I dialed.
She picked up. 'Hi. Lost you. I was saying--'
'Get out of the house. Right now. Run up the street to the cops.'
The piercing scream of our alarm. 'Shit, Patrick, someone's--'
Thundering footsteps. The phone dropping. Ariana's yell was severed abruptly, and an instant later the alarm shut off.
The Beemer scraped along the hillside, sending a pattering of rocks across the roof and reminding me I was driving. Sweat stung my eyes. I was screaming into the phone, but I didn't know what I was saying.
Some muffled directions: 'Have her finish getting dressed. We don't want to drag her around half naked. You, stop resisting or we'll break an arm. Move it.'
And then a rustle as the phone was plucked from the floor. A calm voice. Verrone's. 'We're done playing now.' The calm tenor brought back the memory of his jaundiced complexion, that droopy mustache.
'Don't hurt her.'
'We need that disc.'
'I don't have it. I swear to fucking God, if I had it I would've given it to you.'
'You told us you had it. You just sent us to the wrong hiding place.'
It took a moment for me to realize that the sirens were now not on the other end of the phone but approaching me. Coming around the bend, I saw six police cars and an ambulance heading at me, lights flashing, sirens screeching. Instinctively, I shrank away from my window, but they blasted by, heading for Valentine and Richards. I had to shout over the high-pitched wailing. 'You kidnapped me! I would have said anything to get away!'
'You have two hours to find it.'
The dropping of that ultimatum, a tank in my path, brought the horror of my situation home to roost. I'd scrambled and forged ahead, despite a false imprisonment and a real one, despite being set up and shot at, despite a concussion grenade dropped in my lap, and still it hadn't been enough. The helplessness I'd been fighting to hold at bay and the rage at having my life seized from my own control flooded in, overwhelming me. A hundred and twenty minutes from now, my wife would no longer be alive.
I yelled, 'How am I supposed to fucking find something when I don't know where it is?'
'Then you're useless to us. Which means we can shoot her now.' Over the phone: 'Go ahead.'
'Wait! Okay, okay. I have it.' I cringed, listening, breathless. But no gunshot followed. 'I . . . I . . .' I was falling into terror, grasping at anything, trying to formulate a story, any story that would buy us time. Did I dare to reveal the only cards I held--those incriminating documents I'd retrieved from their copy machine? Right off the bat, in a state of panic, with no guiding strategy? Where did that leave me to go? There had to be something else. It seemed I hadn't spoken in hours, though the delay was probably no more than a few seconds. 'I put the disc in our safe-deposit box,' I blurted. 'I can't get it until the bank opens in the morning.'
'You have until nine o'clock.'
'Richards is dead,' I said. 'Valentine is dead.' A cold silence as Verrone reassessed the chessboard. But I didn't wait for his next move; I pushed forward while he was off balance. 'I'm wanted now. I need some time to get clear and figure out who to send in to grab the disc from the safe-deposit box in the morning.' Still no response. I added, 'A couple extra hours even.'
Stop talking--you're negotiating with yourself.
He pulled the phone away again as he spoke to DeWitt or whoever else. 'Take her out back, watch her closely over the fence. Paparazzi should be up the street chasing their tails, but keep an eye out just in case. Listen, sweetheart, if anyone's out there, we're all friends heading out for a drive. That's the better of the two ways to do this. If you struggle or scream, we'll shoot whoever we see and drag you anyway. . . . What? Yes, get it, it'll look more normal. Now, go.'
Get what?
Look more normal?
What the hell did that mean?
Verrone had come back to me. 'Fine. You have until noon tomorrow. And you'd better stay away from the cops. You're useless to us in custody. Call your wife's cell-phone number--her real cell phone, not that disposable crap you've been playing around with. We'll have it patched through to an untraceable line, so don't bother playing Maxwell Smart. If that phone doesn't ring by noon with good news, we will put a bullet in the base of her skull. And yes, this time it's real.'
The phone cut out.
My brain vacillated between high-rev panic and complete blank-out. I remember passing another convoy of police cars. I remember telling myself to slow down, since I couldn't risk getting pulled over, but I also remember not obeying. I remember screeching over the curb, scattering the paparazzi, and leaving the Beemer sunk in our wet front lawn, car door open in the slanting rain, dinging.
And then I was inside the quiet of our entry, dripping. On the floor by the living-room window, a broken teacup. The prepaid cell phone. And a lavender mariposa.
I crouched over the fallen flower, my heart thundering. Instinct brought it to my nose--the smell of her. Across the room, Ariana and I gazed out from our fallen wedding photo. The symbolism was obtrusive, sure, but it cut me to ribbons nonetheless. The arty black-and-white, our stiff formality, and the fragmented glass imbued the image with a haunted, bygone feel. A past age, dated conventions, ghosts of happier days. Looking at her soft-focus face, I made a silent vow: I promise.
The thought of her, trapped between DeWitt and Verrone in the back of some van, nearly brought me to my knees. But I couldn't give in to fear, not now. How much time did I have before the cops found Valentine and Richards and came here?
I tried to collect my frayed thoughts. Was there anything in the house I had to take with me before I fled? When I'd first reached Ari, she'd been excited about something she'd figured out: You're not gonna believe what I taped together. Had they found whatever she'd come up with, or was it still here?
I ran into the family room. Aside from a few scraps, they'd gathered up and taken the mounds of shredded documents.
Taped together, she'd said. Taped.
I rushed into the kitchen. The mess on the floor remained from when the cops had tossed the house--trash dumped, drawers emptied. I couldn't spot any Scotch tape in the mound, and I doubted that Ari would've rooted through in search of it. Which left my office.
I bolted upstairs. Sure enough, on my desk was a plastic tape dispenser and beside it a round piece of paper composed of taped-together bits.
A disc?
I snatched it up. It was made of the white-silver squares she'd noted in the confetti jumble, those scraps that had stood out as firmer than the others. I bent the CD. Stiff but flexible. I'd seen discs like this before, hip-hop promotional singles slipped into Vanity Fair or the occasional DVD in Variety before awards season.
They'd destroyed this CD along with other documents before clearing out the Ridgeline office. The Frankenstein disc was beyond salvaging, but I didn't have to put it into a computer to realize that a CD like this, with a pliable, thinner design, had certain advantages for an operation like theirs. Easier to shred.
And easier to hide.
Rain tattooed the roof, a drumroll score to my quickening thoughts.
I closed my eyes, pictured opening that FedEx envelope addressed to Ridgeline. That blank CD, wrapped protectively in corrugated cardboard.
What if that disc really had been nothing more than what it appeared--a blank CD? If someone like me intercepted the package, I'd think it contained nothing more than that useless disc. But the intended recipient would see the blank CD as a symbol, a key showing what was really being shipped in the same package.
I ran down to the kitchen and dug through the trash. There it was, beneath a half loaf of moldy bread and a PowerBar box. The corrugated cardboard that I'd thought was mere packaging material. Flattening the bent sheet, I wormed my thumbnails into the edge and peeled it apart.
Sunk in a beveled well inside was a white-silver disc.
Chapter 53
