Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  Then there was Costa Rica, favored by your wealthier fugitives; Brazil—or do we have an extradition treaty with them now? Damn, I used to know that.

  So never mind where he’s going to go, concentrate on how he’s going to get there. One thing for sure—almost for sure—he didn’t drive that Volvo over either border. The airports and bus stations were already covered—how about on foot? Or…

  He worked on the possibilities for most of the drive to the airport, and all he came up with after nearly two hours were a few long shots. Find out if Childs had paid any property taxes to foreign countries. See if he’d ever taken Missy out of this country—he might have a phony passport for himself, but would he have gotten one for her?

  Once they’d dropped the car off, Pender turned his attention to Dorie. He understood enough about phobias by now to know that it was not flying per se that she feared, but the fear of flying. She was less afraid of a crash than she was that she’d lose control, have a panic attack, maybe pass out. So he didn’t bother reassuring her about the safety of air travel or reciting the statistics that said you were more likely to die in your car within ten miles of home than in an airplane accident.

  Instead, as they took their seats on the shuttle van at the Enterprise lot, he leaned as close to her as the brim of his Panama would allow and whispered into her ear that if she wanted to have a panic attack, that would be fine with him. And if she wanted to pass out, that would also be fine with him: he’d stay close enough at all times to catch her before she hit the ground and broke her nose again, then sling her over his shoulder and carry her onto the plane one-handed, flashing his badge as necessary. Which of his zero remaining good hands he would use to flash the badge, he didn’t say.

  He did tell her what wouldn’t be fine with him, though, as the van pulled up in front of the United section of the SFO terminal. Quitting wouldn’t be fine, giving in and giving up wouldn’t be fine. So she didn’t have to waste her psychic energy wondering whether to turn back, as that was no longer an option.

  And no, the Pender treatment was not exactly in line with current psychiatric thinking. Desensitization was the modern style. First you talk it through; then you visualize; then you simulate; then one week you drive by the airport—but no closer—and the next week you walk through the terminal; and so on, until lo and behold, one year and Lord knows how many thousands of dollars in therapist fees later, maybe you’d be ready to fly.

  But who was Pender to challenge the best minds of the psychiatric profession? Where did he get his degree? Why, at the University of Dorie, he would answer. He might not know dick about desensitization therapy, but he knew people, and he knew Dorie. She didn’t need coddling, she needed flooding, a dare, a challenge. Something to arouse that lion heart.

  At seven in the morning, the lines at the counter were still short. They checked their baggage through—Dorie’s painting gear was in a footlocker and her clothes in a full-size suitcase that was never intended as a carry-on—and headed for the gate, with a detour to the same bar Pender and Sid had stopped at six days earlier. A Jim Beam on the rocks for Pender, a screwdriver for Dorie, on the theory that liquor was cheaper and quicker than Xanax, and didn’t give you the shits or diminish your orgasm.

  Not that they were planning to join the Mile High Club—even if Dorie had been willing, there was no way to cram two people their size into an airplane lavatory.

  The worst part, for Dorie, was sitting in the boarding lounge waiting for the flight to be called. It wasn’t Pender who got her through it, though—instead, it was a little boy, maybe four years old, wearing a devilish red-and-black Darth Maul mask, probably part of his costume for Halloween, and playing peekaboo over, under, and around the rows of molded plastic chairs.

  The first time the devil’s face popped up, it gave her a start, no denying that. But a start was all it gave her—she yelped and clutched her hand to her chest, then laughed weakly, same as most adults would have.

  As for the tot, it was probably the first time he’d actually managed to scare somebody; he circled around the row and came around again, and again, and again, and each time Dorie laughed a little harder, not at the boy, but at the absurdity of it all.

  “You sure you don’t want me to tin the little bastard?” asked Pender as the kid came around for the fourth time.

  “Are you kidding?” she replied. “The little bastard is a messenger from God.”

  “From God, eh? And what’s the message?”

  “The message is, Dorie Bell, you’ve wasted two-thirds of your life being afraid of being afraid. Why not unpucker, and enjoy the ride?”

  “Now, there’s an advertising slogan for you,” said Pender. “United Airlines: Unpucker and Enjoy the Ride!”

  3

  A hot shower, a shave (but not the scalp: Simon had decided to let the stubble sprout, lest Grandfather Childs be tempted to make another unscheduled appearance), a good breakfast, a handful of crosstops, and a stout joint, and Simon was himself again. He’d been through some rough moments, what with the death of his mother and all, and for a while there he might have been closer to the precipice than he cared to think about, but that was all behind him. This morning’s grandfather sighting was only a flashback, he told himself. Too many drugs lately—or at least too many of the wrong drugs in the wrong combinations. From now on he’d be sticking to crosstops and weed, the former for energy and clarity of purpose, the latter for imagination and creativity—all of which would be required for the game.

  As would handcuffs and either a scalpel or a narrow-bladed knife—at any rate, something with a pointed, thrusting edge, as nasty-looking as it was sharp, to go along with the box cutter he’d picked up at Conroy Circle. As he searched the house, it occurred to Simon that if he wanted to hear Pender pleading for Skairdykat and Skairdykat pleading for Pender, then he’d have to leave both their mouths free. Which meant at least part of the game had to take place in the cellar, where, if pleading turned to screaming, the screams would be less likely to be heard down by the canal. Later in the afternoon, he decided, he would bring one of the kitchen chairs down to the cellar—for now, he would continue to search for the handcuffs, and further refine his game plan.

  Pain had been no stranger to Linda Abruzzi in recent months, but she’d never known agony like this. Catch the snake first, worry about holding on to it later, was easier said than done.

  Linda’s sense of the passage of time was necessarily vague. It felt as if she’d been lying on her side at the foot of the stairs, holding the coral at arm’s length and listening to Childs’s footsteps overhead for days now (whenever it sounded as if he was approaching the kitchen, she would replace her gag and hide both the coral and the parted rope behind her back), but the dim cellar light told her it was still Thursday afternoon.

  The living room television came on. From Linda’s current location, she couldn’t make out the program. Sounded as if it might be Rosie or Oprah or Sally Jesse Raphael—at any rate, it was a female voice with an excitable audience, and the footsteps had stopped for a while.

  No rest for Linda, though. And as if the pain, the thirst, and the hunger weren’t bad enough, she had to fight the cramps that for the last few hours had been hopscotching unpredictably up and down her arm—now the thumb, now the shoulder, now the wrist, now the elbow. If she could have changed hands, she would have, but she couldn’t trust the benumbed fingers of the left one anymore.

  More insidious than the pain and cramping was the almost hallucinatory exhaustion. She’d been awake since yesterday morning. And unlike her pain, she knew, the exhaustion could well prove fatal. The coral was no longer thrashing, but neither had it gone back to sleep. Instead it was waiting, biding its time. And every so often, it tried her—a powerful, quicksilver-smooth shifting of the bands of muscle beneath the scales; she would tighten her grip and it would relax again. Waiting. Biding.

  Just a little bit longer, she promised it in her mind. And when it’s all over, I’ll l
et you go. You can live here under the house forever and I’ll bring you all the fat mice you can eat, and a hamster every Christmas.

  The television fell silent; the footsteps began again. By the time Childs actually opened the cellar door and started down the steps, Linda had been visualizing the scenario for so long that it was almost as if it had already happened. He trots down the steps, she plays possum, he bends over her, she thrusts the coral at his eye, his neck, his—

  The footsteps came halfway down the stairs, then receded; the cellar door closed again. The disappointment was crushing. Linda hadn’t been willing to admit to herself how whipped she really was until she thought her ordeal was nearly over; now she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to hang on.

  Oh, you scumbag, she called after him in her mind—get back here, you shitsucking scum—

  The coral, perhaps sensing a moment of inattention, gathered itself and lunged for freedom. Linda’s grip tightened reflexively, but she had it around the midsection now instead of behind the head; as she brought her left hand over to grab it higher, she felt a sensation like two needles sinking into the back of her left wrist.

  4

  It must have been quite a sight. The middle-aged couple, huge man with a Panama hat and a broken arm, big woman with a long brown braid and a broken nose, all but skipping down the ramp into the terminal.

  “We did it!” Dorie exulted, still flushed with the glory of having licked her last phobia.

  “You did it,” said Pender. He was happy for her, of course, and not unmindful of his contribution, but mostly he was just glad to be out of goddamn coach. One first-class flight with Sid had been enough to spoil him forever.

  Normally, Sid would have been waiting at the curb in front of the baggage claim. There are friends, and then there are friends who pick you up at the airport—Sid was the latter to Pender, and vice versa. Pender hadn’t asked him this time, though—he wasn’t sure Sid was still talking to him, after the stunt he’d pulled at SFO last Friday. So after they picked up Dorie’s baggage, the suitcase and footlocker—and mirabile dictu, both arrived safely, sliding down the designated carousel in the designated airport—Pender hailed a cab.

  The ride from Virginia to Maryland was Dorie’s first experience with honest-to-God autumn foliage. Pender got a kick out of watching her—the expression on her face was MasterCard-ad priceless: not so much that of a kid in a candy shop as a teenage boy in a whorehouse.

  Pender turned tour guide for the last leg of the drive, pointing out Civil War sites, detailing the history of the C&O. At the bottom of Tinsman’s Lock Road, a canopy of yellow-leaved box elders shut out the sky. Dorie had never seen light like that before—where she came from, bowered light was always green.

  Pender pointed out his driveway, warned the cabbie about the ruts. They jounced the last few hundred yards. Then, as the driver carried the luggage to the front doorstep, Dorie told Pender she wanted to see the canal while it was still daylight.

  “Follow that path around the side of the house,” Pender told her, “and keep going downhill until you see a woman in a bloodstained nightgown looking for a redheaded baby. I’ll catch up as soon as I pay the man.”

  Phasmophobia—fear of ghosts. Despite her protestations last night, Dorie didn’t have it, had never had it—after all, who ever heard of a ghost wearing a mask?

  The path was steep and narrow; it wound down through a dense wood, then opened out suddenly on a scene Dorie longed to paint with all her heart, and doubted she could ever capture. Pender had been right—she would need to add a few new oils to her palette to get it all: the formal strips of color in the foreground, emerald green lawn, malachite green water, reddish brown canal wall built of rough-hewn, fitted sandstone blocks; the particulate air, the long black shadows, the horizontal light streaming in from dead ahead, but cut into dazzling vertical columns by the single row of flaming trees towering behind the towpath running along the raised berm of the far bank.

  Impossible, though, to capture all that in a plein air, then paint in any of the detail—the footbridge, the miniature waterfall tumbling down the flume, the split-rail wooden fences, never mind the joggers and dog walkers on the towpath—before the light faded entirely.

  Still, wouldn’t it be something to try! If the weather held, she could set up her easel in the same spot a few days in a row, paint in one section at a—

  “Well? Did I lie?” Pender caught up with Dorie as she mentally began cutting the scene into horizontal sections—the landscape defined its own verticality.

  “It’s beautiful, Pen. I can’t wait to paint it. Or try, anyway. Where’s the nearest art supply store?”

  “We’ll have to consult the yellow pages on that, scout,” said Pender as they started back up the path to the house. “The last time I bought any art supplies, they came in a Crayola box with a built-in sharpener.”

  “I loved that built-in sharpener,” said Dorie.

  “Me too.”

  When they reached the house, Pender nodded toward the porch. “Let’s go in that way—I want you to see the panorama.”

  “Technically, a panorama is an unbroken view or a series of pictures representing a continuous scene,” Dorie explained as she trudged up the steps after him.

  Pender stopped on the landing and turned back to her as if he had something important to say. Actually, he was just winded from the climb. “Did anybody ever tell you you were extremely argumentative?”

  “Yes. I always took it as a compliment.”

  The view from the porch was spectacular, Dorie had to admit. It occurred to her, as Pender unlocked the sliding glass door, that she could paint from up here in the morning, then go down to the canal in the afternoon. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it, she thought, following Pender into the house. God, I love my work.

  5

  Simon was ready. He’d been ready for hours, fussing around the house, watching TV, smoking a joint out on the porch, refining the game. At the last minute, he changed his mind about taking a chair down to the cellar beforehand. He was halfway down the stairs with it when it dawned on him that if Pender did enter the house through the porch door, he was as likely to head for the kitchen as the bedroom—best to leave everything as is.

  Simon did an about-face on the steps. He was still in the kitchen when he heard a car coming down the drive. He raced into the living room, peeked out through the drawn blinds, saw the cab pulling up behind the Geo. He saw Pender climb out—nice hat, duude; wha’ happen, somebody break your arm? Then he saw a second figure climbing out.

  Simon’s heart dropped—please let it be a cab-share—and when he recognized Dorie Bell, his jaw dropped as well. Last time he’d seen her, she was naked in the galvanized tub in the basement of 2500 and he was holding her head underwater. He knew she hadn’t drowned, but as the only participant ever to have survived the fear game, she had somehow slipped into another dimension of Simon’s consciousness, neither dead nor living; he wasn’t quite as surprised to see her as he would have been to see, say, Wayne Summers—but it was a near thing.

  As the cabdriver dropped the suitcase by the front door and went back for the footlocker, Simon raced into Pender’s bedroom, thinking furiously. Dorie’s presence wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Snatch her first, put a gun to her head, he’d have himself a bargaining chip. Think Edward G. Robinson: Freeze, G-man, or I blow her brains out. Hero cop like Pender, he’ll freeze all right. He’ll do anything I tell him to do—she’s his sweetie pie now. Some hero: he saves ’em and screws ’em.

  And as he closed the bedroom door behind him, breathing hard, as engaged and excited as a soldier going into combat, Simon realized that having a second shot at Dorie was the only thing that could possibly have improved what was already promising to be the ultimate fear game. Not just a triple-header, but a chance to erase his only loss. Because when he was finished with Dorie (and this time he would insist on having a piece of what Pender had been enjoying, if it took
him all night to get it in), the final score in the fear game would be Childs: 27, World: Zip—and that was without counting Zap, any of the old folks, any of the cops, or what’shis-name, Gloria’s husband, the Chinese guy in the red bikini underwear.

  Linda spat out her gag. Somehow she’d held on to the coral; she had it behind the neck again with her good right hand. She told herself not to panic—it hadn’t gotten her that badly. Small mouth, short fangs, Reilly had said—they have to chew their way in. And hadn’t Reilly also said the venom was only borderline lethal and that there was always a delayed reaction. Or had he said often rather than always? Or only sometimes? And how delayed—how much time did she have?

  Related question: what was going on upstairs? Linda could hear Childs running from the kitchen to the living room, then into the bedroom wing. Was Pender home? She hadn’t heard his footsteps yet—and she would have, heavy as he was. Which meant it might be too late to save herself, but she could still save him.

  How? Concentrate—never mind the pain. Use it to focus. You wait until you hear a door, a heavy tread. Then you scream, “Pender, watch out! Pender, Childs is here!” If you can hear him upstairs, he can hear you downstairs.

  But what if Childs already has a gun on Pender? Then all you’ve done is blow your only advantage—surprise.

  No, you have another advantage: he’s already told you he plans to blind Pender while you watch. So you know you have time; he’s not going to shoot Pender as soon as he comes in. You also know he has to come back down to the cellar eventually. Wouldn’t it be smarter to—

  But by then the burning sensation had begun traveling up Linda’s arm: when it reached her elbow, she understood that waiting for Childs to come to her was no longer a viable strategy.