“Pull over again, please, Dmitri.”
“Puke?”
“No. But please, pull over.”
He did, again tapping the meter with his index finger. This tap was a caution for me, not a warning.
I pulled the roll of bills from my pocket and peeled off a fifty that I lofted into the window in the Plexiglas panel between us. The meter read ten dollars and change. “For you,” I said. His thick eyebrows jumped up an inch—the international nonverbal symbol for “No shit?” I assured him, “Yes, for all your kindness.”
Dmitri smiled at me then, and bared his teeth. As he did, I realized he needed a month locked in a room with a talented dentist.
Once the cab was at a full stop in a no-parking zone on the uptown side of 58th Street, I used my cell phone to call the hotel and had the operator connect me with the concierge, a young woman who identified herself as Jennifer Morgan.
“How may I help you?” she asked.
I gave her my name and room number and said that I had a strange request and was hoping she could, indeed, help me.
“I’m happy to do everything within my power to assist you.”
“Could you arrange to have someone pack up my things? Everything in my room?”
“Of course. You’ll be checking out today?”
“Actually, no. I’d like to keep the room for two more nights, just as I had originally planned. I will continue to need access to the room.”
“But you would like us to pack up your things?”
“I said it was a strange request.”
“You did. I should have taken you at your word.” Her tone was pleasant, almost playful. On another day, in another time, I would have been sure to take her temperature to check to see if she was also being flirtatious. “Then you’ll be collecting your luggage at a later date?”
“No. I would like to arrange to have someone come by to pick it up in … ten minutes, if that’s possible. I’ll be sending a taxi to the 58th Street entrance, the driver’s name is Dmitri, the cab number is”—I opened the back door and got out so I could read the number on top of the cab—“2-K-1-7.”
The second I was back on the seat I saw that the same identifier was plastered all over the inside of the cab, too.
“Ten minutes?” Jennifer Morgan said, obviously, and appropriately, dubious about my deadline. “Will we be needing to do much packing? That doesn’t allow a lot of time.”
“No, I travel light and I don’t mind wrinkles. I apologize for the short notice.”
“I will be happy to arrange for your request, but … in order to protect your security, I will need to confirm your identity. I’m sure you understand.”
In response to the questions that followed, I rattled off my home address, the date of checkin, my phone number, and the last four digits of the credit card I’d used to guarantee payment. “Is that sufficient?” I asked.
“Actually,” she said, “do you mind confirming what you had for breakfast this morning?”
From a security point of view it was a very good question. I told her about my room-service meal, emphasizing the silver dish of strawberries. “Did I pass? Do you think you can help me out?” I voluntarily added that I’d asked for two newspapers to be delivered that morning instead of one.
“Indeed. It will be my pleasure. Your things will be at the 58th Street entrance in ten minutes,” she said.
“Ms. Morgan?”
“Sir?”
“Put a fifty-dollar gratuity for yourself on my bill. And twenty each for the bellman and the doorman.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I would like this request to remain our secret, Ms. Morgan. I assume no one else needs to know.”
“I can’t see why that would be a problem,” she said.
“I do appreciate your assistance.”
“It is my pleasure,” she said.
I closed the phone and faced Dmitri, who was waiting with great interest to find out what would happen next. I slid another bill, this one a hundred dollars, into the gap in the Plexiglas. “Would you mind running an errand for me?”
He narrowed his eyes and glanced at the advancing total on the meter. We were north of fifteen dollars by then. “The company,” he said.
“Of course. Absolutely,” I said. “The meter is separate. Keep it running. Keep it running.”
He said something in his native language that had the cadence of a blessing.
I sat in a deli on 58th and sipped at a bottle of sparkling water while Dmitri made his round-trip to the hotel, which was only a couple of blocks down the street. I was tempted to try to eat something bland. Some applesauce. Maybe some crackers. But my upper digestive tract felt raw, and I feared it was again going to erupt like Kilauea if I tried to send any more food its way.
Before I sat down in the deli, I had stepped into the shop next door and bought a cheap, packaged mobile phone with prepaid service. The Death Angels had proven that they were good, they were resourceful, and that they were obviously connected at the hip to the mobile-phone networks. I didn’t want to tempt fate by discovering too late that they were somehow tracking my movements from cell tower to cell tower via my “Ob-la-di” phone.
I pulled Lizzie’s phone from my pocket and placed it on the table in front of me, willing it to ring.
It didn’t.
Dmitri pulled up outside the deli after he’d been gone about fifteen minutes. He honked the horn and waved at me. When he caught my eye, he gave a big thumbs-up.
I left a five on the table, walked outside, and crawled into the backseat. Whatever adrenaline I’d been using for fuel was spent. I was dragging. On the far side of the seat I spotted my carry-on bag and the familiar small, black, beat-up suitcase that had accompanied me around the world a few times.
“Where to now, boss?” Dmitri asked me.
“Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn?”
He shook his head and showed me his rotten teeth again.
He hadn’t been expecting Brooklyn.
Me? I didn’t think that the Death Angels were going to be as easy to surprise as Dmitri was.
While we were stuck in Midtown traffic, I used my I-hoped-still-anonymous new phone to call Mary.
“It’s me,” I said. “I’d like to meet up with you. Near your cousin’s place. That okay with you?”
“Of course.”
“Cross streets?”
She told me, then added, “You don’t want the address?”
“No. I’m not sure that things are as private as I might like. Is there a market or a deli, or somewhere close by her place where we could meet?”
“Place called Julio’s. You can see it from that corner. Red awning. When?”
“Good, I’ll be there within half an hour.”
“Me, too,” she said.
“Wait.” I didn’t like my own plan. “Mary, I just changed my mind. I want you with the plane. Go keep an eye on it—do a real good check. Call your cousin. See if she can meet me at Julio’s. I’ll make it worth her time. Then she can take me to … meet up with you.”
“This is serious, isn’t it? Are you in trouble?”
“Serious? Yes. Trouble? It’s all relative.”
I could tell that Dmitri was sorry to see me go when he finally dropped me off in Brooklyn.
In addition to having learned the meaning of the word “puke,” he probably hadn’t had a more interesting couple of hours or a more lucrative shift since he started driving cabs in New York.
I shook his hand, said my good-bye, and thanked him with another hundred-dollar bill.
I’d actually had him leave me two blocks from the intersection that Mary had indicated was near where her cousin lived, and I’d walked the final distance over to find Julio’s, which turned out to be a bodega with a few old rusty steel tables out front where locals drank coffee and argued and gossiped.
I went inside and bought a bottle of Gatorade to sip to try to restore some electrolyte balance i
n my brain so my neurotransmitters had a prayer of firing when I needed them to. I carried the unnaturally blue potion outside and planted my butt at one of the battered tables where I listened to a spirited discussion about how the cops had handled a hit-and-run at the corner the night before.
Not well, was the consensus.
I heard the old BMW motorcycle long before I saw it coming. The percussion of the Bavarian motor rumbled in gorgeous bass echoes off the brick and stone buildings. Mary’s cousin rolled to the curb, spotted me—I’m certain I was the only stranger at Julio’s—and held a helmet out in my direction. The fact that she’d shown up on the bike was a surprise, even though it shouldn’t have been, and I knew I had a decision to make. My old, reliable suitcase wasn’t going to be making this trip to the airport; there was no room. I made my decision, smiled at Mary’s cousin, and climbed onto the back of the bike with my carry-on slung over my shoulder.
My old suitcase, full of all the clothes I wasn’t wearing, stood upright where I’d left it beside the table at Julio’s. Somebody in the neighborhood, I was sure, would put the stuff to good use.
I pulled the proffered helmet onto my head. The thing fit me like I was doing a modeling session for a designer of bobblehead dolls.
Mary’s cousin watched me, bemused, as I tried to tighten the chin strap. She said, “My brother had a big head.”
She’d said it affectionately. “Mary says he was a special guy,” I said.
“You know how he died? A friggin’ waste.”
Before I could think of something to say that would honor his sacrifice, she kicked the bike into gear, pulled out into traffic, and we were off, zooming down the streets of Brooklyn, doubling back the way I’d just come with Dmitri toward Teterboro in New Jersey. Despite the events of the day, I felt the familiar rush that comes along with the dawn of a new adventure. I had a big smile on my face and was more than prepared to end up with a few bugs crushed on my teeth.
FORTY-NINE
Once we were back in the skies over Colorado, I stepped up into the cockpit and asked Mary to wait until the last possible moment and then modify our flight plan to land at the Jefferson County Airport, across the metro area from our usual home field at Centennial.
Just a precaution.
At my request, she agreed to arrange for a private hangar and twenty-four-hour armed guards for the plane. I asked her if the plane was due for any work. She assured me that it had just undergone a major overhaul and that we were almost a hundred flight hours away from any required scheduled maintenance. If anything came up unexpectedly, she promised to monitor the repairs herself.
Thea and the girls were up in the mountains at our home in Ridgway, which was just as well. I was desperate to be with them every moment I could, but I recognized that prudence demanded I keep my distance. I didn’t know what the Death Angels would do next. I did know that I didn’t want Thea or Cal or Haven to be any part of it.
Giving in to my paranoia, I left the Prius where it was and called a taxi to take me down the turnpike to my friend’s flat in Boulder. On the way, I phoned the detectives I had spread out around the country looking for any sign of Adam. I wasn’t surprised that they had nothing new to report.
I climbed into bed in Boulder between seven and eight, rationalizing my premature fatigue by reminding myself that it was after nine back East. I was sound asleep when the phone rang. Not just asleep, but I was already deep into that REM fog that accompanies the most convoluted of dreams, and at first the sound of the ringing phone became just another stimulus for my brain to insert into the extremely flexible confines of my nocturnal musings. Soon enough, though, I stumbled reluctantly from dreamland to a vague state that left me quasi-awake, at best. I recognized that a phone was ringing, and that the phone was not in my dreams but was in the physical space where I had been—what? —sleeping.
I admit that I failed to recognize exactly where I was at that moment. My first guess was that I was in a hotel, and I grabbed for the ubiquitous bedside phone.
There wasn’t one.
My mind allowed me to consider the alternatives.
Cell phone?
I fumbled to find a switch and flicked on the bedside light. Three phones, not one, littered the surface of the bedside table.
I mumbled, “Shit,” and grabbed one, punched a key, and held it to my ear. “Hello,” I mumbled.
Nothing. I tried a second phone. The screen on that one was lit—a good sign. It read, “Out of area.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“I’m tired,” she said. “But I can’t sleep. Did I wake you?”
Lizzie.
My eyes found the digits on the alarm clock by the bed.
I decided I was in Boulder. Eight forty-seven in Colorado meant 10:47 on the East Coast.
“No,” I said. “I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”
“You’re cute,” she said. “Sometimes.”
I rolled over onto one side and propped myself on an elbow. “I don’t feel too cute. Quite a day we’ve had. Or a couple of days.”
“You could say that. You all right?”
“I’m confused, troubled, too, but … yeah, okay. You?” I said. I was trying to force myself to be alert, to put some defining parameters on the circumstances I was in, but I was still recovering from the depth of my slumber and the edges of my reality were more than a little blurry.
“Things have become more complicated than I’d like,” she said. “But … life is like that sometimes.”
“Tell me about it.” I laughed.
Her voice turned serious. “I have some advice for you.”
“I’m all ears.”
“No, you’re not. You like to think you are, but you’re not all ears at all. From what I’ve seen, you’re mostly brain and penis, but since I’m an eternal optimist, I’m going to give you the advice anyway.”
I laughed. “Should I be insulted by what you just suggested?”
“Hardly,” she said. “And I didn’t really suggest anything. I just describe what I see. Truth be told, I suspect that the ratio between brain and penis is much more favorable for you than it is for most men.” Her voice had turned husky and I let it soothe me like an open palm rubbing lightly on the flesh of my back.
“Is that necessarily good? Are we talking big brain, small penis? Or vice versa?”
She laughed that time. Then she grew quiet.
I wanted her to keep talking. Her voice was like music to me. “Tell me,” I said, using yet another line that I’d co-opted from my shrink.
“Tell you what?” she asked, obviously inexperienced with the open-ended nature of the psychotherapy “tell me” prompt.
“Your advice.”
“You’re not at home, are you?” she asked.
“No, given the events of the last couple of days, it didn’t feel particularly prudent.”
“Hotel?”
“It’s not important.”
“You don’t want to tell me? That’s fine. But you’re right; it doesn’t matter. Something you should know about us: We wouldn’t fulfill our obligations to you in your house. That’s off-limits. You’re safe at home. Your family is safe there, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Unless you become homebound, of course. Then …”
“Of course. You promise?”
“I promise.”
I fought an urge—the instinct of an eight-year-old—to add, “Cross your heart and hope to die?” But it was the wrong thing to ask in so many ways. Instead, I tried something more mature, more rational. “Why?”
“Why what? Why are you safe there?” she said. “Or why should you trust me?’
“Both.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you any of this, but think about it. Initially, clients routinely express their desires that their homes not be violated to fulfill contracts. It’s understandable. We put a tremendous amount of care into developing the end-of-life strategies that we employ. Based on client quer
ies during enrollment, we’ve developed guidelines. Limits to what we’ll do to accomplish our goals. We don’t skimp on our resources there. Homes are inviolate.”
“Okay. Then why should I trust you?”
“I think I’ve proven myself to you.”
“That’s if I should trust you. Not why.”
“Nice,” she said.
It was a compliment. I said, “Thank you. Now please tell me why.”
“Why?” she mused, more to herself than me. “Maybe you touch something deep inside me. Maybe you’re a note in the melody to my favorite song. Maybe … because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Maybe?”
“Best I can do on short notice. I’ll get back to you when I have a better answer.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“Something else. What you did today with your plane? Changing airports, moving it around? New hangar? All that security you’re paying for?”
“Yeah?”
“Not necessary. And even if it was necessary, it wouldn’t be sufficient. You couldn’t hide a Gulfstream from the group, not in a million years. The company is way too resourceful for that. Fact is, nobody in the organization is going to bring your plane down. The group tends not to sacrifice any assets that are more valuable than a car. Your plane is safe.”
“Client relations, once again?”
“Partially. Client satisfaction is the heart of our business. But bringing down a multimillion-dollar plane isn’t necessary to do our work, and would inevitably involve investigative agencies like the NTSB, or the FAA—these days, maybe even the clowns at Homeland Security—that no one is eager to have curious about our endeavors. Our clients would rightfully balk at the waste and the unnecessary risk that might be posed to their families and colleagues if we started bringing down aircraft. The bottom line is that people don’t sign up with us in order to have their most valuable assets plundered. They sign up for peace of mind that they won’t have to spend the end of their lives with physical or mental limitations that they are unwilling to tolerate.”
I thought she sounded like a spokesperson on an infomercial.
“What if I drove a Maybach, or a Ferrari?” I said, trying to be funny. “Those are expensive cars. Trashing something like that would be a travesty.”
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