Authors: Katia Lief
A fifteen second video clip of the end of my world.
Fifteen seconds, just like the clip of my first conversation with Abe Starkman.
Fifteen seconds: was that the limit of a cell phone camera? Only fifteen seconds – the time it took to change my life, twice.
Standing, I dialed the number that had sent the video and indeed it had come from Nat’s phone. His voicemail answered. I hung up … and tried to think.
Nat’s phone was at home in an empty house. Unless he had been dropped off a few minutes early. I tried Henry’s home number and got voicemail. So I called Henry’s cell and Henry answered, “Hi, Mrs Mayhew.”
“Hi, Henry. Could I please speak with Nat?”
“We dropped him off at home a little while ago.”
“OK – thanks.”
So Nat was at home. I called his cell and it went straight to voicemail again; he had either turned it off or the battery had run out. Where did he get that
video
? And why would he send it to me like that? If he had watched those awful images, why wouldn’t he have called to warn me? He would have called me; I knew he would have. He never would have sent it like that, as a curiosity, or for its shock value.
There was only one person who would be cruel and calculating enough to send me that video cold. And if he had sent it from Nat’s phone …
I ran out of the hospital, down the steps onto the street, around the corner onto Amity Street, speed-dialing Jess.
“Darcy—”
“He’s in my house.”
“Coffin?”
“Yes. Right now. He just called me from Nat’s phone.”
“Wait a minute. I left him at his apartment not ten minutes ago.”
“You
left
him?”
“He denies he had anything to do with the explosion, but, Darcy, if he did, the fire examiner will find out. We can’t pick him up right this minute, but once we get the evidence, we’ll get him, just—”
I hung up and ran faster. Enough
later, not now, be patient
. Enough! I had a gun in my purse and I would go home and get Joe away from my son at any cost.
He was in the house; I knew it.
He was in the house with Nat
.
He had used Nat’s phone to call me, so I would answer.
How was it he had a video of Hugo’s death?
How was that?
Had Joe killed my husband? Stalked me. Terrorized me. Frightened my son. Caused a man’s death –
two
men – Hugo and Abe. Tried to kill Rich.
Three
. All to get to me.
Who was next? How far would he go? When would he stop?
Never
. Unless I stopped him.
I unlocked my front door. The alarm was already off. Stilling my breath, trying to be quiet, I walked into the front hall and paused. Angled an ear toward the living room: silence. The kitchen: stillness. I didn’t want Joe to hear me so I toed off my shoes, slid the gun out of my purse and padded up the stairs.
My bedroom was empty.
Bathroom, empty.
I moved, stealthily, toward Nat’s room. The door was open. I could see that the lights were off – the blue of his walls and green of his carpet were muted by the grey twilight that filtered through the room’s single window.
Lifting the gun just as Gary had demonstrated, just as I had practiced, I entered the room.
Empty.
“Nat?”
Silence.
“Nat!”
Nothing.
His closet was empty except for his clothes, a baseball bat, books piled on the floor. Nothing, and no one, was under the bed.
Only one thing was different in this room since I had been here not two hours ago. Nat’s phone: it was missing.
Had I dropped it before? No, I clearly remembered putting it back on the corner of his desk.
I looked everywhere for the phone in case my memory was faulty. Maybe the phone was here somewhere. I looked and looked – no phone.
I
knew
where Nat’s phone was: Joe had it. He had been here. And he had taken Nat. Just as he knew that if Nat called I would answer, he knew that if he took Nat I would come.
CHAPTER 13
DRIVING ALONG COLUMBIA
Street to the address I had memorized – it had been impossible
not
to memorize it, Joe had recited it into my voicemail so many times – feeling cold. Shivering with panic that I wasn’t driving fast enough, that I couldn’t drive fast enough. That it was already too late. Chilled to the bone, even with all my windows rolled up. Evening had fallen and it was dark out. Very dark. The street bumped and dipped and I kept crashing into potholes I didn’t see. It was no mystery why Joe had been able to afford it here: it was derelict except for two storefronts, a bookstore and a trendy bar, where gentrification had sent its tentacles. Lights appeared to have been placed randomly along this forlorn street that edged a mostly good neighborhood with a seedy crust just as it gave way to the East River. The
water
on this still night looked inky, placid, unmoving. A black mirror separating Brooklyn from Manhattan, reflecting a bright half-moon in a foggy shimmer on the river’s surface.
He lived at 65 Imlay Street. I vaguely remembered where that was from my one and only visit to this area, in August, when Nat and I had come to shop at Fairway. I remembered Van Brundt Street as soon as I saw it, and turned. Then, there it was: Imlay Street. I turned again and slowed down to read house numbers.
But before I found the building, my phone rang. It was Nat’s number.
Joe
calling on Nat’s phone. I pulled to the side of the road near a wide strip of unused land piled with junk: rusted cars, broken shopping carts, heaps of tires, half a dozen of those enormous shipping containers abandoned in a haphazard cluster near the river. Answered the phone: “You bastard!”
Silence. Was he looking at my Nat, holding the phone to his smarmy ear, grinning to the sound of my dread?
“
Joe!
”
Silence. I stabbed the
end call
button with a shaking fingertip. Jess: I had to call Jess. But as I ran down my list of stored numbers, hand unsteady, palm sweating, the phone slipped out of my hand and in an iota of a moment it was gulped up in the
space
between the front car seats. There wasn’t time to fish it out. I grabbed my purse – loaded with gun – and got out of the car, leaving the driver’s door gaping and the headlights on so I could see where I was going and also to alert anyone who might come looking for me.
Sixty-five was half a block down, between Bowne and Sebring Streets. I crossed the street to a dilapidated green-shingled three-story house that listed to one side. I remembered that he lived in apartment one, and there was his name at the bottom of a short list of bells:
Joe Coffin
. I pressed the grimy white button and pounded furiously on the door.
“Joe!
Joe
!”
But I needn’t have pounded or screamed. He appeared almost immediately, head cocked, wearing the very grin I had just imagined, his eyes weirdly bright.
“Sorry, but you missed your friend.” The sarcasm in his tone sent a chill through me. He stood in a gaping space through which I glimpsed a grimy hallway, bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. There were two apartment doors in the hall, one of which was open.
“Where is he?”
“Jesus is long gone.” Thinking himself witty, he smiled.
“Not him.
Nat
.”
His eyes flickered with thought or more likely calculation and then he smiled and stood aside. I shot past him into the hall.
Urine
was the stink that hit me first, then
mildew
. I ran to the open door and into the apartment.
It was a studio: twin bed pushed into the far corner, small table with one chair against the opposite half-wall of a kitchenette. Tiny doorless bathroom next to the front door. Clean. Neat. An armoire by the bed was the only closet.
“Nat!” I opened the latch of the armoire. The bottom was stacked with books. Atop the books, three pair of shoes. Hanging from a bar were half a dozen shirts and a few pairs of pants. A red tie was slung over the bar next to a brown leather belt.
Joe came in behind me and watched my frantic search. His hands had slipped into his jeans pockets and he stood there calmly, nodding his head as if something had just become clear.
I turned on him. “Where’s Nat?” Sweat dripped from my forehead into one of my eyes, turning Joe foggy until I blinked him into focus.
“He’s not here.”
“You sent me that video.”
Joe nodded.
“
You killed Hugo
.”
He shrugged, pathetically, like a child unwilling to settle on truth or lie.
“
Where is Nat?
”
“I told you, he’s not here.”
Shaking. Heart beating so hard and fast I felt I would collapse. “Tell me where Nat is, give him back to me, and I won’t tell anyone about Hugo.”
Half a grin crooked Joe’s face into a mask terrifying for his mix of docility on one side and menace on the other. I had never seen anyone look this way: like two different people at one time. He was out of his mind. If I could kill him, I would. But the gun in my purse now felt a million miles away. The blue folder had been right: always keep your gun strapped to your body, easily accessible. How would I get to it now without giving him time to intercept it?
“I won’t tell you,” he said, “but I’ll show you.”
“Don’t play games with me, Joe.”
He stepped away, disappearing into his kitchenette, and reappeared – with a gun of his own. It was a handgun, larger than mine. He ostentatiously released the safety before steadying the gun in my direction.
“Come,” he said, steering me with the merciless trajectory of the gun to the door and into the hall. I was a marionette controlled by a lunatic. One wrong move and he would kill me; wouldn’t he?
Yes
. He had me now and he would do whatever it took to keep me.
The apartment door clicked shut behind us.
“Keep going.”
The front door of the building fell shut behind us and we were alone on Imlay Street, facing the wasteland, the river, the star-studded sky. A car appeared around the corner of Van Brundt, rumbling slowly forwards, and I felt the nose of Joe’s gun press into my waist. He had one arm around me. I had never been so close to him. He smelled like his hallway, like a urinal, and he also smelled like raw fish. Unless that was a smell coming off the river. We crossed the street and he led me into the rubble-strewn junk heap of neglected land, in the direction of the water.
The air was sharp on my face and I felt the stab of rocks through the soles of my shoes. The fish-stink grew worse the closer we came to the water’s edge.
Was Nat here? Here in this wilderness, this graveyard of unwanted things. My heart, a fist, pounded inside the cage of my chest.
No: it was not impossible. Not Nat. Not my baby. My boy. I would do anything, go anywhere, to find him. Even if the chance of finding him alive was remote. I would go.
“What did you do with him, Joe?”
“Shut up,” he hissed, then muttered: “You and your
fucking
son.”
“Did you tamper with the gas in Rich’s house?”
Joe gritted his teeth, a sallow flash in the moonlight.
“You did. I know it. And you took Nat. You thought you could actually have me if you eliminated everyone I love.”
“Shut up.”
“You’ll never have me.”
“I have you now,” he said. “Don’t I?”
We had reached the farthest shipping container, painted beige and dripping with rust stains. Big enough to fit four cars nose to nose, it was the one closest to the river, the only one completely hidden by the others, the one farthest from the street and closest to the glowing darkness of the water. The black mirror: death. It was here. I felt it.
He was going to kill me.
“Don’t do this,” I said. “If you do this, you’ll never have me.”
“If I do this, I’ll always have you.” He smiled at me with the plain enthusiasm with which he had first greeted me at my desk two weeks ago.
He had won
. Then he used his free hand to take a key ring from his pocket, jangle loose a small key and insert it into the bottom of a heavy steel padlock.
His gun dug between two of my ribs and I couldn’t help crying out.
“Quiet!” Gritting his teeth, he removed the padlock and slipped it into his pocket. Then he
pulled
one of the corrugated metal doors, which opened with a screech that could have been a seagull or a child playing but was neither. This was the place, the smell, the sound of annihilation.
It was too dark to see inside the container at first. He walked me in with his arm around my waist, like he was bringing me into a restaurant for a date, except for the gun his opposite hand pressed into my side. If I could only get to
my
gun before he locked me in here! If I tried, he would shoot me first. But if I didn’t, I would die anyway.
The smell was appalling – an unflushed unwashed toilet – and I began to gag.
“You’ll get used to it,” Joe said.
“Nat? Are you here?”
“He isn’t here.”
“You
bastard
!”
“Darcy?” A frail voice seemed to waft over from somewhere ahead.
My eyes adjusted enough to see a stained mattress on the floor, a card table with a vase of orange plastic flowers and two mismatched chairs. Stacked against one wall were cases of bottled water and canned food. Empty bottles and cans were strewn in front of the boxes.
“Nat? Sweetie. I can’t see you.”
But the voice had called me Darcy, not Mom.
And then I saw a ghost crawling toward me. Silver
electrical
tape had been wound around her head to cover her eyes. Her lips were chapped and bleeding. Her knees were covered in abrasions. That sexy outfit she’d worn on Friday was slit up one side and the transparent shirt hung ripped and open over a camisole soiled with dried vomit.
“Courtney …” Degraded. Turned inside out: all the vulnerability she had never revealed now worn as her outer skin.
Joe giggled like a five-year-old. “Told you it wasn’t Nat.”
“Where is he? I know you have him – you sent me that video from his phone.”