Private Screening

by Richard North Patterson

“I’m Jack Harris.” He paused, frowning at Lord. “Stacy’s four takes into the final scene. It may be a while—she’s having trouble.”

  “I’m not surprised.” When Harris scowled at the floor, half-turning, Lord asked, “Mind if I go in with you?”

  Harris looked up, silent. “She asked you here,” he said finally.

  Lord followed him through the partition, past a series of partial interiors: the sterile lobby of an apartment building, one corner of a day-care center, a bar with stained glass chandeliers, a kitchen with a butcher-block table, an off-white living room with track lighting and abstract prints. Only voices from deeper within told Lord they were nearing the actors.

  Rounding half an office cubicle, Lord saw Stacy Tarrant.

  She sat with her eyes closed as a woman applied makeup to traces of sleeplessness. Uncertain, Lord stopped ten feet back. But as the woman finished, she opened her eyes, and saw him.

  Her cool expression did not change; had her gaze not lasted so long, Lord would have thought himself invisible. Then she turned to the makeup woman and murmured thanks.

  A buzzer sounded, twice. Without speaking to Lord, Stacy walked toward a restaurant with Russian decor and half a ceiling. The other half was canvas, casting indirect light.

  “It’s the Russian Tea Room,” Harris explained, and entered the set.

  Perhaps twenty people were there. A black woman paged someone on a walkie-talkie; a cameraman focused his lens; three others adjusted the shutters of lights at various angles; two more held microphones on long poles. At one table, a blond man and a slender woman close to Stacy’s height sat for someone with a light meter. Next to them, Lord picked out Mark Steinberg, talking to Stacy and her costar. No one smiled.

  Listening to Steinberg, Stacy nodded. Then someone put glasses of wine on the table, and the two leads replaced their stand-ins. Voices dropped; the camera lowered; lights focused on the couple; booms hovered over them. The atmosphere reminded Lord of an operating room. Stacy was quite still.

  The buzzer sounded.

  There was silence, and then she began speaking.

  Lord could follow the scene. Stacy and her leading man disliked each other but were meeting out of some need she had. It was tense enough that Lord guessed why Steinberg had saved it for last; she spoke to the table, a woman under pressure who had rehearsed an emotionless speech, finger tracing the rim of her wineglass. Impatient, the costar asked questions. Her voice became taut, her responses more controlled and rehearsed. Lord was not sure she was acting.

  Then her costar asked one question too many.

  Her eyes rose from the glass, direct and quite luminous. “Damn it.” Each word was low, succinct, angry. “I need you.”

  “Print it,” Steinberg said crisply. “That’s a wrap.”

  Stacy’s costar clasped her hand. Someone began clapping; it spread until Stacy looked up in confusion. Then Steinberg called out, “Super,” and grinned at her.

  Managing a smile, she got up from the table and hugged him. “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  She turned to the others. One by one, she took their hands, kissing the makeup lady and two or three more. Most would never see her again; Lord sensed they had come to admire her, and felt for her now. As she walked toward him, head down but still smiling a little, he felt the vacuum she was entering.

  She stopped smiling when she reached him. “I’m ready,” she said.

  “You were good,” Lord said.

  Nodding, Stacy watched darkness fall, charcoal through the tinted windows of her limousine. She did not know how long they had driven without speaking.

  Moments passed like this.

  “Why did you call me?” he asked.

  She turned, examining him. His face was older; that the last year might have cost him something seemed right.

  “Yesterday morning,” she finally answered, “while I was still in shock, suddenly there were all these people telling me what I should do. The FBI, poor Mr. Parnell—even Ralph DiPalma called.” She turned from him again, speaking in a lower voice. “I want John back. I’ll need someone independent to advise me how to do that, period. I don’t have to like them.”

  “It might help.”

  Stacy clasped the armrest on the door. “You know John,” she responded coolly. “And the Parnells, the SNI people, and the authorities in San Francisco who are handling it all. For this, you make sense. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Narrow-eyed, Lord glanced at the soundproof glass between them and the driver. At length, he asked, “Why does Phoenix think you’ll agree to a ‘unique act of selflessness’ to save Damone?”

  “We’ve been together since I started.” She flicked back her bangs, uncomfortable. “John’s a loner—I’m probably his closest friend.”

  “Any family?”

  “Once, in New York City. John was a career foster child—that’s how he ended up in the Army.” Fear welled inside her. “To go through that …”

  “He’s no use to Phoenix dead,” Lord said, “Not yet.”

  She turned, angry at his prescience. “You owe him, dammit.…”

  “Look, how did the FBI say he’d been taken?”

  She had to stop this, Stacy realized; hatred was a luxury until Damone was safe. “Someone broke in,” she finally answered. “The house was torn up, and his car was still there.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I was too rattled to remember it all.” She stared past him at the lights of Malibu. “You saw Alexis.…”

  “I’m just trying to imagine who could take him, and how.”

  But Stacy felt the film of Alexis washing over her again. “What does it matter now?” she murmured.

  Lord was silent. “That depends,” he told her finally. “On exactly what it is he really wants you to do.”

  Stacy realized how tightly she gripped the armrest.

  Her watch showed 7:20.

  2

  IT was 7:37.

  Back against the shed, Phoenix watched the clouds change colors. Vanishing in the Pacific, the sun tinged them a deepening pink. Then pink shaded into gray, and he knew that search planes could no longer see him. Turning, he opened both doors.

  Behind them, two satellite dishes were aimed at the sky. Four feet high, four feet across, the fiberglass webs were smaller but more powerful than those used at the Carson trial. Cables ran from their antennae to his replica of a satellite control room: monitor screen, tape cassette, color controls, sound equipment. Checking his watch again, the low thrum of the generator made him restless.

  It was 7:40.

  Twenty minutes, a nation waiting, and still he did not know if this would work.

  To calm himself, Phoenix thought of his good fortune since the morning he had captured Alexis Parnell.

  It had begun shortly before dawn, at the bottom of a deserted limestone quarry, an hour north of where he would take her.

  The three men had been waiting there since dusk, with the white van. They had bought it for cash in Rhode Island, filed off the serial numbers, stolen its New York plates from a junkyard. Each man was as anonymous. Two years before, in Boston, they had asked Phoenix to finance a drug deal; in return, he had dangled the future prospect of a multi-million-dollar kidnapping. Now his plan had sucked them in. The men had driven west from Massachusetts without knowing his targets, encountered no trouble on the way, had no connection to California. Like Phoenix, they wore gloves.

  As one held a flashlight, they began switching tires from his black van to their white one. Then, silently, they got inside the back. Their keys were waiting for him on the seat.

  In night’s last darkness, he left the black van, climbing the steep road from the quarry.

  The white van stopped again at an abandoned campsite, forty miles from the Parnells’. They waited there for five more hours, hot, reviewing his plan. No one saw them.

  At 2:00 P.M., Phoenix drove them toward the Parnells’.

  His
mouth was dry. Seeing their red brick guardhouse, he realized that he had driven the last stretch of country road with both hands tight on the wheel.

  Yards from the iron gate, he slipped on his hood and took the Mauser from beneath the seat. When he braked suddenly, tires squealing, a head popped into the guardhouse window. In one continuous motion, Phoenix slid from the van, raising his revolver with both hands. Through the glass, the man gaped in his revolver sight; Phoenix saw his own reflection aiming.

  Neither moved. Phoenix fought back panic—he could not shoot him with the gate still locked.

  With a deliberate air, he beckoned.

  Tentative, the man stepped from the guardhouse, arms raised. When he came through the gate, Phoenix clubbed him on the skull.

  In a fireman’s carry, Phoenix hauled the guard to some scrub brush, unlooped the rope from his belt, then bound and gagged him; what seemed agonizing slow motion had taken four minutes. He rushed to his van and began driving in the same direction, steadily as before.

  A mile past the gatehouse, a firebreak branched left from the road. Phoenix took it. When he stopped again, the van had climbed another half-mile. To the left, through a line of oaks, he gazed down at the tennis court.

  It was two hundred feet from the house, a sloping mile from the van. Between them, on the path snaking toward the court, he saw two figures in white. As he raised his field glasses, the woman bent to touch the hem of her tennis dress, sunlight glinting on blonde hair.

  His throat constricted.

  He lowered the glasses, motionless. Then he slowly got out, walked to the rear of the van, and unlocked it.

  The three men blinked at the sunlight, jerkily stretching their joints. Two unloaded rifles, one a camera; sliding from the van, they lifted out the motorcycle, and then Phoenix waved them through the tree line. Sheltered from view, he studied the terrain. Weeks before, he had walked it at night, with the Parnells sleeping inside. As then, underbrush and gullies concealed the route he had taken to the court.

  Satisfied, he stationed the cameraman, then synchronized his watch with the two others. The Parnells began playing as they pulled on burlap hoods; at a movement of his hand, the gunmen started down the hill.

  He found it hard to turn away.

  Driving back down the break, it took him twenty-seven minutes to reach the road again, and turn toward the Parnells’.

  At 3:57, he reached the undefended gate.

  Opening it, he imagined the two gunmen, huddled in the last gully beneath the court—frightened, doubting him. They could not see the players, only hear their voices and the catgut ping of tennis.

  Phoenix slipped on the hood.

  As if in a dream, he passed the manmade lake, bordered with cattails, then drove through the symmetric double row of dogwoods Parnell had planted to please his wife. In the afternoon breeze, a pink blossom fell on the windshield; then the dogwoods ended in a circular drive, a tailored green lawn.

  As Phoenix veered across it, two masked gunmen burst onto the court.

  The players froze; Phoenix felt a savage explosion of joy. And then Parnell turned to the sound of his van, as if hoping to be rescued.

  Phoenix leaped from the van, camera resting on his shoulder.

  Parnell gaped in disbelief; the shock on Alexis’s face seemed to focus on his camera. Then the two gunmen moved to each side of her, one binding her hands, the other with a revolver to her temple.

  Phoenix began filming her.

  Turning from his wife to the whine of the camera, Parnell blurted, “Take me.…”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. As Phoenix filmed them pushing her toward the back of the van, staring helplessly at Parnell, she stumbled.

  Time stopped.

  Even as she gazed up at him, fallen near his van, Phoenix felt the moment as if it were his last: the woman with her hands bound, the slanting clarity of four o’clock light, the green, retreating sweep of hills, the geometry of the white-lined court. Then Parnell moved, a raising of his hand.

  Unshouldering the camera, Phoenix drew his Mauser.

  “No—” she cried out.

  Without turning, Phoenix placed the revolver to her husband’s forehead. Parnell’s mouth fell open; the hooded men beside him seemed to flinch.

  Phoenix swung his arm wide, cracking the revolver against his temple.

  There was a dull thud as the shock ran through Phoenix’s arm. Parnell slumped heavily, glasses falling beside him in the dirt.

  Slowly, deliberately, Phoenix stepped on them, and looked up at Alexis. Her gaze rose in horror from her husband’s shattered glasses to the hooded man who had struck him.

  Turning from her, he signaled his confederates.

  In rapid sequence, the two armed men trussed and blindfolded Parnell, threw him in the van, tied cloth across Alexis’s eyes. They stacked the weapons and camera before pulling her inside with them. Running to the driver’s side, Phoenix stuck his Mauser beneath the seat and stepped on the accelerator. Dust rose in his rearview as he left the court behind.

  Ahead was one straight mile of gravel; then a twelve-hour escape had to be flawlessly timed. He checked his watch, read 4:11, and pushed the pedal to the floor.

  The Parnells’ iron gate and guardhouse grew larger in his windshield. Suddenly, a motorcyclist appeared outside the gate and opened it. Jamming on his brakes, Phoenix stopped.

  The cyclist held up the film he had taken. A second camera was strapped to his motorcycle.

  Phoenix left the van.

  In silent haste, they opened its rear door; as the two gunmen lifted his motorcycle, the cyclist ran with Phoenix to some scrub brush fifty feet from the drive. The guard lay where Phoenix had left him, bound and unconscious. Lifting him by his hands and feet, they trotted to the van and threw him beside Parnell. Then the motorcyclist sat next to the others against one side of the van, facing their two prone victims. Huddled in a corner, Alexis turned her blindfolded face, as if to hear. Phoenix threw his hood at her feet, and slammed the door.

  As he drove away, the gate looked as before.

  His heart still raced.

  He breathed in, foot easing on the accelerator. For the next eight hours, he must drive steadily, drawing no attention.

  The country road they took wound through pastures and hillsides of grapes and crops. Now and then oaks overhung the asphalt, some with Spanish moss; creeks ran beneath them, one so swollen it murmured through his window. Two or three trucks passed in the other direction. Hat shoved over his eyes, Phoenix drove by like a local with his mind on sheep or cattle or planting grapes. He could feel the heat in the back of the van, the fear of those trapped there, and his own.

  For another half-hour, he followed his circuitous route, northwest through Sonoma County.

  Ahead, sun fell between the first scorched trees. Years ago, a fire had seared miles of hills; above the greenness of recent growth—oaks and brush and younger firs—the blackened pines gave him a kind of chill.

  Leaning forward, Phoenix spotted the gnarled oak which marked his path, and turned abruptly from the road.

  In the time it took to climb the path, twisting upward between scrub oaks and scabrous pines, it became dusk. Phoenix could scarcely see the ruined farmhouse. It was enough that the surrounding acres had been sold to the next farm, that no one lived here now.

  He stopped at the crest of the hill, taking out the Mauser. When he opened the van, the sound carried.

  The three men gaped at him. Alexis was hunched in the fetal position, near her husband. As she whimpered, Phoenix threw Parnell’s near-dead weight across one shoulder, snatching a duffel bag.

  For minutes, he carried Parnell across the ridge line toward a stand of oaks, dark shapes in moonlight. There was no sound but the rise and fall of crickets, a few leaves in the wind, Parnell moaning softly, blindfolded.

  At the base of an oak, Phoenix put him down, loosened the gag. Parnell’s voice was a croak.

  “Why …?”

  Phoenix
pushed the Mauser down his throat. As the bound man moved his head from side to side, gurgling, he pulled the trigger.

  The click of an empty revolver echoed in the trees.

  Parnell sobbed when he removed it. Reaching into the bag, Phoenix knelt beside him, looping two videotapes around his neck with twine. Then he forced the audio cassette between the older man’s teeth and jammed it tighter with the gag. Parnell choked, gulping, then was silent.

  Returning to the van, Phoenix walked softly, to slow the beating of his heart.

  It was an hour before Phoenix descended the quarry again. When he stopped, the black van was a swatch of intensified darkness three feet away.

  Opening the white van, he heard Alexis’s muffled crying.

  She was lighter than he had imagined; beneath the tennis dress, her legs felt cold. As he carried her to the black van, her sobs turned to ragged breathing, like a hunted animal afraid of its own sounds.

  The three men shuffled in beside her, carrying their equipment, so that only the unconscious guard remained locked inside the white van.

  Eyes narrow, Phoenix searched the starlit sky for helicopters or surveillance planes, listened for their sound.

  Tomorrow, someone would find an untraceable van, with no fingerprints but the victims’, and match its tire prints to the sites of two kidnappings. A perfect circle, leading nowhere, if Phoenix could evade them for eight more hours.

  In minutes, the other van had taken the path from the quarry to a county road, veering west toward Highway 101. Phoenix began checking the gas gauge.

  It was three-quarters full when he hit the highway, heading north for Humboldt County.

  Five hours distant, yet like another country—rugged, isolated, hostile to strangers. Fifteen years ago, it had been a wilderness, with a few logging towns and Eureka on its northern coast. And then the trickle of burnt-out cases had begun moving from cities where the drugs had gone bad, the rip-offs grown too frequent, the crash pads turned weird or gone condominium. In the mountains, living in tents or lean-tos without electricity, they’d begun to plant their own marijuana, and then to sell it.

  Dying towns thrived; realtors sold land no road could reach. Strangers began raiding crops, careless hikers disappeared, Mexicans brought in to harvest vanished before they were paid. Poachers were shot near their trucks. Now people moved there to grow dope, or not at all.