They're Watching (2010) (39 page)

Whatever that disc held, it couldn't be worth the price I'd paid for taking it.

My head still felt thick from whatever drugs had been shot into me. I realized I was still standing there, interrupting the couple's dinner. I searched for words, for more grounding: "What . . . what day is it?"

The man's wife rested a hand nervously on his forearm, but he offered me a consoling grin. "Thursday."

"Good," I muttered, backing up, nearly colliding with a busboy. "That's what it's supposed to be."

I ducked from their stares into the bathroom, dumped the throwaway cell phone into the trash, and cleaned up as best I could. Flashing on Ari's gray face, I came apart a little and had to clamp down. I had to hold it together long enough to get out of there.

Walking out, I grabbed a twenty someone had left on a table as a tip. The coatrack by the door had a black windbreaker, which I lifted and pulled on as I approached the valet stand, tucking the bag of shredded paper under my arm. The hood, protection against the wet breeze, obscured my fucked-up face.

The valet hopped up off his director's chair. I gestured at a BMW four spots over and said, "That's me right there." I pointed the twenty at him. "I can get it myself."

He tossed me the keys.

Chapter
48

I screeched up behind our back fence, leaving the Beemer a few feet off the curb. But I didn't hear the tires, didn't feel the fence biting me in the stomach, didn't smell the mulch beneath our sumacs. Suspended in grief, I'd come unmoored from my senses. There were a thousand impressions of her and nothing else.

It's bizarre what sticks in your brain. Ariana sitting on the kitchen floor, digging in a bottom cabinet, a carton of eggs waiting on the counter. Home from a night run, she wore a sports bra and had a sheen of dried sweat across her forehead, four pots pulled into her lap and twice as many spread on the floor around her. Her heel poked through a hole in her sock. She looked up, biting her lip, playing embarrassed, as if I'd caught her at something. Behind her hair band, a thick lock had bunched unevenly, and the light halved her face in shadow. She said, "What?" but I just shook my head and took in the sight of her. They talk about it like it's all jukebox slow dances and sweaty lovemaking and princess-cut diamonds. But sometimes it's just your wife sitting frog style on the kitchen floor after a workout, looking for an omelet pan.

Dazed, I floated through the side gate, keys in hand, heading for the front of our house. The dark sedan creeping into view ahead brought me crashing back into my body. The bag of crosscut documents slapped the concrete at my feet. It couldn't be the real cops yet--it seemed unlikely that they'd have found out about Ariana's body already. It had to be DeWitt and Verrone, coming to take their interrogation to another level.

The driver eased into the darkness beyond our mailbox and killed the engine. The first thing to hit was fear, compounded by everything that had come before. But then, cutting through my paralysis, came something else. Rage.

I headed for the car, my hand diving beneath my shirt, seizing the handle of the revolver. Just as I was about to pull and aim, the door cracked, the interior light illuminating Detective Gable. I jerked to a halt.

"You have one job right now," he said, climbing out. "And that is to stay reachable. Where the hell have you been all--"

We were close enough now that he caught sight of my face. Should I run? But my will had evaporated. Deflated, I wobbled a bit on my feet. My shirt was still bunched up, and I tugged the hem weakly, pulling it smooth over the gun.

"Jesus, what happened to you?"

"Did you break in and take a disc from my office? Because you have no idea what you did."

"Yeah, I broke in without a warrant and stole shit just to jeopardize my top case." He had the game face on, but my aggression had caught him off guard.

"You here to arrest me?"

He stiffened against the anger in my voice. "People involved with you keep dying."

"Arrest me if you're going to, but don't you fuck with me," I said. "Not right now. Not over this. There are limits. Basic human decency."

"I saw the body. Doesn't look like you showed her any decency." He stepped forward, and I shoved him, hard, against the sedan. His shoulder blades clapped loudly against the door, and when he ricocheted back to his feet, his hand had come up with his pistol. He pointed it at the street between us. He was as calm as I'd ever seen him. "Watch yourself."

"Say it. Just you fucking say it. Say I killed my wife."

"Your wife?" He looked astonished. "I'm here because Deborah Vance turned up dead."

Deborah Vance? The name was from a different lifetime. And yet it was only twelve hours ago I'd asked Joe Vente to tip the cops to check her apartment.

I became aware of the half dozen photographers who had crept like mice from the shadows. In light of the drawn gun, they kept their distance, but flashes strobed the uncertain standoff.

"You pointed Detectives Richards and Valentine to that woman," Gable said. "She played the Hungarian grandmother, was it? To get the mythical duffel bag of cash you found in the trunk of the mythical Honda? I want the real story." His breath misted. "And I'll need your alibi."

"I don't have a fucking alibi."

"I haven't told you when she was killed." He looked troubled, unsure of himself.

"You think I care about Keith Conner or Deborah Vance? My wife is dead. And you're running around like this other shit matters. That's all you guys do. You don't save anyone. You're historians--you come in after the fact and write reports and point your fucking fingers."

I took a step to the side, the paparazzi behind me now. Gable's gun hadn't moved. The tip remained perfectly still. "They killed my wife," I said. "They took her and they killed her." Saying it out loud gave it more force. I fought my voice steady. "They tried to hold me in a . . . a fake jail--"

"A fake jail?"

I clutched for a response. The false interrogation room was so audacious and mind-boggling that the mention of it sounded outlandish spilling from my mouth.

Gable couldn't decide between amused and irate. "And let me guess. If we go to find it, the space'll be cleared out."

A bar, a mirror, and a poster. DeWitt and Verrone were probably removing even those at this very moment, leaving the Ridgeline office as blank as a wiped chalkboard. "Yeah," I said. "That's exactly what'll happen. And then you'll find Ariana's body in a gully in Fryman Canyon, with evidence showing I killed her. And you idiots won't believe me because I don't have a single concrete thing to prove that her killers exist, except for this."

Fisting my shirt, I tugged it up, revealing the revolver stuffed in my waistband. But Gable wasn't looking at me. He was looking at our garage door.

It was wobbling open.

My hands fell to my sides, my shirt dropping just before he glanced back at me.

Footsteps sounded on the concrete floor of our garage. Gable's gun finally moved, inching over toward the house.

Ariana stepped into view.

At first I didn't believe. And then I was drifting toward her in a daze, stumbling over the curb, finally meeting her in the garage next to her truck. I clutched her shoulders, felt her flesh and bone in my grip.

"You were dead," I said.

"Your face--"

"You were gone, and they had you, and you were dead."

"No," she said. "You were gone." She was tilting my head this way and that, appraising the damage. "My meeting was delayed, and I stopped after to pick up more prepaid cell phones, since you'd taken the last one. There was no one here when I got home."

"So this whole time, you . . . you . . . ?" Was I sobbing or laughing wildly?

Gable stood in our driveway, backlit by the sparkling flashes, though the photographers themselves blended into the dark, a murmuring chorus. The firm line of his shoulders had taken on a droop, and in the grainy darkness he looked like a figure torn from a noir movie.

He called out, "We should just have you committed and save us all a lot of aggravation."

I was gripping Ariana--her hips, her arms--testing the realness of her. She had a hand against my unbruised cheek and a look of bewildered concern. "What happened to you? Who did this?"

Gable, chafing at being ignored: "You think you can just fuck with us this way? Play games with the investigation? I saw what you did to that woman, the bullet through her mouth. And when I nail your ass to my trophy wall, we'll see how well this insanity routine holds up." He turned toward his car, then spun on his heel, incensed. "Next time I come back, I'm not just gonna ask questions."

Ari's eyes didn't leave mine. She reached over to the wall, hit the glowing button, and the garage door tilted down. Detective Gable stood his ground as the lowering door cut off his glare, his chest, and finally his spotless loafers.

The doors were locked and bolted, the burglar alarm set. The day's bouts of street theater had left the paparazzi reinvigorated, sipping coffee from Thermoses, patrolling the block, and comparing lenses beyond the curb. A news helicopter had returned to circle our roof, waiting for another meltdown. The bag of shredded documents sat on the kitchen counter, beside the hard drive I'd tugged from Ridgeline's copier. The revolver rested at arm's length on the coffee table. Gable and RHD were using all resources to shore up the case against me; they didn't even have to waste manpower keeping surveillance on me, since the press was doing the job for them. The men from Ridgeline--DeWitt and Verrone and whoever else--were out there somewhere in the night, plotting. And Ari and I were sitting on the couch, facing each other, our bent legs intertwined.

I ran my fingertips across her mouth, her neck, each living part of her. I held my knuckles before her trembling lips and felt the rush of her breath. I marveled at her coloring, pressed on her skin and watched pink fill in the white, as if this evidence of her moving blood could wipe from my memory the image of her face against the weeds, the shade of her flesh Photoshopped to an unliving gray.

Leaning forward, she kissed me, tentatively. A nervous whisper--"Still remember how to have sex?" Her mouth was at my ear, her hair brushing my bruised cheek.

"I think so," I said. "You?"

She pulled away, rolling her lips as if still assessing the feel of my mouth. "I don't know."

She rose and walked up the stairs. A moment later I picked up the revolver and followed.

We met in a collection of present-tense flashes, a bedroom mosaic. The sheets, shoved back under her impatient heel. The feather-soft grasp of her hand. Her mouth, wet and exploratory against my collarbone. I insisted on seeing every part of her--the mole at the curve of her hip, the arch of her foot, the V of fine blond hair on her nape beneath the weight of her curls.

After, or in between, we lay exhausted, interwoven, tracing drops of sweat across each other's skin. We hadn't been naked in front of each other in months, and it was all the excitement of the new with the comfort of the familiar. The tendon at the back of her knee was firm and fragile against my lips. The revolver remained beside the jammer on the nightstand, poking into view, never forgotten, but our bedroom had become a sanctuary of sorts, keeping the night and the terrors it held at bay. A trail of clothes led from door to bed. The UCLA hoodie she'd bought at the Student Union and cut thumb-holes in the sleeves for the cold early mornings I'd walk her back to her dorm. The Morro Bay T-shirt we'd gotten when we'd gone up to feed the squirrels and stayed in a flea-bitten place we'd renamed The Horsefly Inn. Pulled inside out, her varnish-stained jeans. And dropped into the nest of a fallen pillow on the floor, her wedding set. If ever a string of objects charted a relationship.

My ear was flat against the back of her thigh, and I could hear the hum of her voice through her flesh. "I missed you," she said.

I soaked in the warmth of her skin. I said, "I feel like I found you again."

Chapter
49

Burned adrenaline kept me up almost to daylight, before my vigilance finally gave out beneath the weight of so many sleepless nights. I slumbered--dreamless, solid, untroubled--as I hadn't since my teenage years. When I awakened, the revolver was missing from the nightstand, but I heard Ariana's familiar footsteps moving around in the kitchen. By the time I finally hauled myself out of bed, popped four Advil, and slumped downstairs, it was nearly two o'clock.

The gun and jammer resting beside her, she sat cross-legged on the family-room carpet, facing away, scrutinizing a mound of shredded paper she'd dumped from the bag I'd stolen from Ridgeline. No scrap was bigger than a thumbnail. As I neared, I saw that she'd made a few preliminary piles, organized by color. Her biggest collection, with maybe ten pieces, was dwarfed by the unsorted heap, but she seemed characteristically undaunted.

"We're pretty much fucked on white," she said as I walked up behind her. "There seems to be slightly less gray. Sparse pink, but I think it's a take-out menu. And a few of these harder ones. Weird." She held a white-silver square over her head, and I took it, bent it between thumb and forefinger. It bowed, regained its shape.

"Magazine cover?" I ventured.

"No writing on the few I've found." She leaned back into my legs and looked up at me. A mariposa tucked behind her ear.