I glanced at each: an elderly woman wearing a straw hat, a young man with tortoise-shell glasses, a young woman with heavy eyeliner staring down at her phone, and a man in a business suit, also staring down at his phone.
The coast was clear.
I stepped closer to Tracy, and after a second on her heels, I whipped the straw up to my lips, aimed it at her shoulder, and blew.
She stumbled and swayed.
I swooped in as she was falling.
But I screwed up.
And I knew it as soon as I caught her in my arms. Because I immediately felt that she wasn’t yet a bag of bones crumpling to the ground. She was still fighting the wooziness—and though that fight lasted but a second, during that second, she turned her head slightly and looked me in the eye.
There was no doubt she’d seen my face.
Then her eyes fluttered and closed, and she went limp, collapsing completely into my arms.
I held her tightly, but instead of going into my act—calling her by her name, advertising that she was a diabetic, and setting myself up as her boyfriend—I was berating myself. Why hadn’t I waited just a fraction of a second longer to catch her? What if she remembered seeing my face? Abel had said she wouldn’t remember anything—if I executed the assignment “properly.”
Had I?
It seemed not.
“Is she okay?” someone asked.
“She’s a diabetic,” I answered, getting on with my spiel before it was too late.
“Do you need any help?” the same voice asked.
I looked up to see who was so concerned. It was the young man with the tortoise-shell glasses.
“I think I can manage,” I said. “This has happened before. Her blood sugar just dropped all of a sudden.” I placed one of my arms under Tracy’s legs, then lifted her up.
“Do you want me to call 911?” the man in the business suit chimed in.
“I’m going to take her to the emergency room.” I began to walk away with Tracy in my arms.
“Do you want me to drive you?” That question came from the young woman with the heavy eyeliner. She was standing among the other bystanders, whose number had now grown to eight or nine.
“Thanks, but our car is right here,” I said, and stepped off the sidewalk onto the blacktop. I wanted to leave parting words to strengthen my poor performance, so I added, “She’ll be fine.”
That was stupid. I should’ve picked a line that played into her diabetes. That would have been more convincing.
Someone behind me shouted, “Wait!”
I didn’t wait.
“Wait!” the voice said again, this time more insistent and closer. The owner of the voice was following me.
I instinctually picked up my pace. Sweat pitted under my arms and across my brow. I felt like a criminal on the run. I was a criminal on the run.
And when the owner of the voice caught up to me—it turned out to be the woman with the heavy eyeliner—I was no longer hyperaware. Instead, I was nothing but a shaky, sweaty, panicky mess.
I turned to the woman, not sure what I was going to say—and thinking that I should just give up and cut my losses—when she suddenly thrust a purse at me.
“You forgot her purse,” she said.
My mouth hung agape for a full second before I responded, “Oh, thank you. You’re a lifesaver.”
I reached out with the arm that was under Tracy’s legs, and the woman placed the purse in my hand.
“Are you sure you don’t need any help?” she said.
“I’m okay. The hospital is just three minutes away. We’ve been there before. They know us.”
“Good luck,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Without looking back, I hurried to my car, opened the passenger door, dropped the purse inside, then buckled Tracy in. After closing the door, I was tempted to glance back to see if the woman with the heavy eyeliner was still waiting in the wings, wanting to help, but I forced myself not to.
Instead, I ran over to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and pulled out. As I turned onto Pass Avenue, I again thought about the poor job I’d done.
But after a few minutes on the road, I felt a surge of energy, a surge of exhilaration, and I saw the flip side: I was driving away with the target.
I had completed my first alien abduction.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was bizarre driving through the familiar Valley streets with an unconscious woman in my passenger seat. No—“bizarre” was putting it too mildly. Using the word “bizarre” made it more palatable. It was downright creepy, and I didn’t like it. With Tracy out cold, drugged, just a foot away from me, I felt like a low-life criminal. And I was, wasn’t I?
There was nothing redeeming about kidnapping an innocent stranger, even if it was an alien abduction. Just because an alien was the ringleader didn’t make it some kind of highbrow mission.
As I made my way down Ventura toward Coldwater, I kept glancing around, in all directions and into the rearview mirror, on the lookout for police cruisers. And when I stopped at traffic lights, I surreptitiously checked out the other drivers around me, gauging whether they were peeking into my car at Tracy. Some did peek in, but I could tell by their blasé reactions that if anything registered at all, it was that a woman was sleeping in the passenger seat. I now understood why Ben could drive around in public with an unconscious woman riding shotgun next to him. Other drivers weren’t bothered in the least by what they saw.
But I was.
When I glanced over at Tracy and saw her face, which was turned toward me, I saw an innocent victim, one that I’d preyed upon. As if I were a psychopath. She was serene, and her breathing was calm and shallow. I had complete power over this sleeping beauty. But I didn’t want that power—at all.
Now that the adrenaline rush of the abduction had mellowed a bit, the magnitude of the crime itself was looming larger in my thoughts. Before it could paralyze me, I dealt with it: I escorted the magnitude of my crime to the back of my mind, to the place where I’d locked up my guilt over Ben’s death and the anguish I’d felt when I first saw Sleeping Beauty crossing Pass Avenue. That place in the back of my mind—which I now thought of as a prison cell—was fast becoming crowded.
Then another worry hit me: I was driving through Studio City, my home base, and that meant I was increasing the odds of a neighbor spotting me. A neighbor who’d wonder why I was driving around with a young woman sleeping in my passenger seat.
What if Jenny saw me?
I should have taken Barham to the 101 and taken the 101 straight to Coldwater.
Again—too late now.
Next time, I’d map out my drive back to Abel’s.
And next time, I wouldn’t jump in so soon to catch the target before she tumbled to the ground.
And I wouldn’t use the boyfriend cover story—a cover story that wouldn’t have stood up if one of the bystanders had known Tracy.
I’d made a lot of stupid choices, and I was tempted to continue to list them, berating myself along the way. But instead I forced myself to accept that this was on-the-job training, and the best I could do was apply the lessons learned tonight to the next abduction.
But it wouldn’t be that easy, would it?
The next assignment might have requirements that were totally different from this one. Only after I’d done a number of assignments would I start to learn how to better execute them. Of course, that assumed that there’d be more assignments. After my weak performance tonight, that wasn’t guaranteed.
As I drove up Coldwater, closing in on Abel’s house, my thoughts shifted from abducting targets to returning them. I knew it took Abel fifteen minutes to do whatever it was he did to the targets—that was how long Ben had been at the house with his target—so in less than thirty minutes I’d be heading back down Coldwater. With Tracy. To return her.
Return her to where?
I didn’t get to see where Ben had returned his target. Had he released
her back on Tujunga, where he’d abducted her? Was the “return” part of the assignment similar to releasing an animal back into the wild? Like I’d seen on the Discovery Channel, where animals were tranquilized, captured, and tagged?
I glanced over at Sleeping Beauty. To Abel, Tracy was an animal—all humans were. But what did he do with these animals during those fifteen minutes?
I turned onto Mulholland and continued to play out my nature analogy: What did we do with our animals after we captured them and before we returned them to the wild? We studied them, or experimented on them, to learn more about them. Or to learn more about us.
My gut told me that Abel wasn’t capturing targets to learn more about them, or to learn more about his own alien species. He was capturing them for some other purpose. Why was my gut telling me this? Because of my earlier insight: that Abel was operating as if he was running a criminal enterprise.
I wound down the secluded Beverly Hills hillside and turned onto the dead-end street of grand houses. Again, I noticed how the houses showed off Hollywood’s golden age even under the pale moonlight. Then, for the first time, I wondered if anyone in those houses suspected that one of their neighbors was an extraterrestrial. I doubted it. It was too absurd to even consider. Abel’s neighbors probably thought that the home at the end of the lane was owned by a wealthy eccentric who treasured his privacy.
I pulled up to the wrought-iron gate, and it slid open as if Abel had been expecting me. I drove up the driveway, and as I approached the house, the garage door started to open. I didn’t need to be told that I was supposed to pull into the garage.
Once inside, I stayed in my car until the garage door closed—I didn’t need to be told that either. I thought I might find Ben’s BMW in the garage, but the four-car garage was empty. My guess was that Abel had liquefied the car just as he’d liquefied Ben.
The interior door to the house was open. It was an invitation to enter—with the target.
I got out of the car, walked around to the passenger side, and unbuckled Tracy. I picked her up and cradled her in my arms, but when I saw her tranquil, innocent face up close again—Sleeping Beauty—I had to quickly look away. I didn’t want the magnitude of my crime to escape from its prison cell in the back of mind.
I carried Sleeping Beauty through the open door, which led to the same hallway I’d walked down last night from the other end—the layman’s end, as compared to the employees’ end, which was now my territory. For a second, I wished I had remained a layman, that I’d never followed Ben up into the hills. But if I hadn’t followed him, I wouldn’t be able to give Jenny and Jake and Hannah everything they deserved.
All the doors along the hallway were shut, except one. But tonight the open door wasn’t the door to Abel’s office. It was a door leading into another room—a room where I was sure I was to deliver the illegal bounty.
I carried Tracy inside and found Abel waiting for me. He was standing next to the only stick of furniture in the room: a loveseat. If that’s not ironic, I thought, I don’t know what is. Because whatever was going to happen here, I was certain it didn’t have anything to do with love.
I placed Tracy on the loveseat. She drooped sideways onto the armrest, so I adjusted her—my feeble attempt to make her comfortable, pathetic amends for committing a terrible crime against her.
Abel stepped forward as if to say, I can take over from here.
I didn’t look him up and down, though I desperately wanted to. He was no longer cloaked in the veil of darkness behind his desk. Still, without gawking at him, I took in the basics:
His body was small, maybe four and half feet tall, brown, leathery, and with no distinguishing marks. He was basically humanoid: two legs, two arms, and two hands, one of which was clutching a small black square.
Taking in his entire body didn’t change the fact that his all-seeing eye was his dominant feature. He was still the alien Cyclops. And if human eyes were the windows to the soul, the alien’s eye was a window whose blind was drawn. The large gleaming oval was a tranquil black sea, its surface completely opaque.
“Wait in the living room,” Abel said. “It’ll be ten minutes.” The alien’s electronic voice came from the black square he clutched in his spindly fingers.
As I headed toward the door, I took a closer look at the room. I hoped to gather more information about what Abel was planning to do. But the room gave me no hints. Except for the loveseat, there was absolutely nothing else here.
In the living room, I sat down on the couch. The patio door was open again, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. Did the alien like the fresh breeze? Tonight the breeze was light, and I wished it was stronger, much stronger—strong enough to cleanse me of my crime.
Without much to look at inside, I stared at the fountain outside. The base of the fountain had no water in it, as if it hadn’t been working for a while. And the gray stone sculpture that rose from the base was so old and worn that, in the moonlight, it looked almost metallic. I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t a Greek god or goddess, or a lion or bear, or intertwined lovers. It was shaped like an egg or a pinecone, and I wondered whether in the thirties, when this house was built, it was chic to have a fountain that was more abstract.
A sudden gust of wind blew through the woods and into the house, and with it my attention was brought back to the crime—specifically, to the part of the crime I still had to execute: releasing my target back into the wild. Where would I take her? Wouldn’t it have to be a place she’d recognize instantly when she came to? But even if that was the case, wouldn’t she follow up on why she’d suddenly passed out?
Regardless, I needed to come up with a plan, one where she wouldn’t see my face for the second time.
I starting going over the possibilities, but by the time Abel walked into the living room, I hadn’t yet decided on a course of action.
“You can return the target now,” he said.
I stood up, at his beck and call. “How much time do I have before the tranquilizer wears off?”
Abel handed me a tin box, exactly like the one that held the tranquilizer pellets.
“Place one of these capsules in her mouth,” he said. “She’ll come to one minute later.”
I pocketed the box.
“How did it go when you picked her up?” he asked. His question caught me by surprise. I had expected him to dismiss me.
“Good,” I said.
“No problems?”
“No, not really.”
“Not really? Does that mean yes, there were problems, or no, there weren’t any? I can help with problems.”
If Abel had had a regular voice, instead of the monotone synthetic simulation, I might’ve been able to tell from his tone whether he was genuinely willing to help or not. But as it stood, it was likely that by “help,” Abel meant that he’d liquefy me to make the problem go away.
“It went well,” I said.
“Good, because I gave you an easy target to start out with.”
“Easy?” That worried me.
“I weigh the benefits against the risks for each target. If a target is more valuable, then it’s worth more risk. Isn’t that how you operate?”
“Yes.” But that was a lie. I wasn’t a risk taker.
And this must have been easy to pick up on, because Abel asked me point-blank, “Are you a risk taker?”
“I am now.” I smiled, and wondered if Abel had gotten the humor. There was just no way to tell.
“What makes one target more valuable than another?” I asked, taking advantage of Abel’s sudden interest in conversation.
“To answer that, I’d have to explain more than I want to right now.” The synthetic voice was actually sounding friendly. But I was probably imagining that.
“They’re commodities, aren’t they?” I said. That epiphany had come to me in that moment.
“Yes. They’re crops we’ve grown.”
“Crops? How?”
�
��To use one of your expressions: it’s a long story. And it’s time for you to return the target.”
I didn’t press him further. The alien had already given me more information than I ever expected to get on this one visit. Maybe he was friendlier than I’d originally thought—or maybe he was lonely.
Before I exited the living room, I did want to ask him another question. A practical question. A question about returning targets, because I hadn’t come up with a plan of my own. Was there a procedure to follow?
But I didn’t ask. It was clear from his lack of instructions about abducting targets that he wasn’t going to give me instructions about returning them either. The nitty-gritty part of the operation fell on the employee, not the employer. But so what? That was no different than any other modern American business, was it?
As I headed back through the living room and down the hallway to pick up Tracy, I remembered my earlier line of reasoning: Abel wasn’t giving me any guidance because I’d forced my way into the job. Sink or swim. And with that in mind, I entered the “loveseat room,” scooped up Tracy, and told myself I had to learn to swim.
When I turned back to the doorway, Abel was standing there.
“Return her to a place she’s familiar with,” he said, “and when she regains consciousness, she’ll believe that’s where she passed out. The human mind is easy to fool unless it’s faced with major unanswered questions.”
Again, I took advantage of Abel’s willingness to share. I came up with a roundabout way of asking him my most pressing question.
“Will she remember anything that happened before she passed out?” I asked. I had to know if there was any chance of Tracy remembering that she’d seen my face.
“No,” he said. “Which is why she won’t remember where she lost consciousness. If the assignment is executed properly, the targets only remember that they passed out. Not the circumstances surrounding it. They may go to a physician to find out why they passed out. But that’s where it ends.”
That sounded good, except for that pesky adjective “properly” again.
Abel moved aside, indicating it was time for me to get on with the job.
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