Out of Range: A Novel (7 page)

“She never said that. That is not what Oliver told anyone.”

“It was implied,” Albez continued, unruffled. “She didn’t want to freak the kids out about their daddy. So she says ‘not anyone.’ She gets out of the car to confront you. Oliver hears an angry male voice.”

“Voices,” Charlie insisted.

“Maybe. With a six-year-old, it’s hard to tell. At any rate, you and she brawl out there. Only question is, what happened next? I think you lost your cool, hurt her in a way you never really intended. Now it’s panic time. You got to get rid of the body and do it fast. You’re also going to need an alibi and an explanation for why you’re not home, what you’re doing in that area. You start calling every fifteen minutes or so—make it seem like you’re a concerned guy. But you never leave a message ’cause you’re not sure you can sell it.” Albez pointed at the video screen. “Then you realize maybe that camera there picked up your car going into the gas station. You double-back to check it out, find the doll, and now we’re back to where we started.”

“You’re wrong.” Charlie was seething. “Dead wrong. And while you’re in here pointing the finger at me, someone out there’s got my wife. Doing God knows what to her.”

Charlie looked from Reamer to Albez. Their vacant, cynical expressions said it all.

“You know what I do for a living? You think I won’t have your names splattered all over the front page of my paper when all this goes south? When I prove you rushed to judgment—against a man with no record of violent behavior?”

Reamer stepped forward with concern, her voice gentle. “Mr. Davis . . . when did you find out that your wife was cheating on you?”

Charlie knew it was over—that there was no convincing them.

“You charging me with something?”

Reamer and Albez exchanged a look. “Not yet,” she offered brightly.

“Then I’m going home.”

Charlie stormed out and hurried down the hallway, searching for the room where the Social Services lady had taken his children.

He found them in a grungy office, half asleep on a weary old couch.

“Come on, angels,” he whispered, leaning down to them. “We’re going home.”

Chapter Ten

H
olding one sleepy child in each arm, Charlie shook with anger as he strode through the precinct parking lot at almost two thirty in the morning. He passed a trio of cops, standing by a squad car, drinking coffee and cackling about the wacky events of their graveyard shift. He was sure they had no idea who he was, or why he was here, but their laughter felt personally directed toward him. He wanted to grab them. To shake them. To order them to put away their French fries and get out there and find Julie. Instead he climbed into his car, phone clutched in his hand. The moment the door was closed, he dialed Julie’s sister.

The phone rang and rang before finally going to voice mail. Becca’s clipped English voice answered, “You’ve reached Becca. Do what you do. Cheers.”

“Becca, it’s Charlie.” He cleared his throat, struggling to keep his voice under control. “I know you spoke to the police. And I know Julie wasn’t in New York. You better have some goddamn answers for me. Call me back.”

F
orty-five minutes later, Charlie arrived at home, carried the children up the stairs, gently removed their socks and shoes and tucked them into their beds.

He barreled downstairs and hurried into Julie’s office. The first thing he needed to do was check her computer. If she was carrying on some kind of affair in London—and that was somehow related to her disappearance—there might be some evidence of it in her emails.

He opened her computer. Normally her screen saver brandished a photo of the kids, but now it was just a pale blue screen. Had the power gone off and caused it to reboot? No, that didn’t make sense. It had a battery backup. He typed in the codes for system check. It didn’t take him more than a few moments of key tapping to realize there was nothing there at all. Her computer was empty. No files, no software, not even an operating system. It had been wiped clean. Had Julie done that? To hide something from him?

Charlie hurried toward the kitchen. He could access her email from his own computer, assuming she hadn’t changed the passwords. But when he got there, and he saw his laptop, he was faced with the same blank blue screen. His computer had been wiped too?

He felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck and remembered that he hadn’t set the alarm before he’d rushed out the door. Could someone have broken into the house?

He opened a drawer and grabbed for the longest, sharpest knife he could find. But before he could venture a step, his cell phone rang.

At three in the morning?

He grabbed the phone from his pocket and looked at the screen.

It read—JULIE.

He held the phone for longer than he might have expected, then stabbed the button.

“Jules?” he implored.

“Not quite.” The voice was husky and male.

“Who are you? Where’s my wife?”

“If you ever want to see her again, you’ll come down to the basement. Now.”

Charlie glanced upstairs. Where the kids were.

“Your children won’t be harmed,” the voice assured him. “We only want to talk to you.”

Charlie gripped his weapon, looking down at the blade.

“And leave the knife,” the voice said.

Charlie spotted a man standing in the shadows of his front yard, staring blankly at him through the kitchen window, muttering into what appeared to be a Bluetooth as he raised a gun toward him.

Charlie considered his options—he could make a run for it, dash upstairs, grab the children, and try to get away. Or lock himself and the children in his bedroom and call for help. But for all he knew, there was another man already upstairs. Standing guard.

Whoever these people were—they were professionals.

Charlie set the knife down on the counter, moved to an interior kitchen door and opened it. At the bottom of the stairs was the basement. It was pitch-black down there. Charlie felt for the light switch and turned it on. Nothing happened. Had they shorted the circuit? Taken out the bulbs?

Slowly, Charlie descended the stairs, the wood boards creaking beneath his feet. Even in the darkness, he could make out the shadow of a man down below.

Charlie paused in the middle of the staircase, wondering if he was walking placidly toward his own death.

“Keep coming,” the bland, husky voice told him.

Behind him, at the top of the stairs, Charlie heard the door close and lock from inside the kitchen. He was trapped.

Charlie took three more steps. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he thought he spotted another figure to his right. He paused again.

“Keep coming, Charlie. If we wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”

Charlie took the last two steps and felt his feet arrive on the hard stucco floor.

“How about turning on some—”

Charlie’s request was interrupted by a nasty zapping sound from behind him.

He felt a jolt of electricity course through his entire body and everything went to black.

W
hen the veil of pain had parted sufficiently for Charlie to be aware of his surroundings again, he found himself seated and restrained, his body still buzzing from whatever it was they’d done to him. He would have asked what they wanted but there was a rolled-up sock in his mouth.

The lights were on now, which was of very little comfort. He was in his own basement—cheesy Formica wet bar (inherited from the previous owner), paneled dark brown walls, baseball bats, hockey sticks and football helmets strewn around, the last vestiges of his days as a star athlete.

To Charlie’s left stood two very large men wearing leather jackets. But from the deferential way they eyed him, it was clear the guy in the photographer’s vest was in charge. He looked to be about fifty, a bull of a man, with hard eyes and a bald head. As Bull pulled one of the signed bats off the wall, his vest gapped open, revealing a shoulder holster underneath. He slapped the bat in his palm and nodded at one of the goons, who took out Charlie’s gag.

“Before you do anything stupid,” Bull began, “just recognize that if you scream and fuss and freak out the neighbors, I’ll have no choice but to kill you and your children.”

Charlie’s heart was pounding, but he needed to maintain control.

“You have my wife?”

Bull took a couple of practice swings, the bat passing so close to Charlie that he could feel the wind of it on his face.

“I think I’ll be asking the questions,” Bull said.

“Who are you?”

Bull aimed his cold smile at one of his men, then shrugged—“I guess he didn’t hear me”—and drove the knob of the bat into Charlie’s solar plexus.

Charlie’s body tried unsuccessfully to wretch, but his diaphragm was so paralyzed that all he could do was double over in his chair and gasp. When he finally managed to sit up, Bull asked, “Who does your wife work for?”

“She doesn’t work for anybody,” Charlie gasped. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Bull walked to the wet bar, set down the bat and picked up a small plastic first-aid kit, white with a red cross on top. He made a show of opening it, inviting Charlie to have a peek. Inside the kit lay a row of syringes on a bed of foam egg-crate material. Bull rolled up the sleeves of his button-down shirt and Charlie noticed a tattoo on his forearm—five stars on a blue field surrounding a red diamond with the Marine Corps logo in the middle.

Bull pulled out two syringes and held them up, one in each hand. “You have two choices. Red. Or green.” He held up the syringes in turn, then approached Charlie. “Red?”

But before Charlie could even begin to respond, Bull slammed the syringe into his neck. He felt a brief impact then a burning sensation running up the side of his face and head. Sweat poured from him, his heart began racing and his entire body began to tremble.

“Your heart should be clocking about 250 beats per minute right now. That’s the norepinephrine. Pretty potent stimulant, don’t you think?”

“I don’t
know
anything,” Charlie said, gritting his teeth.

Bull just stared at him. Convinced he was going to die, Charlie thrashed wildly, trying to free himself from the chair.

“You ever drop acid, Charlie? We got a new substance now—salvinoran A—it’s like acid on steroids if you can forgive the mixed metaphor. The thing we found is, if you mix it with norepinephrine, man, the whole cocktail’s like a giant fear amplifier. You got the fight or flight impulse combined with the hallucinogen, all I have to do now is mention your kids and boom! The thoughts you’re going to have about what I might do to them . . . Did you ever see that movie
Saw
?”

Images flitted through Charlie’s mind, graphic and horrible. He clawed at the air, trying to reach out and touch his children, their eyes wide with terror, their mouths screaming . . .

Bull held up a second syringe, this one containing the green fluid. He plunged it into Charlie’s neck. It burned even worse than the red one. But his heart rate slowed to a normal rhythm and his skin stopped pouring sweat. And the fear . . . the fear disappeared entirely, replaced by a strange emotional hollowness. He felt almost nothing, as though his mind was a tooth deadened by novocaine.

“Who does your wife work for?” Bull asked again.

But all Charlie could focus on was that tattoo on Bull’s forearm. Because he had seen it before—at the Marine Corps Special Operations Regiment at Camp Lejeune. It was the kind of elite unit from which operators often graduated to black ops work, the kind of work that was too sensitive to be performed by men in military uniforms.

And it dawned on Charlie—the tattoo, the power of these drugs, the way Bull was talking about “we” . . . these men had to be working for the American government. CIA, NSA, Special Ops, some other shadow group. What the hell had Julie gotten herself involved in that she’d inspired the wrath of men like this?

“I’ll ask you again, Charlie . . .”

“I don’t know!” Charlie growled. “I thought she was in New York. I have no idea what she was doing or where she was.”

Bull smiled, then leaned forward, studying Charlie’s face from only inches away. “You expect me to believe that?”

“She told me she was going to New York. She even brought back a baseball with Derek Jeter’s autograph on it. It’s in the living room. On the mantel.”

Bull nodded to one of his goons, who headed upstairs, apparently to check on the ball.

Charlie was about to tell them the truth, that Julie had used Becca to lie for her, but quickly realized—if he told them that, they might soon be paying her a visit. He had to hold on—to keep Becca out of this somehow. Because if Bull was going to kill him, if he’d already killed Julie, Becca was the one they wanted to raise their kids. They’d already decided that—six years ago when they’d left Uzbekistan and drawn up their wills.

“I swear to God,” Charlie implored. “She told me she was going to New York. That’s all I know.”

“And where was she supposed to be staying there?” Bull asked.

“The Mercer Hotel,” Charlie insisted. “She likes to be downtown. She has some friends who live there.”

“And did you call her at the hotel?”

“No. I was only calling her cell. I never had any idea she wasn’t in New York.”

“Wow,” Bull exhaled. “Pretty elaborate lie, huh?”

“Yeah,” Charlie admitted. “Pretty elaborate.”

Bull sighed sadly. “Doesn’t say much about your marriage, does it?”

Charlie stared at the floor. For the first time since receiving the hit of green, he felt something—the sting of Julie’s betrayal and what it was costing all of them.

“You know, Charlie . . . my instincts say that you’re telling me the truth. Unfortunately in this case, I don’t have the luxury of being able to simply trust my instincts.”

Bull pulled out a second syringe of the Red.

“No!” Charlie screamed, swirling his neck around in a futile attempt to avoid the shot. “No. Please, no . . .”

The syringe bit into his neck, and once again, he began to shake. Once again, the fear blazed through his mind like an inferno of doom.

“Please, no! I don’t know anything. I swear I don’t know anything.”

Bull looked at Charlie, entirely unmoved, almost as though he was bored.

“Well,” he said, “that’s what we’re going to find out.”