Watch You Die (24 page)

Courtney and Jed exchanged seductive smiles. The electricity between them was awkward, at least for me.

“We work together,” I told Jed. “Courtney and I.”

“Well, good to meet you both. Let me just pull up a new file for you, Darcy.” He tapped away at the computer, squinted his eyes until the screen he wanted appeared, then leaned back and faced us. “So … you’re being stalked.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me why you think you’re being stalked.”

“No,” Courtney cut in, “she
is
being stalked. I know this guy. He’s a total freak.”

Jed typed a note. “How do you know him?”

“From work,” she said.

“Actually I knew him before work.” I went on to explain the whole thing despite a sense that Jed and I were making no connection whatsoever and he might not have even believed that
I
was being stalked when an eminently more desirable woman sat right there beside me. Unless I was imagining the disconnect. I plowed on anyway until I had laid the whole episode before him.

“OK.” Leaning back, nodding soberly, fingertips steepled; boy playing businessman at work. “I’ve got to ask you some tough questions now, if you don’t mind.”

“Go right ahead.”

He paused as if for dramatic effect. “Any prior sexual history?”

Courtney actually giggled.

“You mean with
Joe
?” I asked.

He nodded as soberly as a silly man could.

“Absolutely not!”

“My apologies, but I had to ask.”

“Why? I just explained my history with him. I told you: I hardly know him at all.”

“It’s just one of our standard questions.”

He was reading off a list on the computer
. No, he wasn’t twelve; he was nine.

He read the next checklist question aloud: “Does the stalker have a prior criminal history?” Then answered it himself: “You’ve told me that Mr Coffin had no prior criminal history on Martha’s Vineyard, where he grew up, so let’s call that a simple
no
.” He clicked a box, then asked me: “Any issues of chemical abuse or dependence?”

“I have never been a drug user.”

He grinned. “Not you. Mr Coffin.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but I hate hearing you call him
Mr Coffin
like he’s some kind of respectable grownup.”

“Call him Joke,” Courtney said. “I do.”

Jed’s attention rested on her a moment, his eyes smiling. “We’ll just call him Joe. It’s simpler. So, let’s see here.” He clicked a few times, talking as he went and presumably entering my answers into little boxes. “No sexual history, no criminal priors, drug use unknown – is it fair to assume that?”

“Yes.”

“Same workplace. You knew him for two years.”

“
No
. He stalked me for two years. I only met him twelve days ago.”

Jed nodded, thinking how to clarify that discrepancy on his form. Then he scrolled to another page and typed something. After scrolling some more, he hit
enter
, sat back and watched the screen.

“Good news, Darcy. Your threat assessment score is low. Just a two, on a scale of one to ten, ten being worst case scenario.”

I couldn’t believe it. He had summed up Joe’s danger to me using a multiple choice computer program. This was proving to be a real waste of time. But there was more:

“You may not be aware of this, Darcy, but you’re in pretty good company. Seventy-seven percent of female stalking victims are stalked by someone they know. But of that, a full fifty-nine percent are stalked by an intimate partner. Women who are stalked by a current or former husband or cohabitating partner
report
that they were physically assaulted eighty-one percent of the time and sexually assaulted thirty-one percent of the time. And a national femicide study found that seventy-six percent of the victims had been stalked before being attacked.”

Finished, Jed smiled. I felt like giving him an A+ for memorization and a slap across his face for stupidity and insensitivity.

“Femicide?” I asked.

“Murdered women.”

“Jed?” Courtney leaned forwards, pressing her arms against her ribs to accentuate her cleavage which was fully visible beneath the transparent fabric of her blouse. “Darcy’s got a real problem here. I think you’re
great
, but do you think we could talk to someone with a tad more experience?”

“I’ve been mentored by our founder, Alan Tierney, who has been doing this for twenty years and is recognized as one of the very best in the business of threat assessment.”

“I know, that’s why I gave Darcy this phone number to call. Where is Mr Tierney?”

“Unfortunately he’s in the hospital at the moment, recovering from bypass surgery.”

“And who’s MacDonald?”

“Gerry MacDonald was a founder, but he’s been gone seventeen years.”

Courtney and I looked at each other.
Time to go
.

“One more question,” Courtney asked. “How long have
you
been at this?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“No, not with us. Your career.”

“Six months.” He smiled adorably and I wanted to puke.

As we stood to leave, Courtney took the blue folder with her, like a freebie she couldn’t bring herself to pass up.

“Jed,” she said, ratcheting up the charm, “thank you for your time.” She reached into her purse and handed him her business card. “I don’t think we’ll be hiring you but I’ve got to be honest: I think you’re sexy as hell. Call me?”

Strangely, he didn’t look surprised. But
I
was, and nearly lurched out of the conference room. Courtney’s sexuality was too, let’s say,
evolved
for me to grasp. I waited in the hall outside until she emerged, smiling. One look at each other’s faces – hers, glowing; mine, stupefied – and we burst out laughing.

“I don’t want to know,” I said.

“Never had a bimbo?”

“Nope.”

“
Yum
.”

“Just don’t marry him, OK?”

“No threat of that. He’ll be good for a week or two, though.”

We went outside and stood together on the sidewalk. Her work days started at seven and for her it was almost quitting time, at least officially. I knew that she tended to continue working at home on her laptop, as did I.

“Heading back to the office?” I asked her.

“I already filed my story for tomorrow, so I’m good. Want to grab some coffee? We can read through this material.” Meaning the material inside the blue folder she held in her hand.

I checked the time: nearly two thirty. “I want to be home when Nat gets there and I’m already pushing it.”

“Doesn’t he have keys?”

“Yes, but …”

I didn’t have to finish the sentence before she nodded in agreement of the obvious: I couldn’t leave Nat alone for too long, not with Joe
out there
. What if he rang our doorbell? What if Nat answered?

“Ever been to Brooklyn?” I asked.

“Used to date a guy there. Are you inviting me?”

And so we rode the subway to my borough, where I had promised to feed her coffee and scones from the bakery around the corner. All the way there, Courtney kept looking around – for Joe, I assumed – and I got the feeling she hoped to spot him. I almost wanted her to, wondering what she would do if
she
did
discover him following us. Bite his head off, I guessed. I would have enjoyed watching it.

We didn’t see Joe. Instead, in front of my house we found Rich with Nat, searching through his backpack for his house keys. He had the bad habit of tossing them into the middle section where they tended to settle on the bottom among pencils, pens, erasers, calculators, balled-up papers, you name it. It was a habit he would have to change; I didn’t want to think of him out here, excavating for his keys, providing Joe with an opportunity to approach him. Luckily, Rich had the good sense to wait until he got inside.

“Hi, sweetie,” I greeted my son.

Nat, kneeling, looked up and smiled. Rich, standing beside him, also smiled.

“This is Courtney, we work together.”

“You went to work?” Rich asked – and everyone looked at him. The plainness of his reaction, the nakedness of his caring for me, put our relationship into sudden focus particularly for Nat, who had already guessed, and Courtney, whose antennae were always primed.

“No. Courtney and I went somewhere else.”

Rich tried not to appear as interested as he was, but it was too late.

Courtney leaned forwards with an extended hand and a brilliant smile. “So
you’re
Rich.”

He turned crimson. The pink face and the dark orange hair were a beautiful combination and the very sweetness of his embarrassment deepened my desire for him. What was the point in hiding it anymore? It took too much effort away from what was most important: fending off Joe Coffin. I was surrounded by compatriots. They might as well know each other.

“Come on in,” I said. “I’ve got scones.”

We gathered around the kitchen table with a plateful of orange-peel and currant scones, coffee for the adults and a glass of milk for Nat. We chatted about things like school, the neighborhood, working at the
Times
. Only when Nat disappeared upstairs to play video games on my bedroom’s TV did I allow Courtney to open the blue file.

As she did, we both told Rich about Jed Stevens, laughing as we ridiculed the poor guy. I was amazed at how freely Courtney participated, considering her plans to bed him.

“Ouch!” Courtney said, rifling through the folder’s inserts and pulling one out titled “Our Fees”. “That could have cost you five thousand bucks.”

Rich reared his head; that was a significant portion of his teacher’s salary. It was also a significant portion of my reporter’s salary. Hiring MacDonald, Tierney would have been impossible regardless of their expertise (or lack thereof).

“Luckily,” she said, “we’ve got all this good advice, right here. Check it out.”

We passed papers among ourselves until we’d read them all. Jed had handed us, free of charge, safety checklists organized in varying degrees of urgency: “High Alert”, “Staying Aware” and “Everyday Safety Plan”.

“This one,” Courtney said, handing me the stapled pages titled “High Alert”. “Go with the gold, as they say.”

“I agree,” Rich said. “What’s the point of not being as careful as you can?”

“Install an alarm system,” I read aloud. “Install a camera to the front of your house with a video feed and monitor easily accessible inside the house. Install floodlights on the back and sides of your house. Get a postal box for mail delivery at a private company such as UPS; we do not recommend using the post office’s similar service which has proven easy to infiltrate. Install an analog (tape recording, not digital) answering machine on your landline, dedicated to receiving and recording your stalker’s calls. Redirect personal and other calls to a new cell phone number.” I looked back and forth between Rich and Courtney. Both wore studious expressions; it was a lot to take in. I continued: “Consider buying a gun.”

“A gun!” Rich was as shocked as I was.

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Courtney said with an expression I recognized, both seductive and stalwart, her special brew of persistence.

“I have a child here, Courtney. I don’t like guns in any way, shape or form.”

“He doesn’t have to know.”

“He’ll find out, trust me. He’s a teenager – a kid in a man’s body but without any common sense. Not to mention that I’ve raised him to be anti-gun. What kind of message would that send?”

“The message that you want to stay alive.”

That quieted all of us. Right. Once you reduced all the talk and fear and second-guessing,
that
was what this huddle was all about.

“Maybe Courtney’s right,” Rich said. “What if you took a course in firearms so you’d know how to use a gun safely? And if you sat Nat down and had a serious talk with him …” He didn’t finish that sentence because as a father he had to know how cynical it sounded.
My child, let me tell you why everything I’ve ever taught you to believe turns out to be wrong
.

But Courtney, being young herself and not a parent, missed the subtlety of that moment. “I
like
this man. He gets it. We’ll start with gun training, then we’ll find you the perfect gun. Something small and pretty that can fit right into your purse.”

“Didn’t I just read somewhere in there not to carry
a
gun in a purse?” Rich found the page he was thinking of. “Right here: ‘Weapons carried off-body can be grabbed and used against you. Strap your weapon under your shirt, on an ankle, or whatever keeps the weapon comfortably accessible so you can get to it quickly.’”

“You know what, guys? I can’t think about guns right now. It’s so extreme. I think I’ll start with what I can handle, like getting an alarm system and all the rest of that stuff to turn this place into a fortress.”

“I’ll help you,” Rich said.

Courtney smiled. “Are you
handy
, too?”

Rich flushed again. Courtney was playing him like a violin, as they say, and enjoying every minute of it. Since this man was my lover, I only partly enjoyed the show this time. But I was too old and too distracted to let it bother me. If Rich turned out to be seducible by a woman like Courtney – a terrific, powerful woman who knew how to use her appeal and thus was precisely the kind of woman a good man should intuitively know to distrust – let her have him.

Then and there, Courtney helped me compile a list of what I’d need to fortify our apartment, which amounted to the bottom two floors of a four-story house. (Another tenant, a married couple who worked regular hours and otherwise seemed to live quietly, occupied the two floors above us.) Once the list was made, we split it up.

I was to make calls: alarm company, electrician to wire the back of the house, cellular provider for a new number. Rich would go to Home Depot to buy the floodlights and the camera system, and sign up for a post office box, taking it in his name but listing me to receive mail and giving me the keys – his idea, and a smart one, both Courtney and I agreed.

“Here’s something no one thought of,” Courtney said. “Shouldn’t you have a different email address? You can do with email what you’re going to do with phone messages: collect Joe’s at the address he has, but start another one for everyone else. You can get a free Yahoo account; it’s easy.”