“In fact, I was wondering if you've got a copy of that book,” he said to me, “and if you could autograph it for me.”
“Of course,” I said, my eyes moving back and forth between the knife and Sarah. “I'd be happy to do that for you. And anything else you want, I'll give it to you, if you'll go, and leave us alone.”
Rick considered my request. “Well, when I was here last time, I was really only looking for one thing. This big book, with payments and everything listed inside. It was very important to Mr. Greenway that I get that back. And I still want that, no question about it. And maybe those negatives that asshole Carpington says you've got, although I don't really give a fuck about them one way or another.”
Sarah, in addition to looking frightened beyond her worst nightmare, had this look of total bewilderment. Big book? Negatives?
“But what I was wondering was, you said you'd nearly finished the sequel to that book.”
“Yes.”
“Is it, like, printed out on pages and everything?”
“Uh, yes, it is.”
“Terrific. I want that, too.”
“The manuscript.”
“The what?”
“The manuscript. That's what the book is called.”
“Manuscript,” he said, as though he was picturing the word in the air. “That's the title? Like, not Missionary Part Two?”
I shook my head. “No, a manuscript is what you call the printed-out pages of the book.”
Rick eyed me suspiciously, as though I was trying to make him look stupid. “You fucking with me?”
“No, listen, sorry. Yes, you can have it.”
“The problem is, didn't you say you hadn't quite finished it?”
“That's right. There's a chapter left.”
Rick nodded, thought. “Well, let's deal with the most important matter first. I want that ledger.”
“I don't have it,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“Where is it?”
I couldn't put Trixie at risk. I couldn't send him next door. So I said, “I dropped it off on the doorstep at the police station. They'll find it, and start figuring out what it all means.”
Rick shook his head slowly. “I think you're shittin' me there, Zack. I don't believe you did anything like that at all. But I think I'll be able to get the truth out of you eventually. Sit down in that chair.”
He indicated the one across from Sarah. When I didn't move right away, he took a step forward, waved the knife. “Chair! Now!”
I sat down. Rick tossed a roll of duct tape that he'd left sitting by the phone in my direction. “Gimme your cell phone. Wrap that around yourself so you're tied into the chair,” he said.
“I'm telling you the truth,” I said, handing the phone over. “The ledger is with the police and—”
Rick suddenly waved his knife around Sarah. She tried to pull back into herself as he sliced through the air near her neck.
“Start taping yourself up,” he said to me.
I found the end of the roll, gave a tug, heard the familiar rip of duct tape separating from itself. I slapped one end onto my shirt, then pulled the roll around me, handing it off from one hand to the other behind my back, then again in front of me. I went around a couple of times and stopped.
“No, a little more,” Rick said.
“There's no way I can get out,” I protested.
“Just do it.”
I did one more loop around myself, tore off the tape from the roll, and set the roll on the kitchen table.
“Now your ankles,” Rick said.
“I can't do my ankles. I can't bend over because I've got all this tape around my stomach.”
“Shit,” Rick said. Talk about a master plan falling apart. He set the knife down on the counter and approached me from behind.
Now or never, I figured.
I stood up and rushed backward. Sarah screamed. The chair came up at a forty-five-degree angle, my butt still attached to it, my body hunched over. The legs of the chair tangled with Rick's, and the weight of my coming after him propelled him into the vertical blinds that hung over the sliding glass doors to the deck. Rick's arms flailed, grabbing slats, ripping them from their moorings as I squeezed him against the door.
I took a step away, bound to the chair but my arms still free, and spun around. I threw myself into him, punching randomly. Except for Rick, a few hours earlier, I'd never hit anyone in my adult life. And the last time I'd hit him, I'd used a robot. This time, I was connecting with my hands, and the pain traveled straight up my arms and into my shoulders, which still hurt from dangling from that roof peak.
“You fucker!” Rick screamed, and shoved back. It was only reasonable to expect that a guy who'd spent several years working in construction, when he wasn't in jail probably lifting weights, was going to have stronger arms than a guy who daydreams at a computer all day. When he shoved, his arms were like pistons, driving me back across the kitchen and into a set of floor-to-ceiling cupboards. The chair hit them first, and inside I could hear stacked cans rattle and fall over.
Sarah kept screaming.
Rick ducked down, rushed me, grabbed me around my taped waist, and dragged me and the chair down to the floor. Then the pummeling began. This was very serious pummeling. I felt his fist connect with my chin, then my right cheek, bounce off my forehead, crush my lip. Blood filled my mouth where my tooth had gone through it. Some time around then, I started blacking out.
This was not good. This was not good at all.
i was vaguely aware of the sound of more duct tape being ripped from the roll, and of Sarah's voice.
“Zack? Can you hear me? Zack? Zack, say something.”
It was like coming out of a deep sleep, except this time, while snoozing, someone had rearranged my body parts. My head, hanging down on my chest, was throbbing, and I could hardly see anything out of my left eye, or focus very well with the other.
“Zack, you there? He's in the other room. Zack, what's happening?”
I went to stretch, like I normally do when coming out of a deep sleep, but very little of me moved. My legs were held in place, and my left hand was trapped at my left side. Only my right arm was free.
My right eye was starting to focus, and I saw that I was pushed up to the kitchen table. I found the strength to lift my head up slightly, and confirmed that all that had happened before wasn't some bad dream. I was still in my kitchen, Sarah was still tied up in a chair across from me. And I was tied into a chair, too.
I was in a great deal of pain.
I looked over at Sarah and tried to smile, but using those muscles made me wince.
“Zack,” she said. “Zack, can you understand me? Can you hear me?”
I nodded. God, it hurt.
“Who is that man? Why does he want to kill us? What's this ledger he's talking about? What on earth is going on?”
“Fucked up,” I mumbled. “Big time.”
“What? What did you do?”
“The purse. I took that woman's purse, at the grocery store. I thought it was yours.” I paused. “Big mistake.”
Sarah took it in. “My God,” she said. “But I was wearing my fanny pack. You were trying to teach me a lesson and . . .”
“If it had been anybody else's purse,” I whispered. “Any purse but that one . . .”
“Zack, stay awake. We've got to get out of here. This guy's crazy. I think he's going to kill us, even if you give him this ledger he's asking about. Do the police really have it? Because if they don't, just give it to him. Give him whatever he wants.”
I nodded weakly. “I've got some more bad news,” I said.
“What?” she said, holding her breath.
“I don't have anything for your birthday. I know you thought I was up to something, you know, about a gift. But I haven't gotten to it yet.”
Sarah's eyes glistened, and she sighed. “That's okay,” she said. “It's not actually until tomorrow.”
I attempted another nod.
“We'll pick something out later today. Something nice.”
“Sure,” she said, fighting to keep it together.
“And maybe after that, we'll go out for dinner, come home and celebrate. I'm okay, you know.”
“You're not okay. You need to get to a doctor.”
“No no, I mean, you know. My plumbing. It's perfectly operational. I just had a lot on my mind, earlier.”
“Hey,” said Rick, strolling back into the kitchen. “This it?” he asked, and dumped a stack of white paper, several hundred pages' worth, on the kitchen table. I struggled to look at it.
“Is this what?” I asked.
“The book. I was looking around in there, found this, it's lots of typed pages, so I figured that was it.”
I knew that was it. “Yeah,” I said. “It's yours. Go somewhere and read it.”
“Naw, I'll just take it with me. But just tell me, since the last chapter's missing, how does it end?”
I blinked to get some blood out of my eye. “It turns out there is no God after all,” I said.
Rick nodded. “Fuck, is that supposed to be some sort of surprise ending? I could have told you that.”
27
“i hope you don't mind but I'm also going to take some of your toys with me,” Rick said, motioning in the direction of my study. “You've got some of the neatest stuff in there. I love that Klingon warship, and you've got some terrific little Star Wars spaceships.” He came over, looked at me. “Can I ask you a question?”
Still taped into the chair, I raised my head feebly. “Go ahead.”
“Which do you think is better? Star Trek or Star Wars?”
“I don't know,” I said, looking at Sarah, tied up in her chair across from me on the other side of the kitchen table, who'd already seen too much to be surprised by this line of questioning. “Which do you think is better?”
“I think Star Trek.”
“Me, too.”
“Really? You know why I like it better? More chicks in little short outfits. At least in the original one. The Next Generation, they toned it down a bit. Until that Voyager show, and the Borg chick, with the really tight costume. Man.”
Suddenly, as if he'd forgotten something, he went back into the study. A moment later he returned to the kitchen holding a model of the saucerlike spacecraft from Lost in Space, the Jupiter 2. Actually, he was flying it more than holding it, carrying it a couple of inches away from his eyes. One was closed, the other squinting, like he was picturing the craft zooming through the galaxy.
“Okay, I'm taking this, too, but there's a part that's broken off it.”
“It's the door,” I said. “It needs to be glued back on. It's on the shelf right where the model was.”
And then he was gone, looking for it. He returned with the model ship, the door, and a small container of liquid plastic cement he'd found on my modeling table.
“I want you to fix it,” he said. “I was never very good at this sort of thing. I always put on too much glue and ruin it.”
“I'm kind of tied up at the moment.”
“Okay,” he said. “I'm going to let you use your right hand.” He began to unwind the duct tape that held my right wrist to my chair.
“I'm gonna need both hands,” I said. “If I'm going to glue it and then hold the door in place.”
“I look stupid to you? You can do it with one hand. I'll help you, and then we're going to talk about finding that ledger for Mr. Greenway.”
He unscrewed the cap on the liquid cement. With my free hand I set the door on its back side so I could apply cement to the parts that would come in contact with the ship.
“How about this,” I said to Rick as I dabbed a bit of glue onto the door. “I'll tell you more about that ledger, but you have to let me tell you about another story I'm working on first.”
“What? Like another science fiction book?”
“No, this one's a bit different. It's sort of a mystery, about a double-cross.”
“Oh yeah? I always like those. Like you think the guy is your friend, but then you find out he's your enemy.”
“This one's about a guy who does all the dirty work for his boss, takes all the risks, but gets shafted in the end.”
Rick eyed me warily. “Go on.”
“He even kills for his boss, that way the boss is protected, you know? There's some distance between him and the crime, so that if he has to, he can deny knowing anything about it.”
Rick frowned. “Doesn't sound like something that would interest me.”
“No? It should. I'm basing it on you. Here, press the door into place, now hold it for a few seconds till it sets. In this story, you're the central character. You're the one getting double-crossed.”
“Sure I am.”
“You know what your boss Greenway said to me—I don't even know how long ago, I got no idea what time it is now. But earlier tonight, he said something very interesting to me.”
“What he say?”
“He said, ‘What if we gave you Rick?'”
Rick ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “Whaddya mean, what if he gave you Rick?”
“He said, ‘What if we give you Rick for the murders of Spender and Stefanie? We get him to take the fall for that, and then we give you whatever you want.'”
“That's bullshit.”
“It didn't sound like bullshit a little while ago. You see, I may not look like I'm in a good bargaining position right now, but a couple of hours ago, I kind of had the jump on your boss and his friend Carpington, and they were ready to say anything to put themselves in the clear. Greenway said you're a hothead, that you killed those people, and he's prepared to give you up to save himself. He's in some pretty deep shit now. This whole thing's falling apart around him, and if he can keep his ass out of jail by giving you to the cops, I think that's what he's going to do. And you know Roger will go along. That guy cries for long-distance commercials.”
“You're lying.”
“And it seemed like a good idea to Mr. Benedetto, too. He just showed up at the office, I think they're going over the final details now of how to hang you out to dry for all this. And if you kill us, thinking you're doing it in Greenway's interests, well, I wouldn't be looking for him to back you up.”
“That's fucking shit!” Rick said, making a fist and bringing it down hard on the model, shattering it into a hundred pieces. Sarah, even tied in the chair, jumped, the chair legs squeaking as they moved an inch across the floor.
Then Rick was very quiet, thinking about it, not sure whether to believe me or not. But it was probably the kind of thing he'd always suspected. Slowly, the rage was boiling up in him. Pretty soon he'd have to get out his baseball bat and smash another car. “Those fuckers,” he said. “They can't do that.”
“You think they wouldn't? You really think they—”
There was a loud banging on the front door. We all turned our heads in the direction of the noise. Rick sidled over to the counter and took the knife into his hand.
Sarah and I exchanged glances. It couldn't be Angie or Paul. They had keys. And even if they'd forgotten them, they'd never bang the door that way.
The police, we thought. Maybe, finally, the police had figured out I was somehow involved in this mess. Maybe they'd checked the last few calls made to Stefanie Knight's phone, recorded the numbers. Discovered that one of them was my cell, and now they wanted to know what I knew about her murder.
Lots! Ask me anything! I'm ready to talk!
“You stay here,” Rick said to both of us, and I thought: Duh. And: “Don't make a sound.”
I guess, realizing he might not be able to count on us in this regard, he put the knife back down and ripped off two broad pieces of duct tape. One piece got slapped across my mouth and the other across Sarah's.
There was another loud knock on the door.
Rick grabbed the knife and ran out of the kitchen. I reached up with my one free hand and pulled the tape back off my mouth. Sara
h rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Can this guy not get anything right?”
I heard him reach the front hall, and imagined that he had probably peeked through the glass beside the door to see who'd come calling.
I heard him throw the bolt. Whoever it was, it was someone he was willing to admit into the house. I started clawing at the tape that was wound around my body.
“Mr. Benedetto,” Rick said. There was no warmth in his voice.
“Rick,” Mr. Benedetto said. I heard the door close again. “Mr. Greenway had a feeling you might be over here, tending to a few things.”
“Yeah.”
There were so many layers of tape, I was having a hard time tearing through them. So I tried reaching around, to free my left hand.
“We've got a bit of a problem, and you being quite the handyman, we thought you might be able to assist us. If you take a look out there, you'll see Mr. Greenway and that Mr. Carpington out by the car there, and they're both in handcuffs.”
“What?” said Rick. In his mind, handcuffs meant cops. Clearly, there had been developments he was not aware of. “So it's true.”
“What, Rick? What's true?”
“The cops have already picked them up. And they're going to cut a deal. What did the cops say to you? That if you came in here and got me, they'd cut you a deal, too?”
I peeled one layer of tape from around my left wrist. There felt like only one layer left. As I picked at it, I wriggled my left wrist around, trying to stretch the tape enough to slip my hand out.
“I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, Rick. But maybe you could tell me what's going on here. Is Mr. Walker here? Did you recover the ledger?”
“Walker told me what's going on. That you guys are going to turn me over for the Spender thing. And for Stefanie. You know I didn't have nothin' to do with that.”
“I still don't know what you're talking about, Rick. Maybe you could come out and give us a hand.”
Bad Move Page 26