The Mentor (3 page)

Again, I
drew in deep breaths, but this time they pulled in a little slower as if the
air were dragging across my teeth a little.  Had to put that out of my
mind; just a couple deep gasps of air, then—I yanked hard and heard the latch
disengage.

I pressed
up, but the water above me held the door closed.  Moving into a crouch, my
feet on the side edge of the seat, I used my legs to do all the work. 

Steadied my
shoulder.

Then, pushed
with everything I had.

Harder. 

Harder
.

My legs
began to shake as I strained to force the door open.   Sweat burst from the
pores along my hairline, making the gash there sting.  Rivulets of red-stained
perspiration dripped down my face and into my eyes.

I yelled,
pushing harder, my muscles aching, and braced for the rush of water.

It didn’t
come.  Dropping away, I was breathing heavy, trembling as my muscles dealt
with the shock of overexertion.  I banged the van ceiling with my fist.
 

"No
wonder there are no leaks!  The son-of-a-bitch welded the doors shut!"
 

But, then I
remembered.

One foot
of water exerts a pressure of .43 pounds per square inch.

That’s what
he was saying.  Not that the van was going to be crushed but, given the
depth and size of the door, with all that water pressure there'd be no way for
me to open it.    

Luckily, my
abductor had been on a budget, and the van had hand crank windows.
 Readying myself again, I began to turn the crank, but no dice.  

I tried the
driver’s side.  Same result.

Lying on my
side and pressing my shoe hard on the crank, I heard the gears inside strip and
start to buckle.  

One foot
of water exerts a pressure of .43 pounds per square inch.

Ah.  That's
thousands of pounds of pressure.  No way
the
flimsy window crank
could overcome that sort of
weight.

Then how
was I getting out?

Before I
passed out in my apartment, he had said: “Lesson begins.”

This was a
lesson
?
 What kind of lesson?  Or by lesson did he mean "payback"?
 

What had I
done?  Had I so completely wronged someone that to settle accounts it
meant my death?   

Just more
and more questions but one thing was certainly turning out to be true: I
was
actually starting to run out of air.

Lying back,
sitting on the seat sideways, I pressed the cold window against my sore neck
and shoulders.  It helped some, but the worst pain was really my lower back
where the—

“TOOLBOX!”

I popped up
like a jack-in-the-box and slid between the two front seats into the back of
the van where the black, plastic toolbox lay upside down in the corner.  I
grabbed it, flipping the box over in my hands several times.  I could hear
something rattling around inside, but the plastic was thick and my pitiful
attempts to tear it open didn't leave a mark.

This, of
course, from a guy who-- on more than one occasion-- had been summarily
defeated by a tenacious potato chip bag (alas, shortly
after
those
temporary failures, my enemy was often quickly slain with a dirty kitchen
knife.  Or scissors.  Or lawn jart.  Unfortunately, given the manner of my
late-night departure, I hadn't brought any of those implements with me).

Embedded in
the plastic was the face of a small combination lock but, flipping the toolbox
over a couple times, there was no hint at what the combination might be.  No
serial numbers, no manufacture date.  Nothing.  

The numbers
had to be in the van, then.  

The vehicle
had 78,898 miles on it, which meant if those were my numbers I had two
two-digit numbers and a one digit number.  It took me a few minutes to go
through each permutation.  Nothing.

Frustrated,
I ran through the numbers again.  Had I rushed right past the correct
sequence?  Again, nothing.

Panic
gripped my chest.  Had he...
given
me the numbers

Or, worse,
maybe he revealed it as I passed out?

I closed my
eyes for a second and recalled, exactly, every word of the conversation from
the moment he'd entered my apartment.

Nothing, no
numbers that seemed like a possible combo.

I searched
through my pockets again.  Nothing-- they’d been stripped empty.  Not only
were my keys and wallet missing, but the bastard even swiped the twenty bucks
hidden in my black vest.  In fact, the entire vest was gone.  Jerk.

Staring at
the lock, I knew whatever was inside the toolbox was my ticket to getting free.
 

Slamming
the toolbox on the metal walls of the van did nothing but ring my ears.
 The light went out for a brief instant during one attack, the wiring
inside probably shifting, so my failing came to an abrupt end.  As scared
as I was, it would be a lot more frightening in complete darkness.  It was
pitiful, but I needed the tiny, orange bulb to keep me company.  

“What,
then..?”

I stared at
the lock and just started spinning it.  Three numbers, probably.  I
tried increments of five.  Then, faster, I just tried random combinations
of numbers.   Still faster.  Anything, it didn’t matter—nothing worked.

Calm
down
.  

My mouth
was widening, gulping deeper breaths, and I was getting a little dizzy.

He’d warned
me of the pressure on the doors.  He'd warned of the depleting oxygen.
 He'd… oh, hold on.  

He’d asked
about the baker.

Why had he
asked about the baker?  

Testing me.
 Testing my recall.  

“How the
hell had he even
known
about that?” I said aloud and the voice reflected
back to me was thin, shaky.

For
whatever reason that seemed to matter to him.  He'd needed to check my recall
before moving forward.  That was what all the baker stuff was about.  So, if
that meant so much... the answer to my lock riddle would likely be in something
he said after all.

Three
numbers?  Letters, maybe, or…

I had it.

Hell,
you must’ve thought it was your birthday and the beer fairy had brought an
extra cold one.  

My damp
fingers fumbled, trembling as I dialed in my birthday, but concentration
failing me a little, I passed by my birth month and had to do it again.  

Slow.

I had to
focus, go slow.

I had to
get it right.

Ticking off
the three numbers of my birthday in various combinations until—

Click.

Briefly, thrill
washed over me like a winter wind, and I popped open the toolbox and reached
inside.  

A pen.
 Just a pen.

“What is
this?”  I said through clenched teeth.  “I’m supposed to break out
with a clever haiku?”  

Or maybe it
was for a suicide note.  

I was
pissed off.  Pissed off about being in the van, pissed off someone had busted
into my home and pissed off someone had screwed with my beer!

So, I
snapped the pen in two.

But it
didn’t break.  Hell, I was too weak to even
bend
it.

Then— no,
not too weak.  

I grabbed
either end and used all my strength to bend the pen but
it didn’t bend at
all
.

Holding it up
to the light again, I looked at it a little more closely.  “This is a
really good pen.”

But, this
wasn’t the standard Bic you’d pick up at the grocery store.  There had to
be metal shell underneath the plastic surface.  More importantly, it was
at least some clue to what I had to do next.

The
problem, of course, was the pressure on the door and on the door's window.
 I couldn’t open either until the pressure equalized on both sides.
 Like trying to open the van's door while doing eighty miles an hour.
 Really hard to do.  But, open the window, and the door swings a little
easier.

Holding the
pen like a dagger, I psyched myself up for an attack on the passenger side
window above me.

Just as I
was about go all Norman Bates on it, it occurred to me that the water falling
into the van—all that pressure released!—could knock me out cold.  The
back window seemed like a better option.

“Okay, here
we go.”  Grabbing the rear door's interior handle with my right hand, I
arched back with my left and came down as hard as I could on the glass.
 The shockwave rattled up my wrist, arm and shoulder and it felt like Daffy
or Bugs had slammed a ball peen hammer into the base of my skull.

“Ouch.”
 

Instant
headache, arm ache, shoulder ache… just everything ache.  Thinking back to
Psycho, I thought: WWND?  

“What would
Norman do?”

Naturally,
Mr. Bates, a slight man, would use whatever body mass he had to put some force
behind his thrust.  

This time, slipping
between the two front seats, I pushed back even farther to the dashboard.
 The van on its side, my feet gripped onto the back of the driver’s seat
like a runner in starter blocks.

I counted
off in my head again:  
One… two… three!

Screaming
like a banshee—because Norman would have—I leapt with all my strength toward
the back window, arm rocketing forward in a stabbing motion, my feet never even
touching the floor, I was in full flight when I reached the door, five feet
from my starting point.  There was the celebratory shatter of glass then a
whoooosh
of air.

The water
gushing in and all around me was the most beautiful music I had ever heard.

Froth and
spray and foam… tried to get a good bearing, but then the dome light winked
out. 

I dipped
down below, into the freezing water, grabbed the handle to the door and pushed it
open out.  Slowly, it gave way and let me pass into the freezing, black void.

Pulling
myself upward with everything I had left, then dug deeper and used that too--
that part, that reserve we never tap into because we fear it would empty us,
top to bottom, but still I pushed harder.

The first
thing I noticed was the screaming.  Not a vocal scream, but the shrill of
pain.  The water wasn't going to release its prey that easily, and it
squeezed my body, my chest, my head… my ears felt as if I were being lifted by
a giant pair of calipers, its needle-sharp points cutting into either side of
my skull.

I clamped
my hands to either side of my head and kicked with my feet, but the pain
symphony in my brain didn’t quiet.  It felt like my face would surely
crack open, the contents behind it bursting through any split, looking to
escape the pressure.

My eyes
wide open, my lips a vise, I kicked myself toward the sky and slowly saw the
black turn to steel gray above me.  Brighter and brighter until finally,
unbelievably, my body split the surface and took in my first fresh lungful of
air in what felt like hours.

Thrashing
on top of the water, I greedily sucked in deep gulps of air and yelled at the
top of my lungs, took another breath and yelled again.  It felt damn good.

It took a
full minute to get my bearings, and I swam toward the shoreline.  My
sweatshirt was weighing me down, so I stripped it off and instantly grew
freezing cold, but the swimming was much easier.

It wasn’t really
a lake after all.  Nor was it the ocean.

I had seen
this place years ago-- the North Fulton County quarry in Atlanta.  That
explained why I'd gone so deep.

Already
exhausted, the swim to shore, while short, was difficult and by the end of it,
half of the quarry’s small lake must have been in my stomach or mouth.

The rocks that
dappled the water’s edge were oily and slick, so climbing out I fell twice. 
The second time, I banged up my knee pretty good.

Rolling out
of the darkness and through dying patches of heather, a small laugh startled
me.  It was cigarette-harsh and phlegmy, but rather than mean, it seemed
pleasant.  Like someone who hadn’t laughed in a while and all it took was
to see some half-naked fatso fall down a couple times on a pile of wet rocks to
make his day.

It was not
quite dawn yet, and the moon had busied itself trying to calm the water I'd
stirred up.  Not much light. 

He stood a
couple yards away from me.  I could only make out the more angular features of
the man's face.

“No place
for swimmin’, that there,” he called over to me, then laughed again and spit
something out.  “All sortsa stuff down there you don’t wanna get cut up
on.”

Falling onto
a patch of long, matted grass, I was breathing heavily and couldn’t stop
gulping in the air.  Hyperventilating, maybe.  They always say you
should breathe into a paper bag.  Supposed to help.  Dunno why.
 I did, coincidentally, see a small paper bag, but it was wrapped around a
bottle of beer in the hand of my one-man audience.