I started to pull out, but Julianne tapped on the window until I rolled it down. She leaned over, her milk-pale skin almost translucent in the blinding Valley sunlight. “Like I said before. Maybe they’re not after the usual.”
I touched the gas, easing back, the tires crackling over dead leaves. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”
Even though I was running behind, I circled the parking garage again, making sure I wasn’t being followed. I called Ariana’s cell phone, and she picked up on the first ring.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I stayed home. Wanted to clean up a little. Not like I’d be able to concentrate on work anyway. Can you?”
“Home? Look—”
“I know. ‘Be careful.’ But it’s not like they’re planning on kicking down the door and shooting me, or they would’ve just done it already. This whole thing isn’t exactly an efficient setup for that.”
I stared at my real cell phone, turned off on the passenger seat. I wanted to give Ariana the number of the prepaid I was using, but her line wasn’t secure, and now I was heading into the mouth of the parking structure. “Okay,” I said. “Just—”
The reception cut out. Cursing, I zipped up three levels and slotted the Camry into an end space. I spotted Punch sitting on a flat bench near the elevator, reading a magazine. Hurrying over, I checked my shoes again, making sure my Kenneth Coles hadn’t morphed into my GPS Nikes in the past thirty seconds.
I reached the bench and sat next to him, but facing the other direction. It was a good meet point—a lot of cars and foot traffic, plenty of ambient noise, a roof to protect us from Google Earth and its more ambitious brethren. But the question, put to me by the electronic voice, reverberated: Do you have any question as to our capability to reach into your life and touch you where we want? Was I foolish to be here? To be looking into this at all? But I had to. Blind submission was what they wanted, but it hardly guaranteed my safety, or Ariana’s.
Punch kept his gaze on the magazine. “I was just calling to tell you I put out some feelers about Keith Conner and got back some really screwy signals.”
“Like?”
“Like why the fuck am I asking around about Keith Conner and stop it. Look, this kind of search, it’s improper and illegal. My cop contacts aren’t allowed to just run people, especially not as favors for me. But the thing is, no one usually checks or notices. These improper searches got noticed, though. All of them. As in right fucking away. So my guys got chewed out, and I got burned. Someone’s watching this shit, and it ain’t some tea-sipping publicist for the studio. They’re monitoring it from inside or above the department. Now, you want to tell me what the hell you got yourself into?”
I gave him more or less the version I’d laid out for Julianne. Punch’s ruddy face got ruddier, accenting the broken capillaries across his meaty nose and cheeks. “Shit.” He wiped his hands on his button-up. One shirttail was untucked. It was good he and Jerry never overlapped; he was Walter Matthau to Jerry’s Jack Lemmon. “You’re all over this. Investigating, figuring out the angles.”
“It’s like writing, I guess.”
“Yeah, but you’re good at this.”
The elevator doors dinged open, and I felt a stab of apprehension. A mom emerged, tugging a squalling boy behind her. She scowled down at him. “That’s why I told you to leave it in the car.”
I waited for them to pass, then withdrew the mini-recorder from my pocket and handed it over. Punch took the unit from me, folded it into his Maxim, and clicked the button. That voice again: “So . . . are you ready to get started?”
“Electronic voice modulator,” Punch said. “We see that shit all the time in crank calls.”
“Any way to untangle it? Get a read on the voice, type of phone, anything?”
“No. I have a hotshot criminalist who wants in on a show I’m consulting for. To let him prove his worth, I let him play with some scrambled-voice threat to a producer, and he came up with jack shit.” He tilted the magazine, letting the recorder plop back into my lap. “This whole thing is way too big for me and my IQ. Since your phone situation is compromised, don’t call.” He raised a sausage of a finger at me. “And don’t send any e-mails either. Once you open that shit, even if you delete it, your hard drive holds the memory of it. Last thing I need is your Big Brothers tracking you right into my computer.”
“So how do I contact you?”
“You don’t. Too risky.” He tugged at his jowls, taking in my expression. “You don’t like it, put it in your fourth step and call your sponsor.”
“I’m not in AA.”
“Oh, right. That’s supposed to be me.” He stood, curling the magazine in a blocky fist, and offered a shrug before he walked off. “Good luck.”
He meant it, but he also meant good-bye.
The lecture hall’s emptiness seemed all the more glaring given the stadium seating. I stood in the doorway, peering in hopelessly. On the posted room schedule—3:00: PROFESSOR DAVIS, ELEMENTS OF SCREENWRITING. On the clock—3:47. My shirt and pants stuck to me; I’d sprinted from the parking lot to class. Dropping my briefcase, I sagged against the jamb to catch my breath.
As I retreated down the hall, I swore I was catching odd looks from students. The department assistant called out to me as I passed the main office. “Professor Davis? I have that student file you requested.”
I’d all but forgotten about my underhanded request for Bugayong’s file. Stepping inside, I noted the department chair chatting with a few professors at the mail cubbyholes. The assistant held the file across her desk and grinned pertly. Dr. Peterson paused from her conversation to regard me and the assistant, the proffered file floating between us.
I lowered my voice before I realized I had. “Thanks. But I got the matter straightened out.” I nodded at Dr. Peterson a bit too solicitously and withdrew, leaving the folder in the assistant’s hand. Moving back down the hall, I couldn’t help but glance around nervously. A clique of students snickered at something as I passed.
I knocked on the door of the tiny room I shared in rotation with three other instructors so we’d have somewhere to hold office hours. But whoever had been there last had already cleared out. I shut the door behind me, thunked my briefcase down on its side, and sat at the narrow desk. There are few places as depressing as a shared office. Lipstick-stained coffee mug holding gnawed pencils. Several dated textbooks and a cheap wooden carving of the three wise monkeys on the otherwise empty bookshelf. A beige Dell from the turn of the century.
Poking a finger into the slit of my briefcase, I lifted it open. The sheaf of ungraded scripts stared back at me. I tugged them out, patted my pockets and behind my ears for a red pen, and finally located one in the bottom drawer, next to a partially eaten muffin. It would have to do. I got through a script and a half before I found myself drawing little circles across the page, like the ones that had marked off the surveillance devices on our floor plan.
The Dell took two solid minutes to fire up. Dial-up Internet took even longer. After chewing my cheek, stalling, I found myself on the Gmail page, typing in patrickdavis081075 and my mother’s maiden name for the password. My finger rested on the mouse, but I hesitated before clicking. An e-mail, they claimed, would arrive at four on Sunday, the day after tomorrow. So what was I so damn scared of now?
Deep breath. I tapped the mouse. The little hourglass trickled and trickled.
There it was. An e-mail account. My e-mail account. Waiting for me. With an empty in-box.
At the rap on the door, I jumped, almost knocking the keyboard off the desk. I hastily logged out just before Dr. Peterson stepped into the room. “Patrick, I’ve heard that things have been a bit uneven with you lately.”
“Uneven?” I nudged the mouse over and tapped to clear the browser’s history.
“Late for one class, another you never showed up for. An altercation with a student in the hall.”
“Huh?”
“Some kind of shouti
ng match? Professor Shahnazari overheard you cursing at a student.”
“Right, that was—”
She raised her voice, talking over me. “Then I find out you made a request to see a student file. Did anyone give you the impression that adjunct professors were entitled to review confidential student documents?”
“No. It was a bad judgment call.”
“We agree there.” Her lips, etched with small vertical wrinkles, compressed. “I hope you can pull it together here in short order. And in the meantime, you’d do well to remember, invasion of privacy is something we don’t take lightly.”
“No,” I agreed, “nor do I.”
CHAPTER 23
Cleaned up, the house looked almost worse. I glanced around at the glaring holes in the walls, the misaligned flaps of carpet, the bags of trash. It looked more like itself now, just a badly damaged version. My Nikes were set out by the closet door, as if Ariana wanted to keep an eye on them, and beside her on the couch sat her raincoat, positioned over the slashed cushions like an invisible friend.
She’d taken up her hair in a ponytail and was wearing my ripped Celtics T-shirt from the ’08 championship season. In her hand a Burgundy wineglass filled, no doubt, with Chianti; she loved cheaper reds, but the bowl-like glass made her feel more like she was drinking. She rolled her eyes at me and, pinching the phone between jaw and shoulder, made a mouth-flapping gesture with her free hand. “If he hasn’t returned your call, don’t text-message. It’ll just seem desperate.” A pause. “I’m sure he got the voice mail, Janice. You just left it yesterday. Give the guy the weekend.”
I paused, taking in the surreal scene. In light of the ripped-apart house, the bugged raincoat, and the date we had with the curb drain in a few hours, it seemed bizarrely domestic.
“Look, I gotta go. Patrick just walked in. . . . I know, I know. You’ll be fine.” She hung up, tossed the phone into the cushions, and said, loudly. “That’ll teach you guys to listen in.” A weary half smile. “They probably committed hara-kiri in their surveillance vans. Speaking of . . .” She reached into her purse, withdrew the cigarette-pack jammer, and clicked the black button to knock out any surveillance devices that might have regenerated since Jerry’s visit.
“You didn’t say anything to Janice?”
“Please. Our problems pale in comparison to hers. Besides, I’m not sure how to slip this into casual conversation.”
“You did a great job,” I said. “With the house.”
She blew a wisp of hair off her forehead. “Still looks like a ten-car pileup.”
I handed her one of the throwaway phones. “I programmed the number of mine in here. I don’t want to not be able to talk to you when we’re apart.”
Her face changed. My words hung there, so I replayed them, heard what they meant to her, to us. A few days ago, we were barely speaking.
I sat beside her. She offered her glass, and I took a sip. “It’s pleasant,” she said. “Being nice to each other for a change.”
“We should have solicited techno-stalkers months ago.”
“I was sitting here looking at our house. All the crap in it. Dunn-Edwards Shaved Ice paint. Cavetto molding. That stupid chandelier I picked up in Cambria. And I thought a week ago this all looked perfect. And it felt like shit living here. At least it’s honest now. This mess. This is where we are.”
A prim distance between us, we stared at the spray of wires where the plasma used to hang, sharing a glass of wine and waiting for midnight.
The black duffel tugged at my shoulder, bulging with the gear inside. We stood at the curb, Ariana clutching her jacket closed against a biting wind. Given the comforting yellow glow spilling around our curtains and blinds, it was easy to forget how torn up our house was inside. Apart from the occasional porch light, the neighboring houses and apartments were dark, which, along with an odd lapse in traffic, made the crowded neighborhood seem abandoned.
“Three minutes.” Shuddering, she looked up from her cell-phone clock to peer at the mouth of the curb drain. “Hope it’s wide enough.”
As I stepped toward the gap, dead leaves crumbled underfoot against the metal grate, brown flecks spinning down into darkness. A mossy smell rose with the warm air. I guided the end of the bulging duffel through the curb drain. A snug fit, but a fit.
Ariana checked the time again. “Not yet.” She looked across at the apartment balconies, then down the slope of Roscomare Road, her eyes tearing from the cold. “Wonder where they’re watching us from.”
A silver Porsche flew by, the engine’s roar shattering the calm. We both recoiled, Ariana raising her arms as if to shield herself from a hail of drive-by bullets, me stepping back, almost losing my footing on the curb. The driver, annoyed beneath his baseball cap, had scowled at our overreaction; he wasn’t going that fast. My head buzzed from the shot of adrenaline and the burn-out blend of sleeplessness and caffeine. Ari and I took our positions again. Placing a foot on the end of the bag, I waited for her signal.
How much our lives had changed in four days.
Moths battered the flickering streetlight. Crickets sawed.
“Okay,” she said. “Heave-ho.”
I shoved. The bag bunched at its midsection, then popped through. We waited to hear it hit, but instead there was a muffled thump. A soft landing. I looked down between my shoes through the metal grate, my eyes straining to discern the shape in the darkness.
What came into focus first were the whites of the eyes.
My skin was tingling everywhere—the back of my neck, up my ribs, the inside of my mouth. I blinked and the eyes were gone, the duffel with them. Just a muted sound against the moist, buried concrete—the faint heartbeat of footsteps padding away beneath the street.
Wearing sweats and a T-shirt, I stepped out of the bathroom, drying my wet hair with a towel. When I pulled it off my head, I noticed Ariana in the doorway of our bedroom with her nighttime cup of chamomile and the cigarette-box jammer.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t like being downstairs alone right now.”
Unspoken rules had evolved with astonishing rapidity. We’d stopped changing in front of each other. When she was in a room with the door closed, I knocked. When I showered, she kept out of the bedroom.
“Then you shouldn’t be downstairs alone,” I said.
We sidestepped each other, giving wide berth, changing positions. I didn’t continue down the hall, and she didn’t climb into bed. Instead she leaned against the bureau, still filmed with drywall dust. We studied each other, my hands folding the towel, unfolding it, folding it again.
I cleared my throat. “Do you want me to stay upstairs tonight?”
She said, “I do.”
I stopped folding the towel.
Her hand circled. She was trying for casual, but her eyes hadn’t gotten the memo. “Do you want to stay?”
I said, “I do.”
She walked over, turned back the comforter on my side. I sat on the mattress. She went around and slid in. Her clothes were still on. I got in, also fully dressed. She reached over and turned off the light. We sat with our backs against the curved headboard. I couldn’t remember even touching the new bed before now. It was as comfortable as it looked.
“Do you really?” she asked. “Watch me cry some mornings through the window?”
“Yes.”
Even in the dark, we were looking straight ahead instead of at each other.
“Because you want to know what? That I’m still sorry?” Her voice was thin, vulnerable. “That I still care?”
We sat awhile longer. “I want to come in to hold you,” I said. “But I can never find the nerve.”
I sensed her face rotate, slowly, toward mine. “How ’bout now?” she asked.
I lifted my arm. She slid down beside me, put her cheek on my chest. I stroked her hair. She was warm, soft. I thought of Don’s hands. His goatee. I felt a compulsion to pull away, but I didn’t. I considered the distance between what I wanted to
do and what I thought I should do. A collision of alternate selves, a crossroads to alternate futures. My wife had cheated on me. And now I was holding her. We were together, right now. I was afraid of what that would look like—not to others but to myself. In my quieter moments. Driving to work. Sipping coffee between classes. Watching a clever movie scene about extracurricular fucking, Ari stiffening beside me, our sudden chagrin in the dark of a theater. That stiletto jab of paradigms past, of how it was supposed to be.
“I think I want to have a baby,” Ariana said.
My lips were suddenly dry. “I’ve heard you have to have sex for that.”
“Not right now.”
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“I mean, not a baby right now. Or even soon. But being threatened like this, I’ve been thinking about our life a lot. I’m sure you have, too. I’ve got stuff I like to do—the furniture, my plants. But I’m not gonna be content to turn into one of those women who drives her SUV up and down these hills, going to stupid appointments and Whole Foods. I mean, look at Martinique. That’s where I’m headed.”
“You’re not—”
“I know, but you know what I mean.” Her hand twitched, looking for something to do. “I want to have a baby, but at the same time I’m terrified that I want to have a baby for all the wrong reasons. Does any of this make sense?”
I made a soft noise of support. A flash of copper pipe gleamed where we’d torn through the drywall by the bathroom. Her head rose and fell with my breathing. We lay there awhile longer, as I worked my feelings into words.
“I don’t want to keep doing what I’ve been doing,” I said. “Or at least I don’t want to feel the same way doing it.”
“Yes. Exactly.” She came up off my chest, excited. “So here we are. Now. Off balance from all this crap, but at least seeing clearly. Let’s not upset that.”
“What do you mean?”
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