Deceived (5 page)

Mac looked into Slezak’s dull, gray eyes.

“Answer me,” Slezak said.

Oh dear God
,
help me
. Mac could feel it coming on again, one of the rages. Mac felt like the grip of rage was an enemy combatant. Pastor Jon told him the enemy was Satan.

Mac was beginning to think Satan was really one Gordon Slezak.

“I said, ‘Answer me,’ ” Slezak said.

Mac fell to his knees, grabbing his head as he went down.

Red blood on buff-colored rocks. As if a child had spilled paint on a light brown surface.

That was the first thing Liz thought of. She wanted it to be paint, not blood that came from Arty’s head.

Arty’s body was facedown, legs splayed, twenty feet below the blood stain. A larger, darker blotch spread outward from his motionless head.

Maybe he could be saved. She could call 911 and . . . wait . . . there was no phone. She’d broken it. And by the time she got back to the house and made the call he’d be gone.

She could go down there and see if he was breathing, maybe put something around the wound to stanch the blood.

Or . . .

She looked around and listened. No one.

Time to think fast. Time to take control. Fully now. No one to tell her what to do or how to do it or when.

Keep moving
.

“Get up.”

Slezak’s voice, from a distance.

No, from above. Mac looked up. He felt like his head had been worked over by a nail gun. He must have fallen from the pain.

“I got to take something,” Mac said. Tears were streaming down his face, and he was sweating.

“Get off the floor,” Slezak said.

Mac could only see immediately in front of him, as if staring through a small hole in a fence.

Enough to get to the bathroom.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Slezak said, his voice behind Mac now.

Mac ignored him.
Shoot me in the back if you want to. It’ ll be a
relief.

He got to the mirrored medicine cabinet, opened it, found the Vicodin. It was in his hand.

Then snatched away.

“What’s this now?” Slezak said.

“I got a prescription,” Mac said.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Slezak stepped out of the bathroom.

“You can’t take those,” Mac said.

“I wasn’t told about this,” Slezak said. “No, no, no. You can’t be taking narcotics now, huh? I’ll have to check with the doc about this. If it’s cleared, you’ll get these back. But not before then. May take a few weeks.”

The bits of metal in Mac’s head felt like they were shifting around. He grabbed his head and squeezed, then dropped to his knees on the bathroom floor. Tears from the pain continued to spill out. The desire to kill Slezak swelled so strong he could hardly fight it. He clenched his teeth to will it away but lost any capacity for will.

The front door slammed. Mac staggered to his feet and got to the window. Peeked out and saw Slezak driving away.

Back in the bathroom, he found aspirin, poured five into his hand and threw them into his mouth. He took water straight from the faucet, put his head back, and swallowed.

He went to his bed, fell on it, and waited.

Ten minutes later, the headache started to subside. But the nightmare remained. A bad dream named Gordon Slezak.

He needed to call Arty. He was the best friend Mac had now. He got his phone and hit the speed dial.

It went to voicemail.

“Need to talk to you,” Mac said. “Call me.”

When she got back to the apartment building, Rocky wished for once that she did believe in prayer. Because this would be a good time to get some help from above.

She hoped Boyd would be sober and remorseful. That had happened before. Then maybe she could reason with him. They could split up like responsible adults.

Would she ever consider getting back together with him?

It wasn’t like she had a lot of prospects.

Her record in the boyfriend department was not exactly stellar. In high school she had been asked out twice. Once by Carl Day, who was into theater and who cancelled at the last minute for a reason Rocky never understood. It had something to do, so Carl said, with his tropical fish and walking like an Egyptian. What The Bangles had to do with aquatic life was never explained.

No doubt, Rocky would later reflect, it was the worst excuse ever made up by an overly creative type.

The other one who asked her out was Nicholas Grimes, a science whiz who looked like it, and who needed arm candy for the prom. Rocky was a junior and Grimes a senior and apparently the pool of senior fishettes had run dry.

After Nicholas got turned down by three other juniors, or so Rocky was told later, he landed on her.

At first her father refused to pay for a new dress, but he finally relented under her brother Arty’s single-minded campaign on her behalf. Their mother had died eight years earlier, and Arty did his best to offer Rocky the advice their mother might have given her about what a guy liked. It basically boiled down to,
Be yourself and don’t worry.

She worried. And then got angry when Nicholas spent the first half of the prom with his science buddies talking about the relative merits of the Apple Macintosh versus the IBM Peanut.

No dancing.

When they finally got around to it, the dancing was ludicrous. Nicholas Grimes knew calculators. He did not know choreography. Rocky enjoyed dancing. But the more she got into it, the more Nicholas seemed to distance himself.

Nicholas asked Rocky if she could find a ride home. There was something going on at one of the other guys’ house, and he had to go with them right away. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I had fun.”

So much for romantic high school memories.

After that, she could count her boyfriends on the fingers of one hand. None lasted more than a few months.

Except Boyd. Coming after a gap of three years, he lasted longer because she thought he was her last, best hope.

Kind of wrong about that
,
weren’t you
,
girl?
Rocky unlocked the apartment door. She closed the door and waited for Boyd to respond to the sound.

No response.

Where was he?

She listened but heard nothing. Not even the sound of his heavy breathing.

Maybe Boyd had decided to avoid a scene and taken off. Good. That was probably the best thing all around.

Her things. Now was the time. Pack again and get out. Before he came back and they had to go through a whole ordeal.

She went to the bedroom, looked on the bed. Her stuff wasn’t there. No clothes, no suitcase.

She looked around.

Nothing around the room.

She looked through the dresser drawers.

All her stuff was gone.

He’d taken everything.

Just to be sure, she searched the apartment. Maybe he’d packed and put the suitcase somewhere inside. But it wasn’t there.

Maybe he put it by her car, which was parked in the back.

She took the stairs and went out the back of the complex, out to where her parking space was.

The back window of her car was smashed. Her ancient Volvo, which she named Sputtering Sue, was now as scarred as her owner.

Rocky caught a whiff of smoke. Not like someone barbecuing on their balcony. More like someone burning leaves.

Though here in the Los Feliz district, burning leaves was illegal.

She saw smoke coming from around the corner, where the Dumpsters were. Something told her there was a connection.

When she got there, another tenant, an old woman whose name Rocky didn’t know, was rattling her walker.

“Who did this?” the old woman shouted. Her voice was like a nail scraping the Dumpster’s shell.

Rocky didn’t answer. She looked inside, saw the last bits of flame dying down, the charred remains of clothes, the unmistakable remnant of her suitcase.

“You know who did this, don’t you?” the old woman said. “Let me tell you, there’s going to be hell to pay. I won’t stand for it. Hell to pay!”

As she emptied the saddlebag, a state of calm came over Liz. It surprised and pleased her. It was like something she’d once heard about, a Zen moment. In the midst of the most horrendous trouble, people were able to stay focused and peaceful.

In control.

It was exhilarating. As she worked, part of her was observing the whole thing, as if outside herself.

That had happened once before that she could remember. She was ten, and they were making fun of her like always. In the school cafeteria. She had mashed potatoes and gravy and red Jell-O and green beans. She was sitting alone, of course, nobody ever sat with her, but she had a highly developed sense of awareness. She could tell when people were making fun of her and getting ready to do things. Like throw dirt clods at her, which was one of their favorite pastimes when she walked home from school.

This day there was a little group of them, all boys. Laughing and pointing at her. Turning heads back to each other for a fresh insult.

She pretended not to see, but out of the corner of her eye she could. Her peripheral vision was acute. Maybe because she had to use it so much to protect herself.

And then one of them sauntered up to her table. Cal Sensenbrenner. The athletic one. Stocky, built, fastest runner in school. He said, “Hey, Lazy Lizzie, your daddy in jail again?”

“No.” But he was.

“I heard he was in jail and drunk and he peed his pants.”

“Did not!”

“Maybe he could come to career day. I wanna be a jailbird someday.”

She didn’t say anything. She looked down at her food.

“Answer me,” he said and pushed her.

An explosion went off in her head.
Nobody does that to me. Nobody
,
nobody
,
nobody.

She threw the tray. It got most of him. The rest ended up on the floor and on some shoes and on a couple of the other kids. They started swearing at her.

Cal swore loudest, picked up some Jell-O in his hands and mashed it in her face while everybody started cheering. While she was crying, Miss Brainerd waddled over and told Cal to cut it out and he cussed at Miss Brainerd.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Elizabeth,” Miss Brainerd said. “You broke the rules, you sure did.”