Past Due

Chapter 27

I WAS THINKING it through, what Slocum and McDeiss had just given to me, the lead I had been looking for, the name and address of Joey’s girlfriend, when I reached Spruce Street and turned toward my building. Spruce is pretty and tree-lined, a street of quaint old town houses either refurbished spectacularly for the urban rich or chopped up into apartments for the urban not-so-rich. I was very much a not-so.

In the vestibule of my building, I leaned forward, opened the lock on my mailbox, reached in for its delightful little surprises, the magazines, the catalogs, the bills, the notices of unpaid invoices, the bills. As I grabbed the bundle and pulled it from the box, something heavy landed with a thud on my shoulder, blossoming into a flower of pain and driving me to my knees.

Something grabbed the back of my neck and slammed the top of my head into the metal wall of mailboxes and I felt less pain than I ought to have felt and the light dimmed almost to black, but only almost.

Something hit me hard in the stomach and the air vanished from my lungs. Whatever siren had begun to sound was silenced with the vanished air.

With all the fighting instincts of a pill bug, I fell onto my side and curled into ball and felt the pain swarm through my body.

A foot stepped onto my face and ground it into the hard tile floor before lifting and slamming onto my hip. Before I could raise my head to get a glimpse behind me, a hand pressed itself onto the side of my face, pushing so hard upon my nose I couldn’t move my head either way. The breadth of my vision now encompassed only the line where the floor met the wall and two splayed fingers spreading across my face.

“You are trespassing,” came a near indecipherable hiss in my ear. “Trespassing on property where you don’t belong.”

I tried to say something but the hand pressed harder on my face and my nose bent further sideways and a different voice said, “Don’t speak until you are asked a question.”

My eye closest to the floor began to burn. One of the fingers had a ring on it, I could see that, golden and thick.

“Who are you working for?” said the first voice, the whisper so soft I could barely make it out.

I tried to say something but the hand on my face gurgled the sound.

“Answer the question,” said the second voice.

“I can’t.”

“Oh yes, you can,” hissed the first voice. “Most assuredly. You’ve stepped into our territory now. The past is off limits to you. It belongs to us, you are not welcome here. Our possession of it is open, hostile, exclusive, continuous, adverse, do you understand? The signs are up, the fence is electrified, the dogs are loose and they are hungry. One more step inside and you won’t survive.”

“Someone’s coming,” said the second voice.

“Why do you care about what happened twenty years ago?”

The hand pressed down harder, my eye burned fiercer. “Answer the question,” barked the second voice.

“Who are you working for?”

“We have to get out of here. Someone is coming.”

“Who?”

“Now.”

“Tell him we will find him,” came the first voice, the speaker so close now I felt his breath on my ear. “And if you persist we will deal with you like we deal with all trespassers. This is your requisite warning. There won’t be another.”

The hand pressed harder on my face, the foot lifted from my hip and stomped hard onto the side of my stomach.

I contracted my body into an even tighter curl and stifled my groans and felt my stomach heave as footsteps poured out of the vestibule and I was left alone with the pain and the nausea and the spill of my mail all about me.