Tell No One (22 page)

Where was she?

Pigeons waddled with the type of possessiveness
usually associated with politicians. Many flocked in my direction. They pecked my sneakers and then looked up as though disappointed they weren’t edible.

“Ty usually sits there.”

The voice came from a homeless guy wearing a pin-wheel hat and Spock ears. He sat across from me.

“Oh,” I said.

“Ty feeds them. They like Ty.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“That’s why they’re all over you like that. They don’t like you or nothing. They think maybe you’re Ty. Or a friend of Ty’s.”

“Uh-huh.”

I checked my watch. I had been sitting here the better part of two hours. She wasn’t coming. Something had gone wrong. Again I wondered if it had all been a hoax, but I quickly pushed it away. Better to continue assuming that the messages were from Elizabeth. If it’s all a hoax, well, I’d learn that eventually.

No matter what, I love you.
…

That was what the message said. No matter what. As though something might go wrong. As though something could happen. As though I should just forget about it and go on.

To hell with that.

It felt strange. Yes, I was crushed. The police were after me. I was exhausted and beaten up and near the edge sanity-wise. And yet I felt stronger than I had in years. I didn’t know why. But I knew I was not going to let it go. Only Elizabeth knew all those things—kiss time, the Bat Lady, the Teenage Sex Poodles. Ergo, it was Elizabeth who had sent the emails. Or someone who was making Elizabeth send them. Either way, she was alive. I had to pursue this. There was no other way.

So, what next?

I took out my new cell phone. I rubbed my chin for a minute and then came up with an idea. I pressed in the digits. A man sitting across the way—he’d been reading a newspaper for a very long time there—sneaked a glance at me. I didn’t like that. Better safe than sorry. I stood and moved out of hearing distance.

Shauna answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Old man Teddy’s phone,” I said.

“Beck? What the hell—?”

“Three minutes.”

I hung up. I figured that Shauna and Linda’s phone would be tapped. The police would be able to hear every word we said. But one floor below them lived an old widower named Theodore Malone. Shauna and Linda looked in on him from time to time. They had a key to his apartment. I’d call there. The feds or cops or whoever wouldn’t have a tap on that phone. Not in time anyway.

I pressed the number.

Shauna sounded out of breath. “Hello?”

“I need your help.”

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“I assume there’s a massive manhunt for me.” I still felt oddly calm—in the eye, I guess.

“Beck, you have to turn yourself in.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“I know that, but if you stay out there—”

“Do you want to help me or not?” I interrupted.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Have they established a time for the murder yet?”

“Around midnight. Their timetable is a little tight, but they figure you took off right after I left.”

“Okay,” I said. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Name it.”

“First off, you have to pick up Chloe.”

“Your dog?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For one thing,” I said, “she needs a walk.”

Eric Wu spoke on his cell phone. “He’s on the phone, but my man can’t get close enough.”

“Did he make your guy?”

“Possibly.”

“Maybe he’s calling off the meet then.”

Wu did not reply. He watched as Dr. Beck pocketed his cell phone and started crossing through the park.

“We have a problem,” Wu said.

“What?”

“It appears as though he’s leaving the park.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Wu waited.

“We lost him before,” Gandle said.

Wu did not reply.

“We can’t risk it, Eric. Grab him. Grab him now, find out what he knows, and end it.”

Eric nodded a signal in the direction of the van. He started walking toward Beck. “Done.”

I headed past the park’s statue of Garibaldi unsheathing his sword. Strangely enough, I had a destination in mind. Forget visiting KillRoy, that was out for now. But the PF from Elizabeth’s diary, aka Peter Flannery, ambulance-chaser-at-law, was another matter. I could still get to his office and have a chat with
him. I had no idea what I would learn. But I’d be doing something. That would be a start.

A playground was nestled up on my right, but there were fewer than a dozen children in there. On my left, “George’s Dog Park,” a glorified doggy run, was chock-full of bandanna-clad canines and their parental alternatives. On the park’s stage, two men juggled. I walked past a group of poncho-sheathed students sitting in a semi-circle. A dyed-blond Asian man built like the Thing from the Fantastic Four glided to my right. I glanced behind me. The man who’d been reading the newspaper was gone.

I wondered about that.

He had been there almost the whole time I was. Now, after several hours, he decided to leave at the exact time I did. Coincidence? Probably.

You’ll be followed.
…

That was what the email had said. It didn’t say maybe. It seemed, in hindsight, pretty sure of itself. I kept walking and thought about it a little more. No way. The best tail in the world wouldn’t have stuck with me after what I’d just been through today.

The guy with the newspaper couldn’t have been following me. At least, I couldn’t imagine it.

Could they have intercepted the email?

I couldn’t see how. I’d erased it. It had never even been on my own computer.

I crossed Washington Square West. When I reached the curb, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Gentle at first. Like an old friend sneaking up behind me. I turned and had enough time to see it was the Asian guy with the dyed hair.

Then he squeezed my shoulder.

H
is fingers bore into the joint’s crevice like spearheads.

Pain—crippling pain—slashed down my left side. My legs gave out. I tried to scream or fight, but I couldn’t move. A white van swung up next to us. The side door slid open. The Asian guy moved his hand onto my neck. He squeezed the pressure points on either side, and my eyes started rolling back. With his other hand, he toyed with my spine and I bent forward. I felt myself folding up.

He shoved me toward the van. Hands reached from inside the back and dragged me in. I landed on the cool metal floor. No seats in here. The door closed. The van pulled back into the traffic.

The whole episode—from the hand touching my shoulder to the van starting up—took maybe five seconds.

The Glock, I thought.

I tried to reach for it, but someone leapt on my back. My hands were pinned down. I heard a snap, and my right arm was cuffed at the wrist to the floorboard. They flipped me over, nearly ripping my shoulder out of the socket. Two of them. I could see them now. Two men, both white, maybe thirty years old. I could see them clearly. Too clearly. I could identify them. They would have to know that.

This wasn’t good.

They cuffed my other hand so I was spread-eagle on the floorboard. Then they sat on my legs. I was chained down now and totally exposed.

“What do you want?” I asked.

No one answered. The van pulled to a quick stop around the corner. The big Asian guy slid in, and the van started up again. He bent down, gazing at me with what looked like mild curiosity.

“Why were you at the park?” he asked me.

His voice threw me. I had expected something growling or menacing, but his tone was gentle, high-pitched, and creepily childlike.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He slammed his fist in my gut. He punched me so hard, I was sure his knuckles scraped the van floor. I tried to bend or crumple into a ball, but the restraints and the men sitting on my legs made that impossible. Air. All I wanted was air. I thought that I might throw up.

You’ll be followed.
…

All the precautions—the unsigned emails, the code words, the warnings—they all made sense now. Elizabeth was afraid. I didn’t have all the answers yet—hell, I barely had any of them—but I finally understood that her cryptic communications were a result of fear. Fear of being found.

Found by these guys.

I was suffocating. Every cell in my body craved oxygen. Finally, the Asian nodded at the other two men. They got off my legs. I snapped my knees toward my chest. I tried to gather some air, thrashing around like an epileptic. After a while, my breath came back. The Asian man slowly kneeled closer to me. I kept my eyes steady on his. Or, at least, I tried to. It wasn’t like staring into the eyes of a fellow human being or even an animal. These were the eyes of something inanimate. If you could look into the eyes of a file cabinet, this would be what it felt like.

But I did not blink.

He was young too, my captor—no more than twenty, twenty-five tops. He put his hand on the inside of my arm, right above the elbow. “Why were you in the park?” he asked again in his singsong way.

“I like the park,” I said.

He pressed down hard. With just two fingers. I gasped. The fingers knifed through my flesh and into a bundle of nerves. My eyes started to bulge. I had never known pain like this. It shut down everything. I flailed like a dying fish on the end of a hook. I tried to kick, but my legs landed like rubber bands. I couldn’t breathe.

He wouldn’t let go.

I kept expecting him to release the grip or let up a bit. He didn’t. I started making small whimpering sounds. But he held on, his expression one of boredom.

The van kept going. I tried to ride out the pain, to break it down into intervals or something. But that didn’t work. I needed relief. Just for a second. I needed him to let go. But he remained stonelike. He kept looking at me with those empty eyes. The pressure built in
my head. I couldn’t speak—even if I wanted to tell him what he wanted to know, my throat had shut down. And he knew that.

Escape the pain. That was all I could think about. How could I escape the pain? My entire being seemed to focus and converge on that nerve bundle in my arm. My body felt on fire, the pressure in my skull building.

With my head seconds from exploding, he suddenly released his grip. I gasped again, this time in relief. But it was short-lived. His hand began to snake down to my lower abdomen and stopped.

“Why were you in the park?”

I tried to think, to conjure up a decent lie. But he didn’t give me time. He pinched deeply, and the pain was back, somehow worse than before. His finger pierced my liver like a bayonet. I started bucking against the restraints. My mouth opened in a silent scream.

I whipped my head back and forth. And there, in mid-whip, I saw the back of the driver’s head. The van had stopped, probably for a traffic light. The driver was looking straight ahead—at the road, I guess. Then everything happened very fast.

I saw the driver’s head swivel toward his door window as though he’d heard a noise. But he was too late. Something hit him in the side of the skull. He went down like a shooting gallery mallard. The van’s front doors opened.

“Hands up now!”

Guns appeared. Two of them. Aimed in the back. The Asian guy let go. I flopped back, unable to move.

Behind the guns I saw two familiar faces, and I almost cried out in joy.

Tyrese and Brutus.

One of the white guys made a move. Tyrese casually fired his weapon. The man’s chest exploded. He fell back with his eyes open. Dead. No doubt about that. In the front, the driver groaned, starting to come to. Brutus elbowed him hard in the face. The driver went quiet again.

The other white guy had his hands up. My Asian tormenter never changed his expression. He looked on as though from a distance, and he didn’t raise or lower his hands. Brutus took the driver’s seat and shifted into gear. Tyrese kept his weapon pointed straight at the Asian guy.

“Uncuff him,” Tyrese said.

The white guy looked at the Asian. The Asian nodded his consent. The white guy uncuffed me. I tried to sit up. It felt as if something inside me had shattered and the shards were digging into tissue.

“You okay?” Tyrese asked.

I managed a nod.

“You want me to waste them?”

I turned to the still-breathing white guy. “Who hired you?”

The white guy slid his eyes toward the young Asian. I did the same.

“Who hired you?” I asked him.

The Asian finally smiled, but it didn’t change his eyes. And then, once again, everything happened too fast.

I never saw his hand shoot out, but next thing I knew the Asian guy had me by the scruff of my neck. He hurled me effortlessly at Tyrese. I was actually airborne, my legs kicking out as though that might slow me down. Tyrese saw me coming, but he couldn’t
duck out of the way. I landed on him. I tried to roll off quickly, but by the time we righted ourselves, the Asian had gotten out via the van’s side door.

He was gone.

“Fucking Bruce Lee on steroids,” Tyrese said.

I nodded.

The driver was stirring again. Brutus prepared a fist, but Tyrese shook him off. “These two won’t know dick,” he said to me.

“I know.”

“We can kill them or let them go.” Like it was no big deal either way, a coin toss.

“Let them go,” I said.

Brutus found a quiet block, probably someplace in the Bronx, I can’t be sure. The still-breathing white guy got out on his own. Brutus heaved the driver and the dead guy out like yesterday’s refuse. We started driving again. For a few minutes, nobody spoke.

Tyrese laced his hands behind his neck and settled back. “Good thing we hung around, huh, Doc?”

I nodded at what I thought might be the understatement of the millennium.

T
he old autopsy files were kept in a U-Store-’Em in Layton, New Jersey, not far from the Pennsylvania border. Special Agent Nick Carlson arrived on his own. He didn’t like storage facilities much. They gave him the black-cat creeps. Open twenty-four hours a day, no guard, a token security camera at the entrance … God only knows what lay padlocked in these houses of cement. Carlson knew that many were loaded with drugs, money, and contraband of all sorts. That didn’t bother him much. But he remembered a few years back when an oil executive had been kidnapped and crate-stored in one. The executive had suffocated to death. Carlson had been there when they found him. Ever since, he imagined
living
people in here too, right now, the inexplicably missing, just yards from where he stood, chained in the dark, straining against mouth gags.