The Intruders (37 page)
I am not thinking about this. I am not thinking about anything. Thinking means remembering the face of the prenatal technician as she stared at the images on the ultrasound for a beat too long, before quietly summoning a supervisor. It involves the sight of my wife moving slowly around our house, waiting in vain for the thing inside her to go away. It culminates in a spray of fine dust, thrown back in my face by the wind at the end of Santa Monica Pier, just two days before this night, as if all creation wanted to make sure I understood that this event was something that would never, ever go away. The material that came out and was cremated and dispersed was not him. Our son never made it to the outside world. He got stuck inside, still wanders those interior halls, affecting the world only through his shadowy presence in our minds. Those who share their lives with someone dead know that there is nothing as loud as the recounting of all the things that now can never be said, or the memories of events that will never take place.
Cut off from the generations in both directions now, I have nowhere else to go. And so I sit here, and wait. Someone can be held responsible for something. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay. Finally I hear the door of the house open. I hear loud voices and the heavy thud of footsteps, and I sense that more than two people have entered. The sound of their voices is harsh, alien, and jagged with a frustration as toxic as my own.
Within three minutes of this moment, I will have shot four men to death.
I do not want to experience this again. When I finally fight my way up from the dream, I scare the life out of the person stuck next to me on the morning flight up to Seattle; and as I cry out, I realize that it is not the sound of footsteps I have heard but the plane’s wheels being lowered, ready to land.
We touched down just before midday, and I turned my phone on immediately. It buzzed thirty seconds later. The message was not from Amy, as I’d hoped. It was from Gary. An address.
His hotel was on the west side of downtown, close to the canyon of Interstate 5 as it cuts through the center. It looked to be around the same price point as the last one. After the conversation with Blanchard the previous morning, this made sense. Fisher was paying his own way, not charging it off to some deep-pocketed client. I parked the car under the hotel and went around to the trunk. Then headed inside.
Gary had said he’d come down to the lobby to meet me. Instead I got his room number from reception and went up. I knocked on his door. A muffled voice answered.
“Honor bar,” I said, facing the other way.
“I don’t need anything.”
“I have to check stock, sir.”
As soon as the door opened, I kicked it straight at him, catching him in the face. I slammed the door shut again behind me as I strode in.
“Jack, what the—”
I shoved him hard in the chest, sending him stumbling. He fell onto his back, and I put my knee in the middle of his ribs, pulling out the gun and pushing it hard into the middle of his forehead.
“Shut up,” I said. “Do not say anything at all.”
He still started to open his mouth.
“I mean it, Gary,” I said, pushing down harder. “I really do. I am done being fucked around by you and everyone else. Do you understand?”
This time he just blinked.
“Did you get Anderson killed?”
He stared at me. “What?”
“Only three people knew where we were going to meet. You, me, him. I didn’t tell anyone else. I’m assuming he didn’t. Which leaves one person. You.”
He looked alarmed. He started to push himself up, saw my face, stopped. “Jack, you’ve got to believe me.”
“No. I don’t have to believe anything from a guy who leaves a hospital when we’ve just seen a guy gunned down in front of our eyes. Who checks out of his hotel and disappears.”
“I had to, Jack. There’s…People have been following me. Someone had been in my hotel room.”
“For God’s sake, Gary. Go back to your therapist and take it seriously this time.”
“There’s nothing wrong with—”
“Really? So how come you told me you were still working for your company, when it turns out you’re on enforced leave?”
“How do you know that?”
“What exactly are these ‘personal’ reasons, Gary? What the fuck is up with you? Actually, you know what? I don’t care. I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“No you haven’t,” he said. “There’s nothing bigger than this.”
I looked down at the man lying on a hotel carpet and wondered how on earth my life had come to this. How we’d somehow gotten from a high-school running track to here.
“Whatever,” I said. “I don’t care about Anderson, Cranfield, or any of this crap. I want you to tell me anything else you know that pertains to Amy, and then fuck off out of my life.”
“Jack,” he said, “I’ve kept things from you. I admit that. But I had to. Please, just let me explain.”
I should’ve started walking toward the door. The gun felt too good in my hand. But I didn’t know where else I could go except to see Todd Crane, and I knew that would be a bad idea. I was being drawn toward easy solutions. I wanted someone to hurt.
“Please,” he said. “Give me five minutes.”
“For what? More bullshit?”
“Look in the briefcase.”
I glanced at the briefcase lying open on the chair. “Why?”
“Just look. I’ll stay right here. On the floor.”
I went and looked. Photocopies of contracts, reference books. A Bible, dog-eared, marked with Post-it notes. “What, Gary?”
“In the side pocket.”
I pulled out a small, hard rectangle. A Mini DV videotape. “Is Amy on here?”
“No,” he said. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Then I don’t care.”
“Please, Jack. Literally, five minutes. And then I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“Does what you know affect anything I care about?”
“Yes.”
I tossed the tape down onto his chest.
I sat in the chair, still holding my gun, and watched Fisher get off the floor. He took the camcorder out of the briefcase, along with a thin black cable. Went around the back of the room’s television to plug one end in and stuck the other in the side of a camcorder. Put the mini-tape into it.
“I’m going to have to find the right place.”
“Fine,” I said. “The time that takes is included in the five minutes.”
He stood hunched in front of the set, doing something to the camcorder. I couldn’t see the screen from where I sat. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “We’re set.” He stepped out of the way. The television screen was still black. He went to the window and pulled the drapes.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because what’s on the tape is pretty dark.”
He sat on the edge of the sofa. The room was now murky enough so you could tell that the television was on, from the slight warmth on the screen. Fisher pressed a button on a tiny remote.
The screen was suddenly bright with picture. A park, on a cold afternoon. Grass, trees still with leaves, a couple of joggers in the distance, the sound of someone walking on gravel nearby.
The camera swerved and zoomed in to show a child, a baby girl, tottering along a path, holding a stick and waving it insistently at nothing in particular.
“Beth?” said a voice. Gary’s voice. “Bethany?”
The child turned, after a pause, evidently still having to remember that the sound her father had just made related to her in some specific way. She grinned up at the camera and made a babbling noise, flapping the hand not holding the stick.
“Look,” Gary’s voice said. “What’s that?”
The camera panned left to show a large dog ambling up the path toward the girl, whose face lit up.
“Ooof-ooof!” she said. “Ooof-ooof.”
“That’s right, honey. It’s a dog. Woof-woof.”
The child moved confidently toward the animal, hand held out conspicuously flat, as she’d evidently been taught. The dog had brought with it an elderly couple.
“It’s okay,” the woman said. “He’s quite safe.”
The little girl glanced up at her for moment, then at her husband. She raised her hand and pointed.
“Granna,” she said firmly. “Granna.”
Gary laughed as the camera dropped to her level. “Granddad? Well, no, honey.” He then added, not to his daughter, “She thinks everyone, who…well, you know.”
The man smiled down affably. “Has gray hair. I know. And hell, I am a granddad. Five times over.” He bent carefully toward Bethany as she patted the dog’s back. “What’s your name, honey?”
She didn’t say anything. Gary spoke. “Bethany, what’s your name?”
“Batne?” the girl said.
Then she patted the dog one more time, a little too hard, and went running away up the path.
The video froze abruptly, then went to black.
“Very fucking sweet,” I said. “But—”
“Wait a second,” Gary interrupted. “You had to see that. But this is the thing.”
The image on the television’s screen changed again, flipping from pure black to a kind of mottled purple. Some kind of view in very low lighting conditions.
As my eyes got used to the dim light, I figured out that the glow came from a bedside night-light and that a collection of paler dots in the middle of the frame was a mobile, dangling animal shapes twisting slowly. I was looking into a child’s bedroom, in the dark.
“What the—”
“Please just watch,” Gary said.
The camera remained motionless for a while, evidently positioned in a hallway outside the room. I realized I could hear the sound of its operator breathing, trying to do so as quietly as possible.
Then the camera moved in a series of slow steps, as the person holding it stepped into the bedroom and then back and to the side. There was a quiet swishing sound and then a click. The image got even darker.
The camera panned slowly and unsteadily around the room. A faint, cold light through drapes showed shadowy, grainy images of a jungle mural on the wall, a baby-size chair and table, an orderly collection of toys stowed in a shelving unit. The view turned in a complete circle to pass the door, now closed, and ended back on the area made lighter by the clock. Looking down into a child’s bed.
The bed had bars on all sides, a crib designed for someone not yet old enough to be allowed to traverse the world under his or her own steam. You could make out the shape of the sleeping child within. Hear it, too, the slow rise and fall of its breathing.
Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. You could tell that the camera was still capturing the scene in real time, however, because of the quiet sounds of two people breathing and the noise of the image as the camera tried to cope with the near darkness.
This wasn’t anywhere enough to hold my attention. I was just about to get up when I heard something very quiet out of the television speakers.
“What was that?” I said.
Gary held his hand up, gesturing me to keep silent.
On-screen, the camera changed position. It moved quickly back from the bed, around to the side, and dropped a couple of feet. From here it had a view between a couple of the bars, of the side of a baby girl’s head.
I leaned forward, peering at the murky screen.
Nothing for a moment. Then the noise came again. It was a long, drawn-out sigh. From its quality it was obvious it hadn’t come from the person operating the camera—Gary, I assumed. Nothing for maybe another minute. Then, out of the speakers, very quietly:
“I don’t know.”
I blinked. I knew what I thought I’d just heard. There was silence again for fifteen, twenty seconds.
“Can anybody hear?”
This time there was no doubt. The words sounded strained, unevenly inflected. The child’s eyes were shut. Her body was motionless.
And she was two years old.
“Go ’way,” she said then, and this time her voice did sound right, the words vague and unformed.
“No,” the other voice said, still coming out of Bethany’s mouth. “I’m going nowhere.”
The child suddenly turned on her side, toward the camera. The motion was angry.
The operator caught his breath, evidently afraid she was going to wake, see him, and wail the place down.
But her eyes did not open. There was the very faint sound of crying, the child’s chest rising and falling more rapidly.
“I can wait,” the voice said.
Then the girl turned quickly onto her back again. There was another long sigh, and she went quiet. A moment later the screen flicked to black.
I turned to Fisher.
“Play it again.”
He rewound the tape. At no point was there a perfect view of the child’s mouth at the same time as the voice was audible. It was too dark in the room, and her face was generally at least partially obscured by the bars of the crib. But it was hard to believe that the voice had been dubbed in afterward—it shared too much of the same quality as the background sounds of breathing. Even harder to ignore was the way the child turned over at the end. There was something adult about it, fast, bad-tempered. Did children move like that?
I didn’t know. I hit PAUSE and froze the tape on the image of Bethany lying in her crib.
“How does this relate to Amy?”
He stared at me. “You’re kidding, right? I even got the name for them from you. From your book.”
“Name for what?”
“You’ve just heard one, Jack. Heard its voice, coming out of my baby’s mouth.”
I stared at him. “You think someone’s inside your child?”
“Not just her. Don’t you get it?” He leaned forward, his eyes sparking with inner light. “They’re the intruders, Jack. They’re the people inside.”
There’s a feeling you get to be very familiar with as a policeman. The realization that the person you’ve been talking to has, all this time, been lying. It might be something big, could just be some small detail. But suddenly you understand that the world he’s been describing, with plenty of eye contact and the apparent desire to be helpful, is simply not real.
I didn’t think Gary was lying. But otherwise it felt the same. You want neurosis to be heroic, to confer a shamanic majesty upon the tangled and pathless inner landscape some people are unable to escape. It isn’t. There is no upside. It’s just bitterly sad.