Deadline (10 page)

‘
Baby?
Sondra's
pregnant
? Ouch. I have a feeling you just punched me below the belt.' She tilted her head back and appeared thoughtful. I looked at her; in repose, she was lovely in an angular way. She'd never married. She'd had lovers, but her work had always taken precedence. Ambition had overruled her heart. She was on a fast-track and she'd been traveling that way for a long time; she'd never allowed anything or anyone to stand in her way, and now there was a chance that her career might crash and burn. But she wasn't about to be thrown off that particular locomotive without a serious fight to stay on board. She'd inherited her father's cast-iron determination: Robbie Ford, public prosecutor, didn't understand defeat and knew even less about compromise. Emily had inherited his virtues and flaws, his steely obligation to the law as well as his pig-headedness, his focus as well as his inflexibility.

My mind raced to the kidnappers – and suddenly I had one of those little flashes that illuminate the darkness which clouds our brains much of the time. It was either the flare of an inspiration – or the small candle-flame of my desperation.

I said, ‘Something just occurred to me. They want a file they've never set eyes on. They don't have a clue what it might contain. They don't know what it looks like. Typed, handwritten, the kind of paper – they don't know anything like that.'

‘And?'

‘So – I write one for them. From scratch.'

‘And you think they'd go for that?'

‘It's worth a shot,' I said. ‘I can make it look good. I can give it authenticity. OK, granted it sounds crazy, but I'm not thinking in a straight line at the moment.'

‘It doesn't sound crazy to me. How long would it take to dummy something like that?'

‘An hour. Maybe more. If I type like I'm demented.'

‘How close to the truth will it have to be?'

‘Very close. Otherwise, these people will smell a fake as soon as they read it.'
And goodbye, Sondra
, I thought.

‘Give me some idea what you'll write.'

‘Simple. You came to me as a patient for grief therapy. You were having nightmares about your parents. I had to put you on some heavy-duty medication. Then I toss in some vague technical jargon: Generalized anxiety disorder. Post-traumatic stress. I can paint it on thick. I'll say that the treatment was a success.'

‘It's a sanitized skeleton of the real file,' she said.

‘Basically.'

‘And there would be nothing in it that could be damaging to me if it fell into the wrong hands?'

‘I'll make sure of it,' I said.

‘Swear,' she said.

‘I swear.'

She touched my knuckles with her fingertips. ‘And if it works, you get your wife back.'

‘Wife and baby,' I said. My world was black and white, my focus narrowed down to where it could only encompass Sondra and the life of the child she carried.

‘So, at the very least we buy enough time for you to provide me with your patient list, and I see if I can make anything out of the names.'

I was still hesitant about this part. I said, ‘On the condition that you destroy it when you're through.'

‘Deal. Straight into the shredder, Jerry. My word.'

I walked her back to her Mercedes. She unlocked the door of the car and turned to look at me. ‘I want that nomination. And I want it ratified. I want it so bad, Jerry.'

‘And I want Sondra.'

‘Two goals that don't necessarily have to conflict,' she said. She studied my face a moment. ‘Been in an accident? Your neck's badly bruised,' and she touched the contusion gently.

‘Yeah, I tripped, lost my balance,' and I left it at that.

She didn't look convinced. She had the kind of eyes that could sometimes penetrate the best defenses. Sharp, flinty. ‘Let me get rid of these Washington characters. You go print that list. I'll call you.'

She got inside the car and as I watched her drive away, I thought:
She really has no idea that the material stolen from my safe was already laundered, already sanitized.

3.09 p.m.

Out of nowhere a car slid up close to me, a grubby old Pontiac, dust-streaked and rusted-out, paint cracked. The windows were mud-caked, almost opaque.

It came in against the curb and an arm emerged from the window on the passenger side and a voice said, ‘Hey, Lomax.'

I flinched, thinking instantly of assassination, a gun in the hand that protruded from the window. In my imagination, I heard a shot and felt myself blasted backwards to die slowly on the sidewalk, the whole mystery of things unresolved; I'd enter eternity with a conundrum I could never work out – and then silence and darkness. I thought of the trajectory of the bullet, the explosion of skullbone, the leak of brain fluids.
LA Psychiatrist Gunned Down in Daylight.

I stepped back, one hand held out in front of my face, as if this might shield me against the bullet when it came.

But there was no gunfire, only a small, innocuous, brown-padded envelope tossed towards me. I picked it up and the car, gathering speed, squealed away from me. I pulled the tag that opened the envelope – it was light, almost weightless – and I tipped its contents into the palm of my hand. I halfway expected it to be something gruesome, something I couldn't name and didn't want to see.

It was a lock of hair the color of aubergine.

I stared at it. I raised it to my face. It smelled of Sondra. In different circumstances and another age, the hair might have been a token of love to be enclosed in a locket.

The Pontiac came back again, braking halfway up on the sidewalk. The passenger door was thrown open and I found myself looking into the curiously bland face of a fair-haired man in a blue denim shirt. A second man emerged quickly from the passenger side. He was large-skulled, hair-cropped as short and sharp as new-mown Bermuda grass. Large eyes protruded from his head like a couple of ping-pong balls cut in half and placed in each socket. He gripped my shoulder and pushed me against the car.

The fair-haired man slipped on a set of brass knuckles and rubbed them against my chin. A silver and turquoise bracelet hung at his wrist. He smiled. ‘A word of advice, Lomax … Do yourself a favor, give the man what he wants. Or it's gonna get real hairy. I promise you.'

I couldn't help saying, ‘Fuck you.'

The fair-haired guy brought his face so close to mine the motion might have been a preamble to a kiss. His breath smelled of cow-slurry. ‘What am I hearing?'

‘Simple. I said, “Fuck you.”' I felt a tightness in my chest. I didn't need to alienate this pair, but I couldn't blunt the sharp antagonism I felt, the awareness of outrage. One more push and the dam of myself would crack.

The big-skulled guy said to his associate, ‘You want me to kick the living crap outta him?'

The other man said, ‘Yeah, I'd like that. Except it wasn't no part of the job-description.' He rubbed my chin with the brass knuckles again, a circular motion, slow and menacing. I could have pulled my face away, but I didn't. I wasn't going to be stared down either.

‘You think you got
huevos
, buddy,' he said. ‘Doncha?'

‘Yeah, that's what he thinks,' said the big-skulled one. ‘But is he smart enough to keep them getting all fucking scrambled into an omelet?' He made a crushing gesture with his huge hands, as if he were pulverizing a couple of stone orbs. ‘Crunchy crunchy, crunch crunch. Here's your balls in a blender, Lomax. You smart enough to save yourself from that fate, huh?'

The man with the sour breath said, ‘Just do what you been told to do, doc. Don't take no detours. Listen to me. Be obedient. And don't play tough guy, because it don't impress me and my friend here. OK? Whatever you can do, we can do a whole lot better.'

So: it wasn't enough that Sondra was being held captive; I needed extra pressure too.

I heard them drive away. One of them shouted, ‘Keep what we said in mind, doc,' and I sensed the world darkening around me and something half-visible vibrating on the edges of my vision.

3.27 p.m.

The hair had shocked me, sent me into a deeper downward spiral. And the appearance of the two men had given the situation a hard reality it had lacked before. Finally there were faces, belligerent and cunning, behind the abduction of my wife. Real people – more than a disembodied voice at the end of a phone.

Give the man what he wants.

I sat in my office in front of the keyboard. I struck the keys hard and sweat ran down my face. I tried to remember the sessions I'd had with Emily, the areas we'd explored; my memory kept shorting out, dates escaped me, particulars of our interviews, those concrete details that would give a sense of indisputable reality to the counterfeit. This had to be convincing beyond all doubt, but I felt like a man forging a document the original of which had been lost, or somebody applying chemicals to a brand-new parchment to make it look and feel antique. Solvents, dyes, toxic substances.

I had the feeling the formula was eluding me, that I'd end up with nothing credible. This wasn't going to fool anyone. And then there would be repercussions I didn't want to think about.

The letters on the screen blurred as I pounded …
the subject expressed great concern over the limitations of justice … the subject wondered if she might have gone into a different profession, and believed that she'd developed a scepticism about the practice of law …

… She is obsessed with the burdensome influence her father had on her life, his intellectual bullying …

… He was constantly hypercritical of her in childhood …

…
She was often the target of his anger …

… His personality dominated the family. When she qualified as a lawyer, a serious competitive edge entered their relationship … In my opinion, her feelings for her father fitted the classic love-hate matrix … perhaps with more hate than love
…

…
My judgment is that although his death was a tragedy for her, she feels an unconscious relief that he can no longer pressure her. This induces feelings of guilt … She wishes she had been able to settle the differences between herself and her father before he was killed, and now that the opportunity to do so is no longer available to her, she feels even more guilt
…

…
I have taken her off Serax and prescribed 4mg daily of Ativan for anxiety. The effects of Serax were too short-lived
…

I typed and typed faster than I'd ever done in my life. I fudged the dates and times. I couldn't remember them with any precision, anyway. Then I wondered if I should mention our hypnosis session, at least in passing – but no, I didn't want to introduce that into the report. For reasons of authenticity, I might have done: but I couldn't. I walked round the office, thinking, trying to remember. There was gridlock inside my head, a pile-up of stalled thoughts.

I'd placed the lock of Sondra's hair beside the keyboard, and now I picked it up and caressed it between thumb and forefinger. I had to sit down and type more, harder, churn out the words, keep them coming. I knew the telephone would ring soon enough.

And it did.

‘Santa Monica, Lomax,' he said. ‘The pier. Go there now. Bring the file and your phone. You'll be contacted … and do us all a favor by staying away from Emily Ford. You got that?'

They're following me
, I thought.
They saw me go inside Otto's, saw me walk Emily Ford to her car.
I wondered about the surveillance, when it had begun, and the extent of it. I felt a tiny shadow cross my mind, such as a genuine paranoiac might feel: I sensed unseen faces behind the sun-glossed windows of parked cars, I wondered about a guy standing at a bar with an absent expression, a woman sucking an ice-cream cone on a street-corner, a face in a phonebooth – everything was charged, everything loaded, with the menace of the invisible observer. I might have been the subject of a lab experiment, shunted through a maze, my movements charted and recorded.

‘What did you talk to her about anyway, Lomax?'

‘This and that.' I stared at the screen. I still hadn't written enough; I had eight pages. Jesus. Eight pages was nothing. I needed double that. I needed length, density, an infusion of technical jargon.

‘Don't give me “this and that,”' he said. ‘You just
had
to tell her somebody wanted her file, right? Feel free to stop me if I'm wrong, Lomax. You and she tossed a few names back and forth, candidates who might want her psychiatric records, scoundrels with underhand motives. You wanted her to know that somebody's looking for a way to crucify her. You still feel a responsibility towards her. Dare I say a fondness, even? Or is that simply speculation?'

I didn't respond. A note in his voice scared me: supreme authority.
I have your wife and I own you. You obey every command I issue.
How could I even
consider
the idea of telling this voice that the records he demanded had been stolen, for God's sake?

He said, ‘I'll say this for the last time, Lomax. You're alone. You don't have any allies. You don't have friends, you don't even have acquaintances. The universe you live in is very big and very empty. There is no God. Like it or not, I'm your best friend. Understand? Say so.'

‘OK, I understand,' I said. ‘Incidentally, I'm not enamored of
your
friends –'

‘Get used to them. They're never very far away from you. You might even say they're more close to you than anyone else in this situation, including
moi.
Their manners leave something to be desired, but they were raised in bad neighborhoods, underprivileged, alcoholic homes, abusive fathers, you know how it goes, bla bla … Now, if Ford calls you, or contacts you in person, tell her you've come to the conclusion that the “kidnapper” was just some loony, some kind of phone-freak playing with your head, and that your wife's OK. Say something like … she had to go out of town on business. It was unexpected. OK?'