offered to pick up the food myself as an olive branch.
At the stoplight the click-click-click of my turn signal seemed to echo my mounting restlessness. I glanced across three lanes and up the street in the opposite direction of where I was headed. Glossed with rain, the Kinko's sign peeked out from behind a church billboard. A half block away. In fact, it was along the other route I occasionally took home, so it wouldn't even qualify as a detour. I was wearing boots rather than my Nikes, so my stalkers didn't necessarily know where I was right now. My eyes ticked to my rearview, then back up the street. The Roman lettering of the billboard proclaimed EVERY MAN'S WORK SHALL BE MADE MANIFEST, a riff from Corinthians that I took as a sign.
The weather had kept a lot of thin-blooded Angelenos off the streets, so I reversed about ten yards, pulled across the empty lanes, and turned right. I couldn't help but wonder at myself--had this been my real motive in offering to come down the hill alone? Tapping the steering wheel, I pounded out my growing agitation. Slowing as I passed the strip mall, I peered at the dark interior with a blend of relief and disappointment. Closed. That was that.
The windshield wipers worked double-time, trying to clear my view. I was a few blocks from home when, seized by an impulse, I U-turned back down the hill and trolled Ventura, wired with agitation. Finally I found a late- night Internet cafe.
A few minutes later, snugged to a rented computer amid the sharp scent of coffee and the banter of two MySpacers comparing piercings, I logged in to the Gmail account. As the page loaded, I had to concentrate to slow down my breathing.
Nothing from them, just a pop-up window for Viagra on the cheap and uppercase spam from Barrister Felix Mgbada, urgently requesting my help in setting straight his wealthy relative's affairs in Nigeria. I blew out a breath and cocked back in the rickety chair. I was just about to shut down the computer when another e-mail chimed into the in-box. No subject. They knew I was logged in.
My palms were slick. I clicked on the e-mail. A single word.
Tomorrow.
Chapter 27
Awakened by the sound of the running shower, I took a moment to get my bearings. Upstairs. In our bed. Ariana getting ready.
New e-mail coming. Today.
I hadn't done laundry all week, so the only suitable clean thing on a hanger was a trendy, faded salmon button-up that I'd bought overpriced at a Melrose boutique for some screening my agent had invited me to the week after she'd sold my script. Back then I was neither that cool nor did I have the money to afford it. And now I was less cool and more broke, so I would've felt sheepish wearing it if my apprehension about the coming e-mail hadn't drowned out competing emotions.
In my office, nauseous with stress, I booted up and logged in. Even if I wasn't going to open an e-mail from my computer, I could at least see if there was anything waiting in my in-box. But there wasn't. I hit 'refresh' to check for new mail. And then again. I jotted down a few sentences for my morning lecture before my attention pulled back to the screen. Still nothing.
The shower stopped, and I felt a flare of unease. Hoping the student scripts might be more distracting, I pulled one from the growing stack. I read through it, retaining next to nothing. I tried the next one, too, but just couldn't find it interesting. Worse, I couldn't see the point of it anymore. Words on a page. How was I supposed to find interest in a fabricated plot when a real-life one was a single e-mail away?
My hand reached for the mouse. Came back to my pad. Went to the mouse again. Refresh. Nothing new. Tapping my pen against the notepad, I refocused on my lecture, trying yet again to care about character arcs.
Ariana poked her head into my office. 'Bathroom's all yours.'
I quickly closed out of my browser screen. 'Great. Thanks.'
'Want to have breakfast with me? I mean, we are sleeping in the same room now, so I figure we're at least intimate enough to try sharing a Pop-Tart.'
I smiled. 'I'm ready. I'll be right down.'
'Whatcha doing?'
I glanced at the mostly blank notepad. 'Just finishing up some work.'
'Are you having an affair?' Navigating the hall, Julianne placed a hand on the neck of a student and steered him out of our way.
I was slightly winded, having just run upstairs from the computer lab, where I'd logged in to my Gmail account so I could watch my empty in-box for the fifteen minutes before class. I could feel the blood in my cheeks. 'No,' I said. 'Why?'
She tilted her head back, appraising me. 'You're positively glowing.'
'A lot of excitement lately.'
I started to peel off, but Julianne pulled me aside, out of the Monday crush, and lowered her voice. 'I looked into that media contact. Even found a few producers who've gone through the process with her.'
It took me a moment to figure out who she was talking about: the person at the CIA who read movie scripts to see which were worthy of agency cooperation. 'Right,' I said. 'Thanks for doing that, but--'
'Not all the producers got their scripts approved, but to a one they vouched for her. I got her on the phone, said I was doing an article on the approval process--blah, blah, blah. Mentioned your script, and she had less than no reaction. She said it didn't circulate past her staff. She also said--like most scripts she assesses--it didn't paint a picture of the Agency that made them want to help with the movie. But there was no fire to it. So my guess? Unless she's Oscar-worthy, no one at the CIA gives a shit about They're Watching any more than you'd expect them to. I doubt they're behind whatever you're dealing with.'
'Yeah.' I pictured Doug Beeman on that dank carpet, face to the screen, sobbing with relief. 'I think I figured that out already.'
She glanced at the clock, swore under her breath, and began to backpedal up the hall. 'So I guess that leaves you wide open again.'
SHE NEEDS YOUR HELP.
The message, standing out against the black of the screen, made my gut twist. The tiny office in the department felt even more cramped than usual. The air gusting from the vent overhead smelled like freezer-burned ice cubes, and the scent of stale coffee lingered from whoever had taken office hours here last period.
As the bold letters faded away on-screen, I checked my Canon camcorder, which I had pointed at the old Dell monitor. No green dot--the damn thing wasn't recording.
I knocked the camera with the heel of my hand, but already the slideshow had moved on.
A photo of a well-kept prefab house, taken at night, stars in the windows from the camera's flash. Just visible inside, the silhouette of a woman sitting on a couch and watching TV, her curly hair piled high. Two chairs pinned down the little strip of grass in the front, and a lawn gnome kept mischievous lookout.
My eyes jumped frantically from my camcorder to the monitor and back again. After testing the Canon this morning, I'd left it briefly unattended at a few points--in the car when I stopped to get coffee, in the faculty lounge when I'd gone down to the computer lab. They must have disabled the recording function. To stop me from doing this.
Dropping the camera on the desk, I searched out a pencil, finding a broken one in the coffee mug. My other hand rooted in my briefcase, yanking free the notepad and spilling scripts onto the floor. All the while I kept one eye on the monitor, fearful of missing something. Cracked pencil poised over pad, waiting to write. That hazy outline of the woman on the couch. She? Who the hell was she?
A new picture showed our house from the front. Standard shot, like a Realtor's photo.
A knocking on the office door.
'Just a minute!' I shouted, a bit too loudly.
'Patrick? This isn't your slot. My office hours started five minutes ago.'
The next photo showed the fake rock by the driveway, where we used to hide the spare house key, a flash illuminating the night scene.
My heartbeat pounded. 'Right, sorry about that. I'll clear out in a minute.'
And now a car key laid on the grass of our front lawn beside the fake rock. The plug on the rock had been pulled out and the key angled toward the hole. I squinted at the plastic key head, made out the Honda
