Desperate (24 page)

H
ours later the sun went down and the moon came up, because even when the future mother of your child vanishes without a word, even when a vicious drug dealer has threatened to carve up your family with a switchblade, these things happen. Anna followed her evening routine. Maybe she thought that by acting normally life would return to normal, or our normal. Maybe, if we stayed positive, if we believed hard enough, we’d have a stranger in our family once again. Without proclamation, without telling me what she was thinking, Anna showed me, by doing her evening stretches, checking e-mail, and then washing up for bed.

“She will come back,” Anna said, as she got under the covers. “She will. She’s just scared. Or maybe she just had to go away suddenly. There’s an explanation. I know it.”

Oh yeah, there’s an explanation all right.

I knew the specifics of the explanation, too. Not long after we’d left Lily’s condo, I got a text message from Roy.

Roy to me:
Lily freaked and took off. Trying to track her down.

Thinks she’s not safe. We gotta talk. Gotta get the money.

I thought of a lot of responses to Roy’s text. None of them would have ended with lol or thx. I wanted to unleash a tirade for all he’d done to me. If there was any way to make him suffer, I wanted him to feel it tenfold.

Instead of barking at him, I kept my reply short and simple. I had made up my mind, and maybe Lily leaving was the impetus for my decision. I was rid of her and now I could be rid of Roy with one simple text message.

Me to Roy:
I’m not doing anything. You take care of yourself and I’ll take care of my family. Going to the cops in the morning. Don’t text me again.

Roy:
That’s stupid. What about my idea. The battery thing. I can check with Nicky to see if he’s got a contact.

Me:
That’s not going to happen.

Roy:
Don’t quit on me. I need your help. He’s going to kill us.

Me:
I’m going to the police in the morning. That’s my final decision.

Roy:
What about Jorge?

Me:
I’m betting it’ll get back to Nicky. If he wants me to stay quiet tell him to leave us alone. You give him that message from me.

There was a long pause, no reply from Roy. Minutes passed. What I eventually got back put a fresh spike of fear in me.

Roy:
Your funeral.

Hours later, Anna and I were in bed, trying to find our normal. I turned on the ten o’clock news but saw no reports of a dead drug dealer. No mention of a shooting down on the docks by Eagle Square. Lucas must have taken the body and the bullets to the associates Nicky Stacks kept referring to. Word of underground happenings might spread on the underground channels, where people like Lily and Roy got the late-breaking stories and straight guys like me wouldn’t even know to look.

Anna was asleep when I turned off the television. For a long while I listened to the gentle rise and fall of her breathing while I gazed at the ceiling. I thought about taking a play from Lily’s playbook and vanishing with Anna, but if Nicky wanted to hurt us, he could still get to me through the people we loved. And he would do it, too. I knew it when I first set eyes on him at his restaurant. Here was a guy who would shoot me in the back and then piss on my grave.

I wasn’t going to the police, either, despite what I had texted to Roy. I had no real desire to spend my best remaining years in jail for murdering a drug dealer. My goal with Roy was to get a message— call it a threat—to Nicky Stacks and hope he’d agree to a truce: my silence in exchange for my life.

I started to fantasize, because the mind can only handle so much stress. It goes into denial mode, assumes things will work out for the better. It’s a primitive carryover buried into our genetics, because if we contemplated the dangers we faced on a daily basis—car accidents, slips in the shower, a falling tree branch, wild animal attack, lightning strikes, and so on, and so on—we’d never leave the house. So our genetics helps to block out those worries, infuse us with denial. It’s like Adderall for fear—it won’t happen to me—and that’s how we can go about our daily business.

In my fantasy, as I drifted off to sleep, I was right about Stacks. He’d change his tune if he thought I was going to the police. We’d be left alone to live our lives without Roy and Lily. Later, perhaps, when Stacks was a shadow of a memory, Anna and I would try again, after she’d recovered from the loss of Lily and a baby that was never going to be hers. When her spirit was ready, I could once again become the thing I loved most in life—somebody’s dad.

I woke up hours later to the sound of Anna screaming.

A
nna’s scream didn’t sound terrified—not like someone was coming after her. I’d characterize it as perplexed, a surprised and shocked-sounding noise made from somewhere deep in the throat.

My eyes snapped open and I was out of bed like the mattress was on fire. A blast of adrenaline zapped all the sleepiness from my body, and I was instantly on red alert.

Anna, wearing her jogging clothes, stood at the edge of the bed looking down at her pillow as if something was wrong with it. The curtains had been parted and the first sprinkles of sunlight filtered into the bedroom. Anna was looking at me, not in an angry way, but concerned, as if I had done something wrong that she couldn’t exactly blame me for.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

I was unsteady on my feet and struggling to regain my equilibrium.

“What are the side effects of Adderall?” Anna asked me.

“Huh?”

“Adderall. What are the side effects?” she wanted to know, her voice steeped in concern.

I scratched my head, thinking.

“Why are you asking me this? Why did you scream?”

“Just answer the question.”

Anna was serious and not at all amused, so I rattled off what I could remember in my current condition: loss of appetite, nervousness, easily angered or annoyed, dry mouth. There were more, but I couldn’t think of them on the spot.

“There’s no sleepwalking? Night terrors? Anything like that?” Anna asked.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Why? What’s going on? Why did you scream?”

Anna didn’t answer right away. She eyed me thoughtfully in her pink and black running outfit, perhaps seeing if a prolonged gaze might bring about an admission of something, a side effect I was intentionally keeping secret.

I lowered my head and rubbed at my tired eyes. To help with balance, I locked my arms and braced my hands against the edge of the mattress for support. “Why did you scream?” I asked again, lifting my head to make eye contact.

“I was getting ready to go out for my jog when I saw this sticking out from under my pillow.” Anna removed the pillow in a grand sweeping motion, like a stage magician making a dramatic reveal.

My breath caught when I saw what it was. It had nothing to do with the side effects of Adderall.

“I don’t sleepwalk and never have,” Anna said. “I’m a thousand percent certain I didn’t do this. What’s going on, Gage? Are you sure you’re all right?”

“No, I wasn’t all right. I wasn’t all right in the least,” I wanted to say, but couldn’t get those words out.

My gaze was fixed on our largest kitchen knife, the black handle and shiny silver blade shown in stark contrast against the white of our bedsheets. The blade was at least eight inches long, forged from a single piece of high-carbon steel, resistant to stain and corrosion. The thick blade looked strong enough to cut through muscle and then saw right into bone.

Somebody had snuck into my home, had gone into my kitchen, retrieved the knife from the drawer, and slid it under Anna’s pillow while we slept.

Roy had given Nicky Stacks my message.

And Stacks had returned a message of his own.

I
was back at work for the first time since becoming a murderer. My access badge functioned fine, but still I felt that my colleagues were looking at me differently, as if I gave off an unfamiliar scent. Probably just my imagination, but it was noticeable to me.

I sat in my cube and powered up my workstation. Same as always, murderer or not, the e-mails were there, gathered in my in-box, awaiting my reply. They’d have to wait. I had other business to attend to. Important business, like making sure I stayed alive.

I had given Anna a vague explanation about the knife before I left for work. It was probably connected to the stress of Lily being gone, I said, and made up some BS about my subconscious putting the knife under her pillow as a way of protecting Anna from being hurt even more.

She didn’t seem to buy it. She insisted I stop taking Adderall and consider going to see a different shrink. She also, half jokingly, said she’d be sleeping with one eye open from now on.

“That might be a good idea,” I wanted to say, but held my tongue. Instead of obeying Anna’s wishes, I popped some Adderall—because that’s what addicts do—and called ADT from work to schedule an alarm installation. If Anna asked, I’d say I made the appointment beforehand and the knife and alarm were two unrelated coincidences.

I spent the whole day in my cube, avoiding meetings, trying to figure out my next move. Should we run? Could I hide my parents? Hide Bessie? Who else would Stacks go after if he couldn’t get to me? Did he know my friends? My coworkers? Would he go after Brad? His twins? What about Roy’s suggestion? Could he even find a buyer? Do I go to the cops? How would I get out of the murder charge if that came up? At that point, I was certain of only one thing: Nicky Stacks was a man who did not and would not forget a debt.

Or a promise.

The day slid away in an Adderall-fueled burn. I’d come up with no good answers, no workable plan. The only thing on my side, as Mick Jagger had once sung, was time. It was a short duration for sure, but at least I had enough days before the big deadline for me to come up with something. With luck, that something would generate one million dollars. Perhaps Roy and I needed each other more than I wanted to believe.

On my drive home I was more focused on my options than I was the road. Maybe that was why I didn’t notice the black Cadillac CTS with tinted windows until it was riding my bumper.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, furious—I hate tailgating—and checked the side mirror before switching lanes.

The Cadillac switched right behind me and inched even closer. My body tensed as I anticipated the front of the Cadillac scraping my back bumper—it was a hair’s distance away, looming large and threatening in my rearview mirror.

Alarmed and unnerved, I gripped the wheel tight and punched the gas. My Dodge Charger lurched forward, but the Cadillac kept pace, mirroring my every move as I erratically changed lanes. My face turned hot as if I’d just been slapped, and again I checked the rearview. Because of the tinted windows, I couldn’t see inside the car, but I knew it was Stacks, or one of his minions behind the wheel. The rest of the world went out of focus with my attention fixated entirely on the black machine behind me.

As I accelerated some more, the dotted dividing lines blurred into a single streak of white, and the trees on the side of the highway became a line of green. I nearly clipped the rear of a burgundy SUV while working my way from the far right lane to the far left. The Cadillac stayed on my tail as though it were attached to my bumper by an invisible cable.

I switched lanes again, no signal, but this time the Caddy pulled up to my left so for a time we were driving next to each other at the same rate of speed. I rolled down my window and screamed, “What do you want? What do you want from me?”

The Cadillac abruptly accelerated, pulled ahead of me, switched lanes, and slowed, forcing me to jam on my brakes to avoid a collision. Fortunately, there wasn’t another car behind mine; otherwise it would have been a shower of broken glass and a big crunch of steel. I slammed on my horn, which had all the effect of a BB striking a turtle’s shell. My palms were soaked with a stress-induced sweat. We were both going seventy-five, weaving in and out of traffic. Whoever was behind the wheel seemed to anticipate my every move.

I saw an exit ahead, but before I could take it, the Cadillac changed lanes, slowed down, and pulled in right behind me. There was no way I was going to lose this tail, so I did the next best thing. I got off at the exit and came to a slow stop on a wide dirt shoulder. The Cadillac pulled in right behind me and came to a stop as well.

I killed the engine and got out of my car. The Cadillac’s engine was still running, with the low hum of a finely tuned machine. My hands were balled into fists, face red with rage. There wasn’t much traffic rolling by this weedy stretch of road, but the cars that did pass weren’t offering to stop and help. They didn’t know what we were all about. Could have been mechanical troubles, road rage, or just two friends trying to follow each other to some destination. Whatever it was, nobody stopped to ask.

I went right up to the driver’s side and began banging my fist against the door. The tinted window reflected my rabid expression back at me like a distorted fun-house mirror. I pulled violently on the door handle, but of course it was locked.

“Open the door, Stacks!” I shouted. “Come out and face me! You ever come into my home again and I’ll kill you! Open this door right now and show yourself, or are you a coward?”

The Cadillac’s V-8 engine revved and roared in response, and the message was clear—back away. I didn’t care. I pounded my fist even harder against the glass.

The window rolled down just a few inches, enough room for a gun barrel to stick out and point at my chest. Gazing at the muzzle, I staggered back a step, my open mouth frozen in horror. I pivoted as I went to the ground and heard a faint click behind me—the sound of a gun hammer striking, but there was no follow on explosion, no bright and blinding flash like when I shot Jorge, no stench of gunpowder souring the air.

I crouched on the ground, my hands covering my head, whole body shaking. The Cadillac’s engine revved several times as if it was getting ready for a drag race. When it went into reverse, tires screeching, sand and stones went scattering in all directions and a column of dirt lifted skyward as the car skidded off the shoulder, fishtailed twice, and slipped back onto the road.

I stood, imagining how it would have felt to take a bullet in the chest. I thought of Anna, the knife, the gun, the giant mess I’d made of our lives. I waited until I was safely back in my car before I texted Roy. My message was simple and to the point.

Check with Nicky and see if you can find a buyer.