Dying Memories (7 page)

Chapter 19

Things did not go well with the police. Bill gave his story first to a desk sergeant who stared at him as if he had escaped from an asylum, then after waiting a half hour he was brought to a detective who he told the same story. The detective stared at him with disinterest. Stifling a yawn he interrupted Bill and informed him that there was no sign of an accident where Bill claimed that an SUV had hit the van.

“We sent over a cruiser and there was no broken glass, no pieces of plastic, no blood, nothing,” the detective said. “No one saw nothing either. Same thing when we sent a patrolman to your apartment building. No one saw a van in the area, and no one saw you being pushed inside of one.”

Bill straightened in his chair, a coldness pushing deep into the back of his skull. It didn’t surprise him that no one remembered seeing the van. These cleaning service vans were so ubiquitous that they’re close to invisible. “It’s what happened,” he heard himself insisting.

The detective eyed him harshly. “You don’t look no worse for wear, other than your ear looking kind of beat-up. Doesn’t look to me like you were in the type of accident you claim you were. You haven’t been drinking now, have you?”

“No, I haven’t been drinking.”

“Because it would explain things,” the detective said. “Maybe you went into a bar and took a shot to the ear. Maybe it made you dizzy and think things happened that didn’t happen. Are you sure it wasn’t something like that?”

“It wasn’t anything like that. I was abducted. It happened the way I said it did.”

“Then how come no one saw nothing then?” the detective asked. “And what happened to those two smashed up vehicles? They just disappear into thin air?”

“I don’t know.”

The detective leaned closer, his harsh stare intensifying. “You haven’t been doing drugs now, have you?”

The coldness pushed harder into Bill’s skull, making it feel like he had the mother of all ice cream headaches. At that moment he just wanted to get the hell out of there. “There’s no point in my filing a complaint, is there?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the detective deadpanned, his eyes glazing dully. “You could get yourself in a lot of trouble filing false police reports, especially if it’s only so that some dumbass reporter can try making a name for himself by making up a bullshit story. So you tell me.”

Bill shook his head, more to shake out the iciness filling it than any other reason. “Could you have a police officer drive me to my car and make sure I get in it safely?” he asked.

The detective reluctantly agreed to the request. Before leaving the police station Bill washed the blood from his ear and the side of his face. His damaged ear looked red and swollen, but the cut had already scabbed over and didn’t look bad enough for stitches, and outside of that and some shakiness he seemed to have escaped his ordeal intact. The thought that kept nagging at him was that the men who abducted him had to be tied to the government. That was the way it smelled from the very moment he was grabbed, and it explained how they were able to clean up the area as quickly as they did. He wondered whether they were able to influence the local police and whether there were witnesses who were being kept quiet. He’d have to look into that. He couldn’t imagine that type of car crash not attracting witnesses. The problem was he was too dazed and too singularly focused on the man with the gun to notice what else was around him at the time.

The patrolman who drove him back to his apartment building showed the same level of contempt in his expression that the detective had held. He didn’t say a word to Bill until he pulled up behind Bill’s car.

“You want I should have the bomb unit go over your car?” he asked. “We can bring dogs to sniff it out for you if that will make you happy.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Bill said stiffly. He left the police cruiser and moved cautiously to his car while half-expecting the same men from before to come charging onto the scene. Outside of the cop who had driven him and was now sitting in his cruiser glaring at him, the street was empty. The first thing Bill did once he was inside his own car was check to make sure his laptop and cell phone were where he left them. Then, squeezing his eyes shut and mouthing a silent prayer, he turned the key in the ignition. The engine turned over with a slight whirl. There was no explosion. He wasn’t engulfed in a fiery ball. The only sound was his heart pounding over the soft purr of his car’s engine. Bill exhaled in a loud burst and realized he’d been holding his breath since the moment he’d gotten into his car. He opened his eyes and looked in the rearview mirror and spotted the cop behind him. The cop shook his head with disgust, then putting his cruiser in gear, pulled away.

Bill sat collecting his thoughts. What happened could have been a fluke. It could’ve been a bizarre case of mistaken identity, at least that’s what they wanted him to think. Maybe it was that way, but what kept flashing in his mind was that hypodermic needle and that seemed to make it something else. And then there was that email message for his new good pal,
G
. He used his cell phone to call Detective Chuck Boxer.

“Did Gail Hawes have any needle marks on her?”

Bill heard the detective sighing wearily. “We released this to you guys already,” Boxer half growled. “A full toxicology screen was done. Nothing was in her system.”

“That’s not what I’m asking. Did she have any unexplained needle marks on her?”

Boxer hesitated before telling Bill that that information was not for public consumption, but yeah, she had a puncture mark on her arm. “Why you asking?” Boxer asked.

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know when I am.”

Bill got off the phone and thought about Gail Hawes and Trey Megeet both with their mysterious hypodermic needle marks. As anxious as he was to research this, as well as the man he was supposedly mistaken for, Jeffrey Vozzmer, it was six-thirty and he badly wanted to see Emily. At that moment that was all that mattered to him. The other stuff would have to wait.

Chapter 20

Bill arrived at the agreed upon restaurant by seven, and Emily was already there. Like every other time he’d seen her she was stunningly beautiful as she wore her brown suede jacket and matching skirt, her hair down and flowing past her shoulders. When she saw him she flashed him a near heart stopping smile, but as she noticed his injured ear, her smile faded quickly and concern wrinkled her brow. Bill waved away her question about what happened by telling her it was a long story.

After they were seated at their table and having drinks, Emily told him that he was going to have to tell her what happened regardless of how long the story was. “You’re still too wrapped up in it not to tell me,” she insisted.

“I am, am I?”

“That’s right,” she said. “You keep disappearing on me. So come on, spill it!”

“You’ll think I’m nuts,” he said.

That brought a smile back to her lips. “Maybe,” she said.

Her smile was just too beautiful and alluring for him to resist. He relented, first telling her about Trey Megeet, then about his abduction outside his apartment building. She looked at him with a frozen half-smile as if he were joking.

“You’re joking, right?” she asked.

He hesitated for a brief moment before nodding. “Yeah, and not a very good joke either. I’m sorry.” He looked away from her, adding, “What happened was someone punched me in the ear. It happened while I was leaving the prison after talking to Megeet. Not all that interesting in reality.”

“Why’d you tell me that other story?” she asked, her voice not quite right, her skin color all of a sudden very pale.

“I don’t know. I’m having a weird day today, that’s all.”

“Well don’t do something like that again!”

He nodded, smiling weakly. So there it was. The first rough spot in their relationship, the first chink in the armor. What the hell was wrong with him? The story was too bizarre for the police to even consider, how could he expect Emily to believe it? For the first time since he was with her he noticed the silence between them, how uncomfortable it had become. He tried to fill the void with idle chitchat, but it took several minutes and another drink each before they were back to where they were earlier, or at least mostly back. He couldn’t help feeling as if Emily’s attitude towards him had grown slightly more reserved. It wasn’t until after dinner and they were back in her apartment and had finished their first round of love-making with Emily lying on top of him that he felt they were really back. That any doubts that had been creeping into her mind concerning his sanity were gone.

“You really had me going before with your story,” she whispered into his undamaged ear. She hesitated, and with a hitch in her voice, added, “You really were just making it up, right?”

“Yep.”

“With that type of imagination you’re wasting your talents. You should be writing Hollywood screenplays instead of newspaper articles.”

“Yeah, well, it looks like it’s time for me to once again put my active imagination to work. Among other things.”

Bill rolled the two of them over so Emily was underneath him. And then they were onto round two.

It was much later before they were done. Bill fell asleep surprisingly easily afterwards given what had happened that day. Emily’s warm slender body next to his had a powerful soothing effect on him. Still, though, his sleep turned troubled. At one point he found himself back inside the van with the same man with the hypodermic needle; the one with the scrubbed pink face, pointy ears and tiny black eyes. It was just the two of them, and the man kept pushing forward as he tried sticking Bill with the hypodermic needle. As scrawny and thin as the man was he was getting the upper hand, overpowering Bill, moving the tip of the needle closer to Bill’s right eye.

“That’s not sodium pentothal, is it?” Bill grunted out as he fought to push the man’s face away.

“Of course not,” the man said.

The needle moved ever closer. Bill could just about feel it pricking his eye…

He woke up with a start, his body damp with perspiration. Confused at first over where he was, he reached out and felt Emily next to him and memories from the other day came rushing back to him. He took a deep breath and craned his neck to check the time. Ten minutes to five. He lay quietly for several minutes until he could get his breathing back under control and stop his heart from pounding, then left the bed and gathered up his clothing.

In the semi-darkness of the bedroom he quietly slipped his clothes on, then stood for a moment and watched Emily as she slept. She looked so fragile as she lay half buried under her quilt, seeming much younger than her twenty-nine years, her breathing coming out as a thin saw blade rattling softly back and forth. It tugged at Bill’s heart as he watched her. He badly wanted to just crawl back into bed with her and pretend that yesterday never happened. He couldn’t do that, though. Thoughts of that day forced their way into his mind. The pink-faced man with the hypodermic needle and how reptilian and deadly he seemed, especially his eyes. The two behemoths he was squeezed between inside the van. The car crash that supposedly never happened. The driver nearly falling out of the van, his face a broken wreck, but still shooting at Bill to kill.

Bill steeled himself to leave the room and turned away from Emily. Once out in the hallway, he wrote her a note and left it on her kitchen table, then grabbed his laptop and left her apartment.

He couldn’t help feeling jumpy once he was outside in the murky early morning light. It was only a quarter past five, the streets and sidewalks deserted. When a delivery truck rattled past him he half ducked before realizing what he was doing. He had quit smoking after the army, but at that moment he found himself craving a cigarette. Just as badly, he needed coffee.

He took a detour to the bakery he had stopped off at the other day but it wasn’t opening for another forty-five minutes, and he ended up instead at a twenty-four hour convenience store and getting himself a thirty-two ounce cup of high octane and a couple of chocolate doughnuts. He almost bought a pack of Winstons, but decided to hold off, both because he was shocked at the price and also he didn’t want to start smoking again. Back in his army days a pack cost him thirty-five cents at the canteen, the convenience store had it priced at five dollars and thirty cents. He took a long drink of the coffee before stepping outside and moving in a fast half-jog to where he’d left his car the night before several blocks away. When he reached his car he started feeling even more paranoid, and he got down on his hands and knees to look under the chassis, then he popped the hood and checked there for any explosive devices.

Christ, like they really would’ve followed him to the North End….

He had convinced himself that it wasn’t the case of mistaken identity that they tried hard to sell him. It could’ve been they were just trying to scare him off. But from what? Of course he knew what the answer to that was, as bizarre as it sounded. The abduction happened after he visited Trey Megeet in prison.

He got behind the wheel and once again held his breath while he turned the key in the ignition. After a long ten-count he exhaled in a loud burst. Nothing, no explosion. What the hell was wrong with him thinking they’d do something like that? If they wanted to kill him, they could’ve done it easily the other day. Besides, they knew where he lived and worked, but they wouldn’t have had any idea about Emily, and they wouldn’t have known he was spending his nights in the North End…

Unless they put a tracking device in his car…

He was just becoming more paranoid. Except he knew he wasn’t. If they were going to create such an elaborate setup to kidnap him, then later be able to clean up the crash site without the local police ever knowing about it, as well as quieting witnesses, why wouldn’t they be able to slip a tracking device in his car? But if the point was to scare him, why would they bother? Except it was more than that. That wasn’t the only thing they were trying to do. After the crash, the driver who stumbled from the van had shot at him to kill. He was pretty sure he felt a bullet go by his ear, and nobody’s that good a shot where they could’ve missed that closely on purpose.

Grimly, he determined that he was going to have to ditch his car. He glanced at his laptop. His grimace tightened as he realized they might’ve put something in that also while it was left alone in his car. Maybe even his cell phone.

The thought stunned him.

What had he stepped into?