The Bone Bed

moving fast on a heavy surf. It is cold and claustrophobic, and I’m groggy and in pain. I want to sleep.
    Don’t sleep.
    I’m going to be sick, motion sick, vertigo. My stomach lurches as if it wants to climb up my throat, and I wonder if I was hit on the head, if that’s how they got me here, dumped me in the cargo area of an old boat. On my back, a fishnet wound around me, I’m nauseated, about to gag. My stomach has nothing in it, and I don’t want dry heaves, mustn’t start retching uncontrollably. They can’t know I’m conscious, and I focus on every part of me, not sure if I’m injured. I don’t feel pain, just my pounding head.
    “Are you awake?” a man asks loudly.
    I’ve heard his voice before.
    I don’t answer, and my head clears some. I’m in a car. In the cargo area in back, lights from oncoming traffic illuminating him intermittently. Surrounded by boxy shapes behind the front seats, I do the best I can to gather the darkness around me. To hide in it.
    Make him think you’re dead.
    “You should be awake,” says the man driving what I thought was a good idea for the CFC, a small crossover SUV.
    I struggle to remember his name and envision his complete lack of empathy when he sat across from me. Soulless. Empty. Emoting nothing.
    “Don’t fake it,” he says.
    Play dead.
    “Your fakery can’t save you anymore.”
    I recognize the textures of the clothes I put on this morning, I think it was this morning. The corduroys, the cable-knit sweater, and a down jacket I wore because the temperature was freezing.
    I rub my feet together, and they are bare and very cold, and I push them against the net and they find the resistance of something hard and square. It is completely dark, and I hear traffic. While I don’t remember what happened, I am beginning to be certain I know. Then I think I’m dreaming.
    This is a bad dream. I need to wake up. It’s a terrible dream, and you’re fine.
    I take a deep breath and choke back bile as my head throbs, and I take more deep breaths and realize I’m awake. I really am, and this really is happening. I mustn’t panic. I push the hard square shape with my netted bare feet, and whatever it is moves very slightly and feels like plastic.
    A scene case.
    He speaks loudly from the driver’s seat, asking if I’m awake, and again I don’t answer, and I know who he is.
    “Now you won’t have to figure it out anymore,” Al Galbraith says, and I can tell by the sound of his voice, the fluctuations in the volume of it, that he continues to turn around, looking in my direction.
    I don’t move in a way he can see, the entire back of the SUV outfitted as a cargo area, the backseat permanently folded flat, and I try to envision what is in here. It is difficult to think, difficult to breathe. My hands are free. He didn’t tie me but wrapped the net around me, and it is quite tight, and oddly I think of creatures entangled, of the huge leatherback and what I was told. They run into something like a vertical line and panic and spin themselves up in it and then they drown.
    Don’t panic. Slow, deep breaths.
    My phone is gone. He has my phone. He has my shoulder bag, unless it and my phone are on the pavement of the Fayth House parking lot and he left them there.
    He wouldn’t leave them.
    My hands are pinned against my chest, and I move them, poke my fingers through what I realize is the cargo net we use to secure our equipment, and I feel a knotted tie-down and try to loosen it but I can’t. My fingers are stiff and cold, and I’m shaking as if I’m shivering, my teeth about to chatter, and I will myself to calm down.
    “You should be awake,” he says. “I didn’t give you that much. I’ve always wondered if they could smell it coming. The sweet smell of death coming.”
    I don’t remember anything at all, but I know what he did, probably keeps a bottle of it in his car, in that silver Jeep Cherokee, for when the urge strikes. His murder kit.
    You son of a bitch.
    “Of course, everybody reacts a little differently,” he says. “That’s the danger and the art. Too much and the show ends early, which is what happened to the lady in Canada, had to keep knocking her out because I was driving.”
    I can tell from the sound of the pavement under me and the change in pitch of the engine that we are going through a tunnel.
    “Her head was in my lap, and I knew she was going to fight me if I didn’t keep the cloth handy. Then she wouldn’t wake up