Need You Now

I hung up and realized it had been a foolish question: my apartment had only one door, so if the chain was on, she had to be in there.

“Lilly, wake up and open the door!”

Lilly was a light sleeper, and it was odd that she would snooze right through the sound of the door catching on the chain, let alone a ringing telephone, the doorbell, and my shouting. I pushed my face into the opening, and this time I was struck by how cold it was inside-as cold as the outdoors. It was one of our longest-standing battles as a couple: I liked to sleep with the window open. Lilly never did.

Never.

Panic struck, fueled in part by having just spotted that guy from Singapore in my neighborhood. I feared the worst, and “the worst” had many faces, including the possibility that Lilly had done something stupid to extricate herself from a world that seemed to be crashing down upon her. I dropped my overnight bag and put my shoulder into the door, but that chain was serious hardware. I’d noticed a fire ax in the stairwell on my way up, right next to the alarm, and in a weird moment of life imitating art, I suddenly envisioned Kate Winslet in Titanic breaking Leonardo DiCaprio free from the handcuffs as water rose up around them. I ran and got the ax, racing down the hall as if the building were indeed on fire. I called out her name one more time, which drew only silence. One swing of the ax broke through the chain, and I rushed inside.

“Lilly!”

The apartment was as dark and cold as the night. I switched on the light and saw nothing out of the ordinary. I checked the bathroom, the closet, and then the loft. There was no sign of Lilly, but one window in the loft was wide open, which accounted for the cold wave that had gripped the apartment. I stuck my head outside. I’d never had to leave by way of the fire escape, but apparently Lilly had done just that.

Or did someone take her?

“Is everything okay in here?”

The old woman’s voice drew me from the window, and I climbed down from the loft. My eighty-year-old neighbor was standing in the doorway, dressed in a bathrobe that looked to be at least her age. The fire ax on the floor and the busted chain on the door cried out for an explanation, but I offered none. Instead, I tapped into “the eyes of the building,” as Mrs. Voss was known: she missed nothing, knew when her neighbors went to the bathroom, and could probably have made an intelligent guess as to whether it was number one or number two.

“Honestly, I’m worried,” I said, understating it. “My girlfriend Lilly was staying with me. The chain was on the door when I came back, but she’s gone and the window is wide open.”

“She left three hours ago,” said Mrs. Voss.

“With someone?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I heard a noise on the fire escape and saw her climbing down. She was by herself. I don’t know what strange things you have going on in here, young man, but this is a respectable building.”

It occurred to me how bad this must have looked-an ax-swinging man breaking into his own apartment, a young woman fleeing by way of the fire escape. “This is not what it seems,” I said.

She seemed skeptical, even a little afraid.

“Really,” I said. “It’s all fine.”

She retreated quietly, muttering something about the guy who should never have sold me the apartment. I had the feeling that this was going to be prime grapevine material, if not a formal complaint to the condo association.

I picked up the fire ax, laid it aside, and closed the door. The heater hissed, overworked in the battle against winter. I climbed back upstairs and shut the window. When I returned, I noticed the rose petals on the floor. Three of them were just inside the door. Several more marked the way like bread crumbs to the kitchen. On the counter, next to the computer, lay a scattering of long-stemmed red roses. Not a neatly bound bouquet, but six single roses that appeared to have been tossed aside.

What the hell?

I turned and took a better look around the place, trying to reconstruct what had happened. Any number of shops sold fresh flowers in my neighborhood. It was possible that Lilly had been bitten by the decorating bug and gone out, but if the intent had been to brighten my apartment, a mixed bouquet would have done just fine. More likely, Lilly had received a delivery. And then something had scared her off in a big way. Something to do with red roses. It made me wonder what-or more precisely, who -Lilly was running from.

My eyes were drawn again to the roses on the counter, and then to my PC beside them, which was humming. I went to the computer and tapped the space bar. The screen saver vanished, revealing a typed message.

They’re watching. Sorry I had to leave this way. Do not try to find me. Will let you know when it’s safe.

I studied Lilly’s words. No doubt about it: she’d given someone the slip by using the fire escape. My ax-swinging Kate-and-Leonardo episode could have been avoided if she’d simply removed the chain on the door before climbing out the window, but she must have been in too much of a rush. Maybe they were banging on the door as she was making her getaway. Whoever “they” were. I had no way of knowing, and my second sighting of the mysterious man from Singapore had given me nothing to go on. I was tired of guessing. I went to work on the computer.

My hunch was correct. The thought of Lilly cooped up all day in my apartment without going online was inconceivable, and either she didn’t care if I saw her Internet search history, or she’d left in too much of a hurry to erase it. A quick review gave me a road map to her activity. She’d hit Facebook, of course, though only a complete idiot would post her destination online before making a run for it. There were visits to nytimes.com and other news Web sites. Amid the idle browsing activity was a visit to Google maps. That intrigued me. I pulled up the exact page she’d visited, and voila. It was the high-tech version of the gumshoe detective who finds the notepad left behind and shades the top sheet with the side of his lead pencil to turn indentations into words and draw up the last message.

A street address popped up.

It was downtown, maybe a twenty-minute walk from my apartment. I jotted it down, then thought better of it. I committed the address to memory and tossed the note in the garbage. Then I thought of yesterday’s ride through Times Square with a gun to my head.

I fished the note from the trash can, flushed it down the toilet, and headed out the door.

11

D o not try to find me. Lilly’s instructions could not have been clearer. Of course, that was like telling a six year old, Whatever you do, don’t think about pink elephants. I was determined to find her, and not even that herd of pink elephants on the corner of Canal and Hudson was going to stop me.

“Where to?” asked the cabdriver.

I gave the address. The subway would have been just as quick, but my BlackBerry didn’t always work down there, and a few minutes in the back of a cab gave me a chance to answer some e-mails and do my real job. One thread seemed particularly important. I’d been watching a company called Tatfree, a little-known medical- instruments manufacturer whose researchers were on the verge of developing a quick and relatively painless