Lost Cargo (21 page)

“It must be the contractors,” he told her.

“They go home at three-thirty. It’s one in the morning.”

“It’s the cats,” he said. “They’re into something.”

“It must be Pie.”

“Pie’s on my side, hogging half the bed.”

“Then it’s Shadow.” Lisa reached for her bathrobe. “He must be scratching on a box.”

“I’ll check on him,” Ian offered.

“No, I know where he is. Believe me, you’ll never find him.”

Lisa felt her way across the room and flipped on the hall light. She could still hear the
scratch, scratch, scratch
, a persistent scraping of claws against a solid surface. It was coming from the guest room at the end of the hall.

“Shadow,” she called, exasperated. “What are you doing in there?”

The scratching stopped. When she came to the guest room door, she turned on the light, stepped over the vacuum, squeezed around an armchair, and peered in the closet. The bags of clothes and boxes looked the same.

For a moment she couldn’t see the cat, but then she spotted him. Shadow had wedged himself all the way in the back again. The cat looked comfortable with his paws tucked in front of him as if he’d been curled up in the same position for hours, watching the wall.

“Shadow, are you scratching something?” she asked him.

The cat blinked at her.

“Well, I guess you can stay there as long as you knock it off. You’re keeping everybody up. Come on, now.” She turned off the lights and went back to bed.

“Was it him?” Ian asked.

She pulled up the blanket. “It must have been him, but he’s just sitting there now, looking at the wall.”

One in the morning. Travis rubbed his bleary eyes, unable to sleep, grateful for the company of the dog curled up on the floor. The house seemed to have developed more creaks since Monroe moved out, or maybe he was hearing them for the first time.

He shook the tracker, frustrated. The ghost of an image glimmered over the surface, but in seconds the image dimmed and disappeared. How hard did the tracker fall into the gutter? Enough to break it? Why would the alien have equipment that fragile? It couldn’t be broken. He’d never really understood how to turn it on, anyway. He’d just lucked out.

Or a car ran over it. After all, he’d picked it up in the street.

He put the tracker down and paced around the room, obsessed with Lexie and their strange predicament. He’d thought about her every waking moment since their blow-up.

“Coward or realist?” he asked the mirror. Gruesome thoughts about the giant alien filled his mind. He had no intention of becoming a meal in the woods, but if the black triangle’s pilot was dead, he was going to have to come up with a plan fast.

“Just lie,” he said, thinking out loud. “Make up something and call the cops.”

His voice hung in the quiet. Make up what?

Tell them you heard something in her condo
.

He turned on more lamps, amazed by the simple idea that had just floated past him. In the lamplight his room seemed bright and safe, suggesting a world full of things he could get a handle on. The giant was hiding in Buchanan House. Tell the cops he heard something in her condo. It was perfect, really perfect—except he didn’t know where she was hiding. His plan was worthless without an address.

He picked up the lifeless tracker. “This is the key, this thing,” he said, weighing it in his hand. The tracker would show her location if he could get it to stay on for more than a few seconds. What was the thing’s range? Not that far. He’d have to be inside the building.

And days ago they saw her on a balcony. The room behind the balcony had artwork, something with elephants. An oriental wall hanging with three elephants. The wall hanging would confirm everything.

The idea gripped him. Lexie’s plan to risk their lives running around in the dark to get pictures nobody would believe wouldn’t matter. And no Lexie blurting out the crazy truth. Make up something and call the cops. A fight, glass breaking, gunshots, screams, a simple story any cop would swallow. The cops would come if he said gunshots. They would have their own guns ready, and when they saw what she was, they would kill her.

And it wouldn’t happen in the woods. They would nail her in somebody’s living room where she would have nowhere to run.

The phone rang in the quiet.

“It’s me,” Lexie said in a quiet voice. “I know it’s late, but I was driving around and saw your lights.”

“Where are you, outside?” he asked, trying to stomp out the feelings doing cartwheels in his heart. She sounded like she wanted something. It was too much to think she’d just missed him.

“No, at home. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Okay, you got me. What’s up?”

She hesitated. “I met with the reporter from the
Post
and a couple of cops that he knows. They’re going with me into the woods tomorrow to look for Burke. I want you to come with us.”

“I don’t know, Lexie.”

“You could help me remember where we walked before.”

“We already did that,” he said.

“But maybe this time we’ll recognize it. And it won’t be the two of us with an antique gun that doesn’t work. The cops will have guns, and they’ll shoot anything that moves.”

“We’ve been all through the woods. We didn’t get anywhere.”

“Well, I have to keep looking. I can’t just let him die out there.”

“I didn’t say that,” he told her.

“The reporter wants to talk to you,” she said.

She was waiting. He knew what was bothering him. The finality of it all, going in the woods with armed police. What if the black triangle’s pilot was still alive? The alien was probably dead, but what if he wasn’t? What if they shot him?

“The pilot that flew the black triangle has the best chance to capture the creature,” he said. “We should give him a chance. The police will destroy everything.”

“Travis, I don’t care if they destroy everything. I just want my brother back.”

Travis stared at the phone. How long did Burke have? And his own sister and brother-in-law?

He could stall one day. One day would give him time to get in the building. He could visit Lisa and Ian, use the tracker, and call the police with his story. If the tracker would work again.

“I can’t go with you,” he told her, knowing she would hate him for it.

Lexie hung up. He listened to the click, dying inside.

“Y
our teeth are more decayed than I thought,” Dr. Lynch said.

Great. Lisa’s heart sank, but she couldn’t ask him anything because his fingers were in her mouth. She shut her eyes and imagined hanging pictures in the condo while she waited for it to be over.

“We’ll stop for the day,” he finally said.

Lisa crawled to her feet. Her face felt like a balloon.

“How much more decayed are they?” she mumbled. “Is it bad?”

“Not that bad. I just need to make an adjustment on the estimate.” He wrote out a prescription with businesslike preoccupation and thumbed through a small calendar. “How about a follow-up next Saturday at eight? We can make it later in the day if that’s not convenient for you.”

“Eight is fine,” she said. “Do I pay you? Nobody was at the desk.”

“No, I need to get you another estimate,” Dr. Lynch said. “Here’s a prescription for pain, and here’s my home phone number. This is where I want you to call me. And call me if you have any problems of any kind. You’re my number one priority.”

“I was going to prepay. You don’t want me to pay you for today?”

He smiled and shook his head, so she left the office and crossed the lobby. Mid-morning sunlight streamed over the candy dish and the jack-o’-lantern on the concierge’s desk. The pumpkin looked sly, as though somebody had been in a bad mood when they carved it.

Lisa’s mind circled back to Dr. Lynch. She’d never been to a dentist who handed out his home phone number instead of an answering service and didn’t want her to pay. Incredible personal service. In her addled state, she saw an announcement posted by the elevator about the building’s Halloween party and read it twice before she realized the party was that night. She caught her swollen face in the hall mirror and remembered the prescription for pain pills. It would be a good idea to fill it before the anesthesia wore off.

Forty minutes and a bottle of pain pills later, she trudged back through the lobby, surprised to find Dr. Lynch had been a busy bee. He’d left a letter and a tiny return envelope with a Kensington, Maryland address in her mailbox.

His house, she realized with surprise.

She skimmed down the letter. He’d added three hundred dollars, but was writing two hundred off because she’d been “exceedingly cooperative and an excellent patient” and he “appreciated her flexibility.” That was nice, Lisa told herself, flattered. After insurance the bill came to twelve thousand, one hundred dollars, and he wanted a check payable to David Lynch,
DDS
.

“Once again,” the dentist wrote in closing, “I appreciate your cooperation and look forward to your new beautiful and healthy smile.”

Maybe he was still there. She could just give him the check now and transfer it from savings when she went upstairs.

Lisa dragged herself down the hall, but Dr. Lynch was gone. She wrote the check, put it in his stamped, self-addressed envelope, and dropped it in the mail slot by the elevator. The envelope fluttered down the chute and landed with a soft rustle on top of the other letters waiting for pick-up.

He probably did his bookkeeping at his house. She turned to the elevator. Blew a nice hole in their savings.

Moments after she lay down on the living room couch, Lisa gave herself up to a pain pill induced sleep that surged over her in waves. The rustling leaves outside the window became the crash of rolling surf. Sand sifted between her toes. The ticking of the clock ceased, the solid couch beneath her body faded away, and she floated out to sea, drifting into oblivion.

When she opened her eyes, she looked straight into Pie’s face. The kitten was standing on her chest, gazing at her with rapt curiosity. “Pie!” she cried. “What are you doing? Don’t you have any cat manners?”

The TV was running. “The security summit ends this afternoon,” a
CNN
reporter said outside the White House. “While the leaders failed to make progress to reduce nuclear stockpiles, they leave with a new commitment to keep nuclear weapons and weapons-grade materials out of the hands of terrorists.”

The teakettle whistled. “You awake?” Ian called from the kitchen.

“Yes, a cat got me,” she said. “What time is it?”

“Three o’clock. You’ve been sleeping all day. How’d it go this morning?”

“Good,” she yawned. “I think he’ll solve my headaches. How come all the windows are open? It’s freezing in here.”

Ian came in with two cups of tea and clicked off the TV. “It still smells like burned food. Do you feel like a walk in Rock Creek Park?”

She took the tea. “Why don’t we go tomorrow, Ian. It’s so late.”

“There’s plenty of daylight left. I could use some air.”

“I’ll come,” she sighed. Last night’s conversation all over again.

“You don’t have to, you know,” Ian said. “Stay here and rest.”

“I want to come,” she insisted untruthfully. “Just let me get my shoes.”

“Let’s drive down to the old stone mill. There’s a trail that cuts through the park. We can even leave the car and walk.”

“I don’t want to do that. We’ll end up walking home in the dark.”

“You worry too much. You’re exactly like my mother.”

“I am not,” she grumbled. “Let me close the windows.”

“Leave them open,” he said. “Let the place air out. We’re on the ninth floor. Nobody’s going to come in here.”

They drove up Connecticut Avenue and turned off onto Tilden Street. After they passed the Kuwaiti Embassy, the road wound down a sharp hill, past the gates of more embassies and mansions that were hidden from sight behind dense woods. Signs appeared at the bottom of the hill for Rock Creek Park and Pierce Mill, where Ian swung into the parking lot.

Lisa looked around. In spite of the late hour, the park didn’t seem as abandoned as she’d thought it would be. Bleak sunlight still shone down. A man with a book sat on a bench near the park kiosk, and a family with a crying baby gathered around a picnic table. More families walked down the trail into the forest, followed by a young woman in a dark blue jogging outfit with a black Labrador retriever at her side. Bicyclists cycled down the paved path, ringing bells as they passed.

Lisa and Ian took the path beside the creek. Old trees with smooth trunks leaned toward the water as if they yearned to escape their earthbound existence. The water flowed over the rocks in the middle of the streambed and beyond lay as still as a brown mirror. Ian told an amusing story while yellow leaves drifted around them.

They ended up meandering in a circle, passing fewer and fewer walkers and cyclists until they heard the ring of bike bells for the last time. The sun had dipped below the trees when they arrived back at the parking lot. Storm clouds were forming. The family with the crying baby and the man reading the book were gone. In the distance cars with their headlights on rushed down the parkway. Lisa wished she’d worn a heavier coat.

Ian pointed across Tilden Street to another picnic area. “A trail goes through those woods and ends up at our building. You can pick it up on Connecticut Avenue.”

“How did you find that out?” she asked.

“I took it today when you were asleep.”

“Ian! I told you about the body they found in the park.”

“Come on. That was blocks away, and it’s Saturday. The trails have been crawling with people all day. If we didn’t have the car, we could take the trail now and be home in thirty minutes. It’s still daylight. How about walking another half hour?”

“There are only two other cars here. I don’t want to get mugged.”

Ian pulled out his keys. “You’re right, sweetheart. Let’s go. You don’t look like you’re over the dentist yet. I’ll drive.”

“Fine,” Lisa said.

“You know, we should think about getting a new car when we get the move out of the way. Our chariot here has seen better days.”