CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I’m directed down Staples Mill to Broad, where the guy with the gun orders me to go east. The other car, the one that blocked me, is following, as is a van I can see in the rearview mirror. My attempts to engage my captor in conversation are met with silence, other than his advice that I should “shut the fuck up,” followed by a racial pejorative.

Then it’s left on Roseneath and into Scott’s Addition. We drive past Tazza Kitchen, one of my favorite joints. 1 briefly wonder if I’ll ever get to order the white pizza with bacon bits again.

Just beyond Tazza, I am directed to turn right on Moore, then left on Mactavish, and then left again on Norfolk. Just past a strip club of my acquaintance, I’m ordered to turn into an alleyway between two buildings that haven’t yet been converted from industrial use into hip housing and eateries.

The big guy comes around and pulls me from behind the wheel, then gags me. Two other bruisers get out of their car, some kind of retro-sixties gas guzzler, and they lead me along some cobblestone steps to what turns out to be the side door of a building I’ve probably passed a hundred times but never noticed before. The van eases in behind the second one, and another guy gets out.

Without the cell phone, I can only hope that our federal, state, and local cops have some idea where I am.

I’m dragged inside, then up a flight of stairs to a room that seems to take up most of the second floor. The place smells like dust and engine oil, with maybe a little urine thrown in.

The goon with the tattooed forehead sits me down in some kind of beat-up office chair. The little guy who directed me here stands to one side and the goon is on the other. The others stand behind them, with their arms folded. They take the gag off, and then they tie me to the chair.

I look around. The walls are festooned with Nazi and Confederate flags. Blinds have been drawn over all the outside windows.

“We got him,” one of the assholes on the back row says. “Now what’re we gonna do with him?”

Nobody says anything, although it doesn’t take a mind reader to know that none of the options they’re considering will make me very happy.

“Let me go,” I suggest.

Tattoo man, who has been quiet, speaks.

“Not fuckin’ likely,” he says. The silence that follows makes me believe that this guy is the leader, the brains of the operation if there are any.

He pulls a chair up facing mine and straddles it. He’s not a bad-looking dude, until you take a closer look. He is dressed a bit more neatly than his comrades, with jeans that look like they’ve been ironed, and a dress shirt. Unlike most of them, he doesn’t seem to have subsisted on Big Macs and french fries for the last five years. He looks very fit, like he might be ex-military.

But his eyes are what tell you he’s crazy as a bedbug. He blinks them once every minute or two, and they’re black as a coal mine. Unlike my other captors, he doesn’t have a scraggly-ass beard, but his mouth has a downward turn to it, like a smile would cause his face to break. Actually a beard might help his looks, because he has a raw, red scar running from near his ear almost to his lips. And there’s the tattooed forehead.

“So, tell me,” he says, speaking almost in a whisper, “how about that DVD?”

I explain that I don’t have it.

“I didn’t trust you. I planned to have you follow me to another location, where I felt safer.”

The guy doesn’t say anything at first.

“Well,” he offers when he finally speaks, “that’s OK, because we don’t have a goddamn quarter of a million dollars to give your nigger ass either. We just thought you might be stupid enough to, ah, accept our invitation. We were just going to take the DVD and get rid of you.”

“Let’s just kill him, Randall,” the little wheezy guy says. I notice that he seems to be doodling on a notepad of some kind, like he’s the damn recording secretary or something.

“Shut up, Bug,” Randall says. He seems irritated, maybe because I’m not supposed to know his name. “If we kill him now, we don’t get the damn DVD, do we?”

Randall turns back to me.

“We aren’t fuckin’ around here,” he says. “You need to tell us where that disc is. I know you saw what happened to ol’ Whit. We don’t want to make it hard on you. We just want what’s ours, get me?”

He reaches behind him and pulls a big-ass gun from the waist of his jeans. He holds it a few inches from my face.

“Now that we understand each other,” he says, “how about making it easy on yourself. Where. Is. That. Fucking. DVD?”

He says each word a little louder than the one before.

For lack of any better plan, I tell him that I’ve left the disc with a couple of friends, and that they are waiting for me to show up so we can make an exchange.

Randall smiles, and I wish he hadn’t. His front four teeth seem to have been filed down to points, and they are all embedded with red letters. H-E-I-L, same as the spelling on his forehead. That smile, which goes no farther up than his upper lip, makes me wish even more for the arrival of the cavalry.

“And I’ll bet they’re all armed,” he whispers as he moves so close I’m afraid he’s going to bite me.

“That was the plan. We didn’t trust you to just hand over the money.”

“Good point,” Randall says. “But you didn’t count on our little ambush, did you?”

I have to concede that I didn’t.

“Look,” I tell him, “come with me and I’ll lead you to it. My friends don’t know anything about what’s on the DVD. They just know I need backup.”

The guy shakes his head.

“Uh-uh. Bullshit on you. No way in hell you didn’t blab something about this to your so-called friends. You shoulda kept your big mouth shut.”

“And just let you kill my ass?”

Randall displays the world’s most unpleasant smile again.

“Well, yeah, there is that.”

He retreats, and the others follow him, far enough away that I can’t hear what they’re saying, or most of it at any rate.

I hear bits and pieces of sentences as the Purity geniuses try to figure out their next move. “… got to get that disc,” I hear, and some discussion about “… got to do them all,” and plans to dump somebody or bodies somewhere.

“OK,” Randall says. “Your lucky day. We’re not going to kill you. Just tell us where your friends are, and we’ll go and get that DVD. But you better not be lying about this. Remember ol’ Whit.”

Who could forget? Since there are no friends out there holding on to the disc, unless you count the cops as my friends, I need to make something up, something that will at least buy me a little time.

I figure that the authorities probably have already scrambled from what was supposed to be their command headquarters for this totally fucked-up operation, but maybe they’re still around, although they shouldn’t be. They should be tearing Richmond apart looking for the guys who somehow managed to spirit me away from right under their noses.

Maybe, though, I can send these goons over there and I’ll get lucky. At most, it will keep me alive a little longer. If they come back empty-handed, it’ll probably be time for them to start playing “this little piggy” with my fingers and toes. So I give them the address where the cops were ensconced.

I am smart enough to know that, should they get their hands on that DVD, I’ve smoked my last Camel, but maybe the cops are still there and will take these guys out before they take me out.

“Your so-called friends probably have already left by now,” Randall says, shaking his head. He walks over to me and grabs me by the throat, depriving me of oxygen for what seems like a very long time.

“Tell me,” he says, “how long were they going to wait for you to show up?”

He lets go long enough for me to tell him that the plan was to stay as long as it took.

He squeezes again. I’m afraid he’s going to crush my windpipe, but he lets go finally.

“OK,” he says.

He calls the other Purifiers over and tells them where they’re supposed to go to pick up the DVD.

“But we ain’t got no money,” the one called Bug whines, looking up from whatever the fuck he’s doodling.

“Of course we ain’t got no money, you idiot,” Randall says. “We didn’t ever have any money. You’re supposed to get the disc and take care of this asshole’s so-called friends.”

Everybody seems to know what that means.

Randall says he’ll stay here and make sure I don’t manage to untie myself and escape.

The others leave.

“I guess it’s just you and me then,” he says after they’ve gone. He grins.

I figure it won’t take them more than half an hour to get back to the address I gave them off Staples Mill, where they’ll either find an empty house or have one hell of a shootout with the cops.

On the off chance that I see daylight again, I try to get a little information out of Randall.

“What are you planning to do?”

He scratches himself with that big-ass gun.

“Well,” he says, “I don’t want to say much, even though I doubt you’re ever going to be able to tell anybody. Hell, I’m just keepin’ you alive to see whether you’ve told the truth or not. Might decide how we kill you.”

And so he tells me a story.