Kill Me (30 page)

SIXTY

I turned off Lizzie’s cell phone — the one I’d originally found in her lingerie drawer — while I was up in the mountains with Thea and the kids. If she was still on the roster of the Death Angel varsity, she would know that I’d survived the mass murder that they’d arranged for my benefit on I-70, and she would know that I was up in Ridgway with my family. She would probably even be able to guess why I was there. She would certainly be able to guess why I didn’t want to be talking with her.

I took her at her word that I was safe in my home.

More crucial to me, of course, was that I took her at her word that all my girls were secure there, too.

LaBelle e-mailed me, as promised, with the results of the search I’d asked her to do. The gist? She needed more time to track down the names of physicians who were board-certified in both neurology and oncology.

“It’s not as straightforward as you thought,” she wrote. “I’ll stay on it until I get it right.”

FedEx delivered a package for me shortly after eight o’clock the next morning. I knew the FedEx guy almost as well as I knew the mailman; that’s how frequently he came to our house. His arrival caused absolutely no suspicion from Thea.

Inside the flat FedEx envelope was a single piece of stationery from the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder, the new hotel that was only a block away from my shrink’s office.

On it Lizzie had scribbled, “Found him. You were right. He is in New Haven. We don’t have much time.”

Adam?

Why,
I wondered,
don’t we have much time? Her health? My health? The Death Angels’ plans?

Or is it a trap? Has she found Adam at all?

I phoned LaBelle. “Any word from Mary?”

“Good morning to you, too. And yes, dear Mary did call. She stays in touch.” LaBelle put the emphasis firmly on the
she
. “She phoned to say there’s a problem with the backup generator on the plane. A part’s being shipped to Centennial and she is flying there this afternoon from her current location to have it installed. She doesn’t want to get the plane repaired by anybody other than the people we usually use at Centennial. You may know why, but she’s not telling me.”

LaBelle waited for me to tell her. She expected me to tell her. I didn’t tell her.

“O-kay. She thinks the plane will to be ready tonight, late. She said you can count on her meeting you in Telluride, as you asked, but it will have to be in the morning, after sunrise.”

“Please tell her to rush the repairs if she can, and I’ll count on getting to Centennial tonight. She should be prepared for a red-eye.”

“You bet,” LaBelle said. I could almost hear her heels clicking together; she’d resorted to her good-soldier voice. LaBelle didn’t like being out of the loop and she wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise.

“That other thing, LaBelle? The search you were doing for me? Any progress since yesterday?”

“Progress, yes. Answers, no. Soon, I hope. By lunchtime maybe. End of the day for sure. It’s turned out to be more difficult to get those databases than I expected it would be.”

“It’s okay to spend money. As soon as you have something, okay?”

“You got it. You still want the word through e-mail?”

“Or text, but yes. Just notify me that you have what I want. I’ll call you.”

“Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I have something else. I don’t know if you know; don’t even know if you care, but the sniper hit again last night. A sixty-two-year-old man driving a gorgeous ‘62 Chevy pickup. See the symmetry in that? It’s some kind of message, I tell you. He was an African-American man. A church-goin’ man. His hair was the color of an old nickel and he kept it in a gorgeous ol’ ‘fro I swear was the size of a basketball. Now he’s dead. Bullet damn near blew the back of his skull off. The pickup he was driving? It just rolled to a stop on the shoulder as it was heading up that hill to El Rancho. Like it was running out of gas, you know? Nice and gentle? Other than the broken glass — just a neat little hole in the driver’s window — there’s not a scratch on it. That’s what they said on the news.”

“God help us,” I said.

“If you’re coming down by car, you be careful.”

“El Rancho?” I said. I added an inflection between the two words to turn the repetition into a query, but I wasn’t really asking her anything. El Rancho was the exit on Interstate 70 at the top of the hill where I’d seen the third of the three men with cell phones just before my run-in with the flatbed truck full of barrels.

I was wondering if I still believed in coincidence.

I wondered if the sixty-two-year-old church-going black man with the silver afro had been murdered to send me a message.

Like Dmitri.

“That’s what I said. El Rancho. Bad wreck up there yesterday, too. Dozen cars or something. People died.”

“I haven’t seen the news. I didn’t know about the sniper … that he’d hit again last night,” I said. I didn’t tell LaBelle that I’d avoided the news because I didn’t want to learn what the final casualty toll had been from the clumsy, shotgun-blast attempt on my life the previous day on the interstate by the barrel-dropping flatbed truck.

LaBelle was still talking. “Mm hmm hmmm. Imagine not knowing what the hell is going on. Imagine something like that. Mm hmm hmmm.”

SIXTY-ONE

The phone from Lizzie’s panty drawer started ringing when I was less than an hour from Ridgway driving across the expansive land of the high-country plateau that yields the always-worth-celebrating annual bounty of Olathe Sweet.

I could almost taste the buttery, savory sweetness of the legendary local corn. I shed a tear knowing that “almost” was as close as my lips would ever get to tasting it again.

My associations skipped from Olathe Sweet to butter to lips and then on to Thea and the girls. From the road to the horizon, I saw nothing but a sky full of lips I’d never kiss again.

But I ignored the phone.

The panty-drawer phone disturbed the quiet again a while later as I was cutting through Grand Junction to catch I-70 eastbound over the Rockies.

And I ignored it again.

Just outside the small town of Rifle, the phone began to chirp at me every minute or so. I considered turning it off. Instead, I answered it. Why? Maybe boredom. The stretch of I-70 between Grand Junction and Rifle is not exactly Colorado’s most scenic chunk of road. But mostly I answered because of the tantalizing possibility that Lizzie had indeed found Adam.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Where are you?” Lizzie asked in an enthusiastic voice, as though she thought I’d been waiting all day to talk with her.

“Rifle,” I said.

She recognized the irony and laughed. Her laugh made me smile. My smile was as involuntary as her laugh.

“Are you on your way to Connecticut?”

“Why should I tell you that? Why should I trust you?” I said.

“Because I found your son. I know where he is.”

“I would have found him on my own.”

“Maybe.”

“They tried to kill me.”

“Don’t be so surprised. You hired them to kill you.”

“A lot of people died.”

“It’s not an ideal result. But to them, it’s sometimes necessary. I guarantee that they consider the carnage your fault.”

“My fault?”

“You are being … difficult. From their point of view, you’re interfering. You could have chosen to overreact when that first barrel came your way. That cliff was right there, waiting for you to fly over it. Would have killed you for sure. Who knows, maybe no one else would have died.”

I wanted to scream at her. I told myself it wouldn’t help. The urge passed, like a swallowed belch.

A word she’d used was bothering me. “You said ‘them.’ ”

“Us,” she said. She said “us” reluctantly, I thought. For a transient moment I was tempted to grant her the benefit of the doubt that was linked to that reluctance.

But that impulse passed, too. I broke the connection and shut down the power on the phone. I wished I had killed it before I’d made the mistake of answering the call near Rifle.

She called me back on my own phone a couple of minutes later.

I was waiting for it.

“Don’t hang up,” she said. “You need me. You won’t find him.”

“Do I? I’ll bust down every door in New Haven if I have to. I’ll find him by myself.”

“You don’t have time to bust down every door in New Haven.”

“My luck has been holding.” I could have told her about skiing steep slopes in the woods, about my uncanny ability to keep both skis on the same side of every tree. But she probably already knew.

“Your luck isn’t the variable in question. Adam needs you.”

“Why?”

“Trust me, damn it. He needs you.”

“Is he okay? Is he sick? Hurt? What?”

“Sick” for me used to mean the flu. A cold. Strep throat. With the kids, it was ear infections, or fifth disease, which was Cal’s latest malady. On a bad day, sick meant pneumonia. Not anymore. Now, “sick” was a toxic word. Sick was a killer.

“You need to hurry.”

“Why? Tell me what’s going on?” My question was a demand. The most futile kind. The kind I couldn’t enforce.

“Adam needs you.”

“You said that. Tell me why.”

“Take me with you,” she said.

My son needed me and she wanted to bargain? My rage finally blew out from my core like magma spewing from a lava dome. I yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with my son, Lizzie?”

“I’m in Glenwood Springs. I’ll be sitting in the Wendy’s near the off-ramp. You can see it from the highway. Knowing the way you drive, you should be here in fifteen minutes.”

She hung up.

As promised, she was sitting in the fast-food restaurant with her back to the door and to the road. She was so confident I was coming to join her that she didn’t even bother to monitor my arrival through the windows that faced the highway.

All that was on the table in front of her was a bottle of water. The brand was BIOTA, an acronym that stands for blame-it-on-the-altitude. It’s a natural spring water bottled by a company in Ouray, a couple of spectacular valleys and passes away from my Ridgway home. Was there a message there? I didn’t know.

But probably.

I sat down on the plastic bench across from her. She was wearing a hat that almost, but not quite, covered her bald head.

No wig. Not a whole lot of makeup. Lizzie was officially outing herself as a chemotherapy patient.

“It’s not exactly Papaya King, is it?” she said from behind a pair of opaque sunglasses.

I didn’t have to look around to know that the Glenwood Springs Wendy’s — or any Wendy’s for that matter — bore little resemblance to the Upper East Side Papaya King where she and I first had lunch. “No,” I said. Unable to wait a second longer, I said, “Tell me about my son. What’s wrong with him?” I surprised myself with how level I was able to keep my voice.

“I want to go with you. If I tell you what I know you’ll leave me behind.”

I was grateful that she didn’t pretend that her motives were anything different. I said, “I won’t leave you behind.”

“You’ve ditched me once already.”

“I had to say good-bye to my girls.”

A moment later, I watched a tear sneak out from below the rim of her sunglasses. She let it migrate to the corner of her mouth and caught it with her tongue. I imagined the salt she was tasting.

“I accept that. But I have to go to New Haven with you. It’s as important to me as your visit to Ridgway was to you.”

It was beginning to get dark in the mountains. Time was tight. On clear roads the drive from Glenwood over the Divide to the metro area was almost three hours, even at the speeds I planned to be motoring. I glanced at my watch, looked at Lizzie, and said, “We should go.”

“Can I get you something to eat for the road?” she asked.

“Not a good idea,” I said, imagining the inevitable nausea. And then the inevitable vomit.

Out in the parking lot, I said, “I have to climb in from your side. The driver’s door doesn’t open.”

She examined the mangled metal and scratched paint on the driver’s side of the Porsche. “I’m sorry,” she said. “About your car. You’ve had this for a long time, haven’t you?”

What,
I wondered,
do they not know about me?

I patted the German girl on the hood. “Yeah, a long time. But it’s just stuff,” I said. “Though there was a time not too long ago when all this damage would have broken my heart.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “It is just stuff.” She kept a hand on the sheet metal as she ambled around the back of the car to the passenger side. After one last affectionate caress on the German girl’s flesh, she stepped back and allowed me to lower myself onto the passenger seat and contort myself over the gearshift to the driver’s side. She joined me and I started the car.

“Wait,” she said.

I looked over. She was pulling a small nylon pouch from her shoulder bag. “What?” I asked.

She zipped open the bag and pulled out the familiar tools of a phlebotomist. “I need to check your blood.”

I was beyond surprise. “For what?”

“Toxins. They — my colleagues — may have decided to … poison you. They’re very good at it. And you’ve gone on record as preferring drugs to bullets.”

Jesus.
“How the hell do —” I stopped myself.
What difference does it make?
“And if you discover they did?”

“Depends what agent is involved. I may be able to administer an antidote if I can identify what they used. I know their favorites.”

“How will you get the blood analyzed?”

She pointed across my chest to a guy sitting in a white van across the parking lot. “He’s a messenger. He’s going to deliver it to the lab for me. I should have some of the results before we get to Denver.”

“No bullshit, Lizzie?” I asked. “You’re taking my blood, not injecting anything into it?”

“I don’t know how you made it so far in life not knowing whom to trust. But, no. No bullshit. If I was going to kill you —”

“I know. I’d already be dead.” I held out my arm.

“So you’ve decided to trust me?” she asked me a moment later as she tightened a tourniquet around my bicep and swabbed the crook of my elbow with an alcohol swab. Berk called that particular part of her anatomy her “elbow pit.” That little memory, and what it represented, caused a plume of vomit to rise in my throat.

I involuntarily winced in anticipation of the poke. I said, “I’ve decided to be vulnerable to you.”

She filled three rubber-stopped tubes with my blood and pulled the catheter from my vein before she turned up to face me and lowered her sunglasses so that I could see the linear patterns in her irises. “What’s the difference?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

She stuck a bandage over the tiny wound, dropped the vials into a small, pre-printed envelope that she’d already marked, and honked the horn. The guy from the white van walked over. She handed him my blood. She said, “Stat” as she held out a hundred-dollar bill. He took the encouragement, but he didn’t say a word. Lizzie pulled the shoulder belt across her body and clicked it into place. She slid down on her seat and pulled her floppy hat low over her eyes.

“We can go now?” I asked.

“Sure. We have a long drive,” she said. “Plenty of time for you to tell me all about the difference between trust and vulnerability.”

My palm found the familiar orb of the gearshift. I popped the Porsche into first, eased back on the clutch, pulled out of the lot, and accelerated up the ramp onto the interstate.

The engine was thundering before I dropped the transmission into second. I said, “And then you can tell me why I didn’t find any magazines in your apartment. But that’s after you tell me what the fuck is going on with my son.”