Trust Your Eyes (42 page)

He went back upstairs, leaving Thomas and me with Nicole.

“Listen,” I said to her, “we’re—”

“Shut up,” she said.

Lewis was back in two minutes. He had a puzzled expression on his face as he descended the stairs.

“What’s the story upstairs?” he asked.

“The maps?” I said.

“Yeah. And the computer.”

“They’re mine,” Thomas said. “I hope you didn’t touch any of them.”

“I think we need to move this party upstairs,” Lewis said.

I nodded. I nudged my shoulder up against Thomas. “Come
on, man,” I said. “We’ll do what they say and then everything’ll be okay.” I didn’t know what else to do but lie.

Thomas went up the stairs after Lewis, and Nicole followed me. Thomas and I both took the steps cautiously since we couldn’t grab the two-by-four banister. I thought about spinning around and giving the woman a good kick in the face, and maybe if it had just been her, I’d have tried. But that would leave Lewis up in the kitchen, and if that bulge in his jacket was a gun, as I suspected, he’d make quick work of the two of us.

We crossed the first floor and went up the stairs to second-floor hallway.

Nicole had not seen what Lewis had already found. A hallway with maps stuck to the walls everywhere. She cast her eyes everywhere, across maps of South America, Australia, India, as well as detailed street maps including San Francisco, Cape Town, Denver. And that was just in a two-foot stretch.

“It gets better in here,” Lewis said, pushing open the door to Thomas’s room.

Nicole went in first, seemingly mesmerized by the walls, done up just like the hall. She said nothing as her eyes roamed over the maps. At one point, she reached out toward a map of Australia and, almost dreamily, touched her index finger to Sydney.

“And look at this,” Lewis said to her, pointing to the computer monitors. Each of the three screens offered a different vantage point of the same street. “Where is that?” he asked me.

“I have no idea.”

Thomas said, “Lisbon.”

“Lisbon,” Lewis repeated. “This is Whirl360, right?”

Thomas nodded.

“Whose computer is this?”

“Mine,” my brother said.

“Why are you looking at Lisbon?”

“I look at everything,” he said.

“What do you mean, everything?”

“He means everything,” I said. “He looks at cities all over the world.”

“Why?”

“It’s a hobby,” I said.

Thomas shot me a look, obviously wondering why I was lying. Then, to Lewis he said, “You already know, don’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“About the maps disappearing, and how I’m going to help the black-ops people.”

Nicole said, “What the fuck?”

“You’re the bad guys,” Thomas said, like we were all kids playing cops and robbers.

Lewis cracked a smile. “I guess we are. So, let me ask you boys this. Which one of you was looking up Orchard Street on here?” He looked at me. “I thought it was you, since you’re the one who came knocking on the door.”

I felt a chill. It was starting to become clear just how much trouble we were in.

“The neighbor,” I said.

Lewis shook his head. “Motion-activated camera. Trained on the apartment door.”

So now we knew. “Oh,” I said.

“Got a picture of what you were holding in your hand.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“So who was it?”

“I found it,” Thomas said, a hint of pride in his voice. “I saw the lady with the bag over her head. Ray went to check it out for me.”

Lewis looked at Nicole and said, “Well, I guess that answers your question.” When she raised a questioning eyebrow, he added, “About whether we’re taking one of them or both.”

FIFTY-SIX

“WE
should take that with us,” Nicole said, pointing to the computer tower that was connected to Thomas’s monitors.

“Good idea,” Lewis said.

“No,” Thomas protested. “No, no!”

“Thomas,” I said, nudging him again with my shoulder. “There’s bigger stuff at stake here than the computer.”

“But it’s mine!” he said. He was horrified, watching Lewis start to unplug the wires that ran out of the back of it. “Stop it!”

Calmly, Nicole said to me, “Are you going to be able to control him?”

“Yes. Just let me talk to him a second.”

Nicole allowed us to move a couple of feet away. I faced Thomas, leaned my head in close enough that I was nearly touching his forehead.

“Listen. We’re in a tough spot here. I can always get you another computer. A way more powerful one. But the only way I’m going to have a chance to do that is if we cooperate with them. You hearing me?”

“It’s mine,” he said.

“I need you to hold it together, Thomas. Can you do that for me?”

He raised his head, looked into my eyes. “You’d have to get me one that’s just as fast.”

“I’ll get you one that’s even faster,” I said, making a promise I knew I was never going to be able to keep.

Lewis pulled the disconnected tower to the edge of the desk and asked me, “So what were you doing there?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“My brother asked me to check it out. He was on that site, he saw something funny in the window, and he asked me to check it out when I was in the city.”

“Oh,” Lewis said. “So, it was just a huge coinkydink.”

I smiled nervously. “Pretty much.”

“You’re telling me your brother’s just goofing around online, sees this thing, and you decide to go all the way into the city to check it out.”

“Yes.”

Lewis looked at Nicole. “That’s all it is. Just a bit of innocent Web surfing.”

“Great. I guess we can go home now.”

“Yeah,” Lewis said, and came over, putting his face to within an inch of mine. His breath was hot on my cheek. “When we get where we’re going, you’re going to need to come up with a better story than that. You’ll have lots of time to think of something on the way.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Nicole said, “Tape.”

Lewis reached into the backpack and brought out a roll of gray duct tape. He tossed it to Nicole. “Be my guest.”

“I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “It’s just like I said. We don’t know anything.”

Nicole tore off a six-inch strip and slapped it over my mouth.

“Don’t do that to me,” Thomas said as Nicole started tearing off another strip. “Don’t do that to me!”

He was in midscream as she applied the tape. His mouth was half open, and one side of the tape was caught on his lower teeth, allowing Thomas to keep moving his jaw.

“Shit,” she said, and tore off another strip to seal the bottom half of his mouth. “Okay, we’re good.”

Lewis zipped up the backpack, slipped the strap over one shoulder, then picked up the computer tower with two hands.

Just then, a very faint ringing.

“What’s that?” Nicole said. “That your cell?”

“No,” Lewis said. He was looking around the room and his eyes landed on the old landline phone on Thomas’s desk, still there from the days when he used dial-up for the Internet and had his own number.

It was flashing red with an incoming call. Thomas always kept the ring volume very low, and he hardly got any calls, anyway. I couldn’t think of anyone who might be calling him. It could only be one of two things. A wrong number, or a telemarketer.

But Nicole and Lewis wouldn’t know that.

“Answer it or not answer it?” Lewis asked Nicole.

She was thinking, watching the light flash. “If someone’s expecting him to be here, and he isn’t…”

Thomas’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head, looking at that flashing red light.

Lewis snatched up the receiver. The first thing he did was cough, then sniff. When he spoke, he adopted the tone of someone sick with a cold.

“Hello?”

After a short pause, he said, “It’s Thomas.” Another sniff. “I’m coming down with something. Who’s this?”

Half a beat went by. Then Lewis said, “Bill who?”

His eyebrows popped up momentarily, and then he smiled. “Yeah, well, I’d love to chat, Bill, but it’s my bowling night with Dubya.”

He hung up the phone. Nicole was looking at him, waiting for an explanation.

“Crank call,” he said. “Some asshole pretending to be Bill Clinton.”

I glanced at Thomas. I’m sure I looked more surprised than he did, because he didn’t look surprised at all. Annoyed, maybe, that he hadn’t been able to speak to the former president.

FIFTY-SEVEN

IF
it hadn’t been for the tape, I probably would have said something along the lines of
holy shit
.

But neither Nicole nor Lewis had given the call another thought. They had other things on their minds. Like hitting the road, with Thomas and me as baggage.

Lewis headed out of the room first, the computer tower in his arms. Nicole motioned with her ice pick for us to follow. As we reached the top of the stairs I caught a glimpse of the front door swinging shut, Lewis already outside. My hands still bound behind me, I wondered whether there was anything I could do now that Nicole was, briefly, without her partner.

But what could I hope to accomplish? She had a weapon, and I had no free hand. I thought about something as simple as running. Bolting past Thomas, heading out the back door and into the night. Down the hill, through the creek, and once I was into the fields beyond, keeping low and out of sight until I got to some nearby house, where I could call the police.

It would mean leaving Thomas on his own, but abandoning him—briefly—might be my best chance of saving him.

These thoughts were running through my head—when it was Thomas who bolted.

He jumped down the last couple of steps. I expected him to do what I’d been thinking, and run to the back of the house, but he managed to wedge his foot into the front door before it closed all the way and kicked it open so he could run out onto the porch.

It wasn’t an escape attempt. Thomas was going after his computer tower.

“Lewis!” Nicole shouted from two steps above me. Before I could do anything, she reached down and grabbed my shirt collar. “Don’t even think it,” she said, and I felt the tip of the ice pick touch the soft skin just under my right ear.

Outside, I heard something crash, then some scuffling in the gravel.

We went down the rest of the stairs at a steady pace. By the time we got outside, Thomas was on his back, looking up at Lewis, his body arched awkwardly with his hands cuffed behind him. A couple of feet away, the computer tower was on its side by the back of a white, mostly windowless van.

Lewis dragged Thomas to his feet. Then he and Nicole corralled us at the rear doors of the van, which were still closed.

Nicole held her hand out for Lewis’s backpack. He tossed it over and she produced the tape again, looping it around my knees and ankles. She did the same with Thomas. “You’re going to have to hop in,” she said, opening the two doors at the rear of the van. It was wide open for cargo, with two seats up front. I saw what looked like a small pile of folded moving blankets.

From his backpack, Lewis took out what looked like winter ski masks, with holes for the eyes, mouth, and nose.

He pulled the ski mask down over my head, with the holes at the back. I heard Thomas grunting his objections as his ski mask
went on. Someone took me by the shoulders—Nicole, I thought, since the hands felt smaller than a man’s—and led me into a quarter turn. “Two hops and you’re at the bumper,” she said. “Sit down and shoogle yourself in.”

It took three, and I nearly fell over on the third. I felt the bumper at my knee, turned around, sat on the edge, and leaned over carefully until my upper arm touched the floor. Then I slowly shifted my body forward into the vehicle.

“Okay, dumb-ass,” Lewis said to Thomas. “Shuffle on over here.” I felt the van shift as Thomas fell into it. “Move up.”

Then Nicole’s voice. “We’ll be on the road for a few hours. Not a sound out of you. We’ll be making stops. Tolls, gas. Somebody might come up to the window, say something. Don’t be stupid and make any noise. That will get you killed. It’ll also get whoever hears you killed.”

“We already need gas,” Lewis said. “Went through a tank getting here from Burlington.”

I heard some ruffling next to me. The moving blankets. Someone was unfolding them, shaking them out. They were draped over us, I supposed, in case anyone looked inside. I didn’t think it could get any darker, at night, inside the ski mask, but I was wrong. The world went pitch-black, and the sounds around me became more muffled.

The rear doors slammed shut; then the driver’s door opened and closed, followed by the passenger’s. I didn’t know which one of them was driving, not that it mattered. The key was turned and the van rumbled to life. Tires crunching on gravel as we rolled on down the driveway, away from my father’s house, and then turning onto the road.

We’re never coming back here,
I thought.

I
had a lot of time to think, in my lightless, smothering isolation.

I’d thought, when we first headed out, I’d be able to get some
sense of where we were going by the turns the van made. Hadn’t I seen that in a movie somewhere, or a
Batman
cartoon, or a
Sherlock Holmes
episode? The hero concentrates on the vehicle’s movements, estimates the speed by the sound of the tires, pictures the landmarks they’re passing, and by the time they come to a stop, he knows exactly where they are.

After three turns I had no idea where we were.

Just after we left the house, we made a stop for gas. I guessed we were at the Exxon, where I’d filled up a couple of times since coming back to Promise Falls. But once we were on the road again, I soon lost my bearings. It wasn’t long before I was certain we were on an interstate. We were doing probably sixty or seventy miles an hour, and we weren’t stopping or slowing down at all. Occasionally, I could hear the roar of eighteen-wheelers passing us, which suggested interstate to me. Every five or six seconds there was a small
thunk
as the tires went over a pavement seam. The tires would hum, then
thunk
; hum, then
thunk
. If I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat, I might not have noticed the repetition, but lying on the cold metal floor of the van, there wasn’t much else to listen to. Every noise and bump was amplified.