by working for a white man. You take his charity. You call him boss. You kiss his ass!”
He cleared his throat and spit a giant wad of saliva on the barely conscious Jones. “You make me sick. Absolutely sick!”
The large man turned and walked back toward the door. When he opened it, he was surprised to see Ndjai standing nearby.
“Is everything all right?” Greene asked.
The African glanced past his boss and looked at Jones, who appeared to be a few blows short of a coma. “Did he cause you any problems?”
Greene glanced at his hands for a moment, then smiled. “My knuckles are sore, but other than that, things went fairly well.”
Ndjai nodded his head in understanding. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes. I understand that you currently have my good friend Nathan in the Devil’s Box.”
His eyes lit up with pride. “Yes, sir! Would you like to see him now?”
Greene shook his head. “How’s he doing? I don’t want him to die, you know.”
“Yes, sir, I am quite aware of that. We monitor his health frequently, and he is very much alive. He is a little bit swollen from a run-in with some fire ants, but other than that, he is fine.”
“Can he talk?”
“Not very well. He is too dehydrated to speak.”
Greene pondered things, then grinned. “Pump him full of fluids over the next few hours. I want to talk to him later today, and it won’t be fun if I can’t understand him. All of the others had a chance to speak to their guests, and I want the same opportunity with mine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing. Why don’t you move Payne to the Devil’s Box while you’re taking care of Nathan? It’s supposed to be such a lovely day. I would hate to keep him away from the summer heat. He is a guest, you know.”
Ndjai smiled at the possibility.
Let the torture begin.
CHAPTER 36
PAYNE had always loved the sun. Whether he was golfing, swimming, or reading, he always tried to catch as many rays as possible. He couldn’t explain why, but there was something about the sunshine that made him feel good about himself, something that made him feel healthy.
Those views quickly changed as he baked in the Devil’s Box.
“What the hell was I thinking?” he moaned. “Winter is so much better than this.”
With his uncovered forearm, Payne tried to wipe the large beads of sweat that had formed on his cheeks and forehead. Unfortunately, since his hands were shackled to a metal loop in the floor, it was impossible, requiring the flexibility of a triple-jointed circus freak.
“Snow, ice, hypothermia. That stuff sounds so good!”
When Payne was initially dragged across the length of the island and up the slope of the hill, he wasn’t sure what to expect. The possibility of a lynching entered his mind, but for some reason, he had a hunch that the Plantation was more about torture than death. He wanted to ask the guards who were towing him, but the four men weren’t speaking English, mumbling instead in an African dialect.
After reaching the hill’s summit, Payne was actually relieved when he saw the Devil’s Box. No guillotine, no electric chair, no gas chamber. Just a box, a simple four-foot wooden box that had been anchored to the ground. Shoot, he figured, how bad could it be?
Then they opened it.
The figure that emerged was something from a horror movie, a grotesquely deformed zombie breaking from the constraints of his wooden tomb. Haggard and obviously dehydrated, the man’s skin practically hung from his bones, like a suit that was two sizes too large. Payne wanted to turn from the scene—no sense getting a mental picture of the personal horror that was to come—but he knew it would be a mistake. He had to study the prisoner, investigate the guards, analyze the device. He needed to know what may be in store for him, if there were any loopholes in the system. It was the only way he could plan an escape.
The first thing Payne noticed was the prisoner’s size. Despite his malnutrition, the man was quite large. It took three guards to lift his massive frame from the tiny device, and even then it took a concerted effort. In fact, the prisoner was so big, Payne was amazed that the guards had been able to squeeze him into the cube to begin with. His limbs seemed too thick, too long to contort into such a confined space, but it brought Payne some