Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  “Fifteen.”

  “Twelve.”

  “Done.” I hugged him tight. “Don’t worry about me, Pops.”

  He held me very close, like he thought letting go was a mistake. “If I don’t worry about you, how will I fill my day?” he asked.

  “Chess?”

  I got into the car, waved my cell phone at him, and drove without incident the grueling mile and a half to the English Muffin. Dad didn’t look happy in my rearview mirror.

  The English Muffin is a little café so adorable, you want to buy it some chew toys and adopt it. There are exactly four tables outside, each with an umbrella made of cast metal of some kind that’s supposed to make the place look like New Orleans, which belies the whole “English” thing. But Danielle St. James, who owns the place, is a warm, lovely person and, better, a terrific baker. Glenn Waterman was certain to be dazzled by the fare, if not by me.

  Except he didn’t show up. Not for half an hour. I sat outside at the table watching the temperature and humidity levels rise, checking my phone for texts—only two came, both from Dad—or missed calls. Nothing.

  It wasn’t really a long enough period of time to call for clarification, and I was just about to give up without even having anything to eat (disappointment doesn’t generally kill my appetite, but despair brings it down a notch for sure) when I heard a slightly familiar voice from behind me.

  “Ms. Goldman. Who else knows you’re here?”

  I stood up and turned, my stomach doing calisthenics the whole time. Then I let out a sigh of relief. Behind me, reassuring in all her Amazonian largeness, was Special Agent Rafferty.

  “Just my dad,” I said. “How did you know I was here?”

  “I’ve been running checks on the calls you got from this movie producer you’re supposed to be meeting,” she answered. “Something sounded a little weird about it. I mean, I like your books, but have they ever even heard of you in Hollywood?”

  Everybody thinks they know the book business. “They’re interested in the Duffy Madison books as a possible TV series, as a matter of fact,” I said, wondering why I was defending myself all of a sudden. “So what about Glenn Waterman? I checked him out; he’s real.”

  Rafferty nodded. “Yeah, but the calls you got weren’t. They didn’t come from Los Angeles, and they weren’t from that company. Someone wanted to lure you—” She turned her head suddenly, seemingly alarmed. “Did you hear that?”

  I hadn’t heard anything and told her so.

  “Stay right there a moment. Don’t move,” Rafferty said. She patted her side, no doubt looking for her weapon, and walked, quickly but cautiously, around the side of the English Muffin. There was an alley there where I knew Danielle could receive deliveries and sometimes park her car when there wasn’t a space nearby. But Rafferty didn’t seem interested in that; she looked really intense. Then she disappeared around the corner.

  After a second, she started to laugh. “Oh, sorry about that,” she called from around the corner. “Didn’t mean to worry you. It’s just . . . it’s too funny.”

  I snorted at the sound of her amusement and walked around to the side to see what was so damn hilarious. But when I got to the alley, all I saw was a pretty ordinary four-door car, a Ford or a Nissan or something. I’m not great with cars.

  “What’s so—?” That was as far as I got.

  I felt a sharp pain in my right hip, a pinch, really, and heard Rafferty say, “You just go ahead to sleep, now,” as she caught me under the arms. I tried to protest, but my head suddenly weighed sixty-five pounds and my eyelids were gaining weight equally fast.

  The last thought I had before I blacked out was “TSTL.”

  Too stupid to live.

  Chapter 26

  Honestly, I don’t remember much for the rest of that day. Whatever had been injected into my hip did its job with some high level of efficiency. I can’t remember being put into the car, although I surely was, or riding for hours (and I’m sure that’s what happened), and I don’t remember being taken out of the car and dragged into what appeared to be a very large, mothball-scented attic.

  Whoever had done this to me must have been remarkably strong or had help, an elevator, a hand truck, or some combination of those things. That really didn’t matter much to me at the moment.

  I’ll confess it: my first coherent thought after quite a while of not wanting to wake up at all was, “I guess this means I’m not meeting with Glenn Waterman.”

  Yes, that is precisely how crazy I am, and I was willing to bet I’d be the sanest one in the room the minute that hatch in the floor next to me opened up and someone climbed into my loft. I’d decided it was a loft because “torture chamber” was just a little too bleak.

  To be fair, there wasn’t anything in the room that would indicate I was in line to be physically abused. There were blue, probably room-darkening blinds on the one window, so I couldn’t really see out to determine where I might be located. There was an area rug in the center of the room, but I was not sitting on it and the hardwood floor was living up to its name, so my butt was falling asleep rapidly—or maybe it just hadn’t yet woken up.

  I sincerely can’t tell you why I wasn’t in the panic attack to end all panic attacks. I should have been crying, screaming, gasping for breath, and pleading for my release. Of course, there wasn’t anyone there with whom to plead, so that last part was simply a matter of practicality. The rest? No idea why I wasn’t doing it.

  I was thinking along with the character. I must have decided somewhere along the line that if I was going to be in this terrifying position, I’d pretend it was a scenario I was concocting for a new book and that I was somehow just doing the research to see how it felt to be kidnapped and held against my will.

  It sucked, for the record.

  My hands and feet were not bound, which I had figured, since Sunny Maugham’s arms and legs—and I was sure, those of the other three members of the exclusive club I’d just joined—had not shown any bruises. But there was clearly no way out of this place except the hatch, and that was clearly locked from underneath. I suppose I could have tried the window, but jumping to my death wasn’t really all that much an improvement over whatever hideous plan my captor(s) must surely have in store for me.

  I walked over to the window, giving my behind a chance to work out the pins and needles. I was walking slowly, my head in a fog still. Stumbling was not a fantastic option; there was no furniture to break my fall if I fell, and there was that window, which undoubtedly was very high off the ground.

  But I’d never really get to know, because when I moved the blinds, I saw the window had been boarded up from the outside. Touché, complete maniac who had taken me away from my friends and my father.

  Dad must be frantic, I thought. He’d been right all along, and even if I managed to do what none of the other authors had done and survive this ordeal, I’d have to admit that to him and hear him tell me exactly how I didn’t listen to his warnings for the rest of my life. It almost made being murdered by a nutty copy editor seem preferable.

  Almost.

  In one corner behind me, there was a steamer trunk from an era when luggage was big enough to take with you on a ship to Europe and stay six months but before they’d figured out about putting wheels on suitcases. Next to it was a carpenter’s toolbox, probably built by the carpenter himself (or herself; what did I know?) out of wood, with a drawer on top and an open section, about the size of two kitchen cabinets, below it. I walked over. The whole toolbox was empty; the steamer trunk smelled of mothballs but had no clothing in it. No weapons there.

  There was a lamp in the far corner of the room, which was why I could see anything in here, I realized. It was a pole lamp with three bulbs, but it wasn’t exactly making the place look cheery. There was no furniture, no chairs, no table, no bed.

  Whoever was keeping me here certainly didn’t intend to be doing so for a long time. I wasn’t sure whether I was glad about that, but I was guessin
g I wasn’t.

  I looked around for something I could use. As a novelist, you have to mentally put yourself into the scene you’re writing. That means you imagine where the fake incidents are supposed to be happening, you furnish it with things that would be logical for the surroundings, and then you decide how your characters would use those things, either furniture or objects. The better you imagine, the more real your scene will be.

  The person who had dreamed this scene up appeared to have a very sparse imagination. Besides the lamp and the rug, there was a collection of paperback novels—all crime fiction, of course, and many of them by the murdered writers—in a bookshelf that was built into the wall and couldn’t be shaken loose. Believe me.

  The worse part was that the maniac didn’t have one of my titles on the shelf. Not one. I was going to die at this person’s hand, and I couldn’t even be sure it belonged to one of my readers.

  Don’t worry; the fact that you think that’s crazy indicates you have a normal mind.

  There was no gun rack, no straight razor, no hunting knife, no bow and arrow, none of the conveniently if unrealistically placed weapons authors like me are always placing in rooms like this one. There were books and a lamp and a rug. I supposed that when Shana Kineally showed up in the attic—I’d decided it was an attic and not a loft because loft seemed too grand a word now—I could throw some paperbacks at her, but it didn’t really seem the best possible escape plan.

  On the other hand, it was the only one I had right now.

  Despair is an interesting thing, as long as you’re not experiencing it yourself. The notion that nothing is possible, all is lost, you’re out of options (stop me if you’ve heard these . . .), there are no possibilities—it is supposed to lead to a nothing-to-lose attitude, a sense of freedom, almost. That’s if you like popular fiction or TV.

  What I can tell you about the emotion of being trapped in an attic is that more than anything else, it pisses you off. Everything you think you might try is a dead end, but you don’t realize it until after that adrenaline rush of hope, almost immediately dashed. After this happened three or four times, I was nail-spittin’ mad.

  And that was the bad luck of the person who unlocked the hatch in the center of the room and pulled down the stairs to climb up to my level. Because even if my head was still a little woozy, I had been abducted, my life was no doubt in some jeopardy, and worst of all, I now had to apologize to my father. When Shana Kineally appeared, she’d have the devil to pay.

  I couldn’t arm myself with anything, because there was nothing there. I suppose it would be possible to threaten someone with a rolled-up area rug, but I hadn’t given that enough thought and left the thing on the floor, flat and the opposite of dangerous. I did find myself, without conscious thought, curling my hands into claws and mentally sharpening my fingernails.

  When Special Agent Eunice Rafferty emerged from the lower floor of wherever I was, it was less a surprise than a disappointment. I had probably already registered in the back of my sedated mind the information that brought with it.

  “You,” I said. “You’re Shana Kineally.”

  “Big reveal,” she answered. “Somewhere around page two fifty, no? Or is this a mystery novel, and I don’t get exposed until the last chapter?”

  “I didn’t write this one,” I said. “You’re the author of this sick story.”

  Her eyes met mine. “Ooh. A feisty one.” She held out her right hand and then opened it to show two tablets and reached into her cargo shorts to pull out a plastic water bottle. “Take these,” she said. “Your head must be pounding.”

  I took the pills from her and put them in my mouth, then gratefully took the water bottle and sniffed it before drinking.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s nothing in the water. I don’t intend to poison you.”

  Be that as it may, I still stashed the pills in the corner of my jaw between my teeth and my cheek. I wasn’t swallowing any “medicine” she gave me. This was blood sport.

  “What do you intend to do with me?” I asked. “How long has it been since you knocked me out and took me away?”

  “Only about eight hours,” she said. “You’re not even officially missing yet.” I was sure that was wrong, since Dad would have called Ben or Duffy almost immediately after I failed to answer his text. “Still, I’m sure your pals down in Bergen County are already looking for you. They won’t find you.”

  Down in Bergen County. That meant we were north of there, probably in New York State or Connecticut, based on the time. If Duffy’s candy wrapper was right, we were in or near Syracuse, best bet. I couldn’t be sure how long I’d been in the room; the drive could have taken an hour or seven. But any information I could get might prove useful later.

  “You didn’t answer my first question,” I said. “What are you going to do with me?”

  A really chilling smile arranged itself on her face. “You saw the others,” she purred. “What do you think I’m going to do?”

  I braced myself emotionally; showing fear would do no good, and it wouldn’t even make me feel better. I decided to concentrate on being angry. “If you think I’m giving you creative ideas, lady, you have snatched yourself the wrong author. You want to know how to treat me? Read some Dr. Seuss.”

  “He’s dead,” Kineally answered. “And I didn’t even kill him.”

  “That’s a relief. But I’m going to be up here in your little cage for a few days, aren’t I? Isn’t that your pattern?” The pills next to my gum were starting to chafe; they’d probably dissolve and my efforts not to take them would have been for naught. It was a bitch being a modern damsel in distress; cowering and waiting for a man to come save me would have been so much less stressful.

  “I don’t discuss process,” she said. “It ruins the surprise.”

  “So you came upstairs to give me a couple of Tylenol and act like Catwoman?” I sat down next to the wall and leaned back. “What’s the matter, by the way—a chair would have put you in bankruptcy?”

  “I came up here to establish the rules,” she said, barely an inflection in her voice.

  “Yeah, because if I don’t follow them, you’ll do what? You’re going to kill me either way.”

  “True.” Kineally began walking the perimeter of the room, perhaps daring me to make a break for the stairs in the center, but I knew that was a sucker’s move. Instead, I faked a cough and ejected the two slobbery pills into my left hand. Which had seemed like a good idea at the time. “But how . . . unpleasant your time might be is determined by how closely you follow the rules.”

  “That’s a hell of an incentive,” I shot back. “Please. Tell me what I must do to die pleasantly.”

  “No escape attempts,” she answered, as if I were serious about the question. “The first time I catch you trying to get away—and believe me, I will catch you—I will make sure to cause you great suffering. There won’t be any attempts after that.” Okay, that was pretty ominous, so I tried to think of things to make me angry instead of scared. No movie deal. That was it.

  “You know that by snatching me up this morning, you cheated me out of a movie deal for one of my books?” I spat at her. I have no idea why I thought that would be a useful weapon, but it did piss me off again, and that seemed the right way to go.

  But from Kineally’s mouth came the voice of the receptionist Marcie I’d heard on the phone. “You mean the meeting with Mr. Glenn Waterman of Beverly Hills Productions?” she teased, then switched back to her real tone. “Honey, that wasn’t ever going to happen. It was a way to lure you out, is all. Glenn Waterman’s never heard of you.”

  “You called my agent? How did you even know about the manuscript?”

  “Thank your pal Duffy Madison,” she said with a brittle, cold laugh. “He was talking up that book Little Boy Lost with Hollywood producers and made some phone calls. Word got to me through a connection in Hugh Ventnor’s office at Parthenon, maybe to see if I’d edit a new series from yo
u if the movie deal went through.” She sneered. “Which it’s not.”

  “But my agent didn’t know, and he didn’t show up at the supposed meeting this morning.” Go ahead; prove the movie deal was real to the woman who’d made it up.

  Her voice took on that of “Marcie” again. “Hello, Mr. Resnick? Ms. Goldman and Mr. Waterman decided to make the meeting tomorrow at his hotel. Yes, I’ll get back to you with the details.” Rarely have I felt more stupid.

  “Duffy,” I said to myself. She’d mentioned his name, but I was almost trying to summon him.

  “I told you not to trust him. But then, we were talking about the rules. I said not to try to escape.”

  “Why would I want to, as hospitable as you’re being?”

  She ignored that. “I’ve taken your cell phone; you probably realized that already. When it’s time for people to find you, I’ll make the call. Not to worry. You won’t have to pay your cell phone bill this month, anyway.” Now I was pissed off and afraid.

  “If I knew you were paying, I would have gotten the more expensive data package.” It wasn’t much, but the circumstances were playing against my quick wit.

  “I’ll give you food and water when I feel it’s time. You may not come out of this space to use the bathroom unless I bring you downstairs myself. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”

  “What’s the point of keeping me here for however many days?” It had been bothering me for a week now. “You take these authors and keep them here for a while, and then you kill them and take them back to where they live. Why not just kill them right away?” Talking about the other victims made it seem less like I was becoming one of them. Reality was not my best friend right at the moment, so I was denying it.

  “In your case, the point is to get your pals looking for you in the wrong direction,” she said, eager to show off her brilliant technique. “The others were for different reasons. You’re a special case.”

  Somehow that didn’t make me feel better. “You’re a major nut job, you know that?” I yelled. “What’s your problem, anyway? You had to kill all those authors because you didn’t like their syntax? Their misuse of apostrophes finally put you over the edge?”