Kill Me (26 page)

“I do my job.”

“That’s not an answer to either of them.”

“Don’t be so picky,” she said.

“Okay, tell me this: Would they hurt Adam? Or my girls?” I said.

“What? No! Absolutely not.”

She sounded shocked at the question. I felt a wave of relief that she sounded shocked.

“You’re sure? Not for leverage? Not to be punitive? I crossed some line by tracking you down. You made that pretty clear when we were talking on the sidewalk outside of your building.”

“Someday you’ll have to tell me how you did it. Found my home. I’m pretty careful.”

“I’m pretty resourceful. Tell me again: They wouldn’t do anything to my family?”

“Hurting clients’ families? We’d be out of business in a heartbeat. You’re much too savvy not to see that. That’s not how it works.”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.”

“I do find it interesting that you didn’t mention Thea on your list of family concerns.”

I had. Thea was one of “the girls.” But I didn’t want to go there. “I’ll settle for the ‘no.’ Thank you.”

Lizzie pushed me. “Thea? Your wife? Remember her?”

I still didn’t want to go there with her. Thea and the kids were mine. All mine. They had changed my life. I changed the subject. “How does it work? At the end?”

Without a moment’s deliberation, she said, “Once the end is in sight, you shouldn’t be buying any green bananas.”

She’d made me laugh. I didn’t think it was possible right then.

“That’s not what I meant. When the time comes, how do they — or you — do it?”

She grew quiet for a long moment. I could sense the pounding in my heart as I waited for her reply.

She said, “They’ll hurt you. They’ll hurt you once. They’ll hurt you well. One moment you’ll be sick, and alive. The next moment you’ll be dead. Any problems you have will go away. Any problems you’ve caused us will go away.”

The words weren’t surprising but hearing them spoken aloud was stunning.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked again. “Today? Why?”

“Who says I’m helping you?”

“You helped me earlier. I want to know why.”

“I helped you?”

What?
“Are you saying you weren’t helping me when I was in your apartment? In that closet?”

She didn’t reply.

The doorbell rang in my friend’s flat.

FIFTY

I’d never heard the sound before. I thought it was the doorbell; it was definitely a doorbell-like sound — an intrusive, electronic, metallic
ding-ding-dong
. My pulse jumped. I felt the raw horsepower that comes from a sharp spasm pumping adrenaline into my blood.

“Someone’s at the door,” I said. I doubt I managed to keep the panic out of my voice.

“You expecting someone?” I initially thought she was buying into my alarm. When she added, “Room service, perhaps?” I knew she wasn’t. In addition to the subtle mockery, there was a message in her tone: She was telling me that she knew about the white-gloved guy at the Four Seasons.

And that she did think I was in a hotel.

“No,” I said. “I’m not expecting anyone.”

“I’ll hold on. Go check and see who it is. Get rid of them.”

“This isn’t a setup? It’s not those two boys from your apartment?” I asked.

“Not that I know of. I certainly didn’t send them.” She paused and pondered. “No, I’m sure it’s not them. They wouldn’t use the bell. They’d pick the lock, or knock down the door, depending on their mood.”

That made perfect sense. The realization that those two wouldn’t use the bell calmed me. If they were in Boulder to pay me a visit, they wouldn’t knock. If they were looking for me, odds were that I would never hear them coming. I’d awaken to find one of them pinning my arms to the bed, the other one pressing a gloved hand over my mouth.

“Go see who it is. Tell them to go away,” Lizzie said. “You and I aren’t done talking.”

Phone still at my ear, I walked from the bedroom to the front door and gazed out the peephole into the hallway. A girl, maybe ten years old, maybe twelve, stood staring at the door with an odd smile on her face. I looked left and right as far as the peephole would allow; the hallway around her was empty.

Girl Scout cookies? What time of year do they do that? Isn’t nine o’clock a little late for cookie sales?

I cracked the door about six inches and leaned my head toward the opening so I could camouflage my nakedness. The phone was still at my ear. I opened my mouth to say, “Can I help you?” but before I’d uttered a sound, the little girl took one quick glance up at my face, giggled, and skipped toward the stairs twenty feet away. I watched her turn the corner and disappear down the staircase.

“That’s exactly how it will happen,” Lizzie said into my ear, her voice suddenly alive with the provocative timbre of a storyteller. “Just like that. You’ll open the door — literally or figuratively — just a tiny bit. Your guard will be down, just a smidge, and then …”

She appeared at the top of the stairs where the girl had vanished seconds before. Without pausing, she turned down the hall toward me. She was winded — from exertion or anticipation, I didn’t know — her chest visibly rising with each breath. I could hear the crackle of each exhale through the telephone speaker at my ear.

A soft, deep-purple skirt, made of something like Ultrasuede, hugged her hips and followed the contours of the firm muscles on the front of her thighs. A pale gray turtleneck — I was guessing cashmere — fit her upper body like a second skin. Her nipples were erect and stood out, at least to me, like beacons in an ocean mist.

She was pale. Oh so pale, the pallor of her skin only a bare hue away from the tint of her sweater.

“. . . Something you don’t expect. Someone you don’t expect,” she went on, continuing to walk slowly toward me, one hand by her side, empty. The other hand held a phone to her ear. “Someone who doesn’t threaten, who raises no alarm, or maybe — maybe — just a little … alarm.”

I allowed my left hand, the one cradling the phone, to descend from its perch by my face.

She mirrored me, dropping her phone to her side, too.

“But the alarm will arrive too late, or you won’t recognize it until it is too late,” she said, staring directly into my eyes. Freezing me. “Too late. The awareness of your imminent passing will be a fleeting thought, though. You won’t suffer the torment of any prolonged fear. You won’t anticipate your near death for long enough to inspire any despair. That part is a gift. That … is our parting gift.”

Parting gift?
She made my murder sound like the consolation prize on a game show.

“Are you here to kill me?” I asked her. The words tasted funny — odd funny, not humorous — as I spit them from my lips.

She laughed. “Hardly.” She was standing in front of me by then. She leaned her head into the gap in the doorway, and she raised herself on her toes, and kissed me on my lips. She lingered there for a second, long enough for me to know that the kiss wasn’t a mere greeting. Once our lips were separated by a centimeter or so, she said, “If I was here to kill you, you would already be dead.”

She placed a boot against the door and pushed it open. I watched as her eyes tracked a line from my knees back up to my face. She grinned. “I now have a more accurate way to calculate that ratio.”

The ratio?

“Penis to brain?” I said.

“That one,” she admitted. “You going to invite me inside, or what?”

FIFTY-ONE

Lizzie was sitting on the sofa in the front room of the apartment. I was a foot away from her. In order to disguise my ratio from further view, I was wearing a robe I’d found in the closet. We both had our feet up on my friend’s coffee table.

Lizzie obviously knew all about my Boulder subterfuge.

“So you know about Dr. Gregory, too?” I asked her.

The corners of her mouth turned up in response to my question. “Of course. The guy keeps crappy notes, by the way. Hardly anything in them. If I’d done that when I was practicing …” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Hope you’re not paying him too much.”

I wondered if she was teasing me. I thought she was. Something told me she knew exactly how much I was paying my shrink. “Have you spoken with him? Has anyone from your … firm?”

She found that question amusing, too. She shook her head. “When the time comes, maybe. But no, not yet.”

“He’s a funny guy. Ethical, maybe to a fault. I don’t think he’ll talk to you. He’s been in some strange legal situations before.” I knew all that because I’d Googled him before I made the first call to Boulder to set up that initial session. For a small-town shrink he’d crossed paths with a lot of odd characters, and found himself in some precarious places that had left his name in the public record.

One thing I liked about him? He’d absorbed some significant penalties for doing what he thought was right.

She shrugged. “He’s a father, right? He has a little girl?”

“I don’t know about that. He’s never said anything about his family. I haven’t looked into that part of his background.”

She was surprised to hear me admit that. “Well, we have, and he is,” she said. “A father. He’s married to a prosecutor. His wife is chronically ill? Did you know that?”

“No. What does she have?”

“MS. Given their personal circumstances, he might not have a whole lot of compassion about your decision to enlist our help.”

“Then again, he might.”

“You never know,” she said.

“I’ll be surprised if it’s the case with him.”

“Whatever. He and his wife have a girl who’s just a little bit younger than Berkeley. Her name is Grace.”

Why would that kind of detail be important to the Death Angels? I felt a chill, and didn’t allow the thought to go any further. “So?”

“Jeffrey always says that —”

“Who’s Jeffrey?”

“The man you had lunch with at Nobu. It’s not really his name, of course. We use code names for each other like we’re the Secret Service or something. I find it all kind of silly. But I’m a lone voice. A lone female voice, I might add. The boys in the band do like their intrigue.”

“Jeffrey’s the comic?”

“He can be funny sometimes. Don’t underestimate him. It would be a mistake on your part.”

I made a dubious face.

“In
any
way,” she said.

I sighed involuntarily. “What’s your code name? Is it Lizzie?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t going to tell me.

“Before? You were telling me something that Jeffrey always says.”

“Yes, I was. Jeffrey always says that if a person has kids, and that person is unwilling to tell you something you really want to know, then you’re not asking the right way.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “How callous is that?”

“Pretty callous,” she admitted. She touched my knee. She didn’t squeeze it, though. It was just a slice of comfort. A lover’s idle caress. I recalled the texture of the touch from her hand on mine on the plastic tabletop at Papaya King.

She said, “Something to remember about us? Something always to remember about us?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I said, “Yes?”

“We kill people,” she said.

I must have looked at her as though I didn’t want to believe her, because she said it again. “We do. Not too often. But when we have to, we kill people. It’s not a good line of work for the squeamish or the faint of heart. Rest assured, our operations staff is neither squeamish nor faint of heart.”

At that pronouncement, I stood and stepped away from the couch toward the windows. There was a small break in the trees that allowed me to see the tops of Boulder’s Flatirons and enough moonlight to see shadowed places on the faces of the vaulting rocks.

“You warned me,” I said. “You told me I’d reached the threshold.”

She shrugged.

“I suspect you weren’t supposed to do that.”

She shrugged again.

“Are you on the operations staff, Lizzie?”

“Don’t … go there.”

“Okay. Then how about this: You saved me today, in your apartment. I have two questions about that. How did you know I was there?”

“That’s one.”

“The second depends on your answer to the first.”

“Lewis, and Gaston,” she said.

“I know who Gaston is. The doorman. Lewis, I’m guessing, is the newsstand guy?”

“Yes. In New York City, you don’t buy as much loyalty for a few hundred dollars as you might think you do. Gaston gets more than that from me in tips every month. Lewis keeps the change every time I buy magazines. If the total comes to twelve dollars; I give him twenty, or even thirty. It adds up.”

“Especially from someone who buys magazines every day.”

“Lewis talks too much.”

“Maybe. But I bet it buys you a lot of loyalty.”

“I don’t know about ‘a lot.’ But it buys me more than you were able to rent for a few hundred dollars. Gaston was seriously offended that you didn’t sweeten his pot, by the way. I rent Gaston. I suspect someone else could outbid me for his services if they were so inclined. That was a serious judgment error on your part, not finding out what the price was to outbid me. When you really want to succeed at an auction, you have to be prepared to bid your passion.”

“Not that it would have made any difference, right?”

“In this case, who knows? Loyalty counts, too. But I think for the right price, Gaston could have been yours.”

“What a fool I am,” I said.

She didn’t argue with me.

“Okay, then why? That’s the second question. Why did you help me?”

“That’s none of your business. You get to decide whether or not to accept my help. You don’t get to demand to know why I offered it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. Jesus,” she said, suddenly exasperated. “Think! I didn’t call you when you were up in my apartment alone. Right? You were wandering around to your heart’s content before the phone rang.”

I tried to remember.

She didn’t give me any time to organize the memories. She repeated, “Right? Right?”

She was right. “No, you didn’t. You didn’t call me until things started to get crazy.”

“I called you when Gaston called me to let me know that the boys were on their way up.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t care that you were there. You could spend all day in there and not find anything significant about me. That’s the way I live. I called to warn you. That was all.”

“Kindness?”

“Call it what you want.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

I actually believed her, believed that she wasn’t sure.

“Then I get a third question,” I said playfully. “Where are all the magazines you buy? I didn’t see one in your apartment. Not one.”

She laughed, but to me the laugh sounded sad. Then she distracted me. “You saw my panties. My nice ones.”

“I did.”

“Don’t complain. They’re much more interesting than last month’s
Vogue
.”

I had no advantage to exploit. None. I wasn’t accustomed to that state of affairs, and I didn’t like it. Then I remembered that I had one.

Maybe.

“The boss of the two men who came in? Military bearing. Wireless glasses. Cryptic. Seems like he could be explosive if you pressed the right buttons.”

“Ted,” she said.

“Code name?”

“Of course.”

“He was looking for something specific. The other one was looking for you. But Ted was looking for something he expected to find in your apartment that he couldn’t find.”

That seemed to concern her. “Where was he looking?”

“Your bedside table. The bathroom cupboards. The closet. The kitchen.”

She frowned.

“What was he looking for, Lizzie?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

She knew.

I made a decision not to press her. Not then. I said, “In my head? When I think about all this? The introduction, the negotiations, the buy-in? The mess I’m in? I call you guys the Death Angels. Since I don’t know any real name for your organization, that’s what I use. You’re the Death Angels.”

I looked back at Lizzie to gauge her reaction. The age lines at the corners of her eyes had softened. “We’ve been called worse, believe me. I like that, though. ‘Death Angels.’ Most of the time, it fits what we do. Most of the time, our clients are so grateful that there’s someone around who does what we do. We answer prayers. If disability is the devil, then we are their angels of death.”

“But other times?”

“Other times — and thankfully they are rare — there are people like you, people who end up wanting to bend the rules, or break them. People who wish they’d never met us, never signed up. When that happens people end up seeing us as more satanic than angelic.”

“It’s too much to ask for some compassion at the end of one’s life?”

“Our compassion is infinite, but it’s also totally inflexible. It has to be; it’s the nature of the beast. Our compassion takes only one form, the form that we describe at the beginning of the enlistment process. We make a delicate but profound commitment to our clients that is unwavering. The client may waver. We expect the client to waver. But even if the client stumbles, we are determined to finish what we’ve promised to finish. We keep our commitments.”

“You guys are that ruthless? Everyone on your … team?” My questions were an awkward way of wondering aloud whether Lizzie was as ruthless as the rest of them. As Jeffrey, or the white-gloves guy, or the guy in the pickup in Ridgway, or the duo who busted into her apartment that afternoon. Ted and … whomever.

“ ’Ruthless’?” she said. “Ruthless. That’s a very a harsh word. Let’s compare it to, say, ‘reckless.’ Who’s to say which, ultimately, is the more damaging trait for a human being?”

It was an intentional thrust with a sharpened saber and she’d hit her mark dead-on. She’d left me wounded. After I allowed myself a few seconds to absorb the blow, I discovered that, for the ensuing moments, I couldn’t breathe. I felt, too, as though drains had suddenly been opened wide in the arches of my feet and that all the blood was pouring from my body, emptying me of all that was essential.

Lizzie was telling me she already knew all about what was going on with Adam.

The most intimate things about Adam. And me.

And Thea.

I wasn’t so much surprised as I was realizing how desperately I didn’t want it to be true.

“How?” I said.

I didn’t have to say more. I didn’t have to ask her in a complete sentence. She knew what I meant.

For a split second, I thought she was going to tell me. But her eyes grew rueful and I knew that she wasn’t.

“You want to find your son before the end-of-life services are provided, right? I’m offering to help you.”

“Why?”

“ ’How?’ ‘Why?’ You certainly ask a lot of useless questions for a big-shot entrepreneur. We don’t have much time.”

“How much do we have?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Not a lot,” she said. “But first, tell me something. Why just Adam? Why not your daughters? Your wife?”

I didn’t have to think about how to reply. “Since I learned about the aneurysm, I’ve been with them constantly, every minute I could, and I’ve given them … more than I ever thought I was able. They’ve given me even more, of course.” I swallowed back tears. “If I die right now, I’m at peace with them. With Adam, I’m not.”

Her eyes closed. Her shoulders slumped. “Well, we have work to do. But I’m dead tired. Which way is the bedroom?”

I didn’t know what she meant by any of it. By the work part of it.

By the bed part of it.

I was realizing I didn’t know much.

She was already asleep when I whispered into the dark room the question I’d been wondering about since I’d scooped her cell phone from its silk cradle in the underwear drawer in her Upper West Side closet.

“Are you on my side, Lizzie?”