by Marcus Sakey
before, the same bland expression, but in one hand he held an ice
cream cone, a scoop of pink perched atop one of white. “How—what are you—”
“Last time I was in your house I went through your bank records.
Terrible habit of mine. I saw you had a safe deposit box, and thought
you might have stowed my necklace there.” He bit a chunk out of
the ice cream.
“No.” Her skin was cold despite the sunlight. The gun bit into
her belly. “I thought Daniel might have. But it’s not.”
“Want a lick?” Bennett held the cone out to her. When she just
stared at him, he shrugged, pursed his lips around it, rounding and
smoothing the portion he’d bitten.
“I need more time,” she said.
“We all need more time, sister.”
“I’m trying. But I don’t know where it is.”
“Daniel does.”
“Look, his memory, I told you—”
“And I told you,” Bennett wiped a drip of pink off his chin, “I
don’t care. Daniel knows. Go to work on our boy.” He took another
bite of the ice cream, then tossed the cone sideways. It landed in the
street with a splat. He brushed his hands off. “Or I will.” Bennett turned and walked away. She stared at him, his back to
her. It would be so simple. Pull the pistol from her belt. Aim carefully, the way she had practiced. Squeeze the trigger—
Yeah. Shoot him in broad daylight in front of a bank on Wilshire
Boulevard. Excellent plan.
She grit her teeth until her jaw ached.
Then she started walking.
“L
os Angeles Sheriff’s Department.”
“Hello hello. Did you miss me, brother?”
“Damn it,” a rustling sound over the receiver, and the voice dropped, “I told you never to call me again.”
“You did. That’s true.”
“So what the—”
“I need another favor.”
“No. No more.”
Five, four, three, two . . .
“What is it?”
“I need an address.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. I have a phone number, need you to run a reverse lookup.”
“What am I, your computer guy? Use the damn Internet.”
“It’s unlisted.”
“Then call one of your connections.”
“That’s what I’m doing.” A pause to let that sink in. “You don’t have to like me, brother. I can stand the rejection. But do you really want me to share what I know, just to avoid pressing a few keys on your fancy cop software?”
“I’m not going to let you do this forever. Be careful you don’t push too far. People disappear all the time.”
“Wow. That was scary. Seriously, I’ve got chills.”
“Listen, you cockroach—”
“No, you listen. I vanish, a whole lot of secrets get revealed. Including yours. Do you really want that?” A pause. “One of the things you learn, my line of work, is the real weight of a debt. I still have credit left on this one, and you know it. So stop wasting time and run the reverse for me.”
A sigh. “What’s the phone number?”
D
aniel was in a concrete canyon.
Again. Back in a concrete canyon.
Water trickled. The bleeding sun stained everything crimson. Ahead, a tunnel, tall and broad. The mouth of it was perfect black shadow, but he knew that something waited in that darkness. Waited and watched.
Something terrible.
It was clearer this time, the dream. There were buildings beyond the canyon, a skyline of mute towers framed black against the red sky, windows glowing like eyes. In the fading light of day, the buildings loomed like hooded figures of judgment.
His hand was heavy.
From the darkness of the tunnel, a faint rasping. A movement sound, but indistinct and wrong, snakes squirming across one another in dark pits, the slow inhale of some huge beast. His fear was childlike in its perfection. It seized him completely. He wanted to run.
What’s there?
Why am I here?
He took a step forward, dread lighting up his spine. He had the vague and drifting feeling of being near the edge of waking. He couldn’t control the action, but he could nudge it, could float suggestions, and yet he knew it was a dream. Familiar, though, and maybe not just from having dreamed it before. And yet what was a dream but a mash-up of memory and imagination and worry? The mouth of the tunnel was perfect black. Preternatural darkness. Light died when it crossed that boundary.
In that blackness, something waited. Watching him. Staring.
Judging.
As much as fear, there was guilt, that overwhelming sense of horror and shame.
A dusty breeze tugged at his clothing.
His hand was heavy.
He took a step forward. And another. He was almost to the tunnel—
“Daniel?”
Eyes snapping open, he jerked his head back, cracked it against the wooden headboard. He grunted, blinked. “Wha? I’m here.”
The tunnel was gone, replaced by the hotel room. How had he fallen asleep? After Laney left, he’d stood on the balcony and watched the street. Paced ruts in the carpet. Finally, he’d decided to distract himself with the news. When it had gone to a commercial, the braying of the sales voice had bothered him, and he’d muted it, leaned back, closed his burning eyes just for a second . . .
Laney said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Grimacing, he rubbed at the back of his skull, then swung his legs off the bed, leaned on his knees. He had never been a napper. It sounded nice in principle, but he always woke up wooden and confused, feeling worse than when he lay down. “Sorry. I guess I drifted off.” There’d been no real sleep in a week, not since he woke on the beach. He blinked, then looked up at her. “How about you? You okay?”
She nodded, pulled a chair from the desk, flopped into it.
“How’d your thing go?” His thoughts returning to him slowly. “The woman you were meeting.”
“What? Oh.” She shook her head. “No. It was a waste of time.” “She won’t help us?”
“She didn’t know anything.” Laney ran her hands through her hair, bundled it up behind her head, then let it drop. “What if we just pay him?”
“Huh?”
“That’s what we were going to do, before. It’s just that he startled me showing up like that on the PCH, and I ran, and after that, everything got complicated. But why not pay him?”
He shook his head. “After all he did to you?”
“It’s only money. It’s not our life.” She ticked at her teeth with her fingernail. “Where’s the necklace?”
“Pardon?”
“The necklace.”
“I thought— Don’t you have it?”
“No.”
Daniel laughed. “Well that’s a bitch.”
“You don’t know?”
“Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Hell, I don’t remember our wedding day.” A look of real sadness and disappointment swept across her face. Asshole. He spoke quickly. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be casual. I just—laughing about it is the only way I’ve been able to keep myself together.”
She twisted a length of hair between her fingers.
“I did have an idea, though.” Daniel stood, stretched. “I was thinking about it after you left. You went to see this woman— what’s her name?”
“Huh? Oh. Lisa.”
“Lisa, you went to see her hoping she might have something to help us, right? Even a picture? And it wasn’t until you were gone that it occurred to me to think, what difference would a picture make? But you were right. It’s actually kind of brilliant.” She raised an eyebrow.
“See, the thing is, if we go to the police now—”
“Daniel, n
o—”
“Hear me out. If we go to them now, all we have is a description, right? Sophie could come as well, and she’d back up our story, and of course you’re alive, so there’s that. But we don’t really have anything on Bennett. Nothing that they could use to catch him, and no way to make sure he doesn’t come after you if I’m locked up.”
“Okay,” she said, in a tone he remembered. It was the way she used to respond when he was talking out plot twists to her. He had a flash of another room, filled with sunlight—his office at home, maybe—and her leaning back, a little smile on her lips, saying, Okay, as he led her up to a cliffhanger. It was a good memory, and a good feeling, and he went with it, pitched his idea like a script.
“So what if we did get something on him?” He paused, held the moment. “What if, for a change, we had something Bennett didn’t want released?”
5
Late afternoon, and already the streets of Westwood Village had started to clog, UCLA students heading north to the Valley or south to Mar Vista. Bennett rolled up Broxton, past a falafel joint, a movie theater, a mystery bookstore. He got a kick out of the fact that it called itself a “village,” like somewhere there were huts and friendly peasants.
“K-Earth 101, the greatest hits on Earth!” the radio proclaimed, and then Diana Ross came on, singing about how you can’t hurry love, no, you just have to wait. Bennett turned up the volume, whistled along. Diana in her day, that was a woman.
His cell phone rang, a slow pinging sound like sonar. Bennett switched the wheel to his left hand, held the phone in his right, glanced at the display. “Hi, Laney,” turning west. “That was fast.”
“If we give you the necklace, will you leave us alone?” “Cross my heart,” he said.
A long pause, and then she said, “We’re going to do it somewhere
we feel safe.”
“And where would that be?”
“The Santa Monica Pier.”
“Kind of cliché, don’t you think?” He turned down a quiet neighborhood block a bit west of campus. “I mean, why not just do it at the foot of the Hollywood sign, go the distance?”
“Will you meet us or not?”
“When?”
“Sunset.”
“Romantic.”
“We’ll pay you. After that, we never want to see you again.” She
hung up.
He tossed the cell phone on to the passenger seat, glanced at the sky. He had an hour, maybe more.
The houses were large and well maintained, fronted by flowers and lawns. Though it was a short walk to campus, living here would be out of the budget of most professors, let alone students. The address he was looking for turned out to be a one-story with Spanish influences and tall trees spilling shade over the corner lot. A hammock was slung between two trunks. Bennett went past, parking on the opposite side of the street a block down.
One thing led to another. He’d gotten the phone number by looking at call records, highlighting the five that appeared most, and then choosing the one dialed on weekends and late at night. That gave him digits; his cop friend had translated that into an address and a name.
With a little convincing, of course.
Bennett’s leverage with the man stemmed from a police cover-up a decade old, and truth be told, it was getting thin. Of course, what the man hadn’t realized was that by supplying the address, he was tying himself to Bennett forever.
One thing led to another. Flirting with seventeen-year-old Laney led to pictures of his cock in her, which led to the perfect bait for an aspiring congressman, which led to a nice fat payday, which in turn led to leverage on Laney all over again. That was the way it worked.
The house belonged to a guy with the unlikely name of Charles Charlemagne, Esq. A little digging revealed that Chuck was a lawyer before he was a professor, and was still titular partner in a small but profitable firm, hence the digs.
Esquire. What a dick.
Bennett climbed out, walked down the block, whistling Diana Ross. He didn’t bother with the front, just hiked up the driveway of the place next door, then cut around the side yard and into the back, where Chuck had set up a vegetable garden and a nice little patio with an elaborate grill. French doors opened into what looked like a kitchen.
He slid on a pair of gloves, then pulled his sleeve over his fist and popped one of the panes of glass inward. It hit the tile and broke. Before the sound had died, he’d reached inside to unlock the door.
There was a double beep. Alarm.
Bennett sprinted down the hall. He could hear the sounds of panic, someone else in the house. Racing for the front door, because that was what people predictably did. He rounded the corner just as the deadbolt unsnapped. The woman heard him coming, spun, hands up and eyes wide.
“Hi.” Bennett smiled. “Let’s start with the alarm code.” 5
The sun had slipped beneath the horizon as Daniel paced the Santa Monica Pier, and the sky was fading fast, gory reds and brutal yellows slowly washing purple. He checked the clock on his cell phone.
Waves rolled in slow breaks up the beach, foam trimming lace and pewter. Surf kids bobbed and floated, calling across to one another, occasionally paddling to catch a swell, riding in halfway before dropping off. A handful of photographers with cameras mounted on tripods pointed long zoom lenses out to sea, hoping for the perfect stock photo, a dream of a summer evening to sell to all the landlocked in Wichita.
After Laney had made the call to Bennett, they’d left the hotel. Robert Cameron had been good as his word, leaving his silver PT Cruiser with the valet, along with a note:
L: I hope you know what you’re doing. Please be careful. I
love you.
—R
“You drive,” Laney had said. “I’ll get my phone set up.” He nodded, took the wheel. The car was nice, but he missed his
BMW. The thing had become home base for him.
“Okay,” Laney said. “Try it.”
He pulled out his disposable phone, dialed. Robert Cameron’s
voice said, “Ring, sweetie .”
“That’s your ring tone?”
“Just test it, okay?”
Daniel tucked his phone into his shirt pocket, still on. Said,
“Lady, your husband is one sexy mofo.”
Laney hung up, pressed a button. The speaker on her phone was small and tinny, and the sound was muffled. But his voice came through clear enough, saying, Lady, your husband is one sexy mofo.
“I don’t know,” she said, frowning.
“What do you mean? Worked fine.”
“Yeah, but it’s quieter here.”
“It will do.”
“I’d rather just pay him.”
“With what?” Daniel shrugged. “This will work. We’ll have pictures of him and a recording of him threatening us. That should give us enough.”
“I don’t like you out there alone.”
“Has to be that way. If you’re there, then there’s no reason he can’t take us. But grabbing just me does no good.” He leaned over, touched her hand. “You said Bennett is careful, that he survives by people not knowing anything about him. There’s no way he’ll want us going to the police with this.”
Laney didn’t reply. The setting sun filled the air with gold.
Daniel flexed his fingers, tapped a beat on the steering wheel. His exhaustion was making him manic. The couple of minutes of sleep in the hotel had only managed to remind him how very tired he was. “It’s funny, kind of. Using a recording against Bennett.”
“Ironic.”
“Yeah. A lot of that lately. You know, if it hadn’t been so terrifying, this whole experience would be kind of interesting.”
“Interesting?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Are you kidding me?”
“It’s changed the way I think about things. About what’s real. You convince yourself that you know who you are, what your life means. You remember the things that have happened to you. But really, that’s not tr
ue, is it? Memories are just stories we tell ourselves to explain how we got where we are. There’s no absolute to them. It’s all subjective.”
“My memories aren’t subjective.”
“Sure they are. You’re just comfortable with the order they’re in. But you chose which to keep and which to dump. Maybe not consciously, but still.”
“We don’t choose our memories.”
“You know we do. Same way you chose to be somebody else. When you were all those other women, you gave them memories, and you used those memories to make them real.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because . . .” She made an exasperated sound. “Because it is. When I become someone else, I don’t really become them. I still know who I am.”
“But see, I don’t. And it’s made me realize that it’s always up for grabs.” He swiveled in his seat to face her. “Like that tape. The one Bennett has of you.”
Laney glanced over, her eyes narrowed. “What about it?”
“It’s you, right? Doing things you’re not happy about, that you wish you could take back. Having sex with a man to—” He cut himself off. “But the thing is, there’s also video of you in our kitchen, singing the Peanuts Christmas song and dancing.”
She smiled. “I remember.”
“So both exist. Is one more real than the other? Do we have to weigh them the same? They’re in the past. Frozen moments that will never come again. You’ve changed since both of them.” The world outside rolled by, smooth and removed, cars and billboards and other people. “Over the last week, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you’re only who you choose to be. Every moment. The past is gone. Memories are no more solid than dreams. The only real thing, the only true thing, is the present. That’s it.”
“So the things we’ve done don’t count?”
“Of course they do. But we can decide how much. And we can decide what we want the present to be like. We can live it however we want. Own every minute. Be the person we want to be.”
Laney was silent for a long moment. Finally, she said, “I think there are things that can change who we are. Things we can’t forget. Or get over.” She spoke to the windshield, her tone even and measured.
Gentle. You’re poking at a wound. “Look, I don’t care what you did ten years ago. That’s my point. I want to be with you. The video I’m going to remember is the one of you singing and dancing.”