Or She Dies

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Chewing a tablet, Ariana double-checked the cigarette-box jammer and pressed forward. ‘If there are no strings attached to that cash, why wouldn’t they just give it to her themselves? For all you know, that money puts her in danger.’

  ‘I think she’d take that risk,’ I said quietly. ‘So her granddaughter wouldn’t die.’

  ‘But she didn’t get to make that decision.’

  ‘Because I made it for her.’ I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, my groan turning to something like a growl. ‘But what the hell was I supposed to do? Go to the cops? Thinking it might kill that woman?’

  ‘Not then. But now. Why not now?’

  ‘They’ll find out. Given what these guys have shown us so far, do we really want to see how they retaliate when they’re pissed off? Plus, are you forgetting that a seven-figure lawsuit might be hanging in the balance, pending my cooperation?’

  ‘So you keep doing this?’ she asked. ‘Following orders blindly from an all-powerful boss you don’t even know? Waiting around like some clown in a Beckett play? For how long?’

  ‘Until we get the settlement agreement from the studio. Until I figure out an angle into this. Into them.’

  ‘And in the meantime? These aren’t your lives to tamper with.’

  ‘It’s not that easy, Ari.’

  ‘There are probably thousands of kids in this country with that girl’s heart condition,’ she said. ‘Millions of people with millions of problems. What makes her life any different from anyone else’s?’

  ‘Because I can save hers.’ I could feel the knots up the back of my neck. Ari lifted her eyebrows, and I held up my hands, half in apology, half to slow myself. ‘I know it sounds like this is some kind of God complex—’

  ‘Not even, Patrick. It’s a God complex by proxy.’

  ‘But these people are hostages, even if they don’t know it.

  That girl was entrusted to me, like Beeman. She’s been made my problem, my responsibility. When I’ve been given a bag of money to save her life, how can I not leave it for her?’

  ‘You don’t show up to begin with, that’s how. What’s that line from WarGames?’

  I cast out a sullen sigh. ‘ “The only winning move is not to play.” ’

  She nodded solemnly. ‘Look, we both agree we need to break through on this thing. And to do that, you can play your game all you want. Just don’t play theirs.’

  I stared over the sagging fence at Don and Martinique’s dark bedroom window, the curtain at rest. A bedroom like ours, a house like ours. Our quiet little neighborhood, all of us with a story to tell. And yet the scale of what I was confronting, the danger, had gone suddenly out of whack. How had I come unhinged from this ordinary life?

  ‘You’re right.’ I lifted my hands, let them slap to my thighs. ‘As long as I keep taking the bait, they have me trapped. I’ll stop. No more checking email. No more following their instructions. Whatever that brings on, it brings on.’

  ‘I’ll be here for it.’ She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. ‘It’s the only good choice left. You have to call their bluff.’

  She rose and headed inside, her head bowed.

  I sat for a few moments with the crickets, looking out to where the yard lost itself in darkness. I mumbled to the shadows, ‘What if they’re not bluffing?’

  I lay beside my wife in the quiet dark of the bedroom. She’d fallen asleep maybe an hour ago, leaving me to study the ceiling. Finally I got up, went into my office, and unplugged my cell phone from its charger. On the built-in camera, I watched the ten seconds I’d managed to capture of the QuickTime video from them.

  View through a windshield. Car driving. The recording stopped well before the alley and the Honda.

  I downloaded the clip into my computer and enlarged it to fill the screen. A passing semi with daytime running lights swept through the field of vision, playing tricks with the light across the windshield. A dab of silver at the bottom of the glass caught my eye. I backed up the recording, froze the image. Not much more than a smudge at the base of the windshield. Leaning forward, I squinted at the finger-long reflection thrown up from the top of the dash.

  The metal plate stamped with the Vehicle Identification Number.

  It was blurred and faint, but perhaps the clarity could be brought up with the right tools. My first concrete lead. I ran a thumb across the tiny image, savoring it.

  My cell phone emitted an Asian chime. Slowly, I turned and regarded it lying there next to the keyboard. Picked it up. A text-message alert, sender unknown.

  A cold sweat crept over my body. My thumb moved before I could stop it.

  EMAIL TOMORROW, 7PM.

  A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.

  THIS TIME IT’S SOMEONE YOU KNOW.

  Chapter 31

  I sat in my car in the parking lot, watching students drift in to class. The phone rang and rang, and finally he picked up. ‘Hallo.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Stop the presses.’ And then, shouting over the receiver to my mom: ‘It’s Patrick. Patrick!’ Then back: ‘Your mother’s in the car.’ My dad, from Lynn, Massachusetts, had the harsh Boston accent I’d never acquired growing up in watered-down Newton. Mothah’s in the cah. ‘Still goin’ through it with Ari?’

  ‘Yeah, but we’re figuring it out.’ Hearing his voice made me realize how much I missed them, how sad it was that it took this for me to pick up the phone. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been great at keeping in touch these past couple months.’

  ‘That’s okay, Paddy. You’ve had a rough go. You get a real job yet?’

  ‘Yeah. Teaching again. No more writing.’

  ‘Listen, your mother and I were just heading into town. Everything okay?’

  ‘I just wanted to know how you both are. Healthwise or whatever else. If there’s anything you need, I mean, I can hop on a plane, no matter what I’m in the middle of.’

  ‘What’d you join one of those cults out there?’

  ‘I’m just saying. I hope you know that.’

  ‘Everything’s fine here. We got a ways to go, you know.’

  ‘I know, Pa.’

  ‘We’re not in the grave yet.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  Car honking in the background.

  ‘Listen, your mother just discovered the horn. Do me a favor, Patrick. Call her this week. You don’t just have to call when you’re feeling okay. We’re your parents.’

  He signed off, and I sat there a moment, reliving the chill that had passed through me when the threatening text message had chimed into existence on my cell phone last night. Not surprisingly, it had vanished into thin air within seconds of my reading it. All this autodeleting left me wondering if I was making up this whole intrigue myself. But the knot in my throat said it was far too real.

  A passing student waved, and it took effort to lift my hand and wave back. My car might as well have been a submarine for how detached I felt from the world beyond the glass.

  THIS TIME IT’S SOMEONE YOU KNOW.

  I clicked through the saved numbers in my cell phone. All those names, more bases than I could cover even if I knew what to ask. Not to mention all the names not in there. It could be anyone from Julianne to Punch to Bill at Bel Air Foods. Someone I’d graded, someone I’d roomed with in college, someone who’d loaned me a cup of sugar. Someone I loved.

  I flipped the phone shut and set it on the cracked dash. ‘The only way to beat them,’ I told it, ‘is not to play.’

  I found Marcello alone in the editing bay, fussing over the digital sound console. On the attached computer monitor, a guy in a Speedo was paused midbounce at the end of a diving board. When Marcello released the diver with a click of the mouse, the bwang of the board was out of sync.

  ‘Take a look at something for me?’ I asked.

  He froze the diver as he hit the water, and leaned over my cell phone. I played the ten-second clip.

  ‘Cinema verité,’ Marcello said when it was done. ‘I
think the car is a metaphor for the journey of life.’

  ‘I can’t pause it on the cell, but look right here.’ I played the clip over again. ‘There’s a little reflection on the windshield when the truck passes. You see it? I think it’s the VIN. Is there some way to download it into Final Cut Pro and bring up the resolution? ’

  ‘Could take some time. The focus part, I mean.’ A note of annoyance. ‘Patrick, what is all this?’ He crossed his arms impatiently as I figured out how to phrase what I wanted to say.

  ‘They’re sending me glimpses into people’s lives. Their problems. ’

  ‘Like what they were doing to you?’

  ‘Yes. Sort of. It’s complicated.’

  He was scowling.

  I said, ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no damn privacy anymore. It’s like we all got used to it. Or we gave it away, bit by bit. Wiretapping laws. Citizen enemy combatants. Homeland Security looking up your nose. Not to mention all this reality shit. Girls Gone Wild. Crying politicians on YouTube. Spouses trash-talking on Dr. Phil. You can’t even die in war anymore without every schmuck with a flat-screen watching the infrared footage. There’s no . . .’ His jaw shifted; his lips twitched, searching out some suitable term. ‘. . . propriety.’ He heaved out an agitated breath. ‘You used to have to be famous to be famous. But now? It’s all real. It’s all fake. What’s the goddamned fascination with monitoring everything, putting an eye up to every peephole?’

  ‘I guess . . .’ I stopped, studied my loafers.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I guess people want the comfort of knowing that things can be bad everywhere. That it’s not just them. That no one’s got the magic answers.’

  His empathetic gaze made me feel naked. ‘When I was growing up, I thought the movies were magic. And then I got around them.’ He gave a wistful chuckle, his hand rasping over his beard. ‘Guys in rooms. Guys on sets. Guys at computer monitors. That’s it. There’s a loss there. I suppose everyone feels it. When you catch up to whatever you’re chasing and get a close-up, warts and all. Then what do you do?’ He made a popping sound with his lips, turned back to the console brusquely, and resumed adjusting the mix on the student film. The footage reversed, the diver unsplashing from the pool, the water vacuuming itself back into a flat sheet. How easily all that chaos was undone.

  ‘Marcello.’ My voice was a bit hoarse. ‘This has turned into a lot more than voyeurism.’

  ‘I know.’ He didn’t look over. ‘Gimme the phone. I’m done ranting.’

  I set it down next to him on the desk. ‘You sure?’

  ‘I think so. I was gonna throw in something about Britney Spears and her lack of underwear, but I sort of lost the thread.’

  A few students started to trickle in, and I had to whisper. ‘No one can know you’re doing this. It could put you at risk. You okay with that?’

  He waved me off. ‘Don’t you have a class you’re late for?’

  Though no light shone in Doug Beeman’s apartment, I knocked again on the peeling front door. And again there was no response. No eye hiding behind that old-fashioned keyhole this time, only blackness. Resting my forehead against the jamb, I stood helplessly, the neighborhood sounds and smells washing over me. The pump of a tricked-out car stereo. The scent of spicy cooking, maybe Indian. A static-fuzzed Lakers game coming through economy walls.

  I was impatient for answers. Absent those, I was desperate for contact, eager to mull over the bits and pieces of what had happened, to rub them to a high polish. On my way to Doug Beeman’s, I’d detoured by the alley near campus and had not been surprised to find the Honda Civic gone. Once I’d cleared the cash from the trunk, they’d cleared the car from the alley. And now silence at Beeman’s door, darkness at the curtains. As I turned away, I realized just how much that concerned me.

  Ariana’s words were there like an echo in my head, warning of all the consequences I hadn’t considered. I wished I’d found something here to assuage her concerns. I’d come back tomorrow first thing to make sure Beeman was all right; I’d already decided to go to Indio after morning classes to check on Elisabeta.

  I turned away from the door. The complex — and the surrounding streets — was alive with life and movement, music and engines, the crack of beer cans opening, the giggle of children, a woman yelling into a telephone. So many people. How many were on the verge of catastrophe? An aneurysm, a lurking blood clot, a heart valve a beat away from giving out? How many of these apartments had a gas leak, a compromised roof, deadly mold growing beneath the drywall?

  Which name in my address book faced a similar deadline?

  At the intersection my discomfort revved into high gear. Knee bouncing, fingernails strumming, squirming in my seat like a kid before recess. The clock on my dashboard read 6:53 P.M. Seven minutes until their next email hit my inbox. It occurred to me yet again that though it was Tuesday and the workday over, I had yet to hear from my lawyer with the studio’s terms for the legal resolution. Were they waiting to see if I played good little soldier? I was still a rat in their box — push the lever, get a pellet.

  The red light was taking forever. I rolled down my window, tapped my foot, hummed along to the Top 40 tune I was pretending to listen to. But no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, it remained at the edge of my peripheral vision, rising into view from behind the church billboard. Finally I looked over at that Kinko’s sign, beckoning like neon to a drunk. In the foreground rose that redoubtable lettering — WITHOUT WOOD, A FIRE GOES OUT — and for the first time in a long time, I felt like the universe was talking to me, even if it was telling me something I didn’t want to hear. It was easy enough to heed the Word; I was in the left-turn lane, Kinko’s was across three lanes of traffic and up the street the opposite way. Not a temptation at all.

  The only way to beat them is not to play.

  Forcing my gaze ahead, waiting for the light, I listened to the click-click-click of my turn signal.

  Hotel Angeleno, a cylindrical white rise a stone’s throw off the 405 where Brentwood meets Bel Air. The crisp photo, perfectly framing the seventeen stories, looked like an advertising shot. The place was a Holiday Inn that had gotten a face lift a few years back, but it didn’t take much to qualify as a landmark in Los Angeles.

  Hunched over a computer in my corner cubicle at Kinko’s, I took in the image, holding my cell-phone camera at the ready. My thumb pressed ‘record,’ and the Sanyo camera whirred into action. I’d acquainted my thumb with the cell-phone buttons so I could record however long, back-to-back in ten-second chunks, without moving my eyes from the monitor.

  The picture on-screen faded, replaced by a close-up of a hotel-room number: 1407.

  Next was a service door, sturdy and metal, the edge of a Dumpster peeking into view. The parking-lot lines and concrete exterior showed it still to be the hotel.

  The next slide put a charge into my chest: my silver key chain, placed on our kitchen counter. A daytime shot, but there was no way to tell when it had been taken.

  The close-up photo that followed showed one key angled free and clear of the others. Sturdy, brass. Not one of my own.

  Numbly, I reached into my pocket. Lifted my key chain, flat on my palm, up before my eyes. There it was like a Christmas present, hidden in the jumble. A new key. Riding along with me all this time.

  The PowerPoint presentation had moved on. Inside my Camry now, the angle from the passenger seat; the photographer must have been sitting. My glove box had been laid open, and a hotel key card set on top of my tin of Altoids.

  A message appeared and faded: 2AM. TONIGHT. COME ALONE. DO NOT GET SPOTTED.

  Followed by another: YOU NEED TO SEE HIM.

  Him. Him?

  My Sanyo stopped recording a moment before the top browser window closed, leaving me to stare at the email with the hyperlink they’d sent to my Gmail account. My fingers ached from being clenched around the keys. I released my fist and watched the pink creep slowly back into my skin.


  I clicked ‘reply’ on the email, and to my surprise an address appeared. A long string of seemingly random numbers, ending with gmail.com.

  The digital clock on the desktop said I was late for dinner, a walk with Ariana, my life. I thought of my briefcase, bulging with unread student scripts. Our walls, torn down in spots to the studs and pipes. The house I had to get in order, with all that implied. I owed the people in my life more than this. Except the one whose neck was on the line.

  I typed, I won’t do this anymore. Not without knowing who you are and why you’re doing this to me, and sent it off before the second thoughts gnashing at my heels could overtake me.

  I sat and stared at the screen, wondering what the hell I had just done.

  A comic pop sounded from the computer speakers, breaking through my black thoughts. An instant message had flashed up on the screen in its cheery little AOL cartoon bubble.

  TONIGHT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING.

  I hadn’t even logged in to an IM program, but there it was.

  Grinding my teeth, I stared at the smug little sentence. I was sick of being manipulated, toyed with, led down the gallows path one blindfolded step at a time. Something inside me had shifted, whether because of Ari’s persistent reasoning or the ominous silence I’d just encountered at Beeman’s front door. But my resolve had been chipped away, one assumption at a time, leaving me far from convinced that the path I’d been taking was the right one.

  Breathing hard, summoning courage, I stared at the screen.

  My fingers hammered the keyboard, asking the question I was afraid to know the answer to: What if I say no?

  I rocked back in the chair. Across the store, the cash register jangled and copy machines whirred and clicked like futuristic life-forms. The air conditioner blew cool air down my collar.