They're Watching (2010) (43 page)

I yelled, "How am I supposed to fucking find something when I don't know where it is?"

"Then you're useless to us. Which means we can shoot her now." Over the phone: "Go ahead."

"Wait! Okay, okay. I have it." I cringed, listening, breathless. But no gunshot followed. "I . . . I . . ." I was falling into terror, grasping at anything, trying to formulate a story, any story that would buy us time. Did I dare to reveal the only cards I held--those incriminating documents I'd retrieved from their copy machine? Right off the bat, in a state of panic, with no guiding strategy? Where did that leave me to go? There had to be something else. It seemed I hadn't spoken in hours, though the delay was probably no more than a few seconds. "I put the disc in our safe-deposit box," I blurted. "I can't get it until the bank opens in the morning."

"You have until nine o'clock."

"Richards is dead," I said. "Valentine is dead." A cold silence as Verrone reassessed the chessboard. But I didn't wait for his next move; I pushed forward while he was off balance. "I'm wanted now. I need some time to get clear and figure out who to send in to grab the disc from the safe-deposit box in the morning." Still no response. I added, "A couple extra hours even."

Stop talking--you're negotiating with yourself.

He pulled the phone away again as he spoke to DeWitt or whoever else. "Take her out back, watch her closely over the fence. Paparazzi should be up the street chasing their tails, but keep an eye out just in case. Listen, sweetheart, if anyone's out there, we're all friends heading out for a drive. That's the better of the two ways to do this. If you struggle or scream, we'll shoot whoever we see and drag you anyway. . . . What? Yes, get it, it'll look more normal. Now, go."

Get what?

Look more normal?

What the hell did that mean?

Verrone had come back to me. "Fine. You have until noon tomorrow. And you'd better stay away from the cops. You're useless to us in custody. Call your wife's cell-phone number--her real cell phone, not that disposable crap you've been playing around with. We'll have it patched through to an untraceable line, so don't bother playing Maxwell Smart. If that phone doesn't ring by noon with good news, we will put a bullet in the base of her skull. And yes, this time it's real."

The phone cut out.

My brain vacillated between high-rev panic and complete blank-out. I remember passing another convoy of police cars. I remember telling myself to slow down, since I couldn't risk getting pulled over, but I also remember not obeying. I remember screeching over the curb, scattering the paparazzi, and leaving the Beemer sunk in our wet front lawn, car door open in the slanting rain, dinging.

And then I was inside the quiet of our entry, dripping. On the floor by the living-room window, a broken teacup. The prepaid cell phone. And a lavender mariposa.

I crouched over the fallen flower, my heart thundering. Instinct brought it to my nose--the smell of her. Across the room, Ariana and I gazed out from our fallen wedding photo. The symbolism was obtrusive, sure, but it cut me to ribbons nonetheless. The arty black-and-white, our stiff formality, and the fragmented glass imbued the image with a haunted, bygone feel. A past age, dated conventions, ghosts of happier days. Looking at her soft-focus face, I made a silent vow: I promise.

The thought of her, trapped between DeWitt and Verrone in the back of some van, nearly brought me to my knees. But I couldn't give in to fear, not now. How much time did I have before the cops found Valentine and Richards and came here?

I tried to collect my frayed thoughts. Was there anything in the house I had to take with me before I fled? When I'd first reached Ari, she'd been excited about something she'd figured out: You're not gonna believe what I taped together. Had they found whatever she'd come up with, or was it still here?

I ran into the family room. Aside from a few scraps, they'd gathered up and taken the mounds of shredded documents.

Taped together, she'd said. Taped.

I rushed into the kitchen. The mess on the floor remained from when the cops had tossed the house--trash dumped, drawers emptied. I couldn't spot any Scotch tape in the mound, and I doubted that Ari would've rooted through in search of it. Which left my office.

I bolted upstairs. Sure enough, on my desk was a plastic tape dispenser and beside it a round piece of paper composed of taped-together bits.

A disc?

I snatched it up. It was made of the white-silver squares she'd noted in the confetti jumble, those scraps that had stood out as firmer than the others. I bent the CD. Stiff but flexible. I'd seen discs like this before, hip-hop promotional singles slipped into Vanity Fair or the occasional DVD in Variety before awards season.

They'd destroyed this CD along with other documents before clearing out the Ridgeline office. The Frankenstein disc was beyond salvaging, but I didn't have to put it into a computer to realize that a CD like this, with a pliable, thinner design, had certain advantages for an operation like theirs. Easier to shred.

And easier to hide.

Rain tattooed the roof, a drumroll score to my quickening thoughts.

I closed my eyes, pictured opening that FedEx envelope addressed to Ridgeline. That blank CD, wrapped protectively in corrugated cardboard.

What if that disc really had been nothing more than what it appeared--a blank CD? If someone like me intercepted the package, I'd think it contained nothing more than that useless disc. But the intended recipient would see the blank CD as a symbol, a key showing what was really being shipped in the same package.

I ran down to the kitchen and dug through the trash. There it was, beneath a half loaf of moldy bread and a PowerBar box. The corrugated cardboard that I'd thought was mere packaging material. Flattening the bent sheet, I wormed my thumbnails into the edge and peeled it apart.

Sunk in a beveled well inside was a white-silver disc.

Chapter
53

A rush of excitement overtook me. Their CD had been here in the house the whole time, lying on the floor, buried in trash--the one place no one would think to look for it. I plucked it out, held it to the light, appraising it like a jeweler.

So it had been Ridgeline who'd broken in to search our house and steal back their FedEx package. Wanting to recover every piece of evidence, they'd taken the envelope, shipping label, and blank CD. But since the cardboard packaging had been missing, they'd assumed I'd figured out what was hidden inside and that I'd moved it to a safe place. So they'd lured me to Keith's, dropped a grenade in my lap, then posed as cops to get me to cough up where I'd secreted the disc. It never occurred to them that I'd taken the packaging for trash and dumped it on the heap on the kitchen floor.

The thrill of discovery was undercut by a thin, warbling siren in the distance. And then another.

I grabbed a wad of cash and the pickup keys from Ariana's purse, then spun in a full circle in the kitchen, sizing up everything, trying to think what else from the house I needed.

What had Ariana asked to take with her before they'd hauled her out? Verrone's odd words chewed at me: What? Yes, get it, it'll look more normal. Now, go.

The sirens, louder.

Ariana's keys in hand, the precious disc padded by the copied documents in my pocket, I ran out the rear door into the inviting darkness. Thank God she'd moved the pickup around back for me. Running across the lawn, rain spitting at my face, I could hear the squeal of tires from the front. Verrone had narrowed the situation to a simple equation: If the cops captured me, she would die.

And so now I fled out the back, along the same route they'd forced her to move. If anyone's out there, we're all friends heading out for a drive, Verrone had told her. He needed her to look as inconspicuous as possible. His reply to whatever she'd said came again: Yes, get it, it'll look more normal.

I halted. Turned my face up to the raindrops, felt the pitter-patter across my cheeks.

Raining, I thought. Jacket.

Play the hand you're dealt.

I spun and sprinted back into the house, my wet sneakers skidding through trash on the sleek kitchen floor. Blue and red lights flashed through the front curtains. Voices, boots stomping up the walk. I ran toward them, to the coat closet by the entry.

Someone shouted, and then a battering ram shuddered the front door. The bottom panels bent in, but the dead bolt held.

I threw open the closet door and peered in. Five hangers, an old bomber jacket, and a jumble of shoes. But no raincoat.

It'll look more normal. More inconspicuous for a woman heading out in a downpour. She'd manipulated them into letting her grab her raincoat. With their transmitter stitched into the lining. A transmitter they didn't know that we knew about.

A transmitter that maybe I could figure out how to track.

Shoes slippery on the floorboards, I careened back into the kitchen out of view just as a sonic boom announced the front door's disintegration. Gable's voice, commanding and husky with adrenaline, "Clear the upstairs. Go-go-go."

The walls shook. Pounding footsteps and shouted directives conveyed not just brisk efficiency but wrath. They were gunning for a cop killer, a murderer who'd shot holes through two of their own.

I flew across the back lawn, leaping up onto the fence and spotting a pair of squad cars slant-parked in front of the grille of Ari's pickup, blocking off the street. Patrolmen climbing out, talking--they'd missed the white flash of my face in the night. I dropped to the silent mulch by the greenhouse, my chest heaving.

One said, "You hear that?"

My knee had struck the slats, a rasp that reverberated like thunder in my memory.

Brush and branches half obscured me. In the windows of both floors, I could see SWAT officers wielding semiautos. Upstairs, a face shielded with tactical goggles tilted toward my office desk, rifled papers fluttering up into view.

Behind me and the fence, the click of a flashlight, and then a beam prowled the branches overhead, ticking back and forth as the cop approached. From the house a voice, heightened against the nighttime quiet, called out, "Sweep the backyard!" and I saw a balaclava-hooded head, moving in concert with the barrel of an MP5, float across the kitchen window toward the back door.

My bloodless fist, cinched around Ariana's useless keys, stood out against the dark ground. Pressed to my kidney, the pistol beckoned. I touched my hand to the grip, then pulled away as if it had burned my palm. What was I going to do? Draw down on a SWAT team?

Crunched against the slats at the base of the fence, my back picked up the vibration of footsteps closing in from beyond. Cobwebs draped across my wet brow. Across the yard the knob of our back door jostled. Directly above me a meaty hand hooked over the top of the fence.

Wedged in the angle where splintering wood met moist earth, I had nowhere left to go. My mouth cottoning, I looked around frantically.

Through a skein of dusty sumac, I spotted the section of sagging fence between our yard and the Millers'. A post had keeled over, leaving a break in the slats. I scrambled on all fours, gliding across the soft mulch.

The cop's boots knocked the fence, and I heard him grunting, trying to pull his weight up for a look. Across the lawn the SWAT officer kicked through the rear door, the knob taking a bite from the outside wall.

Behind me the cop landed on our side of the fence with a harrumph. I whistled through the gap onto the Millers' property an instant before our backyard lit up with intersecting flashlight beams. Rolling to the side, I found my feet in Martinique's flower bed. I scurried across the well-kept back lawn, crossed the stamped-concrete patio in a few strides, and swung into their kitchen through the rear door.

Martinique lowered the salad bowl she was scrubbing with ridiculous yellow kitchen gloves and regarded me, her mouth slightly agape. I'd frozen as well, my feet still on the outside step but my weight forward on the hand gripping the doorknob. Beyond her in the family room, his back to us, Don sat watching CNBC with the volume raised. The only movement was the financial pundit raving about the subprime crisis and the kitchen faucet going full blast, spewing a vibrating column of water. I barely dared to move my eyes to take in the room. To my right, their washer and dryer, the lids heaped with dirty clothes, the day's mail, and Don's laptop carrier. Five steps forward, the door to the garage.

Martinique turned her head, her mouth open to call to Don, but something stopped her.

I mouthed, Help me.

Car tires splashed water out front, and blue light came wavering across the sponge-painted ceiling. "The hell you think that jackass got up to now?" Don said, standing and dropping the remote onto the cushion. "I'll go upstairs, see what I can see from the den." He turned, draining his scotch. Not bothering to look up at Martinique and me, he set the glass on the sofa table, said, "This is dirty, too," and trudged to the stairs. Neither she nor I had breathed.

Finally her eyes swiveled to the window, the flashlight beams along the fence line now. For a moment I thought she was going to cry out for help.

But her voice came in a low purr. "I'm not getting involved." Her mouth grim, she set down the salad bowl, walked past me, wafting the scent of almond soap, and pulled open a cupboard above the washing machine. Jangling from a silver hook, the keys to Don's Range Rover. "I have too many dishes to clean to notice a goddamned thing."