I’m sprayed by a pink mist of brain and skull and gristle. My ears ring. I look down at my own gun, to see if I fired accidentally.
But it wasn’t my gun.
I turn. Amanda is behind me, holding the big pistol that I last saw brandished by Agent Mitchell.
‘Why did you do that?’ I ask her, even though I know the answer.
‘He was suffering,’ she says. ‘He was in terrible pain. I put him out of his misery.’
She steps towards me. A shaft of sunlight lands on her face, and I study her. The sun is brutal, and now I can see the lines around her eyes, the dark circles beneath them, expertly covered with concealer. Her eyes are beautiful and blank and deep, hiding ancient mysteries.
‘That’s why you were always so interested in me,’ I say. ‘Why you were always keeping tabs on me.’
‘Jim... ’ she begins.
‘That’s why no one killed you in the meth lab. Because it was you. There was no man with long hair, dressed in black. There was just you. You did the killing.’ I realize something. I whisper, in horror, ‘My God. You took out his eyes.’
She doesn’t react. She just looks at me blankly. She lowers her gun.
‘Should I even call you Amanda? Or Katerina?’ I ask. ‘Or should I call you Ghol Gedrosian?’
She is silent.
‘Because that’s your name, isn’t it? Ghol Gedrosian?’ I point to Agent Mitchell, crumpled on the floor. ‘That’s what he was trying to tell me.’
She steps forward. She kneels next to me. She looks into my eyes. She’s close, so close that I can smell her. Beneath the sweat and metallic tang of the crank we smoked hours ago, I detect that sweet floral scent, the scent from that night in the church basement, and from her bedroom. The scent of flowers laid on a grave, the scent of a funeral home. She says: ‘I promise that I will explain everything. But we have to leave here now. There’s a clean-up crew coming. They’re probably already here.’
‘A “clean-up crew”?’
She glances out of the window. I follow her gaze. Parked in Liago’s driveway is a black Lincoln Town Car. Four men get out, slamming their doors. Their faces are unfamiliar, but their posture and demeanour is not. They are big and muscular and move with the brutal certainty of men following orders from someone more frightening than they. Two of them carry red gasoline cans. They come towards the house.
‘They’re here,’ she says. ‘They won’t wait. They have orders.’
‘Orders from who?’
‘You know who.’
‘Tell me the truth. Is your name... ’
She stops my question, while it’s still in the back of my throat, by kissing me. I let her. Her lips are soft, her mouth warm, her tongue gentle.
When she breaks off the kiss she says, ‘We have for ever, you know. To get this right.’
The pain in my leg is just a dull presence now, like an old friend that won’t leave after a long dinner. ‘To get what right?’
‘I’ll explain everything,’ she says. ‘I promise. But you have to go.’
‘Go where?’
She takes an envelope from her pocket and hands it to me. On the outside is written, ‘For Jim Thane.’
I look at it without taking it. ‘What is it?’
‘Your last assignment.’
‘I don’t want an assignment,’ I say, and push back her hand.
She ignores me. ‘There’s an address inside. Go there, and they’ll fix your leg. There’s also a plane ticket. Use it. I’ll meet you when you get there. I promise you.’
‘No.’
‘You can’t stay here. You know that, don’t you?’
I look around the room. There are six dead bodies. Blood is puddled on the floor, splattered against the leather chairs, across the wood walls.
Outside the window, the big men are splashing gasoline along the base of the house. Just beyond the office door, I hear heavy footsteps in the foyer, stomping on the wooden floor. I smell the gasoline.
She’s right, of course. I can’t stay here. Not because of the dead bodies, or because of the gasoline being splashed through the house – but because Jimmy Thane is finished. His life is over.
I think about the money missing from Tao Software. The dead Dom Vanderbeek. The house on Sanibel. The hooker named Libby Thane lying on a gurney with her throat cut. Everything points to a man named Jimmy Thane. Everything points to me.
‘I know,’ I say.
‘You can’t be Jimmy Thane. Not any more. That’s over. But we’ll try again.’
‘Try what again?’
She prises my fingers from the gun, and takes it from me. She lifts my empty palm to her face. She rubs my fingertips on her skin and on her lips. She kisses them. I feel her wet tears on my hand.
I say, with all the anger drained from my voice, all the emotion gone:
‘I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want from me.’
‘You will,’ she says. She wraps my fingers around the envelope and squeezes my hand. ‘It’s time to go now.’
I stare at her. ‘Ghol Gedrosian,’ I say, trying out the name, trying to match it to the face that I see in front of me. The face that looks so much older than I remember Amanda ever being. So much wiser. So much stronger.
Yet still beautiful. I’ve loved her for ever, I realize now. The feeling comes back to me like a breeze on my face. Not memories, exactly. Just a soft feeling. A sense of comfort. The simplest, deepest kind of love.
‘It’s time to go,’ she says again. ‘You have a very long trip ahead of you. A very long trip.’
CHAPTER 53
It’s a small shack, on a remote island near Orcas.
There’s no road to it, no way to reach it from Orcas itself – no way to reach it from the place where the tourists stay – from the ferry, or the bed-and-breakfasts, or the holistic spas, or the art galleries. I have to hire a boat to take me there. It’s a tiny skiff with a putt-putt on the back, and the captain is an old man with sunburnt skin and a melanoma shaped like the State of California on his nose.
On the ride over, as we trace the edge of Orcas Island, he explains to me that he also runs fishing tours, and that if I’m interested, I should return to the dock where I found him. He’s there every day. I tell him I might just do that. But not today. It’s been a long trip, across the country, and I haven’t slept in a long time.
He nods. He rambles on about fishing, and the best hour of the day to find halibut and snapper, and the best hour to find him on the dock, and how if I time it right, I might even have the boat to myself without paying for a private tour.
We round a cove, and up ahead we see gigantic houses built against the water, with wide expanses of green lawn running down to the ocean and touching it. The captain grows quiet, and a cloud darkens his face. He explains that a lot of software executives live on this side of the island. He takes them back and forth to town. Most don’t even know how to use a boat. Isn’t that crazy – he asks – to own a house on an island, but not know how to use a boat?
It is crazy, I agree.
‘You in the software business?’ he asks.
‘I was once.’
He grunts in a way that suggests this doesn’t please him. But then we pull around the inlet, the motor putting, and we see the metal sign on a pebble-strewn beach, announcing the address that I read to him when I got on the boat. On a bluff above the rocks, he sees the shack, and when he realizes how small and run-down it is, how dilapidated and close to collapse, he becomes amiable again. I’m no different than he is. Not like those fancy software people.
‘Never been this far back,’ he admits. ‘Didn’t even know this house existed.’
‘Hardly come here myself,’ I tell him.
I pay him sixty bucks, twenty more than we agreed, and tell him to keep the change. ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘You need any help getting up there?’
He glances at my crutches, and then at the rocky bank that I’ll have to climb to reach the shac
k.
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Pumped up on crystal meth; can’t feel a thing.’
‘Ha!’ he laughs.
Minutes later, his boat pulls away, and I’m left standing on a rocky shore, in the middle of the Puget Sound. The air is cold, and smells like salt, and when drops condense on my cheek, they sting like tears.
The shack has electricity, at least. A black wire arcs from a utility pole nearby. I limp up the hill, the rubber feet of my crutches digging into pebbles, crushing shells. The door opens without a key.
I flick the light. The interior of the shack looks like an execution chamber. Wool blankets, black and rough, are taped across the windows, smothering the sunlight. In the middle of the room is a wooden chair. A video camera on a tripod points at it. Strapped to the chair is a corpse.
Most of the skin on his face is gone, and the patches that remain look like old leather, yellow and brittle, stretched tightly over a skull that leers at me. The man in the chair is held in place with black electrical tape on his wrists and ankles. He wears a business suit. His eye sockets are empty. He stares blindly, smiling.
There’s a table on the far side, and a small metal wash basin. I close the door of the shack and go to the basin. There’s an old metallic mirror above the faucet. I try to avoid looking at my face. Just below the mirror is a wooden shelf upon which a straight-edge razor lies. In the sink is a pile of hair. Dark brown, fading to grey. My own colour.
I limp back to the table. There’s an envelope, and an old manual typewriter, and a laptop computer, which is closed. A Post-it note on the back of the computer says: ‘Play movie’.
I open the laptop, and it wakes from electronic slumber. In the middle of the screen is a video file, named ‘PLAY ME’.
Instead I take out my cellphone. There’s one bar of signal strength. I dial a number. A strange woman answers – someone I don’t recognize – and I ask her to connect me to Darryl Gaspar. She doesn’t ask me who I am, or why I’m calling. She just says, ‘Hold, please,’ and then the line rings, and my old colleague, Darryl, sounding quite stoned, answers. ‘Yo yo yo?’ he says.
‘Darryl, it’s me. Jim Thane.’
His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Jim?’ He speaks quickly. ‘Where are you? There’s a hundred cops looking for you. What’s going on?’
‘I need your help. Can you set up a demo for me – a P-Scan demo?’
‘You want to demo our product? Now?’
‘I’ll need to log in remotely. Can you set it up?’
‘Sure... but... ’
‘No questions, Darryl.’
‘Yeah, all right,’ he says. ‘You know how to use RDC?’
‘More or less.’
‘Write this down.’
I take out a pen. He reads me four numbers, a computer Internet address. I write them on the yellow Post-it.
‘You can log in through that IP,’ he says. ‘What photo do you want to use?’
‘I’ll email it to you.’
It takes only a few minutes to set up.
I point my cellphone camera at my own face and take a picture. I stare at the photo on the tiny screen. The man I see is tired, and old, and worn. He has sleepy eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot, and a glaucous complexion. His hair is matted, dirty. He needs a shower.
I email the photo to Darryl. On the laptop, I fire up the Remote Desktop Client program. I type the Internet Protocol address that Darryl gave. Now, on the laptop screen, I can see and control Darryl’s computer, as if I am seated in front of it.
What I see on the screen is familiar to me. It’s Tao’s P-Scan program, except, this time, it’s my own photograph – the one I just sent to Darryl – in the corner of the screen, labelled ‘Target to Identify’.
I click the icon that says ‘START SCAN’.
On screen, my photo fades and transforms into grey and yellow blocks, highlighting my dark and sleepy eyes, my broken nose, the width of my jaw.
The word, ‘Scanning... ’ appears, and then, below it, flashing strings of text: ‘DMV: Alabama... DMV: Alaska... DMV: American Samoa... DMV: Arizona... ’
At California, the search pauses, and text appears: ‘Possible Match’, along with a driver’s licence photograph. There’s no mistaking it; the driver’s licence found by P-Scan contains a photograph of me. Except, the name on the licence is: ‘Lawson Chatterlee’, and it lists an address in Los Angeles that I do not know.
Other driver’s licences come up as positive matches, too – one in Delaware, again with my photograph – clearly and certainly me – but this time with the name Tyler Farnsworth beneath; and one in Hawaii, with my photo supposedly belonging to a man named Manuel de Casas.
Other databases are searched, and they turn up a surprising number of ‘possible matches’. A search of New York Legal Journal shows a photograph of me, leaning over a desk and poring over a folio-bound law journal, with the caption, ‘Attorney Stanley Hopewell joins Cravath, Swain & Moore LLP as a partner in their Intellectual Property practice’.
From the De Moines Register Online is another photograph of me, this one black-and-white, with the caption, ‘Derrick Fruetel is being sought for questioning in the murder of his wife, Jane Fruetel. He is currently at large.’
Another photograph of me, back in Hawaii, dated two years ago. It’s from a local newspaper article announcing that ‘James Johnson, Child Psychiatrist’ has returned to the Big Island from the mainland, and that I have opened a practice specializing in the treatment of teenage drug addiction.
I don’t bother waiting for the P-Scan to finish. There will be other photos, too. Other names. Other restarts. I shut the laptop.
I put off doing it for as long as I can.
But at last, I do it anyway, because it’s part of the script. The script that I wrote for myself, long ago.
I swing onto my crutches, and cross the tiny cabin, and approach the dead man waiting for me on the chair.
I see a bulge of wallet in his suit pocket.
Gingerly, I reach for it, trying not to touch the corpse. I hold my breath. My fingers brush something hard, and when I look down they are on white pelvic bone, just above his pants waist. Dried stringy muscle is attached to the hip.
I ignore it and dig my fingers into the pocket. I retrieve the wallet, a beautiful crocodile billfold. Inside, in a transparent plastic window, is a California driver’s licence. It shows a photograph of a man. The photograph is blond, handsome, thin, with a pronounced bone structure that makes the man look regal and severe. The man looks absolutely nothing like me.
He does look, however, like the man in the chair – or at least like some version of that man – the version that was once alive.
The name on the driver’s licence says: ‘James Thane’.
I close the billfold, and gently return it to Jimmy Thane’s pocket.
Back to the laptop computer. I open it again, and I click on the video file that I left for myself, at the centre of the screen, named ‘PLAY ME’.
I don’t need to watch for very long. Just a minute or two is enough. The image on the screen suddenly is familiar, burning through a haze of forgotten memory: it was recorded in this shack, by the same camera that stands on the tripod just behind me. It shows the man in the chair being tortured. It shows the horrible things that were done to him. His fingers being chopped, his body being cut.
The screams. The endless screams.
The man standing over him, performing these deeds, has no expression on his face. There is no pleasure. No disgust.
He asks his questions in a cold, unemotional voice, sucking every bit of information from the dying Jimmy Thane – asking him about his wife Libby, and his drowned child, and his ruthless sponsor Gordon, and that time in the parking garage, and what was Libby buying in the supermarket, that night you ran into her and agreed to have dinner?
The man conducting this torture, and asking these questions, is me.
I close the laptop, so that the screaming will stop.
&
nbsp; CHAPTER 54
I see her on the beach, sitting cross-legged atop a rock that juts into the water, not far from the shack. She wasn’t there when I went inside. She has been waiting for me, somewhere nearby. Or maybe she just arrived.
I swing onto my crutches, and down the lawn, and onto the beach. The rubber feet sink into pebbled sand. When I reach the rock where she sits, I slant the crutches against it, and I pull myself onto the stone beside her. The rock is wet, and mossy, and cold. We sit, next to each other, looking into the Puget Sound. She doesn’t turn to me. Doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve come.
‘Amanda,’ I say. ‘Who was that man, in the chair?’
‘Oh, him?’ she says, with a casualness that horrifies me. She does not turn to me. ‘A weak man. A customer. He never could quite pay what he owed.’
‘He was Jim Thane?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘And the woman I lived with? The woman that was my wife?’
‘Libby,’ she says dully.
‘But her name wasn’t Libby.’
‘No,’ she agrees. ‘She worked for you. You promised to help her daughter, if she did a good job.’
‘A good job?’
‘If she convinced you.’
‘She didn’t do a very good job,’ I say.
‘No,’ she agrees. ‘The wives are always the hardest to get right. Love is so hard to pretend.’
‘And those men that lived across the street from us?’
‘Dispensable. They were supposed to watch you. To protect you. To keep the plan on track.’
She turns to me, and smiles. Her teeth are little white pebbles, just as I remember them. There is something so foreign about crooked little teeth. Something un-American.
In Russian she says, ‘Do you know how many times I’ve explained this to you?’
In Russian, I answer: ‘How many?’
‘Oh,’ she says. And she looks into the distance, and her lips move slightly, as if she is counting silently to herself. Then, she gives up, and shrugs, and says, ‘Too many.’
We continue in the language that, until moments ago, I did not know that I could speak. ‘Tell me anyway,’ I say. ‘That man in the airport. Gordon Kramer – he—’
No Way Back Page 36
