She's Not There

by P J Parrish

  Calm down and think.

  Buchanan was moving now, walking slowly toward the corner, like he was out for a damn evening stroll. No one was that cool, Alex thought. Nobody could kill a woman and just walk away like nothing had happened.

  Alex reached back inside the car, grabbed the gun from under the seat, and stuck it through his belt under his jacket. When he looked back at Buchanan, the man was standing on the corner, waiting to cross the street. Then Buchanan turned and disappeared into a bar.

  Alex bolted across the street to the apartment’s entrance. He had to know if Mel was in there. He had to know she was still alive. He had to get in.

  He yanked at the handle on the metal grate, and when it didn’t budge, he spun around looking for buzzers or intercoms. There was only one button outside the gate. RING BELL FOR OWNER. He jabbed at it and waited. When no one came, he punched it again and again. Still no one came.

  Damn it.

  He’d have to confront Buchanan.

  No, that’s stupid.

  He would follow him. For now, he would just follow.

  Alex walked to the bar, pushed open the door and slipped inside. The place was bathed in a smoky red light, but Alex could make out some people sitting in the booths that rimmed the empty dance floor—a young woman in a hoodie curled into fetal position, a skeletal man in a dirty Santa costume clutching a beer and staring into space, an Asian woman cooing into the hearing aid of an old white guy.

  Where was Buchanan? Then Alex spotted him at the far end of the bar, silhouetted by the lights of the jukebox. Alex moved deep into the shadows and dropped into a booth.

  So now what?

  His hand moved inside his jacket and rested on the gun. Suddenly he felt very comfortable with the weapon. But he knew he couldn’t use it now, not here with all these people. He slumped down into the darkness of the booth, tapping his foot nervously and stroking the butt of the gun.

  Finally, Buchanan slipped off the barstool and pulled on his jacket. Alex waited until Buchanan left the bar and then hurried out after him.

  He followed Buchanan as he made his way south on Larkin Street. He was easy to trail, his height and broad shoulders rising above the shorter Asians and hunched junkies. Again, Buchanan seemed to be in no hurry. He stopped to get a newspaper from a stand, ducked into a liquor store, and emerged with a small brown bag tucked into his jacket pocket.

  Alex stayed against the buildings, breathing hard. His skin burned with adrenaline, and he was almost nauseous from the rush. How much farther? Where was he going?

  Suddenly Buchanan stopped and started looking around.

  Alex stepped quickly into a doorway, his feet brushing up against a man huddled under a blanket.

  Now Buchanan was talking to someone, an Asian man who pointed at something down the street. Buchanan had gotten himself lost, Alex knew.

  Buchanan headed across the street, cutting between the cars. Alex followed, creeping behind slow-moving cars as he hustled to catch up. For a second, he lost Buchanan in a crowd but Buchanan resurfaced, still heading south. Then the man vanished, like he’d been sucked up off the street.

  Alex slowed his step and turned a full circle, afraid Buchanan had seen him and had doubled back to confront him. But Alex was alone. The fog had thickened, and Alex could hear the chest-thudding boom of a car stereo but couldn’t see where it was coming from.

  He cursed himself for losing the sonofabitch. He was about to turn around and head back when he saw the entrance to the alley. It was the only place Buchanan could have gone.

  He edged up to it. It wasn’t an alley. It was a narrow street—OLIVE the sign said—and it was just wide enough for one car to pass. But it was empty and dark, the only illumination coming from the streetlight on the far end.

  Then, something halfway down the street moved in the dark.

  A man . . . Buchanan moving away.

  Alex started down the street, passing through a narrow canyon of buildings, his eyes locked on Buchanan, now about twenty yards ahead.

  Alex pulled the gun from his waistband. This was the perfect place, dark and deserted, but he didn’t have much time—Buchanan was almost to the corner.

  Then Buchanan turned around.

  Alex skidded to a stop and raised the gun.

  “Who’s back there?” Buchanan shouted.

  Alex fired, blinking as the muzzle flash lit the street like the strike of a giant match.

  Buchanan fell away from his view.

  Alex heard the clatter of trash cans and the screech of rats.

  He fired again.

  Somewhere a woman screamed.

  Alex turned and bolted from the street, clumsily trying to tuck the gun in his waistband as he ran. Back out on Larkin, he pushed through the crowd, knocking a woman to the ground, but he didn’t stop.

  He knew he hadn’t followed Buchanan very far, but it seemed like a hundred miles back to the red neon of The Outsider bar. When he saw the sign, he stopped and spun, looking for his rental car.

  Fuck! Motherfucker!

  He couldn’t even remember what it looked like. Then there it was, parked halfway down the block. A siren cried behind him, but he didn’t even look back as he ran to the car. He climbed in, started it up, and with a screech of tires, got the hell out of the Tenderloin.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The cold felt good against his hot forehead.

  Alex stood motionless, head against the window, eyes closed. How long had he been here, standing in the dark, head against the glass?

  He slowly opened his eyes.

  He was high up, on the thirtieth floor of the Parc 55 Hotel, and far below, the city lights glowed under the layer of fog. It was quiet, no sounds at all. His heart was pounding slow and hard but his body felt numb, as if the adrenaline he had felt after firing the gun had burned away the nerve endings just under his skin.

  He took a step away from the window and wiped a hand over his face.

  Buchanan wasn’t dead. He had seen him get up and stagger out of that alley.

  But everything after that was a blur, running back out to the street, driving crazily down dark streets. How had he gotten to this hotel? He couldn’t remember checking in or riding up in the elevator. He looked across the shadowed room, spotting his briefcase on the desk and his suitcase on the floor by the bed where the bellboy had left it.

  Where was it? What had he done with it?

  He grabbed his jacket off the desk chair and fumbled through the pockets until he felt the hard metal. He pulled out the gun, releasing a breath of relief. The gun was cold and there was no smell, no evidence that it had been fired.

  But he had fired it. He had tried to kill a man.

  Back on Geary Street, when he had first seen Buchanan coming out of Jimmy Reyes’s apartment building, he had asked himself how someone could kill a woman and be so cool afterward. But in his heart he had already known the answer, because six hours after he had watched McCall push Mary’s car into the canal, he himself had sat in a meeting with two German investors. But later that night, alone in his study, with Mel sleeping upstairs, he drank an entire pint of vodka without moving from his chair. He realized now it had been the beginning of an almost nightly ritual, drowning Mary Carpenter over and over again in a bottle of booze.

  Alex sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Just a few days ago, in that same study, he had sat flipping through Mel’s scrapbook, wondering what had happened to her that destroyed them.

  But it wasn’t her. It had never been her. It was him.

  A voice he hadn’t heard in years was suddenly in his head, raspy with the scorch of cigarette smoke and flat with the apathy of a woman who had given up on living.

  It’s your fault. Your father left because of you, Alex.

  Then another voice—Buchanan’s.

&nb
sp; She’s a different woman and you’re going to have to be a different man to get her back.

  He had been going about this all wrong. He didn’t need to be different. He needed to be what he once was.

  He turned back to his suitcase, pulled out the two suits he had brought, and laid them on the bed. The voice of his law professor was in his ear—brown is for used car salesmen, black is too severe, blue suggests “the truth.”

  He chose the blue. Next he pulled out a crisp, white button-down Oxford shirt, dark blue socks, and a pair of black wingtips. Nothing fancy or foreign looking.

  Ties . . .

  He had brought three. The solid burgundy or the blue stripe were the obvious choices, but maybe he needed the juju of the green and blue. He shut his eyes, feeling a rush of heat through his neck. This had to be perfect. He had to be perfect.

  Green-blue juju. It was imperfectly perfect.

  He turned back to his suitcase, pulled out his wooden box and took out the double-ruby debate pin in the bottom. He couldn’t wear it on his lapel of course—that would be childish—but he could put it in his pocket.

  When his clothes and shoes were laid out on the bed, he looked around to see if he had missed anything he would need tomorrow. The gun, lying on the other bed, caught his eye. He picked it up and set it down carefully next to the double-ruby pin.

  Alex turned out the light, drew a chair close to the window and sat down. He looked at his watch—just after 3:00 a.m. Six more hours before he could see Mel. Six hours to get dressed and walk one mile to the opera house. That’s where she would go, because he had checked and knew that’s where Reyes would be for a rehearsal.

  The watch’s crystal face was smudged. Alex rubbed it on his sleeve. Just like McCall had done the day he had given it to him. It was a Patek Philippe, the same one McCall’s father had passed down to him.

  Alex shut his eyes. What was that slogan, the one in the Patek ads. You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.

  I never had a son, Alex, McCall had said.

  And I never had a father.

  Alex took the watch off and set it on the table.

  He turned back to the window. A reflection appeared on the glass, so distorted that at first he wasn’t sure what it was. Then it sharpened into a face.

  When he realized it was his own reflection, he closed his eyes, not wanting to look at it.

  Traffic was light on the Bay Bridge, but the fog was advancing fast across the bay, a slow white tsunami wiping out everything in sight.

  Buchanan took his left hand off the wheel and flexed it. The damn thing was swollen, and his knuckles were burning from where he’d ripped the flesh off them diving into the trash cans on Olive Street.

  He had sobered up fast, lying there in the stinking darkness, wondering if the shooter was going to come down the alley and finish him off. When he finally got up, he hurried back to his motel, planning to pack up and head back to Nashville to leave these crazy people to solve their own problems.

  But he hadn’t gotten very far when he started thinking about what had just happened to him.

  No way was the shooter a robber or mugger; he would’ve confronted him face to face. And he wasn’t some nut just firing at the sky because the shots had whizzed right by Buchanan’s ear. And it wasn’t Amelia Tobias, either. If she had seen him hanging around the Tenderloin, she would have called the police, or run off again.

  It was fucking McCall.

  He had hired someone to take him out. How McCall had guessed he didn’t intend to kill Amelia, Buchanan didn’t know. Maybe the guy was just that good at reading people, hearing things in their voices that exposed their lies.

  But it didn’t matter how McCall knew. Buchanan was mad, and he wasn’t running. Not from some chickenshit, silk-suited swindler who had built his business by snuffing out secretaries. But if he was going to stay in San Francisco and save Amelia, who was probably in greater danger now than ever, he needed more than just his wits and his anger. He needed a gun.

  He had ducked into the first bar he’d seen, a place on O’Farrell with no name, just a buzzing neon cocktail glass above the metal-grated door. The bartender wore a T-shirt that said EVERYTHING DIES. Five minutes and fifty bucks later, Buchanan was out in the cold again with directions to Oakland.

  Bay Bridge to the Nimitz Freeway South. Take Grand a few blocks into the city and look for any kid in a big jacket hanging out on a corner. Once you get the gun, get the hell out, fast.

  The Toyota’s headlights caught the blur of a green sign for Nimitz Freeway, and Buchanan eased off onto the exit ramp and around a curve that set him south. He hadn’t gone far at all when he saw the sign for Grand Avenue and pulled off.

  The smooth gray freeway lines and darkness gave way to a string of streetlights, their alien sodium vapor glow illuminating a landscape of vacant trash-strewn lots, brick warehouses, and sagging construction fences splashed with graffiti. The only open business Buchanan saw was a gated-up liquor store.

  He drove deeper into the city, into a row of shack-like homes with weedy lawns and rusted cars in the driveways. Another turn led him down a darker street, with warehouses rising up on both sides, and only one streetlight to light the entire block. Music—hard, bass-heavy rap stuff—boomed from the darkness.

  Buchanan put the car in reverse and swung around backward. His headlights caught the silhouette of a man standing against the building. No, it was a kid, his neon-striped sneakers lit up in the glare of the headlights.

  Buchanan drove forward slowly and swung the Toyota up to the curb. The kid moved back into the heavy shadows, but he didn’t run.

  When Buchanan pressed the button to roll down the passenger window, the kid inched toward the car, hands in his pockets, head covered by a hood. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

  “You need directions, man?”

  “No, something else.”

  The kid’s eyes cut to the street and then back to Buchanan. “You a cop or just a stupid motherfucker? Nobody else come down here like this all alone.”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  The kid smiled. “You a funny guy.”

  “I need a gun.”

  “How much bank you got?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “Lemme see it.”

  Christ, he was probably going to get ripped off and left for dead. He dug into his pocket and withdrew three one-hundred dollar bills. He held the money up but not too close to the open window.

  The kid reached into his jacket and produced a small black gun. “Nine mil Nano.”

  “Good enough.”

  Buchanan slapped the money into the kid’s hand and took the gun. He put the car in gear, but the kid was still at the window, his gloved hand on the door frame. Buchanan glanced in his rearview mirror, sure the kid had buddies coming.

  “You got bullets, man?”

  “What?”

  “Bullets, you know, those little lead things you put in guns?”

  “I can get ammo.”

  “Not here in California you can’t, less you got a permit. New law, man.”

  Buchanan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was the kid just trying to jack him for more money?

  “How much?” Buchanan asked.

  The kid held up a plastic baggie of bullets, swinging it gently. “One Ulysses, my man.”

  “What?”

  “Man, where the fuck you from? Fifty bucks.”

  Buchanan rummaged through his pockets and came up with three twenties. The kid dropped the bullets on the passenger seat and disappeared into the night. Buchanan decided to do the same. He pulled away and drove slow but steady back to the freeway.

  Back in San Francisco, he returned to the Mirage and packed up his stuff. It was past midnight by the time he checke
d into his new hotel. The Gateway Inn had a security guard in the lobby. He wasn’t armed, but maybe his presence would deter an attempted hit. The Gateway was also closer to the apartment building where he was to meet the hippie landlord in the morning.

  The room was cold, and the heater was on the fritz. Buchanan made sure the two deadbolts were secure, then stripped off his clothes, taking the gun with him into the bathroom. After fifteen minutes in a steaming hot shower, he toweled off, picked up the gun, and carried it with him back to the bedroom.

  There was one change of clean clothes left in his duffel. It felt good to be dressed in something decent again, something that didn’t stink of sweat and fast food. And it felt good to be alert, too. He figured that had come from the lingering adrenaline rush of being shot at and his trip to West Oakland.

  He settled into a chair near the window, holding the gun in his lap. The view through the dirty, cracked window was of tarred rooftops and air conditioning units. Fog pressed against the glass, like the night was exhaling.

  His adrenaline rush was subsiding. He rubbed his aching hand.

  It had been his fury, his indignation at being shot at, that had put a gun in his hand. He had felt good about that, empowered even, and not simply because he had a weapon. He had taken action to defend himself, and he had taken it because he was sick of getting shit on.

  How you doing, Bucky?

  He thought she had deserted him, left him for good because he’d made such a mess of his life, especially with what he had agreed to do back in Georgia, sitting in the car with McCall. But he should have known she would come back. No matter what mistakes he’d made or what mood he was in, she always came back. Her being dead hadn’t changed that.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  No, you’re not.

  No, he wasn’t. Because he had no idea how this was all going to end, and no confidence even that he would come out of this alive. He looked down at the gun in his lap. The worst part was that even with this, he had no control.