Hold Tight (9 page)

NINE P.M. Darkness had fallen over the Huff house.

Mike pulled up to the curb across the street. There were lights on inside. Two cars were in the driveway. He thought about how to play this. He stayed in the car and once again tried Adam’s phone. No answer. The Huffs’ phone number was unlisted, probably because Daniel Huff was a cop. Mike didn’t have the son, DJ’s, cell phone.

There was really no choice.

He tried to think about how he could explain his being here without tipping his hand. He couldn’t really think of one.

So now what?

He considered heading home. The boy was underage. Drinking was dangerous, yes, but hadn’t Mike done likewise when he was a kid? There had been beers in the woods. There had been shot parties at Pepe Feldman’s house. He and his friends weren’t heavily into the dope scene, but he had hung out at his buddy Weed’s house-clue for parents: If your kid is nicknamed “Weed,” it probably has little to do with legitimate gardening-when his folks were out of town.

Mike had found his way back. Would he have grown up better adjusted if his parents just barged in like this?

Mike looked at the door. Maybe he should just wait. Maybe he should let him drink, party, whatever, and stay out here and then when he came out, Mike could watch him, make sure he was okay. That way he wouldn’t embarrass him or lose his son’s trust.

What trust?

Adam had left his sister alone. Adam refused to return his calls. And worse-on Mike’s end-he was already spying like mad. He and Tia watched his computer. They eavesdropped in the most invasive way possible.

He remembered the Ben Folds song. “If you can’t trust, you can’t be trusted.”

He was still debating how to play it when the Huffs’ front door opened. Mike started to slide down in his seat, which truly felt foolish. But it wasn’t any of the kids he saw leaving the house. It was Captain Daniel Huff of the Livingston police force.

The father who was supposed to be away.

Mike was not sure how to handle this. But it really didn’t matter much. Daniel Huff paced with purpose. He paced on a straight line toward Mike. There was no hesitation. Huff had a destination in mind.

Mike’s car.

Mike sat up. Daniel Huff met his eye. He did not wave or smile; he didn’t frown or look apprehensive either. It might have been Mike’s knowledge of Huff’s occupation, but he looked to Mike very much like a cop who’d pulled him over and was keeping his face neutral so that maybe you’d just admit you’d been speeding or had a stash of drugs in the trunk.

When Huff got close enough, Mike rolled down his window and managed a smile.

“Hey, Dan,” Mike said.

“Mike.”

“Was I speeding, Officer?”

Huff smiled tightly at the poor joke. He came right up to the car. “License and registration, please.”

They both chuckled, neither finding the joke particularly humorous. Huff put his hands on his hips. Mike tried to say something. He knew that Huff was waiting for an explanation. Mike just wasn’t sure that he wanted to give him one.

After the forced chuckles died out and a few uncomfortable seconds had passed, Daniel Huff got to it. “I saw you parked out here, Mike.”

He stopped. Mike said, “Uh-huh.”

“Everything okay?”

“Sure.”

Mike tried not to be annoyed. You’re a cop, big deal. Who approaches friends on the street like this except some superior know-it-all? Then again, maybe it did seem weird to see a guy you know doing what looked like surveillance in front of your domicile.

“Would you like to come in?”

“I’m looking for Adam.”

“That’s why you’re parked out here?”

“Yes.”

“So why didn’t you just knock on the door?”

Like he was Columbo.

“I wanted to make a call first.”

“I didn’t see you talking on your cell phone.”

“How long were you watching me, Dan?”

“A few minutes.”

“The car has a speaker phone. You know. Hands-free. That’s the law, isn’t it?”

“Not when you’re parked. You can just put the phone to your ear when you’re parked.”

Mike was getting tired of this dance. “Is Adam here with DJ?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Huff frowned. Mike dived into the silence.

“I thought the boys were meeting up here tonight,” Mike said.

“What made you think that?”

“I thought that was the message I got. That you and Marge were going to be away and that they were going to meet up here.”

Huff frowned again. “That I was going away?”

“For the weekend. Something like that.”

“And you thought I’d allow teenage boys to spend that kind of time in this house unsupervised?”

This was not going well.

“Why don’t you just call Adam?”

“I did. His phone doesn’t seem to be working. He forgets to charge it a lot.”

“So you drove over?”

“Right.”

“And sat in the car and didn’t knock on the door?”

“Hey, Dan, I know you’re a cop and all, but give me a break, will you? I’m just looking for my son.”

“He’s not here.”

“How about DJ? Maybe he knows where Adam is.”

“He’s not here either.”

He waited for Huff to offer to call his son. He didn’t. Mike did not want to press it. This had gone far enough. If there had been a drink-n-drug fest planned for the Huff residence, it was off now. He didn’t want to follow up anymore with this man until he knew more. Huff had never been his favorite and even less so now.

Then again, how do you explain the GPS locator?

“Good talking to you, Dan.”

“Same to you, Mike.”

“If you hear from Adam…”

“I’ll be sure to have him call you. Have a great night. And drive safely.”

" ’WHISKERS on kittens,’ ” Nash said.

Pietra was back in the driver’s seat. Nash had her follow him for approximately forty-five minutes. They parked the minivan at a lot near a Ramada in East Hanover. When it was found, the first assumption would be Reba had vanished there. The police would wonder why a married woman was visiting a hotel lot so close to her home. They would think maybe she had a liaison with a boyfriend. Her husband would insist that it was impossible.

Eventually, like with Marianne, it might be straightened out. But it would take time.

They took the articles Reba had bought from Target with them. Leaving them in the back might give the police a clue. Nash went through the bag. She had bought underwear and books and even some old family-friendly movies on DVD.

“Did you hear what I said, Reba?” He held up the DVD case. “‘Whiskers on kittens.’”

Reba was hog-tied. Her doll-like features still looked so dainty, like porcelain. Nash had taken the gag out. She looked up and groaned.

“Don’t struggle,” he said. “It will only make it hurt more. And you’ll be doing enough suffering later.”

Reba swallowed. “What… what do you want?”

“I’m asking you about this movie you bought.” Nash held up the DVD case. “
The Sound of Music.A
classic.”

“Who are you?”

“If you ask me one more question, I will start hurting you immediately. That means you will suffer more and die sooner. And if you annoy me enough, I will grab Jamie and do the same to her. Do you understand?”

The little eyes blinked as though he had reached out and slapped her. Tears sprang to them. “Please-”

“Do you remember
The Sound of Music
, yes or no?”

She tried to stop crying, tried to swallow the tears away.

“Reba?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes,” she managed. “I remember.”

Nash smiled at her. “And the line ‘whiskers on kittens.’ Do you remember it?”

“Yes.”

“Which song was it from?”

“What?”

“The song. Do you remember the name of the song?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do, Reba. Stop and think.”

She tried, but fear, he knew, could have a paralyzing effect.

“You’re confused,” Nash said. “That’s okay. It’s from the song ‘My Favorite Things.’ Remember it now?”

She nodded. Then remembering: “Yes.”

Nash smiled, pleased. “ ‘Doorbells,’ ” he said.

She looked totally lost.

“Do you remember that part too? Julie Andrews is sitting with all these children and they had nightmares or were scared of the thunder or something and she’s trying to comfort them so she tells them to start thinking about their favorite things. To take their mind off the fear. You remember, right?”

Reba started crying again, but she managed a nod.

“And they sing, ‘Doorbells.’ Doorbells, for crying out loud. Think about that. I could probably ask a million people to list their top five favorite things in the world and not one-
not one!-
would say doorbells. I mean, imagine:
‘My favorite thing? Well, obviously doorbells. Yes, siree, that’s my very favorite. A friggin’ doorbell. Yep, when I really want to get happy, when I want to get turned on, I ring a doorbell. Man, that’s the ticket. You know what gets me hot? One of those doorbells that make a chiming sound. Oh, yeah, that does it for me.’ ”

Nash stopped, chuckled, shook his head. “You can almost see it on
Family Feud
, right? Top ten answers up on the board-your favorite things-and you say, ‘Doorbell,’ and Richard Dawson points behind him and goes, ‘Survey says…’ ”

Nash made a buzzing noise and formed an X with his arms.

He laughed. Pietra laughed too.

“Please,” Reba said. “Please tell me what you want.”

“We’ll get to that, Reba. We will. But I will give you a hint.”

She waited.

“Does the name Marianne mean anything to you?”

“What?”

“Marianne.”

“What about her?”

“She sent you something.”

The look of terror multiplied.

“Please don’t hurt me.”

“I’m sorry, Reba. I’m going to. I’m going to hurt you very badly.”

And then he crawled into the back of the van and proved good to his word.

WHEN Mike got home, he slammed the door and started for the computer. He wanted to bring up the GPS computer Web site and see exactly where Adam was. He wondered about that. The GPS was approximate, not exact. Could Adam have been in the vicinity? A block away maybe? In the woods nearby or the Huffs’ backyard?

He was about to call up the Web site when he heard a knock on the front door. He sighed, rose, looked out the window. It was Susan Loriman.

He opened the door. She had her hair down now and no makeup and he once again hated himself for thinking that she was a very attractive woman. Some women just have it. You can’t quite pinpoint why or how. Their faces and figures are nice, sometimes great, but there is that intangible, the one that makes a man a little weak in the knees. Mike would never act upon it, but if you didn’t recognize it for what it was and realize that it was there, it could be even more dangerous.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

She didn’t come in. That would set tongues wagging if any of the neighbors were watching and in a neighborhood like this there was bound to be one. Susan stood on the stoop, arms folded, a neighbor asking for a cup of sugar.

“Do you know why I called you?” he asked.

She shook her head.

He wondered how to handle this. “As you know, we need to test your son’s closest biological relatives.”

“Okay.”

He thought about Daniel Huff’s dismissal of him, the computer upstairs, the GPS in his son’s phone. Mike wanted to break this to her slowly, but now was not the time for subtlety.

“That means,” he said, “we need to test Lucas’s biological father.” Susan blinked as though he smacked her.

“I didn’t mean to just blurt-”

“You did test his father. You said he wasn’t a good match.”

Mike looked at her. “
Biological
father,” he said.

She blinked and took a step back.

“Susan?”

“It’s not Dante?”

“No. It’s not Dante.”

Susan Loriman closed her eyes.

“Oh, God,” she said. “This can’t be.”

“It is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. You didn’t know?”

She said nothing.

“Susan?”

“Are you going to tell Dante?”

Mike wondered how to answer that. “I don’t think so.”

"Think?”

“We are still sorting through all the ethical and legal implications here-”

“You can’t tell him. He’ll go crazy.”

Mike stopped, waited.

“He loves that boy. You can’t take that away from him.”

“Our main concern is Lucas’s well-being.”

“And you think telling Dante he’s not his real father will help him?”

“No, but listen to me, Susan. Our main concern is Lucas’s health. That’s priority one, two and three. That trumps every other concern. Right now that means finding the best possible donor for the transplant. So I’m not raising this with you to be nosy or to break up a family. I’m raising this as a concerned physician. We need to get the biological father tested.”

She lowered her head. Her eyes were wet. She bit down on her lower lip.

“Susan?”

“I need to think,” she said.

He normally would press this, but there was no reason to right now. Nothing would happen tonight and he had his own concerns. “We will need to test the father.”

“Just let me think this through, okay?”

“Okay.”

She looked at him with sad eyes. “Don’t tell Dante. Please, Mike.”

She didn’t wait for him to respond. She turned and left. Mike closed the door and headed back upstairs. Nice couple of weeks for her.
“Susan Loriman, your son may have a fatal illness and needs a transplant.Oh, and your husband is about to find out the kid isn’t his! What’s next? We’re going to Disneyland!”

The house was so silent. Mike wasn’t used to it. He tried to remember the last time he’d been here alone-no kids, no Tia-but the answer eluded him. He liked downtime by himself. Tia was the opposite. She wanted people around her all the time. She came from a big family and hated to be alone. Mike normally reveled in it.

He got back to the computer and clicked the icon. He’d bookmarked the GPS site. A cookie had saved the sign-on name, but he needed to enter the password. He did. There was a voice in his head that screamed for him to let it go. Adam has to lead his own life. He has to make and learn from his own mistakes.

Was he being overprotective to make up for his own childhood?

Mike’s father had never been there. Not his fault, of course. He had been an immigrant from Hungary, running away right before Budapest fell in 1956. His father, Antal Baye-it was pronounced
bye
not
bay
and had a French origin though no one could trace the tree back that far-hadn’t spoken a word of English when he arrived at Ellis Island. He started off as a dishwasher, scraped together enough to open a small luncheonette off McCarter Highway in Newark, worked his ass off seven days a week, made a life for himself and his family.

The luncheonette served three meals, sold comic books and baseball cards, newspapers and magazines, cigars and cigarettes. Lottery tickets were a big item, though Antal never really liked to sell them. He felt that it was doing the community a disservice, encouraging his hardworking clientele to throw away money on false dreams. He had no problem selling cigarettes-that was your choice and you knew what you were getting. But something about selling the false dream of easy money bothered the man.

His father never had time for Mike’s Pee-Wee hockey games. That was just a given. Men like him just didn’t do that. He was interested in everything about his son, asked constantly about it, wanted to know every detail, but his work hours did not allow time for a leisure activity of any sort, certainly not sitting and watching. The one time he had come, when Mike was nine years old and playing a game outdoors, his father, so exhausted from work, had fallen asleep against a tree. Even that day, Antal wore his work apron, the grease stains from that morning’s bacon sandwiches dotting the white.

That was how Mike always saw his father, with that white apron on, behind the counter, selling the kids candy, looking out for shop-lifters, quick-cooking breakfast sandwiches and burgers.

When Mike was twelve years old, his father tried to stop a local hood from shoplifting. The hood shot his father and killed him. Just like that.

The luncheonette went into foreclosure. Mom went into the bottle and didn’t get out until early Alzheimer’s ate away enough to not make a difference. She now lived in a nursing home in Caldwell. Mike visited once a month. His mother had no idea who he was. Sometimes she called him Antal and asked him if he wanted her to prepare potato salad for the lunch rush.

That was life. Make difficult choices, leave home and all you love, give up everything you have, travel halfway around the world to a strange land, build a life for yourself-and some worthless pile of scum ends it all with a trigger pull.

That early rage turned to focus for young Mike. You channel it out or you internalize it. He became a better hockey player. He became a better student. He studied and worked hard and kept busy because when you’re busy you don’t think of what should have been.

The map came up on the computer. This time the red dot was blinking. That meant, Mike knew from the little tutorial, that the person was on the move, probably in a car. The Web site had explained that GPS locators eat up battery life. To conserve energy, rather than sending out a continuous signal, they give off a hit every three minutes. If the person stopped moving for more than five minutes, the GPS would turn itself off, starting again when it sensed motion.

His son was crossing the George Washington Bridge.

Why would Adam be doing that?

Mike waited. Adam was clearly traveling by car. Whose? Mike watched the red dot blink across the Cross Bronx Expressway, down the Major Deegan, into the Bronx. Where was he going? This made no sense. Twenty minutes later, the red dot seemed to stop moving on Tower Street. Mike didn’t know the area at all.

Now what?

Stay here and watch the red dot? That didn’t make much sense. But if he drove in and tried to track Adam down, he might move again.

Mike stared at the red dot.

He clicked the icon that would tell him the address. It gave him 128 Tower Street. He clicked for the address link. It was a residence. He asked for a satellite view-this was where the map turned into exactly what it sounded like: a photo from a satellite above the street. It showed him very little, the top of buildings in the middle of a city street. He moved down the block and clicked for address links. Nothing much popped up.

So who or what was he visiting?

He asked for a telephone number to 128 Tower Street. It was an apartment building so it didn’t have one. He needed an apartment number.

Now what?

He hit MapQuest. The START or default address was called “home.” Such a simple word yet suddenly it seemed too warm and personal. The printout told him it would take forty-nine minutes to get there.

He decided to drive in and see what was what.

Mike grabbed his laptop with the built-in wireless. His plan, as it were, was that if Adam was no longer there, he would drive until he could piggyback on someone else’s wireless network and look up Adam’s location on the GPS again.

Two minutes later, Mike got into his car and started on his way.