The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  And yet a week ago, I’d been standing right there on the deck when something had happened.

  I was watching Amy through the glass doors as she chopped vegetables and supervised a saucepan on the stove. I could smell simmering plum tomatoes and capers and oregano. It was only midafternoon, and there was enough light to appreciate both the view and the house’s good side. Instead of being in the office until after nine, my wife was at her kitchen counter happily making mud pies, and she remained appealing from both left and right and front and back, too. I’d even gotten an idea down that morning, and halfway believed I might produce another book about something or other. The spheres were in alignment, and nine-tenths of the world’s population would have traded places with me in a heartbeat.

  Yet for a moment it was as if a cloud drifted across the world. At first I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Then I realized I had no idea where I was. Not just the name of the town—I couldn’t even remember what state I was in. I couldn’t recall what had happened to me, or when, had no idea of how I’d gotten to this place and time. The house looked unfamiliar, the trees as if they’d been slipped into position when I wasn’t looking. The woman on the other side of the big window was a stranger to me, her movements foreign and unexpected.

  Who was she? Why was she standing in there holding a knife? And why was she looking at it as if she couldn’t remember what it was for? The feeling was too pervasive to be described as panic, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I blinked, looking around, trying to lock into something tangible. It wasn’t a reaction to the newness of the environment. I’ve traveled a lot, and I’d been sick to death of L.A. I was tired because I hadn’t been sleeping well, but it wasn’t that either, or the usual shadows that came to haunt me. It was not about regrets or guilt. It wasn’t specific.

  Everything was wrong. With everything.

  Then the cloud passed. It was gone, just like that. Amy looked up and winked at me through the glass, unquestionably the woman I loved. I smiled back, turned to the mountains to finish my smoke. The forest looked the way I had come to expect. Everything was okay again.

  Dinner was good, and I listened while Amy went over the structure of her new job. She’s in advertising. Maybe you’re familiar with it. It’s a profession that seeks to make people spend money so that folks they don’t know can buy an even bigger house. In this way it’s somewhat like organized crime, except the hours are longer. I said this to Amy once, suggesting they should tell clients to dispense with ads and demographics and encourage people to buy their wares through direct threats against their person and/or property. She asked me never to say this in front of her colleagues in case they took it seriously.

  The revised basis of her employment was important to us because her new position as roving creative director across her company’s empire—with offices in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and back down in L.A.—was what had enabled us to get out of L.A. It was a big change for her, a California girl born and bred, who’d liked being close to the family who still lived in the city where she was born. She had painted her willingness to move as related to the sizable hike in salary, but she’d never really been obsessed with money. I believed instead that she’d done it mainly for my sake, to let me get out of the city, and over dessert I told her I was grateful.

  She rolled her eyes and told me not to be a dork, but she accepted the kiss I offered in thanks. And the ones that came afterward.

  When I’d finished my cigarette, I pulled the phone out of my pocket to check the time. It was half past eleven. Amy’s job involved many client dinners, especially now, and it was possible she hadn’t even gotten back to her hotel yet. I knew she’d pick up her messages as soon as she could. But I hadn’t heard from her all day, and at that moment I really wanted to.

  I was about to try her number again when the phone chirped into life on its own. The words AMY’S CELL popped up on the screen. I smiled, pleased at the coincidence, and put the phone up to my ear.

  “Hey,” I said. “Busy, busy?”

  But the person on the other end was not my wife.

  chapter

  FIVE

  “Who is this, please?”

  The voice was male, rough, loud. Coming from Amy’s number, it was about as wrong as could be.

  “It’s Jack,” I said. It sounded dumb. “Who—”

  “Is this home?”

  “What? Who are you?”

  The voice said something that might have been a name but sounded more like a random collection of syllables.

  “What?” I repeated. He said it again. Could have been Polish, Russian, Martian. Could have been a coughing fit. There was a lot of noise in the background. Traffic, presumably.

  “Is this home?” he barked again.

  “What do you mean? What are you doing with—”

  The guy had one question, and he was going to keep asking it. “This is number says ‘Home’?”

  A light went on in my head. “Yes,” I said, finally getting what he was driving at. “This is the number listed as ‘Home.’ It’s my wife’s phone. But where’s—”

  “Find in cab,” the man said.

  “Okay. I understand. When did you find it?”

  “Fifteen minutes. I call when I get good signal. Phones here not always so good.”

  “It belongs to a woman,” I said, loudly and clearly. “Short blond hair, probably wearing a business suit. Have you just driven someone like that?”

  “All day,” he said. “All day women like this.”

  “This evening?”

  “Maybe. Is she there, please? I speak her?”

  “No, I’m not in Seattle,” I said. “She is, and you are, but I am not.”

  “Oh, okay. So…I don’t know. What you want me?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Stay on the line.”

  I quickly walked downstairs and into Amy’s study. Stuck dead center to the flat screen of her computer was a Post-it note with a hotel name written on it. The Malo, that was it.

  All I could hear through the phone was a distant siren. I waited for it to fade.

  “The Hotel Malo,” I said. “Do you know it?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Downtown.”

  “Can you take it there? Can you take the phone to the hotel and hand it in at reception?”

  “Is long way,” the man said.

  “I’m sure. But take it to reception and get them to call the lady down. Her name is Amy Whalen. You got that?”

  He said something that sounded very slightly like Amy’s name. I repeated it another few times and spelled it twice. “Take it there, okay? She’ll pay you. I’ll call her, tell her you’re coming. Yes? Take it to the hotel.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Twenty dollar.”

  My heart was still thudding after he’d hung up. At least I knew the score. No reply to my last message because Amy hadn’t heard it, which gave me a time before which she had to have lost the phone. When had that been? Around nine, I thought. Or could be she’d lost it earlier in the day and chosen to wait until she got back to the hotel to fill me in. Either way, she needed a heads-up to deal with this guy, assuming he was on the level. When phones are stolen, the thieves will sometimes call a home number, pretending to be a helpful citizen, in the hope of reassuring the owner that the phone isn’t lost. That way the victim will hold off getting the phone killed at the provider, leaving the perpetrator free to use the hell out of it until the agreed handover time, when he just drops it in the trash. If this guy was using that scam, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it—I wasn’t going to cancel Amy’s phone without talking to her first. The hotel’s number wasn’t on the note, unsurprisingly—we always communicated via cell when she was out of the house, which is how come mine was down as “Home” in her contacts list.

  Ten seconds on the Internet tracked down the Hotel Malo. I called the number and withstood the receptionist’s mandatory welcoming message, which included highlights of the day
’s restaurant specials. When he was done, I asked to be put through to Amy Whalen. A faint background rattle of someone typing. Then: “I can’t do that, sir.”

  “She’s not back yet?” I checked the clock. Nearly midnight. Kind of late, however important the client. “Okay. Put me through to voice mail.”

  “No, sir, I meant I have no one here under that name.”

  I opened my mouth. Shut it again. Had I gotten the dates wrong? “What time did she check out?”

  More tapping. When the man spoke again, he sounded circumspect. “I have no record of a reservation being made under that name, sir.”

  “For today?”

  “For the past week.”

  “She’s been in town two days,” I said patiently. “She arrived Tuesday. She’s in town until Friday morning. Tomorrow.”

  The guy said nothing.

  “Could you try ‘Amy Dyer’?”

  I spelled “Dyer” for him. This had been her name before we married, and it was credible that someone in her office might have made a booking for her in that name seven years later. Just about credible.

  Tapping. “No, sir. No Dyer.”

  “Try Kerry, Crane & Hardy. That’s a company name.”

  Tapping. “Nothing for that either, sir.”

  “She never checked in?”

  “Can I help you with anything else this evening?”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. The guy waited a beat, told me the hotel group’s Web URL, and cut the connection.

  I took the Post-it from the screen. Amy’s handwriting is extremely legible. You can make out what it says from low-lying space orbits. It said Hotel Malo.

  I dialed the hotel again and got put through to reservations. I rechecked all three names. At the last minute, I remembered to get myself transferred back to the front desk, this time reaching a woman. I told her that someone would be bringing in a cell phone, asked if she’d hold it under my name. I gave her my credit-card number against twenty bucks to pay the driver.

  Then I went back on the Web. Did searches for hotels in downtown, for anything similar to “Malo.” I found a Hotel Monaco, only a few streets away. Their Web site suggested that it was exactly the kind of place Amy hung her coat on trips: funky decor; restaurant specializing in Pan-Cajun this, that, and the other; complimentary goldfish in the rooms. Whatever the fuck that meant.

  I looked at her note again. It could just about be “Monaco,” if written in a hurry or while having an embolism. It might even be she’d misheard the name when being told where she’d been booked and written it down wrong for me. Mal-o/Monac-o. Maybe.

  I called the Monaco front desk and got someone human and responsive. She was able to quickly and regretfully establish that my wife was not, and had never been, resident in the hotel. I thanked her and put the phone down. I did this calmly, as if what I’d done made the slightest sense. As if I could really have misread the note or Amy misheard something from an assistant and as a result happened to name a hotel that actually existed, only a couple of streets away in the same town.

  I stood up. I rubbed my hands together, cracked my knuckles. The house felt large around me. There was a sudden clatter from the floor above, as the fridge dropped a new load of ice into the tray.

  I am not an especially imaginative man. The flashes of intuition I’ve experienced in my life usually have a basis in something obvious, even if only in retrospect. But right then I felt untethered, unguarded, as when I’d stood out on the deck a week before. It was after midnight now. I’d last spoken to my wife around eleven the previous evening. A shorthand debrief between two people who’ve loved each other for a while. Your day, my day; errand reminders; kiss kiss, good night. I’d idly pictured her sitting Indian style on a turned-down bed, a pot of coffee by her side or on its way, her expensive and doubtless too-tight business shoes kicked halfway across the floor of her room, in this Hotel Malo.

  Except she hadn’t been there.

  I put my hand on the mouse to her computer. Hesitated, then found her personal-organizer software and double-clicked it. It felt like an intrusion, but I needed to check. The diary window popped up on the screen. A bar across four days said “Seattle.” The space in between was peppered with meetings, plus a clutch of client breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Except for this evening. Tonight had been clear from six-thirty.

  So why no earlier call?

  There had been a couple of attempts at contact via the house phone. But she always called the cell. She knew I was supposed to be at home working but also that my desk and I acted like magnets with the same charge, and it was highly possible I would be elsewhere. And she always left a message. Amy had strong views on hotels. Maybe she got to the Malo and didn’t like it, checked herself in somewhere else. Didn’t mention it because it was trivia and didn’t affect our communication. Back-to-back meetings, then had herself booked into this week’s most fashionable Seattle eatery, table for one, briefings and demographics to read while she ate—leave calling Jack until she gets back to the room. Her phone slips out in the cab on the way there. She runs into someone from work, stays for an extra glass of wine. Would be getting back to the hotel round about now, reaching into her bag…and thinking, Shit?

  Yeah, maybe.

  I looked around her desk again. Other people’s working spaces are like the ruins of lost civilizations. It’s impossible to understand why they’d have that thing there, put the other here. Even with Amy’s, which is blisteringly neat and looks like an office-supplies serving suggestion. The desk looked as it always did, in I’ll-be-back-later mode. Except that her PDA was sitting in its dock. Amy was the only person I knew who actually used an organizer instead of merely owning one. She kept lists and her diary on it, maintained addresses, took notes, referred to it twenty times a day. She always toted it with her on business.

  But there it was. I lifted it out, turned it on. A mirror of the diary I’d seen on the main computer. To-do lists. Slogans-in-progress. I put it back. So she elected to take one less piece of equipment on the road this time. Rock and roll. Amy had her systems. In her world there was a place for everything and everything stayed in its place, if it knew what was good for it.

  And yet tonight she was not in her allotted space.

  So now what? Her phone was taken care of. I’d run down every available route for trying to talk to her and hit dead ends. It all probably meant nothing. My rational mind was braced for an incoming phone call, a tired/apologetic Amy with a complex tale of screwed hotel bookings and phone-loss woe. I could almost hear how shrill the ring would sound and was halfway to deciding to go have a cigarette on the deck while I waited. Either that or just go to bed.

  Instead I found myself in the living room, standing in front of the big windows, hands down by my sides. Minutes passed, and I did not move. The house was quiet around me, so silent in the continued absence of a phone call, that after a time the background rustle of moving blood in my ears began to seem very loud, appeared to swell until it sounded like the tires of a car on a wet road, still some distance away, but coming closer.

  I could not shake off the ridiculous idea that something had happened to my wife. That she might be in danger. As I stared past my reflection in the plate glass, out toward the dark shapes against the blue-black sky, I began to feel dimly certain that this unknown car was heading inexorably toward me.

  That I had always been its target, and now the time had come. That this was the night when the car hit.

  chapter

  SIX

  Oz Turner sat in the seat he’d preselected, wall side of the booth nearest the door. This position was obscured from most of Blizzard Mary’s other patrons by the coatrack. It gave him a good view onto the parking lot, cars and pickups whose sole shared characteristic was that of not looking too new. He’d been to the bar twice the day before, in preparation. Office workers at lunch, young moms sharing salads. Late at night the clientele switched to lone men interspersed with middle-aged coupl
es drinking steadily in silences companionable or otherwise. Meanwhile their vehicles waited outside, like old dogs, pale and ghostly in the dark. Beyond the lot was the little town of Hanley. A few streets away, through the small and prettified knot of the old quarter, was a wide, flat water-course. Either the Mississippi itself or the Black River. Oz wasn’t sure. He didn’t really care.

  He was nursing a beer to hold his place. He’d ordered one of the specials, too, but barely touched the gluey Buffalo wings. This was only partly due to nervousness. Over the last year, his habits had changed. He’d once been something of a gourmand, in his own way: a connoisseur of quantity. He made his coffee with three big spoonfuls of Maxwell House. He took his meals supersized. He’d enjoyed the tastes of these things, of course, but also responded to the comfort of sheer bulk. He no longer found solace there. After a time the waitress came and took his plate, and he felt no sense of loss.

  He checked his watch again. Well after midnight. The bar was dim but for lamps and neon beer advertisements. The television was on low. There were only ten, fifteen people left. Oz was going to give the guy another quarter hour, then go.

  As he was telling himself this, a car pulled into the lot outside.

  The man who entered the bar wore old denim and a battered Raiders jacket. He had the air of a person who spent his days on the wide, flat plains, near farm machinery. The Raiders didn’t hail from anywhere near here, of course, but geography has become malleable now. It could also, Oz realized, be intended as a signal. To him. He turned to the window and watched the man’s reflection in the glass.