“O’er the stands of flaming Crimson,” the men crooned off-key, “the Harvard banners fly.”
Joe pressed the down button again.
One of the men met his eyes, then leered at Emma’s ass. He nudged a buddy as they continued to sing, “Cheer on cheer like volleyed thunder echoes to the sky.”
Emma grazed the side of his hand with her own. She said, “Shit, shit, shit.”
He pressed the button again.
A waiter banged through the two kitchen doors to their left, a large tray held aloft. He passed within three feet of them but never looked their way.
The Harvard guys had passed but they could still hear them:
“Then fight, fight, fight! For we win tonight.”
Emma reached past him and pressed the down button.
“Old Harvard forevermore!”
Joe considered slipping through the kitchen, but he suspected it was a box with, at best, a dumbwaiter to bring up food from the main kitchen two stories down. In retrospect, the smart thing would have been for Emma to come to him, not the other way around. If only he’d been thinking clearly, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.
He reached for the button again, but then he heard the car rising toward them.
“If there’s anyone in it, just show them your back,” he said. “They’ll be in a rush.”
“Not once they see my back,” she said, and he smiled in spite of the weight of his worry.
The car arrived and he waited but the doors stayed closed. He counted five beats of his own heart. He slid back the gate. He opened the door on an empty car. He looked back over his shoulder at Emma. She stepped in ahead of him and he followed. He closed the gate and then the door. He turned the crank and they began their descent.
She placed the flat of her palm to his cock and it immediately hardened as she covered his mouth with her own. He slid his free hand under her dress and between the heat of her thighs and she groaned into his mouth. Her tears fell on his cheekbones.
“Why’re you crying?”
“Because I might love you.”
“Might?”
“Yes.”
“Then laugh.”
“I can’t, I can’t,” she said.
“You know the bus station on St. James?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What? Sure. Of course.”
He placed the locker key in her hand. “In case anything happens.”
“What?”
“Between here and freedom.”
“No, no, no, no,” she said. “No, no. You take this. I don’t want it.”
He waved it off. “Put it in your purse.”
“Joe, I don’t want this.”
“It’s money.”
“I know what it is and I don’t want it.” She tried handing it to him, but he held his hands high.
“Hold on to it.”
“No,” she said. “We’ll spend it together. I’m with you now. I’m with you, Joe. Take the key.”
She tried handing it to him again but they’d reached the basement.
The window in the door was black because the lights were off for some reason.
They weren’t off for “some” reason, Joe realized. There was only one reason.
He reached for the crank as the gate was thrown open from the other side and Brendan Loomis reached in and pulled Joe out of the car by his tie. He pulled Joe’s pistol free of the small of his back and tossed it off into the dark along the cement floor. Then he punched Joe in the face and the side of his head more times than Joe could count, all of it happening so fast Joe barely got his hands up.
Once he did, he reached back for Emma, thinking somehow he could protect her. But Brendan Loomis had a fist like a butcher’s mallet. Every time it hit Joe’s head—bap bap bap bap—Joe felt his brain go numb and his vision white out. His eyes slid through the white, unable to fix on anything. He heard his own nose break and then—bap bap bap—Loomis hit him in the same spot three more times.
When Loomis let go of his tie, Joe fell to all fours on the cement floor. He heard a series of steady drips, like leaky faucets, and opened his eyes to see his own blood dripping to the cement, the drops the size of nickels, but piling up so fast they turned into amoebas and the amoebas became puddles. He turned his head to see if somehow, some way, Emma had used his beating to slam the elevator door shut and make a run for it, but the elevator wasn’t where he’d left it, or he wasn’t where he’d left the elevator, because all he saw was a cement wall.
That’s when Brendan Loomis kicked him in the stomach hard enough to lift him off the floor. When he landed in a fetal position, he couldn’t find air. He gulped for it, but it wouldn’t come. He tried to rise to his knees, but his legs slid away from him, so he used his elbows to lift his chest off the cement and gulped like a fish, trying to get something down his windpipe but seeing his chest as a black stone, without openings, without gaps, nothing in there but the stone, no room for anything else, because he could not fucking breathe.
It pushed up his esophagus like a balloon through a fountain pen, squeezing his heart, crushing his lungs, closing off his throat, but then, finally, it punched up past his tonsils and out through his mouth. It had a whistle at its tail, a whistle and several gasps, but that was okay, that was fine, because he could breathe again, at least he could breathe.
Loomis kicked him in the groin from behind.
Joe ground his head into the cement floor and coughed and might have puked, he had no idea, the pain something he couldn’t have imagined prior to this. His balls were stuffed into his intestines; flames licked the walls of his stomach; his heart beat so fast it had to give out soon, just had to; his skull felt like someone had pried it open with their hands; his eyes bled. He vomited, vomited for certain, vomited bile and fire onto the floor. He thought he was done and then he did it again. He fell onto his back and looked up at Brendan Loomis.
“You look”—Loomis lit a cigarette—“unfortunate.”
Brendan swung from side to side with the room. Joe stayed where he was, but everything else was on a pendulum. Brendan looked down at Joe as he pulled on a pair of black gloves and flexed his fingers in them until they fit to his liking. Albert White appeared beside him, Albert on the same pendulum, and they both looked down at Joe.
Albert said, “I have to turn you into a message, I’m afraid.”
Joe looked up through the blood in his eyes at Albert in his white dinner jacket.