One Got Away

by S. A. Lelchuk

  He walked back over to Coombs. “A speechwriter,” he said, still chuckling. “You missed your calling, my friend. Such a way with words. Like Albert with numbers. Such talent. You could have worked for a senator or mayor, maybe even a president? Writing their bullshit for them, making it sound so pretty. Such a waste.”

  “I’m telling you, all this can be easily resolved! We all want the same thing. There’s no need for these theatrics.” Coombs started to get to his feet.

  Mr. Z gave an almost imperceptible nod, and one of the bodyguards stepped forward and punched Coombs full in the face.

  The blow made an unpleasant smacking sound. Coombs sprawled onto the ground with a cry of pain. The bodyguard kicked him once in the ribs, then again, curling him into a ball, the impact sounding dense and dull. The bodyguard didn’t look angry or excited or happy. His face held the same level of dispassion and mild exertion as someone doing assisted chin-ups at a YMCA.

  The bodyguard caught another look from Mr. Z and stepped back.

  Coombs sat up slowly and spat red onto the floor. He rubbed his mouth and breathed heavily. “Christ,” he said again, his voice thick with pain. “You split my lip open, you goddamn brownshirt.”

  The jolly mirth had disappeared from the fat man’s eyes. There was an apple in the welcome basket and he munched it with noisy horse bites. “Is that too much theatrics for you, my friend?”

  Coombs rubbed his lip. There was more blood. “I’ll need stitches. What the hell was that about?” He touched his fingertips to his torso and winced in pain.

  “That was a stamp on your passport, Dr. Coombs.”

  The con man stared up. “Have you gone batty? Passport? Stamp?”

  Mr. Z looked down at Coombs, a child watching a bug. “You’ve left your world, my friend. Your fancy fucking world of pleasant conversations and tuxedo dinners and fruit baskets. Now you’re in our world. Someone like you shouldn’t be down here, with us. You should have stayed where you were comfortable. But you found your way here, and now you’re here, and I want you to understand this.”

  “What do you want?” Coombs asked. His lip had already begun to swell and there was a slur to his words.

  “You know what we want. We want what we’ve wanted all along.”

  “And you’ll get it! Good God, man, do you not understand that? That’s why I’m here! That’s why they sent me! To facilitate—to hurry everything along. You know this!”

  “No, not anymore.” The fat man chomped away at the vanishing apple, turning it in his hand for fresh new angles. “You see, I’ve decided to fire you—as a facilitator.” He held up a hand, silencing Coombs. “But not to worry. You see, there’s a new job for you, a new role. Admittedly, it’s a different one, slightly different, but I promise that you will not go to waste.” He bit too deep into the core, wrinkled his nose, and spat a black seed onto the floor.

  “A new role? What are you—”

  “Now you’ll be a hostage, my good doctor. Consider it a promotion. You’re even more important. Tonight is Wednesday. Tomorrow morning, we’ll give you a telephone, and you’ll start making calls and explaining to your friends that the deadline has changed. I’ll give you one day. Until tomorrow. And if we don’t have what we’re asking for, I’ll watch while these two”—he gestured to the stone-faced pair of bodyguards flanking him—“chain a fifty-pound cement block around your ankles and toss you into Monterey Bay.”

  “That’s not enough time!” Coombs exploded. “You know that! It’s out of my hands! Everything was going to be settled by next week!”

  The fat man watched him, unmoved. “Two months ago it was next week. A month ago it was next week. A week ago it was next week.” His voice took on a mocking singsong. “Always next week, next week, next week.” He leaned down and wiped his hands against Coombs’s white-and-blue shirt. The chocolate left dark smears against the elegant cotton.

  Coombs didn’t move. Didn’t even bother to look at his ruined shirt.

  “Sometimes,” Mr. Z continued, “when something is stuck, it needs—what’s the expression—a kick in the pants. To move along. Maybe you and your fancy San Francisco friends took me seriously, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought I was a foolish high school dropout, someone who could be played with and intimidated by shiny talk and big numbers. Now you’ll take me seriously.”

  “I took you seriously,” Coombs said. “All along. You know that. I know who you are.” His voice was strained and anxious. “I need more time. You know how these people bank. The money’s all over the globe and it gets flagged by the banks if they don’t break it into pieces. We’ve started the process but it takes time. You’ll kill me, fine—but you won’t get what you want if I’m gone.”

  The fat man tossed his apple core to the ground. “Are you playing me, Dr. Coombs?”

  Coombs’s hair was disheveled and blood trickled from his lip, but he held the fat man’s eyes. “Give me until Monday. Just until then.”

  Mr. Z considered, then said, “Two days. Friday. If I don’t have my money by Friday night, my cobblers will fit you for concrete shoes.” His small, piggish eyes wandered the room. “Such a fancy place. So expensive, everything, such beautiful taste, such luxury. You’re a gentleman, my friend.” His small eyes took in the closet, the row of colorful shirts and suits gleaming with the dull shine of expensive fabric. “I don’t dress as nice as you, Dr. Coombs. I don’t stay at this kind of fancy place. I don’t think places like this are made for people like me. But that’s okay. I have my own places, my own preferences. A simple man, like I said.” He gestured to Coombs’s suitcase, a brown hard-shell stamped with golden, interlocked letters. “Louis Vuitton, correct?”

  Coombs said, “Yes.”

  The fat man looked satisfied. “See, I know a little about these things. Not as much as you, but a little. A beautiful suitcase, so elegant. Go!” he abruptly instructed Coombs. “We will talk more later.”

  Coombs stared. “Go where?”

  “Inside.” A thick finger jabbed at the suitcase. “We will pack you, now.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I like to sometimes joke, it’s true, but now I’m not joking. Go into that suitcase.”

  Coombs didn’t budge. “No. Absolutely not. This is insane.”

  Mr. Z’s eyes flashed. “You don’t get it!” he shouted. “You still don’t understand! In your world, your fancy fucking world with cocktail parties and nice polite manners, yes, maybe it’s insane for men to be put into suitcases like old stinking laundry. In my world, these things make perfect sense. A man can be packed just as easily as the clothes he wears. No one thinks that’s so crazy.”

  “I refuse,” Coombs said.

  “I see. You refuse.” The fat man jerked his head toward the bodyguard who had hit Coombs. “Show him what we do to people who refuse us.”

  Without a word the bodyguard unbuckled something that had been strapped to his thigh. He straightened, holding the object casually in one hand. I saw the menacing star and snake on his skin, a lurid scar across his brow, the knuckles on his right hand red and raw from having been driven into Coombs’s face.

  He held the object up. We all took in what he held.

  A hatchet.

  Small, light, maybe three or four pounds, with a black rubberized grip. The kind of all-purpose tool that someone would take camping. Versatile, practical. Perfect for chopping firewood or trimming marshmallow sticks or slamming a tent peg into the dirt. The stainless-steel edge was honed to a barely visible line.

  We all watched the hatchet.

  “You’ll go into the suitcase or he will chop pieces off you until you fit.” Mr. Z shook his head, suddenly bored. “I’m hungry. Pack up and we’ll go eat. We can get seafood. A place I like is nearby, it stays open late. If it was earlier, we could sit with cold beers and almost watch the boats bring our fish right up. Very fresh, very tasty.” He nodded to the two big men. “Help our new guest. If he resists, chop his toes first, th
en his fingers.”

  Putting a grown man into a suitcase turned out to be easier than I would have thought. Maybe because, with the hatchet out, Coombs remained as limp and docile as a drugged animal. I got a last glimpse of his figure, curled into an awkward seahorse shape, breaths coming quick and frightened. Then the suitcase closed over him. One of the bodyguards latched the clasps and heaved it upright with a grunt.

  Closed and upright, it looked like any other piece of expensive designer luggage. Impossible to tell there was a terrified man contained within.

  “Where are you taking him?” I asked.

  Mr. Z looked at me as though he had forgotten I was in the room. “It’s better for your health that you don’t ask questions like that.” He paused, as though remembering something. “Ah, he did not pay you yet. I see.” A doughy hand pulled a gold money clip out of his pocket. Several hundred-dollar bills flicked down at me. “There. Now you’re paid, and you didn’t even have to take your clothes off. But because you ask such nosy questions, I will let you decide how to untie yourself.” He started to the door, one of the bodyguards rolling the suitcase behind him.

  They left as abruptly as they had appeared. I watched the door swing shut. I was already moving as it closed.

  * * *

  To my relief, I managed to open the straight razor in the bathroom without slicing my hands open. Soon enough, I had managed to cut away the black tape binding my wrists. My feet were free a few seconds later. I took a hurried look around the room as I repacked my handbag. I had to move fast if I wanted to catch up to them.

  It wasn’t only about the Johannessen family anymore. No longer about a job I had been hired to do. My sense of fairness had been poked. Whatever his past sins might have been, I hadn’t seen anything to make me believe Coombs deserved to be tortured and dropped to the bottom of Monterey Bay. I hadn’t liked seeing Coombs being beaten. Hurting him had been gratuitous. Disproportionate. I thought of the hatchet. The expression on Coombs’s face. The fear in his eyes.

  Another reason, half-admitted, circled. Our dinner together. The way he had understood me, intuitively, at once, like no one I’d ever met. The feeling of his fingertips tracing down the back of my neck. The knowingness in his eyes. I wanted to learn what was going on. I also wanted to learn more about who he was. How he knew me so well.

  I wasn’t exactly sure how guilty I was supposed to feel for wanting that.

  I think you’d try to save me without even thinking about it.

  Well, he had gone off a cliff, now. No question about that. The terrain hazardous in a way that neither of us had understood. A fall perhaps even more dangerous than against those wave-lashed rocks and swirling currents.

  I think you’d try to save me without even thinking about it.

  Despite the urgency of the moment, I hastened to my own room first. I had no desire to get on a motorcycle in high heels and a torn dress. It took me under two minutes to change back into my jeans and boots. I was probably fifteen minutes behind them. Not great. But not impossible. Monterey wasn’t Los Angeles. I had a chance.

  I was halfway out the door when the phone in my room started ringing.

  I looked at the phone. No one should be calling. No one except Jess knew I was here. Not even Ethan. Not even my brother. I had been told to follow Coombs. Had someone been told to follow me? The thought was unsettling.

  The phone kept ringing. I took a step toward it.

  The ringing stopped.

  I turned back to the door.

  The ringing started again.

  I crossed the room, picked up the phone, and got the biggest surprise yet, in a night that was proving to be full of them.

  “Ms. Griffin? It’s the front desk. Someone has been waiting to see you.”

  I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “Tonight? Who?”

  “Your son.”

  16

  There were plenty of things that I didn’t know anything about, but a few facts I was sure of. Martinis should be made with gin—always. Thomas Hardy should never have quit writing novels. I liked cats because they usually didn’t do what people wanted.

  And I didn’t have any children.

  None. That was a definite.

  So, despite my hurry, I approached the main building with caution. Wondering who wanted to lure me into the open by providing an identity I couldn’t possibly believe to be true. A trap so obvious there had to be a second layer. Somewhere. And yet a trap laid by someone who had managed to figure out where I was and who I was. So as I opened the lobby door, one hand rested in my handbag, feeling the comforting grip of my Beretta.

  The girl who had checked me in was gone, replaced by a bleary-eyed guy a decade older. The night clerk, I assumed. He was sleepy, and doing his unsuccessful best to hide it. Or was he doing his best to act it? That was the problem with being held at gunpoint, tied up, and watching hatchet-wielding gangsters stuff a man into a suitcase. Twitchy flashes of paranoia started to pop up like carbonation bubbles.

  I looked around the empty lobby. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  I took another look at the clerk. Generally, bleary-eyed, sleepy men who sat at registration desks late at night wearing emblazoned uniforms were night clerks.

  But nothing said they had to be.

  Who had convinced the clerk to call my room? And where were they?

  Years ago, somewhere in my early twenties, I had gone to three different Berkeley thrift stores and cleaned them all out of the cheapest handbags I could find. Then I had gone to an outdoor range and spent a weekend shooting through them until each was tattered with so many holes it was more air than fabric. A useful weekend, despite some very odd looks. Money well spent. Sixty bucks in used handbags had helped me conclude that although this method was far from optimal—not being able to raise and sight a gun took away ninety percent of what a gun could do—the handbag method could work. In a pinch. From close range, say ten feet, I could hit what I wanted. From twenty feet, sort of, if my target wasn’t moving too much. After that, all bets, as they said, were off.

  I walked up to the registration desk. “I got a call from you.”

  The clerk hid a yawn with his hand. His other hand had fallen onto his lap, behind the desk. Out of view.

  “Name?”

  “You just called me. Five minutes ago.”

  He yawned again. His other hand still out of sight. “He’s been waiting almost an hour, but we couldn’t reach you.” Through the sleepiness, his voice contained a layer of reproach. As though I had been nightclub-hopping while my starving baby cried in a stroller on the sidewalk.

  “Who’s been waiting?” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. Trying not to think of Coombs, drawing farther away every minute.

  “He’s over there. Waiting,” the night clerk added pointedly. He gestured across the wide lobby. My view was blocked by a bookcase. A diversion? But the four men hadn’t seen me as even the slightest threat. To them I was just a kinky escort with the bad luck to be called by the wrong guy on the wrong night.

  Another yawn. The clerk’s expression clearly wondering why I was lingering.

  I crossed the lobby. Someone was there. I could see the edge of a couch and, just barely, the tip of a sneaker.

  Another step.

  I stared in disbelief.

  * * *

  “Mason?”

  The boy from the airport sat reading a battered mass-market paperback with a purple cover. I saw a picture of a spaceship, the title Childhood’s End. He looked sleepy, too. There was a huge mug of hot chocolate next to him. White marshmallows floated like miniature buoys in a muddy lake. He put his book aside, brown eyes worried behind his glasses. “Hi, Nikki.”

  I stared. “Since when are you my son?”

  He blushed. “Sorry. It was the only way I could think of to get them to let me in.”

  “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

  He sipped his cocoa. “I thought maybe you could use some
help.”

  “Help? How did you find me?” I repeated. Adrenaline from the last hour leaked away, leaving only confusion in its place. What was this little boy doing here? He seemed almost a hallucination, as though I was talking to an unusually polite and literate potted plant.

  He put his mug down, took off his glasses, and used the hem of his T-shirt to carefully wipe condensation off the lenses. His hair, once again, cried out for a wet comb. “I figured you were going wherever that man had gone. And I knew the logo with the trees had to be important.”

  “But how did you find this place?”

  He shrugged, as though that was obvious. “Google image search.”

  “How did you know to look in Monterey?”

  “I figured he’d be here—otherwise he would have flown to a different airport, right?”

  “True.” I reluctantly admitted to myself that there were benefits to smartphones. I could have asked the boy for help in the first place, instead of running around town asking strangers.

  I thought of something obvious and important. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

  He answered quickly, his eyes on his cocoa. “My father does.”

  “Honest?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes still hadn’t found mine.

  I tried to decide what to do. Coombs was moving farther away every second. But could I just leave a small boy alone at night? Mr. Z’s group was already far enough that I wasn’t going to catch them with speed. Too many roads. Even two or three turns could lead to almost infinite combinations, like the opening moves of a chess game. If I wanted to catch up I’d have to think my way after them.

  I sat down next to him. “Mason. It’s past eleven. You’re seriously telling me your father knows that you’re at a strange hotel waiting for a strange woman you met at the airport?”

  “He doesn’t care!” the boy exclaimed, finally meeting my eyes.

  “Of course, he cares. He’s your father.”