Or She Dies

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He bellowed, tumbling violently, and then his torso struck metal with a clang and a gunshot exploded, amplified off the surrounding metal. He lurched down a few more steps on his face and chest before rolling over and jerking to a halt, his hand dangling into view off the side. He grumbled something unintelligible, and then the night gave over to the crickets and an odd sucking sound that came at uneven intervals.

  I stayed crouched, frozen, waiting for who knew what, until I saw the dark drops working their way through the steel mesh of the bottom stair and tapping the dirt below. I crept out.

  He’d wound up in a leaned-back sitting position at the base of the stairs. His eyes rolled to and fro, straining, the whites pronounced in the dull moonlight, but as I tentatively approached, they tracked over and fixed on me. He had a tiny hole in his side at the base of his ribs, the tear in the white shirt no bigger than a penny. The surrounding fabric had darkened, the blotch the size of a Frisbee. His right hand, bent unnaturally, clutched the Glock. His finger remained threaded through the trigger guard. His chest lurched, and his lung gave off that sucking sound, fluttering the torn cloth at the edge of the bullet hole.

  The right lapel of his sport jacket was flung back, a band of moonlight falling through the crisscross stairs to illuminate the revealed badge at his belt, with that all-too-familiar number.

  LAPD 1117.

  His hand firmed around the Glock, and I tensed, but he couldn’t seem to lift his arm from his side to aim it at me. The ledge of his brow lowered with exertion. He jerked his head, and one of his legs stiffened, and the gun fired down into the dirt.

  And again. And again. The reports rolled off across the hills, across the blanketing trees and hidden missile silos. The recoil from the next shot knocked the gun from his hand. He looked down at it helplessly, tears mixing with his sweat.

  The next sucking sound from his lung was fainter. His legs twitched, and then the fabric no longer fluttered at the edges of the hole in his shirt. His stare stayed fixed on me, every bit as alive as it had been moments before.

  I had sunk to one knee before him, as if in fearful worship of the act I’d just committed. Through the roar of my thoughts, I could feel nothing.

  Bolted to the wall to Valentine’s left, Khrushchev’s words addressed the bloody aftermath: WE WILL BURY YOU.

  A loud hum sounded, breaking my trance, and I jerked back, tripping over my heels. Cautiously, I rose. It came again, vibrating Valentine’s shirt pocket.

  I approached his body with trepidation; my nerves were sand-papered raw. Keeping my head pulled back, I reached over and tugged a Palm Treo from his pocket.

  A text message read:

  YOUR CASH AT USUAL DROP POINT.

  WE’RE MOVING IN NOW.

  THIS MESSAGE CHAIN WILL ERASE IN 17 SECONDS.

  16.

  15.

  Moving in where?

  A chill crept across my bruised shoulders. The message was a reply. Furiously, I clicked back to the original note Valentine had sent:

  HE’LL BE OUT OF HOUSE AT 8:00.

  MULTIPLE UNITS WILL RESPOND TO A FAKE BREAK-IN CALL TWO DOORS UP TO DRAW PAPARAZZI AWAY.

  SHE WILL BE ALONE.

  Chapter 52

  Stunned, I stared at the glowing screen, words disintegrating into letters, my brain lurching to comprehend and shield myself at the same time. The message vanished, a crumpling sound announcing the autoerase, but the letters seemed to remain, floating in the darkness. They became words again, their meaning shattering my paralysis.

  I caught up to myself ten feet down the dirt path, sprinting, dialing my wife on a dead man’s phone. The Glock was shoved in the back of my jeans, the documents crammed in my pocket, digging into my thigh. The sole reception bar blinked out every time I pressed ‘send.’ By the time I hit the dirt road, the screen showed a satellite dish rotating haplessly — nothing.

  Without slowing, I dug out the throwaway phone, held it in my other hand, glanced from one screen to the next. No signal from either, not up here in the hills at the fringe of the Topanga State Park.

  The cell-phone clock read 7:56 P.M. Four minutes and they’d be clear to breach our house.

  The ground was a confusion of ruts and mounds, and I stumbled in the dark, going down and skimming my palms, the phone and Treo skidding from my grip. I groped, found the throwaway, and after a few seconds of searching gave up on the Treo — the incriminating message had autotrashed anyway, and the reception was just as crappy. Clutching the phone, I kept sprinting, holding the damn lit screen in front of my face as I hurtled forward in the blackness, letting my legs figure out the terrain on their own.

  SHE WILL BE ALONE.

  No signal. No signal. No signal.

  A light rain had opened up, softening the ground that kept duplicating itself beneath my feet, a potholed treadmill. The same hillside kept whistling by. Wheezing, drenched in sweat, I was stuck in a horror-movie loop.

  Finally the yellow gate cut the dark, and I flew through, clipping the post with a shoulder, the collision spinning me in a half circle and depositing me on the hood of the BMW. I leaped into the car, peeling out, heading toward home, toward cell-phone coverage, the crappy throwaway clenched in my wet hand so I could steer the curves and watch the signal.

  At last it gave me a bar. It wavered but came back, and the call went through. It rang and rang, and finally—

  ‘Ari!’

  ‘Patrick?’

  ‘They’re coming for you! Get the hell out of the house!’

  But she couldn’t hear me now. ‘I just got out of the shower. I moved the pickup around back for you to use from now on, so get rid of the stolen car before you come back here. But listen — you’re not gonna believe what I taped together.’ Sirens wailed faintly in the background. ‘Hang on. This is weird.’

  Her breathing shifted as she hustled down the stairs, the noise of the sirens growing louder.

  I was shouting, as if volume, not reception, were the problem. ‘They called in a diversion up the street so the paparazzi will follow and leave our house open. Grab the gun and get out of there. Go to the cops. Ari? Ari!’

  Oblivious to my yelling, she continued, ‘All these cop cars passed our house, but they’re not coming here. Looks like they’re up at the Weetmans. I wonder if Mike got framed for killing a movie star, too.’

  The signal cut out. I looked down at the phone in disbelief. A horn blared; I’d drifted into the wrong lane. Screeching over, I veered off the road, kicking up a plume of dirt, then overcompensated again, wobbling back across the center lane and narrowly missing a Maserati. I righted the BMW, skidding around a rain-slick turn and leaving the clutch of the hillside.

  Two bars. Now three.

  I dialed.

  She picked up. ‘Hi. Lost you. I was saying—’

  ‘Get out of the house. Right now. Run up the street to the cops.’

  The piercing scream of our alarm. ‘Shit, Patrick, someone’s—’

  Thundering footsteps. The phone dropping. Ariana’s yell was severed abruptly, and an instant later the alarm shut off.

  The Beemer scraped along the hillside, sending a pattering of rocks across the roof and reminding me I was driving. Sweat stung my eyes. I was screaming into the phone, but I didn’t know what I was saying.

  Some muffled directions: ‘Have her finish getting dressed. We don’t want to drag her around half naked. You, stop resisting or we’ll break an arm. Move it.’

  And then a rustle as the phone was plucked from the floor. A calm voice. Verrone’s. ‘We’re done playing now.’ The calm tenor brought back the memory of his jaundiced complexion, that droopy mustache.

  ‘Don’t hurt her.’

  ‘We need that disc.’

  ‘I don’t have it. I swear to fucking God, if I had it I would’ve given it to you.’

  ‘You told us you had it. You just sent us to the wrong hiding place.’

  It took a moment for me to realize that the sirens were now not on
the other end of the phone but approaching me. Coming around the bend, I saw six police cars and an ambulance heading at me, lights flashing, sirens screeching. Instinctively, I shrank away from my window, but they blasted by, heading for Valentine and Richards. I had to shout over the high-pitched wailing. ‘You kidnapped me! I would have said anything to get away!’

  ‘You have two hours to find it.’

  The dropping of that ultimatum, a tank in my path, brought the horror of my situation home to roost. I’d scrambled and forged ahead, despite a false imprisonment and a real one, despite being set up and shot at, despite a concussion grenade dropped in my lap, and still it hadn’t been enough. The helplessness I’d been fighting to hold at bay and the rage at having my life seized from my own control flooded in, overwhelming me. A hundred and twenty minutes from now, my wife would no longer be alive.

  I yelled, ‘How am I supposed to fucking find something when I don’t know where it is?’

  ‘Then you’re useless to us. Which means we can shoot her now.’ Over the phone: ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Wait! Okay, okay. I have it.’ I cringed, listening, breathless. But no gunshot followed. ‘I . . . I . . .’ I was falling into terror, grasping at anything, trying to formulate a story, any story that would buy us time. Did I dare to reveal the only cards I held — those incriminating documents I’d retrieved from their copy machine? Right off the bat, in a state of panic, with no guiding strategy? Where did that leave me to go? There had to be something else. It seemed I hadn’t spoken in hours, though the delay was probably no more than a few seconds. ‘I put the disc in our safe-deposit box,’ I blurted. ‘I can’t get it until the bank opens in the morning.’

  ‘You have until nine o’clock.’

  ‘Richards is dead,’ I said. ‘Valentine is dead.’ A cold silence as Verrone reassessed the chessboard. But I didn’t wait for his next move; I pushed forward while he was off balance. ‘I’m wanted now. I need some time to get clear and figure out who to send in to grab the disc from the safe-deposit box in the morning.’ Still no response. I added, ‘A couple extra hours even.’

  Stop talking — you’re negotiating with yourself.

  He pulled the phone away again as he spoke to DeWitt or whoever else. ‘Take her out back, watch her closely over the fence. Paparazzi should be up the street chasing their tails, but keep an eye out just in case. Listen, sweetheart, if anyone’s out there, we’re all friends heading out for a drive. That’s the better of the two ways to do this. If you struggle or scream, we’ll shoot whoever we see and drag you anyway. What? Yes, get it, it’ll look more normal. Now, go.’

  Get what?

  Look more normal?

  What the hell did that mean?

  Verrone had come back to me. ‘Fine. You have until noon tomorrow. And you’d better stay away from the cops. You’re useless to us in custody. Call your wife’s cell-phone number — her real cell phone, not that disposable crap you’ve been playing around with. We’ll have it patched through to an untraceable line, so don’t bother playing Maxwell Smart. If that phone doesn’t ring by noon with good news, we will put a bullet in the base of her skull. And yes, this time it’s real.’

  The phone cut out.

  My brain vacillated between high-rev panic and complete blank-out. I remember passing another convoy of police cars. I remember telling myself to slow down, since I couldn’t risk getting pulled over, but I also remember not obeying. I remember screeching over the curb, scattering the paparazzi, and leaving the Beemer sunk in our wet front lawn, car door open in the slanting rain, dinging.

  And then I was inside the quiet of our entry, dripping. On the floor by the living-room window, a broken teacup. The prepaid cell phone. And a lavender mariposa.

  I crouched over the fallen flower, my heart thundering. Instinct brought it to my nose — the smell of her. Across the room, Ariana and I gazed out from our fallen wedding photo. The symbolism was obtrusive, sure, but it cut me to ribbons nonetheless. The arty black-and-white, our stiff formality, and the fragmented glass imbued the image with a haunted, bygone feel. A past age, dated conventions, ghosts of happier days. Looking at her soft-focus face, I made a silent vow: I promise.

  The thought of her, trapped between DeWitt and Verrone in the back of some van, nearly brought me to my knees. But I couldn’t give in to fear, not now. How much time did I have before the cops found Valentine and Richards and came here?

  I tried to collect my frayed thoughts. Was there anything in the house I had to take with me before I fled? When I’d first reached Ari, she’d been excited about something she’d figured out: You’re not gonna believe what I taped together. Had they found whatever she’d come up with, or was it still here?

  I ran into the family room. Aside from a few scraps, they’d gathered up and taken the mounds of shredded documents.

  Taped together, she’d said. Taped.

  I rushed into the kitchen. The mess on the floor remained from when the cops had tossed the house — trash dumped, drawers emptied. I couldn’t spot any Scotch tape in the mound, and I doubted that Ari would’ve rooted through in search of it. Which left my office.

  I bolted upstairs. Sure enough, on my desk was a plastic tape dispenser and beside it a round piece of paper composed of taped-together bits.

  A disc?

  I snatched it up. It was made of the white-silver squares she’d noted in the confetti jumble, those scraps that had stood out as firmer than the others. I bent the CD. Stiff but flexible. I’d seen discs like this before, hip-hop promotional singles slipped into Vanity Fair or the occasional DVD in Variety before awards season.

  They’d destroyed this CD along with other documents before clearing out the Ridgeline office. The Frankenstein disc was beyond salvaging, but I didn’t have to put it into a computer to realize that a CD like this, with a pliable, thinner design, had certain advantages for an operation like theirs. Easier to shred.

  And easier to hide.

  Rain tattooed the roof, a drumroll score to my quickening thoughts.

  I closed my eyes, pictured opening that FedEx envelope addressed to Ridgeline. That blank CD, wrapped protectively in corrugated cardboard.

  What if that disc really had been nothing more than what it appeared — a blank CD? If someone like me intercepted the package, I’d think it contained nothing more than that useless disc. But the intended recipient would see the blank CD as a symbol, a key showing what was really being shipped in the same package.

  I ran down to the kitchen and dug through the trash. There it was, beneath a half loaf of moldy bread and a PowerBar box. The corrugated cardboard that I’d thought was mere packaging material. Flattening the bent sheet, I wormed my thumbnails into the edge and peeled it apart.

  Sunk in a beveled well inside was a white-silver disc.

  Chapter 53

  A rush of excitement overtook me. Their CD had been here in the house the whole time, lying on the floor, buried in trash — the one place no one would think to look for it. I plucked it out, held it to the light, appraising it like a jeweler.

  So it had been Ridgeline who’d broken in to search our house and steal back their FedEx package. Wanting to recover every piece of evidence, they’d taken the envelope, shipping label, and blank CD. But since the cardboard packaging had been missing, they’d assumed I’d figured out what was hidden inside and that I’d moved it to a safe place. So they’d lured me to Keith’s, dropped a grenade in my lap, then posed as cops to get me to cough up where I’d secreted the disc. It never occurred to them that I’d taken the packaging for trash and dumped it on the heap on the kitchen floor.

  The thrill of discovery was undercut by a thin, warbling siren in the distance. And then another.

  I grabbed a wad of cash and the pickup keys from Ariana’s purse, then spun in a full circle in the kitchen, sizing up everything, trying to think what else from the house I needed.

  What had Ariana asked to take with her before they’d hauled her out? Verron
e’s odd words chewed at me: What? Yes, get it, it’ll look more normal. Now, go.

  The sirens, louder.

  Ariana’s keys in hand, the precious disc padded by the copied documents in my pocket, I ran out the rear door into the inviting darkness. Thank God she’d moved the pickup around back for me. Running across the lawn, rain spitting at my face, I could hear the squeal of tires from the front. Verrone had narrowed the situation to a simple equation: if the cops captured me, she would die.

  And so now I fled out the back, along the same route they’d forced her to move. If anyone’s out there, we’re all friends heading out for a drive, Verrone had told her. He needed her to look as inconspicuous as possible. His reply to whatever she’d said came again: Yes, get it, it’ll look more normal.

  I halted. Turned my face up to the raindrops, felt the pitterpatter across my cheeks.

  Raining, I thought. Jacket.

  Play the hand you’re dealt.

  I spun and sprinted back into the house, my wet sneakers skidding through trash on the sleek kitchen floor. Blue and red lights flashed through the front curtains. Voices, boots stomping up the walk. I ran toward them, to the coat closet by the entry.

  Someone shouted, and then a battering ram shuddered the front door. The bottom panels bent in, but the dead bolt held.

  I threw open the closet door and peered in. Five hangers, an old bomber jacket, and a jumble of shoes. But no raincoat.

  It’ll look more normal. More inconspicuous for a woman heading out in a downpour. She’d manipulated them into letting her grab her raincoat. With their transmitter stitched into the lining. A transmitter they didn’t know that we knew about.

  A transmitter that maybe I could figure out how to track.

  Shoes slippery on the floorboards, I careened back into the kitchen out of view just as a sonic boom announced the front door’s disintegration. Gable’s voice, commanding and husky with adrenaline, ‘Clear the upstairs. Go-go-go.’