If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  “Okay,” he said, and sat down again.

  “Thank God.”

  Chris poured fresh coffee for them both and came back to the table.

  “If there’s some kind of official secrecy involved,” he said, “I’ll sign a paper, or whatever you need. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  Joe told him. The expression of rage in Webber’s eyes when he finished, confirmed that he’d been right to confide in him. He looked the way Joe felt.

  “What do you need?” Chris’s voice was shaky but strong.

  “Wait till I’ve gone, then call this number.” Joe took a pen and notebook from his inside pocket and tore off a sheet. “Detective Cohen’s the man I was just talking to. He’s okay, but I don’t want to get him fired. If he can’t talk to me direct, they can’t expect him to get me back to Chicago.”

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “That I’ve confided in you – God help us all – and that I want him to keep you informed of all developments from his end, as and when.”

  “And meantime?”

  “I’m going to find Charlie Sheldon and I’m going to consider breaking into Ash’s office.” Joe stood up again. “Find out how fast I can get to Miami.” He glanced down at the telephone and made a note of the number. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Chris waited until he heard the front door close, and then he went out into the back yard and walked past the kennels. The dogs barked, but he took no notice. The snow was piled over a foot deep even on the path, and he wore only sneakers, but he didn’t notice the cold or wet. He thought about Lally. About her beauty, her kindness, her courage. He thought about the magic that had flared up between them so fiercely, and about the way they’d both backed off because of Andrea and Katy. He thought about Lucas Ash, and about the little pacemaker that was supposed to have saved her life, and he thought about those other people – all with normal lives and hopes and dreams – blown to kingdom come by a maniac.

  He felt a wet nose on his left hand, and looked down. Jade, the bitch Lally had met when she’d come to the house two weeks ago, was nuzzling him gently, and Chris only realized then that there were tears rolling down his cheeks and that the dog was trying to comfort him.

  “I’m okay, girl.”

  He took a look around. The sun was already starting to dip, but it was still there and the heavily laden branches of the fir trees were glowing pink. In south Florida it would be warm, and somewhere Lally might be getting ready for a blazing sunset and thinking contentedly towards her future. A future that might never come to pass, unless they found her.

  He turned and went back into the house to call Cohen.

  Joe telephoned Chris at six o’clock.

  “What do you have?”

  “Cohen wants you to call him.”

  “So what’s new?”

  “Any luck with Ash?”

  “His office is in a high security building, so no chance. We’re going to have to wait for him to get in touch from Hawaii. Have you found a flight for me?”

  “For us.”

  “No way.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  Joe took a second. “Do you have a decent car to get us to Albany fast?”

  “A Jeep Cherokee – want me to pick you up?”

  “What about your daughter?”

  “I’ve already sent Katy to stay with a friend. She’s ecstatic.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Lally’s house.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Joe called Cohen from the airport.

  “Thank God.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Jess is going nuts.”

  “What’s wrong?” Fresh terror gripped Joe. “Is it the baby?”

  “I’m not sure – she’s not sure – ”

  “Tell me what happened, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Jess called, sounding really upset. She’s been having some kind of pains, and she wanted to talk to you, and then her mother got on the phone and said if you were any kind of husband you’d be here when she needed you.” Cohen sounded distraught. “Joe, you have to come back. I know how hard it must be, but you’ve got no choice.”

  Joe felt as if he was tearing in two. He saw Webber looking at his watch and pacing, and he thought of Lally, somewhere, blissfully ignorant, and then he thought about Jess, his sweet Jess, and he knew Cohen was right.

  “Have you called Florida?”

  “They have all they need. I went to your house and got one of Lally’s photos to fax through to them, and they’ll have the real thing tomorrow.” Cohen paused. “What do I tell Jess?”

  “Tell her I’m coming.”

  “It’s not your fault, Joe. Don’t beat yourself up.”

  Joe put down the phone. Webber was at his side instantly.

  “Something’s happened,” Chris said tersely.

  “I have to go back to Chicago.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I have to.” Joe wanted to scream, but his voice was very quiet. “My wife may be losing our baby, and she needs me.”

  Chris stood still for a moment.

  “I’m going to Florida,” he said.

  “The state police have already started looking for Lally.” Joe looked at Webber. “Are you sure about this?”

  “You know I am.”

  Joe nodded. “I’ll tell them you’re on your way, and that they have to let you help. But you have to do it their way – they’re experts, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The flight was being called. Chris picked up his bag.

  “Find her,” Joe said.

  “I will.”

  “And try not to scare her too much.”

  Chris managed a half-smile. “I’m scared enough for both of us.”

  “She’ll need you to be strong for her.”

  “Trust me.”

  “I do.” Joe picked up his own bag. “God help me, I do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Friday, January 22nd

  They had camped for two nights, and tonight they had taken time off – ”for good behaviour,” Hugo said, for Hugo would never adapt too well to life in a sleeping bag or under canvas – on Conch Key, staying in a tiny wooden cottage with its own screened porch close to the beach. They were sharing the bedroom, and Hugo felt heroic and unmanned at the same time, felt his love for Lally spilling over and over, certain that she must, at last, notice, hoping that she would not, praying that she would.

  “Bahia Honda tomorrow,” Lally said, dreamily, before they went to sleep. “White sand beaches, silver palms and turtles.”

  “You sound like you swallowed the guide book,” Hugo commented into the dark.

  Lally smiled. “And evening bats.”

  She had begun thinking about Chris again. She hadn’t intended to, had almost believed herself free of him, of the sheer impracticability of falling in love with such an encumbered man, but he had slipped neatly back into her mind with the beauty of the settings they had seen over the last few days and the knowledge that such scenes could not be captured with their Pentax, that only a great photographer or an artist could begin to seize the magic of it. The real truth was, Lally confessed to herself under cover of darkness while Hugo gently snored in the next bed, the unvarnished and shameful truth was that, joyful as it was having her dearest friend to share this vacation with her, she wished that Chris could be here, too, so that she could watch him, his reactions, his responses, could spend time with him away from his troubles, could learn something about the man himself, the individual. And if she had allowed herself, Lally knew she was a whisker away from turning wishing into fantasy, and she was behaving like a schoolgirl, and she knew it had to stop.

  You don’t know him, she told herself for the hundredth time. And he isn’t here, and he can’t be here or anywhere else with you, and there’s no point wishing for things that can’t be.

  And yet s
he did.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Saturday, January 23rd

  In Orlando, Florida, Alice Benton Douglas was at the hairdresser, having her first permanent in twenty years. The last time, the day before her thirtieth wedding anniversary, she’d treated herself, hoping that a little change might put some extra spice into their celebrations, but it had been a disaster, all frizz and split ends, and Martin had refused flatly to be seen out in public with her, telling her she looked like an over-used scouring pad.

  This time was very different. In the first place, Martin had been dead for three years, and though Alice often missed him and wished she had a little company in the evenings, at least there would be no man to mock if it all went wrong again. In the second place, Melvyn’s was a class act and terribly expensive, and Alice had yet to see a single scouring pad walking out of this salon. Everyone and everything was sleek and elegant, and Alice, too, felt transformed already, even after her first shampoo.

  Everything was different these days, of course, what with Walt Disney and Epcot and all. And then there was the building work – so many new buildings, all those beautiful houses, all those strangers flooding into the area. Most of her friends, her contemporaries, complained that the landscape was being destroyed, cluttered, but Alice loved it. The new homes were wonderful, she thought, like movie sets and so luxurious, and they had brought life, youth and prosperity with them. And shopping malls and neat little strip malls, so easy to park close to, with places like Melvyn’s, places that had been out of reach in the old days.

  Everything about Alice was transformed now, of course. Had been ever since her surgery. Surgery. A big word for such a small ‘procedure’, which was what they’d all called it in the hospital, only Alice hadn’t believed them for a moment, for how could anything that involved cutting a hole in her chest be dismissed as a simple procedure? And yet they’d been right, she’d admitted that almost immediately – once the terror had subsided and she’d realized not only that she was still there, still alive, but that she felt a thousand per cent better already.

  Transformed, she thought, resting back comfortably while her head was wrapped in a snowy white turban. The new Alice Douglas. The hair would only be a small part of the process, scarcely significant, as would be the new dress she intended buying herself later that afternoon or, if she was too tired, tomorrow morning. But I won’t be tired, she thought contentedly. That’s the whole point. I’m never going to feel dog-tired again, not without a damned good reason.

  The boy who had shampooed Alice’s hair, tilted her chair upright again and helped her onto her feet, and Alice thought, for an instant, of rejecting his help, but she had been brought up in a time of comparative chivalry, and she knew that it was discourteous to spurn kindness of any sort.

  She was looking into the mirror when it happened. Sitting in the chair – a funny, quite unpleasant kind of chair, really, that got pumped up by a pedal till you were the right height, a little too much like the dentist’s chair – and listening to the young woman who was going to give her the permanent explain to her that nowadays there was absolutely no reason for frizz or even curl when all that was needed was a little extra body.

  “A little extra body,” were the last words Alice Douglas ever heard, for everything else was drowned out by the sound of a hair-dryer being switched on nearby, and by the strange, small boom inside her chest, and by the shrieking of the stylist just rolling the first strands of hair into the first roller as Alice’s wet head jerked forward and then slumped back again, flopping and dead.

  For the first few moments, everyone kept their distance, backed away. And then, in a small, shocked rush, they all moved forward again, closing in on poor dead Alice Douglas, staring in wide-eyed horror at the blood that had sprayed the mirror and the white plastic hairspray and gel bottles and the folded towels that stood on the counter ahead of her.

  And at the hole, bloody and ragged, in her pale green gown.

  And at the smoke.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Saturday, January 23rd

  The man knew he was very sick. He might have been shamming when the good lieutenant called on him last Sunday, but looking into his bathroom mirror now, seeing the stark contrast between the hectic flush on his cheeks and the whiteness of the rest of his face, seeing the pain in his eyes and the dark ringed shadows beneath them, he knew that he ought to be in the hospital.

  One of the Gila monsters had done this to him. His favourite dragons. And his own impulse decision to play one more game with the enemy, when they came to find him. He had decided to bury his six sets of records – one the precise log of the work he had done, the other five his intricate false trails – in the vivaria. He’d toyed with the notion of burying two in each enclosure, but the big iguanas still unnerved him and so he’d decided, in the end, to bury the whole package, fastened together with elastic bands, with the monsters.

  They had not been visible when he’d unlocked the glass door of their enclosure and gone inside; they were shy creatures, often burrowing deep into the sand. The day before, the man had played a tracking game with the dim-sighted creatures, placing two newly dead baby rats first in one part of the enclosure, then moving them, again and again, and observing how, slowly but doggedly, the lizards turned towards the scent each time until finally the man had rewarded them with dinner, which they had, as always, swallowed whole. They had eaten well, and often, after a good meal, they burrowed and slept for days. He had not anticipated their waking. Nor that he might accidentally tread where one of them slept.

  Nor that it might bite him.

  He knew about the creature’s bite, about the grooved sharp teeth that could be almost impossible to dislodge, but nothing could ever have prepared him for the pain of the bite, nor, a mere thirty seconds later, for the sheer agony of the venom as it was released through the teeth into the punctured flesh on his left heel.

  He had screamed with the pain, had fallen to the floor and kicked at it with his other foot, had grasped at its fat body and pulled, but the monster’s teeth had only held tighter. He had crawled madly out of the vivarium, scattering sand and grit and faeces all over the room, seeking a tool of some kind, or a knife, but he had cleared everything out of the room after his work had been completed at the end of last year, and still the monster had hung on, and still the venom had poured into his foot. And then he remembered reading a case where hot water had dislodged a Gila monster from a victim’s hand. He had forced himself to the kitchen sink, filled the kettle and boiled it, crying softly all the while with the pain, and then he had poured the water onto his foot and the creature, and finally it had released him, and he had begun to vomit with agony and then he had passed out. And when he had come round again, the dragon had still lain beside him, dead from the scalding water, and in spite of the exquisiteness of his own pain, the man knew he had triumphed again.

  He had cleaned up the mess as well as he could, locked the vivarium, slid the lizard’s corpse, wrapped in newspaper, down the chute to the communal trash area, and stumbled back to his apartment. He had disinfected the wounds and put antiseptic cream on the blisters, and bandaged his foot, but he was growing weaker and was unable to eat. He supposed he had a fever, but had no energy to use a thermometer. He knew what he might expect from the venom. Local pain and swelling, general weakness, nausea, ringing in his ears, perhaps respiratory distress. Even, in the worst cases, cardiac failure. But he knew that would not happen to him. He would not die.

  In time, they would come to visit him again, and when they saw how badly his condition had worsened, he guessed they would send a doctor, perhaps even take him to hospital. He would not tell them about the bite, would wear socks and slippers, however painful, and even when they found it, he would be silent, would not give the other dragons the satisfaction of knowing what one of their kind had done to him. There was no antivenin for the bite of the Gila monster. All they could do was care for him, while he toyed with them.
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  Mother used to care for him when he was sick.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Saturday, January 23rd

  Joe was functioning on automatic. He was numb again, with fear, with guilt, with being torn to pieces. Jess was in the hospital, and all the tests so far indicated that the baby was okay, and they were praying that things would settle down and that Jess could go home. But right now the doctors wanted her to rest up, and it was such a struggle for Joe to keep from telling her about Lally, and the trouble was that his feelings always showed in his face – Jess always said he’d make a lousy poker player – but this time he was hell bent on keeping the nightmare from her, and so far he’d managed it.

  There had been a storm in Hawaii, and Joe’s temper had blown when Cohen had told him that Lucas Ash had still not been in touch because there was a problem with the phone lines, but at least the Florida State Police had gotten the prints of Lally’s photographs, and they were already out there, looking and asking questions. Apparently they thought it a real possibility that Lally and Hugo might be in Everglades City because the big seafood festival was on, and Joe saw some sense in their reasoning that no one who liked food as much as they did was likely to resist it.

  The searching and sifting at both Hagen Pacing and the battery plant had been completed, and nothing, not a sliver or fragment of evidence, had been found to prove that the sabotaging of pacemakers had happened at either site. Hagen and Schwartz were still home sick – Hagen, he had reported to Cynthia Alesso by phone, with a secondary chest infection that looked like turning into pneumonia – but Linda Lipman, younger, fitter and made of strong stuff, was back on duty and had gone to visit Ashcroft and Leary at their homes. Olivia Ashcroft had pretty much fulfilled her expectations, but Lipman had been startled to find Howard Leary markedly different than at the office, a surprisingly convincing family man with a pretty schoolteacher wife, a long-serving and contented Spanish housekeeper, and three normal, boisterous children at different stages of orthodontia.