Blood Of Angels (27 page)

And Karen still wasn't picking up her phone.

He didn't know what the hell to do. He was finally heading back towards the valley through Universal City because he couldn't think of any other direction to try. If he put his mind to it, if he
really
tried, he could believe that maybe his and her paths had crossed earlier, and that she'd been pulling into the parking lot of the Belle Isle just as they were leaving and that she might still be sitting there waiting. They'd been there a lot together, after all. Maybe she thought it was their place. Maybe it was. Brad wasn't sure. That kind of decision is always made by girls.

The traffic was slow but he was going to stick with it. If she wasn't there… he didn't know.

Had either of them ever written the L-word before? Committed to it on paper? He didn't think so. He had been back and forth over the contents of her note in his head and he believed she really did want to talk to him before she went to the cops. He knew her, and he trusted her. He realized now that it didn't matter whether she'd been with Lee. It had never
really
mattered to him, in fact, except that no guy likes knowing someone else has been where he is. The important thing was he loved her. She loved him, too. They'd talk this through and he'd get her to see there was no big deal, and then by the end of the day the cops would have a story and everything would go back to the way it had been. Brad was well beyond caring that Pete would come out of the story badly. Pete
had
been out on a drug deal. He'd already paid the price, and it was too high for sure but there was no point spreading the cost around those still living. Brad would come out of it older and sadder and wiser but he could deal with that, and this was fate telling him it really was time to find a job that didn't involve selling illegal substances. Karen would help him, he knew. It was all fine. It was all containable.

So long as he got to her before she went to the cops.

The traffic started to dawdle to a standstill. To save himself from going insane with the delay he tried to think himself around everything else, for something like the thirty-fifth time. Karen evidently hadn't said anything to her mom, or his conversation at the Luchses' would have been very different. She had a lot of friends, but he really believed she'd have kept quiet about something like this: after all, weren't
they
each other's best friend now? The fact Karen's phone had been off for so long maybe suggested she'd gone somewhere to think and had turned it off. Well, it kind of did. Actually that made no sense — and it hadn't the last three times the thought had occurred to him. If she wanted to talk to him, she'd have kept it on. Battery dead? Not very likely.

Maybe she was somewhere out of signal.

Shit, he hadn't thought of that before. She could have gone to the Santa Monica Mountains, maybe, be taking a drive through the Malibu or Topanga state parks. She liked it there. Always had. What did it say in the note?

Somewhere quiet…

Christ. And now he was headed in the wrong direction entirely.

Brad stood up in the car and saw that the traffic was starting to ease a little up ahead. He was split evenly between carrying on over to the Valley in the direction of the mall — the notion had reached a talismanic status in his head, not least because he could go check the bag had been picked up from Serious About Sport, he didn't like the idea of it just hanging there even though he'd never touched it and it could never be traced back to him — and the new idea.

There was nowhere to turn for a long block anyway. He'd make the decision then.

Gradually the traffic started to bear a little left, and he realized the right lane had been closed off ahead. Cool. Once he was the other side of this, he'd be able to pick up some speed again.

Mountains? Mall? Mountains? Mall? Maybe the mall still made more sense: he could always come back around this way if it was a bust.

He could see the lazy flick of lights now. Cop car. His heart had become so used to the heavy double-thud the sight now produced that it took him a moment to realize there were actually two cars, stationary on the right side of the road. And an ambulance.

Then suddenly Brad's car was level with the obstruction, as he drove slowly past it. Drove past it in a glittering daze.

A car lay smashed up against a post on the side of the road. It had a big, sharp dent in the other side. The front end was mangled to hell, windscreen long gone, fragments splattered red-brown.

The car was a nice new BMW. It was electric blue.

The cars behind him blared, but his foot had slipped off the accelerator. Brad wasn't going anywhere.

Not after he realized it was Karen's car.

She is in a room and the air is dark and soft. The room is at the top of a wooden house, a place where dust motes hang and spin. The door is open, revealing an upstairs hall. Hazy light comes from here, seeping through a window which is dirty and also obscured by a pull-down blind. A narrow plank of wood is propped up beside it, one end splintered as if by great force.

The door to the room is painted white, as are the walls. Over time, and in this uncertain light, the walls have come to resemble the bruised grey of a heavy storm coming in off the sea: still distant, but unavoidable. Despite its size, the room has little sense of being an area in its own right. It feels as though it and the floors and even the house's exterior walls are arbitrary divisions in a wider space; one which perhaps even extends a little beyond the boundaries of the dwelling, though not as far as the trees which she believes surround it. Occasional noises come from out there, hoots or growls or swishing sounds: but so quiet and distant and muffled that they do not seem in the least real, or any argument for the existence of an outside world.

The floor of the room is covered by old, dusty carpet, which in turn supports a patchy collage of other materials. Pieces of glass, small fragments of fallen plaster, half a broken mirror, and some leaves. It's not clear how the latter got here, as the two big windows at the front end are firmly shut, and evidently not broken. On the other hand they allow no view of the outside world either, so they may not be trustworthy. A lampshade lies on the floor near the inner wall. Its garish 1970s purples, now faded a great deal, were once intended to complement the narrow stripes of the carpet, a pattern now similarly subdued.

On its own stands a wooden chair. It is facing away from the door and tilted at an angle. It is a dark green chipped by many years of casual use and would be unexceptional were it not for its status as the only complete object in the room, apart from the single bed frame pushed tight into the corner. The chair is not quite in the centre, but seems to have been placed to leave a larger area in front than behind, as if in anticipation of something. Did someone sit there and watch something, or were they made to watch?

Then she realizes someone
is
sitting in the chair.

It is a woman. Her face is turned away. She is twisted in a position that looks uncomfortable: back quite straight, knees bent. Nina walks quietly and carefully around to the front, to find out who the woman is.

She is only slightly surprised to see it is herself.

She sees she is a little slimmer than she realized and also that she looks very tired and pale. Her eyes are open and she is staring fixedly at the floor near the corner of the room. After a while her right eye seems to twitch. The movement gradually gains in strength and determination until it is something like a wink.

Yes. She is trying to wink, trying to say hi, I know you're there and that's okay. Nina knows that this does not mean she is all right, however.

And then she is in herself, in her body on the chair.

The air in the room seems to get darker and more dense. She cannot move and her feet are cold. She feels unbearably heavy and cramped. She is not looking at the floor in the corner after all, but at the wall just above it. She can see something fluttering there. She thinks perhaps it might be a bird but then she realizes it is a hand. It is flapping slowly, its fingers straightening and curling, as if trying to reach for something — or as if it was trying to understand its location in space, attached to the wall, about nine inches up from the floor. It opens, closes, silent and pale.

Then the hand is still.

It turns a little, as if listening.

Nina heard the noise too. It was a door opening and closing. The door sounded heavy. It was the door to the outside.

But it is not someone leaving. No, it is someone coming in.

The footsteps are heavy. They reverberate loudly and this sound too has a strange quality. With each step she seems to become more awake, and with that, loses her vision — the previous images, the room itself, merely phantoms seen on a confused inner eye. She sees a last movement of the hand at the wall; then she can see nothing at all.

As Nina' struggles to separate what makes sense from what doesn't, she manages to establish only the following:

What she has been looking at is only a memory, a snapshot of somewhere she does not remember being. Either she has lost most of her sight, or she has been blindfolded. She has been tied to something. Her feet are bare.

And she feels very sick.

She tries to breathe normally. He is already very close. This tells her the room is smaller than she thought, or that she is now in a different place altogether. Perhaps she passed out again.

He is quiet. He does not want to speak to her. She knows this may be because some find talking to their victims confers a reality they do not wish to confront.

'I'm awake,' she says. Or tries to. It comes out as a mush of syllables. She tries a couple more times until it becomes intelligible.

He does not reply.

She is assuming it is a 'he'. Men and women smell different, whether they are kempt or not, but there is too much of a pervading odour of dust and oil for her to make that call with complete confidence. She feels his/her/its hands on and around her, but soon realizes they are merely checking she remains firmly secured. As he tightens the knot behind her head, she is glad to have it confirmed that something has been tied around her eyes. Blindfolded isn't good, but blinded is worse. Her vision of the world beyond the cloth is not quite nil, but is no better than shadows at midnight, the darkest soot falling across jet black. The only place he seems to linger is at the inside of her left elbow. He holds her tightly there for a moment, between what must be his thumb and forefinger. The strength of this pressure is enormous. This suggests he is a big man, and strong. She has no recollection of what he looks like. He arrived in the hotel room like a tidal wave hitting a beach house. She had barely a glimpse of a moving presence before her world went black. She has no idea what happened after that but she's wise enough to understand that her being in this place means it's unlikely it was anything good. Her being alive still, at this moment, is the only thing she can count on.

Everything else has to build from there.

'My name is Nina Baynam,' she says.

He seems to move away a little. She can sense him standing looking down at her. Her position is awkward. She is on her back, but her hands have been secured slightly behind her head. Her thighs seem to slope downwards, and then bend at the knee.

'My feet are cold.'

No response, and she decides not to speak again for the moment. Her consciousness does not feel stabilized. Presumably she received a blow to the head, and then was drugged. She has never experienced Rohypnol and is unfamiliar with its effects, but thinks this must have been something far stronger. Bubbles of strangeness are still surfacing. She cannot yet quite clear her mind of the impression that she is in the upstairs room with the chair, though this seems very unlikely now. Maybe that was earlier. Maybe she was never there.

She is getting no response when she speaks and so for the time being it's better to be quiet, so as not to encourage him to drug her again.

The man seems to move a little distance from her, to sit — she hears something settle under him. It is quiet for a spell, though she can hear things from the outside. These are the sounds she could not interpret when she first started to come back to herself, sounds that she thought came from a forest. They don't. She's still not sure exactly what they are, and tries not to reach for them yet. She needs to get things right. She needs to not make false assumptions and build illusory structures on them. She is not in a position in which she can afford to make mistakes.

There is another noise suddenly, shockingly loud.

It is the ringtone of a cell phone, surreally prosaic. She recognizes the melody, one of the standard factory presets that have become part of the background hum and clatter of modern life.

It rings and rings, and then it stops.

Soon afterwards she hears the seat relax as the man stands up again. Her body tenses. She wonders whether to say something else after all, to reason with him. Not to plead, not yet.

He comes closer. She can hear him breathing.

'Open your mouth.'

His voice is quiet and calm. Quite deep. Impossible to age. But it is a man, for sure.

She has no desire whatsoever to open her mouth. She purses her lips. She knows this is partly the urge of the powerless to exert power. She doesn't care. This is all she's got.

'Open it.'

The fear of what he might be about to do is powerful: far worse is the fear of what will happen if she continues to refuse. If he wants her mouth open, it will be opened. A common hammer will achieve that, quickly.

She opens her mouth.

Something is introduced into it. It has a dry, water-leaching quality. As it is pulled around behind her head and tied, she realizes it is a gag. She swallows with a click and understands her position is going to be a great deal more uncomfortable now.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Ten minutes later he is gone. She hears him open a door and close it. Again, there is a strange quality to the sound. She is less angry with herself. Maybe she could have pretended to have still been knocked out, but chances were he would have taken the precaution regardless. It's perhaps odd he hadn't before. It suggests either that he wasn't expecting the drug to wear off so soon — which might be good news — or that he'd done this before, and knew the drugged will sometimes choke themselves if there is something in their mouths. Which would be bad news.