Then I remembered: Waterman.

I felt another jolt as the car went over a bump. I flinched as the pain lanced through my head like a jagged bolt of lightning. I winced. I thought: Ow! Then I thought: Waterman. Right. Waterman in the alley. And the man in the Dodgers cap. And the gun…

The gun. The man in the Dodgers cap had shot me. Quickly, my hand went to my chest. I felt the bruise, the stinging pain under my fleece where the gunshot had hit me.

But that’s all I felt. No dampness. No blood. Plus I was alive. Which meant I hadn’t been shot with a bullet. A bullet to that spot would’ve almost surely hit my heart, almost surely killed me, with plenty of blood to go around. Flinching at the pain in my head again, I realized: it wasn’t a bullet. It was a dart, a drug of some kind. The man in the Dodgers cap had fired a tranquilizer weapon at me. I’d been knocked out, but I was unhurt. I was alive.

Okay. So that was my situation. On the plus side, I was alive. That definitely had to be counted as a positive. In terms of negatives: well, the whole locked-in-the-trunk-of-the-car thing. It was hard to find anything good to say about that.

In fact, as I thought about it, I felt the panic and claustrophobia start to rise up in me again.

Again, I forced myself to breathe deeply. Never give in, I told myself. Never, never, never, never.

Feeling stiff and uncomfortable, I shifted in the small space. I discovered I had a little room to move. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness now too. I could see that I was facing the rear of the car. I struggled to turn around, to face the front, to see what else I could see. Moving like that redoubled my sense of claustrophobia. Made me feel like I was in a coffin, buried underground, left for dead. Not a pleasant feeling.