camera, I watched the ten seconds I'd managed to capture of the QuickTime video from them.
View through a windshield. Car driving. The recording stopped well before the alley and the Honda.
I downloaded the clip into my computer and enlarged it to fill the screen. A passing semi with daytime running lights swept through the field of vision, playing tricks with the light across the windshield. A dab of silver at the bottom of the glass caught my eye. I backed up the recording, froze the image. Not much more than a smudge at the base of the windshield. Leaning forward, I squinted at the finger-long reflection thrown up from the top of the dash.
The metal plate stamped with the Vehicle Identification Number.
It was blurred and faint, but perhaps the clarity could be brought up with the right tools. My first concrete lead. I ran a thumb across the tiny image, savoring it.
My cell phone emitted an Asian chime. Slowly, I turned and regarded it lying there next to the keyboard. Picked it up. A text-message alert, sender unknown.
A cold sweat crept over my body. My thumb moved before I could stop it.
E-MAIL TOMORROW, 7PM.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
THIS TIME IT'S SOMEONE YOU KNOW.
Chapter 31
I sat in my car in the parking lot, watching students drift in to class. The phone rang and rang, and finally he picked up. 'Hallo.'
'Dad?'
'Stop the presses.' And then, shouting over the receiver to my mom: 'It's Patrick. Patrick!' Then back: 'Your mother's in the car.' My dad, from Lynn, Massachusetts, had the harsh Boston accent I'd never acquired growing up in watered-down Newton. Mothah's in the cah. 'Still goin' through it with Ari?'
'Yeah, but we're figuring it out.' Hearing his voice made me realize how much I missed them, how sad it was that it took this for me to pick up the phone. 'I'm sorry I haven't been great at keeping in touch these past couple months.'
'That's okay, Paddy. You've had a rough go. You get a real job yet?'
'Yeah. Teaching again. No more writing.'
'Listen, your mother and I were just heading into town. Everything okay?'
'I just wanted to know how you both are. Healthwise or whatever else. If there's anything you need, I mean, I can hop on a plane, no matter what I'm in the middle of.'
'What'd you join one of those cults out there?'
'I'm just saying. I hope you know that.'
'Everything's fine here. We got a ways to go, you know.'
'I know, Pa.'
'We're not in the grave yet.'
'I didn't mean--'
Car honking in the background.
'Listen, your mother just discovered the horn. Do me a favor, Patrick. Call her this week. You don't just have to call when you're feeling okay. We're your parents.'
He signed off, and I sat there a moment, reliving the chill that had passed through me when the threatening text message had chimed into existence on my cell phone last night. Not surprisingly, it had vanished into thin air within seconds of my reading it. All this autodeleting left me wondering if I was making up this whole intrigue myself. But the knot in my throat said it was far too real.
A passing student waved, and it took effort to lift my hand and wave back. My car might as well have been a submarine for how detached I felt from the world beyond the glass.
THIS TIME IT'S SOMEONE YOU KNOW.
I clicked through the saved numbers in my cell phone. All those names, more bases than I could cover even if I knew what to ask. Not to mention all the names not in there. It could be anyone from Julianne to Punch to Bill at Bel Air Foods. Someone I'd graded, someone I'd roomed with in college, someone who'd loaned me a cup of sugar. Someone I loved.
I flipped the phone shut and set it on the cracked dash. 'The only way to beat them,' I told it, 'is not to play.'
I found Marcello alone in the editing bay, fussing over the digital sound console. On the attached computer monitor, a guy in a Speedo was paused midbounce at the end of a diving board. When Marcello released the diver with a click of the mouse, the bwang of the board was out of sync.
'Take a look at something for me?' I asked.
He froze the diver as he hit the water, and leaned over my cell phone. I played the ten-second clip.
'Cinema verite,' Marcello said when it was done. 'I think the car is a metaphor for the journey of life.'
'I can't pause it on the cell, but look right here.' I played the clip over again. 'There's a little reflection on the windshield when the truck passes. You see it? I think it's the VIN. Is there some way to download it into Final Cut Pro and bring up the resolution?'
'Could take some time. The focus part, I mean.' A note of annoyance. 'Patrick, what is all this?' He crossed his arms impatiently as I figured out how to phrase what I wanted to say.
'They're sending me glimpses into people's lives. Their problems.'
'Like what they were doing to you?'
'Yes. Sort of. It's complicated.'
He was scowling.
I said, 'What?'
'There's no damn privacy anymore. It's like we all got used to it. Or we gave it away, bit by bit. Wiretapping laws. Citizen enemy combatants. Homeland Security looking up your nose. Not to mention all this reality shit. Girls Gone Wild. Crying politicians on YouTube. Spouses trash-talking on Dr. Phil. You can't even die in war anymore without every schmuck with a flat-screen watching the infrared footage. There's no . . .' His jaw shifted; his lips twitched, searching out some suitable term. '. . . propriety.' He heaved out an agitated breath. 'You used to have to be famous to be famous. But now? It's all real. It's all fake. What's the goddamned fascination with monitoring everything, putting an eye up to every peephole?'
'I guess . . .' I stopped, studied my loafers.
'Yeah?'
'I guess people want the comfort of knowing that things can be bad everywhere. That it's not just them. That no one's got the magic answers.'
His empathetic gaze made me feel naked. 'When I was growing up, I thought the movies were magic. And then I got around them.' He gave a wistful chuckle, his hand rasping over his beard. 'Guys in rooms. Guys on sets. Guys at computer monitors. That's it. There's a loss there. I suppose everyone feels it. When you catch up to whatever you're chasing and get a close-up, warts and all. Then what do you do?' He made a popping sound with his lips, turned back to the console brusquely, and resumed adjusting the mix on the student film. The footage reversed, the diver unsplashing from the pool, the water vacuuming itself back into a flat sheet. How easily all that chaos was undone.
'Marcello.' My voice was a bit hoarse. 'This has turned into a lot more than voyeurism.'
'I know.' He didn't look over. 'Gimme the phone. I'm done ranting.'
I set it down next to him on the desk. 'You sure?'
'I think so. I was gonna throw in something about Britney Spears and her lack of underwear, but I sort of lost the thread.'
A few students started to trickle in, and I had to whisper. 'No one can know you're doing this. It could put you at risk. You okay with that?'
He waved me off. 'Don't you have a class you're late for?'
Though no light shone in Doug Beeman's apartment, I knocked again on the peeling front door. And again there was no response. No eye hiding behind that old-fashioned keyhole this time, only blackness. Resting my forehead against the jamb, I stood helplessly, the neighborhood sounds and smells washing over me. The pump of a tricked-out car stereo. The scent of spicy cooking, maybe Indian. A static-fuzzed Lakers game coming through
