“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Yeah, you’re always sorry,” Clete said. “Where are we?”
“Probably on his yacht,” Carroll said.
“What’s this ordeal he’s got planned for us?” Clete said.
“I heard something once. From a pimp Shondell uses. He’s got a collection.”
“A collection of what?” Clete said.
“Shit from the Middle Ages. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What kind of shit?” Clete said.
“Sick stuff, man,” Carroll said.
We heard people coming down a ladder and someone opening the hatch on the compartment we were in. The person stepped inside but didn’t speak. I was breathing through my mouth, sucking in the cloth of the hood, my heart thudding; I could hear the welt on my shoe scrape the deck when I moved. My breath was foul, my face itching and sweating as though it were encased in dried mud. “Who are you?” I said.
“Having fears in the silence?” Shondell said. “The imagination is a powerful engine, isn’t it?”
He went silent again. I tried to measure time by counting the seconds. But I couldn’t concentrate and I lost count, and I desperately needed to go to the head. Five minutes must have passed. I tried to pretend he was no longer in the compartment. I also tried to convince myself that the coolness in the steel deck was absorbing me into its molecular protection, taking me somewhere else in the universe, freeing me from the impotence and vulnerability that now constituted my life. I was totally under the control of an evil and sadistic man. What a fool I had been.
“Would you like to go to the bathroom?” Shondell said. “Just say so.”
“Yeah, we would!” Carroll said.
“Good boy. See what can happen when you’re under the right discipline?”
“What are you getting out of this, Shondell?” I said.
“Everything,” he said. “The reconstruction of the republic. A new era is beginning, and it’s based on the purity of the Nordic race.”
“There’s no such thing as a Nordic race,” I said.
I heard Shondell squat down close to me. I could feel his presence like an obscene hand hovering above an unguarded part of my body. I could see nothing through the hood. He touched my forehead with the tip of his finger. “Scared?”
“I’ll make you a promise,” I said. “If I ever get loose, I’m going to twist off your head and piss on it and flush it down a toilet.”
“Let’s see how you feel by this time tomorrow.” He got to his feet again. “I need you in here, fellows.”
I heard other men coming through the hatchway.
“Get our friends to the bathroom and make sure all their needs are met,” Shondell said.
The ligatures were taken from my ankles, and a man held me by each arm and led me to a toilet; one of them freed my wrists and let me relieve myself, the hood still on my head. “You guys know I’m a cop, right?” I said. “You know what happens when you kill a cop in Louisiana.”
“We are cops,” one of them said.
They led me back to the compartment, then took Clete and Carroll LeBlanc to the head and brought them back.
“I want to show you my collection,” Shondell said.
“Is Penelope in on this?” I said.
“How stupid can you be, Dave? Would she be with Adonis if he were not a rich and powerful man?”
“Fuck your collection,” I said.