by Saul Black
“Thank you,” Katherine said.
38
There was, of course, a next package. It arrived for Valerie two days later. UPS overnight, with a sender name and address, both of which, naturally, proved bogus. They barely even bothered to check. It was sent from a San Diego office, paid for with—again, zero surprise—cash. The note was as follows:
Dear Valerie,
I must offer you my congratulations. Cassandra is, I trust, well? We had very little conversation, but it was more than enough for me to understand how much faith she has in your resolve. I quote: “My sister is going to kill you.” Quite an utterance from a woman facing death. I was impressed—but not surprised. Your credentials are already established. In any case, I salute you, and, implicitly of course, your code-breaking specialist(s).
You must have been very disappointed to miss me at the cabin. If we ever meet, remind me to tell you how that happened. (I see us sharing a bottle of Thorevilos—2006 was a good year—by a log fire with snow falling outside. And no, don’t bother to add “wine specialist” to the Bureau’s floundering profile; it won’t help.)
Cassandra’s two uniformed minders made it clear you’d alerted her, thus obviating my preferred method of fair warning by good old U.S. mail, and naturally this makes plain to me that the nonrandom nature of my selection is no longer a mystery to you. Again, my congratulations. Was it the globe amaranth? I was of two minds about that, but a flower in the hair is irresistible to an old Led Zeppelin fan like me. Like all monsters I am occasionally at the mercy of both whim and sentimentality. And please, have no fear for dear Mrs. Sorenson. I promise you she is entirely safe.
So much for the story so far. We must, as the British say, crack on. (An interesting idiom, since despite etymologists’ best efforts no clear derivation is available. Naturally, my own preference is for the theory that it refers to the “crack” of a whip, used to drive work forward ever since its invention.) To that end, I enclose your next set of teasers. No name this time, since you’ve upped your game. Location only.
As you know by now, I don’t move at a leisurely pace. Once again I say: days rather than weeks.
Good luck.
The enclosed five pages displayed the following:
1. A photograph of a crocodile basking on a rock
2. A reproduction of Venus and Mars, by Botticelli
3. A drawing of a woman’s face, her hands covering it
4. A picture of a postcard showing the Italian beach town of Terracina
5. Two more letter and number grids
“I have an idea,” Nick said to Valerie that night. It was after two A.M., and despite her best efforts he’d stirred and woken when she slipped into bed next to him.
“What’s that?” she said.
“We emigrate.”
“Okay. Where?”
“Polynesia.”
“Why Polynesia?”
“I think you’d suit a grass skirt. And the beaches are quiet.”
“We could set up a detective agency.”
“No. No work. That’s the whole point. I restore a boat incredibly slowly and you lie in a hammock slung between two palm trees.”
“And spear fish. I’d be good with a spear.”
“I can see that very clearly. Your passport in order?”
“I think so. When were you thinking of going?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Suits me.”
She was thinking of Katherine. Audibly, it seemed to her. You spent time with her and brought something of her away with you, as if she’d marked you with her scent.
Polynesia, Valerie thought. If only.
“We got another package,” she said.
“Same shit?”
“Same shit.”
Nick was silent for a few moments. He had turned on his side, his hand resting flat on Valerie’s midriff. “More work for Glass then,” he said. “She’ll miss all this when you get him.”
Promise me that when it’s over you’ll still come and see me, once a month, until they kill me.
“Yes,” Valerie said. “She will.”
No sleep again and a headache but it’s gone and now I feel GOOD.
He made me go over it too many times. He didn’t even kiss me when I walked in.
39
Nick had just arrived at the Bay Club for his Saturday squash match when his phone rang. Eugene calling.
“You better have a good excuse,” Nick said.
“Nick, Jesus, listen. I’m in deep shit.”
The tone startled Nick. Eugene wasn’t joking. “What’s up?” he said.
Eugene lowered his voice. “I can’t talk on the phone,” Eugene said. “There’s … Fuck. Can you meet me?”
“What the hell is the matter?”
“Please, Nick, I can’t discuss it over the phone. I only have a second. I just need you to … I just need your advice. I’m sorry, man, but there’s no one else I’d trust with this. They’re … I’m in a fucking tight spot here.”
Nick’s initial thought was that Eugene had fucked the wrong woman. Been rumbled by a jealous husband with old-fashioned reactions. But he now found himself thinking it wasn’t that. Money? It occurred to him that Eugene had just the personality to live beyond his means. Even his means. The car, the gear, the fancy restaurants. Nick had the sudden conviction that Eugene had been spending someone else’s money. He remembered the Don Lewis encounter at the club. He doesn’t seem the type to take bad news well.
“Are we talking nightclubs here?” he said.
“No, no, personal. Personal.”
Nick relaxed a little—though he wasn’t entirely convinced. Maybe it was domestic after all. Some crazy fuck who needed frightening off by the badge. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had asked him to apply the threat of the Law.
“Okay,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Pacific Heights. I’m staying at a friend’s. I’ll text you the address.”
Staying at a friend’s. Presumably because it wasn’t safe for him in his own home. As far as Nick knew, Eugene had an apartment over by Golden Gate Park, though Nick had never been there, nor had Eugene visited him at home. It wasn’t that kind of friendship. They met at the Bay Club, occasionally for a drink in the Haight, and that was it.
“I’m not going to get beaten up, am I?”
“Christ, no. It’s nothing like that. How soon can you get here?”
“Well, I guess thirty minutes,” Nick said. “I won’t be able to hang around. I’m due at my sister’s in a couple of hours.”
“I really appreciate this, Nick. I’ll explain everything—shit, I have to go. Texting the address now.”
The address on Washington Street turned out to be a white detached house with a faux colonial front and a black wrought-iron balcony that would have looked at home in the New Orleans French Quarter. It was midafternoon by the time Nick pulled up. Aquamarine summer sky with a few faint stratus clouds. Heat came up from the winking asphalt. The white building and short green lawn looked pristine. A large maple at its edge shaded the sidewalk. A driveway to the left led around to the back of the house.
Eugene appeared in the front doorway.
“Hey,” Nick said. “What the fuck, dude?”
“Come in,” Eugene said. “Christ, am I glad to see you.”
“You don’t look in imminent danger to me.”
“It’s complicated. Come on inside. I need a drink to get through this.”
Nick followed Eugene into a large hallway of red floor tiles and white walls hung with a few abstract canvases. Several doors led off, two open, the first showing a luxuriously furnished living room—carpet the color of Bahamian sand and an ivory leather couch, more paintings, wafer-thin TV—the second revealing an open-plan kitchen—high-gloss white everywhere, a state-of-the-art range, burnished copper pans hanging from a rack, and beyond the central island at least twenty feet to the huge French doors that opened onto a travertined pool patio and
more lawn beyond. The sunlit room smelled of lemony cleanliness.
“This place belong to a lady friend?” Nick asked.
“No, no, a colleague,” Eugene said, going to the fridge and taking out two bottles of Corona. He opened them and handed one to Nick.
“You carry a gun?” Eugene said.
“What?”
“I might need one.”
Nick rolled his eyes, exasperated. “Eugene,” he said. “Will you for God’s sake tell me what kind of trouble you’re in?”
“You don’t carry a gun? You’re a cop.”
“Christ, look, I own a gun—but I don’t take it to leave in a locker at the goddamned Bay Club. I just came from there. And believe me, if I had it with me right now, I wouldn’t let a lunatic like you anywhere near it.”
Eugene let out a deep breath. Nick could see he’d been holding tension. It occurred to him that he’d never seen Eugene looking anything other than upbeat. It was his standard mode, a kind of bouncy, bright, mischievous energy. Now he looked depressed. It was startling to see.
“Okay,” Eugene said. “Fuck. Wait here.”
“What?”
“There’s something I need to show you. I’ll just be a second.”
Nick sat down on one of the central island’s high stools. He was convinced, now, that Eugene was in money trouble. Loans. The mob. A debt to someone against whom you’d need a gun. Eugene’s life suddenly looked like a thin disguise over recklessness. Nick could so easily imagine him simply ignoring the cost of his excesses, hemorrhaging cash, borrowing more, digging himself deeper with every restaurant check or luxury dirty weekend, all the time with gaze averted from the silently escalating crisis of debt. And now it had reached critical mass. Now there was no ignoring it because it was refusing to ignore him.
You’re not going to believe this, Nick imagined telling Valerie later. Turns out Eugene’s bankrupt. Up to his eyeballs and contemplating a getaway to Mexico.
He took a sip of the Corona.
Then the Taser hit him in the back.
There was no thinking. Fifty thousand volts shut him down. Consciousness, yes, but with time sloughed away, the details of the white kitchen and the pool’s reflected sunlight frozen in a moment of infinite stillness, as if the barrier between him and his experience had gone. Pain fused everything.
He was on the floor, though he had no awareness of pitching forward. He could hear the Taser, a sound like a rattlesnake. In his peripheral vision the Corona bottle, smashed, in an expanding puddle of beer.
The pain stopped. Through the white light of its withdrawal he felt himself being flipped over. His brain began unscrambling itself. Eugene’s enemies had found him. The copper pans were vivid above him. His limbs were haywire. Eugene’s enemies had found him and now he, Nick, was just collateral damage. They wouldn’t even know he was a cop. Would it make a difference if they did? He wondered if Eugene was about to be executed. How many guys? Guns? Valerie had given him a hard time for not carrying a weapon. You’re Police, she’d said. You put people away. They get out. They don’t forget. It’s stupid to walk around without a gun. And here she was, being proved right. It occurred to Nick that this might be his death. He had nothing to bring to that except a rush of longing for Valerie, to see her, feel her, smell her, hear her voice just one more time before the plunge into darkness. There was this rush of longing, yes, but in some vague higher part of himself a feeling of gladness for having known and loved her, for having been given that gift. He surprised himself with this clarity. All of this and the strange sense that today—this day, from waking with her, showering, making breakfast, sorting through admin crap at home, then driving out to the Bay Club—had turned out to be the day that carried him to his death. Ordinary details stacked up to reach an extraordinary conclusion.
His vision cleared.
Eugene was standing over him, holding the Taser in one hand, something small and black in the other. It didn’t make sense. Nick opened his mouth to begin to frame some sort of question (though he was unsure what it was), but Eugene hit the trigger.
Again Nick went out of time. His eyes were open. Through the pain he watched Eugene raise the other thing he had in his hand. He recognized it, but in this newly unhinged world the word for it wouldn’t come. He just knew he had to close his eyes. But he couldn’t.
Then Eugene pressed the trigger on the Mace, and fire blotted out Nick’s vision.
The moments that followed were a maddening confusion. Pain came through his blindness in blows from something hard and cold and heavy, giant detonations in his shoulder, his wrists, the side of his knee—but with the pain the labored flashes of understanding: Eugene was doing this. Eugene was—
The air went out of him. Aside from this new agony the outraged admission that Eugene had kicked him, hard, in the balls. In training, the female officers had been told: kick a fucker in the balls—get it right—and that fucker isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, no matter what you’ve seen in the movies. Nick was aware of his own neural failures. He had (hadn’t he?) been trying to get to his knees, to grab Eugene, to throw his weight against him. But the reflexes, the intentions, the will—it all went nowhere. He was choking and blind and unstrung, swimming in useless adrenaline. It had happened so fast. How had it happened so fast?
He didn’t feel the final blow.
Just the briefest sensation of deafness—then all his lights went out.
40
“You still messing with that?” Valerie said to Will. He was looking at the trial footage again.
“I wasn’t,” he said. “I left it alone. But something’s niggling. Either that or I’m just running out of ways to kid myself we’re doing something useful. In fact, fuck it.” He shut down the video. “It’s probably just Alzheimer’s. Nothing from Bitch Eyes?”
The last package had been copied and sent to Katherine three days ago. Poor Agent Arden was back on babysitting duty at Red Ridge.
“Nope,” Valerie said. “Although according to Arden she’s putting in the hours.”
“I thought you were supposed to be off today?”
“There’s no off anymore.”
“By my reckoning you’ve done three weeks straight. You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m just saying—”
“He works, I work.”
Valerie’s phone rang. It was Nick’s sister, Serena.
“Hey, Serena.”
“Val, hi. Sorry to bother you, but have you talked to Nick today?”
Alert. Calm down. Alert.
“No,” Valerie said. “Wasn’t he coming out to see you guys?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t show. I’ve tried calling him, but it’s just voice mail. I wondered if he had to go in to work unexpectedly?”
“Let me call down there and check. Maybe he came in and I didn’t see him. Hold on a second.” Valerie switched to the internal phone and called Nick’s department. No. He wasn’t there, nor, as far as his colleagues were aware, had he been in all day. Valerie looked at her watch. It was almost six P.M. Nick had said he was playing squash with Eugene around noon and that he was planning on driving out to Danville to see Serena and the kids straight afterward. Say two hours total for squash. That’s two P.M. Forty-five minutes would be more than enough to get from the city to Serena’s. Two forty-five P.M. That’s more than three hours off radar.
But be calm. He doesn’t take men. Only women. And in any case it’s Nick. He can handle himself. It’s nothing. Could be anything. It’s nothing. It’s people connected to me. Doesn’t get closer than Nick.
“He’s probably just left his phone somewhere,” Valerie said.
Serena was quiet for a moment. The silence between them said all the things they weren’t saying.
“It’s just … You know…?” Serena said. “With what’s going on.”
Serena, naturally, was on the list of people to whom they’d had to give a heads-up. One of the reasons Nick had planned
to go and see her was because he couldn’t resist checking on her.
“Yeah, I know,” Valerie said. She could feel Serena trying to stop her mind working down the dark ways. “But our guy’s not targeting men.”
“Well, let me know if you get hold of him, would you?” Serena said.
“Absolutely,” Valerie said. “I’ll be going by the apartment in a while. I’ll stop in and see if he’s left his phone. I’ll check back with you either way. Call me if he shows up.”
Will had overheard. He and Valerie looked at each other when she’d hung up the phone.
“We being paranoid?” he said.
Valerie didn’t answer right away. It was, on the one hand, obviously paranoia. Katherine and the Man in the Mask had never taken a male victim. It was impossible to think of Nick as a victim. It was Nick, for fuck’s sake. But on the other hand … On the other hand, everything.
“Probably,” Valerie said. “You got a number for whatsisname? Eugene?”
Will called it. Waited. Voice mail. “Hey, Eugene, it’s Will. Trying to track down Nick. Did you guys play today? Call me back as soon as you pick this up, will you?”
Valerie called the Bay Club. Nick had signed in just after noon. The receptionist working during the day had already left, but her replacement told Valerie that as far as the record showed Eugene Trent had not signed in. In fact Nick had let them know at the desk that he and Eugene wouldn’t be needing their two-hour slot after all.
Valerie was slightly reassured. If Eugene hadn’t shown up for their game that meant Nick’s planned day had changed. Some logistics had fouled up. Innocently.
Not so innocently, Nick could have been in an accident. Guiltily, Valerie thought of the standard Police response to someone off the grid for three hours. Three hours, you weren’t missing. You were just doing something no one knew about. But this wasn’t the standard context. Her entire life wasn’t the standard context.
“I’m going to the apartment,” Valerie said, getting to her feet. “If his phone’s not there, we start checking the hospitals.”