By the time I was dressed and ready to move, the clock was reading 10:48
A
.
M
. I was heading out the back door when the telephone started ringing.
I hesitated, trying to figure who it was, and the thought that it was maybe the Parka Man was what finally got me to answer it.
It was Joan.
“Mim? I didn’t wake you?”
“No, I was on my way out, actually.”
“I can call back. . . .”
“I’ve only got a couple minutes,” I said.
She didn’t seem to have heard me. “It’s about Steven, I wanted to talk to you about . . . I was going through his things this morning. I haven’t touched them since he died and I was thinking that I should . . . I was really thinking that tomorrow I should start cleaning things out.”
I felt the pressure of the clock, the absurdity of having this conversation at this moment. Over the line, I heard voices, not kids but adults, and wondered if she was calling me from school.
“If you would come over?” Joan asked. “Give me a hand? I’d . . . I think I could use the support.”
“I’ll try,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t.
Her voice got harder. “It’s not the same as a funeral, and I know he wasn’t Mikel, but I’d think you could find the time if you wanted to.”
“No, absolutely. I’ll be there.”
It wasn’t that she heard insincerity; she heard the haste, and took that the wrong way, too.
“I suppose I’ll see you then. If you remember.”
She hung up, and I hung up, and felt the wound like an acid burn, lingering.
But there wasn’t time.
I had to get to the bank.
CHAPTER 36
Catherine Lumley moved to greet me with a big smile and an outstretched hand.
“Wonderful to see you again, Ms. Bracca.”
I know it was just the hangover, but it hurt my eyes to look at the smile. “We’ll be going upstairs, to Alex’s office.”
“Alex?”
“Rodriguez, your banker.”
She took me off the floor quickly, through a doorway and up a carpeted flight of steps. “You have something to carry the cash?”
I patted the strap on my shoulder, for my backpack. “All set.”
“Wonderful,” Lumley murmured.
We came into a quiet hallway with doors along both sides, and at the third down on the right, she stopped and tapped gently, not with her knuckles, but with her lacquered fingernails. I didn’t imagine anyone within could have heard the sound, but there was an answering voice immediately, telling us to come in.
Alexander Rodriguez was much younger than I expected, only thirty or so, and looking like he took his job very seriously. His tie was navy blue and boring, the knot at his throat so small, I wondered if it was actually a clip-on. He rose from behind his desk as we entered, and came around the corner, leaning forward with a hand outstretched.
“Miss Bracca, very pleased to finally meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too.”
“Do you need anything? Water or tea?”
The hangover was making my mouth grow wool, and my headache was committed, so I nodded, which actually, physically, hurt. “Water.”
“Cathy?”
“I’ll be right back,” Lumley told me.
She went out as Rodriguez motioned me to one of the two chairs in front of his desk. I took the backpack off my shoulder and let it rest against my leg, and Rodriguez went back to his seat, moving some paper. One short stack he slid toward me, with a thick pen.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s the Currency Transaction Report. If you could just review the information, make any notes if something needs to be changed.”
I looked at the top form, saw the words “Internal Revenue Service,” and got immediately worried. “The IRS?”
“It’s a formality, part of the way they regulate cash movement,” Rodriguez said. “They’re worried you’re a drug dealer.”
“No, just a musician.”
“Same thing to them, maybe.” He smiled, friendly. “It just tells them where the cash is going when it leaves the bank. Very simple in this instance, since you’re both the withdrawer and the recipient.”
I skimmed, saw that my personal information had been recorded, my full name, where I lived, my Social Security number. Nowhere was there a check box for “using money to pay kidnapper” or anything like that. The form didn’t even need my signature, so I slid it back to Rodriguez, and he added the sheet to the stack on his blotter.
Lumley came back with a plastic bottle of water, and they both watched me, polite smiles in place, as I opened and drained it. Rodriguez handed me another form, this one a withdrawal request.
“Just fill it out like you would normally,” he told me.
While I did so, he got up and opened a filing cabinet in the corner, and was back at the desk when I finished. I signed my name precisely, and he took the request and pulled a card from my file, and I realized he was comparing signatures. When he noticed me watching, he dipped his head apologetically.
“We have to be thorough.”
“It’s nice to know you’re taking such good care of my money,” I told him, although the care he was taking was starting to make me nervous.
But both he and Lumley brightened with the compliment, and I realized just how worried they were about losing my business. Rodriguez tucked the signature card back in my file, replaced the file in the cabinet.
“If you’ll wait here,” he told me, “we’ll be back with the money. It won’t take more than ten minutes.”
“I’ll be here.”
They left, and I looked at the clock on the desk, then checked it against the watch on my wrist. The clock said it was eighteen minutes past eleven, but my watch said it was only a quarter past. I tried taking some calm breaths, telling myself that I had plenty of time to get back home before the call or whatever it was I was waiting on from the Parka Man. My stomach felt raw, and I wondered if draining the bottle of water had been such a good idea.
The door opened, and Lumley entered first, carrying a counting machine in both hands. She set it on the edge of the desk, ran the cord to the outlet in the wall. Rodriguez followed her, carrying a canvas sack with printing on the side, the name of an armored transport company.
“This is going to take another few minutes,” he told me. “We need to make certain of the count.”
Rodriguez set the bag in his chair and began pulling out stacks of bills, hundreds, one after the other. They were wrapped with paper bands around them, marking denominations of ten thousand dollars. Lumley had switched the counting machine on, and it was humming slightly. He unwrapped the first bundle, and fed it into the hollow on the top of the machine, and the hum grew louder, and the bills began snapping forward. He fed another bundle, and another, and the paper kept flowing, and Lumley gathered the stacks and wrapped them in their bands again, setting them aside.
It took another fourteen minutes before they were positive they had six hundred thousand dollars in cash. Sixty stacks of hundred-dollar bills, bundled one hundred bills each.
“All yours,” Rodriguez told me.
I opened my backpack and began shoveling the money inside. If they thought I was eccentric before, this confirmed it, and they watched, bemused, as I fought to get the last three bundles to fit. The zipper on the backpack stuck as I was trying to run it closed, and I had to muscle it before I could get the bag shut. Then I hoisted it on my arm, felt the weight pull on my shoulder.
Lumley offered her hand first, murmuring that if I needed anything else, I shouldn’t hesitate to contact her. I told her I wouldn’t, and appreciated all of her help.
It was Rodriguez who walked me to the door, saying, “You’re going to want to take that someplace safe immediately. It’s an awful lot of money to just be carrying around.”
“I’ve got it covered,” I told him.
He gave me his hand. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said.
Back at home, I switched on the porch light, then went down to the basement and the Fender amp, pulled the duffel bag free, then got the boxes of press packets out of the closet. On the floor, between guitars, I transferred the six hundred thousand in my backpack into the duffel, and it fit with room to spare. I closed the bag and hoisted it, trying to guess how much it weighed now. Definitely more than the Tele, that was for sure. I had to guess it was close to forty pounds.
The clock in the kitchen was reading three minutes to noon when I came back up, and I saw the empty bottle out where I’d left it the night before. I dropped it in the trash and got the Johnnie Walker out of the pantry, cracking the seal as I went to check the living room window. I pulled some of the heat into my chest, then looked out in time to see the Ford pull up.
Marcus and Hoffman had followed me to the bank, but when I’d emerged, they hadn’t been in their car, and I’d made it home without them in my shadow. It didn’t take Mozart to figure out what they’d done, that they’d stepped inside and had a brief word with Lumley and maybe even with Rodriguez. I doubted either banker would have given the detectives the exact amount I’d withdrawn, but it didn’t matter. It was just one more piece to support Hoffman’s theory.
She was at the wheel this time, and I could see her speaking into a radio as I took another drink, feeling the warmth crawl into my limbs. Marcus, beside her, was leaning around, to take a look at the front of my house. I thought about stepping out and offering Hoffman an apology for what I’d done, the way I’d behaved, for all of it, and knew it wouldn’t do either of us any good. The only thing that would make it better would be me getting brave, telling them that it would happen today, that it would all be over soon.
But I couldn’t, so I took another swallow, surrendering, and all I could think of was how certain the Parka Man had sounded when he told me he would know if I talked to the cops, how he knew people, how I should lie to them. They expected that, he’d said, and Hoffman had echoed him just the night before, already used to my string of lies.
When I thought about it some more it made me bring the bottle down and backpedal from the window.
I was crazy, I had to be wrong, but when I took the Quicks away from the equation, put the spying and the cameras and the pictures all to one side and Mikel and Tommy and the kidnapping on the other, it made even more sense. It explained why Tommy had been so worried for me, why he’d tried to warn me after Mikel’s funeral, and why he hadn’t given Hoffman and Marcus anything when he’d been arrested. It explained how Parka Man could get into my house, not once, but twice, how he could deactivate my alarm without me or anyone else knowing.
Why the Parka Man was doing what he was doing, I had no idea.
But now I knew who he was, I was certain. If I could find him, if I could find where he had Tommy, then there might be a chance. I had to make a plan, to come up with a plan. All I needed was a little time.
Then the phone started ringing, and there was no time left.
CHAPTER 37
“This is going to be real simple,” the Parka Man said when I answered the phone. “Simple and quick. You want your daddy, I want my money. The sooner we finish, the happier we’ll both be.”
“I want proof he’s alive,” I said. “I want to hear him tell me he’s all right.”
“In a moment. Right now, you’re going to listen carefully to the following instructions.”
It felt like his words were swimming around in my brain, and I didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the fear or the still-fresh realization of who he really was. The thought that I would accidentally blurt out his name came over me, and I knew that if I let it slip, Tommy was as good as dead.
“First thing you do is lose the cops,” he said. “I don’t care how you do it. Once you break the tail, you get on the MAX, you take it out to PDX. Just ride it straight out there, don’t talk to anyone. Get off at the airport, then you take a cab, you go to downtown. You’re getting out at the corner of Northeast Everett and Third. There’s a bar, midway down the block. You go in there. At three o’clock, exactly, you get yourself a drink from the bar.”
“MAX, airport, Everett and Third, bar, drink. Then what happens?”
“Be there and find out. And be there without company, or it’s off, and your daddy never sees the light of day again.”
It was the way he kept repeating it, as if I hadn’t understood it, as if I hadn’t lived the past three days with the fear of what he’d do to Tommy in my heart and head at every moment.
“I’ve got your cash,” I said. “Now you put him on, you cocksucker, you let me hear his voice, right now, or you get nothing.”
He chuckled. “You sure you want to make that threat?”
“You want the money, asshole?”
There was another chuckle, but not as amused, this time, and then a rustle. I heard labored breathing.
“Tommy?”
“Miriam?” His voice was thin, as if he’d gone without water.
“God, are you all right?”
Another rustle, and the Parka Man came back.
“Three o’clock,” he said, and hung up.
For almost five minutes after he had cut the connection, I just stood in the kitchen, just stood there, thinking. Trying to find a way to get what I wanted, what I needed, without getting myself and my father killed. Because it was clear, so clear now, what he was going to do, what he
had
to do, if I was correct.
If Tommy knew who the Parka Man was, if Tommy knew he’d killed Mikel, then Tommy was dead as soon as he had the money. Which meant that by the time Tommy got in Charon’s line, he’d find that his daughter was already crossing the Styx; no way in hell was this guy going to let me live after he had the cash. If he was going to tie up his loose ends, he’d tie all of them up, and that meant me, too.
For a morbid moment, I wondered if he’d try to make my death look like an accident. How hard would it be? Musicians die with changes in the seasons, and it wasn’t as if I’d been living a very clean life. Maybe that was why he was having me come to a bar. Pour a bottle down my throat, the rest would be easy.
Maybe I’d get a tribute album, or fan pilgrimages to my grave.
Chapel’s office was downtown, I remembered. I’d have to cover a couple blocks on foot to do what I wanted to do, but it was possible, and if everything went well, it wouldn’t blow the schedule.
I grabbed the backpack, stuffed full, and the Taylor in its case, and went out to the garage, trying to get into the Jeep without Marcus or Hoffman getting a look at what I was doing, struggling with the weight. At first, it seemed like taking the car wasn’t maybe the best idea, that perhaps I could try to go it on foot. But the way Hoffman and Marcus had always been covered, the way there’d never been a gap in the surveillance in front of my house, made me think that there were probably cops out back, too. They wouldn’t have been doing their job if they were only watching the front door.
So I’d stick with the cops I knew. After all, they’d come this far with me.
It was twenty-six minutes to one when I pulled out, heading downtown, jockeying with the lunch hour traffic. I didn’t try to switch lanes or speed up or slow down, nothing to get them worried. It didn’t matter; they were already worried, and the one time I caught them close behind me, close enough to see them reflected in my rearview mirror, Marcus was grim behind the wheel, and Hoffman was again on her radio.
If there were others following me, I couldn’t spot them. Another thing I couldn’t control.
We crossed the river on the Steel Bridge, and it started to rain, spatters on my windshield that the wipers couldn’t quite cope with, as if it wasn’t sincere enough to require their best efforts. I turned at the light on Broadway, then again on Market, and pulled into the underground garage at Chapel’s building. When I took my ticket from the dispenser, I could see the Ford idling near the top of the ramp.
Come on, I thought. Follow me.
The bar went up, and I pulled forward, winding farther down, past rows of parked Beemers and Lexi and Acuras, then through a forest of SUVs. I found a space on the lowest level near the elevator bank, got out with my backpack, and locked up.
There was no sign of the Ford.
This is not going to work, I thought, as I got into the elevator. I am fucked, and this is not going to work.
My hands were shaking when I punched the button for the tenth floor. I had to shove them into my pockets to keep them out of sight, and when the elevator stopped in the lobby, I was glad that I’d done it.
Marcus and Hoffman got on the elevator.
“This is a surprise,” I said.
They didn’t answer, just went to the back of the car, fitting in behind me. It was funny in its own way, how none of us was even bothering to pretend anymore.
We rode another four floors, and the car stopped once more, and two men in nice suits got on, talking anxiously about what the market had done in Japan that morning. They got off again at seven, and when the doors were again closed, I turned to face Hoffman.
“I was a total asshole last night,” I said. “And I’m very sorry.”
“Passive-aggressive
and
apologetic,” Marcus remarked. “You’re very talented, Miss Bracca.”
“That’s what they say.” I was still looking at Hoffman. She was staring back, and I wasn’t even certain she’d heard me.
Then the elevator stopped and we all got out, and they followed me into the offices of my attorney. Marcus and Hoffman waited near the back of the reception area while I approached Joy at the desk. She got to her feet when she saw me.
“Is Fred expecting you?”
“I hope so. He left me a message last night.”
“Why don’t you have a seat, I’ll tell him you’re here.”
There was a clock in the room, hanging over a Tailhook poster, one I hadn’t seen before. In this one, I was standing beside Van, with Click on a riser just behind us. The clock told me it was seventeen minutes past one.
It was reading twenty-nine to two when Joy, back at her desk, answered her phone, and then told me Mr. Chapel would see me now. I rose and joined her, and Marcus and Hoffman stayed put, unhappy with the situation. They wouldn’t be kept at bay for long.
When we were out of the reception area and winding through the halls, I told Joy that what I really needed was a bathroom, and could she direct me to one. She veered off course, leading me to the restroom.
“I’ll wait for you,” she told me.
“No, don’t do that.” I gave her my best embarrassed grin. “Make me feel like a total princess, you have to wait for me while I pee.”
She laughed, like I knew she would.
“I know the way,” I said. “I can manage the rest.”
“I’ll let him know you’ll be right there.”
“Great, thanks,” I said, and then went into the bathroom before she could say anything else, locking the door behind me. I stood with my back to it, listening, and I didn’t hear her leave, but I didn’t hear anything else through it, either, so it didn’t mean much.
Thirty seconds, I told myself. Give her thirty seconds, then go. More than that, Hoffman and Marcus will barge in. Less, she’ll still be there, waiting.
I watched the second hand move on my wrist.
Then I unlocked the door and took a breath, stepped out as if I knew where I was going and what I was doing. The receptionist had gone, and the only people in the hall were occupied with their own affairs, and paid me no attention. I set off toward Chapel’s office, heard his voice, strained, coming from the area of Joy’s desk. I didn’t stop, hoping that he’d keep Marcus and Hoffman busy, but it still took me almost three more minutes before I found the fire door and my way to the stairs.
The latch echoed in the stairwell when the door shut behind me, and as soon as I heard it click shut, I started running, one hand on the rail, the other on the backpack strap, trying to keep it on my shoulder. I went fast, two, three steps at a time, too ambitious, and I almost fell twice, but I didn’t slow down, and I sure as hell didn’t stop. The hangover swelled in my head. Marcus and Hoffman wouldn’t take long to figure out I was ditching them, if they hadn’t figured it already, and the best I could hope for was that they’d go back to my car, thinking that’s where I was headed.
Their bad luck that Portland has such a wonderful light-rail system.
There were two men standing in the rain, watching the ramp into the garage when I came out of the building, and I guessed they were cops, and turned my back to them before I had a chance to find out. Hoofed it across the street, my shoulders aching with the weight of the backpack, then jogged to the MAX stop. I made it by ten of two, and there was a train waiting, and I jumped on without paying the fare, working my way to the front of the carriage and dropping into a seat. It wouldn’t be a problem until I was past the Lloyd Center, since fares in downtown were waived, but I didn’t think I’d have time to hop out and pay then, either, and the thought that I might get caught only compounded my anxiety. It would be just my luck to have ditched the cops only to get picked up again for not paying public transportation.
It didn’t happen, and I made the train switch and all the way to the airport without trouble. Halfway to PDX, I started looking around the car, wondering if maybe he was on board, if he was watching, but after a minute realized that was futile. I doubted he was actually following me; the runaround was more to make certain I didn’t get any ideas, I supposed. Like I was going to start doing that at this late date.
Like I’d recognize him without his ski mask and parka, anyway.
The rain was coming heavier when I got off at the airport, and I swung through baggage claim and back outside immediately, heading for the cab stand. There were three people in line, and my watch was reading two forty-one, and the tremor in my hands was getting worse. I wanted a drink, settled for a couple drags of a cigarette, and got a Broadway Cab to take me back downtown.
“Third and Everett,” I said.
The driver, already behind the wheel and pulling us into traffic, glanced at me in the mirror. “You mean Twenty-third and Everett, yeah?”
“No, I mean Third and Everett.”
He started to argue, eyes on me in the mirror, then shrugged. If the strange white girl wanted to go to the heart of bum central, that was not his problem.
“Hurry,” I told him.
Everett straddles the dividing line between Old Town Portland and Chinatown, and there are storefronts all around the area that date back to the turn of the century, and in some cases, earlier. I almost missed the bar, because I was late by my watch, and now even more frightened that I’d fucked everything up. The rain was coming down in sheets, cold and solid, like walking through a car wash, and I had to go down the block twice before I was certain I had the right place, an unmarked and smoked-glass door sandwiched between a porno shop and a Chinese antiques store.
Inside was everything you’d expect, dark and a little dank, with the bar along the left side, and booths along the right, and enough room between the two that I could fit, if I walked sideways. I was soaked to the skin, and the straps of the backpack had dug into my shoulders so hard it felt like my arms would go numb. I was shivering, and it wasn’t the chill that was giving me goose bumps.
The bartender was a woman, alcoholically aged, trapped somewhere between forty and seventy, with drawn skin and gin blossoms on her face. She stared at me and I thought for a moment that she knew who I was.
“Jack rocks,” I said, and dug out a twenty, slapping it on the bar.
She took the bill and grunted. My watch was reading six minutes past three. Rainwater dripped down my neck, and I could feel it soaking the back of my shirt. The fingers on my left hand had started throbbing again. There were only two other patrons in the bar, and both of them would have scared me if I wasn’t already so preoccupied with other fears.
The door opened as I waited for my drink, and Brian Quick entered, soaked from the rain.
I turned hastily away, felt the panic claw at my heart. If I was right, he shouldn’t be here, this didn’t concern him. And if he was here, then I was wrong, and everything I was planning was worthless.
I heard him move to the bar, demand a bottle of beer, and the bartender snarled back at him to wait a fucking minute, then slapped my change down in front of me, planting my glass on top of it. I took the drink in a gulp. It was watered down, and if it was Jack Daniel’s to start with, I was Nina Simone, but it lit a raw fire in my chest, and made me think it was what I needed.
Brian Quick received a bottle, focused on the television hanging over the corner of the bar. He could have been just another midday alcoholic for all the interest he had in the world around him.
I picked up my change, began folding it into my pocket, and saw a small slip of notepaper wedged between bills. I pulled it free, glancing again toward Brian, caught him taking a pull of his beer.
The paper read
BACKROOM
.
The door was set in the wall behind the final booth, and it opened into a storage room full of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves. I took a last look over my shoulder before pushing through, and the bartender was enraptured by the glowing box again, but Brian had twisted on his stool, watching me go. When I stepped in, I didn’t see any lock for the door. A couple of kegs stood in a corner, and a single, naked bulb gave the only illumination. There was no one to be seen, and I thought I’d trapped myself, had started to turn around and head back out when I saw the other door, only about half-height, between two sets of shelves. The door was metal, old, and slightly ajar.