Or She Dies

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He rose swiftly. ‘I’ll get it.’

  ‘It’s a long alley. And you have to use a chair or something, which’ll slow you down. You might want me to go with you to show you where.’

  He hesitated. ‘No way the chief ’ll let us take you out into the field. Especially in light of the news you just received.’

  ‘Okay, but it could take a long time. You’d better find it fast so we can use it to snare the motherfuckers who killed my wife.’

  We were close, my gaze unwavering. He bunched his mouth, that handlebar mustache bristling as he assessed my face. His eyes were murky brown, as unyielding as flint. Did he know I knew?

  He rose. ‘Okay,’ he said to the one-way mirror, addressing whoever was listening behind it. ‘I’ll take DeWitt, too, so we can get this done quicker.’ He looked over at me. ‘Hang in there. A shrink’s on the way. If there’s anything you need, we’ll see to it when we get back.’

  He walked out, closed the door. A moment later I heard another door open and close.

  I pressed my ear to the wall. Traffic sounds. Distant, but not six stories away. Overhead, the air conditioner cycled room-temperature air, contributing nothing but white noise to keep me from hearing outside sounds.

  I’d read once that a broken elephant can be leashed with a string tied to a stake in the ground; it believes it is trapped and never dares to challenge the perception.

  I tugged at my handcuff, testing the bar. The bolts securing it to the wall were substantial, impressive. Crouching on the metal bench, I gripped the bar, squatted, and gracelessly managed to get both feet against the wall on either side of my hands. Leaning back, I shoved until the pressure sustained me above the bench in a strained float. My legs ached, the edge of the bench biting into my hamstrings, and then the bar ripped from the wall with a tired thud, and I flew back, landing hard on the floor. The wind left me in a grunt, my breath screeching, my shoulder blades on fire.

  No approaching footsteps. No one barging in from the adjoining room.

  I slid my handcuff off the curved end of the security bar and stood. The bolts had gone into the plaster and one wooden stud, but there was no metal or concrete beneath the wall as there should have been. Holding the bar, I approached the giant mirror. So much color on my face. A purple mottling across my right cheek. One eyelid blue and blown wide. The edge of my mouth cracked and red. A bruise on the side of my neck. I leaned closer to the mirror, noting the dark dot at the center of that bruise. A needle mark. How long had they kept me drugged?

  I recalled how DeWitt and Verrone had made sure to address their colleagues in the observation room there, behind the one-way mirror: Okay, we got him, thanks. You recording? A nice touch, to leave me believing I was being watched.

  I swung the security bar at the mirror. The bar bounced back hard, as I’d expected, and glass rained down around me, winking in the light.

  Beneath the mirror was not an observation room but solid wall. The clinging shards broke my reflection into fragments.

  A string and a stake in the ground. A security bar and a mirror.

  The door to the adjoining room was closed but unlocked. Bracing myself, wielding the bar, I stepped out into darkness and fumbled for a light switch. I clicked on the overheads and dropped the bar in disbelief.

  I knew this place.

  Aside from the desk, the poster, and the clock — the sliver of room visible from the bench to which I’d been chained — the room had been largely emptied.

  The last time I was here, from outside peering in, I’d spied DeWitt’s desk. Now it had been moved across the floor to put it in view from the interrogation room. The venetian blinds were closed. To the left of the doorway was nothing but a few discarded computer cords, a capsized paper shredder, and a large copier shoved into the corner.

  Torn from a key ring, a glossy valet parking slip lay on the floor:

  This June, Be Afraid.

  This June, There’s Nowhere Left to Hide.

  This June . . . THEY’RE WATCHING.

  I trudged to the desk. There were my things, neatly collected in the plastic tub. With trembling fingers I pocketed them. Then I dug through the mess around the inboxes. One of the crisp manila folders fell to the floor, spilling its contents. I stared down at the fan of blank paper. Then I rifled through the other files, my consternation growing as I realized that all the folders on the desk were filled with nothing more than blank copy paper. The top drawer held stacks of unused pads and manila folders. But beneath them I found a handcuff key. With great relief I freed my wrist.

  The file drawer held a revolver. I stared down at it like it was a coiled snake.

  I was numb, overloaded, moving on autopilot. It was almost as though I was directing myself from outside my body. When I turned away from the drawer, the gun was shoved in my waistband.

  Stumbling across the room, I opened the hatch on the paper shredder and tugged out a clear plastic bag filled with crosscut scraps. It was probably useless, but I wanted to leave with something. As the front door swung open under my unsteady hand, that brass placard flashed into view: DO NOT LEAVE ANY PACKAGES WITHOUT SIGNATURE. DO NOT LEAVE ANY PACKAGES WITH NEIGHBORING BUSINESSES.

  I staggered out onto the second-floor hallway of the Starbright Plaza.

  Nighttime. It seemed impossible, but all was normal in the real world. Down the unlit hallway, I could hear people working late, voices on phones, selling, selling, selling. Flatware clinked in the café below. In the parking lot, streetlights dropped yellow mercury onto the roofs of sleek cars. A not-quite-rain left everything dusted with dew.

  Halfway down the stairs, clutching the bag of shredded paper, I stopped. Jerry’s warning from last week played in my head: Printers, copiers, fax machines — everything’s got a hard drive now, and people can get at ’em and know what you’ve been up to.

  I ran back up. When they’d cleared out the place, they’d left the unwieldy copier behind. A beat-up Sharp, some years old. Nothing in the tray, nothing facedown against the glass. I swung open the plastic front and peered among the mechanical insides. There it was, an innocuous-looking beige rectangle. With a straightened paper clip, I poked the release hole and extracted the hard drive. Then I jotted down the copier’s model number and fled.

  What was waiting for me? Had the arrest warrant for Ariana’s murder already been issued? How else had the world changed since that stun grenade had gone off in my lap?

  Clearly DeWitt and Verrone and whoever else Ridgeline comprised had planned to hold me long enough to get the CD back and ensure an airtight frame for Ariana’s murder. Then they’d turn me loose to whatever remained of my life, and I’d be snatched up by primed Robbery-Homicide detectives and put away for killing Keith and my wife.

  No car. My wallet, empty. I’d sent them to that alley in Northridge because it was a good forty-minute drive before they’d arrive and be reminded that there was no brick wall. That left me time to drive home and get cash, a checkbook, and the list of defense attorneys Ariana had compiled for me, then disappear before the real cops closed in on me. I could regroup in a Motel 6. Watch the news, build a case to clear my name, get a lawyer, negotiate turning myself in. The revolver handle pressed into my stomach, cold and reassuring. Maybe there would be other options, too.

  With the copier hard drive in my pocket, the bag of shredded documents in hand, I stumbled off the bottom stair onto ground level and out in front of a dry cleaner, the lights out, plastic-wrapped shirts shimmering on the carousel like dormant ghosts. As I hustled past the glass shop next door, the sight inside brought me up short. Lined on wooden racks and hung on the walls were endless mirrors. No doubt the one I’d shattered upstairs had been bought right here, a simple prop carried upstairs by Laurel and Hardy, the workers I’d spotted during my last visit. Ariana’s words returned to me yet again, my eyes stinging at the thought of her: A misinterpretation, a white handkerchief, and a few well-placed nudges. How easily they’d knocked me off course, a tap at a t
ime, until the world in my head no longer matched the world outside. My palm was flat against the cool window, my quick breath fogging the glass. Fragmented reflections stared back at me, bruise-faced and stupefied.

  Shaken, I staggered on my way, cutting behind the valet stand into the café. The patrons regarded me with polite unease, and the waiters made eye contact with one another. I could only imagine what I looked like.

  The place was emptying out for the night. The bartender was putting the bottles to bed. And yet the clock upstairs had shown eight-thirty when I’d left.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked a silver-haired gentleman in a booth.

  A glance at his weighty watch. ‘Eleven-fifteen.’

  They’d kept me unconscious for hours longer than I’d been led to believe. Had they needed the extra time to put the final touches on the fake interrogation room? To find an opening to transport my unconscious body from the rear alley, up the fire-escape stairs, and through that metal back door with the shiny new dead bolt? Or to drag Ariana to Fryman Canyon? Maybe they’d killed her before I’d even regained consciousness.

  Whatever that disc held, it couldn’t be worth the price I’d paid for taking it.

  My head still felt thick from whatever drugs had been shot into me. I realized I was still standing there, interrupting the couple’s dinner. I searched for words, for more grounding: ‘What . . . what day is it?’

  The man’s wife rested a hand nervously on his forearm, but he offered me a consoling grin. ‘Thursday.’

  ‘Good,’ I muttered, backing up, nearly colliding with a busboy. ‘That’s what it’s supposed to be.’

  I ducked from their stares into the bathroom, dumped the throwaway cell phone into the trash, and cleaned up as best I could. Flashing on Ari’s gray face, I came apart a little and had to clamp down. I had to hold it together long enough to get out of there.

  Walking out, I grabbed a twenty someone had left on a table as a tip. The coat rack by the door had a black windbreaker, which I lifted and pulled on as I approached the valet stand, tucking the bag of shredded paper under my arm. The hood, protection against the wet breeze, obscured my fucked-up face.

  The valet hopped up off his director’s chair. I gestured at a BMW four spots over and said, ‘That’s me right there.’ I pointed the twenty at him. ‘I can get it myself.’

  He tossed me the keys.

  Chapter 48

  I screeched up behind our back fence, leaving the Beemer a few feet off the curb. But I didn’t hear the tires, didn’t feel the fence biting me in the stomach, didn’t smell the mulch beneath our sumacs. Suspended in grief, I’d come unmoored from my senses. There were a thousand impressions of her and nothing else.

  It’s bizarre what sticks in your brain. Ariana sitting on the kitchen floor, digging in a bottom cabinet, a carton of eggs waiting on the counter. Home from a night run, she wore a sports bra and had a sheen of dried sweat across her forehead, four pots pulled into her lap and twice as many spread on the floor around her. Her heel poked through a hole in her sock. She looked up, biting her lip, playing embarrassed, as if I’d caught her at something. Behind her hairband, a thick lock had bunched unevenly, and the light halved her face in shadow. She said, ‘What?’ but I just shook my head and took in the sight of her. They talk about it like it’s all jukebox slow dances and sweaty lovemaking and princess-cut diamonds. But sometimes it’s just your wife sitting frog style on the kitchen floor after a workout, looking for an omelet pan.

  Dazed, I floated through the side gate, keys in hand, heading for the front of our house. The dark sedan creeping into view ahead brought me crashing back into my body. The bag of crosscut documents slapped the concrete at my feet. It couldn’t be the real cops yet — it seemed unlikely that they’d have found out about Ariana’s body already. It had to be DeWitt and Verrone, coming to take their interrogation to another level.

  The driver eased into the darkness beyond our mailbox and killed the engine. The first thing to hit was fear, compounded by everything that had come before. But then, cutting through my paralysis, came something else. Rage.

  I headed for the car, my hand diving beneath my shirt, seizing the handle of the revolver. Just as I was about to pull and aim, the door cracked, the interior light illuminating Detective Gable. I jerked to a halt.

  ‘You have one job right now,’ he said, climbing out. ‘And that is to stay reachable. Where the hell have you been all—’

  We were close enough now that he caught sight of my face. Should I run? But my will had evaporated. Deflated, I wobbled a bit on my feet. My shirt was still bunched up, and I tugged the hem weakly, pulling it smooth over the gun.

  ‘Jesus, what happened to you?’

  ‘Did you break in and take a disc from my office? Because you have no idea what you did.’

  ‘Yeah, I broke in without a warrant and stole shit just to jeopardize my top case.’ He had the game face on, but my aggression had caught him off guard.

  ‘You here to arrest me?’

  He stiffened against the anger in my voice. ‘People involved with you keep dying.’

  ‘Arrest me if you’re going to, but don’t you fuck with me,’ I said. ‘Not right now. Not over this. There are limits. Basic human decency.’

  ‘I saw the body. Doesn’t look like you showed her any decency.’ He stepped forward, and I shoved him, hard, against the sedan. His shoulder blades clapped loudly against the door, and when he ricocheted back to his feet, his hand had come up with his pistol. He pointed it at the street between us. He was as calm as I’d ever seen him. ‘Watch yourself.’

  ‘Say it. Just you fucking say it. Say I killed my wife.’

  ‘Your wife?’ He looked astonished. ‘I’m here because Deborah Vance turned up dead.’

  Deborah Vance? The name was from a different lifetime. And yet it was only twelve hours ago I’d asked Joe Vente to tip the cops to check her apartment.

  I became aware of the half dozen photographers who had crept like mice from the shadows. In light of the drawn gun, they kept their distance, but flashes strobe-lit the uncertain standoff.

  ‘You pointed Detectives Richards and Valentine to that woman,’ Gable said. ‘She played the Hungarian grandmother, was it? To get the mythical duffel bag of cash you found in the trunk of the mythical Honda? I want the real story.’ His breath misted. ‘And I’ll need your alibi.’

  ‘I don’t have a fucking alibi.’

  ‘I haven’t told you when she was killed.’ He looked troubled, unsure of himself.

  ‘You think I care about Keith Conner or Deborah Vance? My wife is dead. And you’re running around like this other shit matters. That’s all you guys do. You don’t save anyone. You’re historians — you come in after the fact and write reports and point your fucking fingers.’

  I took a step to the side, the paparazzi behind me now. Gable’s gun hadn’t moved. The tip remained perfectly still. ‘They killed my wife,’ I said. ‘They took her and they killed her.’ Saying it out loud gave it more force. I fought my voice steady. ‘They tried to hold me in a . . . a fake jail—’

  ‘A fake jail?’

  I clutched for a response. The false interrogation room was so audacious and mind-boggling that the mention of it sounded outlandish spilling from my mouth.

  Gable couldn’t decide between amused and irate. ‘And let me guess. If we go to find it, the space’ll be cleared out.’

  A bar, a mirror, and a poster. DeWitt and Verrone were probably removing even those at this very moment, leaving the Ridgeline office as blank as a wiped chalkboard. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what’ll happen. And then you’ll find Ariana’s body in a gully in Fryman Canyon, with evidence showing I killed her. And you idiots won’t believe me because I don’t have a single concrete thing to prove that her killers exist, except for this.’

  Fisting my shirt, I tugged it up, revealing the revolver stuffed in my waistband. But Gable wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at our garage d
oor.

  It was wobbling open.

  My hands fell to my sides, my shirt dropping just before he glanced back at me.

  Footsteps sounded on the concrete floor of our garage. Gable’s gun finally moved, inching over toward the house.

  Ariana stepped into view.

  At first I didn’t believe. And then I was drifting toward her in a daze, stumbling over the curb, finally meeting her in the garage next to her truck. I clutched her shoulders, felt her flesh and bone in my grip.

  ‘You were dead,’ I said.

  ‘Your face—’

  ‘You were gone, and they had you, and you were dead.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You were gone.’ She was tilting my head this way and that, appraising the damage. ‘My meeting was delayed, and I stopped after to pick up more prepaid cell phones, since you’d taken the last one. There was no one here when I got home.’

  ‘So this whole time, you . . . you . . .?’ Was I sobbing or laughing wildly?

  Gable stood in our driveway, backlit by the sparkling flashes, though the photographers themselves blended into the dark, a murmuring chorus. The firm line of his shoulders had taken on a droop, and in the grainy darkness, he looked like a figure torn from a noir movie.

  He called out, ‘We should just have you committed and save us all a lot of aggravation.’

  I was gripping Ariana — her hips, her arms — testing the real-ness of her. She had a hand against my unbruised cheek and a look of bewildered concern. ‘What happened to you? Who did this?’

  Gable, chafing at being ignored: ‘You think you can just fuck with us this way? Play games with the investigation? I saw what you did to that woman, the bullet through her mouth. And when I nail your ass to my trophy wall, we’ll see how well this insanity routine holds up.’ He turned toward his car, then spun on his heel, incensed. ‘Next time I come back, I’m not just gonna ask questions.’

  Ari’s eyes didn’t leave mine. She reached over to the wall, hit the glowing button, and the garage door tilted down. Detective Gable stood his ground as the lowering door cut off his glare, his chest, and finally his spotless loafers.