"You work for Tony?"
"Yes, that would be correct." Morris turned down Second Avenue. The rain had started. He looked at Rick in the rearview mirror. "These other guys are Tommy, to your left, and Jones."
Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of an old factory off Tenth Avenue downtown. Rain battered the windshield and they waited in the car, steaming up the windows. His wrists hurt from the handcuffs. A wet dog nosed through some garbage next to a brick wall.
"He's got a little greyhound in him," Morris said. "You can tell by the curved back."
"He's just starving," said Jones.
"I don't think so." Morris opened the driver's door and whistled. The dog's ears jerked and he looked up. Morris whistled again, but the dog trotted away.
"Tommy, grab this other box, please."
They got out in the rain and this time Jones had a hand behind Rick. Tommy carried one box, Morris the other, each heavy.
The door that Morris unlocked was rusted at the bottom from men pissing there, but the lock was expensive and new, Rick noticed. They walked heavily up one flight of cement stairs and across a ruined wooden floor the size of a basketball court. Enough light came in through the yellowy, broken-pieced windows high up on the wall that Rick could see the room had lost function upon function, been inhabited, vacated, and reinhabited, only to be vacated again, the screw-holes in the floor from one grid of machinery superimposed upon the previous, the activity leaving a crazy quilt of paint-gun stencil edges, rub patterns, oil seepings. Failure and disinterest. Bat-shit drop-dripped on all the ledges. A room no one remembered, a room no one needed. In the gloomy far corner a mattress had gone rotten, spilling a soft pile of foam. Next to it a clatter of bottles, a pile of ghost's clothes.
In the corner stood a worktable, three chairs, and some clip-on work lights.
"Okay," said Morris. "We want you on the table. Sit up."
"Like the doctor's office," noted Tommy.
Morris unzipped his silk baseball jacket and folded it over the back of one of the chairs. He had a doughy body in a green sports shirt. "I'll be asking some questions, Rick. You're okay with that, right?"
Rick nodded, sitting awkwardly with his hands cuffed together. Tommy was looking inside one of the big toolboxes.
"Where is she?" Morris asked. "This Christina Welles." He smiled. "I'm sort of interested in meeting her, keep hearing things about her."
"She's something," Rick agreed, watching Tommy pull out a long heavy-duty extension cord.
"So…" Morris waited. "Will you please tell us where she is?"
"I don't know."
Morris fiddled with a ring on his finger-a wedding ring, Rick noticed.
"I admit I've been looking for her," he went on. "I think she's in the neighborhood down in the Village somewhere, but…" He shrugged. "I think I'm close."
Morris slipped his gold watch off his wrist and put it in his front pants pocket. "You're close, you think?"
"Yeah."
"How close?"
"I'm getting there, you know."
"Right." Morris pointed at the toolbox. "Tommy, I want the quarter-inch."
"Wait, wait," Rick said quickly.
They held him down and Morris started the drill.
"Wait, wait!" He struggled but Tommy calmly poked the barrel of a. 38 in his eye and he froze. "Okay, okay."
Morris stopped the drill, let it whine down. "Okay, what?"
He was panting, neck suddenly hot. "Okay. Fine. So let's talk."
Morris stared at Rick now. "You're sure?"
"Yes."
"Everything is cool?"
"Yes."
"Shall I put my watch back on?"
"Why not?"
They were still holding him down. "I usually take it off, see."
"No, no," said Rick, understanding now, "you can put it back on."
"Okay," said Morris. "In a second."
The drill started suddenly and Rick felt it go straight through his left boot, a hot nail plunging down through his foot, come out the bottom as he screamed, get caught in the sole of his boot, be yanked out.
"Fuck! Fuck! Okay, okay!"
They let him go and he curled up mournfully, clutching his boot with his shackled hands. Blood oozed up through the hole in the leather. He pressed his fingers against the hole. Paul, I need you, he thought.
Morris was holding the drill in front of him, the red bit whining to a stop. "We're serious here, Rick." He handed the drill to Tommy and took out his watch and slipped it back on. "We have something to accomplish."
"Right, right," cried Rick, squeezing his foot. "Okay, I get it. Really."
Morris removed a paper from his breast pocket. Rick's foot felt tight inside his boot. Swelling already. It hurt to move his toes. A bone feeling, pieces not fitting right. You're going to be okay, he told himself, you are. This is just to scare you.
"I got these worked out in an order," Morris began. "Give us the answer and we'll all get out of here soon as we can." He put a tape recorder on the table. "First thing, please tell me everything you know about Christina's method of encryption that you and she used."
"Okay." Rick tried to control his breathing, hoping to sound cooperative. "We had these trucks that we-"
Morris frowned, slipped off his watch, and took the drill from Tommy.
"Fuck, wait! Wait!"
The drill went into the outside of his left ankle, just above the boot. It was worse this time, the bit grinding into the joint capsule until it punctured through the tendons on the other side, then continuing through the flesh until the spinning tip spurted through the inside of his ankle. "Oh, God, please," Rick cried, gripping the table and squeezing his eyes. "Oh! Fuck, fuck!" He tried sitting up, and when they punched him he kicked furiously and even bit Jones's palm until Tommy choked him with both hands and he went slack.
The drill burned into his ankle again. "Fuck! Fuck!" He twisted in agony, hollering incoherently.
"You ready?" yelled Morris.
"Yes, yes! I'm ready!"
Morris pulled the drill out, blood spackling Rick's pants and shirt, Morris's arms and face.
He lay rigid on the table, not yet believing it, knowing it was true, his hands shaking as he tried to breathe through his nose to calm down. His ankle felt destroyed. He sat up. Blood filled his boot now. He bent forward and grabbed it, squeezing against the wounds. Right through everything, tendon, bone, the sock. His back was drenched in sweat and he smelled piss. A warm stain spread across his crotch.
"That's fine, just catch your breath." Morris wiped himself off while Tommy held the drill. "Just catch your breath and then tell us, Rick."
Everything except where she is, he decided. Everything but that. I promise you, Christina. They can kill me and I won't say it. "We had trucks," he began, clutching his ankle as tightly as he could. "We had to get into the city… The problem was-this fucking hurts — the problem was the cops had all our phones tapped, which we knew, we could deal with that. Also, maybe the pay phones around our truck dispatch office. We knew we couldn't trust the phones… Also, Tony didn't want to get the cellular phones that encrypt the call, okay? He didn't trust them. So I was explaining this to Christina one day and she said she could come up with a system." He didn't know what he was saying. "Tony kind of liked this idea. But he said he also wanted it done so that as few people as possible had the information. He didn't want to have to know it, because he didn't want to have to give it up, okay? Like that." He moved one hand to his foot wound. "So the system-we worked it out-was this. Let's say it was with Frankie, one of Tony's regular fences-"
"We were busy with Frankie after Christina got arrested."
"So?" Rick cried anxiously.
"So we thought he was the one who did it," said Morris.
"What?" He looked into the faces of Jones and Tommy. Nothing. Men waiting for a late train.