Kill Me

by Stephen White

  The other man—he was tall and thin and had wireless glasses and a prominent square jaw—stood by the window looking out at the river. His feet were roughly shoulder-width apart. He held his right wrist with his left hand behind his back.

  He struck me as a guy who wanted to be seen as a serene, patient man with an edge. But I suspected that his demeanor was covering a nascent explosiveness. The legs-apart stance told me he was maybe ex-military or ex–law enforcement.

  He also gave off a vibe that he wasn’t expecting the other guy to find anything during his search.

  I spent most of the next minute watching the first man make his rounds through the apartment as he paced down the hallway, and into the guest bedroom, master bedroom, master bath, and closet.

  One of the three monitors in front of me carried a fixed shot of the living room, and one carried a fixed shot of the master bedroom. The third, however, presented the output of a more sophisticated setup; the image automatically followed the man walking through the apartment and changed its view as he moved from place to place. I guessed that motion detectors were sensing his progress through Lizzie’s flat and signaling specific cameras to pick up his progress. After a quick search of the apartment he marched back into the living room, stopping a half dozen feet from the other man, who continued to gaze out toward the river.

  The man who had been searching said, “Not here.”

  “Go back out and check the fire stairs,” the boss man said, confirming my suspicion that he was in charge. “First go all the way up to the roof, then all the way back down to the basement. I want to hear from you every three minutes. And make sure none of the fire doors leading to any floor are blocked open.”

  “How could—”

  “I don’t know. That’s one of the things we need to figure out, right? But first? We need to complete our search. Go.”

  After the other man was out the door of the apartment, the boss man went to the kitchen and poked around in Lizzie’s refrigerator. Unfolded some white deli paper. Wasn’t pleased with what he found sliced inside.

  Looked like cheese to me. Muenster or jack. But the camera resolution wasn’t great. It could have been smoked turkey.

  My eyes followed him as he reached in and grabbed the organic raspberries Lizzie had bought the night before. He flicked open the box and scanned the contents carefully. Apparently convinced of the berries’ freshness, he pulled a sheet off a roll of paper towels, stepped back out of the kitchen, and resumed his position at the windows in the living room. He began popping the berries into his mouth one by one, as though he was eating popcorn at the movies.

  FORTY-SIX

  The man ate about half the raspberries before he set the box on the tea table by the chaise and wiped his fingertips with the paper towel. He folded the towel into thirds as though he was preparing a letter to slide into an envelope, and began a casual stroll through Lizzie’s flat. Unlike his compatriot, this guy wasn’t searching for anything specific.

  He was merely intent on seeing whatever was there to see.

  Using the folded paper towel as insulation, he pulled a few titles—I thought at random, but there was no way to be certain—off the bookshelves behind Lizzie’s desk, flipped them open, allowing the pages to fan from end to beginning, and then left the books in a haphazard pile on top of the lower cabinets. Those credenzas interested him, as they had me, and he felt around in obvious places for a release that would prove that the flat panels were indeed doors.

  He couldn’t get them to open, either.

  I kept waiting for him to lift something heavy to use as a hammer to obliterate the panels and reveal their secrets. He didn’t.

  The cabinets, if they were cabinets, retained their mysteries.

  The spare bedroom interested him more than I thought it should have. He stood dead center in the room and slowly rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, almost as though he couldn’t believe that the room held nothing more than some out-of-season clothes and a couple of discarded chairs.

  Lizzie’s bedroom received even more of his attention. He sat on the edge of her bed as he rifled through the single drawer on the bedside chest. He examined a box of condoms with surprising curiosity, almost as though he’d never seen one before. He read the label on an amber bottle of prescription drugs, and took off the top to examine the contents. He dropped one of the tablets into the pocket of his shirt before he shut the drawer.

  He lifted one of her bed pillows to his face and inhaled its scent. There was nothing at all sensual or prurient in the act; he seemed more like a bloodhound filing the aroma for future reference.

  He wasn’t wasting any time; his entire perusal of the master bathroom took less than a minute.

  Next he came into the closet.

  I held my breath. He’d stopped in front of the tall drawer unit deliberately, as though it had been his destination all along. I thought he seemed to be staring right into the lens of the camera, which was obviously built somewhere into the drawer unit behind which I was hiding. It felt as though he was looking right into my eyes.

  Does he know about this space? Does he know about the cameras? Does he know I’m back here? Did Lizzie—

  A squeal filled my headphones, and I almost yelped.

  The man grabbed at his hip and then flipped open his phone in a smooth, practiced motion. He held it in front of his face like a walkie-talkie. He hissed, “I said every three minutes.”

  “Sorry, I lost track of—”

  “I don’t care. When I say three, I don’t mean five. Did you find anything? Where are you?”

  “Nothing on the way up to the roof. I’m on my way back down, passing the doors on five. I’ll be in the basement soon.”

  “Call me when you get there.” He closed the phone and stuck it back into its holster.

  He began to rifle through the drawers. The angle of the lens prevented me from seeing where his attention was focused. After he was done with the drawers, he turned and began to touch Lizzie’s hanging clothes, patting them, squeezing them. I thought he was exceedingly gentle with the garments, as though he was a lover lamenting the loss of something he feared he would never see again.

  Was he her lover? I wondered. I tried to imagine them together, but I couldn’t see it.

  I told myself it didn’t matter.

  Occasionally, he would pull a sleeve of a shirt or sweater toward his face, adding some new variation of Lizzie’s scent to that olfactory library in some primitive part of his memory.

  The squeal from his phone shocked my ears all over again.

  He grabbed the phone from his hip, stepped from the closet, and said, “Yeah.” With the phone in front of his face, he marched across the bedroom and down the parquet hall.

  “Nothing. You want me to come back up and start to knock on doors on her floor? See if the neighbors saw anything?”

  “No point in going that route. There’re too many units in the building. Wait for me in the lobby. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  I exhaled. Thank God, he’s leaving.

  He stepped toward the door, but instead of exiting the apartment, he spun and retraced his steps down the hall, across the master bedroom, and back into the adjacent bathroom. He stared for a few seconds before he opened the medicine cabinet—even though the camera had him in profile, I could tell that he was frowning at the contents—and then he pulled open the fluted-glass doors of a tall narrow cupboard. Linens. Toilet paper. Tissues. A filigreed silver tray of bottles and lotions and creams. Nothing remarkable that I could recognize. He closed the doors gently, poked his head into the shower stall, and then he backed out of the room.

  Immediately, he came back into the closet.

  This time he was looking for something specific.

  Something that he thought should have been someplace in the bathroom, but wasn’t. Something he’d expected to find in the apartment that he hadn’t found.

  What?

  He reopened the closet drawers. Every on
e of them. I couldn’t see him feel around inside the drawers but I could feel him feeling around inside the drawers. He slammed the last one shut.

  He kicked it with his foot.

  I’d been right. The guy was tightly wound. Only a small frustration away from explosion.

  It was clear that he still hadn’t found what he’d thought he should find.

  He marched back to the kitchen and methodically began to open all the cabinets and drawers. He stared into each space for a few seconds before he shut the door or drawer and moved on to the next.

  Once again, it didn’t appear that he discovered what he was looking for.

  He left the folded paper towel on the kitchen counter.

  Within seconds he was gone from the apartment. He didn’t bother to relock the dead bolt, which meant he didn’t care if Lizzie knew that someone had been there.

  Given the unique way he’d folded the paper towel, I considered the possibility that the tri-fold was a personal signature, and that he was leaving Lizzie an unmistakable message that he had been there.

  My knees were weak. Would he come back?

  I didn’t know.

  But I didn’t dare move.

  What I suspected he’d been looking for in the master bathroom and the closet and the kitchen was surrounding me in my cubby.

  The tiny space where I was hiding—the open area was no more than three feet square—was lined with narrow shelves on two sides. Melamine, I thought. Antiseptically white and unadorned.

  The closet within a closet was a hidden pantry, really.

  A tiny refrigerator, smaller even than a dorm fridge, was built in below the shelves on the right side.

  The shelves—all of them except for the one that supported the surveillance monitors and related electronics—were lined with medical supplies, medical journals, medical textbooks, and vertical files of medical records.

  An IV pole took up half the floor space. Its heavy rolling base was what I’d kicked as I squeezed into the space. The attached pumps and infusers intruded into the hiding place’s volume, forcing me to stand back against the wall.

  On the shelves were vials of drugs, bottles of pills. Racks of files. Dozens of texts. A stack of journals.

  Sealed packages of syringes, needles, tubing, connectors, gauze, alcohol pads, bandages.

  On the bottom shelf opposite the refrigerator was a monitor for pulse, respiration, oxygen saturation. Other things, too. An automated blood pressure cuff sat beside the monitor.

  The smells were familiar. The sights were familiar. Even the labels on some of the drugs were familiar.

  I lifted the top file from the stack of the medical records—there were maybe five files total—and I began to read.

  The names of the patients on the file tabs were all different.

  None of the first names were Lizzie, or any of its obvious variations.

  But each of the patients was a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried female.

  With breast cancer.

  I came to the reluctant conclusion that Lizzie had directed me to hide from the Death Angels in her tiny, secret, nursing station in her own very private cancer treatment clinic.

  I suspected that the only patient being treated in the clinic was Lizzie.

  I also suspected that she was the clinic’s only physician.

  Why was it all so secret?

  I had a guess.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  While I was waiting to see if the two guys would return, the phone rang. Not my phone. No Ob-la-di .

  Her phone. I pulled it out of my pocket as fast as I could. This time the caller ID didn’t read “Pay Phone.” It read “Out of Area.” I flipped the phone open and lifted it to my ear. “Lizzie?”

  “Don’t say my name.”

  I almost replied It’s not your name. Didn’t. I said, “What do they want? Do these guys want to talk to me? Do they want to kill me? What?”

  She didn’t answer me.

  “What?” I demanded.

  She said, “They’re gone for now; but they’ll be back. Look at your watch. What time do you have? Exactly. Be precise.”

  “One-twelve.”

  “Take the stairs down to the first floor. Wait there, in the fire staircase, and time your entrance into the lobby for exactly one-twenty. Go immediately out the service door, not the front door. Head away from Broadway, which means turn right. Do you have all that?”

  “Sure. This stuff? Here in the closet? What the hell is—”

  She hung up on me.

  Again.

  Damn.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  My exit, timed according to Lizzie’s instructions, was anticlimactic.

  At the appointed minute I entered an empty lobby—I could see Gaston outside on the sidewalk arguing with a homeless man who seemed to be protecting a shopping cart full of rusted rebar. The reason someone would be so possessive of a shopping cart of used rebar escaped me. Figuring it was part of some ruse Lizzie had arranged on the fly, I hustled out the service entrance. Within a minute I was in the backseat of a yellow New York taxicab that was pointed uptown.

  “Where?” the driver said. He was a gruff, burly guy with about three days’ growth of whiskers and three decades’ growth of ear hair. His voice was accented with the weight of a few generations of eastern European history.

  “Just keep going for now, thanks.”

  Right after we passed the near corner at 89th Street I told him I’d made up my mind and I wanted to go to Midtown. He responded by making an instantaneous hard right turn from the center lane in the middle of the intersection, cutting a perpendicular swath onto 90th toward Central Park West. During the maneuver, a bus bumper passed about eighteen inches from my nose.

  Didn’t even raise my pulse.

  “Where we go in Midtown?” he said.

  I hadn’t decided where. I said, “I’m thinking.”

  He looked at me in the rearview mirror and tapped the meter, letting me know that my cogitation was going to cost me money.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  After we’d covered a few blocks, I’d begun feeling the familiar rumblings that told me that the consequences of the pressure from my bulging artery on some nerve were once again taking a toll on my upper GI tract. I asked him if he would please pull over to the curb for a moment.

  “Here? Now? Central Park West? No! No stop,” he said, once again finding my face in the mirror, the whole time gesticulating with his right hand. I stared right back at him—he was a man whose face had seen many years in the sun, had endured the ravages of the poisons from tens of thousands of cigarettes, and clearly showed the capillary corrosion of having consumed enough vodka to fill a Jacuzzi. The picture on his taxi license made him look at least ten years older than he appeared in person. And he didn’t appear to be any fountain of youth in person.

  The taxi license revealed that his name was Dmitri. His last name was consonant-rich, vowel-light and, to my tongue, unpronounceable.

  In as level a tone as I could muster in the circumstances, I said, “Then I’m afraid I will puke in your cab.”

  “What ‘puke’? What?” he replied.

  I think he thought I was threatening him.

  “Vomit,” I said. This time, when I caught his gaze in the rearview mirror, I pantomimed sticking my index finger down my throat. “I think … I am about to … throw up.”

  Simply saying it, of course, almost precipitated it.

  Dmitri hit the brakes, yanked the wheel to the left, and began to pull over to the curb that was directly opposite the whimsical planetarium on the west side of Central Park. As I swallowed down vomit and waited for the car to come to a stop I found myself staring out the side window at a big sign that read THE FREDERICK PHINEAS AND SANDRA PRIEST ROSE CENTER FOR EARTH AND SPACE.

  Even before the cab had come to a complete halt, I threw open the back door, leaned my head out into that space, above that earth, and emptied the entire contents of my stomach into a foul U
pper West Side gutter. Behind us a symphony of honking horns and shouted profanities accompanied my energetic retching.

  Two teenage girls wearing the white blouses and pleated skirts of some private school were walking past the cab on the sidewalk. Between fierce spasms, I watched their faces as they took a hasty, scornful look at me. One of them said, “That is too gross! Yuck. Look at him. No! Don’t!”

  Dmitri leaned out of the window and flipped them off with both hands. He yelled at them, “He puke,” as though that alone should have been enough for the girls to excuse me.

  My cabdriver was defending my honor. The act felt kind and generous.

  “Okay? We go now?” he said once I was again upright in the backseat. “No more puke?”

  “Yes, we go now. Thank you for stopping. I really appreciate it. Thanks. I hope no more puke.” I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about the no-more-puke part, but I would have placed a sizeable bet that anything that came out of my mouth next would come from some organ farther down the alimentary canal than my stomach.

  I could feel the disconcerting presence of something grainy lining the inside of my mouth. The textural sensation was of old coffee grounds; the taste was as though I’d just gargled a cocktail of vinegar, puppy pee, gin, and Taster’s Choice.

  “Where we go?” Dmitri asked, his voice tinged with compassion for my condition, whatever it was.

  “Four Seasons.”

  “Restaurant? You eat? You sure? I don’t think good idea.” His tone actually conveyed the reality that he thought it was a psychotic idea.

  “No, not the restaurant. The hotel. On 57th. Or 58th. Whatever.”

  “You sleep. I think better idea,” Dmitri said.

  I sat back against the seat and took a slow deep breath. What the hell, I wondered, is going on?

  “You from Russia?” I asked.

  “Ukraine,” he said. “Kiev.” He smiled with pride. At being from Kiev, or not being from Russia, I couldn’t tell.

  Dmitri picked up Broadway at Columbus Circle in order to head over to the hotel near Park Avenue.

  That’s where I realized that I was being rash with my destination decision.