Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

  However, something made her stop. I assumed Giovanni called for her attention, because he held up a finger and was making a “Wait here” gesture. He vanished from my view but reappeared moments later, holding a bottle of wine. With the roles reversed, it was now Ruby who tried to refuse the offer. Giovanni insisted and Ruby relented.

  She left his store and walked to the corner as we had planned. I started up Ziggy, made a U-turn, and picked Ruby up where Giovanni couldn’t see us. She climbed in and handed me the bottle of wine.

  “He says it goes great with fish,” Ruby said.

  “What else did he say?” I asked.

  “If he could find the guy who robbed him, he’d give him a hug for saving his life.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Then he said he’d get his bat out and finish what he started.”

  I laughed, but only a little.

  We drove in silence awhile. Then I said, “It’s making me sick.”

  “What is?”

  “Rhonda Jennings.”

  Ruby got quiet. “Me too,” she said. “But what could you have done? How could we have known?”

  “I just wish, is all . . .”

  “Wish what?”

  “That there was something I could put inside an envelope and make that right, too.”

  We stopped by Dr. Lee’s office on the way home. Ruby needed more Verbilifide, and we decided to keep using the Uretsky name to get it. In for a penny, in for a pound, or so the saying goes. We had enough stress, and to add to it by coming up with another way of getting Ruby her meds just didn’t make any sense. We also figured Uretsky already knew about Dr. Lee, same as he did Dr. Adams. What could we tell her? “Be careful”? “Look out for strangers wearing masks”? Right now we just needed to get the drugs and get out of there. Soon we were back inside the cramped examination room, which had become as familiar to us as our bedroom—at either apartment.

  Dr. Lee, looking professional in her white lab coat, surveyed Ruby underneath the harsh glare of the overhead fluorescent lighting and didn’t take long to make her assessment.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asked. Her worried tone concerned me.

  “I’m okay,” Ruby said.

  “You don’t look very well,” Lee said.

  “It’s just a bug,” Ruby said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  Lee made a “hmmm” sound as her practiced eyes continued to study Ruby’s face. She looked over at me. “John doesn’t look so great, either,” she said.

  Ruby nodded toward me. “Yeah,” she said. “It seems like we’ve both caught the same thing.”

  Back at the apartment, Ruby held fast to her suspicions about David Clegg, and I couldn’t make her think otherwise.

  “Who else could have known that you were talking to Clegg?” Ruby asked. “It had to be the guy David arrested—the guy in the back of his police car. Think about it, John.”

  “I have thought about it,” I said. “And we’ve got to find Uretsky without alerting the police. Clegg is the only person who can do that for us.”

  “By doing that, you could be alerting Uretsky. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I know.”

  “Then don’t do it.”

  “What should we do?” I asked, tossing my hands in the air. “Just sit and wait for him to call us with the next crime to commit? Do we sit, or do we fight?”

  “You don’t know the consequences,” Ruby said. “You’ll be violating the rules of his game.”

  “It’s a risk,” was all I said.

  “Well, I don’t like our odds,” she said.

  I called Clegg, anyway, while Ruby went to the bedroom to rest. I wasn’t worried about Uretsky overhearing my conversation. Ruby had smashed what I believed to be the only listening device planted in the apartment. If there were leaks, some way for Uretsky to learn of my inquiry, I would be found out regardless if I contacted Clegg by phone or in person. What I wanted was an answer to my question, and I wanted it now.

  Clegg sounded glad to hear from me. We chatted about his divorce, the apartment in Hingham he had found, and Ruby’s health prognosis. He didn’t bring up climbing, but I could hear in his voice that he had a trip planned. It’s like a jealous intuition that I have. I used to get that same squeak of excitement before departing on a major expedition myself.

  I got to the point. “I need a favor,” I said.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I’ve got a problem with one of my game players.”

  “What sort of problem?”

  “He’s just harassing some other players. Nothing too horrible.”

  “Kick him off,” Clegg said.

  “He’s threatening to hack me,” I said.

  I had thought for all of six seconds about what lie I’d tell, and this one seemed to work just fine.

  “So what can I do?” Clegg asked.

  “Tell me if he’s ever been arrested for hacking.”

  “I could look him up if you give a name and address.”

  I gave Clegg the name Elliot Uretsky, spelled it for him, too, along with the address I gave UniSol to help steal the same man’s identity. Clegg keyed in the information, and I waited.

  I sat at the kitchen counter, refreshing YouTube on the laptop, watching my video stats skyrocket. In the time it took for Clegg to come back on the line, another fifty thousand people had witnessed me—ski mask and all—save a man from choking to death while a little old lady beat me silly with her purse. Hell, I’d have watched it, too.

  “I got nothing,” Clegg said.

  “Nothing,” I repeated.

  “No priors. No arrests. No speeding tickets. This guy is clean. So if he’s a hacker, he’s never been busted for committing any computer crime. At least not in Massachusetts.”

  “Is that the only place you can check?”

  “I didn’t look for outstanding warrants,” Clegg said. “That’s in LEAPS—our Law Enforcement Automated Processing System.”

  “Can you look?”

  “Sure thing, buddy. Hang on.”

  Clegg put me on hold. Instead of Muzak, the Boston PD played PS announcements about drinking and driving and the importance of wearing a seat belt. Ginger wove in and out between my legs like a slinky slalom skier while I waited.

  “Lucky cat,” I said, scratching her head. “You don’t have anything to worry about. All you have to do is be a cat.”

  Ginger meowed as if she understood and agreed wholeheartedly. Within a span of five minutes, I had become jealous of both Clegg (for climbing) and a cat (for its peaceful existence). I checked the video and groaned. Forty thousand more views. Damn, this thing was going to make the national news.

  Clegg came back on the line. “Well, I got something,” he said.

  My pulse jumped, and my leg involuntarily kicked out and sent Ginger scampering away.

  “Tell me.”

  Clegg said, “Nothing about his hacking chops, but if your game buddy is plotting an attack, then he’s going to do it from the shadows. It looks like the report was filed a couple months ago by a neighbor.”

  “What report?” I asked.

  I felt a sick drop in my stomach. That was around the same time I’d become Elliot Uretsky.

  “You’ll be surprised,” Uretsky had said to me.

  You’ll be surprised.

  Clegg said, “A neighbor of his filed a ‘be on the lookout’ message about three months ago with the Medford police.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means somebody wants to know where the Uretskys are, and nobody has seen them.”

  CHAPTER 26

  The next day Ruby and I drove to Medford to scope out the house where Elliot and Tanya Uretsky resided. I keyed the address taken from Uretsky’s game account—38 Skyview Lane—into my phone’s GPS. Twenty minutes later we were parked on a wide, pleasant street across from a single-story, vinyl-sided ranch home with a detached single-car garage. Thic
k beige curtains blocked out every window.

  My thumb is brown when it comes to gardening, but even I could have spruced up this place. The trees in front of the house were sparse and scraggly. There were bushes all around, but those looked as shaggy and unkempt as the front lawn that begged for a trim. The home itself appeared dark and uninviting. I surveyed the landscape, looking for lawn furniture or toys or any sign of habitation, but saw nothing of the sort. The garden, brown and untended, seemed especially out of place in a neighborhood full of neatly landscaped properties with colorful flower beds.

  Ruby and I climbed out of the car. She was wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat and smelled of SPF 50 sunblock. Her jeans and long-sleeved shirt were for added protection. She seemed shaky on her feet, so I wrapped an arm around her waist to give her some added support. We had grown to hate the drugs keeping her alive almost as much as we hated the cancer that was killing her.

  “Are you feeling up to this?” I asked.

  Ruby nodded, though I could see she felt about as healthy and ready as Uretsky’s lawn.

  I checked the mailbox, a big black metal oval mounted on a faded wooden post. It was full, but not overly so. There were bills (nothing from UniSol Health), along with the current issues of O Magazine (addressed to Tanya Uretsky) and The New Yorker (also addressed to Tanya Uretsky). I put the mail back in the box, ignoring the temptation to check out this week’s cartoon contest.

  “Where is the rest of their mail?” I said to Ruby. “If we’re to believe Clegg, these people haven’t been seen in months. Shouldn’t there be a mountain of it?”

  “That’s still a big if in my mind,” Ruby said, meaning whether to believe Clegg. My look conveyed my disagreement. “Anyway,” Ruby continued, “maybe the post office is keeping it.”

  “Then why is today’s mail here and nothing else?”

  “I dunno,” Ruby said. “Uretsky is probably hiding out. He doesn’t want his neighbors to see him.”

  “Hiding out with his wife?”

  Ruby shrugged.

  “Something is wrong,” I said. “Something is very, very wrong with all this.”

  “What?” Ruby asked.

  “I just don’t get the feeling that a psychopath lives here.”

  “Why? Because it’s not all spooky?”

  I shrugged. Ruby was right—the place didn’t feel scary as much as lonely.

  “Can we ever really know what our friends and neighbors are up to?” Ruby said.

  “Follow me,” I said.

  There weren’t any lights on inside the home, but I tried to get a peek through some of the windows. Unfortunately, the closed curtains made it impossible to see, and it was too dark inside the house to get a good look through the front door sidelight windows. I couldn’t see into the garage—no windows there—so Ruby and I worked our way around back.

  The backyard was a small, unfenced square of land, not more than a quarter of an acre, but as poorly maintained as the front. I saw a grill and some all-season furniture on the stone patio, but those were dusty from disuse. A dark shadow seemed to have been cast over this place, impervious to the sweet scent of spring air and an afternoon sky that was bright blue and cloudless. Birdsong filled our ears, though no birds seemed to be nesting in the few trees that dotted Uretsky’s property. It was as though the land here had gone sour, and the animals seemed to know it.

  We walked back to the front of the house and climbed inside Ziggy.

  “Somebody is coming to get the mail,” I said to Ruby. “And I don’t think it’ll be Elliot Uretsky.”

  “You want to wait in the car?” Ruby asked.

  I nodded.

  “Would it be in poor taste if I read that O Magazine while we waited?”

  I shrugged, got out of the car, opened the mailbox, and got her the magazine. She flipped through the pages while we waited some more. We didn’t talk much. Ruby took out her phone and checked the stats on my video.

  “You’ve been viewed over two million times now,” Ruby said.

  I took out my phone and checked as well.

  “You mean two million fifty-eight thousand,” I said.

  “Fifty-eight thousand people just watched that video?” Ruby asked, unbelieving.

  “I think I’m big in Japan,” I said.

  Ruby groaned.

  The robbery, just as I had feared, made national news. It was on the CNN home page and was covered by just about every other news outlet around the country. Defense attorneys made endless online pleas for me to come forward so they could represent me. I had reached celebrity status. I had also unwittingly set off a massive ethical debate. Did my single act of goodness offset my unconscionable act of evil? Opinions seemed to vary but were not in short supply.

  The comments were great. Everything from I should be given the key to the city to I should be given an enema by a lifer named Bubba at Concord prison. I was feeling the love, that’s for sure. Web sites about the robbery sprang up overnight like runaway weeds, many paying homage to the masked bandit who stopped his robbery in progress to administer CPR. If Entertainment Tonight was to be believed—yes, my robbery was now considered entertainment—Giovanni’s business had never been better. There’s no such thing as bad PR. I hated what I had done, but to look on the positive side, choking was responsible for about twenty-five hundred deaths per year. Perhaps someone, someday, would save a life using what he saw in that video.

  “I can’t believe you’re a viral video.” Ruby put her hands to her head. “I’m going to keep searching for snakes and lotus flowers.”

  “Let me know what you find,” I said.

  One day, I was thinking. We’ll know in one more day.

  An hour later I saw a woman approach in Ziggy’s rearview mirror. She was just north of middle age and walking a chocolate Lab. She stopped at the Uretskys’ mailbox. I got out of the car, hoping that I wouldn’t startle her. She whirled around and put her hand to her chest. Her dog didn’t bark.

  “Oh, you startled me,” she said.

  The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men . . .

  I smiled, but judging by her expression, I might as well have had the ski mask on.

  “Hi there,” I said. “Sorry about that. I was wondering if you could help me out.”

  Ruby got out of the car, and I saw all the worry in the older lady’s face slip away. Nothing says “nonthreatening” like a sun hat.

  “Hello,” the woman said to Ruby, warmly now. “How can I help you?”

  Ruby stepped forward and introduced herself.

  “I’m Ruth Shane. I’m a neighbor. And this here is Bucky,” Ruth said, patting her dog’s shiny coat.

  Bucky approached Ruby, sniffed around her, and started to bark.

  “Bucky!” Ruth snapped. “Calm down.”

  Bucky circled, winding his leash around Ruby’s legs, sniffing and barking. Ruth yanked him back to her side. Bucky whimpered some, then pulled away to stand beside Ruby once again. He sniffed, barked, and looked up at my wife with eyes that looked brokenhearted.

  “Bucky, what’s gotten into you?” Ruth said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe he smells our cat,” I suggested.

  “Bucky doesn’t care about such things. At least, he hasn’t before. But if it was your cat, I wonder why he didn’t bark at you?” Ruth seemed to say this to herself.

  Bucky settled down, so we all shook hands. I introduced myself as John, since Ruby was Ruby, finally.

  “I’m looking for Elliot Uretsky,” I said.

  The woman looked pained. “Oh goodness, are you family?”

  I lied. “Cousin,” I said.

  “I didn’t know Elliot had any family in the States,” Ruth said. “Are you from Ukraine, too?”

  “No, we’re distantly related,” I said. “We haven’t actually met. I went on a family tree kick a while back, so I’ve been trying to locate as many of my relatives as I can.”

  Ruby looked at me like I had two heads.

  “That’
s so wonderful,” Ruth said. “Young people these days don’t put enough value on family, if you ask me.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach him, but I haven’t been having any luck,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Ruth said.

  “Is that why you’re collecting his mail?” I said, tapping the mailbox. “Is he out of town?”

  “I am collecting their mail,” Ruth said, her pleasant voice now tinged with worry. “But it’s not because they’re out of town. At least, I don’t think they are. You see, I reported them missing to the police several months ago. I’ve been collecting their mail ever since. The police offered to put a stop to it—the mail, I mean—but I don’t mind, really. It’s taking up only a couple of boxes in the garage. It’ll be easier for them to go through it all when they come back.” She paused and reflexively put a hand on Bucky for comfort. “If they come back,” she said, finishing the thought.

  I thought about handing her the O Magazine we had in the car, but that felt a little too creepy. We’d keep the magazine. Hell, I was already a criminal. “How long has it been since you’ve seen them?” I asked.

  “Three months, thereabouts,” Ruth said.

  Three months is well before I became Elliot Uretsky, I thought. “I never saw Elliot all that much,” Ruth continued. “Mostly, I’d see Tanya working in her garden.” She pointed to the brown patch of land that lay barren like a stain on the earth. “I kept telling Tanya to plant more perennials, but she preferred what she preferred.”

  “Why do you think they’re missing?”

  “Well, because nobody has seen them, of course.”

  “What about their friends?” Ruby asked.

  “Oh, they are private people.”

  “Coworkers?” Ruby asked.

  “They both work from home,” Ruth said. “He’s a computer consultant, I think.”

  “And Tanya?” Ruby said.

  “She makes jewelry and sells her work online.” Ruth showed us her earrings—dangling silver triangles with an embedded green gemstone. “She gave me these before they vanished. Beautiful, aren’t they?”