Odd Hours

SIXTEEN

HUDDLING IN THE BACK OF THE MERCEDES, WE had arrived at one of those moments of extreme stress that I mentioned earlier, one of those awkward situations in which my imagination can be as ornate as a carousel of grotesque beasts, standing on end like a Ferris wheel, vigorously spinning off visions of ludicrous fates and droll deaths.

If we were found, these men could shoot us through the windows. They could open the doors and shoot us point-blank. They could bar the doors, set the car on fire, and roast us alive.

Whatever they chose to do to us, we would not die as easily as any of those scenarios allowed. They would first need to find out who we were and what we knew about their plans.

Torture. They would torture us. Pliers, sharp blades, needles, red-hot pokers, nail guns, garlic presses applied to the tongue. Blinding bleach, caustic acids, unpleasant-tasting elixirs, secondhand smoke. They would be enthusiastic torturers. They would be relentless. They would enjoy it so much that they would take videos of our suffering to play later for their adoring mothers.

I had told Annamaria that I was prepared to die for her, and I had told the truth, but my vow had come with the implicit promise that I would also not lead her to her death before I died for her. At least not in the same hour that I had solemnly sworn to be her protector.

Someone switched on the single bare bulb in the garage ceiling. The car was parked nose-in, which meant we were at the front of the garage, farther from the stairs than anywhere else we could have hidden. The light proved too weak to penetrate to our dark little haven.

Mercedes’ engineers could be proud of their skill at providing sound attenuation. If someone was poking around the garage, opening the door to the water-heater closet or peering behind the furnace, I could not hear him.

Silently I counted sixty seconds, then another sixty, and then a third set.

Timing our confinement proved to whittle my nerves, so I stopped counting minutes and waited, trying not to think about torture.

The interior of the old Mercedes smelled of well-worn leather, mentholated liniment, gardenia-based perfume, cat dander, and dust.

An urge to sneeze overcame me. In a spirit of Zen stoicism, I meditated on transforming the urge to sneeze into an itch between my shoulder blades, which I would have been more able to endure. When that did not work, I meditated on transforming the urge to sneeze into a benign colon polyp.

After tightly pinching my nose and breathing through my mouth for a while, I began to believe that the agents of the nefarious harbor department would have by now concluded that Annamaria and I had escaped. They must have gone away.

As I cautiously raised my head, intending to scope the garage, two male voices rose nearby, one deep-toned and the other full of wheedle. I dropped back into my hole as though I were a jack-in-the-box.

Annamaria reached out of the shadows and found my hand. Or maybe I reached out and found hers.

I could not discern what the men were saying. Clearly, however, one of them was angry, and the other was making excuses.

A loud crash followed by a diminishing clatter suggested that the deep-voiced one had knocked over something or had thrown a heavy object at the excuse-maker.

As the argument continued, I realized that Annamaria’s hand in mine seemed to give me courage. My racing heart began to slow and my teeth unclenched.

The two men proved to be closer than I had first realized. To make a point, the angrier one pounded a hand three times on the hood or on a front fender of the sedan in which we had taken refuge.