Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  I laughed, sending a seizure of pain down my side. It was worth it.

  “Bullseye, you remember what to do?” We’d discussed it only briefly when I’d handed off Samantha.

  “I’m a walking computer. I remember the slugging percentage of every member of the 1912 Black Sox.”

  If only our survival depended on us winning a trivia contest.

  “Make sure to call Mike. It’s a lot to ask of him, but I think he can pull it off.”

  “Done and done.”

  I put the phone down. Then picked it up again. A second call was nagging. To Lieutenant Aravelo.

  Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy after all. I desperately needed the help of someone in power. But if I was wrong, and a call to Aravelo diminished even a fraction of the chance I would see Annie again, it wasn’t worth it.

  I instead used the spy phone to remotely check my voice-mail messages. There was only one, a return call from Annie’s friend Sarah. There was something urgent in her voice. I overrode my instincts and called her back. Perhaps she was in trouble, or I could delicately elicit something useful.

  “Nat? Is that you? Hold on.” She cupped the phone and yelled, “Turn down the fucking television! Dammit, this is important.”

  Same old Sarah.

  She bypassed pleasantries and explained that my message had worried her. I’d sounded strange.

  “You sound a little freaked out yourself. Are you okay, Sarah?” I refused to commit to tone, let alone substance.

  “What’s going on? You said you had a question about Annie?”

  “Yeah, something about Annie. I’m seeing ghosts.”

  Long pause.

  “You never got over her, did you?”

  “Are you still tight with Glenn?”

  “I see him around. Why?”

  The tit-for-tat was fruitless. But she knew something. She was nervous. But she wasn’t giving it up.

  “Be careful, Sarah. Something bizarre is going on. I don’t really know what. But I just want you to stay aware.”

  “You’re scaring me, Nat. Frankly, you sound . . . a little weird.”

  “That I’ll stipulate to in court.”

  We said good-bye and I looked into the glare of oncoming lights stacked upon lights stacked upon lights. I took my first deep breath. I felt calmer. Maybe it was the Ritalin, or the distance from the fight. I glanced at the lanes around me, filled with discomfited commuters. They were San Francisco’s most determined strivers. Unable to afford homes or rent in the city, they had spread into suburbs stretching as far east and south as they could stand to drive home each night. Like me, they probably had a bucket seat full of snack foods and a desperate yearning. To my right, I found myself drawn to the driver’s side window of a white Civic. I could make out what looked to be a middle-aged woman with a thick head of dark hair. She must have felt my presence. She turned her head and caught my gaze. She nodded, commiserating. She turned her eyes back to the road.

  I was settling in for the long drive into the Central Valley of California and then to Nevada when I was startled by a shrill ring from the super-secret spy phone. It was Bullseye.

  “I’m coming,” he said. “But I’ve got company.”

  47

  By midmorning, I could see it rising in the distance. The Las Vegas Strip. It looked peaceful, like any downtown before the commerce got plugged in for the morning. Its denizens were doing what they did every day about this time: sleeping in. Drenched in sweaty slumber and dreaming about what might have happened if they’d just dislodged themselves from the table thirty minutes earlier.

  The town was getting more potent still. I’d read that in recent months, the New York-New York casino had installed a new blackjack table that doubled as a video poker machine. There was the opportunity to play the two games simultaneously, for those not jacking up their adrenaline, and losses, at a fast enough clip.

  My poison was caffeine. I got an industrial-strength cup and pulled into the airport. Bullseye was waiting.

  “You look like shit with a hangover,” he said.

  He stood by the baggage claim. Holding out a laptop.

  “Where’s the company?”

  He gestured over his shoulder.

  I directed us to the bathroom—to chat in private. It was the kind of melodrama that I figured would drive Bullseye nuts. He feared nothing that wasn’t highly mathematically likely. So it probably didn’t worry him that someone might be tailing two plainclothed idiots who were meeting in the Las Vegas airport to exchange a laptop.

  But I wasn’t taking any chances.

  In the bathroom, he gestured for me to join him in the full-service stall closest to the left wall.

  “Bad odds,” he said, shutting the door of the cramped stall behind him.

  “How’s that?”

  He wiggled to the side of the toilet opposite me. He had cups under his eyes and the skin on his chin had begun to break out.

  “If you’re worried about someone discovering and killing us, you should pick a middle stall. Gives us better escape options.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  “What if we’re trying to keep someone from listening in?” I said. “This way we’re not surrounded on both sides.”

  “Better odds.”

  He thrust out Andy’s laptop. “Here.”

  It was in just the shitty condition I’d last seen it. I turned it over in my hand and put my foot on the toilet.

  “Did everything else go smoothly?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Yeah, just ask me yourself, dude,” came a voice from outside the stall.

  I popped open the stall door.

  “What’s the good word?” Mike said.

  I shook my head. There stood Mike, the biggest computer geek in the world, wearing a flower-print Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.

  “This is the worst covert operation I’ve ever seen,” I muttered.

  Mike said that when Bullseye called for help, he figured I might need some in-person assistance. But the real reason for his presence was plain. Mike was a monthly visitor to Vegas anyway, and his gambling yen earned him free nights at Caesars Palace. They didn’t know he was trying to count cards, and he didn’t care that he wasn’t doing well enough to make the trips profitable.

  “Do I have time to get to the tables?” he asked.

  “Big mistake,” Bullseye replied. “The odds are better at craps.”

  “Not if you show the proper discipline. You’ve got to factor in the human element. What is the likelihood I can walk away with a profit?”

  Bullseye flashed a perverse smile. He had found a friend.

  “Shall we side bet on who has better success—presuming you set your potential losses to me in escrow. That way you won’t be tempted to give them to the blackjack dealer.”

  I was amazed. I’d never heard Bullseye talk this much in his life—and at this most inopportune time. I interrupted, reiterating that we needed to track the laptop. I’d outlined my idea to Bullseye before, and Mike said he had come through on the technology side.

  “If I don’t make it back here,” I said, “try to pull the trigger anyway.”

  Ten minutes later, I was headed southeast.

  I was ecstatic to see Annie, but also obviously confused, and angry. I’d always known there was a darker part of her, the part that freaked out when I broke the chair or when she got stressed about work. Had I underestimated that? No. Something horrible must have happened to her. Annie needed my help, and she’d have it soon enough.

  Erin’s image left nagging uncertainty too. She seemed strong, but also vulnerable and uncomplicated. Yet she’d survived the explosion, having been previously implicated in a fire. The big-boned housecleaner at Simon Anderson’s said she’d seen a woman working on the family’s electrical system. Erin was there when the rat house exploded.

  The cell phone rang.

  “Are you close, Turtle?”

  “Less than an hou
r.”

  Annie gave me specific directions to a condo complex on the south edge of town. I tried to concentrate but was blown away by the sound of her voice. It was in this world but still surreal.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “I bet you’re even hotter now that you’re dead.”

  That laugh.

  “Hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  When I asked her to tell me what was going on, she said she had some important things to take care of and would explain when I arrived.

  “Nathaniel. You can’t imagine the story I’ve got to tell you.”

  48

  It was nearing noon, and I could sense the heat even with the full blast of air-conditioning. The sleepless night had left me jet-lagged and sweaty. I had given up trying to think and turned on the radio, realizing one of the things that had been yanking at my subconscious.

  “. . . it just goes to show that all the money in the world doesn’t make you happy.”

  “Thank you, caller. That indeed does seem like one lesson—a lesson that Americans seem to need to learn over and over again. Ed Gaverson’s suicide proves that wealth Does. Not. Equal. Happiness. This guy was at various times the wealthiest American. He had houses, cars, boats, more houses, and he still—forgive me for being graphic—put a bullet in his head. People, listen to me, you have the power to be happy, or to be unhappy. Depression, chemical imbalances, all that stuff—it can hit anyone. But you are just as capable as America’s richest man of recognizing the problems and addressing them. Okay, we’ll be back to talk more about the issues of the day on the nationally syndicated Sizzle Talk. I’m your host, Roger Templeton.”

  “Do you suffer from arthritis? . . . ”

  Ed Gaverson, the head of Ditsoft, one of the largest software companies in the world, was dead. One of Glenn Kindle’s close friends, and he had killed himself. This must have been what Diane, Glenn’s secretary, was alluding to.

  I twisted the dial in search of another station—and more information. All I got was static, and a new question: Did Gaverson shoot himself, or did someone else pull the trigger?

  I turned into Boulder City. I drove through a modest commercial strip, then into a mostly empty, no-frills condominium complex. When I pulled into a parking spot, I was in a dream state, sweaty and feral and curious and excited. Yet I was struck by the most modest of considerations. In my stash of snack foods, had I bothered to buy breath mints? Gum? Finding neither, I ingested a handful of Red Hots. Maybe that would kill the smell of coffee and nerves.

  I looked in the rearview mirror at the reflection of red eyes and more whiskers than the last time I checked. I actually, momentarily, thought: Should I go back to town for a haircut?

  Moments later, I stood before the door. Her door. Annie’s door. I pulled a flower from beside the front door and, holding it in a slippery-wet hand, knocked. No answer. I rang the bell. No answer. I knocked again and, finally, the door opened. I forgot about everything.

  I looked at a woman with sandy blonde hair. She might have been Annie’s sister—clearly lighter hair, puffier cheeks, and blue rather than brown eyes.

  “Sorry it took me so long,” she said. “I wanted to look pretty for you.”

  I dropped the flower and pulled her close, feeling her arms close around me—those tender, fragile twigs that once clung to me for strength.

  Up until that moment, I’m not sure I believed it. Even after hearing her voice, it seemed she could not possibly, actually be alive. And even if she didn’t look precisely like the woman I remembered, there was no doubt. This was Annie. She was in my arms again, and getting a wicked bear hug.

  “You’ve become a professional wrestler,” she whispered, and laughed.

  She put her hands on top of my head. She ran her fingers through my hair. The way she used to.

  “Did you bring the laptop?”

  I didn’t want to break the hug—for fear that I might not get it back. Or, worse yet, that it wasn’t really happening. That this all was Alice in Wonderland and any movement would lead to an attack of reality. Annie finally pushed away from me.

  “Did you bring the laptop?” she repeated.

  I looked at her, bewildered. What could she be talking about, at a moment like this? I shrugged, trying to discern her meaning.

  “As you asked.”

  “Sorry.” She looked down, clearing her throat.

  She took my hand.

  “Turtle, do you remember the day at the boardwalk?”

  I couldn’t stop looking at her face. It had aged, certainly more than four years. Four years plus extra time for what must have been incredible stress. And something else—surgery.

  The puffiness I had seen in her cheeks had been an effort to pad her bone structure. Her hairline was deeper. She was wearing contacts that changed the color of her eyes. It was subtle but highly effective, the work of a true professional hired to make someone perceptibly different without radically altering her looks. I tried not to let my face register what I saw.

  “We got a crepe filled with chocolate and you got your fortune told by a palm reader.”

  “It was a cinnamon crepe,” Annie said flirtatiously. “That’s the day I’ve thought about the most. It was perfect. You were perfect. We were perfect.”

  I tried to hold her gaze. She broke eye contact.

  “Do you know what the fortune-teller told me?”

  “She said you’d come into money.”

  Annie pulled her hands from mine.

  “That’s what I told you she whispered to me. But that’s not really what she said.”

  Annie put her head down, like she was the kind of sad that goes beyond tears.

  “She said I would face a difficult choice. But she said I’d choose the path of true love.”

  She took a step back.

  “Your sideburns are longer. Oh, you’re hurt.”

  My light blue T-shirt had been stained ruddy red.

  “Courtesy of Dave Elliott.”

  She put her hand to her mouth. I couldn’t tell if it was shock, or anger, or caring. I felt a whiff of doubt; I sensed something in Annie that was rehearsed. I pushed it away.

  “They . . . they put some program on my computer.”

  It was a simplistic way to put it, but that, increasingly, is what I’d come to believe. Annie would fill in the blanks.

  “Stunning. Turtle, I’m so sorry. How could he?”

  “Your father? What the hell is going on?”

  Her face changed. It went hard. Resolve. I’d seen the look only once before—in New York, when I’d stumbled onto her leading a meeting of bankers involved with Vestige Technologies. I suddenly felt the anxiety of recognition that I’d become an adult and that time had passed and was passing, so fast.

  “You can’t trust anyone,” she said bemusedly. Then: “I’m going to finish this right now.”

  Since I’d last seen Annie, a lifetime had passed. Fish had grown legs, crawled onto the land, and invented the combustion engine, and Annie had hardened. I’d always known a tough part of her existed, but I always believed it was the far lesser part of her spirit.

  “I didn’t play dead for four years to have it end like this. He did this to me. To you, Nat. To us. We can’t let him get away with it. And now I can stop him for good.”

  “I don’t care about this.” I put my hand over my wound. “It heals. It’s not like a broken heart. Annie, remember what we used to talk about. You don’t have to crawl around in his muck. Let it go. That’s how we put this behind us.”

  It came out adamant. As direct as I could remember being with her. Support, but also challenge. She stepped toward me, and her face changed again—this time it softened.

  “When you hear what I’ve been through, you’ll see we have no choice.”

  49

  Do you still love me?” she said, almost in a whisper.

  I looked her in the eye and swallowed. I didn’t think it needed an answer, but she was st
udying me—almost clinically.

  “Of course.”

  “What I’m going to tell you. It’s private. You can’t tell anyone. It’s the biggest secret.”

  “Bigger than when I told you about how I added punctuation to all the Faulkner books in the high school library?”

  Laughter.

  “Annie, where is Erin?”

  “She’s fine. We’re keeping her safe.”

  “We? Where is she?”

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “No, Annie. Jesus. Just tell me where she is.”

  “She’s safe. I promise. She’s coming here. Please, trust me for just a little while.”

  She pulled me into the condo, not exactly the sun-drenched park and clapping squirrels I’d imagined marking our reunion. It was prefab to the max. Annie set me down on the couch, and then hit me with a non sequitur.

  “France is a lot lonelier than the guidebooks lead you to believe.”

  She wore black slacks and a blue blouse, meticulously matched. Even under the circumstances, she looked like she could be secretary-general of the Junior League. She locked the door and peered through a curtain—at the front walk—then pulled it tightly shut. She walked to the kitchen, and I heard pots rattle, then water run. She talked over it.

  “That’s where I spent the first two years after the accident. There was a country house in the north—not far from Luxembourg.”

  “So why didn’t you call me, Annie? How could you let me think you were dead? Were you in a coma?”

  She sighed. “Please, Nat. I’ve practiced this speech a thousand times and rewritten it twice that. Let me work up to it. It’s confusing, even to me, even now.”

  I nodded.

  She sighed.

  “I would sit in a rocking chair next to a window that looked out on a small grove of apple trees. To try to keep from calling you, I would count up the number of apples. When I lost count, or couldn’t remember whether I’d counted a particular apple, I’d start over.” She sounded clinical, then suddenly sad. “Being that isolated, being afraid, being alone like that, it’s worse than jail. It’s worse than death. You are no longer a person. There is no point in existing.”