Stockholm syndrome sex. Although who was keeping whom hostage could be debated.
They’d kissed good-bye in the car, and Blush had hobbled off toward the grieving throngs. About to become a sensation.
For his part, Foster had put on his best tie and the last fresh shirt from his suitcase. A suitcase he’d packed months ago for a trip he’d never taken to Denver. A trip maybe Lucinda herself had foiled. With the list in hand, he’d dropped by a few of the Foley studios. The door for Ives Foley Arts stood in a narrow back street, almost an alley, alone among the back entrances to an Asian restaurant and a tire warehouse. Any parking was between dumpsters.
Bolted to a concrete wall, the sign—“Ives Foley Arts”—its paint had blistered and a tagger had overlapped half of it with spray paint.
It took some looking, but Foster found a push button on the doorframe. He mashed it and heard nothing from within. Not surprising. The building looked to be solid concrete, poured in layers with the wood grain from the forms still visible so long after it had been built.
He mashed the button. Nothing stirred behind the door.
The dumpsters reeked. Foster’s was the only car on the street, and he worried how safe it might be. He mashed the button with his thumb.
This time a voice came back, “Yes.” A female voice. The sound came from above, so he looked up to find a camera mounted well above the door. He ran a hand down his tie to straighten it and called up to the camera, “I need a scream. People say you’re the best.”
Her voice sounded scratchy and mechanical through the small speaker.
Nothing followed for a time. No footsteps. No calling out. At last the rattle and clank of metal suggested deadbolts being turned. Stout burglar bars being moved aside. The rattle of door chains being unhooked. The door swung inward.
Framed in the doorway was a woman in her late twenties, possibly thirty years old. Blonde hair, but a shade darker than he’d expected. If she wasn’t Lucinda’s kidnapper after all these years, she was the kidnapper’s sister. It might’ve been his imagination, but she seemed to flinch. Her eyes went wide and her teeth showed, clenched.
After that awkward pause, she offered her hand. “Hello,” she said.
None of the dark web images had prepared him for this. A small, pregnant woman. Very pregnant. She wore a pair of headphones loose around her neck, a long cable trailing away.
The rage he’d held for so long, it seemed to swell in his hands. The plans he’d made to burn this person alive, to flay the skin of whoever had stolen his child, this fury swelled in his fingers for a moment. Foster might’ve choked her to death at this door. Swung his fist and crushed her skull. She seemed hardly larger than the girl she’d been in the security video leading Lucinda away.
Instead his hand met hers and they clasped and let go. He managed, “My name’s…I’m Gates Foster.”
“Hello,” the woman in the doorway said, “I’m Mitzi Ives.”
Mitzi waved him inside. Motioning down the concrete stairs into the sound pit. His head turned slowly as he took in the equipment, the webs and network of cables and cords that spliced together the jerry-rigged audio components. A cave it was, with the stalactites in the form of mics dropping in dense clusters from the dim ceiling. As stalagmites, floor mics of various heights stood in groups. The table filled the center of the pit. The mixing board wrapped most of two walls, tier upon tier of dials and switches and meters whose twitching needles registered their every step and breath.
Shadowing him, she chided, “Maybe you don’t bullshit me anymore, okay.”
She watched as he did his snooping. “Like I told your people, I sell the license for a scream. I never sell my original master.”
This Foster circled the room, his head canted back, marveling over the banks of equipment, the ancient analog of everything, sniffing at the burning scent of overheated vacuum tubes and the lingering memory of bleach. He said, “Sorry, lady, I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.”
Mitzi prompted. “It’s the magnificent product of your long chain of glorious men.” She really stepped on the word men.
This man, this Foster, he shrugged. He’d killed Schlo. He’d killed everyone at the Dolby Theatre. For whatever his reason, he’d killed the business.
Mitzi went to the mixing console and grabbed up a ream of pages she’d printed off the web. “Resonance disaster,” she said. “That’s your game.” She’d read the 1850 account of the Angers Bridge, of soldiers marching in step, creating a vibration so strong it buckled the bridge and killed more than two hundred. She shook the pages at him. She ranted about the skywalks in the Kansas City Hyatt, so crowded with dancers in 1981, so many dancers doing the Lindy Hop in synchronized time that the sky bridges had crumbled, killing one hundred fourteen.
A chair she pulled out and swung around for him to take a seat. She pinched an Ambien from the cloisonné plate on the console and slipped it into her mouth. Her tongue felt the smooth, soft promise of it before her molars bit down and ground it to mud. She lifted a wine bottle, then a second, then a third before she found one that wasn’t empty. Picking at the cork’s wire cage and the foil, she asked, “Champagne?”
This Foster looked away.
She said, “Don’t think I don’t know why you’re here, Mister Deep Operative.” She popped the cork. “You’re here to tie up loose ends, I’d say. And I’m a loose end, I’m thinking, no?” The printed pages were stacked next to
