Moving Day: A Thriller (30 page)

They must have dropped—to the floor, or into the bowl. He must not have heard them—it must be that nobody had—in the commotion and crash of his body against the toilet.

But when he desperately clenches his hand again, the scissors are still there.

A sticky edge of the duct tape around his wrists and hands must have held them stuck for that brief instant.

He grips them again. Holds them tight.

In another minute, Peke is back in the living-room chair, the nail scissors hidden beneath his taped palms.

O
n a sunny California morning, at a beautiful oceanside home in Santa Barbara, the front doorbell rings.

The lady of the house rises to answer it.

She opens the door.

It’s four men in crisp green uniforms, an immense white truck gleaming in the California sunshine behind them.

Rose and Nick stare silently at each other for a moment.

“We’re the movers,” he says. With only the trace of a smirking smile.

Their possessions in exchange for her husband’s life. Reduced to those stark terms—things versus a life—it’s ridiculous to even contemplate any other decision, no matter what her husband has instructed.

Of course this is what the thief is relying on, Rose knows. He knows there is no choice, really. Though he values the worldly things—values them so highly he has come for them again—he knows they will have no value to civilized people in comparison with a life. To anyone’s life. It’s easy for the thief. It’s an equation he knows the answer to before the test is administered. A nondecision. For all her pacing, her sleeplessness, her replaying of that brief moment of insistent instruction from her husband, there really was never a decision.

The only question is, will the thief honor his side of the agreement? But why wouldn’t he? What is in it not to? She could not see his face at that moment he proposed it—
your things for your husband’s life
—but presumes that his coarse posturing over the phone was primarily for threat. His implying that it would be nothing—easy, unthinking, only momentary—for him to kill her husband. That is bound to be posturing. Necessary for him to do. What would it profit him to actually do it?

Now he is no longer a voice on the phone but standing in the California sun in front of her. Yet the question remains. Who is this man, really? This broad, squat, quick-grinned cipher?

She hopes his coming here, doing this, is pure vindictiveness on the thief’s part. Because if it is vindictiveness, then the thief will want Peke alive to prove the point to him. He will want Peke alive to wander his own empty house. To live with the knowledge of who has won. She hopes, prays, for that vindictiveness, that meanness, that precise purpose in the thief.

“My men will be very careful with your things,” says the broad, squat man now, holding his clipboard. “We wouldn’t want to compromise their value in any way.”

He smiles that narrow smile again.

The same men, she sees. The same uniforms. The same white truck. An eerie duplication of the original moving day, as if to mock them. A perfect reenactment. Making her watch in the bright reality of the California morning what she has already watched repeatedly in shadowy memory.

There was complete shock and surprise, of course, at the unpredictable conclusion of that moving day.

While this time—with every piece they pack and carry—she already knows that it is gone.

The loading begins.

Who is this man, really? The question becomes immediately more pointed, because this man with his clipboard, she realizes soon enough, is going to stand beside her the whole time. It begins as hardly noticeable, but he is soon a pressing presence.

In case she tries to say anything, she’s sure. In case there’s been an arrangement with the police. So that he can monitor her. So that should anything happen, he can grab her, possess a fragile, useful hostage. He is not foolish, this man. He is a tactician. So would a true tactician really see murder as a tactic? What tactical purpose could it serve?

Estelle Simon, neighbor and casual friend, wanders up the bluestone walk, her exaggeratedly puzzled look clearly the excuse she is wearing to approach. Rose breathes deep to calm herself, to prepare for this first test that she knew would come from somewhere.

“My God, Rose. You can’t be moving!”

Rose smiles. “No, no, just putting a few things in storage.”

Estelle stands and watches for a moment. “Such a big truck. It confused me.”

Rose shrugs, smiles. “I don’t know why they sent such a big truck. Maybe they make a few stops.”

Estelle watches the loading, looks in the rear gate of the truck. “That’s a lot for storage.”

“Well, we’re really redoing it. The whole place. You’ll see. You’ll love it.”

“And where’s Stanley during all this?” Slightly disapproving—as if she knows the answer can’t justify his absence.

“Golf with friends. He’ll be back.”

“You let him?”

Rose shrugs again.

The thief is sitting in the kitchen nearby, looking at his sheaf of papers, pretending not to listen, listening intently.

“Well, I was just checking. We didn’t want to lose you and Stanley so soon,” says Estelle. And smiles at Rose. And smiles, too, at the broad, squat, nice moving foreman sitting there studiously over his paperwork, who smiles pleasantly back at her.

P
eke is back in the chair. Worn down from the stealth of the event, the tensions of the effort, the lack of food, the lack of rest. But if he falls asleep, his hands will relax and the scissors will drop. He can’t count again on a lucky edge of tape.

They have not said it specifically, but he knows. That the truck is on its way to his home in Santa Barbara—or is by now even making its return. That Rose is doing everything they ask, in the hope of getting him back. That she is not listening to him. That she is denying his explicit wishes, for perhaps the first time in their lives. For perhaps the last time in their lives.

He still assumes that the skinheads and the Colonel have been instructed to keep him alive, so the fact can be proved to Rose if need be, with a phone call where she hears his voice.
You see, Mrs. Peke? Everything is as promised, everything is as planned, a simple exchange of goods—no reason to involve the police.

At least until the truck is loaded and closed, its big diesel engine started up, and it pulls away from the Santa Barbara curb. Then he is instantly expendable. Then he can be left utterly to the narrow imaginations and devices of the skinheads and their Gothic commandant.

His captors might in fact be waiting for that phone call. Letting them know they can do whatever they want with him. And what would that be, exactly?

The offhand slaps and punches, occasional, unpredictable, are becoming more adept—and more enthusiastic. To him it is clearer than ever that they signify waiting. An aggressive, brutal ticking of the clock. A violent, impatient marking of time. He finds he can bear the individual blows. Each like a wave of pain, thick and liquid, rising up, washing over him but washing past. It’s their cumulative effect that is wearing him down, exhausting him. Can he pretend to sleep? Can he pretend to without actually falling asleep?

His captors have not slept either. They are amped up, stimulated by events. Their normally sluggish, inalert patterns are temporarily suspended. But they will have to revert at some point. Sometime soon, they will want—need—to sleep. Come down. He has to make it until then.

Or else take a chance when there’s no one else in the room. When they’re eating something in the kitchen, for instance. Ignoring him for a few minutes. It’s happened before. He can reasonably expect it to happen again. That will be much riskier, but it may be the only chance he has.

He tries to calculate when the truck will be back. How long it has been away. It’s difficult. A couple of the blows have actually knocked him out, and he doesn’t know whether for a moment or for longer. They’ve taken his watch. He has only night and day to rely on—morning and afternoon shadows in the yard outside the dust-caked living-room windows—and the patterns of his captors, who are largely patternless. By his estimate of when the truck left (he heard it pulling loudly out of the yard) and how long it would
take to drive to Santa Barbara, pack, load, and drive back, they will return here by morning. By his rough and unreliable calculation, he is coming into his last few hours of opportunity. Maybe his last few hours of life.

The skinheads clearly have not heard yet from the thief. It seems they will wait for any greater action, any higher violence, until they do, and if the thief doesn’t call, that could mean waiting until he is back. Peke feels sure the thief will want to see him, show Peke that the mission has been accomplished, wave an item or two under his nose, before he nods to the crazy Colonel and the skinheads to do what they wish, as the thief turns away from Peke for the last time. Peke feels sure that the thief will want Peke to suffer such a moment.

Peke pitches his head forward.

His breathing evens out.

Sleep. Not sleep.

So that he is merely half-aware of the Colonel’s, the skinheads’, eventual wandering away.

He must wait.

He mustn’t wait.

The impossible discipline of half-awareness returns him to the drift of visions, turns his mind loose to play. He finds himself, in this susceptible state, left dangerously exposed to the old ambivalences, to the ceaseless, restless confusions—to all the old questions that an active lifetime could somewhat hide, could tamp down if not fully extinguish. But a chair in the dark, an atmosphere of finality, calls it up for assessment, wraps him in it like layers of tape across the chest.

Those indistinct figures in the long-ago kitchen, remembered only in a detail here or there, are by now merely stand-ins for something else, mythic, visionary, unreal.
They abandoned me to save me. Saved me by abandoning me.
The ancient, banished thought turns in him like a child’s rhyme.
Saved by being abandoned. Abandoned
to be saved.
Once again, he tries to imagine the commotion of the village, to imagine the approaching terror, preceded by the credulity and affirmation of horrifying tales—and what portion of those tales was mere rumor, paranoia, inaccurate hysteria? Would he have been better to stay with them? To be with them forever, whatever form forever ultimately took?