Or She Dies Read online

  My eyes wandered around the squad room, taking in the black boots of various makes attached to various officers. ‘What size shoe is Valentine?’

  Her lips pursed with irritation. ‘Not eleven and a half. And he was on shift with me when that footage of you was taken. Surely you can do better than that, Inspector Clouseau.’

  ‘Well, there haven’t been any cops to our house that we know of. I think ever.’

  ‘Like I said, it could be a cop in a cop boot, or it could be a wackjob in a cop boot.’ She stood, pulled on her jacket, bringing the conversation to a close. ‘If you want to be doing something useful, you should be thinking about who you’ve pissed off lately. Or who your lovely wife has.’

  ‘I have been,’ I said. ‘Where else am I supposed to look?’

  ‘There are rocks everywhere,’ she said. ‘We just usually don’t kick ’em over.’

  Chapter 18

  Heading back up Roscomare, I called Ariana at the showroom. ‘I’m going home early.’

  ‘You’re not going to the movies?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not going to the movies.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll finish up here, too.’

  There was a courtship excitement to our exchange, unspoken but understood, like we were smitten teenagers planning a second date. It hit me how rarely these past six weeks I’d come home before she was in bed for the night. And now I was nervous but eager, unsure what the evening with her would hold.

  Simmering unease eroded my optimism. Ariana’s meeting — the one I hadn’t picked up the suit for — was supposed to be in the afternoon. So why had she been at the showroom when I’d called? For a half block, I actually debated calling back and checking with her assistant. As Ariana had pointed out, it doesn’t take much more than a white handkerchief and a few well-placed nudges. My paranoia, I realized, was bleeding outward, making me question — however stupidly — everything going on around me.

  I passed the shopping strip, and the reception bars blinked off the cell-phone screen, offended by the altitude. As I slowed for the driveway, a sense of foreboding seized me, and I couldn’t help but crane to see if a new surprise was waiting. The front yard looked normal, and the doorstep was empty. But a ripple at the curtain snagged my focus. I caught a flash of a white hand before it withdrew. Too white.

  A latex glove.

  It was so odd, so out of place, that at first it stunned me into a kind of mental blankness. Then, through my rising alarm, I registered the figure behind the curtain, shadow-smudged like a fish in murky waters.

  My body had gone rigid. But I didn’t slow the car further; I rolled right past my driveway and the house next door before pulling over to the curb. I debated hooking back to the grocery-store pay phone to call 911, knowing that the intruder would likely be long gone by the time the cops arrived. Gripping the door handle, staring at my fist-battered dashboard, I fought with myself for several prolonged seconds, but my fury — and burning curiosity — won out.

  I climbed out and jogged back. Cutting up the driveway, I slid along the fence, reaching the door to the garage. I paused for a silent twenty-second freak-out, my fists shoved against my head, and then I regained what composure I could muster, slipped my key into the door, and pushed it tentatively open. The garage’s walls and ceiling seemed to amplify my rapid breathing. My eyes darted around, settling on the golf bag languishing beneath a veil of cobwebs, where it had lived since my then-agent bought it for me to celebrate the screenplay sale. My hand fussed across dusty club heads, upgrading from wedge to iron to driver.

  The door leading into the dining nook had a creak. I knew this. I’d been meaning to WD-40 the hinges for months. I was in the garage; why not do it now? I found the blue-and-yellow can, sprayed the hinges until they dripped. Under the guidance of my white-knuckle grip, the door swung in, slowly, without complaint. I realized, too late, that it could have sounded the alarm, but the intruder had disarmed the system.

  A bead of sweat held to the line of my jaw, tickling. I slipped inside, easing the door shut behind me. Setting down my feet as silently as I could, I led with the club, holding it upright, a yuppie samurai sword. I inched around the cabinets, my view of the kitchen opening up.

  Across the room the back door finished a slow opening arc, stopping halfway.

  I bounded over to the doorway. At the far edge of the lawn, a large man in a ski mask and black zip-up jacket stood perfectly still, facing the house, arms at his sides.

  Waiting on me.

  I froze, my heart lurching, my throat seizing up.

  His gloved hands floated at his sides like a mime’s. He seemed to register me not with his dark irises but with the suspended crescents of white that held them.

  He turned and ran almost silently through the sumac. Enraged, terrified, I followed. In the sane quadrant of my brain, I noted his bulk and almost military efficiency. And his black boots, which I would’ve bet were size-eleven-and-a-half Danner Acadias. He bounded from an upended terracotta pot to the roof of the greenhouse shed as if off a trampoline bounce, then whistled over the fence. I hurled the club at him, but it hit the wood and rebounded back at me. I slammed into the fence and hoisted myself onto it, shoes scrabbling for purchase. Hanging, the slat edges digging into my gut, I looked up the street, but he’d vanished. Into a yard, a house, around the corner.

  I dropped back down with a grunt, fighting to catch my breath. Had I surprised him by altering my schedule, skipping the movies? If so, he sure hadn’t seemed concerned. Judging by his build and adroitness, he could have dismantled me. So hurting me wasn’t his aim. At least not yet.

  I trudged back inside, collapsed into a chair, and sat, breathing. Just breathing.

  After a time I rose and checked the kitchen drawer. Both new tubular keys to the alarm were there. Nothing appeared to have been touched. At the base of the stairs, I stopped to stare at the alarm pad as if it had something to say. I continued up, checked our bedroom and then my office. The cover had been removed from the DVD spindle and set beside it. A count confirmed that one more disc was missing. I went back downstairs and into the living room. The intruder had pulled the tripod clear of the lady palm and tugged the curtain closed. My camcorder’s digital memory had been erased. I walked numbly into the family room.

  The DVD player tray was open, a silver disc resting inside.

  I thumbed the tray closed and sank into the couch. The popping of the TV turning on struck me as unusually loud. I kept getting a blank screen, so I fussed with the buttons, clicking ‘input select,’ ‘TV/video,’ and the other usual suspects.

  At last there I was. On the couch. Wearing my clothes. From today.

  I stared, waiting. I chewed my lip. My on-screen self chewed my on-screen lip.

  The blood in my veins turned to ice. I tried to swallow, found my throat stuck.

  I raised a hand. My double raised a hand. I said, ‘Oh, Lord,’ and heard my voice come out of the surround sound. I took a deep, shaky breath. My double took a deep, shaky breath. He looked utterly dumbstruck, blanched, his face an ungodly shade of pale.

  I got up and walked toward the TV, my image growing like Alice. I tugged the flat-screen off the wall and set it, trailing wires, on the floor. The same perspective of myself stared up at me. Shoving and pulling the tightly stacked equipment had no effect on the shooting angle either. Leaning into the top shelves, I ripped out a few plugs and snapped off the outlet covers.

  Nothing. I yanked out discs and books, used a paperweight to punch a hole in the drywall near a ding and the fireplace poker to pry around further. Finally I reached down and swung open the glass door of the cabinet protecting Ariana’s teenage record collection. The TV image at my feet spun vertiginously.

  I crouched. A tiny fish-eye lens clipped to the top of the glass. I rotated the door open, closed, the room swaying correspondingly on the TV. I unclipped the little lens. A wire trailed back, across the dusty cover of Dancing on the Ceiling. I tugged. It came, giving some resista
nce. At the end, hooked as neatly as a rainbow trout, was a cell phone. Some shitty prepay model that you’d buy off the rack at 7-Eleven. Clenched in my shaking hand, the crappy cell phone, of course, showed full reception. Unlike my three-hundred-dollar Sanyo.

  I took a step back, and then another. Stunned, I mounted the stairs and retreated to our bathroom, the farthest point in the house from the fish-eye lens. I was acting automatically, like an animal, a zombie, and my actions made about as much sense. I turned on the shower, cranked it to red, and let steam fill the room. I wasn’t sure if the sound of running water provided cover from whatever other bugs had infiltrated our house, but it always worked in movies and seemed like a good idea now.

  In a flash of lucidity, I went over to my office, where I grabbed a digital mini-recorder to document any call that might come in. I trudged back and sat with one arm resting on the toilet, the fuzzy oval rug wrinkled up beneath my shoe, the cell phone precisely centered on the floor tile where I could keep an eye on it. One knee was raised. I wasn’t cowering in a corner, but it might have looked that way to an impartial observer. The water drowned out my thoughts; the steam cleaned my lungs.

  I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there when the door banged open and Ariana came in. Her face was red, her hair frizzy; she clutched a butcher knife like a crazed soprano. At least she’d upgraded from the badminton racket. The knife clattered into the sink, and she sagged against the counter and pressed a hand to the slope of her bosom in what seemed a genetically conditioned response.

  I felt more protective of her in that moment than I could ever remember.

  Her gaze took in my expression, the throwaway cell phone, the mini-recorder I’d left on the counter. ‘What . . . the TV . . . what . . .?’

  My voice sounded dry and cracked. ‘I came in on an intruder. Ski mask. He ran away. There’s a bug in the house. A hidden camera. They’ve been recording us. Every fucking thing we’ve . . .’

  She swallowed hard, her chest jerking, then crouched and picked up the phone.

  ‘It was hidden,’ I said, ‘in the cabinet under the TV.’

  ‘Has it rung?’

  ‘No.’

  Working her bottom lip with her teeth, she punched a few buttons. ‘No incoming. No outgoing. No saved numbers.’ She shook it, frustrated. ‘How . . . how’d he get in?’

  ‘The back door, I think. He must’ve picked it. Or he has a key.’

  ‘And turned off the alarm?’ The air was thick with steam, moving in wispy sheets. Condensation clung to her face, mimicking a good sweat. ‘The cops. They saw where we hide the alarm keys. They’re the only ones who know besides us.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But then I realized. The house is bugged. So when you told me the new code, someone was—’

  The cell phone shrilled. Ariana jerked back against the counter, dropping it. It bounced but did not break. It rang again, rattling against the tile. I reached across and turned off the water. The trill seemed amplified. As did the silence.

  I pointed at the mini-recorder, and Ariana snatched it from the counter and tossed it to me. The phone rang again.

  ‘Jesus, Patrick, get it, just get it.’

  Readying the recorder, I pressed the phone to my cheek. ‘Hello?’

  A voice, electronically distorted, made the hair rise along my arms. ‘So . . .’ it said, ‘are you ready to get started?’

  Chapter 19

  The next statement was just as chilling. ‘Turn off the tape recorder.’

  I obeyed and set it gently on the toilet seat, glancing apprehensively at the walls and ceiling. My voice was hoarse, shaky. ‘It’s off.’

  ‘We know that you stopped by Bel Air Foods Tuesday morning to buy a bag of trail mix, a banana, and an iced tea. We know that you watch your wife cry most mornings through the kitchen window. We know you went to the West LA police station today at four thirty-seven, that you saw Detective Richards at her desk on the second floor, that you spoke to her for thirteen and a half minutes. ’ Cold. Steady. Scrubbed of emotion. ‘Do you have any question as to the range of what we can find out about you or anyone else?’

  The electronic filter made the voice flatter, the utter lack of modulation all the more unsettling. My mouth felt gummy. ‘No.’

  Ariana was leaning toward me, hands on her knees, her eyes wide and wild. I tilted the earpiece away from my face so she could hear better.

  ‘Do not go to the police again. Do not talk to the police again.’ A pause. I rotated the mouthpiece up so the caller couldn’t hear how hard my breath was coming. ‘Stand up. Leave the bathroom.’

  I exited, Ariana ahead of me walking backward, stumbling over books and strewn clothes. The bedroom air iced my face, a bracing contrast from the lingering steam of the shower.

  ‘Go out into the hall. Watch your shin on the corner of the bed. Turn right, pass your office.’

  Ariana was now scurrying alongside me as I marched, my cheek sweating against the plastic.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to make you stop?’ I asked, but the voice forged ahead. ‘Pass the M movie poster. Down the stairs. Pass the alarm pad. Hard left. Watch out for the table. Right. Left. Rotate. Another forty-five degrees.’

  I was standing with my back to the TV, facing my meager puddle of blankets.

  ‘Open the couch that you’ve refused to fold out.’

  I flung the cushions aside, my heartbeat kettledrumming in my ears. What was inside? What had I been sleeping on top of?

  The vinyl loop handle slipped from my hand, and Ariana stepped in to help pull. My other hand pressed the phone to my ear, a shock connection I couldn’t break. We tugged, the contraption opening, an insect unfolding from its shell. Ari grabbed the metal brace, which creaked and thumped to the floor, the bottom third of the weary mattress still folded back.

  Hiding something.

  With a numb hand, I reached out and nudged the mattress, which flipped over. It landed flat, setting the crappy springs on twangy vibration and revealing a manila folder and a black wand, maybe four feet long, with a circular head like that of a metal detector.

  ‘That folder contains a floor plan of your house. The red circles indicate where we have planted surveillance devices. The instrument beside the folder is a nonlinear junction detector. It will help you locate those devices and search for any others you believe we may not have indicated on the floor plan.’

  I didn’t have to examine the folder itself to know it had been taken from my desk drawer upstairs. Inside, as promised, two printouts, one for each floor of the house — JPEGs from our contractor that I’d saved in my computer after we’d opened up the fifties bathrooms a few years ago. Down the center of each page ran a faded stripe from my mostly spent toner drum — they’d been printed in my office recently. But that’s not what sent the wave of panic-nausea through my stomach.

  It was the dozen or so red circles pockmarking each sheet.

  Placing the pages side by side, I tried to process the scope of the intrusion. All this time I’d thought my life had turned into Fatal Attraction. But I was really in Enemy of the State.

  Ariana mopped hair off her forehead and let out something between a sigh and a groan. Slowly, I tilted my head and took in my disused proofreading marker, tucked into a year-end edition of Entertainment Weekly at the edge of the coffee table. With shaking hands I retrieved the pen and drew in the margin of the top page, the frayed felt tip tracing a matching, distinctive circle.

  Ariana stepped back, her eyes darting around the walls, the furnishings. With a glance to the printout, she trudged over and stuck a finger into a tiny dent in the plaster just below a framed Ansel Adams she’d had since her dorm-room days. ‘It can’t . . . They can’t . . .’

  The voice startled me out of my stunned reverie; I’d forgotten that the call was still live. ‘A Gmail account has been set up for you, patrickdavis081075,’ — my birthday — ‘password is your mother’s maiden name. The first email will arrive Sunday at four P
.M., telling you what’s next.’

  The first email? The phrase intensified my controlled panic into full-blown terror. I was a fish newly hooked, my journey only beginning. But I barely had time to shudder when the voice said, ‘Now walk outside. Alone.’

  Forcing my feet toward the door, I gestured for Ariana to stay put. She shook her head and trailed me, chewing at the side of a thumbnail. I stepped out onto the walk, Ariana waiting behind, shouldering against the jamb and tugging the door tight to her side so only the front sliver of her was exposed.

  ‘End of the walk. You see the sewer grate? Just past the curb-painted house numbers?’

  ‘Hang on.’ I stopped ten feet shy of the grate. ‘Okay,’ I lied, ‘I’m standing right on top of it.’

  ‘Lean over and look at the gap.’

  So they weren’t watching all the time. The trick was to know when.

  ‘Patrick. Patrick!’

  With dread, I turned to see Don making his way over from his driveway, toting a box of office files. I muttered, ‘Wait a second,’ into the mouthpiece through clenched teeth. And then: ‘This really isn’t the best time, Don.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t see you were on the phone.’

  ‘Yes. I am.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed movement at the front door, Ariana easing back and shutting it to barely a crack.

  ‘Don’t stall us.’

  Don was stammering at me, ‘Listen, I just . . . felt I should apologize for my role in . . . everything, and—’

  ‘You don’t need to. It’s not between me and you.’ My face burned. ‘Listen, I’m on a critical call. I can’t get into this right now.’

  ‘Get rid of him. Now.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ I muttered into the phone.

  ‘Well, when, Patrick?’ Don asked. ‘I mean, it’s been six weeks. For better or worse, we are neighbors, and I’ve tried a number of times—’

  ‘Don, I don’t need to discuss this with you. I don’t owe you anything. Now, get out of my face and let me finish this call.’