Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

  “That’s . . . that’s good news,” Ruby said, her voice lifting with excitement.

  “That’s good news,” Lee concurred, her serious expression breaking into a slight smile.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “Now we keep doing what we’re doing,” Lee said. “Our plan of action is working, and we should stick with it. I’m still of a mind to schedule you for the node dissection, because there could be microscopic cancer left in the nodes, but this is definitely a positive sign.”

  The plan of action was, of course, for Ruby to digest more of the illegally obtained drug, Verbilifide. When we first sought Dr. Lee’s medical advice, I had no doubt that she’d come to the same diagnosis and same recommended course of treatment as Dr. Adams. It was just a matter of going through the initial testing all over again. Throughout it all, I remained in awe of Ruby’s strength. A lesser person would have broken under the strain. Goodness knows I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ruby’s blood work revealed some sort of Amazonian lineage.

  We left Dr. Lee’s office with that clichéd extra kick in our step. Ruby, smiling in a way I hadn’t seen in eons, was light on her feet and quick with a laugh. I felt extra alive and fully aware of our good fortune. Grateful, that was the best word to describe how we were both feeling at that moment. We were so incredibly grateful for everything, absolutely giddy with euphoria. For a brief flash we weren’t weighed down by the guilt of what we’d done, the crime we’d committed to get to this point. Rather, we were elated. I kept thinking about what Dr. Lee had said.

  Our plan of action is working. . . . Nodes are definitely responding to the drug.

  My heart filled with hope and joy, and I thought back to the day I first developed feelings for Ruby. It wasn’t love at first sight for me, more like smitten at ninth sight, because it was on the ninth day of our college history class together that—in a blink—I became spell-bound by Ruby’s dazzling smile. Everything about that moment is frozen in my memory: the way her strawberry blond hair draped like a fine silk cloth over her shoulder, the green sweater she wore that made her eyes sparkle, the freckles that skirted across her cheeks. I’m probably one of the few people in the world for whom the Peloponnesian War evokes lustful thoughts.

  I was sitting behind Ruby, yes, listening to the lecture, yes, taking notes, when she turned around to ask me a question. I had noticed her the first day of class, of course, but I’d never had her smile at me before. I got lost in that smile, forgot all about the Peloponnesians and their bloody conflict. When she smiled at me, the only thing I wanted to learn more about was Ruby Dawes.

  After class I asked her out on a date, pizza at Captain Nemo’s in Kenmore Square, and she promptly agreed. Over cheese slices we talked about school, my passion for climbing, and her love of the outdoors. The subject of parents came up, and so we bonded over having both lost our fathers. It wasn’t a heavy conversation, more like we’d been friends for a long time and there was comfort in rehashing our realities.

  She knew a lot about music. I credit her with introducing me to some old school bands: the Pixies, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guided by Voices, and Jane’s Addiction. She considered herself alternative on the inside, because the way she dressed, sporty casual, didn’t fit the image of a brooding, darkly dressed, cutting-edge music aficionado.

  We left Nemo’s and went back to my apartment, which at the time I shared with two Italian exchange students, who were trying—sadly, without much success—to master my native tongue. We hung out in my bedroom for a while, talking about things people who are attracted to each other talk about, which amounted to just about everything except the one thing we both wanted to do, which was to kiss. When our lips finally touched, I had a pillow between us. I don’t know how that pillow got there, but I decided to keep it there, as a barrier to prevent me from trying to push things too far too fast. It was Ruby who pulled that pillow away.

  “It’s okay, John,” she said between our intensifying kisses. “I want you to touch me.”

  We didn’t make love that night, or even that month. What we did was get to know each other better. She became my best friend, a soul mate. Our attachment was instantaneous and never wavered. I remember when I first told Ruby that I loved her. It was a spring afternoon, just like the one we stepped into from Dr. Anna Lee’s air-conditioned offices.

  “What should we do to celebrate the good news?” I asked Ruby as we strolled down Harvard Avenue.

  “I vote for a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream and a DVR marathon of Ellen,” Ruby said.

  It was a little slap of reality. Our combined elation didn’t mean that Ruby’s stamina had improved. Thanks to Verbilifide, Ruby’s stamina had all the staying power of an ice cube in the desert.

  “Hot fudge?” I asked.

  “With rainbow sprinkles,” Ruby said.

  “Done deal,” I said.

  “What I really want is a kiss,” Ruby said.

  I obliged, with much tenderness.

  “I love you, John.”

  “I love you, too.”

  We both breathed in the day as we walked the few blocks toward our new home. With each step, I let that good feeling linger, savoring it greedily. We arrived back at the apartment, carrying a single bag of groceries containing the ice cream, hot fudge, and of course, the sprinkles.

  While I was putting the groceries away, the telephone rang. Instinctively, I reached for my cell but realized it wasn’t my cell phone that was ringing.

  My heart thrummed in my chest.

  The phone in the apartment had never rung before, and for good reason. We used our cell phones to call the people we needed to call. We checked messages on our voice mail at the old apartment. The only reason this apartment phone worked at all was that I wanted to have utility bills in Uretsky’s name. I obtained online access to Uretsky’s health insurance account after I took over his identity. The helpful customer service representative who doled out Uretsky’s account numbers reset the online portal password using a new Yahoo e-mail address that I had created.

  From that portal I was able to change Uretsky’s address to the P.O. box I’d rented from Post Boxes Unlimited, and the phone number to the new one I got for this apartment. I checked with the phone company to make sure my new number couldn’t be traced back to this address. That meant the only one with access to this number was an official representative from UniSol Health.

  Why would UniSol be calling us?

  The phone rang again. The way the phone sounded—long rings, clattering bells (it was a corded Trimline phone)—made an especially ominous noise.

  Maybe it’s a wrong number, I said to myself.

  It rang again.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Ruby asked.

  “It’s probably a wrong number,” I said.

  Ruby grunted and pushed past me to answer the phone. She put the phone to her ear.

  “Hello. . . . Hello? . . . Anybody there? Heeellloooo?” I watched her eyes dance about confusedly as she waited. She hung up.

  “I guess it was a wrong number,” I said.

  She gave a quick shoulder shrug as if to say, “Oh well.” A feeling of relief swept through me. Then the phone rang again.

  This time I picked it up.

  “Hello,” I said, speaking quickly.

  I don’t know why, but the hairs on my neck started to rise.

  “Hello?” I spoke the word like a question this time. “Is anybody there?”

  A voice answered me, raspy and deep sounding.

  A chill ripped through my body and my skin prickled when I heard a man say, “My name is Elliot Uretsky, and I believe you stole my identity.”

  CHAPTER 11

  My body went rigid, freezing my jaw open and my eyes wide. Ruby, who was standing nearby, gripped my arm, fingernails digging hard into my skin, prying for information. She leaned over, putting her face close to mine, willing me to look at her. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ruby’s mouth sayin
g the words, “Who is it? Who is it?” I held up my hand, a wave. Leave me alone, I was saying to her. I’ve got to think! Holy crap! I switched the phone to my other ear, keeping my back to Ruby. She moved in close, her body pressed up against mine, ear attuned to whatever snippets of conversation could be heard.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number,” I said into the phone.

  A long pause ensued that seemed to drag for eternity. My stomach clenched, releasing a wave of nausea through me.

  “We both know that’s not true,” Uretsky said. His resonant baritone voice sounded throaty and coarse, while his vocal inflection, if graphed, would come out flat like the EKG of a dead man. Calm as a windless sea.

  I took in a deep breath but found it impossible to slow my racing heart. Fear rode the back of my throat as I flashed on what was to come. Uretsky would phone the police, we’d be arrested, and Ruby would lose access to her medication. My subconscious acted on behalf of my frozen thoughts, doing what I’d trained it to do since I started taking climbing seriously—look for an escape route. Only, I couldn’t see any way off this particular mountain. Through a twisted reversal of fortune, I’d become Brooks Hall, swinging pendulum-like from a rope, hovering helplessly above the infinite, while Uretsky assumed the role I had once played, wielding that knife, angling to slice the safety line in two.

  Karma . . .

  I pulled the phone away from my ear, readying myself to end the call, but something made me stop.

  We could run, I was thinking. We’ll run! But how will Ruby get her medication?

  I felt Ruby’s nails digging harder into my shoulder.

  “Are you still there?”

  Uretsky’s voice made me shudder, the way a dark storm cloud could whenever it slipped over a ridgeline to make an unexpected appearance.

  You can’t hang up on him, I thought. He called you for a reason. He could have just gone to the police directly. Why did he call?

  Ruby swiveled me by the shoulders, forcing me to face her.

  Maybe . . . maybe he’ll take pity on us. . . .

  “Who is it?” Ruby demanded to know. “Who?”

  I mouthed the name “Uretsky” and watched a look of terror stretch across Ruby’s face. Her features contorted—eyes gone wide and wild, mouth falling open as though her jaw had come unhinged. Her hand went to her mouth; next, her color blanched.

  “Please,” I said into the phone. “Please, let me explain.”

  “Oh, I’m interested in your explanation,” Uretsky said. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?” His voice filled my head like an enveloping blackness, a suffocating smoke that made it impossible to speak. “I’m waiting,” he said.

  “My wife . . . my wife is very sick.”

  “Yes, I know,” Uretsky said.

  I recoiled as though I’d just been hit in the face.

  He must have called UniSol and gotten access to the account again. That’s how he knew about Ruby’s cancer. That’s how he found our phone number. Our only saving grace was that he couldn’t know where we lived. Our home address was nothing but a post office box, and the phone number he called couldn’t be used to trace us to here. But he still could go to the police, and if he did, it wouldn’t take much to find out our real identities.

  “Mr. Uretsky,” I said.

  “Elliot, please,” he said, with a slight chuckle, chilling as a moonless winter night. “We should at least be on a first-name basis. After all, you’re me. But you know my name, and I don’t know yours. Your real name, that is.”

  “Elliot,” I said, swallowing hard. “What I did was very, very wrong, and very stupid. But I did it out of desperation. My wife has cancer, and we didn’t have insurance for the drug she needed. There was no way we could afford her medication without better health insurance. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I swear that’s true.” I started to speak quicker because I was struggling for breath and on the verge of hyperventilating. “Please, you’ve got to understand. We were desperate. You’re married. What if it were your wife?”

  “The old walk a mile in your shoes, eh?”

  I nodded emphatically, though of course, Uretsky couldn’t see me.

  “Yes. Yes,” I said. “Think about if it were your wife who was sick.”

  “Hmmm . . . that’s a good idea. Let me think about that.”

  The only sound to punctuate the lengthy quiet that followed was Uretsky’s own heavy breathing. The sonorous breaths were like that of a sleeping man. Was he heavyset? I wondered. All I had to go on was his Facebook avatar, which was nothing but a picture of Mario from the video game Super Mario Bros.

  I glanced over at Ruby, who appeared to have gone catatonic. She sat on a stool at the kitchen island, kneading the fingers of her hands; her eyes, unblinking, remained fixed on an empty spot on the hardwood floor.

  Eventually Uretsky let out a long, protracted sigh—a signal to me that he had come to some sort of a decision.

  “I’m done thinking,” he said.

  “Please . . . Elliot . . . don’t report us to the police. We’ll work something out.”

  “I have no interest in reporting your crime—to the authorities, or anyone else, for that matter,” Uretsky said.

  I breathed out a protracted sigh of my own.

  “Thank God. Thank you, Elliot. Thank you for being so understanding.”

  “Oh, I never said that I was understanding. I just said I’m not going to report you to the police.”

  I stammered before speaking. “What do you want? What can we do to make this right?”

  My blood was burning now, like I had downed a pot of coffee with several Red Bull chasers.

  “Do you like games?” Uretsky asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Games. Do you like games? How much clearer can I be?”

  “I . . . I guess . . . but to be honest, I don’t really see what you’re getting at.”

  “Well, I like games,” Uretsky said. “I like games a lot. Online games especially. They’re so much fun.”

  Of course Uretsky was a game fanatic. I’d seen how many hours he logged playing One World. I felt the room darkening, an illusion, just a trick of the eye, I knew, but still, everything around me seemed to dim. I sensed what he was going to say next. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew—gut instinct. I asked the logical next question, anyway.

  “Tell me what you want,” I said.

  “Naturally, I want to play a game.”

  I took in an uneven breath as my eyes closed tightly.

  I was right.

  CHAPTER 12

  My voice got stuck in my throat, but eventually, I was able to ask, “What kind of game do you want to play?”

  I heard him take in a readying breath, one that seemed to suck the air right out of my lungs. “It’s a game I’ve made up,” Uretsky said.

  “You inspired it, in fact. It’s called Criminal. Want to know how to play?”

  “You know what? I think this conversation is over,” I said.

  “You hang up on me,” Uretsky said quickly, his tone flush with hatred, “and I’ll make sure that bitch wife of yours dies of cancer.”

  He essentially spit out the words dies of cancer. A knot built up in my chest. Ruby, who must have heard some or all of Uretsky’s admonition, covered her mouth with her hands. She closed her eyes tightly, perhaps to will this nightmare into nothingness. When she opened them, those blue eyes I loved so dearly were ringed with red. Her lower lip quivered, and I could feel Ruby’s anxiety start to build.

  “Do you want to know how to play Criminal?” Uretsky asked again. The calm had returned to his voice. The old Elliot was back. “The answer, by the way, is yes. Yes, Elliot. I’d love to know how to play Criminal. Please, tell me all about it.” Uretsky paused, long enough to let me know that he was awaiting my reply. “Go ahead. Now you say it.”

  He was goading me along—take a little drag, walk on the train tracks, make the jump, live on the wild side.
“How . . .” I gulped before I could continue. “How do you play . . . Criminal?”

  “Well, I’m glad you asked,” Uretsky said, ebullient. “I think the best games are the ones where you improve yourself. Get better, you know? The more experienced you are, the better you do. So my game is all about making you a better criminal. That’s where I got the name. Do you see?”

  “Please . . . whatever you want.”

  “I want you to play my game,” Uretsky said, the harsh edge to his voice returning. “Now then, at this particular moment in time, I’d say you’re a pretty crappy criminal. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know how to respond to that.”

  “The correct response is yes,” Uretsky said. “I mean, I caught you. And it was damn easy, too. So, let’s both agree that you’re pretty bad at being a thief and get on with it, shall we?” Uretsky’s breathy voice again raised the hairs on my neck. “So here’s the game in a nutshell. You’ve got to prove to me that you’re worthy of being labeled a real criminal.”

  “Okay, this has gone far enough,” I said, a touch of anger in my voice.

  “Oh, we haven’t even begun to dance.”

  “If this is your way of scaring us—”

  “Let me tell you how to play round one.”

  “It’s not going to work.”

  “Do you know the Giorgio Armani store on Newbury Street?”

  “Yes,” I said, exasperated. “What does that have to do with anything? What do you want from us, Elliot?”

  “I want you and your wife to go to that store, and I want each of you to shoplift a scarf valued at greater than a hundred dollars.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to steal two scarves.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?” he repeated, as though the answer should be obvious to me. “Because a criminal is a thief, no matter what the crime—a stealer of identities, a taker of lives, a remover of objects. To advance in my game, you must each steal one scarf with a value greater than one hundred dollars.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” I said, sounding indignant. This had to be a prank, some trick intended to scare us. A tick of relief swept over me, as I believed with increasing conviction that this was true. Uretsky wanted to mess with us for what I’d done to him, and I fell for it, hook, line, and stinking sinker. It made sense. He was an avid gamer, maybe even a hacker type, someone who preferred that justice be served outside the usual lines.