Fear itself

the wallpaper under the socket, and the socket itself, Simon retraces his steps, scorching the carpet until he reaches the bathroom door again. He holds the torch to the crack under the door until the fire threatens to burn his hand, then, with a conjuror’s flourish, drops the flaming Chronicle into the roasting pan.

And as the sound of the running water stops abruptly and the room begins to fill with smoke, Simon backs away to join Nelson over by the doorway. Together they watch, wide-eyed with excitement as the doorknob begins to turn as if by magic, then rattles frantically. A moment later-bam! — the door shudders, the chair wobbles. Bam, bam, bam again; Nelson pictures the old man throwing himself against it. A shiver of fear runs through him, but the door holds, the chair holds. Nelson can hear the old man screaming now: eeee, eeee, eeee-a high-pitched, keening sort of sound.

“Listen,” giggles Simon, putting his arm around Nelson’s waist, giving his love handle a little squeeze; “listen, he’s squealing like an old woman.”

“An old woman,” Nelson agrees. “C’mon, let’s-”

But before they can carry out the rest of the plan (ditch the ashes, put the matches, the baking pan, and the chair back where they belong, then take a powder before the old fart figures out the bathroom door is no longer mysteriously jammed; old fart, old lamp, old wiring, electric fire-hey, it happens, you know?), the door stops shuddering, the sound of the old-womanly keening dies away, and they hear a heavy, meaty thump, followed by a breathy, gasping gurgling, followed in turn by…

By nothing. By the soft crackling of the newspaper in the roasting pan. But from inside the bathroom, not another sound, until they are standing together in the bathroom doorway a few minutes later, looking down at a bald old man lying in a pool of blood, his throat cut from ear to ear, and a straight razor clutched in his lifeless hand, at which point Simon turns to Nelson, and in a voice filled more with awe than with fear, guilt, or rancor, says, “Sometimes you get lucky, Nellie-sometimes you just get lucky.” And sometimes you don’t. Something drags Nelson out of his hypnotic doze. Pain-it’s pain: his right leg, glued slightly higher to the side of the tub than the left, is beginning to work itself loose. He is encouraged briefly-then the pain begins to build. It’s a whole new order of misery, exfoliation by gravity, the fine hairs on the side of his calf being ripped out in agonizing slow-mo. He tenses the leg, holds it up against the pull of gravity for as long as he can, breathing shallowly through his nostrils. Eventually, though, the muscles tire, the leg sags, the torture begins again. Tears swim in his eyes, blurring the midnight blue wall tiles, but even the release of a good cry is denied to Nelson-if his nose stops up, he will surely suffocate.

Finally he can bear it no longer. Summoning all his courage, and the strength of despair, with one convulsive effort Nelson manages to yank the leg free of the porcelain, leaving a patch of hairy, bloody skin the approximate size and shape of a Dr. Scholl’s insert adhering to the inside of the tub. But the pain, at its flood stage, is worse than he could have imagined, and even after it begins to ebb, he knows he will never be able to summon either the courage or the strength to face it again.

And with the departure of that last, forlorn hope-that he might somehow be able to free himself, a limb at a time-comes a sudden clarity. But even though Nelson knows what comes next, the life force is still surprisingly strong within him-if it hadn’t been, he’d have ended his own life years ago, ended it a hundred times over. So as he uses his free heel to kick down the lever that closes the drain, then to nudge open first the right-hand tap, then the left, he tells himself he’s only running a bath. For the warmth. And maybe the water will melt the glue before…

The running water is the first sound Nelson has heard since Simon left, except, of course, for the high-pitched squeal of his own stifled screams. He closes his eyes. The water rises, rises; it covers his ears, muffling its own roar. It sounds like a distant cataract now, and Nelson is floating downstream toward it. It’s all very peaceful, in a hallucinatory sort of way, until the first trickle of water tickles his upper lip. He tries to raise his head, is almost surprised to find it held fast.

Not like this, he thinks. Death, yes: being dead meant you didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Funny that hadn’t occurred to him before. And drowning, sure: there was supposed to be some kind of reflex that kicked in after your lungs filled with water, that made it a much more peaceful way to go than most people thought. But not slowly, not like this, not a trickle at a time. Then the trickle becomes a steady flow, and the flow a warm, choking flood; Nelson flails wildly with his free foot, trying to find the taps again, trying to find the drain lever as the warm water begins to close over his head.

7

Say what you will about the inconvenience of being hunted for capital crimes, it not only kept the blind rat at bay almost as efficiently as the most elaborately planned session of the fear game, but was a liberating experience as well. There was no need for Simon to dispose of Zap Strum’s body, or even hide his own culpability-they could only execute you once, only incarcerate you for a single lifetime.

On the other hand, it was Simon’s understanding that every web site or e-mail address, every keystroke recently accessed on a computer, could somehow be recovered from the hard drive. Which meant that somewhere in this rat’s nest of a loft was information that could not only tell the cops (and when Simon thought of cops now, it was Pender’s face that came to mind) where Simon had been, but might also tip them off as to where he was heading.

“Can’t have that,” Simon explained to Zap, still slumped in his expensive chair, as he rolled the Aeron out from in front of the command post and tipped it forward to empty it. The dreadlocked corpse hit the floor with a meaty, tumbling thud-a gratuitous discourtesy on Simon’s part, as it turned out, the blood-soaked seat back and cushion rendering the chair unsittable.

Undeterred, Simon dragged the saddle-shaped leather foot-stool over to the desk, straddled it, and began tapping the keyboard randomly-he assumed Zap’s own system had a poison pill or fail-safe device similar to the one Zap had installed on Simon’s. Sure enough, the screensaver-a blond woman with breasts larger than her head, performing an endless striptease-fragmented into hundreds of tiny ASCII characters; a few seconds later the screen went dark.

Just to be on the safe side, though, Simon decided to go lowtech for backup. He ducked under the desk, unplugged the CPU box from the surge protector, and proceeded to dismantle, not just that CPU, but every computer and Zip drive in the apartment, then take a ball peen hammer to every silvery disk he found. There was also a small box of floppy disks-these he incinerated in Zap’s toaster oven, along with a videocassette he’d ejected from a deck that looked as if it might be connected to the security camera monitoring the vestibule.

Fifteen minutes later, just as the first wisps of oily, pungent, probably toxic, black smoke had begun to issue from the counter-top oven, Simon located Zap’s stash in a false-front bookcase, behind a dummy set of vintage Encyclopaedia Britannica s. “Mercy buckets, dude,” he muttered, as he stuffed a few prebagged ounces of sinsemilla into his satchel, along with an eclectic, rainbow assortment of uppers, downers, and the milder psychedelics he preferred.

Then, after a short wait in the downstairs vestibule until the sidewalk was clear, it was sayonara Zap, sayonara SoMa, and sayonara San Francisco as Simon, his getaway satchel bulging with cash, drugs, and most important, the Pender printout, pointed Nelson’s Volvo toward the shadowy lower deck of the Bay Bridge, in the direction of Concord, sanctuary, and one final reunion with a bathtub-bound childhood friend-his last surviving friend, it occurred to Simon.

It was a bittersweet realization, a little sad, a little lonely, and as intensely liberating as being hunted for murder. With Missy and Ganny gone, once Nelson was out of the way, Simon would be alone on this earth. Except, of course, for the old woman in Atlantic City who called herself Rosie Delamour, but she didn’t really count. Screw her and the horse she rode out on, was Simon’s motto.

But even thinking about her could degrade a bittersweet mood down to just plain bitter. And bitter was no way to be when you were about to bid farewell to your oldest friend, thought Simon as he pulled into Nelson’s driveway and used the remote clipped to the Volvo’s sun visor to open the garage door, then close it behind him.

Inside the garage, all was peaceful again-at least after Simon had treated himself to a few tokes of Zap Strum’s finest. Dim gray light, smell of old oil stains and cement dust; the only sounds were the hum of the water