Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (19 page)

“Oh no,” Liesel whispered. “He’s awake.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

“He’s divorced. No kids. It’s just him.”

“He lives in this palace
alone
? Seems extreme.”

“But makes it easier for us,” she said.
“Come on. Let’s find a way in.”

“I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
     

“Me neither. But we don’t have a choice.”

I nodded. I stepped out in front of my
wife and headed for the door on the right.

“You don’t think we need a weapon, do
you?” Liesel asked. “I have my paintball guns. Or I could try to find a knife
in his kitchen or something.”

I continued leading the way. “Leese,
you’ve been playing the man in this relationship for days. I need to do
something to reclaim my masculinity.”

She chuckled and started walking by my
side. “Now’s not the time for you to flex your muscles, Cam.”

“Are you crazy? I lost my muscles when I de-aged
from eighteen to one. I’ve got nothing but baby fat.”

“But you have supernatural powers now.
That’s something.”

I took a deep breath and stopped before a
side door. “It sure is. And here’s the real test.”

“Please don’t disappoint me.”

“I’ll try not to.” I pushed on the door,
but it wouldn’t budge. “If I can get in, that is.”

“It’s not opening?”

“No.”

Liesel took a few steps to her right,
then
pointed her finger up at the house, as if she were
counting all the stars in the sky.

“There,” she said.

“What?”

“There’s an open window on the second
floor.”

I turned around to see the sun rising
even higher. It was still pretty dark out, but in the next twenty minutes, we’d
be exposed to all of Santa Barbara.

“OK,” I said. “I see that, too. Problem
is… how the hell do we get up there?”

Liesel pointed over my left shoulder.
“That tree.”

“That
what
?”

I shook my head in disbelief. I really
didn’t want to have to climb any trees to get to this allegedly fraudulent
doctor. But I knew there was no other way.
 

I didn’t even look at Liesel or make a
snide remark. I just made my way over to the large tree, which looked a hundred
years old with its impressive height and character.

“Just climb up and jump to the ledge.”

“Oh, OK, no problem,” I said
sarcastically.

I hadn’t climbed a tree since the second
grade, but I decided to make a valiant effort. I reached up high and managed to
lift myself up to the lowest branch. And as I climbed higher and higher, I
realized how lucky I was to not be rapidly aging; it would have made this
dastardly task much harder.
 

I
could be seventy by now. Or three. Thank God I’m still me. The
nineteen-year-old me!

“Hurry,” Liesel said, her head smacking
against my butt from below as she followed me up the tree.

“I’m going as fast as I can. Be quiet.
What if he hears you?”

“He won’t hear us.”

“We’re chatting away and climbing his
backyard tree!”

“So?”

“So. Be quiet!”

“Shut up!”

“Shhhhhhh.”

I reached the seventh branch up, brushed
a bird away,
then
prepared for launch.

I turned back, only once, to see Liesel
following close behind and waving me on, like this little leap to the edge of
the balcony wasn’t something potentially fatal.

Come
on, Cam. You can’t be afraid of death now.

I took a deep, scared breath,
then
ran at top speeds toward the edge of the branch. I
leaped into the air, trying to keep myself from screaming, and surprised even
myself when I made it over the ledge and landed safely and softly on the second
floor patio. I smiled and looked up, just in time to see Liesel, her jaw
dropped, come crashing toward me. I had no time to move, and no time to brace
myself for impact. Liesel landed right on top of me, her forehead smacking
mine, and her right knee striking my crotch.

“Ohhhhhhhhh Jesussssssss…”

She didn’t seem sympathetic. She just
jumped up to her feet and ran over to the open sliding door.

I knew by her expression that we had
found her target, because she lit up, and motioned for me to come toward her.

Just a minute, Leese.
In a
little pain here.

I stood up, slowly, and waddled across
the patio to the edge of the door. To my total shock, Liesel had already made
her way inside.

I caught her glancing at me from a
bedroom. She mouthed something, but I didn’t understand her. She waved me in,
and I entered.

“Wh—” I started, but Liesel shook
her head, and brought her index finger to her lips, making sure I would keep
quiet.

And then she pointed to her right,
through another doorway. I looked forward, hearing a TV blaring, and what
sounded like a large fan blasting air across a room.

Liesel took my hand, and we walked,
calmly and stealthily, into another room.

The tornado-like noises turned out not to
be coming from a fan, but from an elliptical machine, in the far corner of the
room. A fifty-something man, with thick brown hair, a short stature, and a
grossly sweaty back, was working out his legs, his body rocking back and forth,
more like he was swaying to music than to the motions of the exercise machine.

I would’ve felt more disconcerted to be
standing in the same room as this stranger, but thankfully he seemed
preoccupied with the early morning news, one of those programs that had four
talking heads screaming inanities at each other, two lines of scrolling text
flashing by at the bottom of the screen.

“Do it now,” Liesel mouthed.

I nodded and took a step forward, getting
into position. I hadn’t used this bizarre power outside of the cavern, so I had
no idea if I was going to be able to perform up to Liesel’s high standards. I
bent my knees a bit, faced my right palm toward the back of the guy’s head, and
started to close my eyes and think about all the happy times with Kimber.

But before I could close them all the
way, Liesel tugged me back into the adjacent bedroom, my eyes opening just in
time to catch a glimpse of the man turning off the TV, jumping away from his
machine of sweat and grease, and grabbing for his cell phone.

“This is Gus,” he said on the phone.

I didn’t dare try to look at him again.
It was possible he was turned right toward us. Liesel and I stayed down close
to the carpet. I prayed he wouldn’t enter this bedroom.

“Carly, please, I’m not due into work for
another week,” the man continued, talking much louder than he needed to. “Yes,
I know. I’m aware we’re having a situation right now, but I’m not about to cut
my once-a-year vacation short because of my patients complaining about…” He
stopped, took a few deep breaths. “All right, fine.
All
of my patients.
I’m aware we
have a problem. But Carla, I made my vacation plans for this week sooner than
you were
born
, do you understand me?
I need to—”

And then he stopped. It got really quiet,
so much so that I panicked, thinking he might have heard one of us, or saw our
shadow. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and looked at Liesel, worryingly. I
could tell she was thinking the same thing.

I was happy, a long ten seconds later, to
hear him say a few more words into the phone. “You know what? Fine. I don’t
need a vacation. How about we skip holidays? Weekends? How about I work seven
goddamn days a week? Would that make you happy? Huh? This is bullshit!”

He threw his phone to the floor and
started walking toward the bedroom.

Oh
shit oh shit oh shit.

Now it was my turn to grab Liesel and
pull her across the room. I looked for a closet. Nothing. He was three seconds
away. Two seconds.

I pulled Liesel to the side of the bed,
grabbed two of the pillows, and dropped them on top of our bodies, as if we
were making a little fort together.

All went silent, as the sounds of this
man’s footsteps entered the bedroom. I just stared at the carpet, knowing there
was no way in Hell that Liesel and I were going to get away from this guy. We
looked so obvious, blatantly hiding under some large pillows in the corner of
the room.

Shockingly, though, he didn’t un-mask us
(or un-pillow us, really). I listened to him take his shoes off, and then I saw
his sweaty white t-shirt land on the carpet just a foot away from my face.
 

When the shower turned on a second later,
Liesel and I breathed a sigh of relief. We waited, for a minute or two, before
escaping from under the pillows. I still thought we were going to look up to
see the doctor standing over us, a silencer in each of his hands. But he
wasn’t. He was in the shower, all right. Liesel and I heard him start singing.

“Is he singing what I think he’s
singing?” I whispered.

“You better believe it,” she said.

The song was obvious from the start.
“What are those, again? Oh yeah… haha… feet…” The voice of this Gus Rice fellow
echoed through the bathroom into the adjacent bedroom, where Liesel and I sat
on the bed and listened to the man sing the unabridged version of “Part of Your
World,” from
The Little Mermaid
.

“This man killed your mother?” I asked.
“He’s singing Disney songs.”

“Shut up,” Liesel said, angrily. She
stood up from the bed and headed toward the bathroom doorway. “This is the
perfect time, Cam. He’s vulnerable. Naked and vulnerable.”

“
Naked
being the scary word there,” I said, crossing my arms. “I’m not going to attack
a man in the nude.”

Loud humming emanated from the shower,
and it allowed me to speak even louder.

“What are we gonna do, Leese? Carry him
to the car when he’s butt naked?”

“You have any better ideas?” she asked.
“What if he catches us? He could kill us.”

“He seems harmless,” I said.

“He’s not harmless,” Liesel said. “He’s a
murderer!”

The humming stopped. Liesel slapped her
hands against her mouth, realizing she had just raised her voice.

When the showerhead turned off, I knew we
were in big trouble.

“Hello?” the doctor asked from the
shower. “Is someone there?”

Liesel and I stayed completely still, not
saying a word, trying not to even breathe. But the water from the showerhead
didn’t blast back on. It remained silent in the bathroom, like this guy would
be barging into the bedroom any second.

I shook my head at Liesel. I was scared,
and out of ideas.

Liesel bit down on her bottom lip and
shrugged. But my eyes weren’t concentrating on Liesel. They were concentrating
on the face of rage looking out toward us from the bathroom doorway.

Uh
oh.

“Hey!” the man shouted. “Who
are
y—”

Liesel screamed, and I grabbed hold of
her arms, as the doctor guy tripped on the edge of the rug and planted himself
face first on the floor. I looked down to see his hairy back, and his hairier
ass. He was totally naked.

“Cam, come on!” Liesel jumped over the
man’s body, and I followed. But I didn’t escape into the hallway like Liesel
did. As I leapt over the man, he grabbed for my jeans and pulled me down to the
ground by digging his sharp fingernails into my leg.

“Owww!” I screamed.

“Stop!” the man shouted. “You’re not
going anywhere!”

“Cam, do it now!” Liesel shouted, running
down the hallway, into the exercise room, and back into the bedroom, behind the
man. She grabbed his head from behind and yanked it back. “Do it! Hit him in
the heart!”

I raised my palm into the air and aimed
it straight for the man’s chest. But he was moving too fast, slapping Liesel in
the face, trying to force her off of him. I closed my eyes and tried to think
of Kimber, but the franticness of the moment kept interrupting my focus.

“Cameron, now—”

The doctor let me go, unexpectedly,
making me fall forward and slam my head against the wall. I saw stars for a
moment, and I turned around just in time to see Liesel running out of the
bedroom and down the hall, the doctor chasing right after her.

“Let her go!” I shouted.

No
time for a headache, Cam. Get the hell up and go save your wife.

I slapped my cheeks a few times—that
seemed to break me from my daze—and I rushed down the hallway, then down
a second hallway, until I found one of the mansion’s long, winding staircases.
I looked down at the floor below to see Liesel running toward a large kitchen,
the doctor following her.