Fear itself: a novel Read online

  “Bingo,” she called to Miss Pool in the outer office. “I’ve either found our you-know-what or uncovered the dumbest double agent in the history of espionage.”

  “Congratulations.” Pool appeared in the doorway; she already had her coat on.

  “Should I call Maheu now, or wait until tomorrow morning?”

  “Neither.”

  “When, then?”

  “Two weeks from yesterday.”

  “How come?”

  “Because that’s how much time they’ve budgeted for the job.”

  “And if I finish early, he’s only going to come up with some more shit work?”

  “I believe that’s the plan.”

  “Thanks, Pool. What would I do without you?”

  “Hon, you don’t ever want to find out.”

  The brownstone in Georgetown was empty again when Linda got home a few minutes after six. Instead of a note on the kitchen table, there was a pink Post-it on the computer in the living room: “L: Prefer you not use this machine. Thanks, G.”

  Fine, thought Linda—I can take a hint. Still, as she reached into her purse for her cell phone, she was surprised at how badly the rejection hurt. Tears in her eyes, lump in her throat, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach. Oh, grow up, Abrootz, she ordered herself. Just grow the fuck up.

  “Pender.”

  “Ed, it’s Linda. I—”

  “Linda! Good work—thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Here’s what I need: First of all, forget Maheu. Rule number one for getting along in the Bureau: Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Okay?”

  “Yes, but I—”

  “Good. Now, what I want you to do: I want you to log on to that web site…”

  “Ed.”

  “…and see if you can contact the webmaster or the system administrator, whatever they call it, find out whether—”

  “Ed!”

  “What?”

  “I’m not in the office, and I haven’t gotten any messages from you. I was just calling to ask you if your offer of a spare room is still open.”

  “Absolutely. There’s a key under the stone Buddha on the back porch. Pick out any bedroom but the first—that one’s mine—help yourself to anything you need.”

  “Thanks so much. Now, what were you—”

  “Dorie Bell’s disappeared.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “My sentiments ex—” He broke off in midsyllable. Linda heard someone yelling in the background, then Pender shouting, “FBI! I’m FBI, don’t shoot!”

  “Ed? Ed, what’s going on?”

  “Linda? Still there?”

  “I’m here, Ed.”

  “Barney Fife just showed up—looks like I’m going to have to get back to you.”

  “Ed, wait—”

  “Gotta go.”

  More shouting in the background, then the line went dead.

  7

  They say when you’ve been shot or stabbed you don’t feel the pain right away. Not so with a broken nose, as Dorie could have testified even before this most recent fracture. The agony is immediate—sharp and centralized at first, then spreading outward from its locus, swelling and blossoming until it envelops your entire head, which feels as big as a float in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, the throbbing begins—slow, rolling waves with barely enough time between ebb and flood, between dread and pain, to form a wordless prayer, much less a coherent thought.

  And yet, as she lay on her back in the darkness, vaguely aware that she was drowning in her own blood, a stray thought did manage to insinuate itself into Dorie’s consciousness, complete, discrete, in a disembodied voice that was somehow familiar, though not her own: There are worse things in life than bleeding to death.

  Yeah, or drowning, she answered quickly, before the tide could pull her under again.

  Thank heaven for pure dumb luck, thought Simon, ruefully rubbing his brow, just below the hairline to the left of the widow’s peak. He knew it was only an accident of timing that he’d ducked his head to go titty-diving just as Dorie had brought her head up to butt him, so that instead of catching him in the nose with her forehead, she’d caught him in the forehead with her nose. Broke it again, too, judging by the amount of blood.

  He crawled toward the sound of her moaning—an eerie, bubbling sound. The closer he got, the more blood there was—his palms were sticky from crawling through it, the knees of his trousers were damp by the time he reached her, and when he rolled her onto her side to prevent her from drowning, her bare skin was wet and slick with warm blood.

  Not as unpleasant a sensation as he might have thought. In fact, it reminded him a little of bathing Missy—the feel of soft, cushiony flesh beneath slippery-smooth wet skin—only without the attendant taboos, of course. Unlike Missy’s, Dorie’s body was Simon’s to do as he pleased with, for as long as he could keep her alive—and contingent, as always, upon the amount of fear they could generate together.

  Because without the fear, dead or alive, it was just another naked body, and naked bodies, per se, had never held all that much fascination for Simon. Which brought him back to the question of the moment: what to do about this one. Stop the bleeding, of course. Clean her up a little. Hog-tie her, hands to ankles, keep her out of mischief. And no gag: the poor thing’d be breathing through her mouth for days, if she lasted that long. Maybe throw a spare mattress up against the side door leading to the garage: that was the weak spot for the soundproofing.

  But after that, there would be no sense in hanging around. Something that Simon had learned over the years, something most people would never know, was that while anticipation of physical suffering produced fear, the actual pain was itself anodyne. For several more hours, while her agony was in full bloom, Dorie would be incapable of experiencing any viable fear.

  Inconvenient, sure, but Simon was only mildly disappointed. Because the ejaculatio praecox that had plagued him since early adolescence rendered penile insertion problematical and extended intercourse all but impossible, he was incapable of enjoying prolonged sexual gratification, but when it came to the fear game, Simon Childs was an all-night, do-right, sixty-minute man. The longer he could make a game last, the better he felt about himself.

  And since Dorie’s broken nose was going to force him to delay his gratification for another twelve to twenty-four hours, Simon realized as he crawled off into the darkness to find his goggles, by this time tomorrow, barring complications, he could expect to be feeling very, very good about himself.

  8

  “I said, put your hands up!”

  Pender hit the kill switch on his flip phone, then turned slowly. The young Carmel cop was in a textbook two-handed firing crouch, his feet spread shoulder-width apart, his knees slightly bent.

  “And I said FBI,” replied Pender in his best command tone. “Which letter didn’t you understand?”

  But the kid was starting to tremble from the strain of the position, so Pender adjusted his approach from authoritarian to folksy.

  “Listen, son, we both know you’re not gonna shoot me,” he said in the possum-eatin’ drawl he’d learned in Arkansas as a rookie agent working out of the Little Rock field office. “The paperwork alone’d take you a month to complete, not to mention the hearings. Then, assumin’ you get to keep your job, the counselin’ starts; you’re gonna be tellin’ some shrink all about how you shot that friendly ol’ FBI man because Daddy didn’t give you that red wagon for Christmas when you were five. So why don’t you just back them sights offa my chest, I’ll show you my tin, we’ll whistle in the fire, piss on the dogs, and get back to shootin’ the bad guys ’stead a each other.”

  A bit much? Maybe, but it worked—to a degree. “Okay, nice and slow,” said the cop. “Open your coat, let’s see your badge.” He still had his sights centered in on Pender’s chest—the kill grid, on the firing range—but they both knew it was more to save face than because he seriously believed Pender was a t
hreat.

  Pender played out the scene for all he was worth anyway, slowly opening his plaid jacket, lifting his wallet out of his inside pocket gingerly, with two fingers, and letting it fall open to reveal the old DOJ shield that only two days ago, he’d have bet he’d never be using again. “Okay?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” The kid flipped the safety back on and slid the Glock into its holster. “You know how it is.”

  “Sure I do,” said Pender soothingly. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Mackey. Wynn Mackey.” Clean-cut, soft-spoken, nicely trimmed ’stash, well-tailored uni—just shaking hands with him made Pender feel old and tired.

  “Ed Pender. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Pender! Sure, sure—you were down here in July, that serial killer who broke out of County. I thought I recognized you from someplace—I just figured it was a wanted poster or a BOLO.”

  “Yeah, I guess I have that kind of face.” Pender nodded toward Mackey’s holster. “Now, don’t forget you have a round chambered there.” Then something occurred to him. “Hey, what happened to Sid?”

  “Who’s Sid?”

  “The old guy, sitting in the car?”

  “There wasn’t any old guy in the—”

  He stopped—they’d both heard the studio door slam. A moment later, Sid appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  “Where the hell were you?” snapped Pender.

  “I had to take a leak.”

  “I nearly got my ass blown off.”

  “It’d take at least a shotgun to cover that spread,” said Dolitz, glancing pointedly from the holstered gun to Pender’s rear.

  Mackey checked out the new arrival from the ground up: white bucks, beige slacks, white Ralph Lauren Polo with the collar turned up in back, jaunty toupee. “Don’t tell me you’re FBI, too.”

  “Retired. Very retired. What’s going on?”

  “I was just about to ask Agent Pender here the same question.”

  “Ms. Bell contacted us a few weeks ago,” said Pender, then paused. The idea was to get as much information as possible, while releasing as little as possible. But Mackey waited him out. He was young and he was local, but apparently he wasn’t stupid, so rather than waste any more time, Pender gave him the rundown—everything up to, but not including, the fact that he, too, was retired, at least technically. It would only have muddied the water, Pender told himself, especially since he’d already tinned Mackey.

  And to Pender’s surprise, before he’d even finished explaining the significance of the vomit stain on the parquet floor, how extremely unlikely it was that Dorie would have simply left it there and gone off for the day, Mackey was talking into the two-way radio clipped to the front of his uniform, near his left collarbone.

  “This is Mackey. Patch me over to Smitty…. Al, it’s Wynn. You know that Buick wagon you tagged down on Ocean…? Yeah, well, don’t tow it. Don’t even touch it; it might be a crime scene…. No, I’m not shitting you.…Look, just tape it off, I’ll get right back to you.”

  He thumbed off the walkie-talkie and turned back to Pender. “Dorie Bell’s car has been parked in a metered space collecting tickets since sometime last night. I’ve known her since I was a kid—she used to baby-sit me. I figured maybe the old heap broke down, thought I’d come up here, give her a shout before it was towed. There was a strange car in the driveway, the side door was open…”

  “It was open when we got here,” said Pender. “I almost walked into it.”

  “Did you touch anything else?”

  “I didn’t even touch the door.”

  “How about you?” Mackey asked Sid.

  “Took a whiz over in the bushes.”

  Mackey looked disgusted. “You FBI guys usually go around pissing on crime scenes?”

  Dolitz shrugged. “At my age, I’m lucky to be able to piss at all.”

  9

  The kitchen—the whole mansion, for that matter—seemed empty and enormous without Missy around. In the past it had always been Simon who went off and Missy who stayed behind. He tried to tell himself he was enjoying having the place to himself, but he couldn’t help worrying about Missy. At least when he was away, he knew she was safe, in familiar surroundings, with an attendant she liked and he trusted.

  With Dorie safely installed in the basement and the game on hold, however, there was really no reason not to bring Missy home. Simon called Ganny’s number from the kitchen—no answer. He finished his lunch, went upstairs, called again from the office adjoining the bedroom. Still no luck. Maybe they went out for IiiKee—ice cream.

  Simon logged on to the computer, which was on a DSL hookup and was rarely, if ever, turned off. From force of habit he found himself browsing the PWSPD-sponsored phobia.com chat room. The new kid, Skairdykat, sounded awfully tempting. Simon immediately fired off an e-mail to Zap Strum, the far-from-reformed South of Market hacker–drug dealer who had designed and still administered the site, asking him to poke around behind the screen for Skairdy’s real-world name and address.

  But as he logged off the computer and called Ganny’s number again—still no answer—it crossed Simon’s mind that he might already have gone to that well once too often. Dorie had been in touch with the FBI before Wayne’s disappearance, then again after his death. Now she was missing, too—that would make five PWSPD deaths in six months. Cops were dumb, but they weren’t that dumb.

  And the more he thought about it, the more Simon appreciated the magnitude of the risks he’d been taking lately. He hadn’t pursued his dicey hobby for thirty years without a cross word from law enforcement by being this careless. Maybe he was starting to slip, he told himself—maybe the pressure of arranging a game every few months instead of once a year was starting to get to him. But the alternative was the rat—which was no alternative at all.

  Simon sighed—the PWSPD Association was his masterwork, but there was no denying the fact that it had outlived its usefulness—and picked up the phone again.

  Zap’s machine picked up after two rings: “Do the message thing,” it demanded curtly.

  “It’s Simon. I know you’re screening. Pick up—it’s important.”

  “Zup, dude?” An intermittent Ridgemont High surfer drawl was one of the MIT graduate’s more annoying affectations.

  “Remember when we set up the PWSPD, you said you could make it disappear when the time came?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The time has come.”

  “Web site, archives, bank records, the whole schmear?”

  “Like they never existed. Can you do it?”

  “Never ask the Zap-man if he can do something. Ask only how much and how long.”

  “How much and how long?”

  “The usual hourly, and as long as it takes. Shouldn’t be too hard—the Zap-man built it, the Zap-man can disappear it. Anything else?”

  “Not at the moment. Just let me know when you’re done.”

  “Log on in a couple hours, dude. If it ain’t there, I’m done.”

  Though the Berkeley hills were a world away from the Berkeley flats, it was only a short drive from one to the other. After spending the next hour trying unsuccessfully to contact Ganny, and working himself up to the point where he was envisioning God knows what, blood on the walls and bodies hacked to pieces, Simon made the trip in five minutes. He parked the Mercedes on the street outside Ganny’s little cottage and set the antitheft, but left the top down—they’d only have slashed it, otherwise.

  He rang the front doorbell—no answer. He tried the door—it wasn’t locked. Simon let himself in, saw Missy’s pink valise lying open on the fold-out sofa, its contents scattered across the unmade bed. It was like a waking nightmare—Simon found himself drawn almost against his will toward the bedroom, and the sound of buzzing flies.

  What he found there—Ganny’s mummified-looking corpse lying on its side in the darkened room, with the covers pulled up to its neck as if someone had lovingly tucked it in—seemed even more nightmarish than t
he scenes of Helter Skelter Simon had been picturing on the ride over.

  Numb as a sleepwalker, his mind filled with images of Missy lost or kidnapped, sick or injured, frightened and alone, Simon wandered distractedly into the kitchen, which looked like an explosion in a cocaine factory. There was white powder everywhere, and an empty packet of Hostess mini-doughnuts on the table.

  That about tore it, that stupid cellophane doughnut wrapper. Simon sank down onto one of the kitchen chairs, buried his face in his hands, and let out a wrenching sob, the kind that comes from so deep inside you feel as if your guts are coming up with it. Just one sob—then he looked up, and through the open back door he saw Missy curled up over by the fence in the far corner of the backyard. Above her, gangly sunflowers hung their golden heads.

  10

  Packing was no problem—Linda had more or less been living out of her suitcase since she got to Washington. She knew it would have made more sense to move up to Pender’s on the weekend, but she wanted to avoid her former dear friend Gloria—she wasn’t sure she could count high enough in Italian to keep from saying things she’d regret later.

  As it was, she confined herself to a terse Post-it note with her new address. She had considered playing a computer prank on them that the boys in San Antone had once played on her—changing the default address on their browser from Yahoo to the SSN, the Scat Sex Network, which would plaster coprophagous images all over their screen when they logged on—but decided against it at the last minute.

  Lock the front door, drop the key through the mail slot, haul the suitcase out to the Geo. Linda’s legs were pretty much gone, this late in the day: she nearly overbalanced as she lifted the suitcase into the trunk, and her thigh muscles were quivering as she drove away with her left shoe poised over the brake in case she needed to make a sudden stop. Eventually, she knew, she’d be reduced to driving with hand controls—if she was lucky.