As a police car pulled up, momentarily blocking my view, it felt as if the muffled whine of its siren was actually coming from deep inside my head. I tried to sit up, but my muscles still wouldn't respond. When the cruiser passed, the blond guy was still there. Now I could see he had a bike and was wearing a
backpack. He was just a twenty-something who happened to be shortish and blond. A stranger.
SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB, the slogan floated back to me. Those had been the words on the T-shirt Jeff Gratzenberg had been wearing when I met him at his home. He said he had a collection of them. Where had I seen a black T-shirt with a similarly odd slogan?
Then I remembered the laundry that had gotten knocked off the dryer in Nick Babikian's kitchen, the pile he'd scrambled in front of me to grab. The garment on top had been a black T-shirt. It occurred to me that I'd never seen Nick Babikian wearing a T-shirt. He'd always dressed more accountant than nerd. Shirts with collars. On the other hand, T-shirts were Gratzenberg's everyday uniform.
There had been white lettering on the shirt. I'd seen only part of it. ARE BELONG TO US. Gratzenberg had said he had a whole collection of T-shirts with mangled translations from some old computer game. “
ZeroWing
,” I whispered, the name coming from nowhere.
I closed my eyes. I saw Jeffrey Gratzenberg handing Lisa a white sweater. Or was it a black one? No, the black one had been in my dream. That's what had been nagging at me, the detail that wasn't right.
I wondered, was that the T-shirt Gratzenberg wore to apply for his “new job”? Did he find his old enemy, Nick, waiting for him instead of a prospective employer? Why take the shirt? A trophy? And then, why launder it? Maybe to keep the police from identifying the body if it was found.
If Nick had just left the laundry there in a mound on the floor, I never would have noticed. It was picking it up that drew my attention. Typical paranoidâends up fulfilling his own worst fear.
A firefighter was using a huge wrench to open a fire hydrant,
one I'd cursed for years because it grew out of the sidewalk in front of the house exactly where I wanted to park. He hooked up the hose. In the shadows behind him was a dark figure with a cap pulled over his eyes. The loose-limbed stance reminded me of Nick Babikian.
It had to have been Nick who'd “set up us” this bomb. Who'd known all about video surveillance cameras. Who'd planted a bomb along with a camera after Argus removed theirs, then watched, waited until I was in the garage to detonate it. The fact that he didn't hesitate to push the button with Annie and me in the garage was an indication of how desperate he'd gotten. If it had worked and I'd been killed, the attack might have looked to the world like a last gasp from Ralston Bridges.
But it hadn't worked. And Nick Babikian, never one to trust anything to chance, had stopped by to see for himself. For the capped figure was still there, and I knew it was him. Still watching. I wanted to sit, to push back the fog. I struggled to sit up but strong hands pushed me down.
Now the paramedics were rolling me over on my back and hoisting me up onto a gurney. My mother was a few feet away, her eyes tense with concern. The gurney swung around and headed for one of the ambulances. I was starting to hear voices more clearly. “We're on our way,” said the paramedic hovering over me. “Possible internal bleeding. Shock, puncture wound.”
Nick wouldn't stop now. I had to get him. The open doors of the ambulance loomed. Shut inside there was the last place I wanted to be. I tried to tense my leg muscles, flex my knees. The paramedic who'd been holding me down yelled something to his partner and reached inside the ambulance.
There was a crash as the roof of the garage fell in. I could picture my car, transformed now into a blackened, smoking husk. It meant nothing to me. It was just a possession. In the scheme of things, it mattered not at all.
I looked back to where Nick had been standing. There was no sign of him. I searched the crowd, looking for that baseball cap and the hooded eyes, until the closing doors of the ambulance cut off my view.
TWENTY-ONE STITCHES. Stitch in the side. Stitch in time. To be in stitches. My mind meandered with the Demerol as the emergency room doc tied off the last one. I barely heard the snip as he clipped the thread. But at least I heard something. And I was starting to hear the sounds of the emergency room. My side was numb from the novocaine they'd pumped in.
Annie was there.
“I think I saw Nick in the crowd after the explosion,” I told her.
I explained to her about the black T-shirt with the white lettering I'd seen in the laundry room. ARE BELONG TO US was all I'd seen. And that I thought it was Gratzenberg's.
She got it right away. “It's a slogan from an old computer game. âAll your base are belong to us.' You think he's the one who disappeared Gratzenberg?”
“Yeah. He'd know just what kind of help-wanted ad would entice him. Then when Gratzenberg shows up ⦔ I stared out
the window at the thicket of radio towers on the hill.
“What?”
“I don't know. Nothing good.”
“Nick killed Lisa?”
“Yes.”
“And tried to do in Teitlebaum?”
“That one I'm not so sure about,” I admitted. At least that was one death that I'd been able to prevent.
“You're not paunchy,” Annie said.
It only sounded like a non sequitur. I'd been bothered too by the neighbor's statement to the Globe reporter that someone “paunchy” had been hanging around Teitlebaum's house after the police left and before I discovered him nearly asphyxiated.
If she wasn't talking about me, then who? “Nick's not paunchy either,” I pointed out.
Annie slid me a sideways glance. “Not to mention he was in jail while Teitlebaum was trying to kill himself.”
I shrugged. “Maybe there was no paunchy person. Or maybe she just thought the person was paunchy. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fallible. Stillâ”
“Still,” Annie agreed.
“Up to now it's been the oldest motive in the world: jealousy and revenge. A paranoid guy finds out that his wife is pregnant. He knows it's not his child. He kills her and plants evidence to incriminate his rival. Teitlebaum. Realizes he's got the wrong guy. So he goes after the next most likely candidate. Gratzenberg. Nick thinks they were all after his wife.”
“And were they?”
“Someone was. Lisa was pregnant.”
“Maybe the baby's Gratzenberg's.”
I didn't buy it. “Nick thought so.”
Annie nodded. “So he killed Gratzenberg. And tried to kill us.”
“That's what it looks like.”
Annie disappeared briefly down the hall. She'd promised to call my mother with an update. She came back looking worried. She bent down to me. “No answer,” she said. “Maybe she's still out talking with the cops.” The clock on the wall said it was after midnight.
A half hour later, my mother still wasn't answering her phone. I'd signed off on the last of the insurance paperwork, and Annie and I were getting ready to go over to the Middlesex County Courthouse where Boley was waiting for us. I gathered up my things. As a reflex, I checked my beeper in my pants pocket. It was flashing. I didn't recognize the number.
I called while Annie drove. The phone rang once. Twice. Then a click as someone picked up. A pause. “Peter?”
My hearing wasn't back a hundred percent, but I'd know that voice anywhere. It was my mother. “Mom? Where are youâ” I started.
“Shut up and listen.” Now it was a man's voice. The lower register was harder for me to hear, especially with the competing car noises. I gestured to Annie to pull over.
I held the phone so we could both hear. “This is Nick. I have your mother. We need to talk.”
“What the hellâ”
“I said shut up and listen,” he shouted. Then he lowered his voice. “No cops. I promise, you come here alone, the odds are excellent that you and the people you care about will survive. The odds drop to zero if you tip anyone off. I'm sure I don't have to draw you a map.”
“Where are you?”
“My house,” he said. “And don't get cute. Bring Miss Squires with you.”
“Let me talk to my mother.” I said. But he'd hung up.
The cell phone flew out of my hand as Annie pulled out and
made a U-turn, tires squealing. She gunned it across to Mem Drive. We made it over the Western Avenue bridge and to a red light. Annie paused just long enough to make sure there was no one coming, and tore through it.
I flashed back to my first contact with Nick Babikian. Another beep. Again an unfamiliar number on the readout.
I
'
m worried about this guy
, Chip had said. An understatement.
Finally we were on the Pike. I leaned forward in my seat and tried to swallow the dread rising in my throat. My mind flooded with questions. Had he really taken my mother to his home? Why? Did I trust that Nick wouldn't hurt her? What did he need to talk about that he had to abduct my mother? Should I have called the police and had them meet us there? Was his house booby-trapped? What if this were some kind of a trick?
I tried to shut down my fantasy factory. He had to be there, I told myself. And my mother had to be there too, unhurtâif frightened to death counted as unhurt. With all my goddamned degrees, so-called expert in criminal behavior bullshit, why hadn't I seen this coming?
“Shit,” Annie said. Traffic clotted and we had to slow down to pass a work crew in the right lane. Huge racks of white lights blazed, steam rising, and a backhoe delivered its load into a dump truck. “You'd think with all the equipment they've got over there at the Big Dig there wouldn't be any left over to torment us here.”
“Big Dig Schmig Dig.” That's what my mother muttered every time we tried to make our way through downtown, on foot or in the car. I wondered what she was muttering now. Something to give her courage, I hoped.
“Your mother's incredibly smart,” Annie said, reading my thoughts. “She's got great instincts for handling people.”
It was after one. Why was there a line at the toll booth? Annie swerved and sped through the EZ Pass lane. The Jeep shimmied
as it rounded the on ramp to 128. At least traffic was light and moving.
The air in the car seemed to thicken as we neared Weston. I rolled down the window. Annie downshifted for the off ramp, then sped up again.
She gave a tired laugh. “The guy's completely paranoid. Then, turns out he's right. Someone is banging his wife. If he hadn't been paranoid, trying to control his wife's every move, maybe she wouldn't have needed to break free, to sneak around.”
That was the insidious thing about paranoiaâits power to shape reality to match delusions. “If you think you're surrounded by assassins, eventually you will be,” I said.
“Now what's he going to do?”
I thought about Nick, his eyes constantly shifting beneath the brim of his cap. Like the Seer in
Running Scared,
his mind was constantly anticipating, strategizing, defending. He'd surprised me once. It wasn't going to happen again. “He's gone to a new level. Now it's about surviving. He only seems out of control. Random. There's got to be a plan.”
By now we were zipping along the winding road that led into Weston. Finally, Annie turned and headed up the hill. The street was dark, silent. Annie stopped at the end of the driveway.
“Why don't we get out here,” she suggested. “Give us a chance to see what's what.”
She parked the car and doused the lights. Nick's house was through the trees. We walked up the driveway, keeping to the edges where there was grass to muffle our footsteps. The security gates were open. A breeze riffled through the leaves. We emerged from the thicket.
The house looked very much as it had the first night we'd been here. Innocuous on the outside. Spotlights at the upper corners of the flat roof lit up the front lawn and brick path to
the house. Lights inside were visible through the narrow ribbon windows just below the roofline.
We stood, frozen at the edge of the shadows. The front door of the house was standing open. I stared at the open door, light spilling out from the entry hall. I tried to spot the video cameras, but they were too well camouflaged. Nick was expecting us. Was he watching from his basement workroom? Would entering trip another explosion? I pushed away the thought. He had my mother, and the invitation to enter wasn't optional.
“You sure you don't want me to hang back?” Annie asked. “You can say I wasn't with you.”
“Iâ” I couldn't stand to lose Annie if it all turned to shit. But I knew it was dangerous to underestimate Nick. He knew Annie and I would be together. I could lose before I got started if I tried to tell him otherwise. “No. We go in together.”
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the cool night air. My back throbbed as my chest expanded. I reminded myselfâonly dead people feel no pain.
We stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlights' glare. If Nick were watching, I wanted to seem calm. I let my arms swing, willing the tension from my neck and shoulders. Closer now, I could see the surveillance camera mounted behind the front light.
We reached the open front door. “Nick?” I called out. I had no intention of surprising him. “Mom? You in there?”
I stepped into the house, my heart pounding. There was no explosion. Annie followed. All I could hear was the sound of a television set going somewhere deep in the house. Probably it was Mrs. Babikian's.
“Hello!” I called again, as I started through the entry hall and emerged into the living room.
Nick was sitting on the couch. Hair was matted to his head, and his eyes were manically bright. My mother was next to him.
She was sitting ramrod straight, her legs crossed at the ankles, her hands demurely folded in her lap. She looked at me, then deliberately her gaze trailed down to one of Nick's hands. He was holding something about the size of a small apple. He had his index finger threaded through a metal ring. My stomach lurched. Though I'd never actually seen one in the flesh, it looked to me like a hand grenade. I glanced at Annie. She had her eyes locked on the device as well.
“I have no intention of using it,” Nick said. The masks leered down at me from the wall behind him. I could almost hear the red devil taunting me behind the mask's sneer, and the lacquered Mardi Gras faces snickering. The faint smell of decay seemed to ooze from the bird-feather masks.
Nick opened his palm. “It's just insurance.”
“Mom, you okay?” I asked.
“I'm all right, Petey,” my mother said. Her voice was surprisingly strong. For once, I didn't mind her calling me that. She gazed up at the gallery of masks. She looked at Nick with distaste. “I could be worse.”
“You didn't call the police, did you?” Nick asked. “I don't want any fucking police showing up here. Not until I've got what I want.”
“Which is?” I asked.
Nick ignored the question. “Sit,” he said. Annie backed up into a chair. I went to the other chair to sit. “No, lower the lights first.”
I found the dimmer switch on the wall. I pulled until the room was in half-light, then sat.
Nick slumped against the sofa cushions, but I knew he wasn't relaxed. His index finger twitched inside the metal ring. It made me queasy.
“I know it's over,” Nick said, his voice a rasp in the quiet. “I thought I had it figured out. But it's no use. I'd rather give myself
up than have them surround me like a pack of dogs.” He seemed to gather strength as he talked. “And I will. Give myself up.” He sat forward. “But I can't do that until I know that my mother is taken care of.”
My mother stared at him. This was something she hadn't expected.
“There's plenty of money,” he went on. “And of course,” he clenched and unclenched his jaw, “no heirs.” He looked at me. “I want you to promise me that you'll do everything in your power to see that Mother is well cared for.”
“For God's sake, why me?”
“Iâ” Nick started.
“What about Jeffrey Gratzenberg's mother?” my mother asked. Nick looked at her as if she were one of his masks who'd suddenly started to speak. “Dobra is up all night, every night, sure that the police will come knock on her door and tell her they've found her son. Alive? Dead? She needs to know.”
Nick swallowed. “Not alive.”
My mother seemed to sag as she absorbed this news. “It wasn't enough you took away his livelihood? Destroyed his reputation?” she asked, her voice rising.
Nick blinked at her. “I thought he was the father of Lisa's baby. He denied it. I had to know for sure.”