The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  “I don’t want to be anywhere but here,” I say. “So? How did it go with Alexa?”

  He makes a face. “Hard. Brutal. But it’s done.”

  “It’s done done?” I ask. There’s some reason, after all, to believe that Alexa Himmel has a hard time letting go.

  “I told her it was over and that was that. I wasn’t going to change my mind.” He raises his hands. He doesn’t know if the breakup will stick with Alexa, if she’ll accept it or resist. He—no, we, we will have to be prepared to deal with it either way.

  His cell phone, resting on the window ledge next to him, buzzes. The screen lights up with the word Alexa. He looks at me and shrugs.

  “How many times is that?” I ask.

  “Third call since I left her about an hour ago,” he says.

  The phone stops buzzing and goes dark. A moment later, a small robotic noise comes from the phone, and it lights up again. 3 new voice mails, it says.

  His office phone rings, his direct line that he doesn’t give out to almost anyone. There was a time when only Joel Lightner and I had that number. Alexa became the third one.

  “So this is tough for her,” Jason says, an understatement of the patently obvious.

  Made more obvious still when the office phone stops ringing, and his cell phone buzzes and lights up again: Alexa. Then: 4 new voice mails.

  “It’ll take her some time,” he says. He comes over and takes me in his arms. It’s what I’ve wanted him to do since I walked in. But I don’t want to push. We’re together, whatever that means, whatever that entails. That’s all we are right now. I’m having his baby. Will there be more? Neither of us is ready to ask that question, much less answer it.

  “Now for the even harder part,” he says. “My return to normalcy.”

  Fortunately for Jason, I’ve been doing research, a little at a time every night when I needed a mental break from trial preparation, about addiction and recovery.

  “I haven’t looked closely at which rehab clinics are the best,” I tell him. “But I do know that there are some that special—”

  “Shauna,” he says, “I can’t go into rehab right now. Not right now. Joel and I are trying to hunt this guy down. I have to keep mobile until then.”

  I’m sure my facial expression says it all.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “I’m ready to do this. I’m going to do it. Starting right now. But not in a clinic. I’m not making an excuse—”

  “You are, actually. That’s exactly what you’re doing. This has to be your number one priority—”

  “It will be tied at number one with stopping this guy. Look, Joel’s people are doing most of the grunt work, anyway. I can focus on rehab. But I can’t be hidden in some clinic somewhere without phones or a computer. I have to be reachable and ready to act, whatever ‘ready to act’ means.”

  I don’t like this. This isn’t how you dive into detox. This is dipping a toe. Is he as ready as he thinks he is to start his recovery?

  “I’ve thought about this.” He pulls me to the couch and we sit. “If I tried to go cold turkey right now without help, it would be murder. It would be a losing battle. But there’s a middle ground here, between nothing and what I was doing.”

  “You want to wean yourself off.” The Internet tells me that some people do it that way, ramp down the medication, spread out the doses, slowly rebuild their defenses. But that’s under the care of a physician.

  “I’ll wean myself off. I’ll cut down to—I was thinking a pill every six hours. And without crushing them between my teeth first. It will be a huge change for me, believe me. It will get me started on the process, but not take me completely out of the box while that asshole is out there killing women.”

  As much as I don’t like it, I can’t deny his reasoning. He can’t very well turn his back on a serial killer roaming the north side. And just as important, I have to understand that this isn’t my decision. I can’t force Jason to do anything. He has to want to do this. I really have no choice but to accept his terms or walk away.

  “Every six hours,” I say. “Not one minute earlier.”

  “You hold the pills. You’re the key-master.”

  He hands me the vaunted tin of Altoids. We look at each other. It’s a real moment for him, I realize. A torch has been passed.

  “And you’re going to be intense and focused on what?” I ask. “If you just stew in your juices, sitting around thinking about ‘James Drinker’ all the time, you’re going to be reaching for those pills a lot sooner than every six hours.”

  He looks off a moment, then smiles, really smiles, not a polite grin but a happy smile. I haven’t seen that expression on his face in ages.

  “Exercise,” he says. “I’m not going to have much strength, but I’ll exercise myself to exhaustion.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Go for long walks. And I’ll go for long rides in the car. Read books. I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”

  “It’s going to be really hard,” I tell him. “The hardest thing you’ve ever done.”

  He nods, turns back to the window. “I know,” he says. “Just . . . hang in there with me, okay?”

  83.

  Shauna

  Monday, July 29

  I peek my head into the bathroom. My bathroom, my condo, two blocks away from Jason’s town house. A thousand square feet in all, one bedroom, one bathroom, a decent kitchen, and a great room with a spectacular view of the high-rises in the commercial district to the south. The condo of a successful single woman.

  For Jason, it must feel like prison. We made a decision that he should leave his house and stay with me during this interval of time. Change everything, completely alter the landscape, remove any associations that enabled his problem.

  “Hey,” I say.

  The toilet is in mid-flush. You can hear everything from everywhere in this place, so it wasn’t hard to hear the guttural sounds from his throat, his stomach lurching, his dry retching, the gasps of breath in between. Jason looks better in the sense that he seems more lucid, more self-aware. He looks worse by any other criterion. He hasn’t slept more than two hours at a time, always waking with a cry of some sort, ready for the fix that isn’t going to come. His eyes are dark and cloudy. His skin has a greenish pallor, the permanent look of someone who’s about to vomit. He moves fluidly at times, with a halting, hesitant gait at others. Every six-hour interval between pills is its own adventure, from contentment to discomfort to agony. But he has stayed true to his plan to exercise his way out of this, to let the adrenaline be his drug. He’s speed-walked outside (I never thought the day would come that Jason, jock extraordinaire and marathon enthusiast, would do any exercise that included the word walk) and jogged on my fold-up treadmill inside the apartment. Not wanting to completely trash his knee all over again, he’s gone to aerobics, too. He has hit the indoor pool in my condo building no less than five times in the three nights he’s been here. He does push-ups and sit-ups and leg lifts on the floor, anything he can do to tire himself out and churn the adrenaline. He has little energy and no stamina, and what little reserve he does possess, after months without exercise, is easily spent. That’s the point, to continually tire himself out and occupy himself with the physical exertion.

  Realizing that all of this exercise is just making him drop more weight—not that this is his primary concern—he’s tried to eat. He does the cooking, anything to keep himself occupied, but he hasn’t held down a single meal yet. In between the episodes of vomiting, I’ve seen him double over in pain from the cramps, mostly in the abdomen and thighs. Not that he realizes I’ve seen it. He tries to hide it from me, the pain, the struggle. That’s as much a sign as any that Jason is back, the heroically stoic routine. So instead of saying, Shauna, my legs are cramping so much I’m going to scream, he just asks for a hot bath—the preferred short-term remedy for cramps. I’ve drawn more hot baths in the last few days than I’ve taken all year.

  Sitting on the bathroom ti
le, his back against the vanity, wearing only boxers, he raises his tired eyes to mine. “Sorry for the sound effects,” he says.

  “Don’t ever say you’re sorry,” I tell him. Then, my eyebrows raised, I say, “The Candyman is here.”

  He shakes his head out of his funk. “Six hours already?”

  “Six hours already. Your OxyContin, sir.” A sentence I was pretty sure I’d never utter in my lifetime. I hold out my hand.

  He shakes his head, waves me off. “No. I’m going to hold out.”

  “That’s noble of you,” I say. “But let’s stick with our program. You’ve done great.”

  “No. No. One more hour.” He unfolds himself and stands up, facing me.

  (I must make this statement: As terrible as I feel for this man, as much as his every moan and quiet grimace turns something sour inside me, I do have eyes, and they work pretty well. Jason was always a cut, muscular guy at six-three, two hundred twenty pounds, a real battleship. Thirty pounds lighter? Six-three, one ninety? His face is drawn, his eyes sunken, an unhealthy color to his skin. All of that, yes. But his body? He looks like he stepped out of an underwear ad for Calvin Klein. I couldn’t pinch fat on him with a pair of tweezers. His stomach is a sheet of thin skin raked over rock. His chest and shoulders are a tad smaller than at his fighting weight, but they are more pronounced, every tiny muscle rippling with his every movement. He’s like something Michelangelo carved out of stone.)

  “What?” he says to me.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Can I get you anything?”

  “A loaded pistol?” he suggests.

  His cell phone rings. He switched from a buzzer to ringtones, so if Lightner calls with news, he won’t miss the call. Lightner has been given his own ringtone, the theme song from Dragnet (DUNNN-duh-DUN-dun . . . DUNNN-duh-DUN-dun-DUNNNNN).

  But Lightner hasn’t called yet. Guess who has?

  Twenty times, I think it was, on Friday alone, just to his cell phone. Saturday? Forty-seven calls. Forty-seven. Sunday? I lost track, but we think it was sixty-two or sixty-three times she called him.

  And today—well, today isn’t over yet. There’s still two hours left in Monday, but we’re closing in on sixty phone calls again.

  Jason always looks at me when the phone rings, as if I have any input. I always say the same thing: It’s your decision. Answer it if you want. I’m not going to tell him how to handle this. Look, Alexa was bad news, poison, the worst possible person for Jason at the worst possible time. But I’ve had my heart broken, too. It sucks. It just sucks. Some of us handle it differently. I don’t enjoy witnessing her suffering.

  But I’m not focused on her. It’s Jason who has my complete attention. Anything that will set back his recovery is bad; anything that doesn’t, I’m agnostic. A simple test, in theory. So if he can interact with her, help talk her down, so to speak, I’m all for it. What I’m not for? Alexa sucking him back into that life, because I’ll bet it was a mighty comfortable one, full of guilt-free sex and drugs. (Who knows, maybe they played rock and roll to go for the trifecta.)

  So he’s answered a few of her calls—one on Friday afternoon, one last night, and one this afternoon, his comments to her clipped, succinct. I need to be alone to get through this. I can’t see you or talk to you. I’m really sorry, but I’m not changing my mind. Some version of that, with my moving as far away from the phone as I can, knowing that on the other end of that call, a stricken woman was pleading with him to take her back.

  Oh, yeah, it sucks, no way around it.

  And that’s just the phone calls. Saturday, the e-mails started, too, beginning with something basic, the Why won’t you call me back? variety, then something safe but heartfelt (I’m trying not to push you, complete with smiley-face emoticon, but also This is very hard for me), followed in the early morning hours of Sunday with something a little more disturbing (Maybe we can just wipe the slate clean, and This is killing me, and If you keep ignoring me, I don’t know what I’ll do).

  Yesterday afternoon, as Jason was cooking dinner and actually hopping in place to calm himself, he pulled up an e-mail she sent called “A lesson” that complained that Jason hadn’t given her an adequate explanation (he had, I thought), that he lied to her and used her (he didn’t; it was the other way around, actually), and ended with this: You’d probably like it if I died, wouldn’t you? Well, just say the word, Jason, and I’ll do it. I’m dead anyway.

  “Jason,” I say, “we really should call the police.”

  He runs some water in the bathroom and splashes it on his face. “Shauna, please. I can’t keep having this argument.”

  “But the situation keeps getting worse.”

  He knows I’m right. Around seven last night, another e-mail arrived in his inbox, with a more ominous tone, calling herself poor Alexa the fucked up girl and then this: I just thought of something that could be seriously bad for you and I want to make sure you’re protected so please call me just for that and nothing else. And then this beauty, from this morning: If you don’t get in touch with me your going to be seriously fucked, complete with the grammar mistake (rare for her, Jason insists) and the apocalyptic conclusion.

  Jason dries his face with a towel. “I know,” he says. “But it would kill her. The police show up at her door? Or a restraining order? I already hurt her badly. That would devastate her.”

  “This is venturing into Fatal Attraction territory,” I say. “What about you? What about me? Aren’t you the least bit worried? I mean, what about that doctor in Ohio?”

  He shakes his head slowly. Alexa, not surprisingly, had an answer for the background research Joel pulled up on her. Jason accepted her side of the story. I can’t deny that a cheating husband, lying to hide his affair, would not be a first. But every phone call Alexa makes to Jason’s cell phone draws me closer to believing the worst about her.

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” he says, looking at me with a half smile, because he’s giving back to me the very thing I said to him. That was the deal. If Jason needed fresh air, or a drive, or laps in a swimming pool, I’d be there with him. It is turning into a mutual-protection arrangement. “Alexa would never do anything like you’re thinking,” he says. “And if she tried to hurt you, she’d have to get through me first.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  He moans as he leaves the bathroom. “She wouldn’t do that. She’s in pain, but she wouldn’t do something like that. She doesn’t even know we’re together right now. I told her I was alone and outside the city.”

  He drops onto my bed with another moan.

  “She just needs to get it out of her system,” he says. “Nothing’s going to happen to us.”

  Jason’s cell phone rings again. That just brings another moan from his throat.

  I walk over to check it—Jason insists one of us check every call to his phone, because even though it’s probably Alexa, it might be—

  “Jason,” I say. “It’s an unknown number.”

  84.

  Jason

  Monday, July 29

  I snatch the phone from Shauna before it goes into voice mail and answer the phone.

  “Long time, no see, Jason,” says the man who calls himself James Drinker. “Where you been hiding out?”

  “Let’s call it an undisclosed location,” I say.

  “I get you, I get you. Hey, you’re probably thinking, as long as I don’t know where you are, I won’t do anything else. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  I don’t answer. This guy is always a step ahead, always inside my brain.

  “Tell me something. How was that pizza? You seem like a garlic kind of guy.”

  “Is that right?” Let him talk. Maybe he’ll give something up.

  “I’ll give you credit, my man. That was a close one, over there at Linda’s house. Maybe if your knee was feeling better, you’d have caught me.”

  “How do you know I’m not watching you right now?” I ask.

  H
e breathes out of his nose, blurring the connection. “No, I don’t think so. Listen, I just want you to know, your plan isn’t going to work. I don’t care where you are. I’m still going to do whatever I want to do.”

  “But how do you frame me, then?” I ask. “How do you know I’m not in Hawaii right now? Or with five people who can verify my alibi?”

  He gets a good laugh out of that one. “You really don’t get it,” he says. “That’s okay. You’ll know soon enough, Jason Kolarich. I just want you to know: This next one? This next one is going to be my favorite.”

  THE DAY OF ALEXA HIMMEL’S DEATH

  Tuesday, July 30

  85.

  Shauna

  10:00 A.M.

  I open my eyes and roll my head over to my bedside clock and begin with panic—it’s ten!—my brain hardwired for work after two consecutive trials, month after month of seven-day workweeks. It’s a moment before it all returns to me: I’m off today, will probably be off for days, maybe the whole week, maybe the entire time that Jason needs before he goes to some professional clinic.

  I rub my eyes and listen. The television is on in the living room, SportsCenter, I think, some animated guy talk. The scent of strong coffee.

  It was a long night, like all of them have been since Jason started his recovery. Jason popping awake every couple of hours, hitting the floor for push-ups and sit-ups to combat the nervous energy, the itch, the cravings. Jason at six this morning, fists pumped in the air, Seven hours again! Seven!, celebrating his newfound tolerance, Seven is the new six! I watched him with my eyes half shut, dancing around like Rocky, knowing that in one hour he was going to be doubled over, grimacing from cramps and nausea.

  I poke my head out of the bedroom. Jason is back to his exercise, push-ups on the floor. I take a quick shower, towel-dry my hair, and throw on a robe. It feels like a lazy Sunday morning.