Finally he can bear it no longer. Summoning all his courage, and the strength of despair, with one convulsive effort Nelson manages to yank the leg free of the porcelain, leaving a patch of hairy, bloody skin the approximate size and shape of a Dr. Scholl’s insert adhering to the inside of the tub. But the pain, at its flood stage, is worse than he could have imagined, and even after it begins to ebb, he knows he will never be able to summon either the courage or the strength to face it again.
And with the departure of that last, forlorn hope—that he might somehow be able to free himself, a limb at a time—comes a sudden clarity. But even though Nelson knows what comes next, the life force is still surprisingly strong within him—if it hadn’t been, he’d have ended his own life years ago, ended it a hundred times over. So as he uses his free heel to kick down the lever that closes the drain, then to nudge open first the right-hand tap, then the left, he tells himself he’s only running a bath. For the warmth. And maybe the water will melt the glue before…
The running water is the first sound Nelson has heard since Simon left, except, of course, for the high-pitched squeal of his own stifled screams. He closes his eyes. The water rises, rises; it covers his ears, muffling its own roar. It sounds like a distant cataract now, and Nelson is floating downstream toward it. It’s all very peaceful, in a hallucinatory sort of way, until the first trickle of water tickles his upper lip. He tries to raise his head, is almost surprised to find it held fast.
Not like this, he thinks. Death, yes: being dead meant you didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Funny that hadn’t occurred to him before. And drowning, sure: there was supposed to be some kind of reflex that kicked in after your lungs filled with water, that made it a much more peaceful way to go than most people thought. But not slowly, not like this, not a trickle at a time. Then the trickle becomes a steady flow, and the flow a warm, choking flood; Nelson flails wildly with his free foot, trying to find the taps again, trying to find the drain lever as the warm water begins to close over his head.
7
Say what you will about the inconvenience of being hunted for capital crimes, it not only kept the blind rat at bay almost as efficiently as the most elaborately planned session of the fear game, but was a liberating experience as well. There was no need for Simon to dispose of Zap Strum’s body, or even hide his own culpability—they could only execute you once, only incarcerate you for a single lifetime.
On the other hand, it was Simon’s understanding that every web site or e-mail address, every keystroke recently accessed on a computer, could somehow be recovered from the hard drive. Which meant that somewhere in this rat’s nest of a loft was information that could not only tell the cops (and when Simon thought of cops now, it was Pender’s face that came to mind) where Simon had been, but might also tip them off as to where he was heading.
“Can’t have that,” Simon explained to Zap, still slumped in his expensive chair, as he rolled the Aeron out from in front of the command post and tipped it forward to empty it. The dreadlocked corpse hit the floor with a meaty, tumbling thud—a gratuitous discourtesy on Simon’s part, as it turned out, the blood-soaked seat back and cushion rendering the chair unsittable.
Undeterred, Simon dragged the saddle-shaped leather foot-stool over to the desk, straddled it, and began tapping the keyboard randomly—he assumed Zap’s own system had a poison pill or fail-safe device similar to the one Zap had installed on Simon’s. Sure enough, the screensaver—a blond woman with breasts larger than her head, performing an endless striptease—fragmented into hundreds of tiny ASCII characters; a few seconds later the screen went dark.
Just to be on the safe side, though, Simon decided to go lowtech for backup. He ducked under the desk, unplugged the CPU box from the surge protector, and proceeded to dismantle, not just that CPU, but every computer and Zip drive in the apartment, then take a ball peen hammer to every silvery disk he found. There was also a small box of floppy disks—these he incinerated in Zap’s toaster oven, along with a videocassette he’d ejected from a deck that looked as if it might be connected to the security camera monitoring the vestibule.
Fifteen minutes later, just as the first wisps of oily, pungent, probably toxic, black smoke had begun to issue from the counter-top oven, Simon located Zap’s stash in a false-front bookcase, behind a dummy set of vintage Encyclopaedia Britannica s. “Mercy buckets, dude,” he muttered, as he stuffed a few prebagged ounces of sinsemilla into his satchel, along with an eclectic, rainbow assortment of uppers, downers, and the milder psychedelics he preferred.
Then, after a short wait in the downstairs vestibule until the sidewalk was clear, it was sayonara Zap, sayonara SoMa, and sayonara San Francisco as Simon, his getaway satchel bulging with cash, drugs, and most important, the Pender printout, pointed Nelson’s Volvo toward the shadowy lower deck of the Bay Bridge, in the direction of Concord, sanctuary, and one final reunion with a bathtub-bound childhood friend—his last surviving friend, it occurred to Simon.
It was a bittersweet realization, a little sad, a little lonely, and as intensely liberating as being hunted for murder. With Missy and Ganny gone, once Nelson was out of the way, Simon would be alone on this earth. Except, of course, for the old woman in Atlantic City who called herself Rosie Delamour, but she didn’t really count. Screw her and the horse she rode out on, was Simon’s motto.
But even thinking about her could degrade a bittersweet mood down to just plain bitter. And bitter was no way to be when you were about to bid farewell to your oldest friend, thought Simon as he pulled into Nelson’s driveway and used the remote clipped to the Volvo’s sun visor to open the garage door, then close it behind him.
Inside the garage, all was peaceful again—at least after Simon had treated himself to a few tokes of Zap Strum’s finest. Dim gray light, smell of old oil stains and cement dust; the only sounds were the hum of the water heater inside its cozy blanket of insulation and the distant, homey gurgle of water through overhead pipes, which reminded Simon of Missy and her endless bath. A little catch of a sob caught in his throat, even as the memory brought a smile: the bittersweet feeling was back.
Not for long, though. As he let himself into the house, it suddenly dawned on Simon that there shouldn’t have been any water-heater hum or homey gurgle in the pipes—there shouldn’t have been any water running anywhere in that house, unless a pipe had burst or Nelson had somehow—
But no, that was impossible. Had to be a pipe, he thought, stepping back as a drop of water fell past him and hit the already saturated hall carpet with a fat plop, then looking up to see the dark, continent-shaped water stain spreading across the underside of the ceiling, a nipple-shaped drop gathering at its center. Simon hurried down the hall into the living room, saw that the flood in the hallway was relatively minor compared to the cataract sluicing down the narrow enclosed stairway from the second-floor landing, as if the staircase were a salmon ladder cut into the side of a dam. He splashed up the stairs two at a time, careened around the corner, raced through Nelson’s bedroom, and skidded to a halt at the bathroom door, the heels of the hard-soled black loafers he’d borrowed from Nelson that morning kicking up tiny rooster tails in his wake.
And although Simon had not knowingly been afraid of water since Grandfather Childs had cured him of his fear of drowning nearly half a century ago, he found himself frozen in the doorway, unable to move, watching helplessly as the torrent poured full-throated from the tap, noisily churning the surface of the bath and overflowing the side of the tub like a miniature Niagara. All he could see of Nelson were a few strands of blond hair waving like tendrils of seaweed in the roiling water.
“Coward,” he screamed, as much at himself as at Nelson; Simon could forgive himself anything except cowardice. “You yellow coward.” The shoes were soaked, his feet wet to the ankle, but the phobia had him in its grip, and he knew that until he had mastered it again, he would be unable to either retreat or advance.
You can do it, he told himself. Yo
u’ve done harder things than this in your lifetime; you’ve overcome more than this. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And if he concentrated, if he listened hard, in the human-voiced burble of the running water he could hear Missy singing to encourage him, singing that song she sometimes sang to encourage herself: “Cinderelly, Cinderelly, you can do it, Cinderelly.”
And call it foolish, even infantile, but slowly his feet began to move, shuffling through the water, one step at a time, but one foot following the other, until he’d reached the tub.
Afterward Simon couldn’t remember turning off the water; all he knew was that it was quiet again, except for the sound of the water still dripping down the staircase, and he was leaning over the tub looking down at poor drowned Nelson.
My last surviving friend on earth, he thought sadly—then it was time to go.
8
The next time Pender’s cell phone rang, Dorie rolled over sleepily and patted his cast. “It’s okay, I’m up.”
More or less—she dozed, drifting in and out of a pleasant Vicodin haze, comforted by the sound of Pender’s voice and the solid, grounding presence of his big body beside her in the bed. They hadn’t made love yet. Once they were actually in bed together last night, broken-boned, drugged, and exhausted, common sense had kicked in—or was it maturity? It was going to happen, though, maybe soon—Dorie was as sure of that as she’d ever been about anything.
“Who was that on the phone?”
“First call was McDougal, my boss. He’s putting Linda Abruzzi in charge of coordinating the investigation. Second call was Pool.”
“Who’s Pool?”
“She runs the FBI. I figured Abruzzi could probably use a few pointers getting this thing off the ground. But to get McDougal to put her in charge, I had to promise to stay out of it.”
“But what if you’d stayed out of it before? Where would…Where would that…”Where would that leave me? Dorie couldn’t bring herself to finish the question, probably because she knew the answer: in Simon’s basement.
“Sid Dolitz says there’s an old Yiddish expression that translates: ‘In the land of What-If, all travelers are unhappy.’ Of course, being Sid, he might have made it up. How’s your nose?”
“I think it probably hurts something awful, but I took a Vicodin when I woke up and another one when I woke up the second time, so the pain ain’t reaching the brain. How’s your arm feeling?”
“Like it got whacked with a frying pan.”
“May I recommend a Vicodin?”
“I already took one.”
“Take another.”
“You think?”
“Hey, it worked for me.”
9
Excited as Linda was about finally having something useful to do, she also wondered whether she might be in over her head. After all, she asked herself as the afternoon wore on, what did she know about coordinating an investigation of this size and complexity, involving five separate investigations in five separate jurisdictions and almost certainly more to come, in addition to an interstate manhunt and a growing media interest that was rapidly threatening to turn into a feeding frenzy?
Precious little, came the answer. And she didn’t feel right asking Pender for advice on how to conduct the rest of the investigation, not after McDougal had specifically informed her that part of her assignment was to keep him as far away from it as possible.
Once again, it was Pool to the rescue. She showed up out of nowhere around three-thirty—Linda certainly hadn’t called her—dressed, not for success, but for raking leaves on a Saturday afternoon, hit the phones, called in a few favors or engaged in a little blackmail, and by six o’clock (miraculous as Pool’s earlier Bureaucratic machinations had been, this one was on the order of parting the Red Sea), the bogus bank records were gone, and Linda’s little office in the DOJ-AOB had been turned into a mini-SIOC (Strategic Information and Operations Center) command post, complete with additional phone and data lines and a cork-backed map of the U.S. that took up the entire wall behind Linda’s desk, along with tiny color-coded flag pins with which to track Childs sightings—white for reported, red for confirmed.
And while the map was going up, Pool, as per Pender’s suggestion, transferred a copy of the database program Thom Davies had devised for Pender a few years ago—a cascading boilerplate calendar, year tiles opening up into months, months into days, days into hours—onto Linda’s computer and, under the pretext of showing Linda how to use the program, gently reminded her of the importance of establishing a time line for her suspect: If you want to know where somebody’s going, first you have to know where they’ve been.
Linda didn’t need a second hint. She set to work, culling data on Simon Childs from every available source, starting with Dorie Bell’s letter and ending with the preliminary findings of the Evidence Response Team still combing through the house on Grizzly Rock Road, and entering it into the database herself. Three hours later, not only did she have a preliminary time line, admittedly with more gaps than entries, tracking Simon Childs from birth through yesterday, but through a sort of immersion therapy, she had begun the unpleasant but necessary process of trying to get into the killer’s mind by first letting him into her mind.
The way it worked, you absorbed and memorized every shred of information about your suspect, until you were as conscious of his tendencies, his likes and dislikes, as you were of your own; when things were really cooking, a stimulus would be almost as likely to bring up one of the suspect’s mnemonic associations as it would one of your own. That way (at least theoretically; Linda had never done this sort of thing before), when the time came, you’d not only know which way your suspect was going to jump, but when, and how high.
Early as it was in the process, then, it was no accident that on her way home that night, when Linda stopped at the Safeway in Potomac to get what passed for a deli sandwich this far from the Bronx and saw a teenage girl with Down syndrome in the parking lot, she thought immediately of Missy Childs.
And later that night, as she lay in bed trying to get to sleep, instead of having her thoughts dwelling morbidly on her MS, as they had almost every night since her diagnosis, Linda found herself thinking about something that Kim Rosen had posted on the PWSPD web site less than a week before she died.
I know how people think. They think your doing it on purpose, or your doing it for attention, and that if only somebody would grab you by the collar and give you a good shaking, maybe slap you around a little and tell you its all in your head, you idiot, its only in your head, that you’d be cured. And what they don’t understand is that life has already shook us dizzy and slapped us silly. And knowing that the fear is in your head doesn’t make it easier to bear, it makes it harder. Because you can protect yourself from something outside, you can run away or lock your door or get a gun. But there’s no place to run when the fear is inside you, and even if you do run, there’s no place to hide.
Ain’t that the truth, thought Linda. She opened an eye. It was nearly one A.M., according to the glowing green hands on her alarm clock, and something was nagging at her. Not Kim, not Simon—something closer to home. Something she’d left undone? Half done? Never mind: if it was important, she’d—
Then it came to her: the laundry. She’d left one load wet in the washer this morning, one load damp in the dryer. Abrootz old girl, she told herself, you’re gonna have some serious ironing to do tomorrow.
10
Not yet, thinks Simon, swimming up through the darkness toward consciousness. Not just yet. He’s been dreaming; Missy was there; he doesn’t want to lose her again quite so soon.
But it’s too late—he’s awake now, surrounded by blackness. For a moment his mind is a delicious blank—he can’t quite place himself in time or space. He might be anywhere, any age, a child in his own bed, awakening from an afternoon nap, or an eighteen-year-old nodded out in a crash pad in the Haight. Then he opens his eyes, turns his head, sees the glowing red numbers on the cheap c
lock radio next to the bed. Three A.M. Figures; he’d dropped the Halwane around midnight.
He sits up, fumbles for a light switch. The motel room materializes around him. Pastel walls, TV on the dresser, still life on the wall: this is where the blind rat lives, he thinks—in a generic, three-in-the-morning motel room outside Winnemucca, Nevada. At least it’s a smoking room, he tells himself, firing up the half-smoked joint he’s left in the ashtray against just such a contingency.
And as he waits for the weed to take effect, he finds himself wondering where Missy is spending the night. On a roll-out slab in a pitch-black drawer in the coroner’s basement, most likely. Don’t be afraid, he wants to tell her—you don’t ever have to be afraid again.
He spreads his map out on the bed and, using his thumb and forefinger as calipers, measures out how far he’s come on 80, then doubles that, pivoting the thumb and forefinger around twice to calculate how far he’s likely to get tomorrow. The second time, his forefinger lands on Ogallala, Nebraska. Two more digital pirouettes, and his forefinger is poised over La Farge, Wisconsin, where Pender’s sister lives.
Monday night, then: at his current pace, he can expect to reach La Farge sometime Monday night. Tomorrow he’ll make the initial overtures. If the real Arthur Bellcock hasn’t already been in touch with her, he’ll set up an interview—have to get a tape recorder on the way, or maybe just a notebook—arrive early, scope out the scene, look for signs of surveillance.
Fear itself: a novel Page 19
