The Intruders (41 page)
“Jack has shown a certain facility with violence,” Bobbi said. “Didn’t you know?”
My face felt hot. I was finding it hard to understand how come these people knew a lot more than they had any right to about my life. Had Amy told them?
Fisher was still staring at me. “What does she mean?”
“There was an incident,” I said as I remembered that Amy had been at the Zimmermans’ the morning I’d called after waking up in Seattle—when Bobbi handed the phone to her. “I saw suspicious activity one night. Found that the back door of a house had been forced. I went inside.”
“And?”
“People got hurt.”
Suddenly the phone rang, the jangling we’d heard from downstairs. The sound was coming from Zimmerman’s laptop. Ben reached forward, hit a key.
“Coming to collect,” said a woman’s voice from the laptop’s speakers. It sounded like the voice that had called my phone to derail me from confronting Todd Crane a couple days before.
Ben stood and started gathering papers from around the desk. Bobbi came over and picked up a handful of manila folders. They seemed to be in a hurry.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Is Shepherd here yet?” Ben asked, looking up and smiling briefly. I realized he wasn’t looking at me.
“On his way,” said a voice.
I turned to see two men standing in the doorway. One was blond. The other had short red hair. Both were armed this time. I realized that Georj had been right after all. These guys hadn’t come into the alley for him.
That didn’t seem important right then, however, because between them stood a third person. A woman.
My wife.
My head felt cold and my body as if it had turned to air. I couldn’t move. “Amy?”
She didn’t even look at me. It was as if my voice had made no sound. The Zimmermans walked past me.
“Out the back,” Amy said.
The red-haired man raised his gun to point it at me. “Your weapon, please,” the other man said.
“Yeah, right.”
Finally Amy glanced at me. “Do as he says, Mr. Whalen.”
“Amy…what…”
She just reached out, took the gun from my hand, and gave it to the red-haired man. Then she turned and left.
The two men backed out of the room after her and pulled the door shut.
As Fisher and I stared at it, we heard it lock.
When the phone rang, Todd yanked it out of his pocket so fast it slipped and went skittering across the sidewalk. He crawled after it on hands and knees, people snorting and laughing and not moving out of the way. He was beyond noticing. He’d spent three hours walking the streets. He couldn’t have gone back to his office, dealt with Bianca or the rest of them. He couldn’t possibly go home. He had to do something, and so he’d walked, attempting to lose himself in the press of normal people, trying not to feel once again that the streets were even more crowded than they looked, growing more so as the evening came on, that this feeling was worse than ever before.
“Yes?” he said into the phone.
It was Rose. She gave him the address. It was where it was supposed to be. Todd knew it well. A long time ago, he’d spent many hours in the building, supervising shoots, sitting in a chair with his name stenciled on it, selecting which PA would receive the offer of a quick and expensive dinner somewhere discreet. Since then, more than once, he’d raised the question of selling it. He had not been allowed to. Even though it was never used anymore and had small trees growing out of the roof, apparently it had to be kept. Maybe now he knew why.
As soon as Rose had gone, he called his daughter’s number. He gripped the phone till it nearly broke. Finally the other end picked up.
“Todd.” The little girl’s voice.
“It’s happening,” he said. “Now.”
“Excellent.”
“It’s in—”
“Belltown?”
“How did you know she’d choose where you wanted?”
“Because I’m a clever little girl. They changed the locks. They have something there that belongs to me.”
“Let me talk to my daughter.”
“She’s fine. How else do you think I’m going to get there? You remember what her car looks like, I assume?”
“Of course I—”
“Keep an eye out for it.”
Todd shouted in the street, a hopeless sound. He reeled off the main sidewalk and into an alley between buildings, away from normal people. He knew that the police couldn’t help him now, that this was about that building, and those people, and the things he’d never tried to understand.
He started to run.
When he got to the address, he was appalled to see police cars parked in the street. A tall black guy was hollering as he was manhandled into the back of one of them, barely twenty feet away from the door to the building.
Todd’s head was pounding from the journey, and his lungs were on fire. He looked at his watch—he’d made it here in fifteen minutes. Would the police be moving on in the next twenty? If not…Todd suddenly came to believe he was about to have a heart attack.
He stopped, made himself breathe evenly. Walked across the street and positioned himself under the awning of a gallery that had closed for the night. He watched as the black guy fought the law, and he called upon whichever sleek god looked after admen of a certain age to send the junkie motherfucker a heart attack of his own. Now. Right now.
That god was not listening, however, unless he operated with kindness and through the offices of a cop from the second car, who eventually came over and helped his colleague shove the guy sharply into the backseat. Then the policemen stood around for a while, talking, pointing this way and that. Todd watched them, aware of nothing but these men, knowing dismally that they would take an hour or so to wrap this up and he would never see his daughter alive again.
But then, unbelievably, the cops all got in their cars and drove away. It was over. With five minutes to spare.
Todd’s phone rang. He didn’t know what to do when he saw who it was, but he knew she wouldn’t just go away.
“Hey,” he said. “Look, honey, I’m really busy.”
“For God’s sake,” Livvie said, entering the conversation at full tilt, a skill of hers. “You’re supposed to be here.”
Todd had no idea what she was talking about. Then he remembered. New clients. Japanese. Due at his house for dinner in…about an hour.
“Christ, I—”
“No, Todd. No. There is no conceivable end to that sentence that is going to work for me. So don’t even finish it. Just come home.”
“I will. I’m…look…”
For a split second, he remembered the Livvie of twenty-five years ago, when life had been brighter and so much more straightforward. He wanted everything that had happened since to have not happened. He wanted to wipe all the slates clean, to do whatever it would take to make Livvie not angry at him all the time, to find inside her the raucous college girl he’d not been able to stop thinking about, who had for a while made the rest of her sex obsolete. Most of all he wanted to tell her what was going on now and ask her to help, for her to make everything all right. In the end that’s what men want most of women, and the thing they can never ask for out loud.
Then he saw it. A pale green VW Beetle, his twenty-first-birthday present to his daughter. It was coming quickly up the street.
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
He closed the phone on whatever his wife was now saying and ran across the road.
The car pulled over just past the building. Todd ran up to it, heart thumping. Rachel was hollow-eyed in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. The passenger-side window was already rolled down. The girl was sitting there.
“Observe my hand,” she said.
Todd had already seen that the girl’s arm was up against his daughter’s stomach and that something hidden in her sleeve protruded a little past the tips of her fingers. Also that there was a splash of dried blood under Rachel’s nose and a livid bruise on the side of her head.
“Baby, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Rachel said. Her voice was dry, quiet.
“Open the front door,” the girl said. “Go inside, leave it ajar.”
“No. You—”
“Do what she says, Dad,” Rachel said. “Please.”
Todd turned, walked stiffly over to the building. Found a key on his ring that he hadn’t used in six or seven years. Opened the door and went inside, leaving it open behind him. He turned back to watch what happened in the car, wondering if he could make it there in time.
He saw the girl talking to Rachel. Saw his daughter nod her head, slowly. He saw in her face the tiny being he’d held in his arms, the ghost of that long-ago child. And he wondered what, if anything, was left inside Todd Crane, what dead thing unable to comprehend or affect the cramped prison it had built around itself.
The little girl got out of the car, came across the sidewalk and toward the building. Past her shoulder Todd saw his daughter slump forward until her head rested on the steering wheel. His stomach rolled over.
But then he saw Rachel’s head lift again and turn toward him. Her eyes locked with his.
The girl walked straight past him and into the hallway of the building, pulling the door shut behind her.
The sudden darkness made Todd’s eyeballs twitch. He moved back involuntarily, as if he were here not with a child but with someone larger and older and incomparably more dangerous. Which he was, of course. He knew that now. It made no sense, but there was no other way it could be. He realized he should have listened harder to the voice within him that had said it recognized the parting shot of the child who’d been led out of his office by Bianca the previous afternoon. An expression he’d heard a certain man use a long time ago, a man he’d had few dealings with but had instinctively disliked a very great deal.
There was a click. A strong white beam of light from a flashlight illuminated the little girl’s face as she stood there between Todd and the door.
She cocked her head. “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page here, Todd,” she said.
The girl let the long knife slip smoothly out of the sleeve of her nice, expensive coat. “You hearing me?”
Crane felt sick. “Yes, Marcus, I hear you loud and clear.”
She smiled. “Glad you got there in the end.”
Five seconds too late, I was all about movement. I threw myself at the door, calling Amy’s name.
“Can’t you open it? Pick the lock?” Fisher had gone straight to the bookcase and started pulling books off the shelves.
“It’s padlocked on the other side.”
Gary leafed through another book, dropped it to the floor. “They’re all just law manuals.”
“It’s a lawyer’s office.”
“Lytton works out of here. Zimmerman. Whatever his name really is.”
I kicked the door, uselessly. “So either they’ve got the sense not to keep anything in an obvious place or maybe there’s just nothing to be found.”
“Jesus, Jack. What does it take?”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Two armed guards plus your wife,” Fisher said. “Heavy backup for just some lawyer, don’t you think?”
For either a lawyer or an ex–history professor, and I couldn’t begin to understand what Amy had been doing here. My only chance of finding out lay in catching up with her. I headed into the portion of the room that led to the back of the building. The doors in this section were as thick and heavy and locked as the first one.
“Why replace the doors up here?” Gary insisted. “Why make them so tough? What are they protecting?”
“I don’t give a shit, Gary. I have to get to Amy. Anything else is your problem.”
The window at the back had been secured with a sheet of plywood. I wedged my fingers under the bottom and tugged. It didn’t feel like it was going to move easily. I took a step back and slammed my heel into it. After a couple more kicks, it began to splinter.
Fisher continued to pull books down at random, flicking through them, throwing them away. He was getting more and more frustrated.
Finally a crack split across the bottom third of the wood. I gave it one more kick and then took it in my hands and gave a hard yank inward. The bottom pulled away. Fresh, cold air flooded in, along with the sound of traffic from far below. I hooked my fingers under the higher portion. With a couple tugs, it started to come away, revealing a few square feet of open space.
I stuck my head out the gap. It was totally dark now. We were four stories above the parking lot. A handful of overnighted cars, a chain across the entrance. No light in the attendant’s hut. But right in front of me was the fire escape. I hadn’t liked the look of it before. I did now. “We’re out of here,” I said.
Fisher came over to see. “The hell we are.”
“We can get down to the next level.”
“Yeah—or straight to the parking lot, fast.”
I stuck my head out and shouted. There were a couple of people walking along the street at the end of the lot. Neither of them even glanced up. We were too high up, the lot too deep, couldn’t compete against traffic sounds.
I vaulted onto the sill. Reached out and grabbed the sloping ironwork of the escape. Gave it a push. It moved ponderously. Hanging on to the window frame with my left hand, I lowered my right foot onto the level patch of the metalwork. Gradually moved my weight onto the foot on the platform. It made an unreassuring sound. I lifted my other foot off the sill, then slowly lowered that, too.
“We may not have a lot of time on this,” I said. “Be ready to move fast.”
I went down the stairs, watching the wall brackets. All were rusty. A couple were missing. I disturbed a large bird as I reached the platform below. It took off, and I felt the whole structure move. The window on the next level down was boarded up from the inside.
The floor below was boarded, too, however, and the supports looked even worse down there. So I stayed where I was. The panes in this window were mainly broken, jagged remains of glass studded into the wood frames. I smacked my elbow against the point where the cross-joins met, then again.