Bone Music

by Christopher Rice

“You son of a bitch. You crazy son of a bitch. I didn’t know what I was really taking!”

  “I know, I know. It’s a lot. Don’t try to process it all right now. We’ll have time, I promise.”

  There’s that tone again. That steady, confident tone. The bikers are getting closer, and he sounds cool as a cucumber even as he reveals the extent to which he’s placed her life at risk.

  Did he actually just sigh?

  “Charley, I have to go and take care of these guys, but there’s something I need for you to do for me first.”

  “What?”

  “Run.”

  He hangs up.

  She tries calling him back. Once, twice. Three times. He doesn’t answer.

  It’s a miracle. That’s what’s coursing through her veins now. A miracle, and it wasn’t just put there by someone pretending to be a therapist. It was put there by something . . . bigger than her. Months. That’s how long she and Dylan spent together in that office. Months. He’s had months to plan for this night. For all she knows, he played a hand in bringing the Savage Woods films to the local movie house to trigger her anxiety and create a pretext for forcing the drug on her. And then there’s the kiss. The strange, last-minute, and inappropriate kiss he gave her right before she left the office. So she would be distracted on the drive home.

  Because he took my cell phone, she realizes. He took my phone so I wouldn’t know someone had disarmed my alarm system. And now he knows my code, so I’m not safe from him if I go back in the house. If the phone and Internet are still out, I won’t be able to reset the password because it won’t be able to connect to the security company’s network.

  But this is only the half of it, she knows. If she goes back in the house and if he tries to come for her, even if he just tries to explain his crazy again, something far worse will happen.

  She’ll kill him. She’s sure of it.

  The sense of betrayal sings through her over and over again like lashes from a whip, far more painful and infuriating than her revulsion at being face-to-face with Jason’s dangerous delusions. If she looks into those eyes right now, those same eyes that held her in a consistent and steady gaze meant to earn her confidence, she just might use whatever this strength is to tear them out of his head. Maybe he knows this. Maybe it’s why he told her to run.

  So maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe, if he manages to escape the latest onslaught of bikers, she should let the son of a bitch pay her a visit so he can feel the full force of whatever he drugged her with. But Jason’s agonized wails still play in her ears. What kind of awful music would tearing Dylan Whoeverthefuckheis limb from limb leave on a constant playback in her mind?

  Amid this din of rage and confusion is another, clearer thought that rises above the clamor.

  Drugs don’t last forever.

  She starts the Civic’s engine, angles it up and out of the arroyo, kills the headlights so she can slowly roll toward the highway under the cover of darkness. But when she reaches the edge of the blacktop, she freezes.

  South is Scarlet and the Scarlet police station with its four employees, none of whom seem capable of protecting her from anything bigger than a bobcat. South is also the scene of whatever fight’s about to break out between a supposed Harvard-educated psychiatrist and a bunch of cranked-up outlaw bikers.

  He’s not just a psychiatrist, she thinks. The guy he pretended to be would not look at a gang of bikers barreling toward him and say, “I have to go and take care of these guys,” like he was getting ready to feed a parking meter. And he said he’d take care of Jason, too. What’s he going to do? Break Jason’s other shoulder? Or break his neck? Do I care which? The rope, remember. The rope and the tape. It was all for me.

  North, on the other hand, is a whole lot of nothing until Interstate 40, which will give her a new choice: East or west?

  She tells herself she’s waiting to make a decision because more bikers might come flying past. But there’s no sign of anything on the northern horizon. She’s waiting because she’s paralyzed. Amazing to realize that despite her incredible strength, her muscles can still be seized by self-doubt.

  She hears what comes next before she sees it. A crack that sounds small and thunderous at the same time—two things that contradict each other. When she looks south, she sees a column of white flame shooting up into the night sky. It’s a good distance away. About as far, she guesses, as the scene where the bikers ran her off the road. Whatever its source, the explosion is a single event. It’s precise. It’s big. And even though she’s very far away, she can see pieces of debris inside it.

  She lets her foot off the brake, turns the Civic north, and gives it as much gas as she can without destroying the pedal.

  North.

  It’s the only thought she can manage. Go north. And then possibly west, toward California, the only state she’s ever really called home. But when she tries to think any further ahead than that, her breaths grow shallow and her vision starts to shrink, so she just keeps saying it to herself over and over again. North, north, north.

  A daze comes over her. She thinks it might be shock, but it doesn’t seem to affect her ability to drive, so what does it matter really? She’s not sure exactly how much time has passed when she realizes she’s forgotten to keep her grip on the steering wheel featherlight. Her knuckles look white in the dashboard’s glow, but the steering wheel’s intact. Slowly she eases her foot down onto the brake, pulls over to the side of the empty road.

  She steps from the car, walks into the headlights, and picks up a jagged rock that’s about the size of a newborn baby. It’s heavy and lifting it hurts her arm. Which, in a normal world, is how it should be. When she tries to throw it with one hand, it slips and crashes to the asphalt. Her wrist sings with pain from the effort.

  Whatever Dylan’s miracle provided, it’s over now.

  The strength is gone.

  And now, with the fears of an ordinary woman, she’s looking out into the vast emptiness where the shadows of jagged rocks and cacti are slowly resolving underneath a star-crazed sky.

  She doesn’t have to be careful now as she reaches into her pocket and removes the cardboard packet. Two of the remaining pills have been reduced to orange powder inside their plastic bubbles. Another’s been cracked in half. The fourth and fifth are intact.

  You’re the first one to take it and live.

  She places the pills back inside her pocket and slides behind the wheel.

  The Beretta’s on the seat next to her.

  Facts, figures. Short-term goals. These are her salvation right now.

  She checks the phone.

  Three hours. That’s about how much time has elapsed between her first fight with Jason, the emergence of her miraculous strength, and this moment when it left her abruptly and without fanfare.

  How could it have been only three hours? It feels like a lifetime.

  She starts the car, eases back onto the highway. North, she tells herself again, just as the tears start. North, she tells herself as her hands start to shake in a way that’s all too human. All too normal. All too frightened.

  Then she remembers she’s got five pills left, and the fear gradually starts to recede until her hands go still.

  10

  Before she reaches I-40, Charlotte pulls over to the side of the road and makes a call she should have made hours before. A call that will determine in which direction she heads now—east or west. Kayla answers after one ring. The same woman Dylan dismissed as being undeserving of the title of Charlotte’s only friend, despite the fact that she won the case against Charlotte’s dad and routinely battles wealthy wife beaters and corporations that poison entire communities.

  The minute Kayla says her name, not her birth name but the name she chose for herself, Charlotte feels a sudden, hot sheen of tears in her eyes.

  She speaks through a lump in her throat. “I need to meet. Someplace safe. Outside San Francisco. Wherever it is, make sure you’re not being followed.”


  “Media?” Kayla asks.

  “No.”

  “Your dad?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Jason Briffel.”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte answers. “It’s bad.”

  The incompleteness of the answer feels like a lie.

  “Where are you?” Kayla asks.

  “Nowhere. Making a decision where to go next.”

  “Whose number is this?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Whatever’s happening, you know you can trust me, right?” Kayla says.

  “Why do you think I called? The problem is, I don’t actually know what’s happening.”

  “All right, where are you now?”

  “Near Flagstaff.”

  “Are you in your car?”

  “No.”

  “But you have a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come to California. Once you hit the 5, go north like you’re going to San Francisco. You’re gonna meet me in Patterson. It’s south of the 580 split. When you get there, go east on Del Puerto Canyon Road, and in about two blocks, you’ll see a giant Amazon fulfillment center. I’ll meet you in the parking lot. Describe the car you’re driving.”

  She does.

  “OK. Pretty nondescript.”

  “I’ll come in slow so you don’t miss me.”

  “No, I’m glad it’s nondescript, ’cause you’re gonna leave it there and come with me.”

  “I don’t want to go into the city right now.”

  “I understand. That’s why I’m taking you to one of our safe houses. We put high-value witnesses who get threats there if law enforcement won’t step up.”

  “Good. That’s real good. Thank you. I can’t th-tha . . .”

  “Charley, drive now. Feelings later. OK? I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  Drive now, feelings later, she says to herself as she hangs up the phone.

  II

  11

  “Can we maybe do something about the glare?”

  Cole Graydon isn’t sure who asked this question.

  He’s one of seven people seated around the executive conference room’s frosted-glass table. The others include three members of his company’s legal team, the director of marketing, the chairman of his board, and Dr. Nora Suvari, head of gastrointestinal treatments for Graydon Pharmaceuticals.

  It had to have been Nora, he realizes. She’s the only one looking at him and not the eighty-inch LCD screen at the front of the room.

  Up until a few seconds ago, she was doing a pretty good job of pretending to watch the final edit of this idiotic video they’ve gathered to approve.

  A better job than he was; that’s for sure.

  For most of the presentation he’s been looking out the window at a group of kayakers down in La Jolla Bay. Their tiny yellow oars wink in the sun. Their kayaks are bright red, making them look like bits of shark bait determined to avoid their fate. Will they manage a full loop around the bay before the video ends?

  That this is the question occupying his mind on the eve of their biggest drug launch in three years—well, it won’t be the first secret he’s kept since taking the reins of his late father’s company.

  But Nora’s question, and her vacant stare, makes it clear he’s not the only one bored stiff. The glare to which she just referred is falling across the screen of her iPad, not the screen at the front of the room. When she catches him looking, she closes a Pinterest page and quickly replaces it with the first projection spreadsheet she can open.

  He fights the urge to cackle. Instead he hits a button on the remote control next to his laptop. The wall of glass to his left darkens. The view’s still there, but now it looks shadowy and slightly unreal.

  He owes his life to that view.

  Maybe not his life—maybe just his sanity. The compact skyline of La Jolla’s village and the flower garland of mansions that crown the bluffs overlooking the bay have offered him countless mental escapes from the soul-crushing responsibilities of running this company, most of which bear down on him in this gleaming, glass-filled room.

  He should chide Nora; he knows it. Call her out for pinning wedding dresses when they should be perfecting every detail of one of the most expensive launches in their company’s history. He’s pretty sure that’s why the chairman of the board, Tucker Albright, is giving him a long look now.

  If Cole stays silent, Tucker will no doubt report this exchange to Cole’s mother, who may well see it as cause to hop in her hired car and be chauffeured down from her horse ranch in Rancho Santa Fe, just to see how Cole is handling everything. Which, after some prodding, she’ll admit is code for, I’m here to find out whether or not you’re about to run our family’s company into the ground again.

  He’s not going to upbraid Nora. Not now, not later. She’s a Harvard PhD who came to Graydon with dreams of eradicating stomach-eating parasites in developing nations. Today she’s responsible for a piece-of-shit heartburn drug they’re about to market as the only thing that will keep America’s stomachs from exploding.

  I know, Nora, he thinks. I had big dreams, too.

  Tucker Albright, on the other hand, is one of the country’s wealthiest beef distributors, whose only qualification for running Graydon’s board is that he’s chummy with Cole’s mother.

  But he’s still studying Cole with icy focus, so Cole gives the man a warm smile.

  Tucker nods and returns his attention to the giant television screen.

  Caught, Cole has no choice but to watch the video.

  Again.

  For the hundredth time.

  On-screen, an actress whose last big role involved getting devoured by man-eating slugs in a gas station bathroom sits under dramatic lighting that would better serve an interview with a Syrian refugee. The music is like Chopin on laudanum. The actress is describing, in a tone more appropriate to the recounting of a violent sexual assault, how heartburn has taken over her life. How she no longer enjoys food. How eating became a source of constant fear and worry. There’s a shot of her standing outside the window of a New York deli, staring at the sandwiches inside like an orphan watching a happy family enjoy Christmas dinner.

  The video is one of several that will post to a website scheduled to launch next week, www.EnjoyFoodAgain.com. While the site will be scrubbed of any obvious clues it’s owned and operated by Graydon Pharmaceuticals, more than half of the visitors who flock to it, the ones sharing the most dramatic stories of heartburn-related trauma, will be those hired by a marketing firm with one explicit goal: to convince the people who end up there by chance that they’re suffering from a completely bullshit condition that was invented by Graydon’s marketing department.

  RID. Recurrent Intestinal Disrupt.

  Meanwhile, drug reps for the company, most of them so good looking they could model swimwear for a living, have already fanned out to doctor’s offices all over the country, manipulating every FDA loophole possible to present their new drug, Sunatrex, as a revolution in heartburn treatment, even though there’s no evidence to suggest it’s any better than Nexium, which anyone who reads a newspaper knows isn’t much better than Prilosec.

  So far the process has unfolded without a hitch, in meetings much like this one, while Cole stares out the sea-facing glass wall, wondering what’s become of his ambitions and his father’s legacy, a legacy that includes inventing a drug that revolutionized the treatment of HIV throughout the world.

  He’s killed the sound on his phone, so when the e-mail arrives, it sends a text alert to the lock screen.

  Once he’s sure Tucker isn’t watching him, he unlocks it.

  He doesn’t recognize the address. There’s a video attached, so he’s about to send it to his junk folder. Then he sees the subject line:

  Dream big or die in your sleep.

  This parody of one of his father’s favorite, and most obnoxious, personal expressions—Dream big or go home—is an inside joke. A very inside joke. And the man he shares thi
s joke with hasn’t contacted him in almost three years. Reading it now makes his stomach feel like he just swallowed a mouthful of ice in one gulp.

  He checks once again to make sure the sound’s off; then he downloads the video.

  At first he’s not clear what he’s watching. The contrast between the depressing piano music from the Sunatrex video and the frenzied images on his phone makes him seasick. Dust, tires, the outline of a speeding SUV. Whatever this is, it’s footage taken by a small camera, probably a GoPro, mounted to the front of a motorcycle.

  He thinks it’s a motorcycle. Because the other two vehicles in the frame are motorcycles; their combined headlights light the scene with startling clarity.

  When the SUV takes out one of them, sending the driver flying over its roof, Cole jumps in his seat. It draws Nora’s attention but not Tucker’s, thank God, and she gives him a sympathetic smile. The SUV careens into open desert. One of the other bikers pursues it ahead of the camera-mounted one. The SUV’s lost to darkness for a few seconds, then the bike’s headlight finds it just as it slams into a giant saguaro, an impact that crushes its nose, dents its hood.

  Then the door falls off.

  No, that’s not right, he realizes.

  The driver-side door seems to float off. Which is impossible. But that’s how it looks. The driver pushed the door directly out from the side of the SUV with one hand, as if it weighed nothing, then dropped it to the rock-strewn dirt.

  The guy driving the bike the camera’s mounted to enters the frame, the angle going suddenly still now that he’s parked. He pulls a sawed-off shotgun from his back, while his hulking, blond-haired friend approaches the driver with a pair of plastic flex-cuffs in hand.

  The driver is a woman, Cole sees, average-looking, with straw-colored hair and a face made youthful by curves. And even though her face betrays no fear, she is sinking to her knees. Without sound, it’s impossible to tell what the blond guy is shouting at her. But when he grabs her by the hair, Cole sees the woman’s expression for the first time.

  She’s not afraid.

  He’s so riveted by what happens next, he forgets he’s not alone. The stuttering groan that comes from him when the big biker gets a hole blown through his chest draws the attention of everyone in the conference room. Only then does he realize the video’s held him in such thrall he’s risen from his seat and turned his back on all of them.