Deadline Man

“Take off these handcuffs and find out.”

He stares at me. “I’d love to. But I don’t have time. You don’t get it. There’s no time.”

“Don’t do this.” My teeth start chattering again. “You’re breaking the law. You took an oath…”

He studies me, amused. Then, “You are going to tell us.” He mutters it to himself.

Suddenly, I feel a hand on my forehead pushing my head farther back. The force rams my skull so hard I hear the chair shake and shafts of pain shoot down into my shoulder blades and little lightning bursts come into the edges of my eyes. I try to resist but my head stays at the unnatural angle. My arms and legs struggle vainly against the shackles. I start to panic even before Stu drops the towel onto my nose and roughly pinches my nostrils. The fabric is scratchy. My eyes are covered next. As if I want to see.

“I think he’ll talk.”

“I bet he will.”

I feel the towel fall across my mouth and chin. Then it’s pulled tight.

“Think he went through SERE?” It’s Bill’s voice.

It’s the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training. I’m doing a damned poor job at it right now.

“We’re gonna find out.” Stu chuckles. Then his breath at my ear: “There’s no code word, asshole. This is the real deal. Maybe you’ll live through the first few minutes and then,” his voice rises painfully, “we’re going to ask you again, where the fuck is Megan!”

It’s already hard to breathe. The towel sucks into my mouth as I draw air. I fight the instinct to hyperventilate…I am okay, I have all the oxygen I need right here…try to put my mind somewhere else. Some place that is not looking forward to the first few minutes or even this moment. I start to run through the women in my life. This, I tell myself, will stop the tachycardia that’s so pronounced as to be felt in my eardrums.

Leslie. Linda. Sharon. Susan. Mary Beth No. 2 was a great kisser.

The towel punches against my lips and I feel its wetness. Then I inhale, but there’s hardly any air. I keep counting. Deb: for us, it was always full on—rock-my-world sex and soul baring—I was a fool to let her go. Kathy, Wendy…Patty who loved for me to brush her hair…Tess who looked so sexy when she would put on one of my dress shirts…Rachel with the luminous hair and eyes. Amber…”

Then a deluge….feels like one… And another. The towel leaks water into my mouth but no air. My throat closes off and I gag. I struggle to move my head but it’s locked in place. Suffocation quickly begins to overtake me. The last coherent thought I have is a wish that I had taken a deeper breath.

What’s left are primal feeling and sounds: The slopping of water off my face and onto my frozen chest. My wrists cracking repeatedly against the restraints and the sound of metal being jerked hard and fruitlessly. Gagging…head won’t turn…gagging…air, God give me air…but there’s none. Lungs burn. My nose is cemented shut. A high keening coming from somewhere deep inside my head. Lungs… More water past my tongue…My entire throat is seized up…stomach acid meeting water…can’t breathe, can’t…

“Stop. Stop now.”

The water stops and the towel is relaxed. I make a great, greedy inhalation and immediately start coughing and gagging again.

After a couple of minutes the towel comes completely off my face and the chair is readjusted so I am sitting up again. I look upon the suicide blonde. She closes the door behind her and walks into the room. I cough violently and struggle to keep from vomiting. But I can breathe again.

“You two, back off.”

Bill retrieves his tossed chair and sits, arms folded. Stu leans against the far wall.

Up close, she’s beautiful. Hair the color of harvest wheat is parted on one side and falls to her ears, thick in front and very cropped in back. It is the same color as her eyebrows. She has large pale eyes, high cheekbones, very red lips against a peaches-and-cream complexion. She wears a navy suit with a knee-high skirt and slingback, open-toed medium-high heels. Even freezing, I appreciate her well-carved ankles.

When she sits across from me, the skirt rides up on her thighs.

“We don’t have to do this,” she says, looking at me sympathetically. “The columnist doesn’t want to put the country in danger any more than any of us would.” She looks at Bill. “Turn up the heat in here and get him the blanket.” To me, “It’s going to be all right. I’m sorry things happened this way.”

So she is the good cop in a room full of bad ones. I’ll take it. Momentarily, Bill returns with a blanket and she directs him to drape it around me. My heart rate slows down and I gradually stop coughing and trembling. The temperature in the room grows noticeably warmer. She uses the edges of the blanket to dry my chest and legs, then wraps it tight against my shoulders. Her hands push back my wet hair and gently dry my face. Her finger gingerly touches my left cheekbone and I wince. “Sorry,” she says.

As she has settled in the chair, it’s impossible to avoid seeing that she’s not wearing underwear. She smiles and puts a warm hand on my thigh. “Nice to be appreciated,” she whispers. And my recently tortured body rebounds quickly, appreciating. “Very nice…”

“You’re enjoying this way too much, Laura.” Bill leans against the wall and shakes his head.

“You can leave,” she says.

“We’ll stay,” Stu says.

“Suit yourselves. Now focus on me.” She caresse