I didn’t stop my agitated rant for a second. It’s difficult to talk and attack at the same time. The average person needs to get his mind right, focus, concentrate first, even if only for a moment. Accinelli would recognize this, on some level, and would therefore find my mad logorrhea comforting by comparison with what he’d feared a moment before.

He picked up his keys and shouldered past me. He kept his head turned toward me for an extra-long beat as he moved by, but I showed him my hands, palms forward, my arms held back, to demonstrate my harmlessness, and kept up my blathering.

Finally, his head turned. At the instant I was in his blind side, I shot in and looped my right arm around his neck, yanking him toward me, getting him back on his heels, off his base. The inside of my elbow centered on his windpipe, just hard enough for positioning, not hard enough to crush anything. I caught my left biceps in my right palm, brought my left hand around to the back of his head, and squeezed. I had learned the technique at the Kodokan as hadaka jime, naked choke, better known in the West as a sleeper hold.

Accinelli grunted and backed into me, trying to get his weight under him, to find his balance. His left hand scratched at my right forearm but found only the slippery neoprene gauntlet of the bicycle glove. He dropped his keys and reached back with his right, by instinct or long-ago training going for my eyes, but I buried my face in his shoulder and his scrabbling fingers were stymied by the bicycle helmet.

It was over in less than five seconds. Some people last a bit longer, some a bit shorter, but no one can go very long once the carotids have been closed off and oxygen is no longer reaching the brain. His groping hands abruptly fell away and he slumped in my arms. I leaned back against the wall, supporting some of his weight with my body, and held him there.

I was very conscious of how much pressure I was using. In the heat of the moment, it would be easy to apply too much, which at a minimum would cause bruises. The purpose of the choke was just to deny his brain oxygen. Anything more than that was unnecessary and would leave signs. I had a lot of experience with hadaka jime from my judo days, and always had a knack for it. I could feel just how firmly to squeeze.

I remained like that, controlling my breathing, counting off the seconds. Someone might have come down the elevator or in through the door, but the possibility didn’t trouble me. If it happened, I would just drop Accinelli, walk away, and deal with Hilger and everything else afterward. In any event, there was nothing I could do to influence, let alone control, the eventuality. I knew how I would react if it happened and that was enough.

I imagined what would come next: his mistress tries him on his cell phone, then checks downstairs when there’s no answer. Or some other resident finds him here. No sign of foul play-no gunshot, stab wounds, or blunt trauma-and therefore no justification to expend resources on an autopsy. There would be questions, of course, but he was a prominent man, and his family would be only too eager to close the matter quickly and obscure the details of where he died and what he might have been doing there. The cause would remain unknown, and would probably be treated as an embolism or some other such story that doctors proffer to families to help them find closure when death can’t otherwise be explained.

After four minutes, I knew he was past any attempt at resuscitation. I eased him down on the floor and looked outside. Two women in wool coats and fur earmuffs walked by, laughing about something, maybe on their way to an early lunch. I watched them pass. No one else was coming. Okay.

I picked up the box and stepped outside. I left the keys where they had fallen. Logical enough that Accinelli had been holding them when he was struck down by his mysterious embolic event, and that they would wind up on the floor beside him.

I headed down the stairs, glancing south on Mott as I moved. All clear. I glanced north. Then, only by virtue of years of experience, I turned my head away and continued down the stairs as though I had noticed nothing of any relevance.

What I had noticed, in fact, was the blond guy from Saigon. Hilger’s backup. And he was walking straight toward me.

24

DOX WAS STANDING next to his cot, doing isometric exercises against his chains. He knew from the sounds on the boat that they were in a port somewhere; that, unusually, three of them were off the boat; that the one who’d stayed behind was Uncle Fester. Despite knowing it was a victory for the psycho, he couldn’t help feeling dread. Fester was going to give him the “surprise” now, he could feel it. That, or something worse.

Things were quiet for a while, and then he heard Fester’s footsteps, coming down the stairs, heading his way. He sat up on the cot and pulled futilely against the chains, not for the first time. Goddamnit, if there had been just a little more slack. He’d thought a hundred times about improvising a weapon, something sharp, but there wasn’t a single thing in the cabin, not a doorstop or a window crank, the workings in the toilet tank, nothing. With a weapon, he might, just might, have had a chance. But as it was, he couldn’t stand straight, he could barely fucking move, he couldn’t even defend himself against Fester’s knees and elbows when the psycho paid him a visit, how the hell was he going to take the man out like he needed to?

Fester looked in through the window, then opened the door. He was carrying a large canvas bag and smiling, and Dox thought, Nothing good can come of this.

“I was just thinking about you, Uncle Fester,” Dox said.

Fester smiled. “Yeah? I’m glad I didn’t find you touching yourself, then. It would have been embarrassing.”

“Well, funny you should say that, ’cause that’s exactly the thing I was thinking about. I was wondering if you’d ever had any kind of psychosexual workup. I think you might be intrigued by the insights. Did you know that eighty-five percent of people with an inclination to torture were bed wetters and fire setters?”

Fester’s eyes narrowed and his ears flattened against his scalp, and Dox was pleasantly surprised. He was making this shit up as he went along, but who could say what kind of fucked-up childhood might produce an adult specimen like Uncle Fester? Anyway, it seemed like he’d just hit a nerve.

“No,” Fester said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s all in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Harvard Psychiatric Review. You ought to read the articles, you could learn something about your nature.”

“Yeah, cabrón? I wonder why you enjoy reading those articles.”

“Oh, psychos like you are a hobby of mine. For example, did you know that almost eighty percent of soldiers who volunteered for work as interrogators in World War Two were denied the necessary security clearances because the tests proved they were latent homosexuals? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Gay será, será.”

Fester smiled and one of his eyes twitched. “Remember how we talked about these?” he said, reaching into the bag and taking out a car battery and alligator clips. “When we waterboarded you and you screamed like a girl. It made me think…why not?”

“Oh, Fester, you shouldn’t have. Sharing your toys with me like this, it’s touching.”

“Keep talking, motherfucker. It’s a nice warm-up for screaming.”

Dox smiled, continuing to play the game, but inside he felt a rush of adrenaline at the possibility that had just suggested itself. So this was the “surprise.” Fester wasn’t going to settle for a few well-balanced pops today. He wanted to use electricity, instead, which would involve getting close and staying close while he fucked around with a bunch of wires.