The Syndrome

by John Case

  Shit. Adrienne’s heart stalled for a moment, and she didn’t know quite what to say. Finally, she blurted, “So… what’s going on?”

  Bette giggled—nervously—at what she thought was Adrienne’s indifference. “Well, there’s been some kind of meltdown in San Diego. Slough was flaps up hours ago. And, basically—you-the-man!”

  “What do you mean, I’m the man.”

  “You’re deposing McEligot.”

  “What?! When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “But—” Adrienne began, “I’ve never deposed anybody. I’m not prepared. I don’t know—Jesus, Bette!”

  “Well, some of us are actually jealous. I mean—”

  A quiet, high-pitched moan from Adrienne. The kettle shrilled. She picked it up and poured water into the cups, then stirred each one.

  “He said he was sending you his prep work,” Bette told her in a reassuring voice. “So you should check your e-mail. On the other hand, he was really in a hurry, so… who knows?” She sipped her coffee and headed for the door. “Delicious. Anyway… lucky you!”

  “Wait a second,” Adrienne asked, groaning inwardly at the prospect of another all-nighter. “Have you seen Bill around?”

  “Bill who? You mean Fellowes?”

  “Unh-huh.”

  “Not for a couple of days. He’s in Detroit. I don’t think he’s back until Tuesday.”

  When Bette had gone, Adrienne called Bill Fellowes’s number at home, and left a message on his machine, asking him to call her.

  That done, she logged onto the Internet and checked her e-mail. There were eight messages: two jokes, forwarded by friends; a couple of come-ons from AOL and E*Trade; and four bulletins from Slough, which boiled down to: 1) Call me. 2) Where are you? 3) You’re deposing McEligot. And 4) Here’s my prep work. (You’ll have to flesh it out a little.) Go get ‘em!

  This last message included an attachment that, once she downloaded it, caused her to put her head in her hands. Flesh it out? With the exception of two or three sentences that she didn’t recognize, what Slough had sent her—his prep work on McEligot—was nothing more than the memo that she’d worked up for him. Which is to say that it included everything she already knew—and nothing more.

  She called Slough’s number in San Diego, and left a message, saying that she’d received what he’d sent and that she was at the office if he wanted to talk. Then she put her head down, and got to work.

  Time did not fly.

  The McEligot deposition was a minefield, with each question posing a different set of problems and opportunities—so that, by the time Adrienne looked at her watch, three hours had passed—and she’d forgotten to call Duran.

  “I was worried about you,” he said, when she finally got him on the phone.

  “It’s been really busy,” she explained. “And it’s going to be a couple of more hours. I’m not done.”

  “I don’t like you being there,” he told her. “I don’t think it’s safe.”

  His concern touched her. “I’m not alone!” she replied. “Everyone’s beavering away. As soon as I can, I’ll come back and finish up on the laptop. I’ll bring food.”

  “Great, but—”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful.”

  “Good idea,” he said, “but what I was going to ask is, why don’t you get some beer?”

  It was ten o’clock when her tiredness finally gave way to hunger, and she decided to return to the motel. By then, she was the only lawyer still at work, though not the only person on the floor. From the corridor came the dull roar of vacuum cleaners, the squeak of polish on brass, the chatter of Spanish.

  She could refine her notes at the Comfort Inn, working on Nikki’s laptop. She copied her work to a floppy, slung the laptop over her shoulder and flicked off the light.

  Then she rode down in the elevator with a pretty girl in an Orioles sweatshirt who piloted her rolling bucket and mops through the doors when they stopped at the second floor. Alone in the elevator, the world seemed suddenly, eerily silent—until the doors slid open, and a wave of techno pop washed over her from a boombox in the lobby.

  The rain had stopped, but a damp wind nipped at her cheeks as she hurried toward the car. If anything’s going to happen, she thought, now’s the time, this is the place. But there was no one that she could see. An old lady, walking a small dog. A young schizophrenic, shuffling down the sidewalk, dressed in what looked like half a dozen overcoats. Some musicians, sitting outside a club under the Whitehurst Freeway, sharing a joint. Parked cars and vans, but—not her own. A sizzle of fear zipped through her chest, then fizzled out when she remembered that she wasn’t looking for her own aging Subaru, but a new Dodge.

  And there it was.

  Peering through the glass to be sure the backseat was empty, she got behind the wheel and tried the ignition. A sluggish sound rose up from under the hood. And again. And again. Just as she was beginning to panic, the engine turned over with a roar. Relieved, she pulled out into the street, heading for Rock Creek Parkway.

  She was creeping past the Kennedy Center—Yo-Yo Ma was opening that night—when she noticed a shiny black car in her rearview mirror. She didn’t know what kind of car it was, but it was low-slung and predatory looking. It seemed to her she’d seen it on the street outside her office, when she’d been looking for her own car—but maybe not. Then the traffic opened up and, suddenly, she was past the Ken-Cen, gathering speed on her way to the bridge. With a glance at her rearview mirror, she saw that the car behind her was now a van.

  And so she relaxed, her mind turning to Duran as she crossed the Potomac, heading toward Springfield.

  She couldn’t believe that she was going to spend another night in a motel with this guy—or what was worse, that he was now her only confidant. That, more than anything else, really got to her. It boggled the mind. Her eyes rose to the rearview mirror, and stayed there for several seconds before they returned to the road. Still no shiny black car, but in all this traffic, who could tell?

  At the brightly lighted Sultan Kebab in Springfield, she ordered takeout for herself and Duran, then sat down to wait with the magazine section of the Post. There was a terrific recipe for preserved lemons and, reading it, she wished with all her heart that she might someday have time to do things like that—instead of spending her Sundays immersed in asphalt. Finally, the proprietor emerged from the kitchen with a pair of self-enclosed, Styrofoam trays containing rice, kebabs, and salad.

  The motel was only a couple of minutes away, which was good—because, as she emerged from the Sultan Kebab, she saw the shiny black car, or thought she did. It was parked about a hundred feet away in a rank of other cars, facing in the opposite direction. What caught her attention was not so much the car itself, as the fact that its brake lights were on. Noticing that, she then saw a thin column of vapor rising from the car’s exhaust, even as a hand reached out from the front seat to adjust the mirror on the passenger’s side.

  She saw this as she walked, and in her peripheral vision, she noticed that there were two men in the car. She could feel their eyes upon her in the side view mirrors. Or so she imagined.

  Then she was at her own car, the rented Dodge. Fumbling for the key, she unlocked the door, got in and tried the engine. For the second time that night, it was slow to start. But start it did and, when it did, she took off like a teenaged psycho, accelerating through the parking lot, eyes on the mirror. For a second, she thought she saw the headlights flash on the shiny black car, but then she turned, and there was no one behind her.

  At least, she didn’t think there was anyone behind her.

  The Springfield mixing bowl was a tangle of converging highways, half of which were under construction, and it would have been death to take her eyes off the road.

  Then, again…

  If she was being followed, Adrienne thought, they must have had a change of mind. About Duran, that is. Because the only reason they would follow her—when they could have g
rabbed her outside work—would be to find him. Which was strange, because Duran wasn’t their target. At least, he hadn’t been their target the day before. Then, the big man—the Bear—had gone out of his way not to kill him, turning the gun on Adrienne. So something had changed… but why? Was it the break-in? The 911 call? Maybe. Or maybe she wasn’t being followed at all.

  Soon, she pulled into the parking lot of the Comfort Inn, a vast expanse of concrete that glowed pinkly from the mercury street lamps overhead. Hurrying into the motel, she went straight to the elevator and up to the room, where Duran greeted her from his chair behind the desk.

  “You’re right on time,” he told her, looking up from the Post. “I’m starving.” Brushing by him without a word, she put the boxes of kebabs on the desk, flicked off the lights, and crossed to the windows—where she pulled the curtains shut, and peeped outside.

  “I think I was followed,” she told him.

  “What!?”

  She nodded. “I wasn’t sure, but… yeah.”

  He went to her side, and peered out through the parted curtain. “What am I looking for?”

  “The car behind mine. Next to the jeep. Shiny black car.”

  He looked, and saw a Mercury Cougar parked in a space about fifteen feet behind the Dodge. The car was empty, or seemed to be, until he saw the lighted end of a cigarette flare in the darkness of the front seat. Duran took a deep breath.

  “Now what?” Adrienne asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He paused. “How many people were in the car?”

  She thought about it. “Two… I think.”

  He sighed. “Give me the keys.”

  She handed them over with a frown. “They don’t know which room we’re in—or even that we’re together.”

  He stood beside the curtain, looking out. Finally, he told her, “Here’s what I think: that guy’s friend is at the front desk, right now, asking about us. And if it’s the same guy we met yesterday—the big guy?—I think the clerk will tell him what he wants to know.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “That’s the really hard part,” he replied. “I have no fucking idea.”

  Adrienne groaned.

  “Get your things together,” he suggested. “If we get outta here, you’ll need something to wear.”

  “‘If’!?”

  His look was incredulous, but what he actually said was: “Yeah—‘if.’”

  She pulled the shopping bag out of the wastepaper basket, and went into the bathroom, where she cleared the counter of everything it held. Then she tossed her clothes on top of that, and stood beside the door, waiting for Duran to give the word. Or have an idea. Or whatever it was he was waiting for.

  Finally, Duran said, “There he is.”

  “Who?”

  “The big guy,” he replied, eyes on the parking lot. “He just came out the door.”

  “What’s he doing?” she asked.

  “He’s getting the other guy.” Suddenly, he turned to her. “We have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re on the way up.”

  Lunging from the room, Adrienne turned instinctively toward the elevator, but Duran caught her by the sleeve and pulled her toward the emergency exit at the end of the corridor. Yanking open the door to the stairs, they heard the elevator ping and dove into the stairwell, taking the concrete steps two at a time.

  Until Adrienne crashed with a yelp into someone a lot bigger, someone who was coming up the stairs as fast as they were going down.

  “Bitch!” The Big Guy grabbed her by the collar with both hands, brought her close, then made a sort of no look pass, tossing her into the wall. She hit the cinderblock flat and square, the back of her head smacking against the rock. A gasp fell from her mouth as she sank to the floor—even as Duran came down the stairs, throwing a roundhouse that caught the Big Guy behind the ear. No ooof this time, but a bellow of pain and rage as the Big Man bounced off the wall and, with a feral growl, plowed into the therapist as if he were a tackling dummy, slamming him into the iron balustrade. The impact sent a shock wave up and down his spine, but the real agony was in his mouth, where Duran’s teeth slammed shut on his tongue. He could taste the blood—but only for a moment, as the Big Guy hit him flush in the forehead, setting off a series of clicks and pops inside his head.

  Rolling to the left, Duran counterpunched reflexively, but not to much use. In an instant, his adversary was behind him, looping his meathook arms under Duran’s own, then clasping his hands at the back of his neck, pushing him down. Duran was in shape, but it felt as if his arms were going to snap like twigs—and there was nothing that he could do about it. The man he was fighting was fifty pounds heavier, a lot stronger, and just as quick.

  Then something strange happened. Without thinking about it, Duran jackknifed, plunging his head toward his knees so quickly that the Big Man sommersaulted over his shoulders. It was a wrestling move, and its fluency surprised Duran almost as much as it did its victim. Where did that come from? he wondered, as the Big Man’s tailbone smacked into the rock hard floor.

  He lay there for a moment, stunned, as Duran glanced frantically around for something to hit him with—something to put him out. But there was nothing. Then the Big Guy was on his hands and knees, struggling to his feet. Terrified, Duran took a step back, then drove his instep into the other man’s chin as if he were kicking an extra point, snapping his neck with a crack so loud it could have been a gunshot.

  Then the night was still, and the only noise was Duran gasping for air—he was still lit up with adrenaline, still in pain—and a soft, whimpering sound from where Adrienne lay in the corner of the stairwell.

  Kneeling by her side, Duran coaxed her to wakefulness. Putting his hand behind her head, he could feel the blood from an open wound, matting her hair. “C’mon,” he said, lifting her gently into a sitting position. “We’ve got to go.”

  Reluctantly, she let him drag her to her feet, where she stood, swaying, holding his arm as if it were a life preserver.

  “Where are the keys?” he asked.

  She nodded to the shopping bag, which held her purse and other things.

  He reached in, opened the purse, and fumbled through it until he found the keys. Then he took her by the arm, and led her down the stairs to the mezzanine, just off the lobby. There was no one at the front desk, and no security guard.

  Seeing the open, empty expanse, Adrienne balked. “What about the other man?”

  “He’s looking for his friend,” Duran said. “C’mon.”

  Together, they ran to a side door that gave way to the parking lot. Bursting into the night air, they sprinted for the car, jerked open the doors and dove in. Duran jammed the key in the ignition, revved the engine and said, “Put on your seat belt.”

  “What?!” Adrienne stared at him in disbelief. “Go!”

  He shook his head, and revved the engine even louder. “Put it on!” he shouted. Then he reached over his left shoulder, and drew his own seat belt across his chest, fastening the strap in the receptacle by his side.

  “But—”

  Duran wasn’t listening. His arm was on the back of the seat, and he was half-turned, looking out the back window.

  Sputtering with exasperation and fear, Adrienne did as she was told and buckled up. Then she folded her arms across her chest, and sat stock-still, looking straight ahead in rapt frustration.

  “There he is,” Duran told her, as a wild-eyed man burst out the side door of the motel, looking left and right.

  “Are we going to sit here forever?” Adrienne asked.

  In reply, Duran shoved the gearshift into reverse. The tires squealed, caught, and shot the Dodge backwards into the front end of the Mercury Cougar, ten yards behind them. There was a crash of glass, and a geyser of antifreeze as the Mercury’s hood jackknifed, its engine compacting and right wheel well folding in upon itself.

  Adrienne screamed, and the man in the doorway roared—hap
lessly, if that’s possible. Easing the gearshift into Drive, Duran reversed direction, pulling away from the scene with the comment that “Seat belts aren’t just a good idea, y’know. They’re the law.”

  Chapter 22

  They were out of the parking lot, and almost to the highway before Duran noticed that the rain had turned to mist. Pools of water glowed in the indelible twilight that passed for night in the city. Up ahead, a dull roar rose from the interstate like heat shimmering over a desert highway.

  Adrienne groaned. Duran glanced at her.

  She was acting as if she had a concussion, fading in and out like a weak radio signal. No sooner were they on the highway, heading north, than she asked him to pull over onto the shoulder so she could throw up. After that, she seemed a little better. More alert.

  But they didn’t talk. Using the controls on the armrest, he rolled down the car windows, so the cold air could help them focus. Driving past Capitol Hill, he turned to her, and asked, “You mind if I say something?”

  She shook her head. “What?”

  “I told you so.”

  She blinked. Frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said: I told you so.”

  Her frown deepened. “And what was it you told me?”

  “Not to go to work.”

  Her lips parted in reply, then closed in a pout. It was disgraceful of him to throw that in her face—even if he was right. Especially if he was right. And if he didn’t know that, well… After a while, she asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Bethany Beach.”

  She looked at him in disbelief, and he could see that she was feeling better. “Are you out of your mind? I can’t go there! I have to work!”

  Duran rolled his eyes toward the roof.

  “Turn around,” she demanded.

  Duran laughed.

  “I mean it!” she said. “Get off at the exit.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’? Stop the fucking car! I’m the one who rented it. It’s my—oooh!” Her hand went to the contusion at the back of her head. When he glanced at her again, she was staring at the blood on her fingers.