the two lines of cocaine he had nasally ingested in the men’s room of the Blue Rock Tavern on his way home gave him a feeling of euphoria about all things, including a sense that his mind was really firing on all twelve cylinders—that seemed the most logical inference to draw.
Williams—and his thugs—had been arrested at the Howard Johnson motel on Roosevelt Boulevard, and I wasn’t. That damned well might have made him suspicious, maybe made him think I had set him up with the police. And his getting arrested had also caused him to lose the cocaine he had intended to sell me. Even if he had paid only half of what he was going to sell it to me for, that’s still ten thousand dollars, and he would be very unhappy about losing that much money.
And if he has decided—he’s not intelligent, obviously, so he’s liable to decide anything—that I had something to do with his arrest, then this may be my punishment for that.
Unlikely. The first thing he would do—intelligent or not, he has a certain criminal cunning—would be to recoup his losses. At least the ten thousand he had invested, and possibly the entire twenty I had agreed to pay him. Once he had done that, he might well kill me. But what would be the purpose?
If it’s money he wants, I’ll promise to get it for him. Under these circumstances, I will be certainly motivated to find it somewhere.
But wait a minute! If this, whatever this is, has something to do with Amos Williams & Company, he would have sent his man Baby Brownlee. The people who are doing this to me are white men!
Could this be a case of mistaken identity?
For that matter, could I be hallucinating? This does feel like a bad dream. Am I going to wake up in just a minute?
Or could I really be hallucinating? I did a couple of lines . . . what, forty minutes ago? Was it bad stuff?
No. That was from my next-to-last packet of emergency supplies. I’ve been into it twenty, perhaps thirty, times without anything unpleasant happening.
Ketcham became aware that the sound of the vehicle’s passageway over the roadway had changed. For one thing, he sensed that they were moving more slowly than they had been.
The vehicle stopped.
Ketcham heard the sound of the vehicle’s door opening, and then it moved as if someone had gotten out.
He heard a metallic screech and decided, after a moment, that it was the sound of a door opening, and then changed that to suspect strongly that it was the sound a gate in a Cyclone fence—as those surrounding a tennis court—makes when being opened.
The vehicle moved a short distance forward. Ketcham heard the sound of the squeaking gate again. The vehicle tilted as if someone had gotten in the front seat. The door slammed shut and the vehicle drove off.
Ketcham sensed that they were no longer on a paved road, and confirmation of this came when the vehicle, moving slowly, encountered one hole in the road after another.
What are they doing? Taking me out in the woods someplace to kill me?
But if they wanted to kill me, they had ample opportunity in my garage.
If they’re not going to kill me, then what? They must want something from me. What?
If this is a case of mistaken identity, which seems as likely an answer as anything else I’ve been able to come up with, then there will be the opportunity to clear things up, to let them know I’m not who they are looking for.
Or, even if it’s not a case of mistaken identity, if they want something from me—maybe they know I’m a stockbroker, and think we keep large amounts of cash around the office. They’re Italian, they could be the Mafia. That sounds like something the Mafia would do. And they might not know the only cash around the office is in the petty-cash box, and I don’t even know of any negotiable instruments at all. Anyway, if they do want something from me, there will certainly be an opportunity to talk, to negotiate.
Those thoughts made Ketcham feel better.
After two or three minutes of lurching down what Ketcham was now convinced was an unpaved road, the vehicle moved onto a solid, flat, and thus presumably paved surface and stopped.
There was the sound of two doors being opened, the sense of shifting as if two persons had left the vehicle, and the doors slammed shut.
Then Ketcham heard the rear