Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel

by S. A. Lelchuk

  “Like I could forget.”

  “I’m not trying to upset you. But just to get all of the elephants out of the room.”

  “Sure. The elephants.”

  “Your last boyfriend, Bryan. That was his name, right?”

  “Bryan. Yeah. Sure. What about him?”

  “I feel compelled to point out that you struggle with—with certain tendencies. How you react to certain things.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on my side? Bryan was an asshole. I was protecting him. Protecting him. Did you get that in my file?”

  “Nikki, I know you’re upset.”

  “Let me finish. Okay? Since we’re herding the damn elephants or whatever. You know that he didn’t even bail me out after it happened? That I got to spend a day in a cell with the DTs puking two feet from my cot and a bunch of sleazy male guards telling us all the fun things they wanted to do to us—did that go in my file, too?”

  “You feel betrayed by Bryan.”

  “I’m not complaining. I can handle worse. I have handled worse. A lot worse.”

  “I believe you, but my point is that problems become problems when they have a negative effect on your life. Legal consequences, the end of a relationship, risks to your health and safety. This has to be addressed. Why didn’t you want to talk about your parents last time? Can you tell me?”

  “Can we call it a day?”

  “We still have some time left.”

  “I know.”

  “We can finish early if you like. I’ll see you next week, same time?”

  “Like I have a choice.”

  “Be good, Nikki. I’ll see you next week.”

  14

  Gregg Gunn had asked to meet me at a fitness center in San Jose, a couple of miles from the Care4 building where I had begun following Karen Li. I pulled up to the big glassy building and walked into a sun-filled atrium, dodging potted ferns and finding the main desk just past a smoothie bar with lemons and oranges painted along its walls. The effect was like a corporate kindergarten. Around me everywhere were young staff in white polo shirts and khakis, all smiling and moving with the precise efficiency of robots. Gunn must have given them my name because a moment after I checked in, a good-looking Korean guy bounced around the desk and offered to show me upstairs. “He’s on the racquetball courts,” he explained. My guide looked to be college-age, with a wide smile and muscular arms that strained his sleeves. A name tag identified him as Kevin. We walked past the Sales offices, where a handful of attractive men and women were on the phone or leaning forward in earnest conversation.

  “You’re a trainer here?” I asked.

  Kevin nodded with vigor. “Most definitely! Do you work out? You look it.”

  “When I can.”

  “Ask for me if you ever want to book some individual sessions. I’d love to help you achieve your goals!” We reached the racquetball courts on the second floor. “He’s on court three,” Kevin said. He flashed me a parting smile and offered a strong handshake. “Don’t be shy about getting in touch!” As he walked away I thought again of the robots.

  The back wall of the racquetball court was glass. I watched Gunn move within. He wore athletic clothes and hit with energy, leaping side to side across the polished maple, arm winding back and sweeping across his body with each shot. The glass stripped the scene of audio; I watched sneakers squeak silently off wood and the paddle bounce soundlessly off the ball. When I walked into the court he glanced at me over his shoulder but didn’t stop. “Nikki. Thanks for coming. Any updates?”

  I told him briefly what I’d seen of Karen Li in San Francisco, omitting only the strange phone call I’d gotten at my apartment. Gunn kept hitting while I talked. I tried to stay out of the way. “You’re sure about this?” he said. “Did you record the conversation?”

  “No.”

  He gave the ball a hard slam and repositioned himself for the bounce. “Why not? Isn’t that what I’m paying you to do? No offense, Nikki, but I can’t just take your word for everything that happens. I need proof. You of all people should know that.”

  I stepped out of the way of the ball as it angled toward me. Gunn’s paddle came within six inches of my head and sent the blue rubber ball spinning toward a corner. “The woman is scared out of her mind,” I said. “Meaning she’s hyperaware. A hundred thousand years ago, that’s probably why we didn’t all get eaten by lions. If I had been snapping pictures, someone would have noticed. Once that happens, forget about following her anymore.” I wasn’t exaggerating. Being professionally followed was an experience that the majority of the population never encountered. The feeling tended to be deeply unsettling. It could keep a person looking under the bed for years to come.

  He sidestepped to take the ball on his backhand and smashed it down-court. “So you physically saw her leave her bag. And the two men took it? You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed. I reminded myself the guy had paid me twenty grand. For that money, I could play parrot.

  Gunn abruptly stopped and set the paddle down, breathing hard. The ball rolled away from us. “So I was right.”

  “That I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Of course I was right,” he snapped as though I had called him a liar. “What do you think, she’s giving them her dry cleaning?”

  “Would you like me to stay on her through the weekend?” I was hoping he’d say no. It was the first weekend in October and I was looking forward to seeing Ethan again. I didn’t want to cancel. Not for any reason, but especially not for Gregg Gunn.

  He shook his head, wiping sweat away with a gym towel. “No need. We have a company retreat down in Big Sur. She’ll be there the whole time.”

  “Okay.” For once, I wanted to say more. I wanted to ask why the woman I was following looked like she was standing three stories up in a burning house, if all she was doing was stealing documents. I wanted to ask why a man using a voice changer would have gone through the trouble of digging up my home number to warn me about unknown danger. I wanted to ask him, again, why he had hired me in the first place instead of picking one of the big, sleek corporate security firms that specialized in handling exactly this kind of case. For that matter, I wanted to know how exactly he had found me, and why he had decided to pay me a retainer far in excess of my normal rates. I wasn’t buying that he’d flipped darts into the Yellow Pages until my name came up, either. I wouldn’t have minded learning a bit more about Gunn or his company. There were plenty of things I wanted to know.

  I kept quiet.

  Gunn drank from a water bottle, still breathing hard. Under the sheen of physical exertion he looked tired, eyes reddened as though he hadn’t slept well. Together we left the court, closing the glass door behind us. “Are there things about Karen Li you’re not telling me?”

  He gave me a sharp look. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Maybe I like questions.”

  Gunn started to say something, stopped, and shrugged. “I suppose there’s always something we don’t know. I told you what is relevant.”

  “Is Karen Li working with anyone else at your company? Do you suspect anyone else?”

  Gunn narrowed his eyes. “Not that I’m aware. But if she is, I hope you can find that out.”

  “And there’s nothing else I should know? About who she is or what she wants?”

  “I told you the salient details,” he replied. “That’s what you should be focused on.”

  He stopped by a door leading to the men’s locker room. “We’ll be in touch. Make sure I can reach you.”

  * * *

  Outside in the parking lot I had just gotten on my motorcycle when there was a double honk behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a little white BMW, one of the boxy hybrid models. I raised my visor, irritated by the constant impatience of Silicon Valley. “You can have the spot,” I said. “Just give me a second.”

  The driver looked at me through his open window. He was Gunn’s
age, in his late forties, but had the opposite manner of the charismatic CEO. His brown hair withdrew from his forehead in a pronounced widow’s peak and he had prominent eyebrows set above an intelligent, uncertain face. The uncertainty was telegenic. He could have been cast in a commercial as the guy thinking about switching from one phone company to another after his best friend tells him what he’s missing while they’re watching a baseball game. “I don’t want your parking spot,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” His voice was soft and careful.

  “If you want to hit on a woman, I think you’re supposed to do it in the gym, not the parking lot. And you’re never supposed to honk. Just a tip for the future.”

  He didn’t smile. “I’m not hitting on you, and we can’t stay out here all day. He might see us. He’ll be out any minute.”

  I took a closer look at the driver. I’d never seen him before. “You don’t mean—”

  “Follow me,” he said. “Hurry.”

  I generally wasn’t in the habit of letting strange men pull up in a parking lot and tell me where to go, but this time I nodded. I followed the white car onto the freeway, heading north. It was early afternoon, before the South Bay’s hellish commuter traffic really got bad. In North San Jose, the white car exited and we drove down wide roads crammed with construction cranes and new apartment complexes. Even through my helmet, noise assailed me, clanging and hammering descending from the little troops of orange-vested men on scaffolding and catwalks. I was relieved when the BMW took another, narrow road that spun us out away from the craze of buildings, and then we were weaving between high unkempt grass and, beyond that, marshy water that must have been the southernmost tip of the Bay.

  The car pulled over on the side of the road and the driver got out. I pulled up behind him and we faced each other. I wasn’t worried. Nothing about the man in front of me seemed dangerous. He was a little shorter than me and wore high-waisted blue jeans and a tucked-in black T-shirt. Sock-clad feet filled leather sandals. The skin on his hands was soft, fingernails neatly clipped. He had the expression, out here in what passed for wilderness, of someone who seemed far more comfortable indoors.

  “Your name is Nikki Griffin,” he said. “You’re a private investigator.”

  “I’ve been called worse. And you are…?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  Something about him seemed familiar, even though I was sure we’d never met. I took a long-shot guess. “You called me the other night, didn’t you? At my home.”

  His eyes shifted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Using a voice changer. You were trying to warn me about something.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeated weakly. He pulled an orange plastic bottle from a pocket and removed two small white pills, dry-swallowing them. I glimpsed the label. Lorazepam. Jess had a prescription for the same thing because she hated flying.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” he repeated.

  “You never got around to giving me your name,” I added.

  “No! I’m not used to this cloak-and-dagger stuff,” he continued more quietly. “It’s very stressful. I don’t know how people like you manage it constantly.”

  “Don’t tell me your real name if you don’t want to. We’re not in The Secret Agent.”

  “The what?”

  “Conrad. Never mind. But I have to call you something.”

  He hesitated. “Call me Oliver.”

  “Okay. So, Oliver, why are we here?”

  “You took on a job that you shouldn’t have,” he finally said. “There’s a lot more going on than you know, and what you’re up against is a lot more than you can deal with.”

  “You really know how to build up a girl’s self-confidence.”

  He didn’t smile. “You should walk away,” he said. “Better yet, run. Away from the whole mess, before it’s too late. Because after a certain point, there’s no going back.”

  I was getting tired of the whole Nostradamus act. “I thought you had something to tell me. Something real.” I glanced around at the grass, dead brown after the dry summer. “As much as I like the beautiful view and scintillating conversation.”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  “Well, you’re not breaking any speed limits.”

  “First I need to know that I can trust you.”

  I spread my hands apologetically. “Oliver. Please. There’s no way I can make that happen. And that’s not a bad thing. You don’t know me. You’d be stupid to take anything I say at face value. But, sure, if you insist—how can I earn your trust?”

  “Well, you’re doing a pretty bad job of it so far,” he retorted.

  “How long have you worked at Care4?”

  He drew back suspiciously. “Who says I do? How do you know that?”

  “Because you knew Gunn would be at the fitness center, which means that you either have access to his calendar or work at the gym.” I remembered the biceps and smile of the charismatic Korean guy who had walked me up to the racquetball courts, the cluster of energetic salespeople we’d passed. “You’re definitely not a trainer, and frankly—no offense—there’s no way you’re in sales, because if you were, the whole place would be bankrupt.”

  “You really know how to build up a guy’s self-confidence,” he returned.

  I had to laugh. “Sorry. Guess we’re even. So what do you do at Care4?”

  The flash of humor faded as he gazed out at the weed-choked water. “I’m in security.”

  “I think you forgot your gun and badge.”

  “Not that meathead goon crap. I mean the security that matters—network security. The stuff that people should actually worry about.”

  “How about me? You told me I should worry. So what do I worry about?”

  His lip pinched his teeth. “Why were you hired by Care4?”

  I made a fast calculation of the pros and cons of disclosure, and decided that I almost definitely wouldn’t be telling him anything he didn’t already know. “To follow an employee. Karen Li. To find out if, and what, she’s stealing from the company.”

  He nodded. “Have you talked to her?”

  “Of course not. You think I can just walk up and ask if she had eggs or oatmeal for breakfast? That’s not how it works.”

  He unwrapped a candy bar that he took from his pocket. “What do you know about Greggory?” he asked, biting into the dark chocolate.

  “I know that he’s the CEO of a tech company that’s going to change the world one baby monitor at a time. Look, Oliver. I appreciate the questions, but I can’t do the runaround all day. What do you want to tell me?”

  “Not tell you. Show you.” He reached into his car and handed me a sheaf of folded papers. I unfolded them and looked up questioningly.

  Airline itineraries.

  The passenger name on each was Mr. Greggory A. Gunn. “Are these real?”

  He nodded. “It’s easy enough to verify a couple of flights if you don’t believe me.”

  The destinations jumped out. Grozny, Chechnya, with a stop in Moscow each way. A three-day round trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then a third trip to Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul. I did my best to memorize the flight numbers and dates. Three separate trips in total, all within the last ninety days, all commercial. It was the last part that made me skeptical. “You’re telling me your CEO is too cheap to fly private? Have you seen his watch?”

  “On the contrary. He always flies corporate. Except on these trips.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at the destinations.”

  “I did.”

  “A lot easier for people to know where you’re going if you’re in a company jet.”

  “So what was he doing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Can you take a guess?”

  Oliver gave me a sour look. “I thought that was your job, Detective.”

  “You think Karen Li is
part of this? Or knows something about it?”

  “No idea. And I’m not about to get involved.”

  “Then why talk to me now?”

  Even the question seemed to make him nervous. “I’m not a hero, but I don’t plan to end up in prison, either. If my company is doing something wrong I don’t want to be complicit.”

  “Why not go to the police?”

  “To report a travel itinerary?” He slid his sandaled toe around the dusty paving and watched little tracks form. “Look—just take my advice and walk away. I’m sure there are a million people out there who will pay you to follow someone or snap pictures or whatever you do. Don’t get involved in this. It’s not worth it, I mean it.”

  “Thanks for the advice. To be continued.”

  He didn’t like that. “No! Not to be continued! This was a one-time favor. Don’t think we’re getting into a whole … arrangement.”

  I didn’t bother to answer that. Putting my helmet on, I tried once more. “No guesses? Why your CEO would want to visit those countries? He doesn’t seem the type to be into the whole extreme tourism thing, but maybe I’m wrong.”

  Oliver started to say something, then stopped. “No idea whatsoever.”

  “Nice to meet you, Oliver.”

  I rode away, thinking about the destinations, what they had in common.

  Wondering what a tech CEO was doing visiting the world’s hotbeds for extremism.

  15

  There might have been worse parts of Oakland than Castlemount, but I didn’t know about them. I parked on the sidewalk, right by the door of the six-story apartment building I was headed into. In addition to breathtaking coastline and sweeping redwood forests, the Bay Area also had the distinction of being statistically the best place in the country to have a car stolen. Something like fifty thousand vehicles gone each year. I wanted to come back to a motorcycle that was still there. Across from me was a small white house. A rusted car sat in the front yard on tireless rims. Two young men sat on the porch, staring openly, passing a bottle in a paper bag. A dog barked somewhere down the street. I took grocery bags out of the lockable metal storage cases on either side of the motorcycle.