Killer Move

He pulls his head up, dislodging drops of sweat that had been hanging off his nose. His head whirls. After a moment of confusion, things start to fall into place. He sees the bare walls of some octagonal space thirty feet across. There are four blue patches, like windows—except you can’t see through them. Tarpaulins. Around the edges you can see the outside world, where it is bright and very sunny. A flapping sound from the tarps says there’s a light breeze outside, but it’s not reaching the inside. The man can also hear, distantly, the sound of the sea. A standard concrete cinder block, eight by eight by sixteen inches, lies against the wall.

He looks back down. He sees now that an area of his sweatpants above his right knee is stained reddish brown. In parts this stain is very thick, and hard, suggesting that a lot of blood was involved.

Ah. He remembers now.

He was shot.

The wound feels like some eternal moment of impact, but he understands that it maybe still hurts less than it should. It seems likely he’s on some serious kind of painkiller. Possibly he’s also coming out of a dose of something used to knock him out, a narcotic presumably.

None of these are reassuring ideas, especially when the third and most salient detail of his situation finally announces itself. His wrists are tied to the arms of a very heavy wooden chair. They are bound by thick canvas straps. So are his ankles. There’s a similar strap around his waist, and another around his shoulders.

They are all very tight.

He tries to pull himself forward in the chair, but he cannot move more than half an inch. This is enough for him to notice, however, that someone has chalked a question on the gray concrete floor in front of him. The letters are about a foot high, and the chalk is red.

There are just two words:

Who else?

He tries shouting. His voice is thick and coarse, barely loud enough to rebound off the walls. After a few minutes he’s able to get up to a good loud bellow. Nothing happens except that he gets hotter and starts to panic.

He stops, takes deep breaths, evaluates what he knows. He’s been brought to a building—either a private house or a condo—in the early stages of construction. He gets the feeling he’s on a second or third story, because when he gets a momentary glimpse around the edge of one of the tarps, it only shows sky. The building has been mothballed, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to tarp the window gaps in a building that hasn’t got to first fit stage. The structure has been built out of cinder block that was given a quick cement render. The man in the chair knows about these things, having been involved in many a development in the last decade.

This doesn’t enable him to work out where he is, however, as he’s aware of at least six big condo projects currently in hibernation, waiting for the market to get more frisky. He’s a stakeholder in two of these himself, but he knows this building isn’t in one of those. He’d recognize it. He might be able to work out a little more if he were able to move, but the strapping is irrevocable. If a point comes when he needs to relieve himself—it hasn’t yet, but that might be a temporary aftereffect of whatever drug he was given—he’s going to be doing it where he sits.

The chair is very heavy. He tries rocking from side to side. He could probably just about get it to tip over to the left or right. There are two problems with that plan of action, however, even assuming he doesn’t bang his head on the way over. The first is that he’s just going to be strapped to a chair lying on its side, which doesn’t really represent an improvement in his situation.

The second, as he’s now realized, is that though there’s floor space in front of him—where the two-word question is written, for example—there’s none to either side. This octagonal space is evidently intended as an observation lounge, designed to be accessed by a showy spiral staircase from below. That staircase isn’t in place yet. From what he can make out, only half the octagon has a floor. The chair has been placed on a stubby rectangular platform that juts out into a space not much larger than the footprint of the chair itself.

Causing the chair to tip over to the left, right, or backward will make it fall at least one story, to crash onto a concrete floor.

So he’s not going to do that.

He sits, occasionally building himself up into a few minutes of increasingly hoarse shouting, for many hours. The flickers of sky that make it past the tarps start to soften, and the bright blue of the sunlight hitting the cloths themselves starts to darken. In the end the stuffy heat allows him to dip into a shallow drowse.