SIX
Once in the garage, Katia quietly opened the driver’s side door of Emerson’s big Suburban. She had to stand on the running board to reach the visor over the steering wheel so that she could pull one of the remote controls from where it was clipped. It was the control for the gate out in front. She had seen Emerson use it many times, coming and going.
Suddenly she heard creaking footsteps on the floor overhead. Emerson was in the master bedroom. She reached up and grabbed the remote from the visor. She glanced quickly at the other remote. She didn’t dare use it. If she opened the overhead garage door, Emerson would hear it upstairs. She climbed down from the running board. Katia left the driver’s side door open to avoid the noise of closing it.
She exited the garage by the side door. Suddenly she was out in the crisp night air, running as fast as her legs could carry her. There was a vapor of low fog over the ground. Now for the first time fear gripped her. In less than a minute, Katia was beyond the gate and out on the street, closing the mechanical barricade behind her, praying that this would not be heard back down the driveway in the big house.
She ran headlong up the street and tossed the remote into the brush in a deep ravine off to the side of the road. She ran, not down the hill toward the lights of Del Mar, but up the hill, in the other direction, into the darkness. Katia was scared, driven by fear, but her mind was clear. She knew exactly what she was doing.
When Emerson came out of the shower and saw the note in the study, he would get into his car immediately and start looking for her. The missing remote would only slow him down for a few seconds, just long enough for him to punch in the code on the keypad at the gate.
What she was counting on was that he would then turn in the wrong direction, to the right, toward Del Mar and the old coast highway, the obvious avenue of escape.
By then Katia would be standing in front of one of the other houses up the hill, using that address to call a taxi on Emerson’s cell phone. Before he could sort it out, she would be in San Diego, and he would be looking in all the wrong places, trying to find her.
It registered immediately. Emerson didn’t have to pick up the wallet and look. He knew. The way it lay limp, pitched up like a collapsed tent; the cash that had fattened his wallet that afternoon was gone.
He didn’t bother to put on his slippers. Instead he ran barefoot out of the room, down the hall toward the study.
“Katia! Katia!” There was an ugly, angry edge to his voice. There was nothing paternal in it. Emerson was mad, mostly at himself for being so stupid. He should have locked her up, and now he knew it. He slammed through the door into the guest room next to the master bedroom. This was the place Katia used to get ready at night, but the lights were out, the room was empty.
He rocketed back out into the hallway. He raced down the corridor toward the study and the stairs in the direction of the front door. He called out her name, glanced into the study as he ran by the first door. He didn’t see her, but something else, out of the corner of one eye, a shadow moving quickly toward the other door, near the head of the stairs. Instantly it dawned on him. Katia would need more than the cash in his wallet to get back to Costa Rica.
In less than two strides, he slowed to a walk and then came to an abrupt stop, planting himself between the stairwell and the study. The confident, thin smile spread across Emerson’s face. He took a deep breath, regained some composure, drew the bathrobe around himself, retying it with the belt, and walked calmly into the study. “Where’s the money from my wallet?”
The last syllable had barely rattled from his larynx as the mind-numbing agony fired the cells of Emerson’s brain. The needle-sharp point of the chef’s knife penetrated half of its length, into Emerson’s left kidney. With a quick twist the blade sliced the organ open, paralyzing him in a paroxysm of pain. An arm came around at the level of his throat, too tall for Katia. But by then his brain was filled with other things.
The shock enflamed every nerve in his body. The involuntary contraction of his own muscles arched his back as he heard the sound of his own snapped vertebrae. More excruciating than any pain the human brain could imagine, it made it impossible for Emerson Pike to suck in a thimbleful of air, enough to emit even a single sound. It seemed to last forever. He stood suspended in that place where the tortured mind pleads for death. Relief from the agony came only as the darkening empty void of death rolled over and enveloped him.
SEVEN
Sometimes it’s how you back into things in life that is most unsettling. It was how I met her, over the bananas in the produce section of a small market on the main drag up in Del Mar, not far from the racetrack. It was a Saturday morning and I was headed to the races to hook up with some friends. A cup of coffee in one hand and a bag with a muffin trapped under my arm, I was busy trying to separate a single banana from three others when she caught me in the act.
“Could you help me,
“Ahhh…” She looked down for a moment, collecting her thoughts, translating in her head. “Do you know… umm…do they have plantains? You know plantains?”
I must have given her a kind of dull look. It wasn’t because I didn’t understand the question.
“Plantains.” The way she emphasized the word with the fingers of each hand at the corners of her mouth, full lips, a dark-eyed beauty, visions of Catherine Zeta-Jones descending from the big screen to haggle with me over bunches of bananas. She could read the stupidity of it all in my face, and she laughed.
“Ahh. I don’t know.”
I wasn’t sure if I had a clue as to what a plantain was, but if I could have invented one in that moment I would have done it.
She had that shiny, well-scrubbed look, the girl you dreamed about when you were twenty, the one you didn’t even try and date because you knew it was all a vaporous wet dream. The only place you could truly hold her was in your delusions. She would vanish the moment you touched her, tapped to go to Hollywood or hustled off on a modeling contract somewhere. Why bother to break your own heart?
She picked up one of the bananas and held it up. “Similar but larger.” She spread her hands about eighteen inches apart.
She laughed. There was something magical in it. I sensed by the way she smiled and instantly sized me up that it was not the first time she had seen this kind of confusion from men. It was in the air, surrounding her, atoms of volatile ether. It should have been a warning. To her, it was nothing unique, just part of nature, another fly in the trap.
“I need plantains to practice some recipes for a dinner party in two weeks. I am cooking for friends,” she said.
“Am I invited?”
She looked at me, a kind of twinkle in her eyes. “Nooo. Well, maybe. But only if you can help me find
