Don't Look for Me
Page 5
BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.
Inside the rectangular frame was a word, each letter printed carefully. Actually, it wasn’t a word at all.
It was an email address.
7
GRAND ISLE MONDAY, 12:05
The feeling in my gut that had kept sleep at bay for so long the previous night had solidified by the time I woke up. It was the unshakeable conviction that something had changed. It was as though I had woken up with an unscratchable itch. Like somebody had pushed a button, and the uncomplicated contentment of the past few months had melted away. It wasn’t a hangover, and it wasn’t money worries, I still had more than enough in my bank account to pay for this extended sabbatical.
Sabbatical. That’s what I had been calling it. Just a break, not a career change. Lately, the word had started to sound hollow. What had started as a sabbatical was starting to feel a little too much like early retirement. I had enjoyed the past few months of idling my time away, beholden to no one and nothing. But the slight diversion of the last couple of days had felt good. I wondered if that was what had begun to knock things off kilter. Solving Emily Button’s problem had been just that, an enjoyable diversion, but it had rekindled something in me. An urge.
I got out of bed and walked across the small living room of the beach house to the galley kitchen, flicking the switch on the coffee maker. While it did its thing, I pulled on a t-shirt and joggers and went out onto the deck barefoot. The sun was already midway up in a blue sky. The bay, so dark and unknowable a few hours before, had transformed into a collage of shades of blue. On the horizon I could see the oil rigs and a scattering of small boats. I closed my eyes and let the warmth of the sun bathe my face. After the Winterlong thing, I didn’t think I would ever take warmth for granted again. Not in six months on the Gulf Coast, not in six hundred years.
“Morning, Blake.”
I opened my eyes and pointed them in the direction of the voice with the light southern accent.
Emily Button was approaching from the west, walking along the strip of sandy beach with her Yorkshire terrier Otis scampering along beside her. She was tall, with a lithe, athletic build. She jogged along that strip of beach twice a day, as well as the dog-walking. She wore red shorts and a dark gray vest top. Her curly auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail which fed through the back of her LSU baseball cap.
I waved a hello. “Is it still morning?”
She glanced at the phone in her hand. “Ten after noon. Close enough.”
That sounded about right. Early mornings were one thing I didn’t miss from my days acting like a person who has a job. An electronic noise pinged softly from inside. “Coffee’s ready, if you want some?”
We sat on opposite couches and drank coffee while Otis sniffed around the kitchen cupboards.
“I can’t thank you enough. The police say he won’t be bothering me again.”
I waved it away. “I told you it was no problem.”
“It would’ve been a big problem for me, if you hadn’t worked out who was sending me those ... those letters. God, I had barely noticed the guy at the garage. You wouldn’t think ...” She sighed and crossed her arms. “Anyway, thank you.”
“What are neighbors for?”
She smiled. “Usually, they’re for ignoring you. Or paying you way too much attention.”
I guessed that was probably true. I wouldn’t know. Having neighbors, however temporary, was a new experience for me.
“The Olbertsons, for example,” she continued after I hadn’t spoken for a minute. “They pay you a lot of attention.”
“They do, huh?”
I had noticed. Sidelong glances in the store. Net curtains twitching as I passed by their beachfront house on one of my walks. Once, I had caught Mrs. Olbertson at my mailbox, examining the meager contents. I assumed she would have been disappointed by the personalized label on the Domino’s menu addressed to “Pizza Lover.”
“Mmmhmrn,” she agreed. “They think you’re quite the mystery man. They’re not alone.”
I opened my arms and gestured at the small confines of the beach house. “What’s the mystery? I’m a very basic guy.”
She took a sip of her coffee. “This is good. Italian?”
“Colombian.”
“So yeah, there’s a little mystery here. You showed up out of nowhere, you don’t seem to do anything for a living. You’re too young to be retired.”
“I’m on a sabbatical.”
She grinned. “That’s exactly it, Blake. Every time I talk to you about yourself, you deflect. A sabbatical from what?”
My phone bleeped quietly on the coffee table and I glanced at the screen. A new email. That was unusual, things had been very quiet. Whatever it was, it could wait until later. I was finding that was the case with more and more things lately. Nothing was urgent. I looked up and remembered Emily was still awaiting an answer to her question.
I shrugged. “It’s really very boring.”
“Try me.”
“I already told you, I’m a consultant. Freelance. Last year was a good one for me, so I’m taking some time off.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What kind of consultant?”
“Logistics, problem solving. Like what I did for you, I guess.”
She watched me over the rim of her cup as she drank. “The police mentioned Chris O’Brien had a black eye. Seemed to have hurt his ribs, too.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. A guy like that makes enemies.”
“The Olbertsons have a theory. They think you’re a reclusive dot com millionaire who’s retired already.”
“Do I look like a dot com millionaire?”
She considered that for a moment. “You look young, and you don’t go to work. They think anyone who can order from Amazon is a tech genius, so with the other stuff, you can see how they’d reach that conclusion.”
“I’m definitely not a dot com millionaire.”
She sighed. “I think you do this on purpose. I think you’re deliberately cultivating an air of mystery.”
That was the last thing I wanted to do. I attempted to turn the conversation around. “So what’s your day job?”
“I’m a realtor.”
“Do you like talking to people about what you do?”
She sighed. “Sure. If they ask interesting questions.”
“But what most people ask is, ‘How’s business?’ right?”
She smiled in recognition. “Right.”
I spread my hands to say: there you go. “I just think what a person does is usually the least interesting thing about them. I’d rather talk about music, or books, or sports or ... even coffee.”
She drank the last of the cup and ran her tongue along her top lip. “Good coffee,” she repeated.
“Another?”
She shook her head. “I have to be in the office in an hour.” She got up and took her mug through to the kitchen and put it in the dishwasher. “Your sabbatical, it’s ending soon, isn’t it?”
“What makes you say that?”
She thought about it for a minute. “We never really had a real conversation until last week, did we? I mean, you were always pleasant, always said hi when I ran by, always held the door for me when we were at the store at the same time. I used to wonder about you. You just seemed so laid-back, so ... content. I envied that. I envied you being able to sit around all day and be happy. I guess I thought you were one of those shallow rich guys, not a care in the world. Not a dot com millionaire, but maybe an overgrown trust fund kid. But the other day I realized I had you all wrong.”
“How so?”
“When I saw you doing what you do. Looking at those letters, asking me questions. Working it all out.” She paused and recalled the phrase I’d used. “Solving problems. You seemed different. You seemed more like a human being. Engaged, you know?”
“Is that a good thing?”
She nodded. “I don’t think you’re the beach bum type, Blake. Sorry.”
When Emily and Otis had departed via the steps down from the deck, I poured myself another cup and sat back down. The display on my phone was blinking intermittently, reminding me about the unread email. I unlocked the screen and realized the message had come into my combined inbox via one of the old addresses. As in, very old. As in 2010. In fact, thinking about it, I hadn’t sent or received anything from that particular address since ...
I opened the inbox. It was completely clean but for the new arrival from ten minutes before. The sender was someone named Sarah Blackwell. The subject line was, Wondering if you can help.
That vague, teasing subject made it look like spam; a phishing email. The kind that makes you curious enough to open. Then hopefully you’re dumb enough to download the virus or type in your online banking codes or whatever. Only you have to give your email address out to get spam, and this one hadn’t been given to anyone for years.
I tapped into the email. Just by glancing at the layout, I knew it was wordier and better-formatted than your usual spam message. Three paragraphs. From the look of the grammar and syntax, it had been composed by a real person whose first language was English. There was an attached file as well, a jpeg. I ignored that for the moment and started to read the message.
Hi
You don’t know me, and this is probably going to sound a little odd, but like the subject says, I’m wondering if you could help me. I’m looking for someone, and your email address is basically my last hope.
Definitely not spam. Looking for people is what I do, or did until recently. So this would be a strange coincidence. But who had given this person my email? I read on. Before I got to the end of the second paragraph, I was beginning to have my suspicions.
Sarah Blackwell, whoever she was, had managed to fit a lot of information into her three paragraphs. She wrote clearly and concisely, no words wasted.
She lived in Nevada. Summerlin, a suburb west of Las Vegas. She was concerned about her neighbor, who had vanished overnight several weeks before, along with her husband, and hadn’t been seen since. There had been a note left in her mailbox, ostensibly from the neighbor, saying they would be out of town for a while. Sarah thought that was a little strange, because it had been typed and printed, not handwritten.
That wasn’t the only thing that gave her cause for concern. Ever since the neighbors had moved in, she had gotten the impression the husband could be a shady character. Little things, she said, without elaborating further. And then one night she had seen two men arrive in the small hours and break into the house. She had contacted the police and they saw nothing to investigate. The neighbors were grownups and, hey, they had even left a note. Sarah had used a spare key to get into the house. She had done some poking around, and found an old notebook, with my email address in it.
So, long story short, that’s why I’m contacting you. This is my message in a bottle, and if nothing comes of this, I don’t know what else to do. But I know it’s going to drive me crazy, not knowing where Rebecca is, or if she’s safe.
Rebecca? I didn’t think I knew anyone by that name. But then, names can change, as I knew better than most.
My thumb hovered over the jpeg attachment. The last time I had opened an image on an unexpected email it had triggered a world of trouble. I had the feeling this picture was going to do the same thing. Storms roll in fast.
I tapped to open the image. The status circle whirled for a tantalizing few seconds and then a photograph appeared. It showed three people—two women and a man—outside somewhere in the sun. It looked like a party. I didn’t recognize one of the women or the man. The other woman I might not have recognized either, had I not been prepared. She was wearing sunglasses, and she wasn’t looking right at the camera. Her hair was red, instead of the blonde I remembered. But there was no doubting it. Her name was not Rebecca. It was Carol Langford.
I hadn’t heard from Carol since 2010, and the last message from her had been very clear cut; no room whatsoever for ambiguity.
Don’t look for me.
8
LAS VEGAS
Gage only noticed the blood because his appointment was running four minutes late.
He finished the last of his lemonade and checked his watch. Officially late. Gage forgot about that for a second, though, when he noticed the dot of rusty brown-red on the cuff of his shirt. He had only found out about this meeting yesterday afternoon, and hadn’t been expecting to stay over. He wasn’t in a position to turn down work, so he had found a modestly priced hotel, soaked his shirt in the sink, and hung it over the shower rail overnight to dry it out. Somehow, the small bloodstain had survived the dousing.
He remembered Farnam’s face, staring back at him, his beady little eyes moist and pleading.
I’ll do anything, I’ll give you anything.
It wasn’t the first such offer Gage had heard in that exact kind of situation, and it wouldn’t be the last. When a man realizes the remainder of his life can be counted in seconds, he’ll say pretty much anything to try and extricate himself from the situation. The problem is, by that time it’s almost always too late. What Gage had done to Farnam didn’t bother him. He had done a lot worse in the past, and would again.
He raised his eyes from his sleeve and looked over the interior of the bar again. It was an authentic dive: torn linoleum flooring, mismatched stools lined up in front of the bar. Behind the bar was an elaborate mural of various celebrities playing poker: JFK and Lady Gaga and Muhammad Ali and many more. It was a crime against art. The place was way off the beaten track, and even more empty than you would expect on a weekday afternoon. Just two hardened alcoholics sitting separately at the bar and staring at the poker-playing stars. It was the kind of place someone asked to meet you if they didn’t want anybody to know about it. In the eight years Gage had been in this line of work, he had seen the inside of a lot of places like this.
He angled his glass so he could dip a finger in the melting ice at the bottom and rubbed at the little rusty brown-red dot until it was almost invisible. Six minutes past two now. He looked up and saw three men approaching his table.
They made an interesting trio. If you lined the three of them up at a bus stop, you would assume they had nothing to do with one another.
The middle one, the one closest to him, was a tall man in his fifties: bald, with horn-rimmed glasses. He wore a gray suit. Well cut, expensive-looking.
The one on the right was younger: late twenties, maybe. Short and stocky, with dark hair and eyes, wearing black jeans and an olive-green t-shirt. The black ink of a tattoo protruded from the sleeve on his left arm.
Gage lingered slightly longer in his appraisal of the man on the left. This one was late fifties, around six feet, wearing a blue shirt under a gray sport coat and with a short buzz cut that was graying a little around the temples. The look in his eyes was shifty, as though he expected someone to point him out at any time. A cop. Either current, or recently retired. Gage knew one when he saw one, of course, but he also sensed that this was not the kind of cop he needed to be worried about.
The three of them stopped a couple of paces in front of Gage’s booth and stared at him, waiting for him to speak. Gage didn’t say anything, just sat back on the upholstered bench and crossed his arms loosely.
After an uncomfortable twenty seconds, the man in the middle, the tall one with glasses, spoke.
“Are you here to meet us?”
Gage looked back at him. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you were supposed to be here six minutes ago.” He consulted his watch. “Seven.”
“Are you serious?” the one on the left, the one who looked like a cop, asked.
Gage’s eyes flicked to him. “I take timekeeping very seriously.
Is there something wrong with that?”
“It’s not even ten after two yet,” the short one said, an edge of defensiveness in his voice. He was the driver, then.
“Traffic was bad,” the guy in the middle said, extending a hand. “I’m Walter.”
The name sounded odd in his mouth, like he was trying it on for size. The hell you are, Gage thought as he shook Walter’s hand.
“This is Grant, this is David,” he said, gesturing to introduce the cop and the driver. The two of them said nothing, neither one acknowledging the names that could be first names or last names, if they had been real. Gage saw Grant’s eyes scan the room again. He doubted Grant had anything to worry about in this dump. Even if one of the two other customers happened to know him, they had probably stopped forming memories three rounds ago.
“Apology accepted,” Gage said, giving a look that dared one of them to object. None came, which suggested they needed something in a hurry and had no time to waste on posturing. He picked his glass up and rattled the ice, staring at Walter, since he seemed to be the official spokesman of the group. “I’ll have another while we talk.”
David—the short one—shook his head slowly. He turned, as if to leave, but Walter grabbed his arm.
“That’s fine,” Walter said, a little louder than he needed. “You two sit down, I’ll get us all something to drink.”
David eyeballed his compatriot for a moment before relaxing. He and the cop going by the name Grant sat down across from Gage, while Walter walked across to the bar and returned a couple of moments later with four glasses on a tray. Three bottles of water, a glass with ice in it, and a bottle of lemonade. The same brand as the empty on the table. He hadn’t bothered to ask the other two what they wanted, this was just table rent. He waited patiently until Gage moved over to make room, and then sat down next to him.