitchen and tried probing the lock and ended up with a fork with a bent tine. I hadn’t held out much hope of opening it, but it was still discouraging.

I couldn’t think of anything to do after that but sit on my thumbs.

There was no way of telling how long I was there before I heard the door lock turn and the slight hiss of pressure equalizing.

“Hey, you in there. Stand back from the door.”

“Hey yourself. Let me out of here!”

“Can’t do it, mate. You wanna eat, or not? It’s all the same to me.”

I wasn’t really very hungry, but any change at all would be a good thing, so I stepped back to the far wall.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Questions, questions, questions. All in good time.”

“Dammit, what are you going to do with me? Who are you? Where am I? Is this a spaceship?”

“Still with the questions. Ask me what’s for dinner, I’ll tell you that.” He took the cover off the tray and the smells suddenly made me ravenous. I felt like I could eat a whole brontosaurus ham, and a side of ribs, too.

“Cow steak smothered in hollandaise sauce and sautéed mushrooms,” he said, “with crispy deep-fried chips, a side of broccoli au gratin, chocolate milk, and a slice of key lime pie.”

“Please thank the chef,” I said, with a sneer.

“That would be me. Sorry about the milk, it was all I could find at the moment.”

“Next time have a steward bring the wine list.”

He turned and started to go. I had the tray in my hand, and I thought about hurling it at him and trying to make it to the door. He wasn’t a big guy, and I figured I could take him if I had to…

… but I was still not at my best. Also, I’d like to have a better idea what was beyond that door. An empty corridor, or fifteen well-armed guards?

Plus, I was really hungry. Get some food in me, and I’ll think about hurling the breakfast tray.

“Hey, man, please give me a break. How long are you going to keep me in prison?”

He turned back.

“This is not a prison.”

“Great. Then I’ll be leaving now, thank you.”

His mouth twisted up a bit.

“All right, you’re being detained. I really don’t know how long it will be.”

“Okay. Where’s my dog? I’m sure I heard him just before you guys knocked me out. What happened to Sherlock?”

Now he looked angry. He pulled up his pant leg and showed me some pink, freshly healed wounds. Some of them looked like tooth marks.

“Your goddamn dog! He practically tore off my leg!”

“He wouldn’t have done that unless you gave him a very good reason. You were kidnapping me, don’t forget that.”

“‘Kidnapping’ is a pretty harsh word. It’s for your own good, believe me. One day you’ll thank us.”

“Damn you, tell me what happened to my dog!”

This time he looked a bit uncomfortable.

“He was okay the last time I saw him. That is…”

“What?”

“Well, we might have had to stab him a little, in the leg, to make him let go.” He actually shuffled his feet a little. “Look, man, I’m a dog lover, too. I got a little Pomeranian, cute as the dickens. But what would you do if a huge hound like that was trying to kill you?”

He actually had a point, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“Look, man, just let me out. Okay? I promise I won’t go to the cops. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where I am. You can blindfold me and take me someplace and let me go. What could I tell them?”

For a moment I thought he was thinking it over, but that was not to be. He shook his head and turned to go again.

“What is your Pom’s name?”

That stopped him.

“Trixie.”

“What would you think if you knew Trixie was out there somewhere, with a stab wound in her leg? How would you feel? My dog’s name is Sherlock, by the way.”

“I’d feel terrible.” He sighed. “Look, Mr. Bach… I’ll put the word out to look for an injured bloodhound. That’s the best I can do. Maybe someone can catch him and treat him. But last I saw him, he was running away with his tail between his legs. I’ll bet he ran a long, long way.”

That didn’t sound like Sherlock, but what did I know? The poor guy had never really been in a fight-or-flight situation. He might have run away.

Tom went outside and shut the door behind him. On the off chance, I went to the door and tried the knob. I was not surprised to find it was locked.

A prison cell with five-star cuisine. How crazy was that?

A bit of an exaggeration, but it was all very good. Tom was a first-rate chef, I had to give him that. So what was he doing acting as a kidnapper and a jailer? Moonlighting?

The walls closed in around me again. Eventually Tom appeared again, this time bearing eggs Benedict. With sides of hash browns, extracrispy bacon, a hot buttered English muffin, and a large glass of orange juice.

“So is it morning outside? How long have I been in here?”

“Almost twenty-four hours.”

That was longer than I had ever been away from Sherlock. I was so worried about him I could hardly think straight.

“Hey, I’m going out of my mind with boredom. Every prison movie I ever saw, the inmates get to leave their cells for exercise now and then. How about it? A deck of cards so I can play solitaire. Or you can join me if you want and we can play gin rummy.”

“I told you, this isn’t a prison.”

“Well, a cage by any other name… come on. A book or two? A screen so I can watch old movies?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

What he could do was a dilapidated player. It wouldn’t pick up any current shows or news, but the crystal had several hundred thousand movies and shows in the archive. There were even a few I hadn’t seen.

I began counting off the days with hash marks, in the time-honored manner of jailbirds everywhere. I made a mark on the wall every time breakfast was served.

Soon I had fifteen marks on the wall.

The player saved me from going crazy. I unrolled the screen and started going through the menu. I looked at a lot of jailbreak movies, and a lot of black-and-white noir. I had seen many of them before.

In the film of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe is drugged and locked up in a private sanatorium in Bay City. It is run by a beefy broad named Frances Anthor. Marlowe clocks her a good one with his fist; it does him no good.

But someone gets careless, and Marlowe staggers out of the place through a scene of violent chaos.

Could I do the same? I still had no idea of what was beyond that door, but I might never find out if I just lay back and took it all.

What Marlowe does is overpower the attendant. So one evening — it had to be evening, Tom had told me the entree was pasta primavera — I waited by the side of the door and when it opened, I upended the tray out of Tom’s arms and up into his face.

Tom looked surprised and hurt, and then I was past him and out the door.

He might have been careless, but he was a lot quicker than I had expected. I got one short look at a long corridor with doors opening to either side, then I was overcome with what must have looked like an epileptic seizure. I’d seen them in the movies. I never passed out, but I was totally helpless. I watched as Tom pocketed the taser, then he leaned over and shook his finger at me. He said nothing but dragged me back to the room. There were noodles all over his face and chest.

Breakfast the next morning was cold oatmeal and a stale bun. It went like that for three days, then he relented with a really great Caesar salad and roasted veggies. Tom just couldn’t resist being a good cook.

I marked off twenty-five days.

Prison routine can be so stultifying that when something changes, it can throw you for a loop.

One morning, Tom showed up to collect my breakfast tray and there was someone with him. Call him Dick. He was enormous, and carried what looked like an electric shock stick, colloquially known as a cattle prod. He slapped it into his palm a few times.

“Are you going to give me any trouble, Mr. Bach?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” I said. “In fact, we’re going to be friends, so you can call me Chris.”

Dick looked at Tom.

“Is he trying to be funny?”

“He t’inks he’s a private gumshoe, always makin’ wit’ da wisecracks. A wiseguy, dat’s what he is.”

Okay, Tom had boned up on the old lingo as a counterattack to my attempts at sarcastic tough-guy dialogue. Donuts were sinkers. Coffee was joe. Milk was moo juice. Toast was a raft. Butter was axle grease. I found it as annoying as he must have found my lame bits of dialogue. What he didn’t know was that I acted the tough guy so I could almost convince myself that I wasn’t scared.

“No, no trouble,” I said, quietly.

“Turn around, face the wall, hands behind your back.”

He cuffed me and slipped a hood over my head. I tried to control my breathing, but the heartbeat was racing away. Each of them took me by an elbow and walked me out of the room. It all had the air of being marched to an execution. I hoped that was just my imagination running away with me.

Then we stopped, and they took the hood off. I looked all around. I managed to look behind me and saw a big air lock. I knew it was the standard sort used for cargo on freighter ships. So I had been right. My cell had been aboard a ship.

But where we were now was airtight, too, which means stuff had been built right up to the side of the huge ship, tight as a barnacle on an ocean liner. And I recognized where I was. It was an open plaza in Irontown.

The fact that they didn’t care that I saw the ship or the Irontown space scared me. If a kidnapper lets you see his face, it probably means you are not going to survive the experience. I had worried about that during the twenty-five days of my imprisonment; but Tom was such an amiable, harmless-seeming guy that I had a hard time taking it seriously. Now, with the appearance of Dick, I wasn’t so sure.

But what really scared me had little to do with what was happening now. I recognized this place though it was much changed. This was the mall where I had been burned to a crisp. That realization weakened my knees so much that Dick had to catch me and get me back to my feet.

They took me across the open space, bustling with people. We approached a small restaurant with delicate twisted-metal chairs and tables outside. There was a lovely woman seated at one of the tables. People were coming and going, asking questions and getting quick, brusque answers. There was a hot-fudge sundae on the table beside her, and she took a spoonful as I got nearer, then glanced up at me and smiled.

I saw the sign on the wall behind her. Aunt Hazel’s Ice Cream Emporium.

The woman got to her feet, then she looked alarmed. I heard a commotion behind me and turned around to see what was happening.

A pack of twenty or so dogs was coming at us, full speed, growling. In the lead was Sherlock.