Cold Silence

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I’ll never get out of here alive, thought Tahir Khan.

He backed away from the peephole in the Boca Raton penthouse apartment, as the quiet knocking on the front door continued. Across the room, bright sun flooded in through floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that faced the blue Atlantic, dazzling and still, twenty-four stories below. In early January, seventy-degree air washed in from the balcony and he heard the ocean, vaguely, insistent as a hiss.

Khan looked around wildly, as if somehow, magically, an escape hatch would appear in the walls. But all was as it had been when he rented his hideaway. The place was costly but ugly and generic; hospital white walls and matching floor tiling, curving Naugahyde couch wrapped toward a giant TV. Bright lime green cushions topped wrought iron furniture. The same generic pastel beach paintings hung in a thousand rental condos from Key West up the East Coast, to New Jersey. Still life conch shells. Wind ruffling dune grass. Six-year-old children in bathing suits, wielding plastic pails.

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