The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “Maybe he was a never-nude,” Lyons jokes. “Had a roommate like that in college. No one ever saw him naked. Guy never even took his shirt off.”

  “Maybe it isn’t him,” Lowenstein says.

  Madden: “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. That guy you have in there on ice, maybe he isn’t Mark McGregor.”

  “Impossible,” Lyons says.

  “Why?”

  “We got a match on his DMV thumbprint and dental.”

  “What about DNA?”

  “Later today or tomorrow,” Lyons says. “It’s been expedited. I mean, seriously, dude, come on. Who do you take me for? That’s fucking insulting. And to think, I had a lot of respect for you.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  Lowenstein smiles. “You know him at all?”

  “Who?”

  “McGregor.”

  Silence.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “Meet him?”

  “Yeah, you ever spend any time in the same room with him?”

  Lyons looks to Madden for help, but Madden’s not inclined to give him any. He’s curious to hear what Lyons has to say.

  “Answer the man, Greg.”

  “Yeah, I met him. How’d you know that?”

  “You’ve got some pictures of him up on your Facebook page. He and a couple of other entrepreneurs from some panel you attended. Some networking event.”

  “That’s not a public photo.”

  “You know that attractive, innocent-looking brunette whose friendship request you accepted the other day? Well, maybe you should be more careful about who you friend. Not everyone’s who they seem.”

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

  “So I’m going to ask you again, how well did you know McGregor? From what I gather, you were trying to start a little business of your own. Apps, I believe. Just one dumb idea, right? That’s all it takes. Did you ask McGregor for an investment? What’d he ask for in return?”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You’ve got some fucking nerve.”

  Lyons takes a step toward Lowenstein. For a moment Madden thinks he may have to step between them, until he feels his phone vibrating on his hip again and decides that now would be a good time to answer it.

  “Madden,” he says, putting the phone to his ear.

  “It’s Carlyle. Where are you? I’ve been trying to call.”

  “Up at the coroner’s office. Why?”

  “Richie Forman just broke off his ankle leash.”

  Madden’s stunned.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know why. But the alarm went off.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Not far from you. San Carlos.”

  San Carlos. What the hell’s he doing in San Carlos?

  “I’ve got the sheriff’s guys on it,” Carlyle says.

  Since the city of San Carlos has had so many fiscal problems, a few years ago it outsourced its police department to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office.

  “What’s going on?” Lowenstein says, moving closer, trying to listen in.

  Ignoring him, Madden gets an address, repeats it back, and tells Carlyle he’s on his way, breaking for his car even before he hangs up. Lowenstein follows him.

  “What’s going on, Detective?”

  “Apparently, your client removed his GPS bracelet,” Madden says. “The alarm went off.”

  Lowenstein seems equally stunned. “Are you sure? He could have gotten it wet. They go off sometimes when they get wet.”

  “I don’t think so, Marty. This one’s waterproof. Now get out of the way before I accidentally hit you with my truck, news-at-eleven style.”

  38/ TIMID BY S & M STANDARDS

  CAROLYN SLOWS THE CAR TO A CRAWL AS THEY NEAR THEIR DESTINAtion and they both start looking in earnest at house numbers while keeping an eye out for Ashley’s rental car.

  “That’s it,” Richie says, pointing. Carolyn pauses in front of the house, which is at the end of a cul-de-sac. A two-story home with an attached garage and pitched shingled roof, it’s relatively modest in size, painted a yellowish white. Probably a three- or four-bedroom, it looks well maintained, particularly compared with the home across the street, a foreclosure. There’s no car parked in the driveway and nothing’s going on inside as far as he can tell.

  While it’s nice enough, Richie’s first thought is that it doesn’t seem like the home of a guy who recently collected several million dollars from the sale of his company. Of course, he could have bought another home and was waiting on the sale to close. Or maybe he was still house hunting.

  “Turn around,” he tells Carolyn. “Swing around the block. Maybe she parked on one of the side streets.”

  They’re in cookie-cutter suburbia, a modest neighborhood that’s got some larger lots but nothing extravagant. They pass a few other cars and a couple of Hispanic guys who are working on a yard down the block.

  They make a couple of loops, taking different streets each time, but don’t spot Ashley’s car. They turn back into the cul-de-sac and Carolyn, on Richie’s instruction, pulls the car over in front of a neighbor’s house a couple doors down from the target address.

  “I’m going to go check it out,” he says. “Watch me. If anything happens, call the police.”

  He doesn’t really have a plan but figures he’ll keep things simple and just go up to the door and ring the bell. And that’s what he does. He rings the bell and stands there, waiting and listening, but doesn’t hear anything. He rings again and waits. Nothing. He gives it another minute, then decides to try to get a better look inside.

  The front yard has a small, manicured lawn and a set of high, dense shrubs that come up to a level just above the windowsills and make it harder to see inside the house. Keeping low, he wedges his way between the shrubs and then pops his head up and looks into a large picture window.

  The place appears to be empty but lived in at the same time, like a hotel room that’s awaiting the next guest. There’s a bowl of fruit on a dining-room table, which has six chairs around it. The furniture looks like generic Pottery Barn or Crate and Barrel. He listens for a moment, blocking out the din of a lawn mower down the street. He gives it one last look, then goes around to the side of the house, where there’s a wooden gate. Trying it, he realizes it’s not locked; it’s just a latch. But instead of opening it all the way, he shuts the door and goes back to the car.

  “No one’s answering,” he tells Carolyn.

  “You sure it’s the right address?”

  “I think so. The gate on the side is open. I didn’t see any stickers for a security system. I’m going to take a quick peek in the back and then we’ll get out of here.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says. “You’re in enough trouble already. Let me do it.”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Just vouch for me if I set an alarm off. And call the police if I’m not back in oh, six minutes.”

  “You sure her phone’s battery didn’t die? Happens all the time to me.”

  “Maybe,” he says. But he doubts it. It wasn’t like Ashley to say she would call, then not find a way to do so. In the few weeks he’d known and worked with her, she’d proven to be pretty darn reliable and resourceful. “But we’re here, we might as well make sure. What time does your phone say?”

  She tells him, which of course matches what’s on his phone since both clocks are set by the network. They agree on an end time, the hour mark, which is slightly more than six minutes.

  “Okay go!” she says.

  He heads back to the house. After looking down the street to check that no one’s watching, he walks purposefully toward the side gate. This time he opens it all the way and goes through, closing it gently behind him. He finds himself in a sort of alleyw
ay that runs alongside the house and is bordered on one side by the neighbor’s high, mesh-textured wooden fence. A strip of dirt, maybe four feet wide, runs next to a cement walkway and contains what appears to be an incomplete gardening project: a few plants in the ground, a few others in plastic containers looking wilted and on the verge of death.

  He cautiously makes his way to the back of the house and comes upon a wooden deck with a table that has a green umbrella rising from its center and chairs around it. There’s no pool but he spots the cover for the hot tub Ashley mentioned from her conversation with Anderson’s former Macy’s coworker. The backyard lawn is small, with rosebushes and dwarf fruit trees.

  He pauses on the deck, listening again for stirrings from within the house. Then he turns his attention to a set of sliding glass doors that lead into a kind of den or media room. It’s hard to see inside because of the angle of the sun, so he presses his face up against the glass, cupping his hands around his head. He notes a leather couch and large flat-panel display in a cabinet but almost nothing on the bookshelves next to it.

  Damn, this guy’s neat, he thinks, and just then he notices the light shift behind him and a shadow appear on the carpet in front of him inside the room. It takes a moment for it to all register, but in one brief and fleeting instant he realizes someone’s standing behind him and that he’s in trouble. Deep trouble. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the flash of a dark object, and a sharp pain streaks through his head. Then nothing.

  Come on, Richie. Carolyn says to herself, looking at her phone. Get back out here. Come on. I don’t want to have to call the goddamn police. Christ, what have I gotten myself into?

  Five minutes have ticked away and there’s no sign of Richie. Then, just as she’s on the verge of panic, the front door to the home opens, and a guy staggers out, clutching his side. He looks around and waves to her, continuing to stagger forward. He’s wearing a San Francisco Giants hat and appears to be cut on his face.

  What the fuck?

  “Help,” he calls out to her. “Someone’s robbing my house. A guy’s robbing my house.”

  Oh no, she thinks. Oh Christ.

  “No, no,” she says, getting out of the car and going toward him. “He’s not robbing it.”

  As she gets closer, she sees the guy really isn’t in good shape. He’s got a major scratch running down his cheek, starting from just below his left eye.

  “Call 911,” he says.

  He says something else she can’t hear and suddenly it dawns on her that he’s not shouting at her. He’s just talking in a normal tone voice. And then she recognizes the voice; it somehow sounds familiar, though she’s not sure why.

  “Sir—” she says, coming up to him, but stops midsentence when she realizes that the face is familiar, too. She peers at him, squinting, and he looks back, his eyes filling with apprehension. He seems to recognize her. The eyes. The face is rounder, more moon-shaped, a little bloated even. But those eyes. She remembers them from somewhere. And then, suddenly, it hits her.

  “Holy shit,” she says, freezing in her tracks, her hand going up to her mouth. She should scream but nothing comes out. And then he has his hand over her mouth and she feels something metal jab her side and stay there.

  “That’s a gun,” he whispers in her ear, the scent of alcohol on his breath. “Don’t make me use it.”

  She tries to pull away, but he jams the gun harder into her rib cage and this time an excruciating pain shoots up her side.

  As he drags her into the house, she tries to get away, but he’s a big guy, over six feet and at least twice her weight. He pulls her down a short hallway, then opens a door. She catches a glimpse of a set of stairs leading down to a dark space, a basement maybe. That’s the last place she wants to go, and with every ounce of energy, she manages to turn her head and bite his thumb as hard as she can. He lets out an angry cry, swears, and whips her wildly through the door, sending her flying into a wall and tumbling down the stairs. Somewhere between the second and third roll, she hears a horrible sound as her leg catches awkwardly underneath her and snaps at the shin, both bones breaking clean through.

  The pain hits a second later but what freaks her out more is the feeling of her leg just dangling there and then seeing it lying there on the floor pointed in a gruesome direction. Lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, she’s screaming now. “Oh my God, it’s broken. I broke my leg. I broke my fucking leg!”

  Mark McGregor comes down the stairs and stands over her, holding his hand. “Christ,” he says, staring at her leg, seemingly shaken by the sight.

  “You fucker!” she’s screaming. “You fucking asshole. You set this whole thing up!”

  “Shut up,” he says. “What the fuck are you doing here? How’d you find me?”

  “Where’s Richie? What did you do to him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up,” he says again, and drags her by the arm further into the room, which is only lit by a small lamp that’s shaped like a gargoyle. She looks over and realizes she’s actually in a sparsely furnished bedroom, its walls painted red. There’s a white shag carpet on the floor and a king-sized bed in the middle of it with a canopy over it, held up by a metal frame. She sees a big white plastic chair that looks like a cast-off from the set of A Clockwork Orange and a dark, oppressively rustic chest of drawers. She feels like she’s entered some cheesey bordello but what makes it all the more unnerving is the horrible mix of goth and modern.

  McGregor drags her over to the chest, pulls out a set of handcuffs from the middle drawer and cuffs her to the bed frame. In the fog of her agony, she sees Ashley sitting on the floor on the other side of the bed, handcuffed to the opposite bedpost, a strip of silver duct tape over her mouth, her eyes wide with fear.

  The pain now is unbearable. Carolyn shuts her eyes, fearing she’s about to pass out, and takes a series of short breaths. Fuck childbirth, she thinks. This is worse. And it’s only then that she starts crying. Not because she’s terrified but because she realizes all those shots were for nothing. Getting pregnant on a broken leg would be too crazy even for her. And Cogan. She was so close. It all hits her at once.

  “Fuck!” she screams, and wham, McGregor grabs her by the head and slaps a piece of tape over her mouth.

  “Shut up,” he says. “I gotta think. I gotta fucking think.”

  When Richie wakes up, he isn’t sure where he is. He hears someone screaming, but the cry is muffled and he isn’t sure where it’s coming from. He’s got a splitting headache and his head feels heavy. His first thought is not to move, he doesn’t want to get up, but then he thinks he has to, someone’s in trouble. He’s in trouble. He struggles to lift his head from the floor, and realizes he’s bleeding; there’s blood on the tiles in the shape of a ragged half moon where his head has landed.

  It takes a moment but he soon realizes he’s in a laundry room and his hands are handcuffed together around one of the metal legs of a sink. The sink is large but cheap-looking—plastic, possibly fiberglass.

  With a bit of maneuvering he manages to get himself into a seated position, but when he tries to stand, he has to take a knee after becoming dizzy. After a moment, he tries again and this time makes it onto his feet. But because he’s limited by the height of the leg on the sink, he’s left hunched over, like he’s trying to lift a bucket that’s too heavy for him.

  He pulls up on the sink as hard as he can and gets the legs to lift off the ground an inch or so but no more. The problem is part of the sink is bolted to the wall—or at least seems to be. He sees what he has to do: lift the sink up, then wedge something under the opposite leg and prop up the sink just enough for him to slide his hands down the leg and slip the cuffs out through the gap between the leg and the floor. But when he looks around to find an object that will do the trick, all possible candidates are out of reach.

  He tries again to pull up on the sink, the cuffs digging painfully into his skin, but stops when
he hears a door open and shut and footsteps nearby. He thinks Anderson’s coming back, and still can’t understand why he isn’t hearing police sirens. Why didn’t Dupuy call? Why has he got me locked up like this? And then he has a chilling thought: maybe the screams, which have now stopped, were hers.

  His heart pounds as the footsteps become louder. He braces himself for the door to the laundry room to open but just when he thinks it’s going to happen, it doesn’t: the footsteps grow fainter; Anderson’s moved on to another part of the house. A momentary sigh of relief, then distress again as he thinks he detects an odor that smells like gasoline.

  Think, Richie. Think.

  And then it hits him. He’s got the object he needs around his ankle. He lifts his leg awkwardly, bringing his foot up to his left hand, and lowers the sock that’s covering the tracking bracelet. Once he’s got it exposed at the top, he lifts up the sink with all his might and gets the leg up a full two inches this time, maybe more. Holding up the sink, he moves his foot next to the leg and jams its tip into the small space between the bracelet and his skin. He then carefully lowers the sink down a half an inch or so. When he’s sure the tip of the leg is wedged in, he grits his teeth and lets go.

  He feels a sharp pain as the leg reaches the floor and just catches the side of his foot inside his shoe, pinching it badly. But it’s worth it: he looks down and is amazed to see that the bracelet has snapped off. Fuck yeah, he thinks, lifting the sink just enough to free his shoe. Come get me, boys. Now all he has to do is lift the sink again and, using his foot, slide the bracelet under the opposite leg. That should give him enough clearance to get the handcuffs’ chain out from around it.

  He hears the footsteps again and on the first try, his nerves get the best of him: he fails to properly align the bracelet with the bottom of the leg and the sink doesn’t stay up. The footsteps grow louder, they’re coming toward the door. He tries it again, and this time the wedge holds, and he quickly slides the chain down the leg and pulls it out through the open gap.