Wanted! (15 page)

He drove a black Porsche. I was awestruck by that Porsche. A car to die for, I thought.

But the police told me that it was not the car that killed Rob, and I had to believe that. I said to the police: A person can own two cars. He can rent a car, borrow a car, steal a car. It was Dick Arren, I know it was!

Cool off, son, said the police.

After school, after the funeral, I drove to the offices where Dick Arren’s Porsche was parked, and when he left work, I followed him, he in his Porsche and me in my Triumph. He’d stop at a red light and I’d pull up next to him, driving right up on the sidewalk if I had to, and I’d yell, “I know what you did, and I’m going to prove it!”

Arren grinned, and took off way faster than I could, and we were in a weird sick drag race that I could only lose.

He should have been afraid of me. Even at sixteen, I was bigger than Dick Arren. I was bigger than most people. But he was not afraid. A man who has killed another man knows he can do something extraordinary: He can take a life.

But he was not afraid of me. He was enjoying himself. He let me catch him. This time I pulled up next to Arren and he waved a wooden pencil—a yellow Ticonderoga pencil—out of his window and twirled it baton-style in his fingers. Then, smiling—a wide delighted ultrahappy smile; the smile, indeed, of a man who was not normal—he snapped the pencil in half. The pieces dropped onto the pavement between us. He giggled. “That’s your brother, kid,” he said. “Garbage in the road.” He gunned the Porsche and left me behind.

I wanted to grab Dick Arren by the hair and jerk his head back, breaking his neck. The sound of his spine cracking would be music to my ears.

But I could not chase him once he decided to use that Porsche the way it was designed to be driven, and I could not find him again, not at home, not at his office, not anywhere, so I went to the police.

But of course Dick Arren denied to the police and my parents that he had said any such thing. He told my parents sympathetically that he would be happy to help pay for psychiatric help for me. My parents liked him. They thought he was a fine fellow. They didn’t think much of me, harassing and threatening an innocent man.

And soon after this, there was nobody to follow. The company was gone. The office was empty. The house was empty. The garage was empty. The phone was disconnected.

Arren had bailed out.

I went to the police again, and they said, “He can run a computer business from anywhere. Why should he stay here and put up with you?”

My parents didn’t live long after that. My dad had a heart attack when I was twenty and didn’t recover. Mom was lonely, with me at college and no husband at home. I’ve always thought she mentally lay down in the road, like the son she missed so badly, and let her physical problems run over her.

I was an orphan at twenty-two, and there was no big brother to be Twins with. I found a job with a computer company myself and began to cast my computer net to find Dick Arren. I’d make him lie down in the road.

I embarked on a newspaper search, which covered many cities and many years. I was going to find Dick Arren.

And then something happened to change my life utterly and forever. I met a beautiful wonderful girl named Chrissie.

Chrissie made me a better person. Together we created a perfect daughter. That baby was the love of my life. I would come home from work laughing, just thinking how my baby Alice would throw herself on top of me, shouting, “Daddy!” I never knew what a great word that was—Daddy!—until I heard it from my own child.

But my need for revenge never lessened. It was deep within me, sometimes all over and through me.

No wonder Dad liked a car called Avenger.

No wonder Dad played Escape and Chase. He’d been chasing for twenty-three years.

Alice did not know which was more awful: the idea of a killer whose viciousness had touched her own family, or the idea of Dad chasing him for so many years. Dad had not taken all those new jobs because of the money or the excitement of the work—he’d been trying to get closer to Dick Arren. The tragedy of Rob’s death had become an obsession.

Oh, Dad, why didn’t you tell us! Did you think I was too little? For ten or twelve years, you were right. But I’m fifteen now, Dad. You could have included me.

“I would have understood, Daddy,” Alice whispered, and then she thought:
but Mom wouldn’t have.
She’d never have let Dad dedicate his life to revenge. Living is better. Laughing and loving is better.

So. Was Dick Arren out there, using another name? Still in computers? Still stealing formulas?

Who did Alice know, age fifty? Elegant and hard and blue-eyed and a computer expert? A man in his twenties who drove a Porsche would drive something spectacular in his fifties, too.

Mr. Scote and Mr. Austin were middle-aged and drove great cars. Mr. Scote had a silver Jag; Mr. Austin, a Mercedes. They were certainly into computers.

And yet—a Lumina minivan was in this. A Lumina was an unpopular, unsuccessful, low-end model. Did a former Porsche owner pick out a Lumina?

Had Dad, like Rob, been murdered by his employer? Was Mr. Scote or Mr. Austin really Dick Arren? But why on earth would Dad voluntarily go to work for Dick Arren? Surely her father could not have stayed sane, showing up for work every day with the man he believed had snapped Rob in two.

And if Dad had finally located Dick Arren, and that was what this disk was about, why hadn’t Dad been ready when the bad guys came? Dad was big and strong and full of fight. He’d planned for years. He knew the enemy was dangerous.
Why hadn’t he been ready?

“Oh, Daddy!” she cried, and she had to get away from the gray and careless screen. She tottered in the dark to the small living room and fell to her knees and curled over the coffee table, clinging to its sides, wanting things to be different.

The phone rang.

The sound of the bell burst through her head and she convulsed on the carpet, almost yanking the table over. Could she live through the sound of her father’s cheerful voice explaining that neither he nor Alice could come to the phone right now?

But the answering machine did not pick up.

It had been the fax.

Alice listened to the harsh cry of the machine and the sound of a single page inching out.

She had to crawl back to the desk and drag herself up by the knobs on the drawers and reach for the page. She stumbled into the bathroom to turn on the light and read the fax.

It was from James.

Marc—What are you waiting for? I’ve tried E-mail, I’ve tried phone, I’m down to fax. Now send the stuff so I can download. Condense to one page. Nobody’s going to read more than that.

Too bad the only photograph of Dick Arren is twenty-five years old. We should hire somebody to do a computer aging process, guess at what he’d look like now. As soon as you send me the WANTED poster, we’ll get it out on the Internet.

Dad had planned to put the story of Rob’s death on the Internet. He was through asking around locally. He was going to ask globally.

Dad must have been ready to send his WANTED poster when the killer walked in on him.

The events of that terrible day were becoming clear now.

Dad realized he was in trouble, but not how much trouble. He’d called Alice to get the disks, and he didn’t want anybody to know where she was going with them.

Then he ran out of time.

He had not found the killer. The killer had found him. Right up to the end, they had been drag racing, and the killer’s car was still faster.

Alice could take no more.

She made it to the couch. She felt her headache fall off, sliding down into sleep, and she slid with it.

A
LICE SNAPPED AWAKE.

Somebody was cranking a stalled engine.

Daylight made pale rims around the pleated blinds in the living room windows.

Two other cars started up, decently and quietly. People were leaving for work.

Alice had planned to get out of Dad’s condo when it was still dark; when no alarm clock had gone off, no automatic coffeemaker had begun to drip in a dark kitchen, no neighbors were turning the keys in their locks, glancing around and seeing Alice. Now she would have to leave in daylight.

She had had plans for the day: clear, careful, intelligent plans. But she could not bring them to mind. Okay, she said to herself. Okay.

She was like a kindergarten teacher, trying to coax all her little thoughts to get in line.

Last night I realized that Dad and his friend James believe there is a killer out there. A killer who has been around twenty-five years. If Dad was murdered by this person, he’s still out there, ready to do it again. A killer whose voice I heard:
I killed him good.
As Rob had said, not normal.

Last night Alice had stripped off the clothing stolen from Amanda but had not changed out of her jeans and T-shirt from the mall. It was strange to sleep in her clothes, even stranger to be filthy and not care. She looked like what she was: a girl on the run. Alice yanked her hair into a ponytail to help herself think.

What would the former Dick Arren be doing right now? He had killed another person, and surely it was time to abandon this place and this identity. No doubt he was packing. Throwing files and papers into boxes, cramming suitcases full, calling the airlines. Perhaps he already had a new identity and a place to go. Perhaps, while she slept, he had already vanished. If Alice did not take action today, he’d be gone, and history would repeat itself.

You will not get away with murder this time, she thought. Not Rob’s and not Dad’s. You will not laugh from the safety of another name and another city. I will move too fast for you.

Last night she’d half thought that Dick Arren must now be Mr. Scote or Mr. Austin. This morning that conclusion seemed flimsy. After all, Dick Arren would recognize Dad’s name. He would not hire Marc Robie, because he’d remember Marc Robie as vividly as Marc Robie remembered him. She was basing her conclusion solely on the fact that Mr. Scote and Mr. Austin were middle-aged and drove great cars.

Her stomach hurt from emptiness and yet the thought of food was nauseating. She did not even want to go near the refrigerator for orange juice. It was too normal. People with ordinary lives, calm lives, lives that worked out—those people had a glass of orange juice in the morning.

Alice could only stand in the half light and have half thoughts.

The file called TWIN was not the sort of thing that would become a wanted poster for the Internet. It was long, and rambling, and full of personal detail that nobody but Dad, or Alice, would care about. Perhaps, she thought, it was just for him. He was sorting out the worst subject of his life. Getting ready to choose the dozen sentences he’d actually use on the wanted poster. Or perhaps there’s another file, accessible by a password I don’t know. Perhaps somewhere, a twenty-five-year-old photograph of Dick Arren.

It was way beyond Alice’s capacity to sort this out.

Only the authorities had the time and expertise to follow Dad’s years of research and locate the real Dick Arren.

The awful time had come in which she was going to have to turn herself in. There would be a period in which nobody believed her. She would have to accept that. Everybody, including her mother, had accepted the E-mail confession.

Alice would have to face people who were horrified by her, who would treat her as a vicious animal, and she would have to stay calm and convince them that yes, there was a vicious animal out there, and it was a man formerly known as Dick Arren.

She could do this with her mother at her side.

Of course…
Mom might not be at her side.

She said she was, Alice told herself. Mom said she loved me no matter what I did. I have to count on that. I can go home.

She imagined Mom forcing herself to touch her daughter, flinching because they were related, sick because she was picturing Alice hitting Dad.

I have to be brave enough to get through that, Alice told herself. I have to believe Mom will believe me later.

And what if I’m wrong? What if nobody does believe me ever? What if nobody can find Dick Arren, if nobody tries to look—because nobody thinks there’s a reason to?

Alice had no choice. The situation was too large and terrible for her to go on alone.

She had no friends to call upon. Her classmates had gone after her as if she were a fish in tournament. They were wading around in their hip boots, sweeping their nets, eager to catch Alice.

She considered calling the police from here. But what if they came and did not let her see her mother? What if it was like some Monopoly game card—Go straight to Jail? No. She had to go home, and once she was with Mom, whatever happened would happen.

Wait.

There was one person who would believe her. James.

Alice stumbled around the condo, trying to find the fax. She was so muddled that she could hardly tell what was paper, what was book, what was plastic. There it was. Lying on Dad’s desk. Alice snatched it up, and sure enough, the heading on the fax gave James’s last name.

Alice turned on the computer, grateful that she used it so much that the movements were automatic for her; making her way through each command did not require thought. She went into Dad’s address book. There was the E-mail address for James. Alice opened the document and sent him the entire TWIN file.

She found herself playing with the computer, wanting to hang out and search for the stored photo and the wanted poster. She went back to Dad’s address book and read through names. Who else should I send TWIN to?

I’m killing time, she thought. I’m afraid to leave the condo. I’m so scared of what’s going to happen next.

She made herself leave the computer, but it didn’t get her out the door. She wandered around. She would drive the Blazer, which had extra power outlets. With phone and laptop, Alice would have a command center. From her bedroom, Alice got her laptop. In the kitchen, she got the spare keys to Dad’s Blazer.