Harlan Coben

by Play Dead

  Laura had never seen him act like this before. Marty Tribble had worked with Laura from Svengali’s conception. He was a serious-faced executive, a down-to-earth conservative in a rather liberal, flighty business. His sense of humor was famous around the office only because no one believed he had one. Crack a joke in front of ol’ Marty and you’d see the same reaction if you tickled a file cabinet. He was the office rock, not a man who became excited over trivialities.

  “Which product?” she asked.

  “Our new line.”

  “The casual walking shoes and sport sneakers?”

  “The same.”

  Her eyes met his and she smiled. “Sit down and start talking.”

  The plodding Marty (he wanted to be called Martin but everyone called him Marty for that very reason) practically leaped into the chair, his legs showing a spryness not yet seen in the downtown Svengali headquarters.

  “We’re going to run a national advertising campaign on television starting this fall. We’ll introduce the entire line to the public.”

  Laura waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He just continued to smile, looking like a game-show host who was trying to build suspense by not revealing the answer until after the last commercial. “Marty, that’s hardly an earth-shattering announcement.”

  He leaned forward and spoke slowly. “It is when your spokesman is the sports idol of the decade. It becomes even more earth-shattering when that sports idol has never endorsed a product before.”

  “Who?”

  “David Baskin, alias White Lightning, the Boston Celtics superstar and three-time league MVP.”

  His name struck her like a sharp slap. “Baskin?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Of course, but you say he’s never done any endorsing before?”

  “Only those ads for handicapped children.”

  “Then why us?”

  Marty Tribble shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me, but, Laura, all we have to do is throw a good advertising blitz during basketball games in the fall, and David Baskin’s broad shoulders will carry Svengali’s sneakers to top of the sporting world. He’ll give us instant recognition and legitimacy in the market. It can’t miss. I’m telling you the public loves him.”

  “So what’s our next step?”

  He reached into his breast pocket, where he neatly kept his matching Cross gold pen and pencil. His fingers plucked out two tickets. “You and I are going to the Boston Garden tonight.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to watch the Celtics play the Nuggets. The contracts are to be signed afterward.”

  “So why do we have to go to the game?”

  Again he shrugged. “I don’t know. For some strange reason, Baskin himself insisted on it. He said it would be good for your soul or something.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “It’s part of the deal.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that if I don’t go to this game—”

  “Then the deal is off. Right.”

  Laura tilted her chair back again, her fingers interlocked, her elbows resting against the armrests. Her right leg started doing its gyrating dance of annoyance again. Slowly, a smile formed on her lips. She began to nod her head, quietly chuckling to herself.

  Marty eyed her worriedly. “So, Laura, what do you say?”

  For a moment, the room was still. Then Laura turned her eyes toward her director of marketing. “It’s game time.”

  THE Boston Garden experience had been nothing short of shocking. When Laura first entered the old eyesore in North Station, she was skeptical. The Garden? This decrepit old building was the Boston Garden? It looked more like the Boston Penitentiary. Most arenas in the country were modern glass-and-chrome towers, shining and sleek with air-conditioning and cushioned seats. But not the Garden. The Celtics’ home was a run-down, seedy hunk of cement with a stale-beer odor and an oppressive heat all its own. The splintered seats were hard, broken, uncomfortable. Glancing around her, Laura was reminded more of a Dickens novel than a sporting event.

  But then she watched the thousands of anxious fans fill the Garden like parishioners on Christmas morning. To them, the climate was utopian, the aroma was that of roses, the seating arrangements plush and luxurious. It was as if these people thrived on escaping the niceties of the day to delve into the more perfect dwelling of their Celtics. Here was the Boston Garden—the zenith of the world’s millions of college, high school, backyard, and driveway basketball courts, the place in which countless children had imagined hitting the winning jump shot, grabbing the winning rebound. She looked up at the rusted rafters and saw the championship banners and retired numbers standing proudly like medals on a general’s chest. Silly as it sounded, this place was history, as much a part of Boston as the Bunker Hill Monument and Paul Revere’s house, but there was one big difference: the Celtics were living history, constantly changing, consistently unpredictable, always coddled and loved by their fair city.

  The frenzied crowd cheered when the players took the floor for warm-ups. Laura spotted David immediately. From her seat in the third row, she tried to catch his eye but it was as if he were alone on the parquet floor, completely oblivious to the thousands who surrounded him. His eyes were those of a man possessed, of a man on a mission from which he could not be diverted. But Laura thought she also noted a peacefulness in the bright green, the calmness of a man who was where he wanted to be.

  Next: the opening tap.

  Laura’s skepticism dissolved away slowly, like acid eating through a steel chain. By the end of the first quarter, she found herself smiling. Then laughing. Then cheering. Finally awestruck. When she turned around and gave the man behind her a high five, she had officially been converted. The basketball game reminded her of the first time she had been to the New York Ballet at Lincoln Center as a wide-eyed five-year-old girl. There was a similar artistry to the basketball players’ movements, like a complicated, well-choreographed dance interrupted by unpredictable obstacles that only made the spectacle all the more fantastic to the eye.

  And David was the principal dancer.

  She immediately understood the sweeping praise. David was poetry in motion, diving, leaping, swooping, spinning, twisting, chasing, ducking, pirouetting. There was a tenacious, aggressive gracefulness to his movements. One moment he was the cool floor leader, the next a daredevil trying the impossible like some comic book hero. He would drive toward the basket only to have a man cut him off, and then, like a true artist, he created, often in midair. When he shot, his eyes would focus on the rim with a concentration so strong she was sure the backboard would shatter. He had a sixth sense on the court, never looking where he passed, never glancing at the ball on his fingertips. When he dribbled, it was like the ball was part of him, just an extension of his arm that had been there since birth.

  And then the finale.

  Scant seconds remained, the outcome very much in doubt. The beloved boys from Beantown were down by one point. A man wearing the familiar Celtic green and white passed the ball to David. Two men from the enemy camp covered him like a blanket. One second remained. David turned and launched his unique, high-arching, fade-away jump shot. The shot lofted the orange sphere impossibly high, heading for its target from an impossible angle. The crowd stood in unison. Laura’s pulse raced as she watched the ball begin its descent, the game and hearts of the crowd riding on its slow movement toward the basket. A buzzer sounded. The ball gently kissed the top of the glass backboard, and then the bottom of the net danced as the ball went through for two points. The crowd screamed. Laura screamed.

  The Celtics had won another game.

  “Telephone is ringing, Mrs. Baskin,” the Australian accent said.

  “Thank you.”

  Laura rolled over on her stomach, the phone gripped tightly in her hand. She wondered if it had been during that fade-away jump shot that she first had begun to fall in love with David. She h
eard a click and the ring that originated in Boston traveled halfway around the planet to the small town of Palm’s Cove.

  On the third ring, the receiver on the other end was lifted. A voice came through the static-filled wire.

  “Hello?”

  “T.C.?”

  “Laura? Is that you? How’s the honeymoon?”

  “Listen, T.C., I need to talk to you.”

  “What’s up?”

  She quickly recounted the past day’s events. T.C. listened without interrupting, and like Laura knew he would, he immediately took control.

  “Have you called the local police?” T.C. asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll catch the next plane out of here. Captain said I’m due for a vacation anyhow.”

  “Thanks, T.C.”

  “One more thing: stress to the police the importance of keeping this quiet. The last thing you need is a plane- load of reporters pounding on your door.”

  “Okay.”

  “Laura?”

  “Yes?”

  He heard the strain in her voice. “He’ll be all right.”

  She hesitated, almost afraid to speak her mind. “I’m not so sure. Suppose he has one of his …” The words stayed in her throat, the thought too unpleasant to be spoken. But T.C. was one of the few people David trusted. He would understand what she was talking about.

  “T.C is my closest friend,” David had said to her the previous year. “I know he’s rough around the edges, and I know you don’t easily trust, but when there’s real trouble, T.C. is the one to call.”

  “What about your family?” Laura had asked him.

  David shrugged. “I only have my older brother.”

  “What about him? You never mention him.”

  “We don’t talk.”

  “But he’s your brother.”

  “I know.”

  “So why don’t you two talk?”

  “It’s a long story,” David said. “We had a problem. It’s all in the past now.”

  “So why don’t you call him?”

  “I will. But not yet. It’s not time.”

  Not time? Laura had not understood. She still didn’t.

  “Just get here fast, T.C.,” she said now, her voice quavering. “Please.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  IN Boston, Massachusetts, home of the beloved Celtics, T.C. placed the phone receiver back in its cradle. He glanced down at his dinner—a Burger King Whopper and fries he had picked up on the drive home—and decided he was no longer hungry. He reached for a cigar and lit it with a Bic lighter. Then he picked up the phone again and dialed. When the receiver was lifted on the other end, he spoke three words:

  “She just called.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN hours passed. Terry Conroy, known to his friends as T.C., a nickname given to him by David Baskin, fastened his seat belt as Qantas flight 008 made its final approach before landing in Cairns, Australia. It had been a long journey, beginning with an American Airlines flight from Logan to LAX, then from Los Angeles to Honolulu with Qantas, and finally, the flight from Honolulu to Cairns. Almost twenty hours in the air.

  T.C. pushed open his shade and looked down. The water of the southern Pacific was unlike any other he had ever beheld. The color was not merely blue. Describing it as blue would be like describing Michelangelo’s Pietà as a piece of marble. It was so much more than simply blue, too blue really, gleaming in its purity. T.C. was sure he could see straight through the miles-deep water right to the bottom. Small islands dotted the ocean’s canvas, beautiful landscapes formed from the rainbow corals of the Great Barrier Reef.

  He loosened his seat belt because his newly formed gut was getting crunched. Too much junk food. He looked down at his rolls of flesh and shook his head. He was starting to get fat. Ah, face facts. For a guy under thirty, he was already too flabby. Maybe he would start an exercise program when he got back to Boston.

  Sure, right. And maybe he’d meet an honest politician.

  He threw his back against his seat.

  How did you know, David? How did you know for sure?

  T.C. had turned twenty-nine last week, the same age as David. They had been roommates at the University of Michigan for four years, best friends, amigos, partners, equals; and yet David had always awed him. It wasn’t his basketball ability—awesome as it was—that set him apart. It was the man, the man who seemed to let problems and unhappiness run over him like small ripples of water. Most felt David was carefree because he had everything going for him, that he had never known real hardship or conflict, but T.C. knew that was bullshit, that David had survived the early wallops to end up on top, that he still had his moments of private hell that fame and fortune could not counter.

  “It’s not real, T.C.,” David had told him during his rookie season with the Celtics.

  “What’s not?”

  “The fame. The girls. The groupies. The adulation. The people who hang around you because you’re famous. You can’t let it mean anything.”

  “Well, then, what is?”

  “The game,” he replied, his eyes lighting up. “The feeling on the court. The competition. The moment when the game is on the line. A perfect pass. A fade-away jump shot. A dunk. A clean block. That’s what’s it’s all about, T.C.”

  And years later, T.C. thought now, Laura was put on the top of that list.

  The Boeing 747 landed with a thump and began to coast toward the small terminal building. David. T.C. shook his head, thinking he’d seen just about everything in the last few years but this … Hell, it wasn’t his place to ask a lot of questions. It was his place to help. Explanations would come later.

  He filled out the quarantine form, grabbed his suitcase off the rotating carousel, passed through customs, and walked to the waiting area, where Laura said she would meet him. The electronic doors slid open and T.C. found himself facing a wall of faces. To his right, chauffeurs held up signs with names printed in capital letters. On the left, local guides wore shorts and T-shirts, their signs stating the name of a hotel or tour group. T.C.’s eyes searched for Laura.

  A minute later, he spotted her.

  T.C. felt something sharp slice through his stomach. Laura was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, still ravishing enough to knock any man to his knees, but David’s disappearance had crawled all over her and attacked with a vengeance. She was practically unrecognizable. Her high cheekbones were sunken. Her eyes were dark circles staring out with bewilderment and fear, the bright blue color terrifyingly dim.

  She ran to him and he hugged her reassuringly.

  “Anything new?” he asked but the answer was all over her face.

  She shook her head. “It’s been two days, T.C. Where could he be?”

  “We’ll find him,” he said, wishing he was as confident as he sounded. He took her hand. There was no reason to stall the investigation. He might as well dive right in. “But let me ask you something, Laura. Before David vanished, did he have—?”

  “No,” she interrupted quickly, not wanting to hear that word. “Not in more than eight months.”

  “Good. Now where can I find the officer in charge of the investigation?”

  “Palm’s Cove only has two officers. The sheriff is waiting for you at his office.”

  Forty minutes later, the taxi pulled in front of a wooden building marked TOWN HALLand GENERAL STORE. There were no other buildings on the street. The lone structure looked like something out of Petticoat Junction , except for the surrounding lush tropics.

  “Listen, Laura, I think it might be best if I speak to the sheriff alone.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at this place,” he said. “It looks like something out of Bonanza, for chrissake. I doubt the sheriff here is much of a progressive thinker. Out here, women’s lib is probably a concept for the distant future. He may be more willing to talk if I speak to him alone, cop-to-cop sort of thing.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll le
t you know the moment I learn anything.”

  She hesitated. “If you think it’s best …”

  “I do. Just wait out here, okay?”

  She nodded mechanically, her eyes wet and glassy. T.C. got out of the car and walked down the path. His head was down, his eyes finding the weeds popping through the cracks in the worn cement. He raised his line of vision and stared at the building. It was old, the paint chipped, the structure looking as if a good push would topple it over. T.C. wondered if it was age or the climate of the tropics that made the wood look so weathered. Probably both.

  The front door was open. T.C. leaned his head through the frame.

  “May I come in?” he asked.

  The Australian accent was the first T.C. had heard since landing. “You Inspector Conroy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Graham Rowe,” the man said, standing. “I’m sheriff of this town.”

  While his words were those of a sheriff in a cheap Western, his accent and size were not. Graham Rowe was huge: a mountain of a man who looked like Grizzly Adams or some professional wrestler. A gray-blond beard captured his entire face, his hazel eyes serious and piercing. His green uniform with shorts made him resemble an overgrown Boy Scout, but T.C. wasn’t suicidal, so he kept that thought to himself. A bushwhacker hat with its right side tilted up rested on his head. A rather large gun and an equally large knife adorned his belt. His skin was leathery and lined but not aged. T.C. guessed him to be in his midforties.

  “Call me Graham,” he said, extending a giant hand/ paw. T.C. shook it. It was like shaking hands with a catcher’s mitt.

  “They call me T.C.”

  “You must be tired after that long flight, T.C.”

  “I slept on the plane,” he said. “What can you tell me about your investigation?”

  “Kind of anxious, huh?”

  “He’s my best friend.”

  Graham moved back behind his desk and beckoned T.C. to take a seat. The room was bare except for a twirling fan and the many rifles hung on the walls. A small holding cell was in the left-hand corner.