On Tenterhooks

by Greever Williams

  “Okay, please hurry then,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am,” the driver replied.

  She pulled Steve’s business card from the side pocket of her briefcase and dialed his number, her hands still trembling.

  “Steve? It’s Veronica. Yeah. Are you guys still here?”

  She paused, listening.

  “Great. What time is your flight?” she asked, rummaging for a pen and paper in her briefcase.

  She wrote as she talked. “Okay, which airport? Uh-huh, got it. . . .Okay, I’ll see you there in the morning. What’s the weather like in Texas this time of year? . . . .Yes, count me in for now. I’ll explain in the morning.”

  She paused, watching as the cabbie cocked his head, seemingly listening to her conversation.

  “No, I am fine. I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”

  Pause.

  “Okay, great. See you both then. G’nite.”

  She hung up and dialed again, watching the cabbie intently. “John? Hey, listen, I am sorry to bother you on a Friday night. But you remember how you offered to cover for me if I wanted to take some time off?”

  She paused.

  “Yeah, I do. I am heading out tomorrow for a little “me” time. I’ll be back soon. Can you cover for me?”

  Pause.

  “Thanks John. No, I am good—just need some time away from the office to take care of some personal things. Thanks, John, I’ll catch up with you mid-week next week and see how things are going, okay?”

  Pause.

  “Great, I will. You have a great weekend too! Hugs and kisses to the wife and kiddies. G’nite.”

  When she hung up and sat back in the cab, she looked out the windows as the Midtown nightlife streaked by, letting herself be calmed by the familiar but always fascinating panorama for the ten minutes it took the cab to arrive at her brownstone. She gathered her purse and briefcase and passed the fare and a tip to the driver through the partition window.

  “You enjoy spying on conversations, cowboy?” she asked as she slid to the door.

  “No ma’am. I only do what needs to be done.” She shook her head, and as she always did, looked up and down the quiet street before stepping out of the cab. As she climbed her stairs, the driver rolled down his passenger side window.

  “Stay safe out there, darlin’,” he called to her. “It’s a rough road you’re on.” He rolled up the window and left her on the stoop.

  “What an ass.”

  She fished her keys out of her purse, swiftly unlocked the front door and entered her building, closing the door behind her.

  Chapter 28

  “Sooooo. . .San Antonio, huh?” said Veronica, to no one in particular.

  Martin grunted in response.

  It was 8:12 AM. She, Steve and Martin were sitting at their departure gate in LaGuardia. Their flight did not leave until 10:17, but the security checkpoint had been unusually light for a Friday morning, so they had made it through more quickly than they had expected.

  Martin looked at his boarding pass again. “Yeah, San Antonio,” he said, shifting and stretching, “by way of Denver. It’s gonna be a long day.”

  Steve worked to find a comfortable sitting position on the black vinyl bench, the kind that had a monopoly on the floor space of every airport he had ever visited. “Sooooo. . .Veronica,” he said, “you mind filling us in on why you changed your mind so quickly? You seemed pretty adamant that you wanted to stay out of it when we left your office yesterday.”

  “Yeah, well, things change,” she snapped, then clearly felt better of it.. “Sorry, boys. I don’t mean to be harsh. Just tired, I guess. I was up very late packing for this. . .adventure. A girl needs to know what to wear when she’s—what are we doing exactly? Stalking? Solving a great mystery? I dunno.”

  She shook her head and sipped her gourmet mocha. “Plus. . .I saw. . .Him.”

  “The preacher?” asked Steve.

  “Yeah. He came to my office last night. It was just like you said. Tall, pale, eerie. The guard said he was talking to himself, staring at the walls.”

  “What happened?” asked Martin. “Did you talk to him?”

  “Hell no! I didn’t get that close. I had the security guard keep him busy, and I snuck out the basement. Having him in the same building terrified me. I don’t know why. I am not usually a person to run from anything. I can take care of myself, if I need to!”

  She balanced her coffee on the armrest and leaned toward them. “But when the guard called me to tell me he was at the front desk, I panicked. I mean I literally panicked. I nearly passed out on the way down in the elevator!”

  Leaning back into her bench seat, she sighed: “I slipped out via the parking garage and caught a cab. I had the driver swing around so I could see him. At first, his back was to me. Then he turned suddenly and stared right at me. I swear he was seeing me. . .through the tinted windows of the building and the cab, in the dark!”

  She shuddered involuntarily, zipped up the front of her designer turquoise tracksuit and cupped her coffee with both hands, looking for warmth. “I told the driver to go, and he sped up to an intersection. And then the security guard, the same one you two met, attacked the cab!”

  “What do you mean?” Martin asked.

  “I mean, he attacked it! He jumped out of an alley and tried to break through the window and force the door open. He scared the shit outta me! It was like he was possessed or something. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and he was spitting and drooling all over the place. The driver gunned it, but Roth held on for like half a block or so. We were actually dragging him down the street. He fell off and got himself run over. I guess he’s dead, although I can’t find anything in the paper about it.”

  “You mean you didn’t stop?” asked Steve.

  “No. We didn’t. I asked the driver if we should call the cops, but he said no, and that was fine with me. I couldn’t go back there, not with that preacher man so close by.”

  “You think he did that to the security guard?” asked Martin.

  “Yes, I do. You didn’t see how bizarre Roth looked when he stared at me through the window of that cab. He was like a robot. What could do that to a person? It was nothing short of evil.”

  Steve and Martin were silent.

  “A few minutes later, I called you from the cab.”

  Steve nodded.

  All three were silent for several minutes, lost in their own thoughts. They drank their caffeine and absently read portions of a discarded copy of the day’s paper. Occasionally they’d glance at the television mounted in the ceiling nearby. They passed the time in silence, watching the crowd and frequently checking the time. Martin pulled a tarnished gold pocketwatch from his breastpocket nearly every fifteen minutes.

  “Quite the timepiece you’ve got there,” Veronica remarked.

  Martin smiled. “Thanks. A family heirloom. My father left it to me when he passed nearly ten years ago.” He closed it and rubbed the cover with his thumb. “I’ve got three wristwatches, really nice ones too. But they all live in my sock drawer.” He chuckled, picked the watch up by its chain, and carefully dropped it back into his pocket. “Seems to be that all I need is this one right to get me where I need to go on time.” He patted his pocket.

  “Have you guys thought about what you’re going to say?” Veronica asked. “When we get there?”

  Martin and Steve looked at each other.

  “No, not really,” admitted Steve. “We spent a lot of time planning how we were going to talk to you, and that didn’t work out so well.”

  “Well, she’s what? Seventeen? Eighteen?” asked Veronica.

  “Yeah” said Martin. “She’s a senior in high school.”

  “Okay, so she probably lives with her parents,” said Veronica. “You have an address, right?”

  “Yeah, got it,” said Steve. “I checked it out. She’s in a suburb, halfway between San Antonio proper and New Braunfels. I also got the address for the high school
in that district, so we could go there too.”

  Veronica looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Mr. Creepy Stalker,” she grinned. “I just wouldn’t advise going anywhere near that school. They don’t take kindly to people on school grounds who do not belong there.”

  “Okay, fine. I just like to be thorough.”

  “How about we just talk to her and her parents?” asked Martin.

  “Yeah, we can try that,” replied Steve, “but I wasn’t sure how well that was gonna go over. Our story is a bit unusual.”

  “Agreed,” Veronica said, “but I still think we should try the direct approach. Stalking her—or even looking like that’s what we’re doing—is not going to work.”

  “I wasn’t going to stalk her! Look, when I got that info, I was alone and had no idea if any of you people were going to listen to me. But you did, and now we’re in it together. If you guys want the direct approach, that’s fine by me. I don’t care how we do it, so long as we reach her.

  “Okay,” said Martin. “It’s settled then. We’ll go to her parents and be straight up with them.”

  “Yeah,” said Veronica, “but what do you want them to do? I mean, hear me out here guys. We stroll in, tell them we’re all being targeted or exploited or whatever it is and then what?”

  She looked at them both, shrugging her shoulders. “I mean, seriously, what are you expecting them to do? Best case, they might let us talk to her—ask her if she got a message from that site or if she’s seen the creepy preacher. But then what? I doubt they’re gonna let her go cruising for answers with us. And even if they did, I don’t think she’s gonna want to do that.”

  “Who knows what she’ll say, Veronica?” said Steve. “We have no idea where her head is. Maybe she’s dying to talk to somebody about it, somebody other than her parents.”

  “That might be true,” said Martin, “but I really doubt it’d be us she’d confide in. Teenagers, girls especially, tend to be particular about their closest friends. It is rare for a teenaged girl to be wide-open with adults. Trust me on this one.”

  “I understand that, Martin. But this isn’t a typical situation we’re dealing with here. None of this is reasonable or normal.”

  He turned to Veronica. “Think about it. Twenty-four hours ago, you were sitting in your office doing your advertising thing. Then we show up, botch your afternoon and less than a day later you’re sitting here with two virtual strangers, waiting for a plane to take you halfway across the country. Is that your idea of the start to an average weekend?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, “I get it. You’ve got a valid point. But how are you going to approach it on the other end of this flight?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest. I am making this up as we go.”

  The group fell silent in the waning moments left before they were to board. The overhead PA in the gate area crackled to life, and the boarding process began. They gathered their bags and fell into line, waiting for the attendant to call their group. After long minutes of shuffling forward, Steve made it to the attendant. She smiled as he handed her his boarding pass. She scanned it and handed it back to him with the generic “enjoy your flight” sendoff.

  As he stepped into the jetway, Veronica grabbed the strap of the bag on his shoulder and hissed “Look!”

  Steve turned and looked at her. Over her shoulder, he saw the preacher on the other side of the gate area. His long, tall frame leaned casually against a carpeted column, with one foot propped up behind him so that the sole of his shoe brushed against the column. He clutched the Bible with both hands in front of him. The stance was arrogant and un-priest-like in its flamboyance. He looked more like a cocky gunslinger than a man of God. His deep red lips rose slightly at the edges in the mockery of a smile, and it was the smile that Steve distrusted most. It seemed to be a veil that did little to hide the contempt that bubbled beneath the surface of the man’s pallid complexion.

  Veronica was too frightened to look back again. She stared straight at Steve, eyes wide, as she handed the attendant her boarding pass.

  “Ma’am?” said the attendant, holding out Veronica’s boarding pass. “You need to keep this with you, for your seat assignment.”

  Veronica nodded absently and took the stub back. She followed Steve to the edge of the jetway, but still refused to look back.

  Martin approached the podium stop with his head down. Clearly, he had seen as well. He finished with the attendant and urged them up the jetway with sweeping hands. Steve resisted, staring hard at the preacher. From this distance, he felt much braver, for the moment.

  Preacher’s smile broke into a wide grin, and he mouthed a single, now-familiar phrase at Steve: “LETITGO.”

  Steve’s shoulders convulsed in an involuntary shudder. He relented to Martin’s pushing, and they traveled up the jetway, huddled in a small pack like a pee-wee soccer team fighting for the ball. They boarded the plane and found their seats quickly. Martin and Veronica sat together and Steve sat directly across the aisle from them. They were seven rows back from the front of a 737.

  “Holy Christ!” hissed Veronica. She leaned to the side, so that Steve could hear her. “Who the hell is he?”

  “I don’t know. But he seems to be very interested in us.”

  “I got this tight feeling, down low here in my gut,” said Martin, putting a hand on his lower stomach. “And it felt. . .wrong. I turned around, thinking I was gonna have to break for the bathroom, and then I saw him there. And as soon as we got up the jetway, the feeling went away.”

  “What are we gonna do when he gets on the plane?” asked Veronica. She was watching the front aisle intently.

  “I don’t think he will,” said Steve. “He didn’t look like he was in a rush to get in line.”

  “So?” said Veronica, her voice pinched with near hysteria. “What does that matter? You think that means he isn’t getting on?”

  “I don’t know. But what if he does?” asked Steve. “You can’t claw the guy’s eyes out just for being a creep. I mean, believe me, I agree the guy is strange, but technically, he hasn’t done anything to us, right?”

  “How about sending that security guard to attack me?” Veronica raised her voice.

  “You don’t know for sure that was connected,” said Steve, with as much of a diplomatic tone as he could muster.

  “The hell I don’t! You weren’t there,” said Veronica.

  “He told me to let it go again,” said Steve.

  “What?” asked Martin.

  “Just now—he said ‘let it go.’ I could read his lips. It’s the same thing he said to me when he saw me at the airport in Charlotte.”

  “Let what go?” Veronica asked.

  “This search,” said Martin.

  “Come on, Martin,” said Steve. “I don’t believe that. What is he—some kind of mind reader?”

  “I don’t know. But that guy is not right. I don’t know what he is, but there is something strange. I am telling you, I get a very bad vibe from him.”

  “He’s right, Steve,” said Veronica. “I get the same creeped-out feeling. I could feel him when Roth called, like he was right there with me. And he looked at me from the lobby, I had some kinda physical reaction even. I am not bullshitting you.”

  Steve shook his head. “Let’s get a little grip on reality here, folks. Now look, I grant you that the guy is a little off. But seriously, listen to yourselves!”

  “Then how did he know we’d be here today, Steve?” snapped Veronica. “Are you telling me that was coincidence?”

  “No, but maybe he’s tapped your phone. Or maybe he followed you here, like he was staking you out last night and trailed you here.”

  “Christ, Steve. This isn’t some eighties buddy-cop movie! This is real. Wake up!”

  “Come on guys,” said Martin. “This is getting us nowhere. Look, she’s closing the cabin doors.” He gestured to the front of the plane. The flight attendant se
aled the hatchway. Steve craned his neck to see the rows in front of them. There was no sign of the preacher. Each of them breathed an uncontrollable, but audible, sigh of relief.