Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  She pulled at my shoulder again.

  The basement. It sounded so distant when she said it. Two floors and three galaxies away.

  “I need a second to figure out what happened.”

  “No, we have to get out of here.”

  I followed each of the wires connected to B4’s head to where they led. Nowhere. They lay on the ground in back of the cages, unattached to anything. But each had a little tag. One wire had the word “stim,” the other read “wave.”

  I started pulling at the door to B4’s cage, to lift it. It was locked to the cage beneath. All the cages were attached. I needed a tool.

  “Dammit.”

  “Leave it,” Erin shouted.

  I didn’t respond.

  “Give me the car keys.”

  “Help me look, Erin.”

  “I’m leaving. Now.”

  Erin stood by a window overlooking the front of the house, staring resolute and contemptuous. She caught my eye, then turned to look out the window.

  “Look!”

  “What?”

  She was pointing.

  “Nat!”

  Another burst of hot air surged from the stairwell. And I looked where she pointed, out the window. A spit of flame jumped up in staccato leaps like a spring of orange water.

  “I know. It’s a tinderbox. I need your help, Erin.”

  “No!”

  No, it’s not a tinderbox? Or, no, she wouldn’t help?

  “Look! A car—driving out of the gate,” she said. “Please. We have to go. Now! Move, or give me the car keys and stay here and play detective yourself.”

  I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t be drawn away from the room. I wanted to have control over one goddamn thing. All the helplessness of the preceding few days felt like it had come down to this moment. What had happened here?

  Erin was pointing out the window. I saw a single flame whisk at the top of the edge of the window. And I felt a brush of heat graze the bottom of my feet. I moved closer to the window to look for what Erin had seen. There was nothing. Maybe it was hidden from view. Maybe it had already made its escape.

  Arson.

  Erin.

  “Erin, did you . . . ” I said. “Did you? . . . ”

  “What?” she said. Not hearing, or understanding, or pretending not to.

  I shook my head. No way. My brain felt muddled and fuzzy. No time to think. No clarity. I looked at Erin. She caught my eye, then started moving. Sprinting. But it looked like slow motion.

  She bounded down the stairs.

  I took a step to follow her.

  Then turned around. I wanted a second look at the operation center called Strawberry Labs. Was there anything I could imprint? Any clue? Anything I could testify to later?

  I swiveled my head across the lab. Everything blurred together. Rats, medical equipment, a bank of computers, nothing discernible. No smoking gun.

  I gave a final glance to the still living rat, the hearty soul known as A11. I yanked open its cage door. The critter scampered out and I pushed it off the table. It ran three steps, stopped, sniffed, fled to the stairs, slid down a step, stopped again, and pulled itself back up, then began frantically circling the room. Under the edge of its cage, something caught my eye. Pinned beneath was a tattered piece of paper. I reached two fingers through the bars. The paper looked to have names and numbers. It was technical, with decimal points, and something familiar. At the bottom, the scrawled words: “Password— Vestige.”

  I clenched my teeth in thought, and I felt piercing warmth. On my feet.

  The floor was on fire.

  The baseboard was pulsing red—the foreplay just before the real heat started.

  I stuffed the piece of paper in my front pocket.

  “Time to go.”

  I looked back at the stairwell and saw a lick of flame. I took a step to the stairs. A surge of black smoke billowed out of the opening. Danger.

  The window.

  I looked to my left, above a table holding a computer monitor. Another window. Overlooking the side of the cabin. I jogged to it. I peered outside. Flames surged more persistently up the side of the house, though still not regularly enough to form a wall. They seeped from the garage. Or maybe even the first floor.

  I yanked the monitor off the table and tossed it through the window. Cool air. I toppled the table.

  I moved to the window. Suddenly, an explosion and a surge of flames. I looked down. Fire bathed the house’s side. If I jumped, I was leaping into a cauldron. I looked back at the stairs. Smoke churned from the stairwell. I sprinted toward it, and got rebuffed by a surge of flame, jutting up toward me.

  That’s when I realized the full extent of my mess. I could see that eight stairs down, the stairwell took a ninety-degree turn. It meant I had visibility about halfway; if I made it the first eight steps, I would turn the corner into an uncertain fate.

  I looked back at my surroundings. I’d remembered something—about the room, and about medical training 101. There it was. Under the table I’d overturned—a small green-and-blue area rug.

  I yanked at the rug, dragged it back to the stairs, and wrapped it around my shoulders.

  “Now or not at all.”

  I took a step toward the top of the stairs. I pulled the rug over my shoulders. I realized that the moment I turned the corner on the stairs, I’d have to make a decision: If the fire wasn’t too bad, I’d walk out the front door; if it was bad, wrap myself and roll. And pray.

  I took a step toward the stair and felt a dying man’s last wishes. Let me live long enough to find out what happened to Annie.

  I took the next step, the wool rug wrapped around my shoulders, dragging down from my back and behind me like a cape. Smoke streamed around me. I took the final step before the turn of the stairs in silence, then heard an explosion. A burp from the guts of the house. Something highly flammable had caught fire. The explosion had a domino effect. The noise was followed by a burst of heat and a stream of fire—coming around the corner, right at me. Instinctively, I fell back onto the stairs. I began sliding on the rug. Back down the stairs. I braced my foot against the wall.

  I flailed frantically, grabbing for a wooden rail. I snagged it, succeeding in slowing my descent, then I halted the slide altogether. I used the leverage to pull myself to my feet.

  I stepped back toward the turn in the stairs, then turned the corner. Flames were covering the first floor and the staircase just a foot below me.

  Eight steps separated me from the floor.

  I pulled at the corner of the rug and yanked it toward me, turning into a human enchilada wrapped in woven wool. I let myself fall backward. I pulled the rug on top of me, rolled, and saw a life flash before my eyes. Not mine, Sonny Ellison’s. For just a nanosecond, I thought of a young man who had come into the emergency room when I was a medical student. His Civic had dived fifty feet over the edge of Sea Cliff onto the rocks. The gas tank exploded. Ellison lived, and I never forgot him, or what the human body could sustain in pursuit of its own survival, like the bumps slamming into me as I rolled down the stairs. And suddenly stopped.

  I was at the bottom of the stairs, consumed with heat.

  I flung open the rug from around my shoulders. I’d hoped it would stamp out the flames in my immediate vicinity, plaster them to the ground.

  I got lucky. The rug opened toward the door. The ultimate red carpet.

  The porch was hot, but not engulfed in flames. I tumbled down two concrete stairs and fell onto the gravel in front of what would soon be the ashes of Strawberry Labs.

  There was Erin. Ashen-faced, covered in char, standing beside the car.

  “What the hell is going on, Erin?”

  “Thank goodness. I thought you were going to die.”

  I ambled toward her, trying to gauge her expression. Sincerity? Fear? Outright manipulation?

  Suddenly, I grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “What are you doing, Nat?”

  “You left me in
there to die.”

  “You’re crazy. You’re freaking out.”

  She spun away from me, insisting she’d seen a red sports car leave the property. “We have to go!” she said. Dazed, I climbed into the car. The house was gurgling and bursting. A surge of heat bathed us. Then another wave, this one internal. A fierce pulsing, the headache again. Erin pulled the keys from my hand and put them in the ignition. I kept her from starting the car. I looked back at the compound, the house in the middle now ablaze.

  “What happened to Annie?” I said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What’s Vestige?”

  She turned the keys in the ignition.

  I said, “Time for the police.”

  I sped down the mountain, looking for a phantom sports car and a cell phone signal. I couldn’t find either. Just before Felton’s town center, there was a four-way stop. A road sign said it was ten miles to Santa Cruz. It might be impossible to go back in time, but you can at least visit. Time for a trip down memory lane.

  “You like fire,” I said coldly. “You like to see things burn?”

  The rat lab, the café, a pornography studio, Simon Anderson’s house.

  “What are you talking about?” Erin said.

  “Let’s start simple.”

  “Simple?”

  “I want to know the real reason you didn’t like Simon Anderson,” I said.

  It had been kicking around in my head, a relative coldness in the way she described him, the fact that she didn’t get out of the car at his funeral, or when the Anderson house burned down, looking at the ruins of someone she had known well. It didn’t seem like her style, even if, as she said, Simon Anderson had been a player.

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Now, Erin.”

  I turned the car toward Santa Cruz.

  Silence.

  Finally, she said, “How did you know?”

  34

  Erin pulled her knees up to her chest. She was looking out the window with a distant, defeated stare.

  I hadn’t known Erin had lied to me, but I’d suspected, even before Danny’s warning.

  “He didn’t get that far under your skin just because he flirted with the waitstaff,” I said.

  Erin turned to me.

  “The Napa mud gave him away.”

  Napa. The epicenter of Northern California’s wine country, three hours due north of our current location. Maybe Erin liked to start her confessions in the middle.

  “At the Four Seasons, they keep the mud baths ninety degrees, so the minerals get good and baked into your skin. Simon called it the ‘dirt shirt,’” she said. “I told you Simon was a word person. And a lying son of a bitch.

  “He didn’t tell me he was married for three months.”

  Erin said they met almost immediately after she started working at the café. He came in almost every day, ordered a caramel latte and wrote on his laptop, and checked his stock prices on one of the café’s three Internet computers. He made friends with everyone. They were drawn to his charm and wealth, which he commented on just enough to establish its existence. He was witty and sure of himself and Erin didn’t have anything else going on.

  They kept the whole thing private. He never invited her to his house. They spent weekends away from San Francisco together—in Napa, drinking and bathing in mud. It turned out that those were the weekends his wife took their autistic son to a special clinic at UCLA. Eventually, he got caught by his wife, or so he claimed, and came clean with Erin. Over time, she came to see this was serial behavior.

  “He was a sinner to his core,” she said.

  Andy came along shortly after. He and she experienced a much different attraction, the strongest one Erin had felt. “He was the first person who made me feel that the lifestyle I was living was okay. When I moved from Michigan, I knew someone like him was out there.”

  They had a fling too, but it didn’t stick and gave way to something more than that—mostly platonic and deep.

  “Six months ago, he started getting distant,” Erin said.

  It correlated with a time that Simon and Andy became good friends. Both men liked to talk about books and writing. Andy started babysitting for Simon’s kids. He wanted a family of his own.

  “What does that have to do with you, Erin? C’mon,” I said, filling in the silence that followed. “You were jealous? Is that it?”

  “No.”

  “He was your best friend, and your relationship got strained, and then he died. It was easy to blame Simon.”

  “You’re reaching.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You couldn’t possibly understand,” she protested quietly. “What Simon did was so terribly cruel.”

  “Did he kill Andy?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What makes you think it was even a possibility?”

  “Simon was a seducer and a manipulator. He got inside Andy’s head. Andy got depressed. He felt so conflicted. Alone.”

  “Enough to kill himself.”

  “I need to see the diary,” she said.

  The phone rang. It was Danny. The reception was choppy. “Turn . . . news. Radio . . . news.” I was hearing every third word. I told him to call me back. I told Erin to find a news station.

  I saw an unpaved entrance to a cove beside the Santa Cruz pier, the cove where I’d watched a flotilla and an amphibious team try to find Annie’s remains. A sign read, “Emergency Vehicles Only.” I drove in.

  Maybe I just wanted to pretend the last four years hadn’t happened. Maybe I wanted to go back before Annie. At least before I got the excruciating headache. Maybe it was the thick sea air, but it felt like the insides of my brain were pushing against my skull. The linebackers that had been dancing Swan Lake on my spinal column had taken steroids. My eye twitched, my legs were cramping.

  Erin found a news station.

  “A major development in the investigation of this week’s café explosion in San Francisco.”

  I slammed on the brakes and put my hands on top of Erin’s, for the purpose of stopping her from changing the dial. I had reached a clearing where road met beach. I looked out over a gorgeous blue sea.

  “Sources at the San Francisco Police Department said they are looking for two people in connection with the explosion, which took at least five lives. Police sources said they want to question a San Francisco resident and a café employee who survived the blast. Police declined to say whether the people are official suspects or what their motive might have been. We will provide details of this remarkable breaking story as they emerge.”

  Two possible suspects, sitting in my car—an employee, and a San Francisco resident. Could there be any doubt who they meant?

  And I knew goddamn well I hadn’t blown up the cafe.

  Were the cops on the same page?

  I felt a surge of excruciating pain. A migraine, I thought. It felt like my skull was peeling back, letting a harsh wind scream through the opening. I opened my door just in time. I threw up.

  I picked my chin off the ground and looked at Erin. She was stone-faced.

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?” she said. “Did I what?!”

  The light hurt. I closed my eyes and squinted.

  “What about Michigan, Erin? The fire?! Goddammit! What aren’t you telling me?”

  She responded by opening her door. She stepped outside and started walking.

  “Erin!”

  But I couldn’t continue, or follow her. Whatever it was that was tormenting me, it had won. I leaned out the door. I purged again. Bile and stale air pouring out in heaves.

  Seconds later—or maybe minutes—I heard a noise. I lifted my eyes. I caught a reflection in the rearview mirror. Of flashing lights. I turned my head to look at the newest visitor. A police car had parked behind me, blocking my escape.

  35

  As the cop exited his car and walked toward me, I wip
ed my chin and considered my options. According to the radio, I was wanted in connection with the explosion of a quaint San Francisco neighborhood café. If the officer knew this, I probably was going to be arrested. That seemed like a rotten way to spend such a cloudless day, or the next forty years.

  That left my alternatives as lying or leaving in a hurry. I didn’t like my chances either way.

  “You okay, sir?”

  Sir.

  “This beach is restricted,” he said, walking to the driver’s side door. “Eighty-five-dollar fine. But you look like you could use a break.”

  I looked up to find a giant mustache and ears. The cop didn’t exceed five and a half feet. But he had the facial hair of a man twice that size. A handlebar mustache, and round ears protruding from the sides of his cap. I wondered if it might be from acromegaly, a condition that causes facial features to get coarse and pronounced over time.

  “Tempting to come down this way,” he said. “But I tell ya—when the tide gets high, it’s a son of a gun out here.”

  I told him I’d get out of the way. But he started right in chatting about what a beautiful day it was, and what a terrific view. In San Francisco, you get used to everyone being in such a rush, but Officer Ears just wanted to take a few minutes to reflect and sip a cool lemonade on the porch.

  I fought off the nausea and took a chance on his goodwill. I told him that I’d lost a friend in a boating accident about four years earlier and was wondering how I might find out more about the accident—could I get incident reports or the like?

  He said I could do a Freedom of Information Act request, if I wanted to wait for a couple of months, or I could try to talk to the officer in charge of the investigation. He said I could ask the clerk at the Santa Cruz Police Department. He said I could use his name.

  First, I had another stop. By the side of the road. I turned on Andy’s laptop and called up his diary. I combed through pages of seemingly innocuous entries typed in shorthand. The short entries appeared to span a couple of years, though they were denoted by day and time, not by date and year.