Deadline (11 page)

I said OK. I was tense. I scanned the screen, the words I'd written. I felt my heart drop and go on dropping, a stone down a well. He was never going to buy this half-assed mock-up. He'd see through it like a transparency. He didn't sound like a stupid man.

He was quiet for a moment. ‘By the way. Get the hair?'

‘Yeah,' I said.

‘You should be grateful. Considering.'

Considering what? Considering what I
might
have received in that envelope? I had images of butchery, dismemberment. I shoved the pictures away. My saliva felt like silt in my throat.

‘I want to speak to my wife,' I said.

‘You speak to her when I decide, and only then,' he answered. ‘Now go to the pier.' And he hung up.

I sat down, hammered out a few last sentences, then printed up what I'd written. Dear Christ, it was as thin as consommé. But I didn't have time to embellish or expand it. Eight pages, double-spaced in Univers Condensed 12 point. It didn't feel right.

The paper looked and smelled too new, that was it.

I rummaged in a closet in search of some old paper and found a box that had been opened a while back; I took some of these sheets and stuck them inside the printer, then I printed the file again. Better, but not much.

I slipped the pages inside a manila envelope and licked the gummed flap and sealed the thing shut.

Then I brought up on-screen the file that contained the names of my patients. Attaching it to an e-mail, I sent it to Emily Ford, with the message:
I'll contact you.
After I'd sent it, I wondered if my computer was secure, or if my electronic mail was being illicitly monitored.

I picked up the lock of Sondra's hair and stuck it in the breast pocket of my jacket, as if for luck. I passed Jane Steel on my way out. She was updating computer data: housecleaning, she called it. Making copies. Deleting out-of-date material.

‘I may not be back today,' I said.

She gazed at me. Her mouth had a slight downward twist that suggested concern. ‘Is there anything you want me to do?'

‘If I can think of anything, I'll call.'

‘Take care,' she said.

‘I'll do my best, Jane.'

4.29 p.m.

In Santa Monica I parked a couple of blocks from the pier, then I walked past the carousel and the hot-dog concessions. The tide rose and fell sluggishly against the pilings. I'd come here with Sondra on our second date, and I remembered, with a measure of pain, the slow-running calm of the ocean, the first kiss, the first connection, that almost unbearable contact of flesh, my hand on her naked breast beneath her white cotton shirt. The image shimmered, the water slipped over the sands beneath the pier.

I remembered telling her, with brazen certainty, that I was falling in love with her. She'd laughed lightly, a little surprised.
Do you usually give your heart away this fast?
she'd asked. No, I'd never committed myself so quickly to anything before, but I'd known that it was right to tell her what I felt. I was like an adolescent afflicted by love's first assault. I trembled even now to think of that intimacy.

A dozen sailboats moved listlessly about half a mile from shore. A distant freighter plumed the air with dense brown smoke that rose into the sun. Two freckled, red-haired kids, probably brothers, carried fishing-poles towards the end of the pier. I'd fished creeks around Buffalo as a boy. I remembered nylon and reel and float and the splash of a hooked fish breaking the surface. I could almost hear it now. A lost world, innocence capsized. I thought of the route my life had taken, and how it had turned suddenly into a series of fiendish switchbacks.

What was I supposed to do now? Wait for somebody to contact me? Or was this a dry run that had been devised, a chance for me to prove that I'd come to the designated place alone? My senses had altered. The disappearance of Sondra had colored everything. I ached for her. I might have lost a limb. Or the will to live. My goals – but I couldn't recollect specific goals. What had I wanted, anyway? A different car, a house in a quiet place out of the city, my office refurbished, walls painted? God knows, none of it seemed of any importance now.

I touched the lock of her hair in my breast pocket, and pictured the battered Pontiac from which the envelope had been tossed. I could have described the two men easily, but I couldn't recall the license number, because my attention had been focused on the idea of violence and the way sun glimmered on the ugly brass knuckles. I should have been more alert, but my first impulse had been fear, the idea that somebody was going to shoot me down on the sidewalk in cold blood; you don't think straight in these situations, you don't look for peripheral details –

I reached the end of the pier. I checked the people strolling in the afternoon sun. Couples, solitary men and women, some teenagers, two old guys playing chess on a bench with a miniature set. The air smelled of brine and something else, a scent like that of dead fish. The ocean was polluted. I sat down, my back to the sun, the crisp manila envelope on my lap. I felt like a student whose final exam lay in that envelope, and whose whole future depended on this paper receiving a high grade. An A, a B-plus. A simple Pass would be enough.

When my phone rang I took it out of my pocket immediately.

‘You're on the pier,' he said. ‘I can see you.'

I turned my head, looked the length of the pier, back through the entrance as far as the avenue that ran parallel with the beach.

‘You're wasting your time, Lomax,' he said. ‘You can't see me.'

Was he in one of the white-faced buildings on the far side of the avenue? Or was he closer than that, standing in a concealed place on the pier itself? The thought struck me that maybe he was offshore, a passenger in one of the yachts, a guy with binoculars or a telescope.

‘Get up, start walking,' he said. ‘There's a trash-can on your right just as you step off the pier. Drop the envelope in the can. Got that?'

‘I've got it,' I said.

‘Then you go to your car and you drive away,' he said. ‘If anyone impedes the person picking up the envelope from the can, if you've brought anyone with you as back-up, if a single goddam
thing
goes wrong, the consequences are on your head. I hope I'm making myself plain.'

‘Plain as day,' I said. ‘When do I get my wife back?'

‘You'll hear from me.'

And the line was cut.

I walked towards the exit. A flock of black-headed gulls flew overhead, shrieking. Ten yards from the trash-can stood a couple of homeless characters, a barefoot guy in an old plaid poncho, and a skinny waif of a teenage girl with a tie-dyed bedsheet drawn around her shoulders. She had matted hair and gazed at me pleadingly, holding a hand out for change. She smelled of unwashed flesh, and she was shivering.

‘Got a quarter, mister? Fifty cents? Please?'

‘Sure,' and I fished out a bunch of coins, dropped them in her palm.

‘Thanks a lot,' she said in a plaintive little voice.

Then I wondered: how did this transaction look to the man observing me? Might he interpret my contact with the girl as a sign? Might he think that this thin urchin was an undercover cop and the guy in the poncho her partner, and that I'd just imparted vital information, passed on a prearranged signal? An innocent gesture, coins dropped in the dirty palm of a wasted young woman – but how did I know he'd see it that way? I didn't. But the notion had a reverse side: how did I know that the pair weren't the kidnapper's people, his gophers, messengers, part of his scheme?

I was crushed by questions. And no answers.

I dropped the envelope into the trash-can surreptitiously. I glimpsed a half-eaten burger, alive with buzzing flies, and a condom wrapper. I kept moving. I was nervous, and curious to turn my head, but I didn't look back. Would the file convince? It had to, otherwise I was lost, everything was lost.

I reached my car, drove away. I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. How could you know if you were being followed in a world filled with traffic flowing endlessly? You couldn't. It was an effective trick of one person tracking another: you didn't have to be a constant watcher, you only needed to plant a single seed. The victim's troubled imagination did the rest, imbuing the follower with omniscience. Or maybe in the mind of the hunted the follower was multiplied – one, two, four, eight, a platoon, a whole goddam battalion.

I knew all this, I knew how easy it was to succumb to paranoia. I knew it, sure, but that didn't make it any easier to overcome.

My head felt like a pod about to burst open.

I wondered where they'd seized Sondra. Maybe she'd been snatched at a
Stop
sign, her door jerked open, hands grabbing for her, a chloroformed handkerchief. But she always drove with her doors locked. Unless something had persuaded her to unlock the car and step out, a rigged accident, say, or a vehicle blocking her way. I thought of the gloomy parking garage at LaBrea Records, another possibility. I wondered if her car was parked there, if she'd been abducted at her place of work.

I passed the park on the bluff that overlooked the Pacific. The homeless congregated here with their shopping-trolleys and kids whizzed past on skateboards and people threw Frisbees for their dogs. I chewed on my thumbnail so hard I gnawed it down to the quick, drawing a little blood.

I turned right off Ocean Avenue. I glanced at a surfboard sales and repair shop, and a tea-room that was a replica of something you might find in an idealized English village – scones and clotted cream and pictures of royalty. I had the impression these places were unreal. They were movie sets. This entire city existed only in some movie-maker's mind. Fake knives. Fake patients.

My cellphone rang.

Sondra.
Her voice was distant. She was trying to speak through tears. I didn't understand anything she said. She seemed to be in pain. It was as if somebody had forced her arm up her spine to an impossible angle. I imagined the bone held at breaking point, the distorted expression on her lovely face. I felt her pain inside myself, a stake.

‘Sondra –'

Whatever she was trying to say was incoherent, choked back in her throat. I pulled the car into a narrow alley and parked among dumpsters, old wood crates, and cardboard boxes heaped outside the rear door of a restaurant. ‘Sondra … take your time, talk to me … I love you and I'm trying to get you back and it's only a matter of time, I promise.'

Then there was silence. I said her name over and over. Why was she quiet now? What were they doing to her?

The man came on the line and said, ‘It seems that she's not entirely herself, Lomax.'

‘Put her on again!'

‘You're not hearing me, Lomax. She's not herself. She's not well. She can't come to the phone again.'

I said, ‘Look, I left the file where you asked me to leave it. Now just tell me where my wife is and I'll come get her. I kept my end of the deal –'

‘Really, Lomax? You really kept your end of the deal, did you? Let me read you something. “
Subject reports a series of bad dreams. In some of these, she is being chased through the corridors of a house that resembles the one she grew up in, but in the dream it is bigger, with many more rooms and unfamiliar passageways. She wakes breathless and covered in sweat. She cannot identify the figure that chases her in the dream.
” This ringing any bells?'

‘It's from Emily Ford's file,' I said.

‘OK. Here's another. “
Subject has been dreaming of Billy Fear. In her dream, Billy Fear is a male Caucasian of about forty. In reality, Billy Fear was an Afro-American of twenty-three. She says that in her dreams Billy Fear wears a cloak covered with the signs of the zodiac, or something similar
…” You remember writing this?'

‘Yes.'

‘I've got a real problem with it, Lomax. Let me explain. It's a yawn. It's an eight-page yawn. I could hardly keep my eyes open when I was reading it, which took all of ninety seconds.'

He knew. He goddam
knew.
‘I don't have anything else I can give you –'

‘Do not fuck with me, Lomax. The point I'm making is I'm not going to be fobbed off with these notes, which are total shit. They're about as bland as a railroad timetable. This is the kind of stuff that belongs in Psych 101 or some prerequisite class for kiddy shrinks. It's boring and useless, totally useless, Lomax. What did you do, decide you'd try to con me with the
Reader's Digest
condensed version? Jesus, Lomax. One thing I seriously hate is being underestimated. I can smell crap from a long way off, and crap is what I'm smelling from these pages. I want the
meat
, Lomax. Are you with me? I want the blood, the rich, marbled flesh. I want this woman's eternal soul in the palm of my hand. I want everything, godammit. And you know what I'm talking about.'

‘No, I don't know.' I'd failed the test. I hadn't had a chance from the start. The idea had been dumb and hopeless and fueled by my despair and anxiety.

‘Oh,
please
, Lomax. I'm not one of your patients, whacked-out on funny drugs. I'm angry. And I have your lovely young wife sitting a few feet from me. Your lovely young
pregnant
wife. And all I want in return for this precious cargo is everything you ever learned about the inside of Emily Ford's head. You understand that?'

The connection was broken suddenly.

I struck the handset against the dash. I smashed it hard in rage a few times until I heard the plastic casing break. What was I doing? I couldn't shatter this device, it was moronic to do so, I needed it, I needed to be connected, a telephone was the only thread I had to Sondra.

I put it back in its slot under the dash.

Precious cargo
, I thought.
On a perilous sea.

4.46 p.m.

I drove to my bank.