Plan B (14 page)

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Checking for air bubbles,” he said, replacing the syringe in the leather bag.

“What is that?”

“Thorazine. Should take about five minutes.”

“Couldn’t you use anything faster?”

“Nothing except a blunt object to the head.”

“What are we going to do with him for five minutes?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You have any good jokes?” He reached into another drawer and pulled out a blue and green cloth bundle and threw it to me. “Scrubs,” he said. “For our daring escape. You may as well change now.”

As I climbed out of my clothing and put on the flimsy scrubs, I was overwhelmed by the surrealism of the whole situation. Here we were, two grown men, about to abduct another man and remove him from circulation. A major movie star was going to disappear without a trace, and we were going to be the ones behind it. This was big. I even had to wear a disguise. I looked over at
Chuck, who was wiping his hands on his white jacket. “All we need is the soundtrack to
Mission: Impossible
,” I said.

A few minutes later Chuck’s beeper began jumping across the desk again. I grabbed it and looked at the readout. All ones. That was the signal from Lindsey, who was parked across the street in Alison’s hunter green Beamer.

“Elvis is in the building,” I said.

“Places everyone, places,” Chuck said much too loudly, stepping behind the door.

My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a litter of rabbits as I took my position in the chair behind the desk. I was terrified of facing Jack, of seeing the look of betrayal in his eyes, when he realized what we were doing. My mouth was suddenly a desert, and my lips began to stick to my gums. I couldn’t stop my right leg from shaking. I looked at Chuck and he stared grimly back. We were trapped in the moment, which seemed to last an eternity, but still it seemed as if the door was flung open way too soon.

Jack flew into the room with such force that I was scared the door would smash Chuck’s face in, à la the Three Stooges. I had a momentary vision of Chuck slipping to the floor unconscious, the incriminating syringe still clutched in his fist, and Jack turning to me with the tough glare and half-smile he used in his action films and saying, “What’s going on, Ben?”

But Jack just stepped up to the desk, gasping for air, and said “Ben, what’s the story?” If he was surprised to see me there, he didn’t show it, and he didn’t seem to notice that I was wearing the scrubs. He was wearing Ray Bans and a purple Lakers hat to keep his face hidden. He looked flushed and was sweating heavily, as if he’d run the entire way, or at least up the eight flights of stairs. I felt a pang of guilt over making him worry like that, but I reminded myself that it had been Alison’s idea. Desperate times and all that.

“Alison’s okay, Jack,” I said. “Why don’t you sit down for a second.”

“She’s okay?” he asked, peeling off the shades and his hat, still laboring to bring his breathing under control. “You saw her?”

“I saw her, Jack,” I said, standing up behind the desk. “Just sit down and I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

Jack pulled the plastic, molded chair out and dropped down into it. The instant his butt hit the chair, Chuck stepped out silently from behind the door and, with no hesitation, jabbed the needle into the back of Jack’s shoulder. Jack let out a yelp that was one part pain and two parts surprise and jumped to his feet, flinging an elbow back reflexively at his unseen attacker. The elbow connected squarely with the center of Chuck’s face, and there was an audible crack as Chuck’s nose erupted into a geyser of blood.

“Motherfucker!” Chuck yelled, falling on his knees, cupping his face as the blood flowed over his hands and onto the floor. Jack kicked the chair away and spun around, his hands up and his body squared in a very convincing martial arts posture. Jack had trained with various martial arts experts in preparation for a number of his films, and some of it had clearly taken.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Jack asked, staring down Chuck. “What’d you just stick me with?”

Chuck stumbled to his feet, grabbed some paper towels from a shelf on the back wall and pressed them to his nose. “Jesus Christ, Jack!” he blubbered. “You broke my goddamn nose!”

“What the fuck is going on here?” Jack yelled again. “Ben!” He turned to look at me, his eyes seething. I noticed that the needle had broken off of the syringe and was sticking out of his shoulder. I made an instant decision. I decided this was a stupid fucking plan.

“Relax Jack,” I said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Keeping one hand on his wounded nose, Chuck reached out to Jack with the other. “It’s okay, Jack,” he said, grabbing him by the arm, which turned out to be a grievous error in judgment. Jack, interpreting the grab as a continued attack, grabbed Chuck’s wrist in an arm lock and spun him into the desk, which his thighs hit with a resounding thud. Chuck gave out a low moan and doubled over the desk.

“Jack, cool it!” I yelled helplessly. We were one minute into our plan, and it had already gone horribly wrong. I saw Jack glance at the door and realized he was going to make a break for it. “Don’t move, Jack!” I screamed. “Don’t fucking move!”

It worked. For about three seconds—and then he broke for the door, but before he could get there, it swung open and Alison walked in, closing it calmly behind her. When Jack saw her, his jaw dropped. “Alison!” he whispered, shock etched into his face.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said, walking slowly towards him and opening her arms.

“You’re not hurt,” he said in a toneless, subdued voice, absently pulling the needle out of his shoulder.

“No,” she said, putting her arms around his neck and holding him to her. “I’m sorry we had to do it this way, honey, I really am.” He tried to move her back a little, so that he could see her face, but she held on tightly, whispering into his ear, while I looked on dumbly. Chuck was less concerned with Jack now and more concerned with stanching the flow of blood from his broken nose, so it was I who had to leap over the desk, scraping my left shin in the process, to help Alison catch Jack when he dropped into unconsciousness a minute later. He dropped into my arms so suddenly that I fell on my ass, with Jack sprawled all over my lap like a little kid who’d fallen asleep.

We all stayed like that for a moment. Chuck, leaning against the desk with the blood-soaked paper towels pressed to his face.
Alison standing by the door, her eyes opened so wide that her eyeballs appeared to be in danger of rolling out of her head, and me, sitting Indian style on the floor with Jack drooling onto my thigh.

“Phase one,” I said. “Completed.”

“Like clockwork,” Alison said, her voice shaking slightly.

Chuck just let out a gurgling groan and leaned back on the desk. “My nose is broken. I can’t believe it. He broke my fucking nose.”

The next part was easier than we anticipated. Chuck produced a gurney and we put Jack under a blanket and wheeled him down the white hospital corridor and into the elevator. When we reached the ground floor, Chuck went into a closet and came out with a wheelchair and the three of us moved Jack from the gurney to the chair. We got a few strange looks from passing nurses and orderlies, but as Chuck had predicted, everyone was too busy to give us more than a passing glance.

We wheeled Jack down the outside ramp and across Fifth Avenue, where Lindsey was double-parked, the rush-hour traffic providing some welcome cover for us. Chuck and I hoisted Jack’s unconscious bulk out of the wheelchair and into the back seat, while Alison ran across the street to return the wheelchair. The exertion caused Chuck’s nose, which I noticed had swelled considerably in the last five minutes, to start bleeding again.

“Chuck, your nose,” I said.

“Shit.” He pulled off his white medical jacket and bunched it up to press against his face.

“What happened to him?” Lindsey asked, looking over her shoulder from the front seat.

“Minor glitch,” I said. “Chuck, do you want to go back inside and get that fixed?”

“That depends,” Chuck said nasally. “Do you want be double-parked on Fifth Avenue when Jack wakes up?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “Get in.”

“Just stop at a bodega and get me some ice.”

We all got into the car, Chuck and I sitting like bookends on either side of Jack in the back seat while Alison took the driver’s seat and Lindsey rode shotgun. Alison steered us down Ninety-sixth Street, stopping briefly at a deli for the ice, and then onto Harlem River Drive. As the adrenaline seeped out of me, I realized that I was soaked with sweat, so I opened the window and let the brisk fall air batter me dry. Every time a car passed us, I was sure that someone would look in and notice something irregular, but no one gave us a second glance. By the time the George Washington Bridge was looming in front of us, I’d accepted that we were going to get away with it.

“Well,” Lindsey said merrily as we drove across the bridge into Jersey. “We just crossed a state line. I guess that makes it a federal offense now.”

“You don’t think Jack would really press charges against us, do you?” I asked.

“I would,” Chuck said.

“You’re just pissed because he broke your nose.”

“No shit.” He looked at Jack over his plastic ice bag, put his palm against Jack’s head and gave it a disgusted shove. Jack fell forward until his head came to rest on the corner of Lindsey’s seat.

“If it really came to that, I think he’d understand we’re doing this for him,” Alison said.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Chuck said, his voice muffled by the ice pack.

“Music anyone?” Lindsey interjected, hitting the car stereo before anyone could object. 10,000 Maniacs came on, singing “These
Are Days” and all conversation came to a stop as we sat back to contemplate the enormity of what we had just done, or rather, whether what we had just done had any enormity to be contemplated. Depending on how you looked at it, we were either five friends heading up to the mountains for a vacation, or four criminals who had just kidnapped a major film star across state lines. Either way, the next few days would certainly be memorable. As I watched Lindsey’s hair fly around her face in my open window’s backdraft, I found myself overcome by a sensation of sweet anticipation that I hadn’t felt in years. Natalie Merchant’s syrupy, full voice filled the car as we drove into the pink-orange shadowlands of the Palisades Parkway at sunset. I decided that, come what may, I could certainly go for a few memorable days.

The Schollings’s vacation home was a lakefront property on the outskirts of a small town called Carmelina, New York. The back of the house faced Crescent Lake, right in the bend of the crescent, which meant that just about every window in the place had a view of the lake. The house itself was a typical example of modern country architecture, a mixture of colonial and ski condo. Its exterior was stained wood, and there were slanted roofs, skylights, and windows everywhere you looked. The back of the house had a deck on stilts that looked out over the lake. The house and the surrounding forest made you feel as if you’d entered a J. Crew catalogue. It was exactly the kind of house I would have wanted to have if I had someone to have it with.

We drove up the long, narrow driveway to the left of the large front yard and parked close to the front door. Alison ran ahead to open the door and turn on some lights while Chuck and I carried Jack, still unconscious, out of the car. Jack had stirred once during the trip, and Chuck had given him another injection, this
time Versed, straight into the vein. Chuck was confident that it would keep him out for the rest of the night.

The foyer was filled with our suitcases, which Alison had sent up the day before with Lucy, her parents’ housekeeper, who’d been dispatched to prepare the bedrooms and dust off the house. She had also been charged with stocking the kitchen before she left, which was no mean feat when you considered that it was larger than my entire apartment.

We followed Alison up the stairs and around a short corridor to her father’s study. The house had that slightly musty, pine smell that I always associated with summer camp. The study itself was rectangular with a mahogany desk and matching bookcases that lined three of the walls. A quick glance at the shelves revealed an
Oxford English Dictionary
, an
Encyclopedia Britannica
, hard-bound editions of everything from Shakespeare and Milton to more postmodern stuff like Pynchon and Barthelme, what looked like an entire shelf of old
New Yorker
s and
Commentary
s, and in between, stacks of papers and manila folders. The room had no windows. The fourth wall was devoted almost exclusively to family pictures. Alison and her sisters in various stages of childhood, always freshly shampooed and suntanned, as if the Schollings were only photographed in the summer. Beneath these photos was a convertible couch that had been opened up into a queen-sized bed. To the left of the sofa bed was a door leading to a small bathroom, also windowless. We laid Jack down on the bed, pulled off his shoes, and covered him with the blue comforter that had been left folded on the floor.

“He’s going to be one unhappy camper when he wakes up,” Chuck observed. His nose was now a misshapen clump, with a nasty purple bruise descending from his forehead to its bridge. He had to be in agony.