Page 58 of The Big Fix

“I’m rich,” I apprised him. “I can make you rich as well.”

“I—”

“Listen,” I said affably, smiling at him. “Certainly, you’re a powerful man, but you scrape and claw for your piece of the pie. That’s twenty percent by my estimation. I suspect the person I’m looking for has the other eighty. You may feel wealthy, but twenty percent isn’t rich. You’re merely the middleman. Let me hand you the keys to the entire empire. I’ll take out your competition, and you help me find my associate. Win-win.”

Yu paused. It was big money. Hard to turn down.

“I accept your proposal, Mr. Colter.”

He extended his hand, and I leaned forward to shake. I shouldn’t have.

I didn’t even sense that there was another man there besides the bodyguards, but there had to be. Because even as everyone else remained still, just looking at me, something hit the back of my head. Instantly, a bolt of pain traveled down my spine. I gasped for breath, my mouth opening on reflex. I saw brief images of laughing men and then the floor and nothing else.

When I opened my eyes, I could see nothing. The blackness was complete. Moving my head gently, I felt the blindfold, and when I tried to move my hands, I found them tied in front of me. Normally, I would have gone for the blindfold at that point, but since I could feel the rocking of the vehicle, I didn’t try. Better to sit and not bring on another blow with, I was guessing, some kind of blackjack.

How long had I been out?

My head felt like I’d been kicked by a mule. And no, that had never happened to me, but I imagined it was similar. Was I letting my mind wander? Yes. Had that always been helpful, talking to myself in these kinds of situations? Actually, yes. It calmed me, and at the moment, calm was good.

I lost any sense of time. I was in the back seat of a vehicle, an all-terrain, I was guessing, since I could hear the grind of the transmission’s low gear as the tires plowed over tough terrain in a steady climb. But if I was pressed to answer the question of direction, it would be impossible to tell. All I could say was that the roads got rougher and rougher as my captors pressed on.

There were at least two men up front—I heard them talking—and I could feel another in the back seat with me. The way I was being ignored, as if they weren’t even remotely worried that I could speak the language, told me there was little point in trying to get them to talk to me. In my experience, when people were quiet, that was when there was a chance they saw you as a threat. When they chatted in front of you, unworried, that was when they considered you already dead.

Finally, the vehicle slowed, then came to a sudden stop. It had slowed several times over the past couple of hours as we’d encountered some obstacle or another in our path, but this time was different. The driver shut the engine off.

“Okay, you get out,” a voice spoke slowly with a slight accent.

From the low and controlled tone of voice, I could tell I would not be told twice. A pair of hands roughly yanked me from the back seat. I swung my legs down from the vehicle onto the ground.

“Where are we?” I always asked in these situations, just to see what the response would be.

“You stay quiet,” barked the man. His tone was harsh, but the Thai slang I’d heard the men using during our travel told me I was still somewhere in the Phuket province.

A long silence followed, during which I noted the heat and heavy moisture in the air. I couldn’t see anyone because of the damn blindfold, and I couldn’t hear anyone either, which meant they were deliberately keeping quiet. Still, I could sense them, and I could definitely smell the stink of sweat.

“Take off your clothes,” a low voice growled, and someone untied my hands.

“Why?” I said without thinking.

“I said, take your clothes off,” the voice snarled, his anger evident in each chopped syllable. Then he barked something in Thai, and the next second, a boot hit me hard in the stomach.

The pure violence of the blow took me by surprise. I stumbled as pain tore through me. Instinctively, I raised my hands to protect myself, but I could see nothing through the blindfold. More kicks smashed past my hands and into my chest, neck, and throat. The force of the blows emptied all the air out of my lungs.

“I’ll do it!” I shouted, coughing violently. “Okay!” I yanked off my boots and pants. I left the boxer briefs alone, figuring no one wanted to see me that naked, then peeled away the cheap short-sleeve button-up that I was certain, going in, would not make it back out with me. I let each item fall onto what I knew, after pulling off my socks, was dusty earth.

“Your health is of no interest to us,” the man hissed. “Whether you live or die depends on your efforts to resist.”

Someone pushed a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and some kind of slip-ons into my arms. When I smelled the pungent odor of gasoline, a split second before a rush of heat close by, I realized what they were doing: they were burning my clothes to make sure I didn’t have any bugs on me before they took me any farther to their base. Once I pulled on the new clothes, they retied my hands, and I was shoved hard from behind and told to walk.

“Where? I can’t fucking see shit.”

I flinched when a large, meaty hand gripped my shoulder. It squeezed tightly, and I winced as fingers dug hard into my flesh. “Just move,” a new voice demanded, different, dark and pinched.

Another sudden shove, and I started walking. This time I could feel two pairs of hands pushing me forward, guiding me. I was unsteady, the blindfold making it harder to keep my balance. Just over a kilometer, I was sure I was being led into the mountains. We walked another hour before stopping.

Again I sensed more men around me, but no one was talking out loud. The hands tugging me along shoved me inside some kind of doorway. I could hear at least four sets of boots as the barrel of a gun in my ribs was coaxing me forward along a narrow corridor. I tried counting my steps to get some sense of the size of the place. We only strode some thirty steps by my estimate before I was steered down a staircase. We stopped, and I felt the hands on my shoulders release me.

I could hear the high and low bolts of a door, then a key turning in a lock. The flex was cut from my wrists, there was a boot suddenly in my back, and I found myself falling forward. I had a moment of sheer panic as I realized I was in free fall with no idea what I was barreling toward. My arms flailed out desperately to grab hold of anything, but there was nothing there apart from thin air. In the next instant, my body crashed forward into a hard stone floor. There was laughter then, because seeing me windmill my arms was clearly hysterical.