After the camera had zoomed in on Elaine’s face, the videotape went blank. Just a snowy void. He pressed rewind, and as the tape spun backward, he suddenly realized he wasn’t alone in his office. He spun around. A large man dressed in black trousers, a black sweater, a black ski mask stood behind him. He held a small black gun.
Steve scrambled away from the television set. He wondered for a moment where the man had come from, then saw that the file cabinets in the back corner of the room had been pushed slightly to the side. Had he been there the whole time?
The man spoke softly. Carefully. “Bee-tee-ex, three-three-oh.”
“What do you want?” Steve asked, not comprehending.
“Bee-tee-ex, three-three-oh,” the man repeated, emphasizing each letter and number.
“I don’t understand.”
“Memorize it,” the man said.
“What are you — “
“Shut the fuck up! I’ll say it one more time. It’s simple. Bee-tee-ex, three-three-oh. Got it?”
Steve nodded, although he was not sure if he got it at all.
“Now open your safe and give me the sixty thousand dollars you have stashed in there.”
Steve tried not to show his disbelief. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
The man came at him fast and stuck the gun in Steve’s chest. He put his other hand around Steve’s neck and slammed him against the wall. “Don’t fuck with me. You’re wife’s time is slipping quickly away and we’ve got no time for games.” His face was inches from Steve’s. The black moist wool covering his mouth moved in and out as he breathed. “Beneath the marble planter. Open it.” He loosened his grip around Steve’s neck.
How could he have known about the safe? No one knew about it except the man who installed it, and no one, absolutely no one, knew about the sixty thousand dollars except—
Of course. Elaine knew. And this man, this big fucking ape of a man, had Elaine.
Steve sucked in a mouthful of air that shot painfully down his throat. He stepped cautiously over to the marble planter, the man close behind. He pushed the heavy planter aside and lifted up a square of blue carpet. A small metal door winked back at him. Steve’s hands shook, but he managed to get the combination right on the first try. He opened up the safe and pulled out two thick bundles of hundred dollar bills. The man in the black ski mask hovered over him, a massive breathing obelisk radiating power. He grabbed the bundles of cash from Steve and stuffed them in his pockets.
“Find the car with the license plate that corresponds to the number I gave you.” He dropped a set of two keys at Steve’s feet. Steve stared at them, spread apart and shiny like two poisonous fangs.
“Number?”
What number? Bee? Tee? Ex? That sounded right. But the rest?
The man ignored him. “Inside the car will be directions to your wife.” The man backed up to the office door and placed his hand on the knob. He stood there a moment, his eyes hard on Steve. “Have I made myself clear?”
“What were the numbers?” Steve asked.
The man backed out of the office and slammed the door shut.
This was too much. This was not happening. Steve stood up, his legs almost giving out. He lurched at the door and flung it open.
“
The man was already gone.
Finally a little movement. He merged onto the freeway, cramming himself between a blue Jeep Cherokee and an orange Gremlin. The traffic moved steadily, but still only forty miles an hour in a fifty-five mile per hour zone. The skyscrapers gradually disappeared, replaced by smaller office buildings, shopping malls, residential neighborhoods. Yet he was still too hot, still unable to get the vision of his wife sitting there in the chair out of his head. It was all his fault. He knew it. The end of his perfect little world. He had needed the domesticity to keep him grounded, to keep him from flying off the edge of the world, and if he had to choose, if it came down to his family or endless flings of passion, he would choose his family. Hands down.
But wasn’t it too late for that now? Why couldn’t he have seen this coming? Why was it that the truth came only in the final seconds? The truth was a climax with no denouement. There would be no time to enjoy it.
He knew that now.
Only thirty minutes earlier, Steve tried to remember the number the man in the black wool ski mask had told him. Funny how he could keep facts and figures in his head, how he could visualize spreadsheets and balance sheets and totals for three months worth of assets and liabilities, of revenue and net income.
The man in the mask hadn’t even told him which level the car was parked on, but as he frantically searched the parking ramp for those first three letters — B-T-X — it suddenly struck him.
“BTX 330,” he said out loud. That wasn’t just any license plate number. That was Elaine’s car. An old, rusting brown Toyota Corolla. Why had it taken him so long to make that connection? Jesus.
He found her car within ten minutes.
When he opened the driver’s door with one of the keys the intruder had tossed him, he saw a piece of paper taped to the steering wheel. He slid into the driver’s seat and read it.
Highway 35N to County Road 60. Turn left. Six miles up will be an abandoned farm house. She’s in the cellar.
Names flashed through Steve’s head, names of people he’d pissed off, names of people he may have said the wrong thing to. Who could do something like this? But the more he thought about it, the more he realized the names racing through his mind were just camouflage.
The last time he had seen Linda was a week ago. They had taken the afternoon off, rented a motel room, a cheap Mom and Pop joint outside of the city with no perks, no extras, no amenities to interfere with their fucking.
While Steve lay naked and spent on top of the bed, Linda came out of the bathroom, rubbing at her nose, the residue of cocaine still visible on her left nostril.
“Let’s go away,” she said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here and change our names, our identities.”
Steve laughed. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Why not? What’s stopping you?”
“My wife, for one thing. My son.”
“He’s old enough to handle it.” Linda sat down on the bed, staring wild-eyed at Steve. “Come on. Right now. We’ve got credit cards.”
It sounded tempting. Exciting. How many times had he imagined that exact same thing? But as Linda hovered over him, her wild-eyed, flared nostril excitement scared him.
Steve shook his head. He patted her bare thigh. “Sorry. Can’t.”
Then she was at the phone, violently poking at the numbers. “I’m calling her,” she said. “I’m calling Elaine and telling her what we’ve been doing.”
“Hey!” Steve leapt off the bed and tried to grab the phone from her, but she twisted around. “This is not funny.”
Linda said into the mouthpiece, “Hello? Is this Elaine?”
The world seemed to stop. Steve’s heartbeat became a live thing, a beast that pounded at his ears with
