The car hurtled down the surface streets, running lights, crossing lanes to get around backups. Sudden turns flung us against the door and against each other as we careened past hangars and warehouses.
Ellen sat with her knees drawn up on the seat, trembling and hyperventilating. Occasionally, a whimper escaped her breath.
I patted her hand in a lame attempt to console. I could think of no encouraging words. I knew who these guys were and had a good idea what they planned to do with us and it wasn’t going to be pretty. My escapades in Cleveland and Pittsburgh had finally caught up with me.
The three men in the car didn’t talk much, not even to each other. The long-haired guy in the back seat with us kept some kind of boxy automatic weapon pressed against my ribs. If it happened to go off I was pretty sure the bullet would slice right through my innards and into Ellen—two for the price of one. Ellen, the poor thing, didn’t deserve what was coming.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of this,” I whispered.
“How? How can you possibly—?”
“I’ll find a way.”
She stuck her mouth close to my ear. I could feel her hot breath. “Who are these people? What do they want?”
“You two! Shut the fuck up!” said the long-haired guy. “No talking!”
I squeezed her hand, making sure I caught her eye, nodding, to re-emphasize my promise. She had no business getting entangled in all of this. Me, I didn’t care so much about. They could do whatever they wanted with me, as long as she got away. I just didn’t want to be responsible for another lost soul.
***
We drove for a good hour and a half down the New Jersey Turnpike. We got off at the exit for Atlantic City, but instead of seeing casinos, we entered this seeming wilderness of swamps and forests of scrubby pine. The terrain was nothing I expected out of New Jersey.
The guy in the front passenger seat took a call from someone named Sergei. From the way his voice changed, higher in pitch and oozing with deference, I took it that this Sergei guy was his boss. I wondered if and how he was connected to that Cleveland racket. Seemed so far away. Could their territory range this widely? But then again, these guys had tentacles stretching all the way to Europe. How else would they know I was being deported?
That name—Sergei—gave me a focus on which to train my will. My nemesis now had a name. It wasn’t hard mustering ill feelings. He had been cramping my style and making me anxious for months, getting in the way of me and my Karla, and now here he was terrorizing poor Ellen.
There was a wad of cash, hundreds and twenties, clipped together on a tray between the driver and the guy riding shotgun. I got the topmost note to curl up at one corner, all the way to the clip, and then relax in time with my breaths. My displeasure was manifesting itself.
I folded one corner down and then the other like I was making a paper airplane. It had no purpose. I was just exercising my abilities. Because I could, I made the bill inch its way out from under the clip like some kind of flat caterpillar.
I happened to glance over at Ellen, and all this time, she had been staring at the money, too, watching me do all this. The distraction put an end to all the curling and uncurling. She looked straight at me and mouthed the word: “How?”
I looked at her and shrugged and looked away.
***
We reached a place where some of the pines had been cut back away from the road. They had gone to the trouble of uprooting all the stumps, which were piled in a heap in a corner of the lot. A work team with a dump truck was putting together a stone wall, setting mortared blocks into a frame of rebar and wire mesh.
