They're Watching (2010) (13 page)

"Oh, didn't see you were on the phone."

"Yes. I am." Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed movement at the front door, Ariana easing back and shutting it to barely a crack.

"Don't stall us."

Don was stammering at me, "Listen, I just . . . felt I should apologize for my role in . . . everything, and--"

"You don't need to. It's not between me and you." My face burned. "Listen, I'm on a critical call. I can't get into this right now."

"Get rid of him. Now."

"I'm trying," I muttered into the phone.

"Well, when, Patrick?" Don asked. "I mean, it's been six weeks. For better or worse, we are neighbors, and I've tried a number of times--"

"Don, I don't need to discuss this with you. I don't owe you anything. Now, get out of my face and let me finish this call."

He glared at me and took a few backward steps before turning for home.

"Okay," I said, "the curb drain . . ."

"Once you've removed the devices from the house, put them in your black duffel bag on the top shelf of your closet and drop them down there. All lenses, cables, even the nonlinear junction detector. At midnight tomorrow. Not a minute before. Not a minute after. Say it back to me."

"Midnight tomorrow, sharp. Everything down the grate. Sunday at four P.M., I get an e-mail."

Until then, live with dread about what that e-mail might hold.

"This is the last time you will hear my voice. Now set the phone on the ground, smash it with your foot, and kick it down the sewer grate. Oh--and, Patrick?"

"What?"

"This is nothing like what you imagine."

"What do I imagine?"

But I was talking to a dead line.

Chapter
20

After disposing of the phone, I returned inside. The front door swung open to greet me, and I grabbed Ariana by the wrist and pulled her into me. Our cheeks pressed together. Sweat. The smell of her conditioner. Her chest was heaving. I cupped a hand around her ear and whispered, as faintly as possible, "Let's get ourselves to the greenhouse."

The only place on the property with clear walls.

She nodded. We pulled apart. "I'm scared, Patrick," she said loudly.

"It's okay. I know what they want now. At least what they want me to do next." I gave her the broad strokes of the phone conversation.

"And what about after this, Patrick? These people are terrorizing us. We have to call the cops."

"We can't call the cops. They'll know. They know everything."

She stormed toward the family room, with me at her heels. "So keep giving in and giving in?"

"We don't have a choice."

"There are always choices."

"And you're an expert on sound decision making?"

She wheeled on me. "I'm not the one who sold out my life to get fired off a shitty movie."

I blinked, stunned. Holding her hand low by her stomach, she beckoned with her fingers: Come on.

I caught my breath again. "Right. You're much more grounded. It took what? One crank call to get you to step out on our marriage?"

"It took a lot more than that."

"Because I was supposed to read your mind to know about all the resentment you were silently storing up?"

"No. You were supposed to be present in this marriage. It takes two people to be able to communicate."

"Nine days!" I shouted, so loud I caught us both off guard. Ariana started, took a half step away. Bitterness rode the back of my tongue. I couldn't stop myself. "I was gone nine days. That's less than two weeks. You couldn't wait nine fucking days to talk to me?"

"Nine days?" The color had returned to her face. "You'd been gone a year. You disappeared the minute an agent returned your phone call."

Her eyes welled. She turned and banged through the rear door. I shoved the heel of my hand across my cheek. I lowered my head, exhaled, counted silently backward from ten.

Then I followed.

When I pushed through the rasping door into the heat of the greenhouse, we grabbed for each other. She hugged me around my neck, squeezing hard enough to hurt, her forehead mashed to my jaw, my face bent toward hers, mossy humidity coating our lungs. We let go of each other a bit awkwardly, and then Ariana rotated a finger around the small enclosure. Lifting pots, crawling under shelves, running hands along posts, we searched. The translucent siding made the job easier. We finished and faced each other across the narrow aluminum staging table.

Our exchange inside, for the cameras and in spite of them, our clumsy embrace, the intruder's even stare, the feeling of horror when I'd discovered the first hidden device, the casually marked floor plans showing dozens more--the pressure from it all exploded in this first moment of relative privacy. I hammered a fist into the staging table, denting the aluminum, splitting the scabs on my knuckles. Two terra-cotta pots toppled off and shattered. "These assholes moved in to our house. Our bedroom. I've been sleeping on top of equipment they planted. What the fuck do they want from us?" I stared at the shards, waiting for the rage to recede. Nice work, Patrick. Sound strategy, responding to a grand master with a temper tantrum.

"They heard everything," Ariana was saying. "All the arguments. The petty stuff. What I told you Tuesday night over the dining table. Everything. Jesus, Patrick. Jesus. There's not an inch of our lives that's been just ours."

I drew in a deep breath. "We need to figure a way to get out of this."

Her lips were trembling. "What is 'this'?"

"It's got nothing to do with an affair. Or a student. Or a pissed-off movie star. Whoever these guys are, they're experts."

"In what?"

"This."

Silence, broken by the gentle whir of the shutter fan. I wiped the back of my hand across my shirt, leaving a streak of crimson. Ariana looked at the lifted scabs and said, "Oh. Oh. That's how you . . ." She took a deep breath, nodded. "What else do I need to be clued in on here?"

I told her about everything from Jerry to Keith, Sally Richards and the boot print, and how I'd lied and told the caller I was standing on top of the sewer grate and he hadn't known the difference.

"So they're not watching everything all the time," she said.

"Right. We just don't know where the dead spots are. But they seem to be backing off the surveillance. Why else would they give us the location of the bugs in the house?"

"To set up something else." She took a deep breath, shook her hands as if drying them. "What the hell's gonna be in that e-mail, Patrick?"

My stomach roiled. My lips felt dry, cracked. "I don't have a clue."

"What can we do? There's gotta be something we can do." She looked helplessly through the green siding at our house. Here we were, huddled, displaced. "If they know specifics about your trip to the police station, they probably have someone inside. Is Richards involved with this?" She'd dropped her voice instinctively to a whisper.

"It's not her," I said. Ariana regarded me skeptically, so I added, "I just know. Plus, why would she have told me about the boot print, which implicates the cops?"

"Okay. But even if it's not her, we can't go to her again or they'll find out."

"I doubt she can help us anyway. Whatever this is, it's well above the pay grade of a divisional detective."

"Fine. So let's go above her pay grade. How about the higher LAPD divisions?"

"No good. The make of boot could've been SWAT issue, so we can't trust downtown either."

"Then we need to get help from the FBI or whoever."

"These guys'll find out."

"Do we care if they do find out?" Ari asked. "I mean, what are they threatening us with?"

"I guess that would be another surprise," I said. "When it comes."

She shivered. "Should we risk it? To get help?"

"I think we should see what these guys want first. Or else it'll just be another futile conversation with cops or agents or whoever. We've already seen how that goes."

"Are you sure you don't want to go along with their directions just because you're scared of how they'll retaliate if you don't?" she asked.

"Of course I'm scared," I said. "I'm willing to believe they can do anything."

"That's the point," she said angrily. "That's what they've been trying to teach us. We don't know people big enough to help us. So what do we do?"

"First let's get the bugs out of the walls. At least the ones they're admitting are there. And let's do it quickly."

"Why quickly?"

"Because at midnight tomorrow, all the evidence goes down the sewer grate."

My arms cramped from holding the wand. Slowly, laboriously, I swept the circular head over the south wall of the living room. Though we'd checked every square inch of every surface, and though false positives abounded, the marked-up floor plan hadn't left out any bugs. At least any I could detect using the instrument they'd provided. Despite the endlessly swirling dust, we'd closed all the curtains and blinds, making the rooms as claustrophobic as the tiny greenhouse.

On the armchair in the corner sat our laundry basket, filled to the brim with a jumble of cables, mini-lenses, transmitters, mounting plates, assorted sleeves, and a catch box for various optical fibers we'd dug out from behind our air-conditioning fan outside. Upstairs looked like a crack house--furniture slashed and upended, walls torn apart, paintings, mirrors, and books strewn on the floor. Pots and pans littered the kitchen, the cabinets stood ajar in the family room, and the contents of the drawers and medicine cabinet had been emptied into the powder-room sink. For hours we'd worked in dread-filled silence.

Dust and bits of plaster flecked the sweat on my arms. When I scanned down the inner doorframe, the green light glowed right on cue. Pulling the printout from my pocket, I checked the location against the final red circle, stepped down from the chair, and tapped the spot. Wearily, Ariana trudged forward and punched a hammer through the drywall.

I stepped over a nail-studded length of molding, set the wand down on a flap of turned-back carpet, and stretched my aching arms. Beside the torn carpet, I'd rested the photographs I'd found inside cabinets and drawers, the remaining pictures Ariana had printed up and playfully hidden six months back. Together they formed a visual CliffsNotes of our relationship. Smoking together outside a Bruins basketball game. Our first meal in the house, some moving boxes shoved together to form a makeshift table for take-out Vietnamese. Me grinning, holding up a check from Summit Pictures, the first dime I'd made as a writer. In the background the lopsided cake Ariana had baked for the occasion. The maudlin, tender things we did to celebrate ourselves, back before we discovered we could look foolish in front of each other. I stared at that cake, the candles still smoking. Whatever wish I'd made had been the wrong one. It was hard to believe, in light of the calamity of the past few days, that we'd actually thought we had problems before all this.

A length of runner cable wrapped around her fist, Ariana stepped back, fighting it from the hole like a fishing line. The embedded wire came lurchingly, carving a trench across the wall, past our framed wedding picture, which slipped from its nail to the floor, a crack forking the glass through our grinning faces. The crumbling channel zigged north through the ceiling, the cable eventually tearing free from the fan. She staggered a bit when the wire gave, standing stooped and openhanded for a breathless moment. Then she lowered her face into an upturned palm and finally broke the dour silence with a sob.

Chapter
21

"No one I like would call me at this hour."

"Jerry, listen, it's Patrick."

"As I said . . ."

I hunched against the pay phone outside Bel Air Foods, casting a glance over my shoulder at the empty street. The tinge of morning light stole some of the glow from the streetlamps. "This thing's taken a turn, Jerry. Our whole house was bugged."

"Ever think about adjusting your meds?"

"Can you--please, please--give us some guidance here?"

"Why the fuck are you calling me? You fishing for a restraining order, Davis? I told you the studio has zero interest in--"

"This has got nothing to do with the studio."

That stopped him. "Why not?"

"I'm telling you, come look at this stuff. You won't believe what we pulled out of the walls--lenses and shit that I didn't know existed. There was not a trace of the insertion. They must've run the wires behind the drywall arthroscopically or something. They hid a pinhole camera inside the speaker grille of my alarm clock, another one in the vent of a smoke detector."

He whistled, and then I heard him breathing. "Pinhole cameras?"

"That's the least of it. Listen, the house is supposedly clean now. But I don't trust it. I want it checked. They called, said I can't contact the cops."

"You must be in dire straits if you're calling me."

"I really am, Jerry." I could almost hear him thinking about that one. I prodded a little: "You've done surveillance, right?"