The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk

by David Ambrose

At the same time something strange happened to Charlie. He found himself opening his eyes, but with no memory of having closed them. It wasn’t just a blink. This was like opening his eyes after falling into a light doze. He saw right away that the cab wasn’t in the same place it had been a moment ago—if it was only a moment. It seemed incredible, but he must have fallen asleep.

  “Hey, mister, are you all right?”

  It was the cabdriver looking at him in his mirror.

  “Yeah, sure… I’m fine.”

  “You flaked out back there. I thought you’d had a heart attack.”

  “No, I’m… I’m okay…. How long was I out?”

  “I don’t know. I just looked up and saw you with your head back and your mouth hanging open.”

  “But… how long have I been in the cab?”

  He saw the driver’s face in the mirror crease into a frown.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, mister?”

  “Just tell me how long I’ve been in the damn cab!”

  “Two, three minutes, tops.”

  So what the hell had happened? Had he passed out? Or had Marijuana Shirt used something on him? But what?

  His thoughts were interrupted by the phone in his pocket. He answered it.

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think you’re doing, Charlie?”

  It was Control’s voice. Charlie felt an odd sense of panic, something he was unaccustomed to.

  “Charlie, talk to me.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He was too busy coming to terms with the fact that Control must have been behind what just happened. Control was having him followed because he knew, or at least suspected, that he’d lied about Kathy. That was the only explanation.

  “Charlie!”

  On an impulse, he switched off the phone. It rang again almost at once. This time he didn’t answer, he just flipped open the back and disconnected the battery. Of course that didn’t mean it couldn’t still be used to trace his movements. There could be something in it sending out a signal. He took out his pager, then felt for a space under his seat and wedged it and his phone firmly in there.

  “Pull over on this next corner,” he told the driver, “I’m getting out.”

  “You said the marina. That’s a thirty-dollar fare!” The driver’s voice was pained and indignant.

  Charlie saw there was only six bucks something on the meter this far. “Here’s twenty,” he said, pulling out his wallet and handing over a couple of bills. “Now pull over.”

  The driver did so. Charlie got out and watched the cab disappear in traffic. Then he looked carefully around. He was pretty sure he hadn’t been followed. He started walking.

  Was he crazy, he asked himself, defying Control like this, going out on a limb? For what? For somebody he hadn’t seen for fifteen years or more? Who, for all he knew, might have been a lot less excited to see him than he had been to see her?

  Okay, maybe he was crazy—crazy enough to decide now that he was going to go through with what he’d started. If Kathy was in trouble, it was beginning to look as though the trouble was coming from his own side, not from the amorphous “enemy” out there he’d always taken for granted. That thought disturbed him. He intended to find out what the game was, and who was playing it.

  As he walked he ran through his options. He’d noticed when he paid the cab that he didn’t have much cash on him. Obviously he couldn’t use his credit cards and leave a paper trail. Various solutions presented themselves, theft being one. Then he noticed he was passing an art gallery, and he thought of Virgil Fry. Fry owed him for his last batch of paintings. If he could get to Fry he could demand cash instead of having the money transferred to his bank. He knew he’d have no difficulty persuading the weasel-faced little man to do this one small favor for him.

  Luckily he remembered Fry’s address from the few pieces of correspondence he’d had with him. It was in Pasadena. He checked his wallet again; he had just about enough money to get down there. He found another cabstand. Twenty minutes later he paid it off a few blocks from where Fry’s place should be located.

  If he hadn’t been looking out for the street numbers he would have walked past it without a second glance. It didn’t look much like a gallery at all: more of a junk shop, Charlie would have said. True, there were a few paintings on sale, but none of them Charlie’s. And they were stacked alongside a couple of ancient armchairs, a brass bedstead, and a marble fireplace.

  He paused in the mouth of an alley across the street and watched for signs of life. After a moment he saw Fry moving about in the dark interior. He was about to step out and cross over when he caught sight of something that made him pull back sharply into the shadows and press himself against the wall.

  It was the dusty blue sedan with Marijuana Shirt at the wheel. He pulled up outside Fry’s door and went briskly inside.

  Chapter 26

  CHARLIE COULD SEE the two men through the window. They obviously knew each other, though it was impossible to say how well. They talked urgently for several minutes. Marijuana Shirt seemed to be impressing something of great importance on Fry. and Fry was nodding vigorous agreement. Then Marijuana Shirt left and drove off as abruptly as he had arrived.

  Fry then went methodically into action, closing up the shop, pulling down blinds, and locking the door. He seemed to be alone and without the assistants who sometimes came with him to collect pictures from Charlie’s apartment.

  Slipping from his hiding place, Charlie moved cautiously some way along the street and then crossed quickly to the other side. He found another narrow passage, similar to the one that he’d been standing in, that looked as though it might lead around to the back of Fry’s shop. He ventured down a little way and saw that it did. A white van was parked outside a garage door that had been rolled about three-quarters of the way up into the ceiling. Fry was ducking back and forth under it, loading things into the back of the van. They were Charlie’s pictures—including some of the most recent that he’d painted on the East Coast and left there, not expecting to see them again. Who had brought them back, and why? And where was Virgil Fry taking them now?

  As he watched, Fry rolled down and locked the garage door, slammed shut the rear of his van, and got behind the wheel. Charlie realized he needed to find a car fast if he was going to follow him. He’d done a course on stealing them, and learned enough to know that modern alarms and clever circuitry made that a very skilled and essentially full-time profession. The surest way was to commandeer one. The course on how this was accomplished had been far simpler to understand.

  Taking out his platinum American Express card, he ran the fifty yards to a stop sign. It wasn’t a busy intersection, but visibility was limited, which meant that everybody obeyed the law and stopped. A black Toyota was pulling up as Charlie got there. Flashing his credit card, but holding his fingers so it wasn’t readable, he shouted: “Police!” The driver, mild-looking in a hat and rimless glasses, looked up in alarm. His first instinct was to dive for the lock, which he found, to his relief, was already on. Charlie confirmed this by tugging the door handle to no avail.

  “Police!” he repeated. “I need this car.”

  “Let me see that ID again,” the man behind the wheel said with a tremble in his voice, shouting so he could be heard through the closed window.

  Charlie’s hand moved like a jackhammer. He used the side that had been specially hardened, not just by training but by injections, too. Held the right way, it was like a ridge of steel. In a single movement he shattered the window behind the driver and reached over to unlock his door. His other hand snatched it open. The driver didn’t even have time to cry out before a jab to the neck sent him slumped sideways, unconscious. Charlie bundled him over to the passenger side and slid behind the wheel.

  A few minutes later when Fry pulled out onto the road, all he would have noticed, if he’d noticed anything at all, was a black Toyota with two men in it, one of whom seemed to be enjoying a refreshing sn
ooze while his companion drove.

  Fry headed out on the 405 southbound toward San Diego. Charlie stayed three, sometimes four cars back, occasionally switching lanes so that he wasn’t an eternally hovering presence in Fry’s rearview mirror.

  Nothing in Fry’s behavior suggested he knew he was being followed: no double turns or other tricks to test out the car behind. Instead he just stayed on the main highway. Charlie checked the gas, anxious about how far Fry might be intending to go, but he saw he had nearly a full tank and needn’t worry for a while yet.

  The man in the passenger seat stirred and moaned faintly. Charlie glanced over but paid no particular attention. He had already checked that he wasn’t carrying a weapon, nor was there one hidden within easy reach. He waited for the man to wake up and fully take in what was happening. When he did, he jerked upright and instinctively cowered away from Charlie, pushing himself against the passenger door and groping for the handle.

  Charlie’s hand shot out and took the man’s arm in an iron grip, pulling him away from the door and exerting a painful warning pressure.

  “Don’t panic. Nothing’s going to happen to you. You got a headache?”

  The man nodded and tried to speak, but he was trembling too hard to get the words out.

  “Try anything stupid and you’ll get a worse one. Just do as I say and you’ll be fine. Understand?”

  The man nodded more vigorously this time. “You’re not really a cop, are you?” he managed to say.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Are you on the run?”

  “Empty your pockets.”

  “You’re not a serial killer, are you?”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Okay…sure…look, I’ve got about two hundred dollars…take it…please take it…”

  “Maybe I will.” Charlie took the money held out to him and slipped it into his jacket. He didn’t want to rob the man, but he was still short of cash and had no idea how much he might yet need. “Now empty your pockets, like I said.”

  “But I don’t have anything else—”

  “Do it.”

  The man fumbled through his pockets, pulling out bills, papers, envelopes. “I’ve got some credit cards. If you want my credit cards…”

  “I don’t want your credit cards. Gimme that in your hand.”

  “It’s just personal things, letters…”

  Charlie made an impatient gesture. The man handed over a couple of envelopes. One was handwritten, the other a printed bill. Both bore the same address.

  The man caught the look in Charlie’s eyes and realized what had just happened.

  “Please…my wife, my children… I won’t say anything about this…please don’t do anything to my wife or my children…”

  Charlie pocketed the envelopes ominously. “You better be damn sure you don’t say anything.”

  The man swore on his life that he wouldn’t. They then drove on in silence for a while. Charlie was pretty certain that the guy still hadn’t figured out that they were following the white van several vehicles ahead. He thought Charlie was on the run, which was fine with Charlie. The fewer people who knew what he was up to, the better.

  They drove past signs for Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach; past shopping centers, offices, and auto dealers all incongruously interspersed with fields of cauliflower and potatoes. They drove past the huge South Coast Plaza, after which the signs for John Wayne Airport began to appear. For a moment Charlie worried that Fry was going to take to the air, which would make him more difficult to follow, especially if he took a flight out of the country.

  The freeway had widened to six lanes in both directions. Charlie tightened the distance between himself and Fry as far as he dared, ready to follow if he made a right onto the MacArthur Boulevard exit. Planes were coming in to land, hanging low in the air above their heads.

  But Fry didn’t make a turn. Instead he drove on for another ten minutes, then pulled across two lanes of traffic and signaled he was about to pull off the freeway. He took the Bristol Road off-ramp toward something signposted as the Irvine Spectrum.

  This turned out to be a massive area of high-tech corporate buildings, acres of glass sparkling in the late-afternoon sun. Some of them had their own areas of green and cultivated landscaping. In between were vegetable fields, well farmed by the look of it.

  Charlie saw a sign offering industrial spaces between 2,700 and 100,000 square feet. Looking around him, he thought some of them must be even larger than that. Most were open on all sides, but several were fenced and looked secure.

  They drove on quieter streets now, Charlie still hanging back as far as he dared without losing sight of the white van ahead. After several blocks, Fry signaled a right and pulled over to the side of the road. Luckily a pickup truck was making the same turn, so Charlie didn’t wind up sitting right on Fry’s tail.

  The street they turned into was quieter still, and narrower. Charlie sensed the guy in the passenger seat was beginning to eye him suspiciously. He wasn’t driving like a man in a hurry to get away from something, and any minute now the guy was going to make the connection with the white van up ahead and realize they were following it.

  Just then Fry made a sharp left. Charlie didn’t respond, just drove calmly on. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed big iron gates set back among a long row of mature eucalyptus trees. Fry’s van was already through them and heading up a winding drive, waved on by security guards.

  Charlie drove on, intending to put a mile or so between this place and himself before dumping the car and doubling back. When he saw an empty picnic and rest area, he pulled into it. Without a word, he killed the motor, removed the ignition key, and got out. Then he leaned in through the open window and addressed the vehicle’s still-terrified owner.

  “Unless you want to see me again, forget this happened.”

  “I will.”

  “Remember, I know where you live.”

  The man gulped and swallowed and went a shade paler than he was already. Charlie tossed him the keys; the man flinched as though he’d been thrown a grenade. Charlie turned and walked into the nearby trees. He heard a screech of tires and an overrewed engine and glanced over his shoulder. The car was already back on the road, traveling faster than was wise. He hoped the guy wouldn’t get picked up by the cops too soon and spill everything in his panic. That was why he had started walking in the opposite direction from the one he intended taking once the car and its driver were out of sight.

  Now he turned and started back toward where he had last seen Fry’s van.

  Chapter 27

  IT TOOK HIM less than fifteen minutes to find a tree-covered spot that gave him a view of the place Fry was visiting. It looked similar in design and layout to most others around there: labs, workshops, offices, arranged in a gridlike pattern, with newly created strips of lawn and bits of landscaping here and there to break up the symmetry.

  Yet Charlie could see there was more to this one. It had a chain-link fence with steel posts every few yards. The fence didn’t make it unique; he’d already seen several like it. There was nothing particularly intimidating about it, no spikes on the top or deathly warnings about dogs or electric current. But it was just high enough to make a big deal out of climbing over it. If you made the attempt, you would certainly be spotted. He could see cameras over the main entrances to most of the buildings. There were also two patrol cars: One was always making a slow tour of the estate while the other was stationed near the gate. These people, Charlie decided, didn’t want strangers in there.

  Virgil Fry’s white van was nowhere to be seen. Charlie wondered if he’d parked somewhere out of sight or if he’d left already. If the purpose of his visit had been simply to deliver a load of Charlie’s paintings to some mysterious collector, then he could well be on his way home by now, leaving Charlie with the difficult job of finding out who took such an interest in his artwork, and more important, why. Just at that moment a doo
r to what appeared to be a subterranean garage beneath one of the main buildings swung open and Fry’s van emerged. Charlie couldn’t see clearly enough to be sure it was Fry at the wheel, but he assumed it was. He watched the van drive to the gate, then turn onto the road and start back the way it had come.

  At least, Charlie told himself, he now knew in which building to start looking. All that remained was the question of how to get in. He glanced at his watch, then at the security patrol car touring the tidy, antiseptic avenues set at perfect right angles to one another. For the next hour he timed them. They had a set routine with minor built-in, and equally routine, variations. It wouldn’t be hard to get past them, but first he had to get over the fence.

  He looked around from where he sat in the boughs of the huge eucalyptus. A set of power lines ran from behind and down toward one part of the fence, but not over it. He looked farther and saw that a little way on they crossed another set. This set, Charlie saw as he traced them with his eyes, came back and passed close by one corner of the estate. A little way inside the fence were more trees like the one Charlie was sitting in. They had probably been kept to break the monotony of concrete and glass rectangularity.

  Charlie calculated the distance between the two sets of power lines and decided he could do it. The lines, he knew, were strong enough to take his weight. He knew they carried enough raw electricity to fry him like a piece of bacon at a single touch—but only if he was grounded at the same time. That meant he had to find a way of breaking contact with anything else and just landing on the power line like a trapeze artist. He needed to find somewhere to jump from. He looked around again.

  There was a tower—tall, narrow, almost sheer concrete. It was his only chance, but it would be like climbing a pole.

  He decided to wait until it got a little darker.

  Bracing himself, with the force coming entirely from the grip his feet had on the tower, he launched himself into space. His outstretched hands began to close even before they felt the touch of the cable. He swung hard and felt his skin burn from the friction, but not badly; then he used his whole body to steady himself. He hung there a few moments. There had been no noise: That was good. Nothing had broken or given way. Now all he had to do was pass himself along hand over hand, sometimes hooking his feet to get a little speed, until he was as close as he could get to the second set of power lines.