got no newspaper anymore. There ain’t no more Watchman. Not now. And when they reopen that rag, it’s gonna be under new management. Things are gonna get a little easier around here. A little looser, you know? Like the good old days.”
I give him nothing.
“I said, how you like it back there, boy?”
I should keep quiet, but for the thousandth time I picture Buck being dragged from the river by incompetent deputies. He was probably killed by a guy a lot like Farner.
“How do you like being Paul Matheson’s bitch?” I ask mildly.
Chapter 42
I’m drowning.
The more I gasp for air, the more water I suck down my throat. I’ve been blinded, and my arms are strapped to my sides. My mind is screaming, my vocal cords locked in spasm. A man is shouting in my ear, but the words make no sense. This nightmare is not happening in Afghanistan or Iraq, but in my hometown jail.
The city cops handed me over to a deputy who booked me, but I was never taken to a cell. The deputy led me, still handcuffed, to a group shower in the basement of the county jail. There I found good old Officer Farner waiting for me. City and county law enforcement usually coexist in a state of cold war, but apparently the Poker Club has the power to bring them together in common cause. Farner showed me that he had my wallet and cell phones. Then he locked me in the shower room, telling me on his way out that we were going to have a good time together soon.
An hour after he left, Farner returned with a second man wearing a hood. The new man wore jeans and a black T-shirt, not a city or county uniform. The two men used ballistic nylon straps to bind my legs, chest, and arms to the long bench. They wrapped a towel around my head and used duct tape to secure my head to the wood—to keep from bruising me, I guess. Then one of them started pouring water down my nose and mouth.
I figured I would hold my breath, but when I tried, they pulled the wet towel close over my face. I knew that when I gasped, there would be no air, and that knowledge drove the breath from my lungs and made me suck in with all my strength.
All I got was soaked cloth and water.
After ten seconds of blind panic, they stopped pouring. Until that moment, I had never understood what waterboarding was. The simplicity of the torture makes it incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t endured it. That’s how life is: in the simplest things lie the greatest joy and misery. Ask any hospital patient who can’t urinate or defecate without emergency catheterization or a forcible bowel evacuation. Ask someone dying of thirst the value of water.
Ask a drowning man about air.
They did it to me twice before they even asked a question. Until that moment, I believed Officer Farner was simply punishing me. But no, their process had an object. While dripping water onto the towel, a new voice said, “Where is the stuff Sally Matheson put together to blackmail her husband?”
“I don’t know,” I coughed, trying to place the genteel Southern accent.
“We know you have it.”
“I don’t! I never had it.”
“You’re lying. You quoted from it to Tommy Russo this morning.”
“No! Somebody emailed me that. Anonymous source. You can look in my phone. Look in my phone!”
“Stop for a minute,” said the voice.
Until those words, I’d existed only moment to moment.
The prospect of even temporary cessation of the pain and terror filled me with shameful gratitude. In less than two minutes I’d learned that I would betray anything I knew, everyone I loved. How could it be so easy to break a man? How could it be that some men had held out for days or weeks or months against torture? The only answer I could imagine was that there are degrees of torture. Pain is one thing; terror is another. Pain can be isolated by the mind, objectified, distanced, even befriended. Terror is a wild animal trying to claw its way out of your chest.
“Take that blindfold off,” said the genteel voice.
A strong hand yanked the towel from around my head, banging the back of my skull against the bench. Beau Holland stood over me, his golfer’s tan dark and rich above a salmon-colored button-down. His eyes contained a mixture of malice and pleasure, and when he smiled, his