Blackbird (12 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF–NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

AFTER TWENTY MINUTES
, your arms pumping, heart steady in your chest, you finally slow to a walk. The man didn’t follow you out of the fast-food restaurant. He probably had to stick around, answering questions . . . maybe they even called the cops. You couldn’t risk waiting there to see. You sprinted for as long as your legs would carry you, making sure you’d lost him.

You turn everything over in your mind. The man followed you, trailing you for miles, probably from Griffith Park. Who is he? How is he related to the men who questioned Ivan? You’re certain it wasn’t either of them. This man was broad-shouldered and athletic, taller than one and shorter than the other. You’d never seen the car before. It only had a slip of paper for the license plate, a shiny advertisement for Calabasas BMW.

Ivan said that they asked for your location twice. The first time was at the bus station, the second time the park. The man, like the woman, trailed you and tried to kill you. But why? What did they have in common? Who are you to them?

You’re so deep in thought you almost miss it. You stand there under the awning marked
LIQUOR STORE
, staring straight into the glass case at a green bottle filled with dark liquid. It’s the label that caught your eye. There’s script, and above it an antlered deer with a cross in the center of its horns.

It’s the same image that was on the woman’s medallion.

You push open the door and head for the clerk, remembering at the last second to smile. He looks up and smiles back. He’s in his late thirties, wearing thick black glasses and a vintage T-shirt. His laptop is open in front of him. He looks like he spends most of his time behind this counter.

“That bottle there,” you say, gesturing to the one in the window, “what is it?”

“My sanity,” he says with a grin.

You remember to laugh a second too late. “The Jägermeister,” you clarify, reading the name. “Do you know anything about the label—what that symbol’s for?”

“Finally,” he says with a smile, “a real question.” He does a quick search and then turns the laptop toward you so you can read it yourself. You skim the passage.
Bottles feature a glowing Christian cross in the middle of a stag’s horns. This imagery is in reference to the two patron saints of hunters, Saint Hubertus and Saint Eustace.

You look up and nod, but your whole body is shaking. You manage a short “thank you” as you head for the door. He’s still smiling, still asking you if you want a bottle, offering a curious “customer discount.” But your lungs are tight, your breaths so shallow they hurt. You can barely manage a wave.

You walk quickly, hoping the movement will steady you as the puzzle pieces click into place in your mind. It makes strange sense that they would want clues as to where you were and where you were going to be, but not access to the tracking device the entire
time. It would make it more challenging to find you . . . to
hunt
you.

The man and the woman don’t know you and they don’t have a reason for wanting you dead. They are simply the hunters and you are the prey. You are a target in an elaborate game.

You sit down on the edge of the sidewalk, feeling your stomach twist and tense, running through everything that’s happened since you woke up. How the men referred to their “clients.” How the woman followed you beneath the freeway, waiting until you were alone in the alley to try to kill you.

Ivan had been telling the truth. He was part of it, but he never wanted you dead. He’d been keeping track of you for them. He’d used the robbery to keep you away from the police. He’d set up the interactions twice—first between you and the woman, then giving them your location in the park. The man must’ve followed you from there. He is after you now. . . . He’s still hunting you.

You pull the photo of Ivan from your back pocket, hoping he’s alive, that it’s possible they’re keeping him somewhere.

A few minutes pass in quiet silence. Finally, you look up. Up the street, a police car sits in a parking lot with its lights off. The officer doesn’t see you. As you start toward him, you brush the dirt from your knees, straighten the pack across your shoulders, knowing it’s useless. You look how you feel—worn, beaten, half dead.

You keep your hand on the photo, running your finger over its glossy surface. When you’re nearly at the edge of the parking lot the police officer looks up. He stares at you, holding his hand over his eyes as if he’s not quite sure what he sees. Then you wave your arm back and forth, signaling him. “Over here,” you say, but your voice sounds so different now. Low and cracked. Barely a whisper.

“I need help. Please.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF–NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“
IT WAS IN
the afternoon,” you say. “I don’t know the exact time I woke up, but it was light out when I left the station.”

“The report from the subway station said around three in the afternoon.”

The detective has a gray beard and mustache. In his plain green shirt and gray pants he looks like he could be someone’s grandfather. There’s been no pounding on the table. He hasn’t even raised his voice.

Instead he asks slow, specific questions. It’s been like this for hours. He writes everything you say on a yellow legal pad. He keeps scribbling things down, flipping the page over, and scribbling more. There’s a camera in the corner and you can feel that they’re watching, that somewhere several officers are standing around, waiting to hear more from the girl from the office robbery downtown.

“We should have more answers after you’re admitted to the hospital, but as I understand it—you haven’t had any flashbacks? No memories that seem like they could be from the days before you woke up?”

“There are things . . . but I don’t know what they are. I don’t know if they mean anything.”

“What kind of things?”

“There was this funeral. I had a flash of it. . . . It was only for a few seconds.”

“Whose funeral?”

“I don’t know, really. I was just walking past a coffin and it felt like someone I knew had died. That’s all. It was barely anything.”

The man nods. They took your knapsack when you came in and you still haven’t gotten it back. You’ve mentally gone through the contents, hoping everything in it backs up your story, that everything, eventually, can be explained. You’ve told them about your memory loss, about Ivan and the way you were set up, the robbery he staged downtown, the woman he killed. The men, the house, that they took Ivan somewhere. Each time they asked why, what this was all about, you hesitated. You can feel the words on your lips . . .
I am being hunted
. . . but you can’t bring yourself to say them just yet. You don’t want them to discount all you’ve said before. You need them to believe you, to listen.

“And the man, the one who said his name was Ivan? Have you had any memories or flashbacks of him or the woman he killed?”

“No,” you say. “None. Did you find anything about his car? Was it where I left it?”

“Yeah, an officer found it in an hour ago. There wasn’t anything inside.”

“Can’t you trace it?”

“The VIN number was filed off. It was completely clean—nothing on the inside doors, the engine, the steering column. We’re thinking it was stolen a while ago. They’re running tests on the trunk, but nothing yet.”

He shuffles some papers, as if preparing to leave. You take a deep breath. You know that this is it, that you need to tell him now.

“There’s something else.” You clasp you hands together, squeezing the blood from your fingers. “The men who were at that house, the ones who took Ivan . . . he worked for them, and he was following the tracking device, but I think there’s more to it. I think it was all part of a game.”

“What do you mean, ‘a game’?” The man stops writing, instead watching you intently.

“The woman who was shot . . . before she died, she tried to kill me. And I couldn’t figure out why she would follow me. But then, after I left Griffith Park, another man came after me, one I’d never seen before. He also had a gun. He cornered me in a bathroom but I got away.”

“And you think they were playing a game?” the man almost laughs as he says it.

“I know how it sounds,” you say. “But it’s the only thing that makes sense to me right now. Ivan didn’t know what was really going on, and as soon as he started to figure it out, as soon as he tried to help me, they turned against him. I know that he set me up, but he’s in just as much danger as I am. Wherever they took him, whatever he did—he needs help, too.”

“We’re going to try,” the man says. “But explain this to me . . . why would these people go through all this trouble for a game?”

You can’t hold back anymore. “It’s not a game . . . it’s a hunt. I think they’re hunting me.”

“They’re hunting you? Now you’ve lost me.”

“Please, just listen. . . .” You try to keep your voice even, but your throat is tight. You can’t seem unsure. You can’t seem desperate. “I think I’m a target. Like . . . prey. I think they dropped me in the middle of Los Angeles and that they set me up so I couldn’t go to the police, not even after a woman came after me with a gun. I think Ivan tracked me and delivered my location to both hunters, first the woman, then the other hunter who came after me today. Ivan wasn’t supposed to kill the woman; that wasn’t part of the plan. It was when she tried to kill me that he understood what the game was about, and tried to stop it.”

The detective is silent. You feel like all the air has left the room. He puts the pen back on the paper, scribbling a few lines you can’t quite decipher.

You go on, explaining everything: the woman’s medallion, the man who pursued you, the map and the symbols on the wall of the house. You mention the island, even if it’s impossible to be certain what it means. The men referred to their clients, and now it makes perfect sense, the service they provided. They allow people to buy entry into the ultimate high-stakes game.

The detective writes it down, sometimes interrupting with questions or to clarify a point. You lose track of time, but you keep going, not wanting to leave anything out. You finally pull the notepad from your back pocket, flipping through the pages to show him the details you’ve copied down. You know what it must sound like to someone on the outside. But it doesn’t matter now. The truth is all you have left.

The detective is writing down a few last notes when a woman comes in. She sets two scraps of paper down on the other side of the desk, where you can’t see them. She points to something she’s written there, and then she’s gone. She doesn’t even look at you.

The detective—was his name Powers? Or Paulson?—studies it, turns it over. “Thank you for being so thorough. Anything else you want to include before we wrap up?”

The walls of the room are covered in some sort of soundproof padding. You suddenly feel shut in, closed off. It felt good to say everything out loud, as if that confirmed it actually happened. And you’ve done your best to include everything—all of it—but now you’re convinced you’ve missed something, that there’s some specific thing on that piece of paper that you haven’t shared and he is testing you.

“I think that’s it.”

He pockets one piece of paper and then he pushes the other piece forward.
Ben,
it says. Then the number. It’s the receipt from the first day you met.

“So who’s Ben? You never mentioned him.”

You try to fix your expression, try not to let your breath catch in your chest. “I didn’t mention him . . . because I don’t know him.”

“You don’t know this person? Then why do you have his number?”

It’s possible they called him already. But you hedge your bets—it is not even six in the morning and you doubt he’d be awake, though it’s not impossible. He could’ve thought it was you on the other line. He could’ve picked up just to see.

“He was just some guy I met at the supermarket. He tried to pick me up.”

“Why did you keep his number?”

“I didn’t realize I did. . . .”

You wait a breath, knowing that it’s not the complete truth if it doesn’t include Ben, but no one—not even the police—can know he’s helped you. He has to remain separate from everything else. The night at the beach . . . the party . . . the kiss you shared. You have to keep it all away from tonight, from Ivan and the men and this police station, this exhausted room with its cheery, flickering lighting.

“I hope that’s the truth, because we’re going to call it. . . .”

“I’m not lying.”

When you meet his eyes you can tell you’re losing him. His face reveals the hours
you’ve been in this room, the story you told—the ludicrousness of what you claimed. You told him you were being hunted, like prey, by multiple people in the middle of a bustling city, sometimes in broad daylight. Can you blame him for questioning you? If someone told you this story, would you believe them?

But now you need him—to believe you, to protect you, to find Ivan—and he is glancing at the corner of the room, to where the camera is. Do they think you’re lying? What was written on the woman’s note?

“I know this sounds insane, and I feel insane,” you say. “But I wouldn’t have come here if I wasn’t desperate. You took my fingerprints and I’ll go to the hospital and I’ll take whatever tests you want. You can question me again but I need you to help me. I don’t know how I got into this but now I’m stuck. I can’t get out.”

The detective gathers the papers and turns, heading for the door. “I’ll be back. Just wait here.”

The door falls shut behind him and you are alone again. You tuck the notepad back into your pocket. You think of Ben, of the receipt, trying to estimate how long it’ll be before you get to a phone to call him. He needs to tell them the same story you told them. He needs to explain the number away.

The security camera in the corner is still watching you, and as ten minutes pass, then ten more, you’re concerned. It’s the longest they’ve left you alone since you came in. You stand, pacing the length of the small room, wondering if it makes you look guilty.
She’s restless,
they’ll say.
She’s nervous
.