Todd opened his mouth, but it was dry.
“Just do it,” the voice said, and then was gone.
Todd was on the road in minutes. It didn’t occur to him to go wake his wife. This wasn’t something she could help with, and nothing he could do or say would stop her from getting on the phone to the police.
He raced across the sleeping city in a daze, running red lights without even realizing. Drove past his daughter’s house, careful not to slow down. It was dark inside. He pulled the car around the next corner and came to a halt, trying to work out what to do.
Would this person really know if he called the police? How could she? He was pretty sure that part had been a bluff, but the threat she’d made was not. More than anything, he’d been convinced by his daughter’s voice. What had he heard—twenty, thirty words? It was enough. Rachel was independent, tough, more like her father than either of her sisters was. Couldn’t seem to get her private life together, but it took a lot to knock her confidence. She’d sounded about four years old on the phone. And very, very scared. She was convinced by the person with her, and that was enough to convince Todd. If he called the police—even assuming they’d take seriously a report of a grown woman being held hostage by a child—and they knocked on the door politely, instead of just busting their way straight in…
Todd couldn’t take that risk. Rachel could be dead and her killer away over a back fence before they got into the house.
What if he went up to the door himself? That wouldn’t constitute calling anyone, would it? But he didn’t know if it was just the girl inside or if she had someone else helping her.
He sat in the thrumming car, horribly irresolute. This was what fathers were supposed to be able to do, wasn’t it? To make this kind of call. To protect their young. To go charging in, confident of their ability to handle the situation, to prevent harm.
But now he knew that this had to do with that other thing, the oddness that had circled in the back of his world for half his life, the people for whom he had once in a while done small things and from whom he had received career-making favors in return.
And so he was not confident of his ability to control the situation. He was not confident of anything at all when it came to Rose.
“You’ve got to listen to me,” he said twelve hours later. “I really have to meet with you. Today.”
“Tell me over the phone,” she said. “I’m very busy.”
Todd put his head in his hands. His palms were slick with sweat. He felt sick. It was now a little after three in the afternoon. It had taken all this time to get the woman on the phone. He had this shot, and that was it. He could not blow it.
He raised his head. Stared out over the bay, at the mountains, tried to lock himself into the way he usually felt while at his desk, the habitual confidence.
“I can’t do that,” he said, in a voice that sounded very reasonable and professional. The voice of a good boss. The voice of someone in control.
“Why?”
“I think my phone’s being tapped.”
There was a pause. “Why would you think that?”
“I hear strange noises.”
“Are you quite all right, Mr. Crane? You haven’t been drinking? Had too long and convivial a lunch, in the pursuit of a client? Or a young lady, perhaps? Have you possibly reverted to the excessive use of cocaine that we once had to assist you in relinquishing?”
“No,” he said, and he knew he could not keep this up for much longer. “I just have to talk to you in person.”
“That’s not going to happen, Mr.—”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Come on—it’s Todd. You know I’m not going to screw you around. I’ve just got to see you. I—” He stopped just in time.
“You…what?”
Todd hesitated. He knew what he was not supposed to say. But he also knew that without giving Rose something, she wasn’t going to do what he needed her to.
“Someone came into the office yesterday,” he said carefully.
“What do you mean, ‘someone’?”
“A girl. But there was something weird about her.”
There was a beat of silence.
“I’ll call you back in half an hour,” the woman said.
The phone went dead. Crane sat there with it in his hands, shaking.
As he sat waiting, he stared at the radio still lying on the floor. Tried not to see it as a symbol for all the other things he should have taken more care of while he had the chance. But once the mind thinks it’s found a sign or portent, it will not let go even if it discovers too late and only to punish you. When he reached KC&H that morning, he’d tried phoning Rachel’s work number. She had called in sick. Halfway through the morning, Livvie phoned, complaining she’d tried to get hold of Rachel on her cell to arrange lunch later in the week and gotten no reply. Todd told her he’d received an e-mail ten minutes earlier saying she’d lost her phone at some club the night before, was getting a replacement sent, sorry—he meant to tell her right away.
He was doing all the right things. He was behaving well. He was going rapidly out of his mind.
Rose called back twenty minutes later.
“I can see you,” she said without preamble. “Around seven. I’ll confirm a venue closer to the time.”
“I need to—” Todd stopped. He knew he couldn’t demand to know where they were going to meet. He couldn’t ask for a specific place either. Not yet.
“Need what, Todd?”
“To see you, that’s all.”
“And it’s going to happen. I just hope I find it worthwhile.” Then she was gone.
Todd pulled on his coat and hurried out of the office. Bianca tried to wave him down as he passed her office, but she could wait. Everything could wait.
He emerged into Post Alley with his phone already in his hand but didn’t call his daughter’s house until he was halfway down the street, shoulders hunched against the rest of the world.
As he pleaded with the person who answered, getting her to accept the fact that he hadn’t yet been able to confirm the venue she’d specified, he didn’t notice a stocky, red-haired man coming out of the deli on the corner: a man who heard every detail of Todd’s phone conversation and quickly relayed it on.
In a hotel ten minutes’ walk away, a man sat on the end of a bed. He had been there most of the afternoon. It was not a nice bed. It was not a nice room. It was, all in all, not a great hotel. Shepherd didn’t care. He’d stayed in good hotels often enough. Unless you are in urgent need of spa treatment and don’t mind spending thirty bucks on breakfast, the difference isn’t very noticeable when the lights go out. You’re still just a man in a room in a building in a city, surrounded by strangers, hoping that tonight you will sleep.
His phone rang. He checked the number and did not answer it. It was Alison O’Donnell’s cell phone. Again. She’d left a number of messages during the day. Her husband, too. They were in an excitable state, having hooked up with some policeman in Seattle, one who’d had the sense to realize that the reason Shepherd had specified Alison should call him on her cell was that the alleged FBI agent who’d left his card with her would accept calls only from that particular number. Give a cigar to Detective Whatever-His-Name-Was: Evidently the SPD Missing Persons Bureau recruited from a higher IQ bracket than the sheriff’s department in Cannon Beach. Shepherd had no interest in talking to Mrs. O’Donnell now. Things were closing in. Not just the situation he’d brought about, but everything. He could feel it getting closer by the hour.
Behind him on the bed lay his suitcase. It had lasted four years so far. Before that there’d been one exactly the same, and another before that. How many had he gone through in his time? He had no idea.
The suitcase was full of money. This was what had made him accept the bargain and stick to it, a bargain that had seen him lending material assistance to someone who’d been declared far beyond the pale. The first thing the girl remembered on the beach was the money’s whereab
outs. It had been arranged that way—with the 9-by-9 symbol as a trigger—and Shepherd had gone straight back to Portland to pick it up from the old Chinese woman to whom it had been entrusted. He’d broken the terms of the initial bargain because he couldn’t wait any longer. He needed the money now. It was to be his stake, his first birthday present, his head start next time. It was utterly forbidden to do this, but he wasn’t one of them, and he would not be even when he took advantage of the older deal, the one struck when he was twenty.
Work for us, that deal went, do our dirty work, and we’ll arrange that you, too, will be reminded, when you come back. Shepherd had not merely been present at deaths, after all; he’d been instrumental, as all who took the title were, in rebirths. He had arrived in people’s lives, sometime after their eighteenth birthday, and supplied the trigger they’d registered with the trust. A phrase, a piece of music, a picture or symbol, on a couple of occasions a specific flavor: memory joggers, carefully selected so as not to be something the person would run into by accident, before he or she was ready. Before someone like Shepherd was on hand to guide the subjects through the process of realizing that their current feet were not the first with which they had walked the earth.
Shepherd knew that if a count were made in his life, however, the deaths far, far outweighed the rebirths. He had become a specialist. People who found out something, however small. People who guessed next to nothing at all. And once in a while even one of their own. Someone who had become a threat to the system or had returned damaged in transit—either of whom was not then supposed to be helped to come back again.
Murders and motel rooms—in the end they all flattened into one. Now Shepherd could feel his legacy gathering around. With Anderson’s machine he might even be able to see them, if it had really worked. The people Shepherd had sent away grew thicker around him. Like invisible cats, but larger and far colder, rubbing insidiously against the back of his legs and neck. Waiting. How far away were they? Not far enough.
Shepherd needed this situation to be over with. Then he had to admit his condition to Rose and start putting things in place. He needed certainty, more than ever. Now that the time was approaching, he’d found himself prey to occasional doubt, to the idea that maybe there was no deal, that all those like him had been tricked. Perhaps this notion had come to him in a dream or a waking thought in one of the long night watches when he looked back over the things he’d done. Or perhaps one of the shadows that surrounded him had whispered it in his ear, not as a warning but as a taunt. Either way it occurred to him one night that he’d never met someone like him who had come back. Never heard of one from the others either, and he’d known more than a few like him who had died, after years of long ser vice. The man who’d recruited Shepherd, for example, who found a gangling youth in a small town in Wisconsin and made him a promise compelling enough to make that boy leave everything behind, even a sweetheart whom he loved. That man had died twenty-five years ago. Since then there’d been no sign of him, even though it had been agreed that he could get in touch with Shepherd once he’d been reminded.
But he must be out there somewhere.
The deal must be real. It had to be. These doubts were nothing more than a variation on those that every human felt when faced with the end of the road.
Shepherd could smell the bathroom from where he sat. His stomach was in near-constant revolt now, and yet still he tried to eat. It was a habit the body found hard to break. Like a wounded dog, viciously rejected, kicked for years, but still returning with cowed back to its hateful master or mistress, in the hope of love this time. He could remember his mother, in her last days, when he was thirteen. In the months of her slow death, she’d made little notes in a book, jotted down memories of her early life, as if gathering fallen leaves to her chest, to stop them from being scattered and lost by the coming winds. In the final few weeks, she stopped doing it. She merely sat in her chair out on the porch, reeking of cancer, and done nothing but wait, with increasing impatience, for the end. Ready to go home alone, to leave, waiting for her wounded dog of a body to finally lie down and die, so she could be free of its relentless needs and loves and demands.
At the time Shepherd had accused his mother of giving up. Now he understood.
After a while his phone rang once again. He looked at the screen, answered it.
“We’ve found who you’re looking for,” Rose said. “Arrangements for a meeting are being finalized.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
“When I call, be there fast,” she said. “This situation has to be resolved immediately, I’ve got a bad feeling about who this might be.”
“Who?” he asked, to see whether she’d gotten it right, making it sound like it didn’t matter to him.
“Someone we all used to know,” she muttered, and cut the connection.
Shepherd stood. She knew. That didn’t matter. It merely made it all the more important that Madison O’Donnell wound up dead, and that it happened fast.
He got his gun out of the suitcase and closed it up.
chapter
THIRTY-SIX
“I don’t see how we’re going to do this,” Gary said.
We’d spent five minutes inspecting the back of the building in Belltown, confirming that the windows were boarded from the second story up. Their condition was academic: The fire escape stopped ten feet from the ground, and I wouldn’t have trusted a cat’s weight on the rest. The ground-level door had a pair of Dorling bolts, which could be opened only from the inside. It would have taken time and a sledgehammer to get through the door from here, an endeavor that would arouse comment in the parking lot that ran right up to the back wall and in which we sat, peering up through the windshield. Patrons came and went, and an officious-looking man was sitting in a booth. He’d already given us a long and suspicious glare. Nobody was going to be dealing drugs on this guy’s watch. Or smashing down doors.
We got out of the car and walked around the side to the road that ran along the front of the building. Crossed the street and stood looking at it from the other side. It was coming up to five o’clock. Passing road traffic was light and moving fairly fast. Nobody in a car was going to notice much. The problem was pedestrians. There was enough cause for people to be on their feet in this part of Belltown—a few battered bars, hopeful new ones, restaurants dotted here and there. Most people would mind their own business. Some would not.
“Go over and ring the buzzer,” I said.
Fisher went across the street. I watched the windows of the upper story as he leaned on each of the buttons in turn. The sky was overcast and dark enough that the reflections were muted, but there was no discernible change behind any of them. Gary looked back at me. I held my right hand up to my ear, nodded upward. He got out his phone, dialed. He shrugged. Nothing changed.
He walked back. “So now what?”
I went into a convenience store, and then we met L.T. outside the coffeehouse on the next corner up from the building, the one Gary had been sitting outside when he took his photos of Amy. L.T. was on the sidewalk with a friend, a tall guy who looked so disreputable you could have arrested him just for being alive and probably made it stick. He regarded Fisher and me with something between hunger and open hostility, but he probably looked at his own reflection that way, too.
“I said to meet inside,” I reminded him.
“Threw us out,” L.T. answered.
I offered him a cigarette, a folded fifty lying on top of the pack. He took the note, along with two cigarettes, winked at his friend.
“So?”
“Nobody come out,” he said. “They still inside.”
“You want to earn another fifty? Each?”
“Shit,” L.T. said, which I took as assent.
“Either of you holding?” They shook their heads. “No, really.” After a beat, both nodded. “You don’t want to be,” I said. “Stash it somewhere. Now.”
They touched hands with the l
ightness of magicians, and then the tall one trotted around the corner to hide their drugs.
“Okay,” I said when he got back. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” I pointed down the street. “I want one of you on each of those corners.”
“And do what?”
“Just stand in the middle of the sidewalk. Eyefuck anyone who looks like they’re heading your way, but don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Okay? I just want five minutes without too many people passing that building.”
“What this shit about?” L.T. asked.
“None of your business.” I gave him the money. “When you can’t see us anymore, you can go.”
L.T. took the cash, nodded at Fisher. “This dude ever say anything?”
“He’s choosy. Only talks to other narcotics cops. And he’s seen where you hide your shit. Understand?”
L.T. made the money disappear. “Don’t you want to know about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Little girl I told you about, man.”
“Not really,” I said. “Why?”
“See her again, last night. She come back later, go right up to the door. Keep pressing a buzzer. But there ain’t nobody answer. And then I see her later watching outside some new bar, a couple blocks downtown. Way after little-girl bedtime, you know?”
“Great,” I said. “Now go stand where I told you to.”
Gary and I waited as the two guys crossed the street. L.T. took the corner nearest us. His friend loped down to the other end of the block. Within a couple of minutes, most pedestrians were electing to cross to the other side rather than walk close to either of them.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I went across the street and straight up to the door of the building, Gary following right behind. “Get out your phone,” I said. “Make it look like you’re placing a call. Glance up at the building once in a while.”
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