by Hines
“But they’ll have access to the security cameras at the hospital, and—”
He saw a bit of anger bubble to the surface. “You think maybe, I show them this, they won’t wonder why my car is at the hospital?” She lifted her shirt, revealing a network of purple and yellow bruises. “You think I don’t know how to come up with lies to cover what’s really happening?”
He nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“I know you’re wondering how it happened,” she said. “How? Why? Because I loved him, once upon a time. Because I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake. Because I tried, talked to people at the hospital, even had a few visits from the police. When your husband is a diplomat, these things can be covered. But see, you don’t understand my life. Who I am, where I come from.”
She gestured to the basement door; behind it, her husband was quiet now. “Him, for instance. Tell me you haven’t looked at his name and thought, what kind of name is Kleiderman? He’s Hispanic, he should be Jorge or Roberto or something. But you’d know, you’d understand, if you were Venezuelan. Strange names, they’re a badge of honor. And so, for us, Kleiderman isn’t strange at all; it’s normal. Down in Venezuela, you’ll find many men named Kleiderman.”
She looked at him hard, pausing to catch her breath. “Like you. Someone who breaks into homes and videotapes people. To me, it’s strange. It’s scary. But to you, it’s probably normal.”
He looked at her a moment, smiled. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing normal about it.”
He crouched down beside Dilbert once more. When he touched the man, his eyes opened again. The pupils looked a little better, Lucas thought, but they still didn’t register any recognition.
He coaxed Dilbert to a standing position, keeping the man’s arm draped around his shoulders as he worked his way over to the door of the garage. After getting the door open, he glanced back at Leila again. She was on the phone, speaking softly.
After getting Dilbert folded into the front seat of the car, he returned. She met him at the door.
“Better get going,” she said. “Police will probably be here in a few minutes.”
He nodded. “What are you going to tell them?”
She pulled a digital tape from her pocket. “I’ll start by showing them this,” she said. “Tell them I set up some cameras around the house. Then, tonight, he found the cameras and went psycho. Started ranting about some intruders in the house, grabbed a baseball bat and came after me. I knew he had snapped, and I knew he was going to kill me, so Annie Oakley got her gun and shot him down.”
“Then locked him in the basement.”
“He was already in the basement,” she said. “That’s how he discovered the cameras. If you had some psycho with a baseball bat in your basement, wouldn’t you lock the door?”
Lucas nodded. “Okay.”
She reached for a button on the wall of the garage and pushed it. The door behind the Volvo began to rise into the ceiling.
He held out his hand, offering a handshake. “Thanks,” he said.
She stared at him a few moments, then, surprisingly, stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him, hugging him in a tight embrace. He stiffened, but then relaxed as he felt her sobbing.
“Thank you,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “For doing what no one else would. Even me.”
She broke the embrace, then held his head in her hands and stared straight into his eyes as tears continued to pour from hers. “Thank you for seeing,” she said.
SIXTEEN
ON THE DRIVE TO THE HOSPITAL, SOMETHING LEILA HAD SAID KEPT replaying in his mind: When your husband is a diplomat . . . it seemed important somehow, but he couldn’t quite figure out why. Yet.
He turned to look at Dilbert as they turned into the hospital parking lot. Dilbert was conscious and alert, but had said nothing. He’d only stared at the road in front of them, with an occasional glance at Lucas.
“Want me to drop you off at the emergency entrance?” Lucas asked. As he said this, a light mist of rain began to fall on the car, creating a steady white noise to fill the silence following his question.
Finally Dilbert spoke. “You followed me.”
Lucas paused. “Yes.”
“Why?” Dilbert was staring at the hospital lights, a liquid smear through the windshield of the Volvo.
Lucas sighed. “I want you to take me to the next Creep Club meeting. I know the location’s changed, but I don’t know where.”
There. He’d said it. No harm in being truthful.
Dilbert shook his head slowly. “You set off an alarm on my turf, almost get me killed, cost me a ton of equipment, and now you want me to take you to the next meeting.”
Lucas ran his hand through his hair, sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s pretty much it.” He’d already committed to the straight-ahead approach with all this; might as well stick with it for the time being.
Dilbert chuckled softly until it turned into a cough. He cleared his throat. “No way I’m bringing you back to the Creep Club.” He turned to face Lucas. “I never woulda brought you in the first place.”
Lucas waited a few moments. “I could just stay here, follow you when you leave,” he said.
“You could try,” Dilbert said. “Think I haven’t thought of that already? Think I won’t have some way of getting out of here unseen?”
Lucas doubted Dilbert could really shake him, but no harm in letting Dilbert have a little overbearing pride in his abilities. It could work to his advantage. “That’s why I asked you to take me.”
“And now you have my answer.” Dilbert opened his car door and stepped out into the rain. He was starting to swing the door shut when Lucas spoke again.
“You didn’t lose all your equipment.”
Dilbert stopped the car door, looked back inside. “What?”
Lucas held out his hand, and Dilbert looked at the object in it for a moment. “My mini camcorder,” he said.
“I knew you’d want it,” Lucas said.
Dilbert looked at him for a few moments, then reached in and snatched the camcorder from his hand before closing the car door and walking to the emergency room entrance.
Lucas watched as the car’s interior lights dimmed and winked out. He put the keys to the car in the glove box, opened the door, and stepped into the rain himself. Its staccato pattern on the pavement comforted him as he began to walk.
Yes, he knew Dilbert would be very interested in taking his camcorder.
Which was why he’d attached a geopatch inside the camcorder’s battery compartment.
LATE THAT NIGHT, IN HIS FOURTH-FLOOR COCOON, LUCAS SLEPT. AND dreamed.
He walked beside a running stream. No, not a stream, but a river: a large, deep ribbon of blue that gurgled over rocks and boulders to his left.
He was on a trail, a dusty path winding among tall pines, the scent of their needles bright and heavy in his nostrils.
At first, it was just him. But then, on the path ahead of him, he saw a couple. A man and a woman, their backs turned to him as they walked along hand in hand. He called out to them, but they didn’t hear, even though the only sound in the air was the wind whispering through the pine boughs overhead.
He started to run, understanding in some way that it was very important to reach these people, to get their attention.
Ahead of him, they approached a concrete bridge that spanned a stream joining the large river. They walked onto the concrete path, barely pausing, oblivious to his shouts.
Seconds later, he was on the concrete pathway behind them, but they seemed no closer. They were only a few feet away, yes, but they refused to turn and acknowledge his cries. He stopped, winded by his running, and studied the small stream. Just before it reached the main river, it spread out into a large pool. Inside the pool, large bubbles rose to the surface.
Springs, his mind told him. These were springs, and they were beautiful. He stared deep into the bubbling water, imagining himself captured inside o
ne of those bubbles, carried through the atmosphere of this earth to a place beyond. A place where he could breathe and laugh and live.
He turned again to look at the people walking on the path ahead of him. They hadn’t stopped the entire time he stared into the gurgling springs, yet they were no farther away.
That’s what these people were. His chance to escape this world. He began to run again, screaming at them to stop, feeling tears beginning to curl down his cheeks.
And this time, he did move closer. He ran, and he stretched out his right arm, impossibly long, reaching for the woman, now so close he could smell her perfume (wildflowers and oranges, wildflowers and oranges), and his finger brushed the back of her shirt.
At the instant his finger made contact, he felt something snap deep inside, like a cord stretched too taut, and he fell to his knees along the path. Water to his left, water to his right, and he on this small, concrete wall in between.
Like Humpty Dumpty. On a wall.
He tried to scream at the couple again, but they were farther away than ever, still deaf to his cries.
And now, even the sound of his own voice was overpowered by the sound of something new: cracking. Stones, he thought, stones crumbling and breaking apart as if pounded by an earthquake. On his hands and knees in the middle of the path, he looked at his fingers splayed out before him and saw crumbling dust. The pathway was breaking up beneath him, turning to dust—
No, he realized with sudden horror. It wasn’t the pathway breaking at all. It was his body. He held up his left hand, saw a jagged crack of darkness move from his wrist to his forefinger, followed by a spiderweb of smaller fractures.
Pieces of his hand fell away, crumbling into tiny fragments, scattered into the nearby river by the soft breeze.
His mouth opened to form a scream, to demand an end to this impossibility, but there was no mouth to scream, only his mind falling, falling toward the water and—
Lucas awoke, his face bathed in sweat. After a few moments of dizziness and disorientation, he realized he was in his fourth-floor home above Dandy Don’s Donuts. But for a few moments, for a few brief moments after waking, he was a shattered chunk of concrete, sinking into the swirling water.
He sat up, the images of the dream continuing to blaze in his mind. He hadn’t had that dream for so long. Years. The dream that always ended with one mournful thought as he sank into the river’s depths:
(Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)
THE NEXT MORNING, LUCAS KNEW HE NEEDED TO REGAIN HIS FOOTING. He’d been knocked off his game, his familiarity, by the previous night at the Delgado house. And today he had two main threads to follow up: track Dilbert and make contact with Saul.
Not necessarily in that order.
But first, he needed to clear his mind of the thoughts pushing their way in. Even the dream that had once haunted him had returned. He shuddered just thinking about it and made himself look at his left hand.
No cracks or fractures.
Nestled inside his perch from the utility closet, he stared out into the sitting area at Dandy Don’s Donuts. This was a Sunday morning, and he knew it would be packed. Lots of people getting boxes of a dozen donuts to take home for a lazy morning, others settling in at the tables for a quick old-fashioned doughnut and a look at the Sunday morning paper.
Lucas closed his eyes for a second, consciously cleared his mind, took a deep breath. He was here now to . . . to leave all that other stuff behind. Or at least put it away for a while.
Over in the corner of the seating area, he watched two young children, a boy and a girl both under age five or so, using the chairs as makeshift monkey bars while their mother immersed herself in a story from the newspaper.
The family had just come from church, he decided, based on their clothing. The young boy wore a shirt and a messily knotted tie that clutched at his neck; the young girl was in a yellow dress and tights.
The mother was named Teresa. Mother Teresa. He smiled at the thought.
Teresa worked at a lobbying firm in DC. A firm that lobbied on behalf of oil companies. She was married, and her husband was on the staff of a congressional representative for a western state.
He thought for a moment.
Wyoming, it would be Wyoming.
The husband, whose name was Brandon, was a typical smalltown Wyoming boy. Had surprised everyone in his hometown by taking an interest in politics while going to college at the University of Wyoming. Had surprised them even more by getting on staff for a representative, then meeting Teresa and falling in love while working in DC.
And yet, whenever they went back to Wyoming, whenever they visited, they were treated like stars. Everyone loved to see them in small-town Wyoming, and Mother Teresa was something of a celebrity when they were in town.
Teresa took a sip of coffee, turning a page of the newspaper.
On the other hand, Teresa was torn. In college, she had been active in progressive politics, taken part in a couple of marches on the Mall, her first taste of DC. An internship with the NAACP, followed by some lobbying. Her life, her path, had been set.
Until she met Brandon. The boy from Wyoming with blond hair and blue eyes. She loved him, yes, she loved him, but inside she always felt she was betraying who she was. Hadn’t she fought for justice and change? And now, she had sold her soul to ply the legislation Big Oil wanted.
Lucas watched her eyebrows furrow as she read, and in the secret history he was inventing for her, this meant she was pondering the Great Questions of who she was, wondering where she’d gone wrong.
Mother Teresa picked up the section of the paper she was reading, held it in front of her and unfolded it, giving Lucas a clear view of the front page.
It was the Metro section of the paper, and a large photo occupied about a quarter of it.
A photo of his own face.
He caught part of the headline—MAN SOUGHT FOR—but that’s all he could read before Mother Teresa refolded the paper and started another story.
Lucas sank to the floor of the utility closet, abandoning his peephole, abandoning his invented history for Mother Teresa.
His face.
In the newspaper.
How? Why? Officially, he didn’t exist to the government. To anyone. He had no identification, no driver’s license, no social security number. He moved from odd job to odd job, always getting paid under the table in cash or panhandling.
But that hadn’t stopped Donavan or Saul from discovering him, had it? And now, his photo was on the front page of the Metro section.
Wait. Saul. Had to be Saul. After all, Saul had managed to discover him, track him, enlist him. And now, after a trip to Saul’s home, he had a good idea the man was selling secrets to someone. Saul had to be behind this, trying to flush him into the open for . . . he wasn’t sure what.
Without bothering to check the bathroom, Lucas clumsily stumbled out of the utility closet, surprising a young man in a hooded sweatshirt at the sink. The young man eyed him for a few seconds, his eyebrows arched in a question.
Numbly, Lucas looked around him. Back inside the utility closet, he saw a WET FLOOR sign and an empty mop bucket. Quickly, he grabbed the sign and slid it out onto the bathroom floor, then wheeled the bucket out after it. “Hard to keep this floor clean,” he mumbled.
The young man at the sink finished washing and nodded, but said nothing. He dried his hands with a paper towel and threw it into the trash before disappearing out the bathroom’s front door.
Lucas stood silently for a few moments, feeling the sweat trickle down his forehead as he collected his thoughts.
Lucas stepped up to the sink, splashed some water on his face and dried it. He studied his reflection in the mirror, looking for an answer that didn’t appear. Okay, if he was going to step out into the donut shop—let alone the rest of DC—and if his face was plastered on the front page of the paper, it was probably best to change his appearance in some way.
That meant he’d have to go
upstairs again. He swung off his everpresent backpack and unzipped the outer pocket, where he kept some gloves and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. He pulled the cap down over his head. Not exactly a wig or a change of hair color, but it was something.
He returned his attention to the backpack and pulled out a pair of wraparound sunglasses from a side pocket. Hiding the eyes, he knew, was the key to a disguise; without the eyes, people couldn’t distinguish faces as easily.
With the cap and sunglasses in place, he replaced the pack on his back and went out into Dandy Don’s. No one appeared to notice him leaving the bathroom, which was good.
At the counter, he greeted the young woman with short-cropped, kinky hair and heavy black-framed glasses. She offered a thousandwatt smile and asked what she could get for him.
He ordered an old-fashioned and a cup of coffee, and picked up a copy of the paper from the display near the counter. The young lady looked at the front of the paper, then at him, and announced his total. He thanked her and paid, retreating to a corner by the door.
Across the room, Mother Teresa was gathering up the kids, getting ready to leave.
Lucas bit into his donut, sipped his coffee, and folded open the paper, finding the Metro section.
There was his face again. Blown up, a bit out of focus and pixelated, but recognizably him. Obviously a still from a security cam somewhere. But where? MAN SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN DISAPPEARANCE, the headline read. Below it, he read the story:
Metro police are searching for a man described as a person of interest in a kidnapping case involving two principals of ATM2GO, a DC-headquartered company.
The kidnapping victims, identified as Anita Abkin and Ted Hagen, were reported missing Saturday morning after Viktor Abkin, also a principal at ATM2GO and husband of Anita, found a ransom note in his home and agreed to a secret meeting with the alleged kidnapper at a local club.
The meeting between Viktor and the alleged kidnapper was caught on security cameras at Split Jacks and turned over to authorities, on Saturday morning.
Abkin said he received a threatening phone call from the alleged kidnapper shortly after finding the ransom note on Friday, and agreed to meet at Split Jacks. After the meeting, he went directly to police to report the crime, turning over the note and opening his home to investigators.