Rift (15 page)

“How can they know where you are? What if they come here? They can't come here!”

“Nicole—”

“You have to get out of here!”

“Nicole, please! They're talking about my wife!”

Her feet drive hard against the floor, pushing her chair away from mine, and she lurches toward the bookcase. I can't pry my eyes away from the monitor, from the instant message window from
BATIROD
.

“Log off now,” Nicole says from behind me.

When I turn around, Nicole is holding the gun in her hand. She is more or less pointing it at me.

“Cameron, please
log off
!”

The command makes sense—if they are somehow tracing the call back to this house, we shouldn't help them by keeping the line open—so I reach forward with the mouse and disconnect.

“I'm sorry about this, Cameron, I really am. But I am not a saint. I feel badly for you and want to help, but I can't let myself get involved in your problem.”

“So you could care less if they kill my wife and me? What about the other volunteers?”

“It's not my problem!”
she screams. Her face has gone an angry shade of red, but her eyes are not as convinced. They dart from side to side, wide open with fear, but something else, maybe? Compassion, perhaps?

I must stall her long enough to think of something. Even if Batista really knows where I am, there must be a way to remove her from this situation. That's the only way I'll convince her to help me further.

“I'm sorry, Cameron,” Nicole says and begins walking toward me. More confident with the gun now, which she's pointing directly at my head. I walk backwards and make it to the doorway.

“I'm sorry,” she says again. Moisture leaks from the corners of her eyes. “I can't let something random like this ruin my life. Please leave.”

We're in the hallway now. I move slowly, feeling my way along the wall with my hands. Nicole doesn't seem to realize that if Batista is telling the truth, it already
is
her problem, whether she asked for it or not. But I'm not going to win her support if I just come out and tell her this. I've got to think of something, some way to extricate myself from her life and use that to my own advantage. But how? How do we erase this random event from—

“Hold on a minute.”

“What now?”

“I know how to get you out of this.”

“I'm getting out of this by showing you the door.”

“But if they really know where I am, don't you think they're going to come here? Even if I leave, this is where they'll show up.”

“No! I won't let them in. I'll call the police right now. They're not coming here.”

“They
are,
Nicole. If they traced the computer call somehow, they're coming here. And if I'm gone, they might force you to tell them where I went.”

“I'll tell them. I don't care. I'm not going to put my family or myself in danger to protect you. I'm sorry.”

“Even so, do you think they'll tip their hats and say ‘Thank you, ma'am'? They already shot my friend.”

“You don't know that.”

“I heard the gunshot.”

“Then I'll just leave,” she says. “Go pick up my husband and check into a motel.”

“You might as well post a sign on the door that says ‘I left because Cameron told me you'd be coming.' If their intent is to clean up loose ends, do you think they won't watch the house until you come back? Or figure out where you're staying and go after you there?”

Nicole just stares at me, and the contempt in her eyes is obvious.

“What the hell do you want me to do?”

Relief surges through me. “We have to make it look like I came in here and forced my will on you. It's the only way to convince them you know nothing. If I tie you up, maybe lock you in a closet, you'll look more like a victim.”

“Which I am,” she moans.

“Which you are. And if they show up here, you can scream for help, play it up. Act like you don't know a thing.”

“And what do you do?”

“I leave right now for Flagstaff.”

“How are you going to get there?”

“I'll take your car.”

“My car! Are you crazy? I'm not going to let you take my car!”

“Of course you won't let me take it. I'm going to steal it, and you're going to let the insurance company work out the claim. If you want, I'll wire you the sticker price when I get home.”

“You're crazy!”

“Think about it. This is better than just sending me off on foot. If they get here and you're not subdued somehow, they'll know you voluntarily helped me. And if I
don't
steal your car, they may not buy the story at all. What kind of fugitive would walk out of here when he could ride?”

When she doesn't immediately fire “You're crazy!” back at me, I decide I'm making progress.

“I know you don't want to get involved, but you already are. The challenge now is to get you uninvolved. If we do this my way, it will help both of us.”

Still she says nothing, and my confidence grows.

“Doing this will really help me. It could help a lot of people. Think about all the others around the country who might eventually transmit. Volunteers or even paying customers later. How many of them will come through changed like me? Someone has to stop this from happening.”

“And you think that someone is you?”

“I don't know, but if they don't catch me soon enough, my story will be all over the news.”

“And what if these bigwigs don't want your story told? Your CEO and his friends in the media.”

“Someone will tell it. The story is too big to ignore.”

A good salesman knows to shut up at the end of his pitch. The next move is Nicole's.

“Well, I guess you've got it all figured out,” she finally says, “and I don't know what the hell else to do. Where are you going to lock me up?”

I decide to use the master bedroom closet. A nearby armoire, large and solid, will block the door from opening. She informs me that her husband usually arrives home from work around six
PM
, which means she could be locked in the closet for more than eight hours, but we both know that nearly any amount of time is more welcome than a visit from NeuroStor.

She gives me directions to the interstate while we set the stage for her imprisonment. She's brought some tea, dry cereal, a paperback copy of Jeffrey Eugenides'
Middlesex
, and a laptop computer. “You'll wind through mountains all the way to Flagstaff. The town isn't very big, but I still don't know how she expects to find you.”

“Me neither.”

“What about your wife?”

“Batista might be bluffing. If he kills her, his leverage against me will vanish. I don't know. But I don't think it will help anyone if I just sit here and wait.”

Barely ten minutes have passed since I read the instant message, but every second I remain here with Nicole seems like wasted time. We're in the closet, and I'm about to pull the door shut behind me.

“They'll probably find the room above the garage and know I was in there. Tell them you offered to help me—that will agree with what the Texaco guy saw—and that I turned on you in the guest room. I locked you in here and used your computer. You don't know anything else. If they don't come, tell your husband the same thing. Let him call the police. Repeat the story for them. They won't be able to track anything to me, because by then I'll be in Flagstaff. I'll park your car somewhere safe. Someone will find it and maybe you'll get it back without a scratch.”

“Whatever.”

“Don't forget to put this food and stuff away when—”

“I'll take care of it,” she says. “Just get out of here.”

I'm about to leave when I remember something else.

“Where's the gun?”

She doesn't say anything. Her silence is my answer.

“Have you ever fired a gun before?” I ask her.

“No.”

“You had better be sure you can hit all of them, Nicole, whoever it turns out to be. There might be two, there might be more. I think you stand a better chance if you just play dumb.”

“We'll see.”

“I'm sorry about this,” I tell her.

“You should be.”

“I really appreciate— I mean, if you hadn't offered to help me, I—”

“Please,” she says. “Just go. I didn't want this. Just go.”

I don't know what else to say to her. Nothing, it seems. I push the door closed and then struggle with the armoire. Eyes shut, exhausted muscles straining, trying to slide the armoire far enough left to block the closet door from opening. But guilt steals through me, weakens me. I don't think I'm going to be able to push it far enough. This isn't right, locking a woman in her own closet, turning her into a sitting duck for Ivan or Ed or whoever might show up here after I'm gone.

If
I'm gone.

I've been here too long since reading the instant message. They could be anywhere. Alarm pours adrenaline into my bloodstream, solidifying the muscles in my legs and abdomen, and the armoire moves. An inch. Two inches. Then four. A few more until there is no way Nicole can open the door.

I hope this isn't a mistake.

         

The street is empty, as is the main road, the one onto which I crawled from the canal last night. From here I turn left—north—because I don't want the Texaco guy or someone else to see me in the car and call the police. The next main cross street is about a mile away; I'll use it to head west until I reach I-17.

I don't even see the patrol car until I'm upon it. The officer reaches a stop sign and waits for me to pass. I watch the rearview mirror and wait for him to come after me. But he just sits there.

He's thinking about it, I bet. Probably saw me out of the corner of his eye. Somehow he knows this car isn't mine. My next turn is within sight. Why doesn't he move? Why just sit there?

And then the patrol car pulls forward. He doesn't go left or right, but straight across the street. After a moment I can no longer see him.

I reach the intersection and turn left. This street is full of cars. I head west under the bright sun for nearly seven miles, traveling into and out of civilization. The road is fresh blacktop, wide and smooth, and traffic lanes are marked with bright yellow and white paint. Everything is new. New homes, new banks, new grocery stores. Oversized parking lots packed full of shiny Japanese luxury cars, German luxury cars, American SUVs. The road winds through a range of desert hills and emerges at Interstate 17. Soon I'm heading north on a wide freeway, out of the city, toward a horizon of brown mountains. The monotonous sound of tires on pavement eases my tension, and I allow myself to relax just a little. With the speedometer pegged at seventy-five, I ought to reach Flagstaff in two hours.

I hope I'm doing the right thing.

I hope Misty is safe.

God, I hope.

five

I
t's hard to believe I've been married for fifteen years.

When I was a child, time, and my life, seemed like something indeterminate, an invisible, unreachable horizon. But initiation into the ritualistic working world brought a new understanding of time, and the monotony of eight-to-five employment erased mind-bending chunks of life that could never be reclaimed. Periods of boredom were intensified by the knowledge that human existence was cruelly finite. Five years of marriage passed quickly, then ten, and soon I was a man who could say his best years were behind him.

Misty knows I'm bored with the familiarity of expense evaluation, of calculating income tax refunds and payouts for my friends, of any number of mind-numbing, number-crunching accounting services. But what do you say to a husband who knows little else? Occasionally, I join a golf tournament at my country club, and I've won quite a few. But the victories are hollow because we're all just a bunch of amateurs. We play our little hearts out, sweat over our shaky putters and unsure tee shots, and still none of us are worthy of carrying Tiger Woods' dirty towel.

How does a person live with mediocrity? How do you reconcile the knowledge that you will never be the best at anything, will never be acknowledged for doing anything worthy of true recognition, will never escape the cloying stigma of your tedious middle-American, middle-class existence? Maybe you're better than ninety percent of golfers in the world, but what's the point of competing when it's obvious you will never challenge the best? What does a person do when denial no longer numbs the daily pain?

I suppose if that person is me, he agrees to transmit.

What exactly is going to happen when I don't show up in Houston today? My return transmission is scheduled for noon, which is less than three hours from now. I have to hope the instant message threatening Misty was a bluff, because my incentive to cooperate with Batista will be gone if he murders her now. Still, what the hell is she going to do when they tell her I didn't show up in Phoenix for my transmission? Try to call Tom first, I'm sure. And after a few agonizing hours, she'll probably contact the police. I don't know how long before they'll declare us missing, but eventually someone will investigate our disappearance.

In time, they'll realize that Tom and I vanished from the golf course. And unless anyone in the adjacent houses saw us running down fairways and across greens, there won't be any reason to believe our disappearance was the result of foul play. Tom and I will be reduced to an unsolved mystery unless I do something about it.

But let's be realistic. Can one person ever successfully stand up to a wealthy corporation? Especially a person who's driving a stolen car down an unfamiliar road in an unfamiliar state?

I am so alone.

The horizon changes gradually, sometimes near and other times farther away. Small towns are spaced every five or ten miles, and none offer more than one exit from the highway. The sky is blue and perfectly clear. The mountains draw closer, occasionally turning green with Ponderosa pine.

A gray Isuzu Trooper passes me in the left lane and seems to go by in almost slow motion. A couple of kids in the backseat have pressed their faces flat against the windows. A boy and a girl, both fair-haired, grinning at me. As the Trooper pulls away, the boy moves to the back window and waves. I close my eyes for less than a second, but when I open them the truck has somehow become a speck on the horizon.

I blink again and hear Tom's voice. He's talking to Crystal, asking if she'd like to come back to his place for a private dance. Music seems to come from everywhere, and colorful lights reflect off chrome-frame chairs and tables. A cloud of smoke hangs above us. I look over at Tom, who smiles broadly, and a great weight lifts from my mind. He is alive. Tom is alive. I thought for sure they had killed him.

The ground rumbles beneath my feet. Something is wrong with the music, it sounds like—

I've driven halfway off the road. My hands jerk the steering wheel violently to the left, and the car jumps back onto the highway.

Sweat trickles down my forehead and temples, into my eyes. I lock the steering wheel in a death grip.

Shit. If I'm going to do Batista's work for him, why fall asleep at the wheel? Why not find a gun and blow my head off instead? I mean, let's be as dramatic as possible.

My fingers switch on the stereo, and the tuner searches until it finds soft rock hits from who knows when. But that crap isn't going to keep me awake. The next station is screaming heavy metal, and this is a much better choice for morons who can't seem to keep their eyes open. I crank it up to one decibel short of intolerable and glue my eyes to the road. Soon afterwards I pass a road sign that tells me Flagstaff is only fifty-four miles away.

Forty-five minutes or so.

         

I see it first topping the distant peaks, but as I close in on Flagstaff, the snow stretches all the way down to the highway shoulder. Just a light dusting, but still something of a shock compared to the warm desert air in Phoenix. Directly ahead, mountains make the middle of the horizon tall and jagged. I'm twenty miles outside of town.

I wonder if anyone has visited Nicole yet. Is she all right? Did she tell them where I'm going? After all, if Ivan and Ed are parked beside the highway shoulder up ahead, they won't let me get away again.

The mountains ahead are higher than any I've passed so far, and their rugged, snowy peaks are startling. I must assume these are the San Francisco Mountains of which Crystal spoke. Flagstaff is still thirteen miles away, but already I'm passing A-frame houses and small log cabins built inside clearings carved out of the pine forest.

Interstate 17 ends ten minutes later. I can go west toward Los Angeles, east toward Albuquerque, or leave the highway completely. It looks as if the town continues north, so I exit on Milton Road and find myself in the middle of a traffic jam on a road five lanes wide.

People are everywhere.

Another road sign tells me Northern Arizona University is directly ahead. The San Francisco Mountains stand against the northern horizon as if guarding the town. Am I supposed to drive toward them? I was expecting a small town with three streets and a Piggly Wiggly, not a city with strip malls and universities and plenty of traffic. How in the hell am I supposed to find Crystal here?

I drive through town, past fast-food restaurants and gas stations and hotels, and soon I'm in the country again, traveling north on U.S. 180. Perhaps Flagstaff isn't as big as it seemed—the liveliness of the main road may have deceived me—but trying to find one person here will still be akin to looking for the proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack. A highway sign tells me the Grand Canyon is eighty miles away.

I turn the car around in someone's gravel driveway. The mountain looms before me—Humphrey's Peak, according to signs I've seen along the way—and there is something else up there called the Arizona Snowbowl. Ski resort is my guess.

I wonder if I'm supposed to look for her up there? After all, Crystal did say the “highest point in San Francisco.” I can't believe she expects me to climb to the mountain summit, but what else could “highest point” mean?

I drive back into town and find a convenience store. The gas tank is nearing empty, but I still have no money or credit cards. Why didn't I think to ask Nicole for money? If I don't find Crystal soon, I'll be looking for her on foot.

The clerk inside is a college-age male with closely cropped hair and an earring. He's tall and lanky and glares at me as I approach him. According to the badge on his shirt, his name is Cory.

“Hi,” I say. “Maybe you can help me. Those are the San Francisco Mountains out there, right?”

He looks at me as if I'm a narc. The distrust is obvious. “You mean the Peaks?”

“Yeah. I was—”

“Really it's just a volcano that blew its top.”

“And the main mountain is called Humphrey's Peak?”

“Well, the highest peak is called that, yeah.”

“How do I get up there? Is there a road?”

“We have maps here, you know.” He points to a stand on the counter stuffed with maps for the Grand Canyon, for Arizona, for Flagstaff and Vicinity.

“If you could just tell me how to get up the mountain, if there is a road or—”

“The Snowbowl is up there. Ski resort. It's not open yet, so you'll only be able to drive to the gate. Sometimes people go there to watch the sun set. And the trailhead is there if you want to summit Humphrey's.”

“Great. How do I get there?”

“You from out of town?”

“Out of state, actually. If you could just tell me how would I . . . how . . .”

And then all at once the store grows bright, as if someone just cranked up the electricity. My ears begin to roar. A metallic taste seeps into my mouth. The world begins to swirl away.

The guy behind the counter says something, but I can't hear him above the roar in my ears. I try to ask him for help, but someone must have stuffed cotton in my mouth. I can't say anything. My tongue seems to swell.

Now I'm on the ground. I don't think I fell, and yet the convenience store clerk is standing over me, looking at me with bulging eyes and a wide open mouth.

“Wha—”

“Don't worry, dude,” he says. “I called an ambulance. They're on the way.”

“When? When did you call?”

“Just a second ago, after I kept you from choking on your tongue. You epileptic?”

“Epileptic? Of course not. What did you do with my tongue?”

But I can taste it now, the salty flavor of his fingers in my mouth. Why can't I remember?

“Just relax, dude. You had a seizure.”

I raise up, and he puts his hand on my shoulder.

“You should stay put. I've seen stuff like this before.”

“No! I've got to get out of here.”

“Why, man? You need to get to a hospital.”

I struggle to get up, but dizziness sends me back to the ground. Determined, I try again, and this time manage to stay on my feet by stumbling around in circles.

“Please tell me how to get to that place on the mountain. Please.”

“You're crazy,” he says.

“Maybe, but I'm not a criminal or anything. Please just tell me how to get there, and then forget I was here. It's sort of an emergency. Please help me.”

My mind is quickly clearing. It's imperative I get out of here now, even if this guy won't tell me where I need to go.

“Just head toward the Grand Canyon on 180 and watch the signs for the Arizona Snowbowl. Turn right and follow the road. It's a switchback that'll take you where you need to go.”

“Thanks.”

“You can't sue us,” he says as I shuffle to the door. “If you leave, you can't come back and sue the store.”

“Just tell the paramedics that I ran off,” I tell him. “Then no one will even know who was here.”

Distant sirens wail as I step outside again. I hurry to the car and drive toward the street, darting into traffic. The sharp, white mountain peaks beckon to me. I never see the ambulance.

Soon I'm out of town again, going the same direction as before. Toward the Snowbowl, and away from the convenience store . . . where something just went wrong with my body
yet again.
A seizure this time. What's next, a stroke? Will one of my arms rot and fall off while I sleep?

The terror rushes back, simultaneously hot and cold and electric. The transmission is only forty-eight hours in the past, and just look at the symptoms that have surfaced: faltering coordination, eighteen hours of unexplained sleep, and now a seizure. If all this so soon, then what about a few days from now? What about next month?

Will I die?

I so glibly embrace the exhilarative nature of this new life—running from armed gunmen, hoping to expose Batista's faulty product for heaven's sake—and then a seizure jerks me back into the real world where it becomes clear that I am nothing more than a frightened, unsure creature whose fate rests, in part, on the resourcefulness of an exotic dancer with whom I once spoke in a topless bar. Have I really escaped the boring constraints of my humdrum life? Or am I merely a doomed man trying desperately to make something of the last few moments of existence?

Confused, I almost miss my turn. The new road is a narrow stretch of asphalt barely wide enough for two cars to pass side by side. Trees close around me, perfect cover for Ivan and Ed to hide within while they wait to pounce.

The road weaves and curves, tracing a roundabout path up the mountain. I disengage the automatic overdrive, which can't seem to decide on its own what to do. So far, I've come upon no other cars, and none pass me. I look out the window occasionally and watch the peak slowly grow closer. How high up am I? Eight thousand feet? Ten? Mountainous terrain is unfamiliar to me. In Houston, freeway overpasses are considered high ground.