A Confidential Source (36 page)

“You don’t look so good,” Ayers said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. He put his finger on a button and rolled down
my window. “If you’re going to puke, puke on other cars. Not in here.”

“I’m not going to puke,” I said, wishing I had a full stomach to retch all over them, or at least the courage to jump through
the window. But we were going too fast, weaving through lanes, cutting off cars on the highway. Reuben closed the window when
we slowed down to get off the ramp and turn into a part of Providence I’d never seen before. It was a neighborhood of old,
listing buildings with boarded-up windows and few streetlights.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into a parking lot behind a narrow two-story building on a corner, a faded sign on the front
saying
BOOTSIE
’
S ROAST BEEF
. Reuben hauled me out of the car, pushing me toward the building. I tried to picture where we were. Somewhere south of the
hospitals, but I wasn’t even sure if we were still in Providence.

Ayers and the Parka got out of the front of the car and I was marched to a back door. We climbed a dark staircase, my ankle
aching with each step. I was desperate for the sound of customers or of cooking smells, any sign of life, someone to call
for help. But Bootsie’s looked like it hadn’t served roast beef in years. There was no one besides Ayers, the hairy little
man with the gun, and the enormous refrigerator shoulders of the Parka.

Upstairs, we passed through a narrow hallway into an apartment that looked like someone had pounded their fists into the walls.
Linoleum curled up from the plywood and there were stacks of sealed boxes all over the floor. I was shoved into the center
of the living room, where there was a card table with torn plastic matting and two shaky-looking folding chairs. A shade with
a water stain was pulled partway down a window streaked with bird droppings.

The only light came from a shadeless floor lamp that was plugged into a wall outlet near the back of the apartment, where
there was a hallway and a kitchen with stacks of sealed boxes on the floor. The bald, high-wattage bulb cast a harsh light
in the middle of the apartment and left the corners in darkness.

My ankle ached, but I was too afraid to sit down, so I stood at the table while Ayers yelled at the two men for almost losing
me. The Parka folded his arms and looked sheepish as Reuben echoed a browbeating in that other language and held the gun.

Much of Ayers’s makeup had worn off, but he still looked surreal. He’d changed his jacket for the cardigan sweater he’d been
wearing that night at Raphael’s. He looked like Mr. Rogers. Only not so nice. He grabbed my knapsack from my shoulder and
turned the contents onto the card table. My wallet, tape recorder, dead cell phone, keys, supermarket receipts, brush, notebook,
and several crumpled-up papers landed in a heap. Two pens and a lipstick rolled off the end of the table and onto the floor.

“Where is it?” he shouted. “Where’s the tape?”

I didn’t answer.

Holding the knapsack upside down, he beat it like a rug against the wall. Eraser crumbs, Tic-Tacs, Post-it notes, and the
winning scratch ticket rained to the floor. He picked up the scratch ticket, put it into his pocket, and beat the knapsack
against the wall again until it was clear nothing else was coming out. Frustrated, he threw the knapsack and it skidded across
the linoleum. “Tell us what you did with the tape!”

My brain tried, but failed, to direct thought. I opened my mouth, but couldn’t speak. Ayers gestured to the Parka, who suddenly
stepped behind me, imprisoning me with his loglike arms, pulling my back into his chest. His hot breath was in my ear. “I
wonder where it could be.”

Ayers cackled. Stepping in front of me, he leaned his back against the wall, beside Reuben, who had let his gun drop to his
side. Reuben looked away, but Ayers’s eyes glinted with anticipation. As if this was the fun part, as if he couldn’t wait
to see what the Parka would do next.

“Lots of places to look,” the Parka said, lowering his voice to a whisper. His breath smelled of raw onion. With his left
arm, he put me in a neck lock. Then he reached around me and stuck his right hand into my front pants pocket, his thick fingers
stabbing the skin just above my crotch.

I tried to pull away, but he held me in his grip. “Where the fuck is it?” he asked, jamming his hand so deep into the pocket
that I felt the fabric tear.

“It’s not there!” I shouted.

He took his hand out of my pocket and slowly pulled it up my body, an inch at a time, spreading his fingers as he traveled
from my waist to my breast. He was sweating heavily and his body had that same onion smell. He let his hand linger on my breast,
drawing another dry laugh from Ayers.

Then suddenly, the hand was cupping my right ear. His fingers grasped the stud of my half-moon earring and twisted it sharply.
“Nice jewelry. You think this is worth anything?”

Reuben shook his head. “Silver. Is shit.”

“Junk,” Ayers said.

With one jerk, the Parka ripped the stud through my earlobe. A bolt flashed behind my eyes. Pain seared through my ear and
into my temple. I put my hand to my earlobe and felt a quarter inch of skin hanging from a thread. My fingers were wet with
blood.

Ayers chuckled this time. Encouraged, the Parka jammed one hand into my back pocket now, pulling the jeans away from my body.
“Let’s take these off,” he said to Ayers. “Don’t worry, I know where I’ll find it.”

I stared at the blood on my hand. “It’s not on me!”

The walls began to swerve. When I inhaled, I was overwhelmed with the onion smell, which was now behind my eyes. I was going
to be sick. I was going to puke out the contents of an empty stomach. Then the throbbing in my ear turned into a pounding
and I realized that Gregory Ayers was pounding on the table.

“You idiot. Look at all the blood!” His cardigan sweater had splatters of red all over it. And then to Reuben: “Get a paper
towel or something from the kitchen, she’s bleeding all over my sweater.”

“And my cell phone,” the Parka noted.

“Do something, clean her up!” Ayers ordered.

Reuben came back from the kitchen with a stack of Dunkin’ Donuts napkins, which he shoved in my hand. I sat on the folding
chair and wrapped a paper napkin around my severed earlobe, trying to push the skin back together. I winced with new pain.

The Parka removed his cell phone from his belt and began cleaning it with a paper napkin. Ayers walked to the kitchen sink,
turned on the water, and dabbed at the blood. “This sweater is ruined. Completely ruined,” he moaned.

Returning to the room, he averted his eyes from the bloody napkin I held to my ear. “You should have just given me the real
tape. Why? Why would you want to make this so hard on yourself?” Deliberately, he looked from me to the Parka and Reuben and
back again, as if he, himself, wouldn’t want to spend too much time with them.

I had to think fast, turn fear and nerve impulses into a plan, into some kind of escape. Words sputtered out. “It was in my
jacket pocket. I threw it off when he was chasing me.” I gestured to the Parka, who was still cleaning his cell phone. “You
know. To lose him.”

Ayers looked at him and he explained that I’d been wearing this bright-yellow jacket and that the jacket had disappeared and
he’d lost sight of me in the crowd.

“Where did you throw the jacket?” Reuben asked.

“In the river.” I heard my own voice waver. Ayers’s face brightened, and I realized that if he thought the tape was destroyed,
the evidence gone, he would be free to kill me. The only reason to keep me alive was to find the tape. If I offered to guide
them to it, maybe I could get the hell out of here. Maybe I’d have a chance to get away. “I… I… took the tape out of the pocket
first and threw it into the bushes. Near the footbridge. We could go back there. I could find it for you.”

The Parka’s eyes began darting, scanning his memory, trying to remember bushes. Were there bushes along the path? By the wall?
I wasn’t completely sure.

“Do you know what she’s talking about?” Ayers asked him.

“Maybe I saw a few bushes,” he said, slowly. “Along that wall.”

My stomach was tight. I
had
to convince them to take me back. Get me out of this horrible room. “I could show you exactly where I threw it.”

Ayers gestured to Reuben and the three men walked past the kitchen and toward the shadowed hallway. They stopped in front
of a door, heads together in conference. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Ayers’s voice kept rising in pitch
until finally the Parka kicked his foot into the wall in frustration. Then Reuben said something to the Parka in whatever
language they spoke. Ayers interrupted and there was more argument.

The Parka had left his cell phone amid the clutter of my knapsack contents on the table. I might be able to pull it onto my
lap without them noticing. I leaned across the table and slowly reached for the phone, which was beside one of my notebooks.
I managed to sweep it into my lap.

Punching in 911, I waited what seemed like forever until I heard a distant official-sounding female voice. Then I called out
down the hall. “Don’t hurt me… please… If you take me back to WaterPlace Park, I promise, I can find the tape.”

All three of them shut up at once. My fingers froze on the phone. All three men turned and stared at me. “I know if I retrace
my steps…,” I offered.

Reuben started walking toward me and my hands shook in my lap. I was terrified he’d notice that the cell phone was gone from
the table, but he stopped midway and turned back to Ayers. “How I keep gun on her with peoples there?” he asked in his halting
English.

“The tourists will be gone in another hour or two,” I said.

“Oh fuck, we’re not going back there, are we?” the Parka asked.

I held the end button down long enough on the cell phone to make sure the service was turned off and cops couldn’t call back.
Then I snapped it shut. As if he heard, the Parka emerged from the shadows, walking toward me. He stopped and stared at me
long and hard to let me know he considered this all my fault. My throat tightened, a vein in my neck feeding new blood into
my fear. I waited for a suspicious glance at the table, a sudden move toward me and the cell phone on my lap.

But instead, he scratched his crotch and announced that he had to take a leak. Ayers pointed him to the bathroom. When the
Parka turned away, I slipped the cell phone back on the table.

Hope beat in my chest for about thirty seconds.

Ayers returned to the table, scrutinizing my ear. “She’s bleeding too much,” he said. He waited until the Parka walked out
of the bathroom, and then began barking new orders. “You’ll go alone—when the tourists have cleared. We’ll wait here.”

I prayed for an argument. Or at least a demand that Reuben go with him. I might stand a chance against Ayers alone. But the
Parka only glared at me with his lopsided eyes, as if he’d like to rip the other earring off.

Ayers found some duct tape in a drawer in the kitchen and taped my hands together in front of me, twisting it tight enough
so that my wrists burned. He taped my sore ankle to the other one in the same way and used his belt to secure my waist to
the chair. Then he handed Reuben the tape and ordered him to tape up my earlobe so he didn’t have to look at the bloody napkins.

Reuben wound a piece of duct tape over my ear before grabbing a beer from the refrigerator in the kitchen. Then he relaxed
on the floor with some sort of foreign-language magazine.

Ayers dragged the other folding chair across the room, putting it next to Reuben, and sat down. Minutes passed in silence.
My temples throbbed in pain. The duct tape fell off my earlobe and drops of blood began to spatter my shoulder. I twisted
my wrists in my lap, trying to loosen the tape, but only managed to rub the skin raw. The blood spatters began to dry on my
shoulder, and finally the Parka left to search for the tape I had thrown into the bushes.

After what seemed like hours, my head jerked up at the sound of a door slamming. Reuben and Ayers had risen to their feet
and the Parka was standing in the doorway. “I couldn’t fucking find it anywhere,” he said, glaring at me. “There aren’t any
fucking bushes.”

“Right outside the footbridge? Right by the stairs, where I told you?” I tried to sound surprised.

The Parka exploded in frustration, shaking his hand at Ayers, bellowing with fury. “Fuck the tape. I don’t give a shit. Let’s
just fucking get rid of her!”

I held my breath waiting for Ayers’s reply. He walked to the streaked window and snapped the shade completely open. Outside,
it was still night, but judging by the shade of gray, maybe only another hour or two of darkness remained. He turned back
to us. “I can’t take the risk that someone else stumbles across it,” he said to the Parka. “Go find a Band-Aid or something
to put on that ear and take her back to the river. If she can’t find the tape, you can do whatever you want to her.”

The night sky held thick clouds that made it hard to believe there would ever be a sunrise. My wrists and ankles were raw
from where Reuben had ripped off the tape, my ear throbbed and my ankle was weak, but I didn’t care. Even flanked by both
Reuben and the Parka, with a gun pointed to my ribs, I felt better now that I was out of that horrible apartment. At least
outside, there was air to breathe. And a chance.

A chance that the dispatcher had figured out I needed help. A chance that the police would come. A chance that I could get
away.

It was a bitter November night. I had no jacket, but the Parka had me clenched in his arm with a gun now pointed at my abdomen.
Reuben was close behind us. The onion-tainted body heat was like a furnace. Within minutes, I felt like I was suffocating
again.

As we came out of the tunnel into the park, I scanned the terrain, trying to peer through the dim street light and shadows.
It had been many hours since my phone call, but surely the cops wouldn’t have given up already. Surely they’d still be patrolling
the park, looking for anyone suspicious.