“Let me out! GRUNWALD, PLEASE!”

“Can’t. It’s all arranged,” The Motherfucker said in a businesslike voice. “You came out here to do a little sightseeing-a little gloating. You felt a call of nature, and there were the porta-potties. You stepped into the one on the end and it fell over. End of story. When you’re found-when you’re finally found-the cops will see they’re all leaning, because the afternoon rains have undercut them. They’ll have no way of knowing your current abode was leaning a little more than the others. Or that I took your cell phone. They’ll just assume you left it at home, you silly sissy. The situation will look very clear to them. The evidence, you know-it always comes back to the evidence.”

He laughed. No coughing this time, just the warm, self-satisfied laugh of a man who has covered all the bases. Curtis lay in filthy water that was now two inches deep, felt it soaking through his shirt and pants to his skin, and wished The Motherfucker would die of a sudden stroke or heart attack. Fuck the cancer; let him drop right out there on the unpaved street of his stupid bankrupt development. Preferably on his back, so the birds could peck out his eyes.

If that happened, I’d die in here.

True, but that was what Grunwald had planned from the first, so what difference?

“They’ll see there was no robbery; your money is still in your pocket. So’s the key to your motor scooter. Those things are very unsafe, by the way; almost as bad as ATVs. And without a helmet! Shame on you, neighbor. I noticed you set the alarm, though, and that’s fine. A nice touch, in fact. You don’t even have a pen to write a note on the wall with. If you’d had one, I would have taken that, too, but you don’t. It’s going to look like a tragic accident.”

He paused. Curtis could picture him out there with hellish clarity. Standing there in his too-big clothes with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his unwashed hair clumping over his ears. Ruminating. Talking to Curtis but also talking to himself, looking for loopholes even now, even after what must have been weeks of sleepless nights spent planning this.

“Of course, a person can’t plan for everything. There are always wild cards in the deck. Deuces and jacks, man with the axe, natural sevens take all. That kind of thing. And chances of anyone coming out here and finding you? While you’re still alive, that is? Low, I’d say. Very low. And what have I got to lose?” He laughed, sounding delighted with himself. “Are you lying in the shit, Johnson? I hope so.”

Curtis looked at the coil of excrement he had shoved off his pants, but said nothing. There was a low buzzing. Flies. Only a few, but even a few was too many, in his opinion. They were escaping from the gaping toilet seat. They must have been trapped in the collection tank that should have been below him instead of lying at his feet.

“I’m going now, neighbor, but consider this: you are suffering a true, you know, witchly fate. And like the man said: in the shithouse, no one can hear you scream.”

Grunwald started away. Curtis could track him by the diminishing sound of his coughing laughter.

“Grunwald! Grunwald, come back!”

Grunwald called: “Now you’re the one in a tight place. A very tight place indeed.”

Then-he should have expected it, did expect it, but it was still unbelievable-he heard the company car with the palm tree on the side starting up.

“Come back, you Motherfucker!”

But now it was the sound of the car that was diminishing, as Grunwald drove first up the unpaved street (Curtis could hear the wheels splashing through the puddles), then up the hill, past where a very different Curtis Johnson had parked his Vespa. The Motherfucker gave a single blip of his horn-cruel and cheery-and then the sound of the engine merged with the sound of the day, which was nothing but the buzz of the insects in the grass and the hum of the flies that had escaped from the waste tank and the drone of a far-off plane where the people in first class might be eating Brie on crackers.

A fly lit on Curtis’s arm. He brushed it away. It landed on the coil of turd and commenced its lunch. Suddenly the stench of the disturbed waste tank seemed like a living thing, like a brown-black hand crawling down Curtis’s throat. But the smell of old decaying crap wasn’t the worst; the worst was the smell of the disinfectant. It was the blue stuff. He knew it was the blue stuff.

He did a sit-up-there was just room-and vomited between his spread knees, into the puddled water and floating strands of toilet paper. After his earlier adventures in regurgitation there wasn’t much left but bile. He sat bent over and panting, hands behind him and braced against the door he was now sitting on, the shaving cut by his jawline throbbing and stinging. Then he heaved again, this time producing only a belch that sounded like the buzz of a cicada.

And, oddly enough, he felt better. Somehow honest. That had been earned vomiting. No fingers down the throat needed. As far as his dandruff went, who knew? Perhaps he could gift the world with a new treatment: the Aged Urine Rinse. He would be sure to check his scalp for improvement when he got out of here. If he got out of here.

Sitting up, at least, was no problem. It was fearsomely hot, and the stench was terrible (he didn’t want to think what might have been stirred up in the holding tank, and at the same time couldn’t push such thoughts away), but at least there was headroom.

“Must count blessings,” he muttered. “Must count those sons of bitches carefully.”

Yes, and take stock. That would be good, too. The water he was sitting in wasn’t getting any deeper, and that was probably another blessing. He wasn’t going to drown. Not, that was, unless the afternoon showers turned into downpours. He had seen it happen. And it was no good telling himself he’d be out of here by afternoon, of course he would, because that kind of magical thinking would be playing right into The Motherfucker’s hands. He couldn’t just sit here, thanking God he at least had some headroom, and waiting for rescue.

Maybe someone from the Charlotte County Department of Building and Planning will come out. Or a team of headhunters from the IRS.

Nice to imagine, but he had an idea it wasn’t going to happen. The Motherfucker would have taken those possibilities into consideration, too. Of course some bureaucrat or team of them might take an unscheduled swing by here, but counting on it would be as stupid as hoping that Grunwald would have a change of heart. And Mrs. Wilson would assume he’d gone to an afternoon movie in Sarasota, as he often did.

He rapped on the walls, first the left, then the right. On both sides he felt hard metal just beyond the thin and yielding plastic. Cladding. He got up on his knees, and this time he did bump his head, but hardly noticed. What he saw was not encouraging: the flat ends of the screws holding the unit together. The heads were on the outside. This wasn’t a shithouse; it was a coffin.

At this thought, his moment of clarity and calm vanished. Panic descended in its place. He began to hammer on the walls of the toilet, screaming to be let out. He threw himself from side to side like a child having a tantrum, trying to roll the Port-O-San over so he could at least free the door, but the fucking thing hardly moved at all. The fucking thing was heavy. The cladding that sheathed it made it heavy.

Heavy like a coffin! his mind shrieked. In his panic, every other thought had been banished. Heavy like a coffin! Like a coffin! A coffin!

He didn’t know how long he went on like that, but at some point he tried to stand up, as if he could burst through the wall now facing the sky like Superman. He hit his head again, this time much harder. He fell forward on his stomach. His hand splutted into something gooey-something that smeared-and he wiped it on the seat of his jeans. He did this without looking. His eyes were squeezed shut. Tears trickled from the corners. In the blackness behind his lids, stars zoomed and exploded. He wasn’t bleeding-he supposed that was good, one more goddam blessing to count-but he had almost knocked himself out.