They're Watching (2010)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  I was impatient for answers. Absent those, I was desperate for contact, eager to mull over the bits and pieces of what had happened, to rub them to a high polish. On my way to Doug Beeman's, I'd detoured by the alley near campus and had not been surprised to find the Honda Civic gone. Once I'd cleared the cash from the trunk, they'd cleared the car from the alley. And now silence at Beeman's door, darkness at the curtains. As I turned away, I realized just how much that concerned me.

  Ariana's words were there like an echo in my head, warning of all the consequences I hadn't considered. I wished I'd found something here to assuage her concerns. I'd come back tomorrow first thing to make sure Beeman was all right; I'd already decided to go to Indio after morning classes to check on Elisabeta.

  I turned away from the door. The complex--and the surrounding streets--was alive with life and movement, music and engines, the crack of beer cans opening, the giggle of children, a woman yelling into a telephone. So many people. How many were on the verge of catastrophe? An aneurysm, a lurking blood clot, a heart valve a beat away from giving out? How many of these apartments had a gas leak, a compromised roof, lethal mold growing beneath the drywall?

  Which name in my address book faced a similar deadline?

  At the intersection my discomfort revved into high gear. Knee bouncing, fingernails strumming, squirming in my seat like a kid before recess. The clock on my dashboard read 6:53 P.M. Seven minutes until their next e-mail hit my in-box. It occurred to me yet again that though it was Tuesday and the workday over, I had yet to hear from my lawyer with the studio's terms for the legal resolution. Were they waiting to see if I played good little soldier? I was still a rat in their box--push the lever, get a pellet.

  The red light was taking forever. I rolled down my window, tapped my foot, hummed along to the Top 40 tune I was pretending to listen to. But no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, it remained at the edge of my peripheral vision, rising into view from behind the church billboard. Finally I looked over at that Kinko's sign, beckoning like neon to a drunk. In the foreground rose that redoubtable lettering--WITHOUT WOOD, A FIRE GOES OUT--and for the first time in a long time, I felt like the universe was talking to me, even if it was telling me something I didn't want to hear. It was easy enough to heed the Word; I was in the left-turn lane, Kinko's was across three lanes of traffic and up the street the opposite way. Not a temptation at all.

  The only way to beat them is not to play.

  Forcing my gaze ahead, waiting for the light, I listened to the click-click-click of my turn signal.

  Hotel Angeleno, a cylindrical white rise a stone's throw off the 405 where Brentwood meets Bel Air. The crisp photo, perfectly framing the seventeen stories, looked like an advertising shot. The place was a Holiday Inn that had gotten a face lift a few years back, but it didn't take much to qualify as a landmark in Los Angeles.

  Hunched over a computer in my corner cubicle at Kinko's, I took in the image, holding my cell-phone camera at the ready. My thumb pressed "record," and the Sanyo camera whirred into action. I'd acquainted my thumb with the cell-phone buttons so I could record however long, back-to-back in ten-second chunks, without moving my eyes from the monitor.

  The picture on-screen faded, replaced by a close-up of a hotel-room number: 1407.

  Next was a service door, sturdy and metal, the edge of a Dumpster peeking into view. The parking-lot lines and concrete exterior showed it still to be the hotel.

  The next slide put a charge into my chest: my silver key chain, placed on our kitchen counter. A daytime shot, but there was no way to tell when it had been taken.

  The close-up photo that followed showed one key angled free and clear of the others. Sturdy, brass. Not one of my own.

  Numbly, I reached into my pocket. Lifted my key chain, flat on my palm, up before my eyes. There it was like a Christmas present, hidden in the jumble. A new key. Riding along with me all this time.

  The PowerPoint presentation had moved on. Inside my Camry now, the angle from the passenger seat; the photographer must have been sitting. My glove box had been laid open and a hotel key card set on top of my tin of Altoids.

  A message appeared and faded: 2AM. TONIGHT. COME ALONE. DO NOT GET SPOTTED.

  Followed by another: YOU NEED TO SEE HIM.

  Him. Him?

  My Sanyo stopped recording a moment before the top browser window closed, leaving me to stare at the e-mail with the hyperlink they'd sent to my Gmail account. My fingers ached from being clenched around the phone. I released my fist and watched the pink creep slowly back into my skin.

  I clicked "reply" on the e-mail, and to my surprise an address appeared. A long string of seemingly random numbers, ending with gmail.com.

  The digital clock on the desktop said I was late for dinner, a walk with Ariana, my life. I thought of my briefcase, bulging with unread student scripts. Our walls, torn down in spots to the studs and pipes. The house I had to get in order, with all that implied. I owed the people in my life more than this. Except the one whose neck was on the line.

  I typed, I won't do this anymore. Not without knowing who you are and why you're doing this to me, and sent it off before the second thoughts gnashing at my heels could overtake me.

  I sat and stared at the screen, wondering what the hell I had just done.

  A comic pop sounded from the computer speakers, breaking through my black thoughts. An instant message had flashed up on the screen in its cheery little AOL cartoon bubble.

  TONIGHT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING.

  I hadn't even logged in to an IM program, but there it was.

  Grinding my teeth, I stared at the smug little sentence. I was sick of being manipulated, toyed with, led down the gallows path one blindfolded step at a time. Something inside me had shifted, whether because of Ari's persistent reasoning or the ominous silence I'd just encountered at Beeman's front door. But my resolve had been chipped away, one assumption at a time, leaving me far from convinced that the course I'd been taking was the right one.

  Breathing hard, summoning courage, I stared at the screen.

  My fingers hammered the keyboard, asking the question I was afraid to know the answer to: What if I say no?

  I rocked back in the chair. Across the store, the cash register jangled and copy machines whirred and clicked like futuristic life-forms. The air conditioner blew cool air down my collar.

  Another popping sound, another message. This time it could just as easily have been my own thought bubble; the words seemed to look right through the windows of my eyes and read my mind.

  THEN YOU WILL NEVER KNOW.

  Chapter 32

  Midnight.

  I wasn't going to that hotel room.

  Ariana asleep beside me, I lay and watched the clock. She'd taken an Ambien to help her doze off, but I was fairly certain that no sleeping pill would get me down tonight. Whatever this thing was, I had it by the tail or it had me by the neck. When I didn't show up, would they come after me, renewed? If they didn't, could I stand never knowing? Could I go back to student papers and faculty-room joking and neighborhood walks? I would have to. As Ari had said, I was tampering with other people's lives. And if I kept following instructions, when would it end? By no-showing, I was taking my fate into my own hands. And if they reacted with wrath, I would be ready for them. If the lawsuit returned, I was no worse off than I'd been two days ago. In the quiet dark, I began listing the precautions I'd start taking at first light.

  12:27 A.M.12:28 A.M.

  I wasn't going to that hotel room.

  TONIGHT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING. Who was waiting in Room 1407? A face from the past, a wronged friend, a man in a dark suit, legs crossed, silenced pistol in his lap? Or a stranger with a gift, nothing more to me than I was to Doug Beeman? How long would the person wait before figuring out that I wasn't coming through that door?

  12:48 A.M.12:49 A.M.

  I wasn't going to that hotel room.

  I pictured Doug Beeman on his kn
ees, his face up against the TV, how he'd sat back on his heels and swayed and how I hadn't known he'd been weeping until I heard the sobs choke out of him. The school photo on Elisabeta's table, the missing-teeth grin. Those heaps of banana peels. The despair, thick as a scent in that cramped living room. The duffel of cash that I prayed would lift that despair as the DVD had lifted Beeman's, that might just buy a wink of light at the end of the tunnel.

  1:06 A.M.1:07 A.M.

  I wasn't going to that hotel room.

  Snippets of text floated in the darkness. SOMEONE YOU KNOW. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. What was I going to do? Lie here miserably unasleep until I was awakened by a ringing phone? Or would the death notice come later? A day, a week, three months. Could I live like that, waiting, knowing I could have prevented whatever was coming?

  1:17 A.M.1:18 A.M.

  The only way to beat them is not to play.

  I wasn't going to that hotel room.

  1:23 A.M.

  I kissed Ari on the sleep-warm neck. Regarded her sleeping face. Lips fat and luscious, popped open just slightly, giving off the faintest whistle.

  Whispered, "I'm sorry."

  Slid from bed, guilty, miserable, and racked with fear.

  It wasn't that I had to go.

  It was that I couldn't not.

  Having parked at the curb up Sepulveda beyond eyeshot of the valets, having retrieved the key card from my glove box and snugged it in my back pocket, having pocketed my Sanyo and the prepaid cell phone to cover any recording or calling contingency, having waited for a break in traffic and threaded through the rear parking lot in my jeans and black T-shirt, I stood at the base of Hotel Angeleno, key in hand, confronting the service door from the photo.

  Crinkling in my pocket was the note I'd jotted hastily under the dome light of my car: I received an anonymous message telling me to come to Room 1407, and that it was a matter of life and death. I don't know who's in the room. I don't know where this will lead. If something bad happens, please contact Detective Sally Richards of the West L.A. station.

  Past the concrete freeway wall to my left, invisible cars swooped by, rushing smooth and soporific, an endless wave. The cylindrical building loomed overhead, a cool green glow uplighting the penthouse soffit.

  A car approached from the curving drive, a valet closing my brief time window, but before the headlights swept into view, I zippered the key into the lock and twisted. A satisfying clunk. I slipped inside, breathed the heated air, and tried to shake the tingling from my fingertips.

  Immediately I heard a squeak of a wheel, but before I could move, a worker turned the corner, pushing a room-service cart. In the frozen instant before our eyes met, I put a hand up on the door nearest me and noted with great relief that it led to the stairwell. Hoping he wouldn't catch a glimpse of my face, I swiveled quickly and stepped through.

  "Excuse me, sir--?" The closing door severed his voice.

  I huffed my way up, the tapping of my Nikes coming back at me off the hard walls. The fourteenth floor was blissfully quiet. Ariana would've liked the L.A.-hip deco--sleek, slate, stone, earth. Dark wood trimmings, amber glows from wall sconces, silent carpet underfoot. A clock showed 1:58. Passing the elevator, I felt a jolt of panic as a woman dressed for the gym stepped from her room, but, busy on her cell phone, she didn't bother with eye contact.

  The key card ready at my side like a stiletto, I counted down the room numbers. Reaching 1407, I jammed it home. The little sensor gave me a green light, and I turned the hefty handle and shoved the door open a few inches.

  Darkness.

  A few inches more. A bottleneck hall by the front bathroom, only a sliver of bedroom visible from the doorway. The curtains had been thrown back, floor-to-ceiling glass doors letting out onto a cramped balcony.

  "Hello?" My voice, strained and thick, was completely foreign to me.

  Barely cutting the black of the room, the glow of the distant city lay in faded puddles on the floor. The hum of freeway traffic blended with the rush of blood in my ears as I inched forward. The door shut itself firmly behind me, cutting what little light the hall had afforded.

  Somehow I sensed an emptiness in the room. Was I supposed to wait for someone here? Would it be another phone call leading to another wild-goose chase?

  A faded smell--sweet, spicy, a trace of ash. My body tense, I stepped even with the threshold to the main room. The comforter had been dimpled where someone had sat on it. And lying next to the indentation, a slender object, about four feet long.

  Scanning the room, I took an exploratory half step forward and picked up the object by the rubber grip. The metal head swung up on the graphite shaft, glinting in the city lights. A golf driver. My golf driver. The one I'd hurled after the intruder as he'd hopped our rear fence. The etching on the face of the head was dark with something, probably dirt; I had left it out there in the leaves, after all. But the stuff didn't act like dirt.

  It was sliding slowly down the titanium face.

  I dropped the driver abruptly on the bed. That smell in the air resolved, the faintest whiff of smoke. Clove cigarettes.

  YOU NEED TO SEE HIM.

  My chest heaving, I took another half step to my side to steady myself, and my foot struck something with a bit of give.

  It was attached to a dark mass sprawled to my left beside the bed. I sucked in a breath, amplified to a screech inside my head, and blinked down through the darkness at the body splayed grotesquely on its back, the death curl of the white hands, the dent at the forehead, the black tendrils of blood worming into the hair, the ear, pooling in the eye socket. The famous brow. Those perfect white teeth. And my nemesis, that well-defined jaw.

  TONIGHT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING.

  Horror knotted at the back of my throat, blocking off air, making my gorge lurch. I knew even before I heard the pounding footsteps coming up the hall. Stepping away from the bed to the middle of the room, facing that glorious smog-diffused cityscape, I tugged the woefully inadequate insurance note from my pocket and put my arms up over my head a split second before the door smashed in and the powerful beams of police flashlights hit me.

  Chapter 33

  I didn't kill him. I didn't kill him. It sounded like my voice, saying it over and over, but I wasn't sure whether it was in my head or coming out of my mouth until one of the cops said, "Yeah, we got that part."

  Patrolmen, huddled in twos and threes, alternately fielded phone calls and mumbled into their radios. They peered at me not with animosity but with a sort of bemused wonder, awed by the scope of what they'd stumbled into. I heard them from the end of a tunnel, their words strained through the humming in my ears. I'd gone into shock, I think, but I'd thought that when you were in shock you weren't supposed to be so fucking terrified.

  I'd been frisked roughly and moved to a room up the hall, a match of 1407. They'd seized my note asking them to contact Sally Richards, though I didn't know whether they had tried to reach her. Hotel Angeleno fell within her and Valentine's jurisdiction, so that gave me my only glimmer of hope.

  I sat on the corner of the bed. Looking down, I realized I wasn't wearing handcuffs, though I had a vague memory of being cuffed at some point earlier when they'd wiped my hands with a forensic swab. It seemed they weren't sure what to do with me yet.

  One of the female cops asked, "Want us to call your wife?"

  "No. Yes. No." I pictured Ari waking up, finding me gone. It would take her about two seconds to put together that I'd gone to the hotel, though I'd promised her I wouldn't. "Yes. Tell her I'm okay. Not injured or dead, I mean." That drew some odd looks. "They led me here. They put a bug on me. Give me a pen. Here. Here. I'll show you."

  One of the cops withdrew a pen from his breast pocket, clicked it, and handed it to me. Another said, "Watch him."

  Using the tip of the pen, I dug into the heel of my Nike, right where the thin incisions were. The pen bowed and almost snapped, but I managed to fight out a chunk of rubber. "They bugged me.
Right here. They were keeping track of--" I bent the sole back, digging my fingers into the gash.

  Nothing inside the tiny cavity.

  My breath left. I wilted.

  One of the cops snickered. The others looked like they felt sorry for me. My shoe slipped from my hands, hit the floor. My sock had a hole at the toe. My voice, little more than a whisper: "Never mind." With a shaking hand, I raised the pen. I couldn't even look up, but I felt the cop take it back.

  There was a brisk knock at the door, and then Sally entered, Valentine at her heels. She frowned at me brusquely, then asked the nearest cop, "Look at that color. He gonna pass out? You sure? Good. Leave us alone." A low murmur from the cop, and then Sally snorted and said, "Yeah, I think we can handle him."

  Her wry tone--something familiar, at last--brought me back a step from the edge. The cops shuffled out, and Valentine took a post by the slider to block me in case I decided to go for the balcony. Sally dragged a chair over from the sturdy hotel desk, flipped it around with a twist of her thick wrist, and sat facing me.

  "You were found with an unauthorized hotel security key in a room that isn't yours over the dead body of your declared enemy and plaintiff with a murder weapon containing your prints. What do you have to say?"

  The room smelled of dust and Windex. Just beyond my right foot was the space corresponding to where Keith Conner's body lay, stiffening, four or five rooms up the hall. My throat was so dry I wasn't sure I'd be able to speak. "I'm an idiot?"

  A curt nod. "That's a start." She checked her watch. "We have about twenty minutes before RHD rolls in and takes over--"

  "What? How the hell am I supposed to trust Robbery-Homicide?"

  "That's not exactly your--"

  "If they take over, I'm finished. They've got me from every angle here. No one else will believe anything I say." I'd come off the bed, and she gestured sternly for me to sit back down. I said, "Why can't you keep the case?"