Rough Draft (25 page)

No way to squirm free. Too slow and too big. No way he could pull loose from the fingers. Hal's thick, strong fingers around his throat, choking off his air, kneeling on Marcus Shoenfeldt's chest, strangling him till he wallowed beneath Hal and gasped and closed his eyes and his body sagged.

When the big man was quiet beneath him, Hal unbuttoned the straps of his overalls, and pulled them down. Then he rolled his shirt up over the swell of his belly. Hal squatted down over the man and used his thumbnail to gouge an opening in the flesh below his chest plate, breaking through the tough hide of Marcus Shoenfeldt. The blood began to seep, pumping with each beat of the big man's heart.

Hal leaned over the big man and used both hands to tear the skin wider. Then he unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt and rolled it up to his elbow. Hal squeezed his right hand into a small shape and sunk it deep into the meaty folds of Marcus Shoenfeldt. Wedging his hand through the wet, greasy layers, deeper and deeper, up to his wrist, then his forearm inside Marcus, under the bone and past the stomach, until Hal felt the big solid quivering muscle of his heart. Beating and beating and beating. And Hal Bonner spread his fingers wide around the biggest heart he'd ever held, huge, the size of a cantaloupe. It beat, it beat. And Hal closed his fingers around the living thing, the muscle, the pump. He squeezed. He clamped the man's heart muscle inside his hand until he could feel it stumble and surge and cramp and wriggle. Blood on Hal's arm. Blood on his pants. Blood everywhere on the floor. But Hal held on, slowing the man down till the heart beat one more time, one more after that,
then was silent. And the big man lay with his eyes open. Looking up at Hal. Looking through Hal, through the ceiling, into the sky, into that place that dead men can see, the place they speed away to.

Hal needed to take a shower. He needed to wash his clothes.

He was a mess.

He walked into the big man's kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes and roaches scrambling. Hal found a sliver of soap and ran hot water over his hands and washed himself, then he used some paper towels to dry off. He was leaving DNA everywhere, traces of himself, but he didn't mind. They could have his DNA, for all the good it would do them.

After some of the blood was washed away, he searched the pantry until he found a gallon bottle of bleach and a roll of silver duct tape.

He went back to the hallway and took hold of Marcus Shoenfeldt's heels and dragged the man into his bedroom. He pulled the blue bedspread off the big man's bed and laid it over his body. He pulled the sheets off the bed and draped them over the body as well. Then he took hold of Marcus's shoulder and turned him slowly, wrapping him in the sheets and blankets until Marcus was a mummy. A very fat, bloody mummy. Hal opened the bleach and poured it over the sheets and blankets. He would have preferred lime, but lime was not available.

He used the duct tape to seal around the edges of the two windows. Then he went to the bedroom door and shut it and stood in the hallway using more duct tape to seal up the edges. When he was done, he ran his finger over the duct tape inch by inch all the way around the door, mashing it flat against the wood frame, fixing the seal.

He stepped back. A good job.

Two or three days would go by before Marcus began to stink and the mailman smelled him. Hal thought that would be enough time. Two or three more days before anyone found out that Hal Bonner had been a bad boy again.

While Frank Sheffield finished his sandwich at the picnic table and Randall disappeared again into his computer, Hannah went to her bedroom, shut the door, leaned her back against it for a moment, lifting her hands and watching them quiver. She took several slow, deep breaths, willing the tremble to cease, but her hands continued to defy her. The cold palsy of panic.

She pushed away from the door, marched into the bathroom, and turned on the shower full blast, as hot as she could stand it.

A few minutes later, standing naked under the spray, running her soapy hands over the familiar contours of her body, she felt an odd flush of awareness. A man in the house, changing the chemistry, the vibrations in the air, giving this simple act of hygiene and renewal a sensuous cast. Without intending it, her own nervous hands became Sheffield's hands, a flicker of fantasy. Frank in her shower, naked beside her, stroking her, touching those places that no man had caressed in years. The whisper of another's flesh across her flesh, bringing the sleek skin alive with a creamy warmth, a glow. She cocked her hip against the shower wall, touching herself with another's hands, touching and touching until her legs were soft and the shiver in her flesh finally stilled.

Then she was back in the shower alone, the hot spray in her face, feeling silly, feeling juvenile and vaguely ashamed.

She finished her shower, toweled off, gave her hair a
quick blow dry. Minimal makeup. Considered, then rejected a dab of perfume.

She put on beige walking shorts, a pale blue cotton jersey with three-quarter sleeves, black leather sandals. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, still feeling foolish, a little out of breath from her reverie.

The house was quiet beyond her bedroom door. It was not yet three o'clock. She walked to her study, sat down before her computer, and clicked her way quickly back into Erin Barkley's world.

She knew it was crazy to tinker with the story at a time like this, so much going on, so much unresolved, but it had become an automatic response to emotional turmoil, turning on the computer, slipping away into that clear, sensuous parallel universe. A world of order. Where she could neaten the edges, go from rough draft to second draft and third. Paring, shaping, eliminating the superfluous, the bothersome irrelevancies. Edit out the banal. Control the uncontrollable.

But this time as she stared blankly at the words on the bright screen, she felt nothing but a great sense of detachment. Suddenly the bodiless people on the page seemed absurdly irrelevant. Their struggles trifling. For years she'd been wasting her time in that vaporous world, resolving nothing, discovering not a single thing that mattered.

With an angry rap on her mouse, she exited the novel and hooked up with her Internet provider. When the opening browser page came up, she punched in the Web address,
www.Deathwatch.com
and in a few seconds she was staring at the scratchy, color image of J. J. Fielding in his hospital room. He was still napping, his adjustable bed cranked up to nearly a sitting position. The room was bare except for the IV stand and a small wood bedside table. On the table was a stack of magazines. Hannah recognized the top one, a copy of
People
from a week ago, a cover photograph of the teenage British prince hand in hand with one of the Kennedy girls, a giddy smile on the young royal's lips. A paparazzi's wet dream.

She glared at J. J. Fielding, watching his tranquil, dreamy
face, feeling her blood warm and her airways tighten. Before she knew what she was doing, she reached up and pressed a finger to the screen, grinding it against Fielding's face, smothering him, then bearing down hard against the glass as if to crush the old man's skull.

“You cocksucker,” she said. “Hang on a little longer. I'm almost there.”

When she could stand it no longer, she drew her hand away and killed the screen. She sat there a moment more, taking long gulps of air, then she pushed away from the machine, got up, and walked back into her bedroom. The house was still quiet. The two males had not yet come to blows, no hand-to-hand, no furniture overturned, no glass breaking.

She settled on the edge of her bed and opened the copy of
First Light
, took out the folded typing paper where she'd written the decoded message. “Your name is the next key.”

She knew what it meant. She'd known it almost from the first instant she read it, though her knowledge had remained vaporous, hovering in the back chambers of her mind. She had solved this puzzle as she solved most things, in that wordless, intuitive zone where impossible knots were unsnarled and crucial decisions took shape.

Hannah got up and walked out to the living room, and found Frank Sheffield still on the screened-in porch, still at the picnic table with his empty plate before him.

“You've got parrots,” he said.

“What?”

“Parrots. I've seen about ten of them so far. They land in that big tree there, they squawk at the other birds, then they fly off. Ten minutes later they're back squawking again.”

“It's a rosewood, an Indian rosewood, that tree.”

“We don't get a lot of parrots out on Key Biscayne. What we get a lot of is tourists dressed like parrots, but not many of the birds themselves.”

She set the book down on the table and took a seat next to him on the bench. She drew out the sheet of typing paper and unfolded it and laid it before him.

“I figured it out. ‘Your name is the next key.'”

He examined the sheet a few moments longer, looked up at her.

“Can't we just stay with the parrots? Forget all this.”

“If you want to, Frank, you can forget it, run along home. But I can't.”

“I'm sorry. You're right. Don't pay any attention to me, I was just doing some wishful thinking. So tell me, what'd you figure out?”

“My name is a palindrome. H-a-n-n-a-h.”

Frank's eyes flicked away from hers, following the squawking flight of another parrot sailing low through the branches of the avocado trees.

“And a palindrome would be what? I know I've heard the word. Something from high school if I'm not mistaken. Is it chemistry? I was never very good with science.”

“No, it's from English class. A palindrome is a word or phrase that can be read the same way frontward or backward. Rats live on no evil star.”

Frank repeated it slowly to himself, looking out at the yard, the avocado trees.

“Okay, I get it Backward and forward. Like kayak.”

She smiled, gave his arm a playful thump. “Yeah, like kayak.”

“So that tells you what? A palindrome.”

“Well, think about it. When Randall read through the list of numbers, he naturally read from top to bottom. But what if you read the list backward, starting at the bottom, going to the top, what would you come up with?”

“Gibberish probably.”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, there's a simple enough way to find out.”

Hannah got a pen and a scratch pad from the kitchen, came back to the picnic table and Frank started tracking down the words, going from the bottom of the long list of numbers this time. Page number, line number, the words on that line. Hannah wrote them one by one, a sentence, then another. When they were finished she set down the pen.

“Somebody was pretty clever,” he said. “Says one thing
going down the list, says another going back up. That's amazing.”

Hannah read from the scratch paper.

“Next you travel to the west house with the red shingles. It is on stilts in the water looking out to sea. There you will find what will lead you to me. One step at a time. One after the next, one, two, three, four. But please you must hurry, please be quick, come now, there's not much time, hurry, hurry, hurry.”

“Stiltsville,” Frank said. “The westernmost house.”

“Seems that way, yeah.”

Stiltsville was the small community of simple wood homes built in the fifties and sixties. The houses were erected on pilings, planted in about ten feet of water on the edges of the flats of northern Biscayne Bay, a mile or two offshore of Cape Florida. Fishing shacks, weekend party retreats built by some of the early Miami movers and shakers. By now the stilt houses had passed on to the descendants of the original owners or to other lucky souls, but after numerous hurricanes and severe zoning restrictions forbidding any remodeling, only half a dozen of the houses remained standing, and those were under seige by the U.S. Park Service, which considered them eyesores in the serene and natural surroundings of Biscayne National Park. The owners of the houses and their supporters had been fighting to win historical designation as a way of preserving their little enclave, claiming those remaining structures were a crucial part of Miami's colorful legacy. But their position was weak. It was hard to argue that any building less than a century old was historically significant, even in Miami, a town that reinvented itself every five years. Hannah valued the past as much as anyone, but was finding it harder and harder to justify the whole idea of grandfathering in all the shady bargains and cushy arrangements of the past. Just because it was old and colorful didn't make it worthy. Didn't make it right.

“Doesn't this strike you as odd, Frank?”

“Which part?”

“All of it. The Bayshore house, a place in Stiltsville. This idiotic code. I mean, if Fielding wants me to come to him, why the hell make me jump through these hoops? He could've just laid it out. Such and such address at such and such a time. Meet me there, we'll talk.”

“Well, like you said, maybe he's worried about the Cali guys. All the hoops are meant to keep them at bay. He wants to be sure it's you and not them showing up at his door.”

Hannah shook her head, not buying it.

“If he's worried about them, why is he on the goddamn Internet, broadcasting like that for the whole world to see, saying my name out loud? If he wanted to get me to his bedside, a simple discreet message would've done it.”

“I think it's pretty obvious, Hannah. Fielding wants to make sure you're not being followed. He has these locations staked out; if no one's tailing you, he shows himself. Like the classic kidnapping payoff scenario. Same thing, running you from phone booth to phone booth around the maze he's invented. You don't know exactly where you're going next I mean, maybe the guy watched too many movies, this is the way he thinks it's done.”

“Still there's no need for all this code bullshit.”