“The name,” I said again, “is Terry Archer.” I gave her my home and cell numbers. “I’d really like to talk to him.”

“Yeah, well, you and plenty of others,” she said.

So I left the Dirksen Garage. Stood out front in the sun, said to myself, “What now, asshole?”

All I really knew for sure was that I needed a coffee. Maybe, drinking a coffee, some intelligent course of action would come to me. There was a doughnut place about half a block down, so I walked over to it. I bought a medium with cream and sugar and sat down at a table littered with doughnut wrappers. I brushed them out of my way, careful not to get any icing or sprinkles on me, and got out my cell phone.

I tried Cynthia again, and again it went straight to voicemail. “Honey, call me. Please.”

I was slipping the phone back into my jacket when it rang. “Hello? Cyn?”

“Mr. Archer?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Kinzler here.”

“Oh, it’s you. I thought it might be Cynthia. But thanks for returning my call.”

“Your message said your wife is missing?”

“She left in the middle of the night,” I said. “With Grace.” Dr. Kinzler said nothing. I thought I’d lost my call. “Hello?”

“I’m here. She hasn’t been in touch with me. I think you should find her, Mr. Archer.”

“Well, thanks. That’s very helpful. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do right now.”

“I’m just saying, your wife has been under a great deal of stress. Tremendous strain. I’m not sure that she’s entirely…stable. I don’t think it’s a very good environment for your daughter.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything. I just think it would be best to find her as soon as you can. And if she does get in touch with me, I will recommend to her that she return home.”

“I don’t think she feels safe here.”

“Then you need to make it safe,” Dr. Kinzler said. “I have another call.”

And she was gone. As helpful as always, I thought.

I’d downed half my coffee before I realized it was bitter to the point of being undrinkable, tossed the rest, and walked out the front of the shop.

A red SUV bounced up and over the curb and stopped abruptly in front of me. The back and front doors on the passenger side opened and two rumpled-looking, slightly potbellied men in oil-stained jeans, jean jackets, and dirty T-shirts-one bald and the other with dirty blond hair-jumped out.

“Get in,” Baldy said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You heard him,” said Blondie. “Get in the fucking car.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, taking a step back toward the doughnut shop.

They lunged forward together, each grabbing an arm. “Hey,” I said as they dragged me toward the SUV’s back door. “You can’t do this. Let go of me! You can’t just grab people off the street!”

They heaved me in. I went sprawling onto the floor of the backseat. Blondie got in front, Baldy got in the back, rested his work-booted foot on my back to keep me there. As I was going down I caught a glimpse of a third man behind the wheel.

“You know what I thought he was going to say for a second there?” Baldy asked his buddy.

“What?”

“I thought he was going to say ‘unhand me.’” They both started pissing themselves laughing.

The thing was, it had been the next thing I was going to say.

As a high school English teacher, I didn’t have a lot of experience in how to handle being grabbed by a couple of thugs out front of a doughnut shop and tossed into the back of an SUV.

I was learning, very quickly, that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say.

“Look,” I said from the floor of the backseat, “you guys have made some kind of mistake.” I tried twisting around a bit, onto my side, so I could at least get a glimpse of the bald man who was pressing down on my thigh with his boot.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said, looking at me.

“I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m not the kind of guy anyone would be interested in. I don’t mean you guys any harm. Who do you think I am? Some gang guy? A cop? I’m a teacher.”

From the front seat, Blondie said, “I fucking hated all my teachers. That’s enough right there to get you capped.”

“I’m sorry, I know there are a lot of shitty teachers out there, but what I’m trying to tell you is I don’t have anything to do-”

Baldy sighed, opened up his jacket, and produced a gun that was probably not the biggest handgun in the world, but from my position below him, it looked like a cannon. He pointed it at my head.

“If I have to shoot you in this car, my boss is going to be pissed that there’ll be blood and bone and brain matter all over the fucking upholstery, but when I explain to him that you wouldn’t shut the fuck up like you were told to do, I think he’ll understand.”

I shut up.

It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this had something to do with my asking questions about where to find Vince Fleming. Maybe one of those two guys at the bar at Mike’s had made a call. Maybe the bartender had phoned the auto body shop before I’d even got there. Then somebody’d put in a call to these two goons to find out why it was I wanted to see Vince Fleming.

Except nobody was asking that question.

Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe it was enough that I was asking. You ask around about Vince, you end up in the back of an SUV and nobody ever sees you again.

I started thinking about a way out. It was me against three big guys. Judging by the extra fat they were carrying around their middles, maybe not the fittest thugs in Milford, but how in shape did you have to be when you were armed? I knew for sure that one of them had a gun, and it seemed reasonable to assume the other two did as well. Could I get Baldy’s gun from him, shoot him, open the door, and jump from a moving car?

Not in a million years.

The gun was still in Baldy’s hand, resting on top of his knee. The other leg remained propped on top of me, and his boot had left a gravelly smudge on my jeans. Blondie and the driver were talking, nothing to do with me, but about a ball game from the night before. Then Blondie said, “What the fuck is that?”

The driver said, “It’s a CD.”

“I can see it’s a CD. It’s what CD it is that’s got me worried. You are not putting that in the player.”

“Yeah, I am.”

I heard the distinctive whir of a CD being loaded into a dashboard player.

“I don’t fucking believe you,” Blondie said.

“What?” Baldy asked from the backseat.

Before anyone else could say anything, the music started. An instrumental intro, and then, “Why do birds suddenly appear…every time…you are near?”

“Fuck me,” said Baldy. “The fucking Carpenters?”

“Hey,” said the driver. “Knock it off. I grew up with this.”

“Jesus,” said Blondie. “This chick singing, isn’t she the one who wouldn’t eat anything?”

“Yeah,” the driver said. “She had anorexia.”

“People like that,” said Baldy. “They should have a fucking hamburger or something.”

Could three guys debating the merits of a seventies singing group really be planning to take me someplace and execute me? Wouldn’t the mood in the car have to be a bit more grim? For a moment, I felt encouraged. And then I thought of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are arguing over what a Big Mac is called in Paris, moments before they go up to an apartment and commit murder. These guys didn’t even have that kind of style. In fact, there was an unmistakable whiff of body odor coming off one or more of them.

Is this how it ends? In the backseat of an SUV? One minute you’re having coffee in a doughnut shop, trying to find your missing wife and daughter, and the next you’re looking down the barrel of a stranger’s gun, wondering if the last words you hear will be “They long to be…close to you.”