Follow Her Home (7 page)

One important question became clear amid the steam—was my tormentor bluffing? He implied that my phone had been bugged, but he would have done that whether or not it was true. My apartment looked undisturbed, and, for all I knew, he was a bumbling one-man team with a smooth voice, a cell phone, and a rudimentary knowledge of the conventions of crime movies. If I knew he was bluffing, I could call the police right now. If I was wrong, and called the police anyway, he might be powerless even then. He was outside my building and would have to flee.

But then what? I knew nothing of his identity or whereabouts—I knew only that he was unfazed by murder, that he was a man who had ditched the norms that controlled the animal impulses of human society. I might run the risk that he would track down my family whether or not he had anything to gain.

The entire situation felt unreal, and I considered how the body in my trunk had come to be. I ran scenarios through the fuzzy projector of my mind's eye and, squinting as water ran down my stinging head, watched them unfold on the sweaty white plaster wall in front of me.

I watched as a man in a black trench and matching fedora approached the malnourished redhead on Citrus. He held a nondescript belt in two downturned fists like bicycle handlebars, giving and taking up slack as he tiptoed toward his victim. He caught up to the tall redhead and, with a sudden fast-forward flourish, looped him from behind, kicked out the backs of his knees to get him to bend down to where he could pull up on the belt, and yanked hard and steady while the soon-to-be corpse kicked the concrete beneath him. Midstrangle, the killer saw my car pull up in front of Lori's house, watched as I watched her to her door, watched as I almost left, watched as I watched the BMW, watched as I lurked solo in the dark street, poking into other people's business. Maybe his eyes, gleaming and bloodshot in the velvet warmth of the night, were fixed on me as he felt the body in his arms fill with death as with so much cement. Maybe he was watching, worrying, and missed the moment when his victim made the binary leap from 1 to 0. I closed my eyes and watched him watch me as he dropped the body and crept, sliding as if he had no feet, across the street. His hand disappeared into a deep pocket and came out holding a heavy flashlight. Maybe when he caught up to me and brought the weapon down on the back of my head, he wielded it with a wrist stiffened by resentment that my interference had deprived him of his victim's crossover moment.

Then what? He must have gone through my purse at some point, gotten my keys, and lugged the body to my trunk. Why? So it wasn't his problem anymore? No—a corpse in my trunk wouldn't make me the murderer, not in a competent policeman's eye. It had to be a message, a drastic way of saying,
This is what I can do.

I pulled back the shower curtain, grabbed the towel, and gave myself a rough, quick pat-dry before stepping out of the misted warmth and onto the sterile linoleum floor. I swept to my closet to swap the towel for a navy thong and a loose gray V-neck, dressing with Olympic speed. By the time I grabbed my MacBook and plopped back onto the couch, the drenched ends of my hair had left dark wet splotches on the front of my T-shirt. I opened up the laptop and woke it up by hitting the space bar. It gave a brief whirring groan and was at my service. I entered my password and opened a Web browser.

I would have to count on my computer being secure. It was one thing to put a wire on a phone, and quite another to monitor e-mail on a password-protected laptop. I clamped my teeth together and hoped I was right.

I opened a new message and addressed it to [email protected]. It was just past eight thirty in the morning, and I estimated the chances of Luke being awake as fifty-fifty, solely because of what had happened during the night. I added [email protected] to the recipient list. I needed to reach Luke, and I wanted Diego's advice.

I typed: “Hi guys, I'm in a pretty urgent situation right now, and I want to talk to you in person. Diego—I know you're up. Could you call Luke for me and make sure he's getting this? Can we meet up as soon as possible? I'm ready to leave my apartment whenever. I don't have a phone.”

I thought about e-mailing my mom and found I couldn't remember the last time I'd spoken to her. We were never officially out of touch, but I could go about my days and realize I hadn't heard from my family in months. For now, I would do what I could to keep my mess out of their lives.

I decided to start getting ready. I had to leave the building, and I didn't want Luke and Diego to be seen coming in. I found a black padded bra in the folds of my unmade bed and put it on under my T-shirt, feeding the straps through the armholes and hooking it in the back. I pulled open the bottom drawer of my dresser and found a pair of denim shorts and threw those on. When I sat back on the couch, there was a message from Diego in my in-box. “Come over whenever you want. I'm not getting through to Luke right now but I'll try again in a few minutes. Is everything okay?”

I closed my laptop and got up again. I unclasped my clutch and emptied its contents into a roomy black leather shoulder bag. I glanced at the block of sharpened knives on my counter, but I knew I couldn't wield a blade outside the kitchen. Instead, I scanned the room for something heavy and breakable, and settled on a thick, black ceramic ashtray. I put that in my bag. Its weight was reassuring. I put on my flip-flops, left my studio, and locked the door behind me.

I could have asked Diego to call the police. They may not have gotten my villain without a description, but they would have kept him away from me and taken a body off my hands. Still, I ruled out involving the law just yet. The likelihood that this man would commit violence against my family before I could get the police to protect them and track him down was very small, but greater than zero. If I had Diego call the police, he would know, and if he was a murderer, he was also part madman.

He would know because after he hung up the phone, there was nothing for him to do but watch for my next move. He would see the police pull into my garage because he would be lying in wait nearby. If I was right, I could see how crazy he was for myself, just by setting foot outside.

 

Five

A man in a smart blue suit and polished brown oxfords leaned on the corner of the 850's closed trunk, his feet crossed jauntily at the ankles, relaxed as a lizard on a rock. He held one of his elbows in a cupped hand and examined his fingernails, a sculpted interpretation of nonchalance. It might have passed but for the subject's middling height, which forced him to keep his heels tense on the ground to maintain his noncommittal perch on the car. His glazed gold-and-chestnut hair parted right at the 30/70 line of a short forehead, falling into a tall, swept-back shell around his head, the gel-crusted crest of which you could bounce a ball on. His cool eyes, black or green or both, like the chitinous shell of a housefly, were downcast as he continued looking for grime and snagged cuticles. They held a devilish gleam that wasn't uncharming, and he had a nose that could cut glass. He looked up with a slow, exaggerated raise of the chin, a lopsided smile, and an affected widening of the eyes that spread across his face as he heard my stomping footsteps. If he'd had a hat, he would've tipped it, no doubt.

I stopped when his eyes met mine, and the slap of my rubber-soled foot on concrete boomed brassily around us. “You look exactly like you sound.”

“Thank you.” He pushed off the car with a backward thrust of his tailbone and his feet touched the ground with a soft pat.

My throat felt dusty and my voice was on the verge of cracking. “Are you going to kill me?”

“I would like to avoid it if possible.”

“You could have killed me last night.”

He shrugged and tilted his head to look at his fingernails.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Humphrey.”

“Do you have a last name?”

He smiled. “Bogart.”

I scanned the parking lot but Bogart and I were alone. It worried me that he showed himself, what it would mean for it not to matter that I could identify him. With my assailant before me, the ashtray in my purse felt stupid, pointless, a minute's reach away. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to come with me.”

“Where?”

He shook his head.

I tried to stall. “Who is that in my trunk?”

“That's none of your concern, Miss Song.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Tsk-tsk.”

I looked at the ground and perked up at the sound of a door opening. A girl around my age came through it, a neighbor going to her car. It was a brief window, but it was there and it had a witness.

“I won't go with you,” I said with volume, and I took my car key out of my purse. I stepped quickly to my Volvo's door and unlocked it.

Suddenly there was a navy-clad forearm in my field of vision and pressure on my shoulder and at the side of my neck. I felt the warmth of a live human body all along my back. It was the negative of an embrace, the same gesture in a world of black teeth and white eyes.

His mouth at my ear let out hot breath and as he whispered I saw like a bat the quivering damp of his inner cheeks, red and uneven. “I can kill you, you know. You and your pathetic scrap of a family.”

My hands, at my sides, sprung open and stiff, and I had to fumble to recover my key. I nodded slowly and my voicebox managed to puff up under the hold of his arm, “I know.”

He laughed. It was an airy laugh that was almost nervous, like that of a child who had lost his temper on the playground and wanted back in the games. His hold relaxed and he withdrew his arm, the fabric of his jacket rustling as it slid over my shoulder. He patted me on the back, jocularity in his very fingertips.

“We will see each other again.” He emphasized the second word, certainty buoyant in his voice.

He was still behind me and I said without turning, “Yes.”

I stood for a long moment, waiting, then opened the door and climbed into the driver's seat. I jammed my foot on the clutch and started the engine with teleport speed. I backed out and sped out of the lot.

I listened to the hum of my engine as I switched gears, and I left him to figure out whether to follow me, satisfied that no amount of scrambling would allow him to tail me directly. The wait for the garage door to sense my presence and crawl open was strange and strained, but he was too far away to share my darting eye contact. He didn't move, even as I drove away and he became a vague, suited Waldo in the rearview mirror. When he was out of sight, I noticed I was breathing normally, and that this was a change.

It was eight twenty now. Diego lived on Kings Road and First Street, a five-minute drive from my apartment. I rolled down the windows and tried to relax, breathing with the sound of the passing air as the Volvo knifed through it.

*   *   *

I still depended on Diego, but when I was eighteen, I could forget how to breathe without him. My first weeks home that summer were lonely and difficult, and not only because of Iris. After months of virtual cohabitation with Diego—and, in turn, Luke—I was getting my first taste of a long-distance relationship.

When Iris told me she was pregnant, she asked me not to tell anybody. I told her I wouldn't breathe a word to our mom, but I asked for permission to talk to Diego. I told her he had a cousin who'd had a baby in high school and that he might have some good insight. She was reluctant, but she said she couldn't stop me.

It was true that he had that cousin, but I needed Diego's ear more than his experience. We talked every day, and Diego listened to me gripe over the phone. He said that Iris would come around, that she would open up if I gave her time. But my newly secretive sister was driving me mad.

I avoided trapping her in a lie. I didn't ask,
What does Paul think?
or
How have things been with him?
If there was any consideration in this open strategy, it was incidental. I was protecting myself. Hearing a new-spun lie out of Iris's mouth would have hurt me, mind, heart, and stomach.

“I heard you broke up with Paul,” I said.

We were getting ready for bed, and she caught my eye in the mirror, with her toothbrush in her mouth. She finished brushing, took her time rinsing, splashed water onto her face, and dried off on a towel.

“Where did you hear that?” Her tone was sharper than I'd heard it in a while. She had her hands pressed down on the bathroom counter in the posture of a push-up. Her head was down and sought neither my eyes behind her nor their reflection in the glass.

“Doesn't matter.”

“Of course it matters. I didn't tell you that. You went behind my back.”

I smirked. “Well, gee, Iris. Why the hell would I go behind your back when you've been so up front with me?”

She turned on the faucet to splash more water onto her face and let the water run as she squinted at my reflection. We were only minutes into the fight and I already felt the wear of battle. “Don't be bitchy,
unni.
You have no idea what I'm going through.”

“You're right. You haven't told me fucking anything. Every time we talked in the last—I don't even know how long—you've been lying to me.”

Her eyes glassed over with malice and she turned off the faucet with a hard twist. “You never asked. You stopped listening to me. You left me here, and ever since, you've been in your own little world and it's all you ever want to talk about.”

There was violence in her tempo—she whetted her words so they could break skin. I gasped, but before I could protest, she continued.

“You went to college and stopped caring about your sad little sister all the way across the country. I could tell. I know I annoyed you, crying on the phone, saying how miserable I was. You acted patient, but I could hear you zoning out. So, obviously, I made an effort. To stop being such a drag. I let you have my ear, and I listened to every detail of your new life, wishing you were here instead.” Her voice dissolved, shaking with tears.