Fear itself: a novel (22 page)

“All part of the game, Nellie, all part of the game.”

“I’m not
playing
your goddamn game,” said Nelson, too loudly, sounding more doubtful than defiant even to his own ears; he could feel his courage, or at least his resolve to be courageous, draining away.

“Aren’t you?” said a harsh new voice, both familiar and unfamiliar, more nasal than Simon’s normal speaking voice, with a hint of a quaver in it. Nelson recognized it immediately, though he hadn’t heard it since he was a boy.

And as the figure let fall the hood and slowly turned the lantern that had been shining into Nelson’s eyes upon himself, Nelson felt as if he were passing through a sort of prism—the kind where beams of light converge and condense themselves into a single point before emerging on the other side with their spectrums all reversed.

No, he whispered, trying to close his eyes again, trying to unsee what he told himself he couldn’t possibly have seen, but it was too late. Nelson had already crossed over to the other side of the prism, where he found himself staring into the lashless, browless, reptilian eyes of the bald old man whom he’d last seen over thirty-five years ago, lying in a pool of blood on the floor of a smoke-filled bathroom, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and a straight razor still clutched in his lifeless hand.

Pender’s cell phone woke him a little after six o’clock on Saturday morning, chirping the first two bars of “Moon River” from somewhere in his pants, which were on the floor next to Dorie’s bed. Retirement or no retirement, after twenty-seven years with the Bureau, it never occurred to him not to answer it. He grabbed the pants and took them into the hall, shook the phone out just before it kicked over to the message center.

It was Steve McDougal, Pender’s longtime boss and longer-time friend. “Jesus H. Christ, Pender, did I or did I not attend your retirement party earlier this week?”

“I was poking around a little, doing a favor for Abruzzi—it got personal.”

“And what the screaming fuck possessed you to enter a suspect’s home without a warrant or backup?”

“The sister invited me in.”

“Ed, she was a fucking mongoloid idiot! And what were you doing on his doorstep in the first place?”

“That’s Down syndrome. And Dorie had mentioned Childs’s name the night before. When she disappeared, I became concerned for his safety as well.” That was the story Pender had been giving out since the first cops arrived on the scene yesterday afternoon. Might as well stick with it—it would make things go more smoothly for all concerned. “I decided to drop in and check on him—not as a suspect but as a potential victim. The sister invited me in, he attacked me. It’ll stand up. And by the way—I did try to get in touch with you Thursday afternoon, but you never returned my call.”

Irrelevant as the reason for Thursday’s call had been to the matter under discussion, Pender had decided to throw it in anyway—when you’re low on ammunition, you toss anything you can find into the cannon: grapeshot, scrap metal, whatever. And sometimes you even hit something.

“All right, all right,” said McDougal. “You’re talking to me
now,
and I want your word, both as your friend and as your boss, that from this day on, the word
retirement
will mean more to you than putting a new set of Michelins on the Barracuda. No poking around, no favors for Abruzzi, no nothing. Agreed?”

“You bet. Word up, as the kids say.” Pender decided there was no point bringing up the fact that he had just launched an affair with one of the victims in the case. “Speaking of Abruzzi, can you get Maheu off her ass?”

“Why, what’s going on?”

Pender told him. “And the worst part of it is, if there was ever a case where Liaison Support could be useful, this is it. Childs is wealthy, he’s slick, he’s mobile, there are probably victims we don’t know about scattered all over the country, and unless I miss my guess, he’s going to be leaving a trail of new ones. Plus Abruzzi’s had some bad breaks lately—why not give her a chance?”

“I’ll think about it. We do have a personnel drain, what with this Y2K flap on. But if I give her the point on this one, I want it understood, I’m giving it to her, not you. You’re still out.”

“I’m out, I’m out. One more favor, though—do you still have that cane I gave you after your knee operation…?”

Zap Strum, who was not a morning person—he wasn’t even a daylight person—surprised Simon by answering the phone on the first ring.

“Duude, saw you on the news again,” he said, even before Simon had identified himself. “You’re famous. And how are you enjoying your visit with Mr. Nelson Carpenter of 1211 Baja Way in scenic Concord?”

“How did you know that?” demanded Simon.

“Dude, please.” Strum sounded vaguely offended, as if somebody had asked Houdini how he’d worked the got-your-nose trick on a toddler. “You have nothing to worry about, though—if I was going to turn you in, I’d have done it last night.”

“Did you get the information I asked you for?”

“Sure thing. It’s going to cost you a little more than we discussed, though—you being a fugitive from justice and all.”

“No problem,” said Simon.
You being a dead man and all.

Before leaving, Simon popped in on Nelson, who had spent the latter half of the night naked in the bathtub, not out of choice, but because Simon had superglued him to the porcelain after the game.

“I have to go out for a little while,” Simon told him pleasantly. “I’ll be borrowing your car—try to stay out of mischief while I’m gone.”

There was no response, which was not surprising, since Nelson’s lips had been superglued as well. The idea had come from a recurring childhood nightmare of Nelson’s that Simon had kept in mind all these years. Young Nellie used to have dreams in which he’d been captured by witches who erased his mouth as cleanly as if he’d been a cartoon figure, to keep him from crying out; in real life the effect, the panicked jerking and stretching of the seamed lips, would have been more satisfying to Simon had it not been for the unmistakable madness in Nelson’s eyes.

Fear stimulated Simon, but insanity only repelled him—when he returned, he decided, if he returned, he would seal those eyes as well.

Linda Abruzzi awoke Saturday morning to the pleasant sound of a gentle rain pattering against the crumbling shingles of the old house by the canal. It sounded sweet—Linda didn’t remember much gentle rain in San Antonio, where it had sometimes seemed to her as if the relentless drought was broken only by the occasional murderous gully washer.

She stayed under the covers another half hour or so, luxuriating in the idea of having the house to herself on her day off. (The last she’d heard from Pender, he’d called her back yesterday afternoon to tell her he’d canceled his flight after all, and was going to “poke around” a little; the events at Grizzly Rock Road had taken place after she’d left the office.) But when at length she climbed out of bed to visit the bathroom across the hall, it was with a vague sense that she was forgetting something; a moment later she found herself facedown on Pender’s hard plank floor.

It was the drop foot, of course—she’d forgotten about the paresis in her anterior tibial muscles that caused her to trip over her own toes unless she had her braces on.

Linda knew, lying there, that her whole day, perhaps the entire weekend, hung in the balance, and forced herself to laugh. “I give it a nine point five,” she announced as she picked herself up, hanging on to the end of the bed for support. “High degree of difficulty, but the landing was a
leetle
rough.”

The rain had stopped by the time Linda got out of the shower. After her Betaseron, which raised a nasty red blotch at the injection site, and a breakfast of coffee, vitamins and supplements, and a smoothie she drank out on the back porch, she explored the house a little more thoroughly. Because the place had been built on a hillside that sloped down toward the canal, the front door was at ground level, while the back porch was fifteen feet above the sloping hillside.

To the left of the living room, as you faced the back of the house, was the bedroom wing. Pender’s room, the largest of the seven, was at the near end of the long corridor; Linda had selected the third bedroom, which was the smallest, but located directly across the hall from the guest bathroom.

To the right of the living room was another corridor, ending in a small kitchen that might have seemed homey if it hadn’t been quite so filthy. Getting it cleaned up to code would be a project, but Linda knew that if she was going to live here for any length of time, it would have to be done.

First, though, she desperately needed some clean clothes. Searching for a laundry room, Linda opened the door on the far side of the kitchen, and with her laundry bag over her shoulder, limped carefully down a dark narrow staircase with a railing on the right and a sheer drop to the left.

The cellar was also dark and narrow, a combination laundry room, storage area, obstacle course, which ran the length, but not the breadth, of the house. There were gaps in the red-brick facing of the walls, the concrete floor appeared never to have been swept, and the crossbeams supporting the plank flooring overhead were in turn supported by a haphazard forest of timbers varying in shape, size, age, and provenance; some rough-hewn and primitive, with clumsily beveled corners; some massive as debarked tree trunks; some gray, rounded, and splintery like telephone poles; some so new that they might have been borrowed from construction sites by midnight salvagers.

Not the place you’d want to be during an earthquake, thought Linda—but she did find a venerable Kenmore washer-dryer combo, and a sagging clothesline had been strung between two of the support beams. She decided there would be no point in hauling herself up and down that steep staircase between loads, so after getting the coloreds started, she dragged a legless, rump-sprung armchair over by the furnace, and began thumbing through a boxful of old
National Geographic
s. Half an hour later, whites in the washer, coloreds in the dryer, and Linda herself deep in the Kalahari with a tribe of underdressed Bushmen, she heard a telephone ringing directly above her head. Pender’s answering machine picked up, and surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, given the architectural eccentricities of the old dump, she found she could hear every word.

The real surprise was that it was Deputy Director Stephen P. McDougal, and he was calling for her. She hadn’t a prayer of intercepting the machine—he’d left his private number and hung up before she’d even managed to push herself up from her stumpy chair. A moment later she heard a familiar chirping sound, also overhead, but much farther to her right, and realized with a sinking feeling that she’d left her cell phone in the bedroom.

This is not a good thing, Linda told herself as she hurried (a relative term) upstairs. FBI agents were supposed to be on call at all times—it was part of the job description—and although she was technically no longer a special agent, she knew that missing a call from a deputy director was not exactly a terrific career move.

Sure enough, the number blinking on the screen of Linda’s cell phone was the same one McDougal had left on Pender’s machine. He didn’t seem put out, though. Quite the opposite: he thanked her politely for getting back to him, then asked her if she’d spoken to Pender recently.

“Not since yesterday afternoon.”

“You haven’t heard, then?”

“Heard what?”

“How long will it take you to get to my office?”

“You’re in Edgar?”

“Edgar.” He sounded amused. “Yes, I’m in Edgar.”

“It depends on the traffic. It’s Saturday, though, so—”

“See you in an hour.”

“But—”

Too late—the connection had already been broken.

In the fall of 1999, with the dotcom bubble distended to the bursting point and the prick of the first market corrections still in the future, the SoMa area, south of San Francisco’s Market Street, was
the
location for cyber-entrepreneurs. Spiking rents had driven most of SoMa’s previous population of struggling artists and leather-clad bondage-and-discipline aficionados from their lofts and warehouses, and every storefront big enough to hold a few PCs, a server cabinet, and an espresso machine now housed an IPO
in posse.

Kenny Strum, nicknamed Zap by admiring fellow hackers for his ability to reduce your hard drive to an expensive Frisbee if you pissed him off or if he just happened to be in the mood, had occupied his Brannan Street loft for three years; his five-year, pre-dotcom lease was the envy of his neighbors and the despair of his Indian landlords. He had made some improvements to the place, though—if your idea of improvement includes the installation of case-hardened steel grilles on the windows and a double-doored airlock-type front entrance complete with a security camera.

It wasn’t that Strum was paranoid, just realistic: since his return from Amsterdam in the early nineties, he’d been involved with some awfully shady characters. Ironically enough, setting up and hosting phobia.com for one of those shady characters, Simon Childs, was one of Strum’s legitimate operations, providing him with enough declarable income to keep the IRS off his back. Their connection would have been entirely legitimate if he hadn’t also been Simon’s most versatile and reliable supplier of illicit substances, including, but not limited to, super-sinsemilla by the ounce, solubilized Rohypnol by the bottle, and one lonely little blue suicide capsule.

Strum, a pudgy, pungent thirty-year-old with unhygienic-looking blond dreadlocks, had been hitting the bong hard all morning while he awaited Childs’s arrival. If only half the things he’d heard on the news were true, Simon Childs was a dangerous fugitive—but a dangerous fugitive who needed Zap’s cooperation. He told himself not to worry, but when the door buzzer sounded, he had to take one last billowing toke to allay his nerves as he checked the security cam. Quick double-take: the change in Simon’s appearance was so startling that Zap almost didn’t recognize him at first.