Guilty Minds

“Man, I hate like hell to be talking like this. We should be working together, what I’m saying. Keeping the sheep safe.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t want to be on the wrong side of me, Heller. We work this out, same time next year I’ll be sending you clients.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We don’t? Get yourself a black suit. You’ll be going to a lot of funerals.”

His cell phone rang, and he took it out of his pocket. “Vogel,” he said. “Yeah. Got it. I’m on my way.” He turned around, called out, “Rafferty, let’s go.” Then to me he said, “I’m sorry, I’ve got a meeting.”

He took out one of his metallic business cards and slid it into my shirt pocket. He waved vaguely at me, at the chair and the zip ties and everything. “We’ll give you some time to think it over.”

67

For a long time I sat there, zip-tied to the aluminum chair, thinking.

Vogel had left me alone in the empty warehouse, probably figuring that it would take me most of the day to get free. Maybe several days. I’d been bound with an excess of zip ties, one looped to another, which made it particularly challenging.

Not impossible, though.

Or so I told myself.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t use Vogel’s metallic business card, since I couldn’t reach my shirt pocket. I looked around the room, poring over the metal desk and coat tree and floor, looking for scissors or knives or anything sharp. The desk had a drawer, and that demanded a closer look. So how to move around? My ankles were zip-tied to the front chair legs. I shifted my feet and discovered I had a little bit of play. Enough for me to lift my heels and push against the ground with my toes. That moved the chair only a few inches, though, and I had twelve or fifteen feet to travel to the desk drawer. But it was something. The journey of a thousand miles…

A kind of dazed calm settled over me, like a blanketing fog. A very useful sort of calm. Once I was helping my nephew, Gabe, assemble a fiendishly complicated play-set model of a hospital, and he cried out in frustration. That was when I taught him how to let the calm wash over you, and to focus on one piece at a time, breathing in and out, placid, calm. It probably took the two of us three hours to assemble this damned hospital, but high-strung, short-tempered Gabe stayed with it, and when the hospital was finished, he glowed with pride. So whenever he was faced with something perplexing and intricate, a physics problem set or a difficult math assignment, I would say to him, “Remember the hospital,” and he’d instantly smile and nod, as if to say, I got this. When I’d see him about to blow his stack over an impossible jigsaw puzzle, I’d just say “hospital,” and he’d smile and nod and try harder.

Now I said to myself hospital, and I smiled. I can do this. It’ll be arduous and slow, but I can do this. I made myself enter the zone. Calm. I lifted my heels, pushed off with my toes, scraped the chair legs another two inches closer to the desk drawer. Two down, one hundred and seventy-eight to go.

My cell phone rang in my pocket.

As I slow-scuttled along the floor, the phone ringing, I worked on my hands. They were looped to each other at the wrists, and then each loop was connected to the chair’s vertical struts. If you thrust in a downward direction with enough force, you can snap the cable tie’s locking head and free yourself. But that wasn’t an option.

Lift heel, press toes, and shove. Another two inches closer. Nothing was impossible. Hospital.

I had to get the hell out of here.

The phone continued to ring. I counted thirteen rings, and then it stopped for a moment, and then it started to ring again. Insistently, it seemed. Someone was trying to reach me with some urgency. Mandy? Dorothy?

Only then did it occur to me that my fingers were free to wiggle and move, and that was something.

Working by feel alone, I tugged at one of the cable ties with my fingers, a loop that connected the loop around my wrists to one of the struts. I was able to pull it around so that its locking head was nearest my fingers.

Now I inserted a fingernail into the tiny plastic box that forms the lock. Inside that little box is a pawl, a pivoting bar that engages with the notched end of the strap and locks it in place, keeps it from moving. With my fingernail I was able to pry the pawl upward to release the tension. Then, tugging with my fingers, I loosened the cuff, pulling and pulling until the end of the strap came loose.

Success! It felt like a major victory, like winning an Olympic gold medal. I didn’t think about the fact that my wrists were still tightly bound together and my ankles were still looped onto the chair legs. That was negative thinking and wouldn’t help me. Focus on one tiny victory at a time. Hospital.

The phone stopped ringing.

I crabbed the chair along the floor toward the desk drawer, another couple of inches.