Authors: Michael Marshall
W
hat screwed me was trying to be clever. While I was sticking to sensible and semismart, I did okay. Clever was a step too far. I trotted down the sidewalk—and I was starting to get my shit together quickly, because though I wanted to sprint, I didn’t, as who the hell goes haring down the street at nine o’clock on a Friday morning without evident quarry, unless they’re running away from something they’ve done? So I trotted instead, as if in a vague hurry but no more—no need to stare, people, nothing of interest happening, just a guy doing something, going somewhere a little fast. Move along.
Soon as I could I ducked around a corner, however, and then I
did
ratchet up the pace. I’d like to say this was a conscious decision to put distance between me and the woman before she noticed that I’d gone. It wasn’t a real decision, however. It just happened. I started to run because I was scared.
Really scared.
Scared of what I’d seen in Cassandra’s apartment. Scared because I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, or where my wife was. And scared perhaps most of all by the fact that the woman I was running away from was frightened, too. If the person who knows more than you do looks freaked out, then you’d better be freaked out even more, on principle.
Eventually I had to stop. I staggered to a halt, gasping for air, and glanced back along the street. I’d been jacking back and forth through the blocks for ten minutes, and there was no sign of the woman on foot or in her pickup. It probably hadn’t occurred to her that I would up and run, that someone in my position would turn down assistance in a time of need. Probably it was an outlandishly dumb thing to do. I didn’t care. Getting away from her felt like the first sensible or active thing I’d done since my first beer at Krank’s the night before—and maybe for far longer than that.
I ran a quick inventory, bent over on the corner as trucks and cars belted past me. I had my phone, with nearly a full charge (courtesy of a dead girl, but let’s not think about that). I had my wallet, credit cards, and around sixty bucks in cash. That was all good news.
I was wearing a creased shirt and battered chinos, drenched with sweat. The lower sections of both pant legs sported red wine stains that dated to when the stuff had been coming back out of me rather than going in. I had a mind-fucking headache, tremors in both hands that weren’t solely due to exertion, and a whole-body nausea that was getting worse by the second. This was all less good.
Then I realized I’d left my USB drive in Cass’s apartment—a disk that had both the pictures of Karren on it (my only proof that I was being fucked with) and copies of letters and documents featuring my name and address—and so could be tied to me in half a second.
Things were actually worse than I’d realized.
I
finally convinced myself I wasn’t going to throw up, and started to move again in a ragged half trot. Halfway along the next block I found a minimarket. I bought a bottle of cold water and a pack of industrial-strength painkillers. I washed a handful of the latter down with half of the former before I’d paid for either. My stomach tried to revolt, but I kept it down.
Back outside I considered my options, keeping an eye on the street and sidewalks in case “Jane Doe” had been merely biding her time. I couldn’t get my thoughts to run straight, and the thing that kept popping up with the brightest and shiniest sign was the fact it was now coming up on nine thirty. That meant Karren would be at her desk, wondering where the hell I was. I didn’t care about this from the point of view of ambition, not this morning. But still, I was supposed to be there. Insanely, I couldn’t let this fact lie.
“Karren,” I said, when she answered the phone. My head was pounding so loudly I was afraid she’d be able to hear it down the line.
“Hey, you,” she said affably. “Was wondering where you’d got to. Noticed you weren’t at your desk. Turns out here you are instead, on the phone.”
Her voice was like an audio postcard from better times, bittersweet enough to make me want to cry.
“Yeah. I’ve, uh, I’ve been held up.”
“No big deal. It’s like the grave here this morning anyhow. You sort out your problem?”
I didn’t know what on earth to say. Then I remembered that our last conversation had been about Stephanie and the mystery of her whereabouts. “It’s ongoing,” I said. “But I have hopes of progress.”
“That’s excellent. We like progress, right? So when should I expect you?”
“Little while yet,” I said, cupping the handset to mask the sound of heavy traffic. “Got a meeting in a half hour, might as well head straight there, I guess.”
“Oh yes? Anything exciting?”
“Nah. Same old same old. I’ll see you later.”
I ended the call, hearing an echo of what I’d just said.
Same old same old.
I realized I had two choices now, that two roads led from here.
Keep running . . . or not.
Either mark myself out as someone who’d done wrong—when, in fact,
I had not done anything at all
—or stick to the same old same old, in the meantime doing what I could to work out what the hell was going on—and try to stop it. Go undercover in my own life, effectively.
I was immediately sure which option made the most sense, and it had been talking to Karren that had driven it home. As far as
she
knew, my life was business as usual, the same old podcast: Longboat Key’s Most Promising Realtor, Bending the World to His Will. She knew nothing about the rest: she wouldn’t magically be aware of what I’d woken to that morning, just because it was smeared all over my mind.
The same applied to everyone else I knew (except for the lunatic stranger I’d just escaped from). The only modifications that had taken, so far, were the ones in my own head. To the outside world, everything about the Bill Moore Experience remained cool—as other people’s lives always are, from the outside, until some crisis blows the lid off and they’re forced to reveal that the program’s breaking down too badly to be papered over with bright smiles anymore.
My phone rang.
I didn’t recognize the number, but I hoped against hope it might be Steph calling from some unknown location, as if my reaching the act-normal realization had somehow been enough to immediately realign the spheres and kick-start normality.
“Good
lord,
that was dumb,” another woman’s voice said, however. “You should win an award for stupidity. Why on earth did you run?”
It didn’t surprise me that “Jane Doe” had my number. “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said. “Still does, as a matter of fact.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea who you are,” I said, peering up and down the street, in case this call was supposed to distract me while she crept up from some unseen angle. “Or what you’ve done, or whether you’ll tell me the truth about anything at all.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“That’s just it,” I shouted. “I don’t even know the answer to
that
question. Without that, it’s hard to judge
anything
you might say.”
There was a pause. “That’s a reasonable observation,” she said. “But there’ll come a time when you realize you have no other option, that I am your best and only hope. When you get there, call me. No guarantee I’ll answer. But I might. You never know.”
The phone went dead. I decided to start right then and there on the second item of the short To Do list I’d developed while sitting in the Burger King.
I dialed Deputy Hallam. It went to voice mail. I cut the connection, hands shaking, realizing only then that I’d been intending to dump everything on him—to tell him about Steph, Cassandra, the whole nine yards.
Good idea? Bad idea? I didn’t know. But I couldn’t do it to a machine.
I called back and left a message saying that I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible, like right
now
. Then I crossed the road and trotted along the highway toward the DeSoto Square Mall.
G
oing home actually made the most sense, of course. What put me off that was the idea that Hallam might not be answering his office phone because he was currently sitting in a patrol car outside my residence with a huge butterfly net. I did wish to speak to the guy, but under circumstances of my choosing. I did not want to be shouting at him from the back of a cruiser into which I’d been forcibly shoved, head down, in that way you see all the time on
Cops
and that does not look cool.
I thought about calling the neighbors—at least one of the Jorgenssons should be at home—and asking if there was a cop car outside, or if they’d seen Steph, but the idea conflicted badly with the notion of trying to keep my life rolling under the Business As Usual banner.
One question kept jammering away at me as I hurried around the circular and cool and calm interior of the DeSoto Square Mall, looking for a men’s clothing store.
Someone killed Cass while I was sleeping, then took her away, leaving only blood.
What kind of person does that?
My mind kept serving up flash frames of Cass standing pertly behind the counter in the ice cream store, or looking up at me and not minding I’d been glancing down the lacy front of her shirt, deep in the shadows of the small hours. I don’t know why it continued doing this. Maybe in the hope I might be able to help, to sort the images into a better order and undo what it had experienced since. I couldn’t, not least because so much of my brain was occupied with worrying about where the hell Steph was, and hoping desperately that she was okay.
I went through the doors into the cool mall and headed straight into Eddie Bauer. There was no one else in the store, and clerks of both sexes converged on me in a pincer movement. I knew I must look a wreck and smell like I’d bathed in cheap wine, but both affected not to notice after it became clear that I had a charge card and was determined to use it. Six minutes later I had a replacement outfit—a classic, sober ensemble in which to turn up to work and pretend everything was okay.
I stood withstanding inane chatter from the male clerk as he bagged my purchases while the girl rang them up.
Someone killed her. Killed her, but not me.
“Excuse me?”
“What?”
The clerk was looking at me warily. “I thought you said something, sir.”
“No,” I said. What he’d heard was an uncontrolled intake of breath, a flinch against another onslaught of internal images—and against the sudden realization that . . . I could have been killed, too. Somehow this hadn’t even occurred to me before. I’d been asleep (okay, unconscious) on the floor, so out of it that I hadn’t heard anything that happened. They could have sawed my head off and I’d have known nothing about it until I turned up in heaven ten minutes late.
I could be dead now. So why wasn’t I? Why had someone killed Cass, but not me?
The girl behind the till made a tutting sound, eyes on the screen.
“System’s real slow this morning,” she said, holding up my Amex. “Going to try it over at the other register.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry,” I said.
“I appreciate that, Mr. Moore. I’m right on it.”
I waited, trying to keep my breathing even, trying to look like just any other normal guy. The male clerk finished packing my clothes in unnecessary tissue paper, and then stood waiting, too. There was no one else in the store to serve, and he evidently felt that abandoning me before the end of the purchasing event would be in some way inappropriate. We had nothing to say to each other. We stood like two dumb robots waiting for further instructions from higher up the chain of command.
Outside the store, women pushed babies in strollers around the interior marble walkway, looking for something to buy or to sip, disinclined to leave the air-conditioning and reenter the stretch of another featureless Friday morning of maternity. A young black guy strolled by with a mop.
Time passed, and then suddenly broke.
I should have got it earlier. I should have realized that if the card-checking system’s slow, it’s slow. It’s a global variable within the store. Putting it through another register three feet away isn’t going to make a difference. And had the clerk picked up my surname just because she was an accomplished clerk, or because it flashed up as a detain-this-person-in-the-store?
A police car pulled up in the parking lot outside. I wasn’t sure what was happening until I glanced back at the female clerk. She looked smug and correct: confident that the world would never turn against her, that she would always be a spectator in events like this and never the subject. As, until very recently, had I.
“Give me my card.”
“I’m advised to retain it, sir.”
It wasn’t worth fighting for. I ran out of the store and hooked a hard right. Having killed plenty of time in the place over the years while Stephanie overturned Banana Republic, I knew that the mall had four sets of external doors, equidistantly placed around the circle. Would the cops have sent more than one car to apprehend someone whose charge card had been flagged? I didn’t know.
About halfway round the mall I slipped on the mopped floor and careered into a stand geared to quick-sell Verizon contracts. The guy manning the kiosk had fast reactions and dealt me a smack around the ear, but I ploughed on, my head ringing.
Shoppers watched with mild interest but no more; as if I were an unusual car passing in the street, someone else’s poorly behaved child. As if I were unexpected rain.
I came banging out of the back doors and into the lot, to find no police car waiting. So then I was running again, as fast as I possibly could this time, and not caring how it looked—flat-out sprinting, dodging over hot asphalt between cars and sparkling windshields.
I didn’t know where I was running to. Sometimes you don’t have to.
You just run anyway.