Critical Mass (47 page)

The two men picked me up and bundled me into the basement. One of them stuck his hands in my pockets, came away with my papers. I couldn’t lift a hand to fight them.

They shone a flashlight on the papers and saw the copy of the BREENIAC sketch. “So you did steal the drawing, bitch!” Durdon said.

Underneath the burning pain from the Taser, I felt very cold. The graduate student who minded the Basier kids said there’d been a cop at Julius’s door yesterday. Not someone from the CPD, checking on Julius, but Glenn Davilats, planting the sketch. And last night, when Julius died while a cop was questioning him, that had been Davilats, finishing the job for Cordell Breen. Tuesday night, when Alison was driving us home, a squad car had turned onto the street leading to the Breen house. Tan with brown markings. The colors of the Palfry County sheriff’s cars. Davilats driving out to Breen’s house to get his orders, or get paid.

“What did you do with the drawing?” Davilats demanded.

“What, you planted it here, and Cordell sent you down to get it back before the Chicago cops or the Basiers found it?” My words came out like shapeless gravel; I wasn’t sure they could even be understood, but the effort to speak left me short of breath.

Davilats kicked me in the stomach, fingering his Taser. “Where is the fucking drawing?”

“In my office,” I said as quickly as my heavy lips would move. “In my big safe in the back. Combination 09-19-06-08-07-27.”

“Say it again,” Durdon ordered, pulling out a notebook.

I’d used my parents’ and my birth dates. I repeated them slowly. Davilats kicked me again, just for emphasis. The two men climbed back upstairs. When they’d scrambled over the side of the cabinet, they pulled the top back on. I lay helpless as they hammered the top back into place.

46

THE PIT AND THE SKELETON

I
WAS FINALLY ABLE
to move my hands. I sat up, slowly, painfully, massaging my fingers, which tingled, as if I’d bathed them in acid. My side ached where Davilats had kicked me. I could feel the darts, one in my left pectoral, the other in my thigh. I pulled the one from my thigh; my jeans had kept it from going in very deeply. The dart in my pec took some doing, first to grab the tiny protruding end in the dark, and then to yank it out. I blacked out briefly, but when I came to, I felt better.

My poor body craved sleep, but I couldn’t rest, trapped in a root cellar with a skeleton next to me. I crawled up the stairs and pushed against the cabinet top, hoping I’d been mistaken about the hammering. The top didn’t budge.

I’d thrown my flashlight in the struggle, but I couldn’t find it when I felt around the floor near the trapdoor opening. I thought I felt furry feet crawling across my hand and let out a stifled shriek. My fingers closed on the cord to the flex lamp. I held my breath, fumbling up the cord to the switch. The light didn’t turn on: my assailants had yanked out the plug on their way out.

I felt sick with disappointment. I sat on the edge of the trapdoor, my head in my hands.

When Davilats and Durdon broke into my office safe, they wouldn’t find the BREENIAC sketch; they would come back here to finish me off. If I sat here waiting, they’d finish me faster.

I braced my feet on either side of the door hole and pushed with all my might, but the top didn’t budge. I put spiders, rats, snakes, skeletons as far from my mind as I could and cautiously stepped my way back down the steep stairway. My throat was parched and my skin still burned. I put those as far away as I could, too.

When I stepped off at the bottom, I stood on one leg and traced a circle with the other foot, feeling for my tools, but I was still dizzy and couldn’t keep my balance. I went down on my hands and knees and moved slowly around. My left hand went into the hole I’d dug and connected with matted fabric. I pulled away quickly, but kept feeling the threads, spider feet, clinging to my hand.

At length I came on my burn phone. It didn’t get a signal down here, but in the light from the screen, I found my flashlight and my other tools. Flashlight under my armpit, ax and crowbar hugged to my chest, I hoisted myself to the top one painful step at a time. Ten steps. Ten years it seemed to take to reach the top.

I had to sit again. My arms were already weary.

“You have a lot of work in front of you, my friends,” I told them sternly. “No whining. Get to work.”

I placed the flashlight in a corner where I wouldn’t step on it. Pushed the remaining bags of birdseed down the trapdoor opening to make room for myself.

“Sorry,” I muttered to the skeleton at the bottom. “Didn’t mean to dump it on your head.”

I couldn’t stand upright in the crate; I had to swing the pick from the top step while bracing myself against the opening. My shoulders shook with involuntary tremors. Dehydration, electrocution, not good for physical labor. How desperate would I get before I opened the jars of gray mush in the basement?

Swing, thud, rest
. The outer skin of the cabinet was metal, which was why it looked like a trunk. It bounced back at me every time I hit it.

“I hope you were dead before you were buried,” I said to my companion. “If you promise not to tell Davilats and Durdon when they come back, I’m a bit scared. Never show fear, of course: vermin like those two can smell it on you.”

I understood what had happened now, but not why.
Swing, thud, rest.
Max had said the equations on the BREENIAC sketch were written by someone who, like him, had been educated in Central Europe. Austria, say, although perhaps Germany or Czechoslovakia.
Swing, thud, rest.

That meant that it was Martina Saginor, Gertrud Memler or Benjamin Dzornen who’d created the design, not Edward Breen. The little logo, the triangles in the bottom right corner, was the designer’s signature.
Swing, thud, rest.

When Martin saw the triangles, he recognized them from the documents his mother had stolen from his grandmother.
Swing, thud, rest.

He talked to Cordell, asked him about the triangles. That’s what didn’t add up for him: the same triangles on the BREENIAC design and on his family documents. That conversation put Breen on the alert, made him look for Martin, pretending to Jari Liu that he was worried Martin would take Metargon’s secrets public. Edward Breen had been an engineer, he was clever and saw the potential for the ferromagnetic memory, but he wasn’t brilliant: he didn’t work out the idea from the hysteresis equations the way the actual inventor had.
Swing, thud, rest.

When King Derrick posted that nuclear secret document on the Virtual-Bidder website, he signed his death warrant. Cordell Breen couldn’t afford for the document to fall into public hands. He got Rory Durdon to sniff around Palfry County to find the deputy-most-likely-to-be-bribed.
Swing, thud, rest.

Maybe Glenn Davilats was already taking kickbacks from other meth houses, so Durdon knew it would be easy to sell him on digging himself deeper into the pit on the far side of law and order. However the relationship was cemented, the two men arrived before dawn at the
Schlafly house and killed Ricky. Maybe Cordell had sent them to kill Martin—he was the person connecting the dots, after all.

The Navigator that Judy had driven back to Chicago had been leased to Metargon. I’d double-check it if I ever—when I got out of here.
Swing, thud, rest.

Poor Julius Dzornen. He’d been involved in the death of the woman in the cellar, and the secret so weighed on him that he’d lost the ability to function. It was as if the Breens had Tasered his spirit.

What really did him in was his father’s complicity. “Did Benjamin Dzornen kill you?” I asked my companion. “Or was it Edward Breen? Did the two men make Julius kill you, or bury you? You haunted him for many years.”

My flashlight battery was giving out and I could only see the side of the trunk dimly.

Swing, thud, rest.
The trunk was turning gray. I blinked, sat. Hallucinating, not good. I put a finger on the gray spot: it was a hole, light was seeping in from the kitchen. I was shivering now with a feverish excitement. I took the crowbar and used what was left of my muscles to pry out a chunk from the side. It peeled away like a sardine tin, the metal siding hanging loose like a great lip.

I lay on my back with my boots against the opening. Kicked, kicked again, felt more of the metal give. It wasn’t a very big hole, but it was wide enough for me to slither through. I landed in an awkward heap on the old linoleum.

Sunshine on Lake Michigan had never looked as clean and bright as the dim light seeping in through the ivy-shrouded windows. I lay for several minutes, soaking it in, breathing in must and mold on the linoleum as if it were bottled oxygen.

An old industrial clock over the sink told me the time. Three
P.M.
I’d climbed into the crate six hours ago. Time to get help, time to move on. I turned on the kitchen tap, held my head under the stream of water, gulped down great mouthfuls.

I didn’t want to move, but Durdon and Davilats might come back at any second. If they’d broken into my office, the combination I’d given them wouldn’t open my safe. They could blow it open, but it was possible they’d come back to torture the actual combination out of me. Or the BREENIAC sketch’s actual location.

I took my flashlight and my picklocks to the Subaru with me, but left the digging tools where they were: my shoulder muscles were too watery to lift the pickax again. My back felt as though someone were shooting Tasers up and down the cervical vertebrae.

As I stumbled through the front door, Ms. Basier was getting out of the Volvo with her daughter. The two stared at me without speaking, then scuttled into the house. When I looked at myself in the Subaru’s rearview mirror, I didn’t blame them. Standing under Julius’s kitchen tap, I’d turned the dirt in my hair and skin into mud. My clothes were also caked with dirt. My eyes looked like portals to the Inferno.

I drove slowly, sticking to side streets all the way north. It took over an hour to cover the twelve miles, but by taking the slow route, I could rest my sore back against the seat.

When I got home, Mr. Contreras started haranguing me almost before he had his front door open. He hadn’t heard from me since I left the apartment two days ago, he didn’t know why I couldn’t let him know for a change, and here was young Sunny Breen—he stopped short when I swayed and half fell onto the bottom stair.

Peppy came over and started licking the mud from my face. Mr. Contreras’s scolding changed to clucking. Behind him, I heard Alison Breen cry out, “Oh, what happened, oh, please don’t tell me that it was my father who did this.”

I was too tired to open my eyes. “Rory Durdon,” I said. “Rory Durdon and a bent cop he picked up downstate.”

I heard her start to sob but I just curled up against the stairwell wall, an arm around the dog.

“What happened, doll, how’d you get like this?” Mr. Contreras asked.

“The guy who drove us up to Lake Forest the other night,” I said. My lips were so thick that the words came out slowly, like cold molasses from a bottle. “Rory Durdon. His cop buddy Tasered me. Then they locked me inside a root cellar. I couldn’t get a phone signal down there. I had to hack my way out.”

“Tasered you? Oh, no!” Alison cried. “I was afraid—after the reporter came, Mother called Dad—she and I, we were both worried—I can’t believe—oh, what is happening?”

“She can’t talk right now,” Mr. Contreras told her, adding to me, “We need to get you cleaned up, doll. Can you make it up the stairs to your own bath or do you want to use mine down here?”

The third floor seemed a great distance away, but I wanted to be in my own place, to get into clean clothes and throw these away. I unlaced my boots; Mr. Contreras got down on the bottom step next to me to pull them off. Without their weight on my feet, I managed to push myself up the stairs.

Alison followed anxiously behind me, asking questions, but I felt as though I were in a swamp in some alien world, unable to think or speak. Mr. Contreras took my keys the third time I dropped them and opened my front door for me. He turned on the taps in the bathtub. When I started to unbutton my shirt, though, he left hastily, shutting the door behind him.

I sat in the tub under the shower, rinsing the mud out of my hair. When I finally felt clean, I filled the tub and lay back, almost comatose, letting the hot water soak into my ripped-up muscles. The place in my pectoral where I’d pulled out the dart was an angry red, but my thigh only showed a small pink circle.

When the water turned cold I finally stepped out and wrapped up in a fluffy dressing gown that Jake had given me for my birthday. In the living room, Mr. Contreras handed me a mug of hot tea that was half milk and filled with sugar. I gulped it down gratefully. Alison
took the mug to the kitchen to refill it and came back with a plate of poached eggs on toast.

Mr. Contreras watched me eat, nodding seriously at each mouthful I swallowed. When I’d finished, and was starting to fall asleep, he gave me a shamefaced look but said, “You ain’t going to like this, cookie, but I called the doc. She’s going to come by to look at you on her way home from the hospital.”

“It’s okay,” I yawned. “We’ll have a party.”

The eggs and the sugary tea had revived me enough that I was able to give him and Alison a more coherent description of what had happened in the coach house. Alison’s sensitive mouth quivered, but she had herself in hand and didn’t turn my experience into her own drama.

When I finished, I said to her, “I heard you say a reporter had been to the house. Was that Murray? Murray Ryerson, I mean?”

She flung up her hands. “I don’t remember his name. He’s big, with reddish hair, and a Mercedes convertible?”

“Yes, that’s Murray. He came out to ask why Julius Dzornen had been at the house Tuesday night, didn’t he?”

“Mother didn’t know what Mr. Dzornen and Dad talked about, but when she called Dad over at Metargon, he came roaring home. He’s never done that, not when I fell as a kid and broke my arm, not even when Mother started hemorrhaging after her second miscarriage, so I was pretty tense.