“Nadine, turn off that camera,” Paul says.
Nadine hesitates, but Jet nods at her.
As soon as Nadine lowers her cell phone, Farner says, “Look, man, if you don’t like it, call Mr. Buckman.”
Max’s umbrella of protection for his daughter-in-law has definitely been removed. I don’t think Paul’s ever experienced this kind of resistance from Bienville cops. He sighs, looks at the ground for a few seconds, then steps within two inches of Officer Farner. In a voice so low as to be nearly inaudible, he says, “I’ll tell you how this is gonna go, Jerry. You can take Marshall there straight down to the pokey, but my wife and son are coming to Jackson with me.”
Farner stiffens and tries to step back, but Paul catches his arm and holds him close. The young cop clearly has no idea what to do.
“If they don’t,” Paul goes on, “you’re gonna be calling Roto-Rooter to fish your balls out of your septic tank. After I flush ’em down the toilet.”
Pale with anger, Farner lays his hand on the butt of his gun.
“Last thing you’ll ever do,” Paul says, never taking his eyes from the cop’s face. “Badge or no badge, I swear to God.”
Farner leaves his hand on his pistol for a few face-saving seconds, then pivots away from Paul, catches hold of my arm, and drags me toward the cruiser’s back door. The young cop jumps forward and opens it for him.
“We’ll have you out first thing in the morning,” Jet promises me.
“You leave that to Nadine,” Paul says.
As Farner’s big hand clamps down on top of my skull and forces me into the stinking backseat, it comes home to me just how dangerous Paul is. He just told a cop—in front of witnesses—that he’d beat the hell out of him if he disobeyed Paul’s order. And rather than wait for backup and arrest Paul, both cops decided to let it go.
Not the guy whose wife you want to sleep with . . .
“How you like it back there, Mr. Newspaperman?” asks Farner.
The reality of spending the night in a cell at the mercy of the Poker Club is settling over me. But not even that can bury the epiphany that hits me behind the metal mesh separating me from these fine officers of the law. Paul didn’t slug me because he thinks I hit his father with a hammer. Paul hates his father. He hit me because at some level he knows that, despite my denial earlier today, I am sleeping with his wife. He may not know that he knows . . . but he does.
“Hey,” Farner goes on as the squad car leaves the parking lot. “A week ago I’d have worried what you’d write about me in the paper. But you ain’t got no newspaper anymore. There ain’t no more Watchman. Not now. And when they reopen that rag, it’s gonna be under new management. Things are gonna get a little easier around here. A little looser, you know? Like the good old days.”
I give him nothing.
“I said, how you like it back there, boy?”
I should keep quiet, but for the thousandth time I picture Buck being dragged from the river by incompetent deputies. He was probably killed by a guy a lot like Farner.
“How do you like being Paul Matheson’s bitch?” I ask mildly.
Chapter 42
I’m drowning.
The more I gasp for air, the more water I suck down my throat. I’ve been blinded, and my arms are strapped to my sides. My mind is screaming, my vocal cords locked in spasm. A man is shouting in my ear, but the words make no sense. This nightmare is not happening in Afghanistan or Iraq, but in my hometown jail.
The city cops handed me over to a deputy who booked me, but I was never taken to a cell. The deputy led me, still handcuffed, to a group shower in the basement of the county jail. There I found good old Officer Farner waiting for me. City and county law enforcement usually coexist in a state of cold war, but apparently the Poker Club has the power to bring them together in common cause. Farner showed me that he had my wallet and cell phones. Then he locked me in the shower room, telling me on his way out that we were going to have a good time together soon.
An hour after he left, Farner returned with a second man wearing a hood. The new man wore jeans and a black T-shirt, not a city or county uniform. The two men used ballistic nylon straps to bind my legs, chest, and arms to the long bench. They wrapped a towel around my head and used duct tape to secure my head to the wood—to keep from bruising me, I guess. Then one of them started pouring water down my nose and mouth.
I figured I would hold my breath, but when I tried, they pulled the wet towel close over my face. I knew that when I gasped, there would be no air, and that knowledge drove the breath from my lungs and made me suck in with all my strength.
All I got was soaked cloth and water.
After ten seconds of blind panic, they stopped pouring. Until that moment, I had never understood what waterboarding was. The simplicity of the torture makes it incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t endured it. That’s how life is: in the simplest things lie the greatest joy and misery. Ask any hospital patient who can’t urinate or defecate without emergency catheterization or a forcible bowel evacuation. Ask someone dying of thirst the value of water.
Ask a drowning man about air.
They did it to me twice before they even asked a question. Until that moment, I believed Officer Farner was simply punishing me. But no, their process had an object. While dripping water onto the towel, a new voice said, “Where is the stuff Sally Matheson put together to blackmail her husband?”
“I don’t know,” I coughed, trying to place the genteel Southern accent.
“We know you have it.”
“I don’t! I never had it.”
“You’re lying. You quoted from it to Tommy Russo this morning.”
“No! Somebody emailed me that. Anonymous source. You can look in my phone. Look in my phone!”
“Stop for a minute,” said the voice.
Until those words, I’d existed only moment to moment.
The prospect of even temporary cessation of the pain and terror filled me with shameful gratitude. In less than two minutes I’d learned that I would betray anything I knew, everyone I loved. How could it be so easy to break a man? How could it be that some men had held out for days or weeks or months against torture? The only answer I could imagine was that there are degrees of torture. Pain is one thing; terror is another. Pain can be isolated by the mind, objectified, distanced, even befriended. Terror is a wild animal trying to claw its way out of your chest.
“Take that blindfold off,” said the genteel voice.
A strong hand yanked the towel from around my head, banging the back of my skull against the bench. Beau Holland stood over me, his golfer’s tan dark and rich above a salmon-colored button-down. His eyes contained a mixture of malice and pleasure, and when he smiled, his Chiclet-white porcelain veneers shone in the dim room.
“I warned you this morning,” he said. “You didn’t listen. Listen now. You had two phones when they brought you in.”
“The email I quoted from is in my iPhone. Look at it. You’ll see the sender used some high-tech anonymous program to send it. We tried to trace it, but it’s impossible.”
Holland nodded to the man in the hood. “What’s your password?”
“Zero-five-two-seven-seven-two.”