Chapter 1: The Wrong Man, The Right Bind
The rain had let up around eleven, and Paul Harrolds was bored enough to commit crimes of his own, mainly trespassing. The docks at midnight were supposed to be romantic in a grimy, film-noir sort of way, and instead they were just wet. His sneakers splashed through puddles that reflected the streetlight in broken orange pieces. Somewhere behind him, the city hummed. Ahead of him, a warehouse stood with its side door ajar, which struck him as an invitation.
He should have kept walking. He knew that. Boredom, however, had never been famous for good judgment.
The door opened without a sound, which was suspicious in itself. Inside, the dark smelled of mildew and old motor oil, and the pipes overhead ticked like a patient clock. Paul pulled out his phone, switched on the flashlight, and immediately regretted it, because the beam caught a figure standing ten feet away, a stocky man in a leather jacket holding a phone of his own and a roll of zip ties.
"Oh, come on," Paul said.
The man yelped, dropped the phone, picked it up, yelped again at whatever he saw on the screen, and came at Paul like a defensive end with a grudge. Paul was fast, genuinely fast, but the floor was slick with rain he'd tracked in, and his first sidestep turned into an awkward skate across wet concrete. A hand closed on his collar. Another clamped over his mouth, tasting faintly of cigarettes and panic.
"Don't scream, don't scream, this isn't, look, just don't scream," the man hissed into his ear. His voice cracked halfway through, which undermined the menace considerably.
Paul, mouth covered, made a remark anyway. It came out as a muffled series of noises that could plausibly have been interpreted as rude.
"I mean it," the man said, and wrestled him backward toward a folding chair that had been set out with suspicious intent. There was a coil of zip ties on the seat, black and industrial, the kind of thing you bought in bulk if your plans went wrong often. The man spun Paul around, shoved him down into it, and looped a tie around his wrists behind the chair back. He pulled it tight with a ratchet-click that echoed off the metal walls.
Paul flexed his hands, testing the plastic. It bit in pleasantly. He had to work to keep his face neutral, which was difficult, because neutral was not the word for what he was feeling.
"Okay," the man said, stepping back, breathing hard, smoothing his jacket with both hands as if the jacket had been the problem. "Okay. That's, that's fine. That's manageable."
"You're doing great," Paul said. "Very smooth. The yelping especially. Very intimidating."
The man's head came around sharply. In the gloom, lit only by the slit of streetlight through a broken window, he had a gray goatee and the expression of a man doing arithmetic he was losing to. "Shut up. Just, shut up. You're not supposed to talk."
"You tied my hands, not my mouth. Kind of a design flaw."
"I said shut up." He crouched to check the tie on Paul's wrists, tugging at it nervously, then tugging again, as though it might have loosened out of sympathy. Satisfied, or at least distracted, he retreated a few steps and hunched over his phone. The screen lit his face from below, giving him the look of a man reading bad news by campfire.
Paul took inventory. Wrists bound behind a cheap folding chair, tight enough to matter. Ankles free, but the chair was light and the man was between him and the door, and honestly, getting free wasn't high on his list of priorities right now. His heart was doing a slow, warm drumbeat against his ribs. This was, he reflected, the best thing to happen to him all week, and his week had included a very good pasta.
The man was muttering at his phone. "Come on, come on, pick up. Marco. Marco, you absolute, pick up."
"Marco," Paul said helpfully. "Is that the guy who was supposed to be in this chair?"
The man flinched so hard he nearly dropped the phone again. "What did I just say about talking?"
"That you'd feel better if I stopped, but that we both know I won't." Paul shifted in the chair, letting the plastic dig in, and grinned at him. "So what's the job? Ransom? You've got the wrong vibe for ransom, no offense. You've got more of a vibe of a guy who kidnaps someone by accident."
"I did not," the man said, with the rising pitch of a lie being born, "kidnap anyone by accident."
"You yelped. Twice. Kidnappers don't yelp. That's canon."
"It was a tactical yelp." He jabbed at the phone again, and this time it connected, because he straightened up and lowered his voice into something he clearly imagined was hard-boiled. "Marco. Yeah, it's Vince. It's done, I got him. Yeah. The thing is." A pause. Vince's face went through several expressions in rapid succession, like slides in a bad projector. "The thing is, he's not, hang on." He lowered the phone and squinted across the dark at Paul. "Hey. You. What's your name?"
"Paul."
"Paul what?"
"Harrolds. Paul Harrolds. And you are Vince, evidently, and this chair was meant for someone else, and I want you to know I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. I've never been kidnapped by a clerical error before."
Vince turned the phone flat against his chest, muffling whatever Marco was saying, which by the volume leaking out was a lot and mostly profane. "You're not," he said slowly, "Marco's cousin."
"Nope."
"You're not the accountant."
"Accountants don't get dragged into warehouses at midnight. They get dragged into, I don't know, white-collar crime, politely."
Vince stared at him. Somewhere in the pipes, something released a long groan of pressure, as if the building itself were wincing. Rain started up again outside, drumming on the corrugated roof, and the streetlight through the broken window flickered, steadied, flickered.
"Marco," Vince said into the phone, very quietly, "we have a situation."
Paul rolled his shoulders, felt the zip ties hold, and settled deeper into the chair like a man adjusting himself in a good seat at the theater. The plastic creaked. His pulse was pleasantly loud.
"So," he said. "Before you decide what to do with me, quick question. Is there any chance at all you were planning to leave me tied up for a while? Because I'd hate for the mistake to go to waste."
Vince looked at him. Then at the zip ties. Then back at Paul, with the expression of a man who had just realized his night was going to get much stranger, and no more profitable.
"Why," Vince said, "are you smiling like that?"
"Occupational hazard," Paul said. "Sit down, Vince. This is the interesting part of your evening, and you don't even know it yet."