Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel

by S. A. Lelchuk

  I pulled off the rest of his clothes and tossed them at various places on the floor. As though they’d been passionately stripped and strewn. The owner of the passionately stripped clothes lay on his back, naked and snoring. This was the second time I’d seen him naked. I could do without a third. I took one of the condoms from his wallet, opened it, and threw the empty wrapper conspicuously on the floor near the bed. The condom itself I flushed down the toilet. I was going to open the other as well for good measure but I held off. No need to further swell his ego. I put his wallet and car keys and room key back in his pants pockets and jotted a line onto the hotel stationery on the nightstand.

  Last night was everything I wanted. You were perfect.

  The pen was nice. I kept it. I poured myself a glass of champagne. The ice was mostly melted but the bottle was still cold. I went out to the balcony and stood watching the city and thinking about what I was going to do next. Wondering if I’d get through the next day.

  I closed my eyes, seeing the cabin, the broken windowpane, the woman on the floor. I hadn’t kept her safe. I hadn’t protected her.

  The odds were against me, but finally I understood what I was up against.

  Now, maybe, I could redeem myself.

  I opened my eyes.

  All in.

  41

  I found an all-night diner on Van Ness where I drank coffee and ate scrambled eggs, thinking about that first diner, over a month ago, where I had met Ethan. I wondered if he’d called me since our conversation. I got up and used the diner’s phone to check my voice mail. Nothing from Ethan, but there was a new message from Jess. It had been left an hour earlier and her voice was plainly stressed. “Nikki, it’s your brother. Get over here when you can.” I hung up with a stab of guilt. I shouldn’t have left Jess with Brandon for that long without checking in. The Care4 case was affecting me.

  It was late enough that the roads were empty. It took me barely fifteen minutes to get back into the East Bay. The wind was fierce and as I swept across the luminous Bay Bridge I could feel the gusts tugging and pushing at the motorcycle. The hotel was in Emeryville, a nondescript city wedged between Berkeley and Oakland. One of the ubiquitous chains found off every freeway in the country. Nothing compared to the five-star place I had left earlier that night. No ornate marble lobby or bartender pouring cocktails. A young night clerk in a wrinkled blue shirt slumped behind a glass window off the side of the empty lobby, his head resting on a paperback, eyes closed. The spine was turned toward him so I couldn’t make out the title. Next to a stained table with an empty coffee urn, a rack of bright brochures offered discounts on local theme parks and haunted houses. I found the elevator and creaked up to the second floor at about half the speed of climbing a staircase. Jess was sitting in a chair by the bed.

  “How is he?”

  She nodded toward the bed. Brandon lay on top of the twisted sheets, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. He was soaked with sweat and very much awake. Jess’s voice was tired. “I’ve never seen someone go through withdrawal before. I keep wondering if I need to call nine-one-one. I’ve been taking his temperature every hour—he’s running a high fever but it’s not climbing anymore. Thank God for Linda being a doctor. She’s come by twice today to check him, take his blood pressure and heart rate.”

  “I’ll take over,” I said. “I shouldn’t have left you with him this long.”

  “You’re sure?” She couldn’t hide the relief in her voice.

  “Of course. I’ll stay with him tonight.”

  “Okay.” She grabbed her jacket and bag, pausing. “Have you found anything more? The first of November—it’s in two days, Nikki.” She checked the clock, seeing it was well past midnight. “Technically, one day.”

  I tried not to sound irritated by the reminder. “I know, I know.”

  “Shouldn’t you go to the police? If something does happen and you didn’t warn people when you could have…” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t have to finish the sentence. We both knew what that would mean for me. Morally, and quite possibly legally.

  “I have it under control. Don’t worry.” The words were pushing hard at my aversion to mendacity. I knew I shouldn’t even be in the hotel room. The moment I left Silas Johnson’s hotel I should have been on my way to the FBI. I told myself I hadn’t gone to them because my evidence hadn’t exactly been obtained in a manner that would hold up in court. Regardless of whether we shared goals, I didn’t particularly feel like confessing to Mr. Jade and Mr. Ruby that I had drugged a lawyer to steal confidential client documents. I had no interest in ending up as collateral damage in their quest to take down Care4. Besides, law enforcement was bound by rules. Search warrants, subpoenas—all kinds of judicial paperwork that took time we didn’t have. Shutting down Care4 on November 2 wouldn’t do much for the people who would die on the first.

  There was something under that rationale, though. Something I was less comfortable admitting even to myself. Something darker. Something I knew was in me, even if I didn’t like it.

  They had killed Karen Li. Tried to kill my brother. Tried to kill me.

  My battle with Care4 had become very personal.

  I didn’t want the FBI to come in and sweep things up.

  I wanted to do it myself.

  For almost my whole life I had been wrestling with this part of myself. Trying to control my reactions when sometimes it felt so much easier just to give in. I didn’t know which way was right. I didn’t know whether it was normal to be more frightened of myself, of what I might do, than anything out there. I didn’t know …

  “… okay?” Jess was asking.

  “Okay?” I had missed most of what she said, and assumed she was talking about my brother. When I looked up, though, her eyes were on me. Her face was worried and she was watching me closely. “Are you okay?” she asked again.

  “Of course I’m okay. What do you mean?”

  Her fingers brushed absently at a clump of gray cat hair on her jeans. “I know you pretty well, Nikki. We spend a lot of time together. Lately you’ve been walking around like a zombie, exhausted, like you’re holding up the world. How can you be trying to handle everything yourself? You’re up against an entire company, a huge conspiracy. People are being murdered. It’s too much for any one person. Even you,” she added pointedly.

  “I have everything under control,” I repeated. “Trust me.”

  The words sounded flat and forced even to me.

  “This isn’t what you do,” Jess went on. “Going after some asshole tough guy who hits his girlfriend is one thing. This is completely different. I saw the man who came into the bookstore when I hid. I still have nightmares about him.”

  “I don’t need help,” I said tersely.

  “Are you making the right decisions? Are you sure that you’re not too deep in this to even know what the right decisions are?”

  “Don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  I knew I was just repeating the same forced words over and over. Jess stood, giving me a last look. She left. The door swung closed. I sat on the bed next to Brandon. Sweat filmed his skin and his eyes were filled with restless energy. I could see his ribs against his chest, and I put my hand on his forehead, startled by the intensity of the damp heat emanating from his skin.

  “Brandon,” I said softly. “Can you hear me?”

  His eyes snapped onto mine. “Nikki? Nikki, you have to get me out of here. You have to get me something. She wouldn’t—but you will. I know you will. You look out for me.”

  “We’re going to stay here,” I said softly. “I’m right here with you.”

  “No! I need something! You don’t understand—I’ll die!”

  I tensed, startled by the surety in his voice. I went into the bathroom and found a clean towel. Soaked it in cool water and placed it gently against his forehead. “We’re going to get through this, Brandi.”

  He thrashed on the bed and his fingers found my arm. “If you really loved me, you�
��d help me. If you cared that I was sick you’d help. You don’t give a shit about me, do you?”

  I said nothing. He shouted more things and I sat there quietly, dabbing the towel against his sweat-filmed skin, holding him. I looked around the room, seeing the untouched bowl of grease-filmed soup on a dresser, bottles of Gatorade and water, the plastic bucket next to the bed. His voice went on, raving, crying. I sat there with him, saying nothing, stroking his arm or dabbing his forehead with fresh towels.

  Eventually he calmed. I thought he had fallen asleep but then he spoke again, his tone gentler, less tortured. “Nik?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think Mom and Dad can see us now?”

  I sat up. “What?”

  “Mom and Dad. Can they see us now? Or are they just gone?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea.”

  “Why don’t we talk about them more?” His green eyes were fastened on mine with the most extreme lucidity.

  I spoke slowly, unbalanced by the frankness of the questions. “It’s hard to talk about. And I know what you went through—I’m scared, sometimes, of bringing them up. In case doing that makes it worse for you. Or maybe I just got used to not talking about them.”

  “Dad tried to save her. Did you know that? It didn’t do any good, but he tried. I didn’t try. I didn’t try to save anyone. I just hid.”

  Tears had filled my eyes. I squeezed his hand. “If they had gotten you, I couldn’t have made it. Honest. You being alive saved me. That’s always been what’s saved me.”

  Outside, the engine of a tractor trailer started up. The very dimmest light had started to filter through the curtained windows.

  “I wanted to kill them,” he said. “Both of them. That’s all I thought about, for a long time. How badly I wanted them to die. I pictured it—every part, every detail—how it would happen. How I wanted it to happen. In my fantasies I killed them both a thousand times.”

  My fingers were over his, but that didn’t feel close enough. I lay down next to him, held him, put my arms around him, willingly, gladly, feeling his sweat soaking into my clothing. “I did, too,” I said. “That’s all I thought about, too. It’s okay to think like that.”

  “Carson Peters. They locked him up for good. San Quentin, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Think he’ll ever get out?”

  “I hope so. Badly. But he won’t.”

  “Jordan Stone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The other one.”

  “The other one.”

  “I didn’t see what they did to Mom. I was under the couch in the living room and they were in the kitchen. I couldn’t see, but I heard it. I heard all of it.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “She asked why. That was the last word she said. Why. After she was—after it had started. She screamed it while she could still talk. They never answered her. The last question of her life, and she never even got an answer.”

  “You never told me that,” I said again. Holding him tighter. Choking on my own swollen throat, my own breath.

  “We don’t talk about it. But things we don’t talk about still happen.”

  “I know they do.”

  “They released him, didn’t they, Nik? He was paroled, right?”

  I didn’t answer at first. “Yeah. I guess they did.”

  “And then?”

  A longer pause. “I guess he went back home.”

  “I tried to find him, you know. A few years ago, I finally got the nerve. He was from Hercules. Just up the road from here. I don’t know what I would have done. I always told myself I’d try to kill him … but I don’t know if I could have. Part of me hopes yes, part of me hopes no. Maybe I would have punched him, or tried to hit him with my car. Maybe just yelled at him. Maybe just cried or gotten beaten up. Who knows? But he’s gone, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “I guess it doesn’t.”

  “It’s funny, though,” my brother continued in that same quiet, reflective voice. “That day that I went looking, I couldn’t find out anything at all about Jordan Stone. No one seemed to know a thing. Like he went home and disappeared into thin air.”

  I held my brother. I felt his sweat, his body, his breathing, against me. I felt him so closely it was like I was inside his body, feeling in my own body the sluggish sickness of withdrawal, in his mind, the tremor and sensitivity of his thoughts my own. I’d never felt closer to him. We had come from the same place. Out of the world’s billions, only us two, no one else.

  “Nik?”

  “Yeah, Brandi?”

  “Can you tell me a bedtime story? Like you used to when we were kids?”

  “A story.”

  “Yeah, a story. Tell me a story.”

  I breathed very slowly. My eyes were closed and my voice was quiet. “What should the story be about?”

  “Tell me a story about what happened to Jordan Stone after he went back home.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long time. Just lay there with my arms around him, watching the cracks of lightness seep out from behind to frame the curtain. “You mean it?”

  “It’s just us, Nik. Just me and you. No one else. So tell me a story. Tell me that story.”

  Some of the thoughts hurling through my mind found purchase, steadied.

  “Okay. If you want me to, I will.”

  * * *

  When they paroled Jordan Stone in the spring of 2005, he moved back to his parents’ house in Hercules. A small city of about twenty-five thousand on San Pablo Bay, just north of Berkeley. He had just turned twenty-eight and was dead broke. Heading home was logical. Not that Jordan Stone had a choice. Living at home was a condition of his parole. There weren’t many conditions, but that was one of them. Federal and state laws were remarkably tough if you were, say, a sex offender. If Jordan Stone had been convicted of even a crime such as having sex with a seventeen-year-old girlfriend when he was eighteen, he would have faced all kinds of harsh restrictions. Register as a sex offender for life, check in with the local police station anywhere he moved, no living near schools or parks, name and address permanently in a publicly accessible database. But a convicted murderer? Society was more trusting. Sure, he wasn’t going to be voting or buying guns, but beyond that, his only real responsibility was to meet with a parole officer once a week and avoid trouble.

  Back at home in Hercules, Jordan Stone seemed to live quietly. His whole release had been quiet. No media attention. No stories in the papers about the reformed killer returning home. No op-eds thundering for or against his release. Nothing.

  His family was middle class. His father owned a small contracting business. He had two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, now both married, with kids of their own. The sister in San Diego and the brother in Richmond. They didn’t seem close with their middle brother.

  Not many businesses made a habit of hiring felons, especially those fresh out of prison for murder, but Jordan Stone was in luck. His father knew a painting crew that either wasn’t too particular or was willing to do a favor. He got a steady job almost right away. Spent Monday through Friday on job sites and enrolled at Contra Costa, a local community college. Courtesy of the State of California, which had already paid about $50,000 a year to lock him up, Jordan Stone now began working toward a college degree.

  His days were simple. Work, check in with his parole officer, sleep at home. As part of his parole he couldn’t drink. He didn’t hang out at bars or clubs. He didn’t have many friends. Occasionally he met up with a few guys he’d probably gone to high school with, played pool or went bowling. He usually went to the arcade once or twice a week at least. Spent hours and hours in the NASCAR simulator or battling zombies. Beyond that, his life didn’t seem to have much else.

  With one exception. Jordan Stone loved comic books.

  There was a comic book store in town. He went in at least three or four times a week. Most of the customers were regulars.
They hung out. Knew each other. Almost all of them boys, men, ranging from preteens to middle-aged. A community. There was a back room where Magic: The Gathering tournaments took place on Friday nights, and there was a section with Dungeons & Dragons games and another for Japanese anime and manga. But mostly comic books. And Jordan Stone loved them. He hung out in the store for hours, flipping through old issues. The few times he smiled seemed to be when he was staring deep into the vivid pages of a comic book or graphic novel.

  I knew all this because I followed him to Hercules.

  The parole board had decided that he was rehabilitated.

  They felt he deserved a second chance at life.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  I rented a room in a shared house in Berkeley. Living with five or six undergrads who were barely younger than me. They partied and studied and cooked and forgot to wash their dishes. Bought plenty of cheap vodka and boxed wine but always seemed to forget toilet paper and dish soap. All the usual undergrad stuff. Fine with me, as long as they left me alone. Berkeley was convenient. Only ten miles south of Hercules. Close, but not too close.

  After a few weeks I knew his schedule probably as well as he did. The painting, the arcade, the comic book shop. I’d never followed anyone before. I had to teach myself as I went along. But I had an advantage. Not only did Jordan Stone not know what I looked like, he didn’t expect to be followed. So I watched. And learned.

  Soon I knew what I had to do.

  I set out to give myself a crash course in comic books.

  I’d thought it would be easy. Brush up on some Spider-Man and Superman and be ready to go. I’d never much liked comic books. Growing up they were probably the only books I didn’t read. Superheroes, superpowers, supervillains. Everything super-something. People were enough for me. I didn’t need super.

  To my surprise, it turned out that the world of comic books was overwhelmingly vast and intricate. Thousands of characters, hundreds of beloved writers and illustrators, intersecting plots, rival companies like DC and Marvel with different ecosystems, some characters and worlds mixing, merging, a whole interlocking universe. I was shocked to learn that some of these little paper books sold for insane amounts of money. The big conventions each year drew tens of thousands of people. A huge amount to learn.