Fear itself: a novel Read online

  “My spies are everywhere,” said Simon, slipping past him into the house. He glanced around disapprovingly at the avocado walls and beige carpeting, track lighting, built-in knickknack crannies, faux-white-brick facing on the fireplace; Julia Morgan would have puked. “We’ll catch up later—right now we need to get my car out of your driveway before anybody notices it.”

  “There’s no room in the garage.”

  “Make room.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?” Nelson locked the front door behind him.

  Simon slipped his arm around Nelson companionably. “Buddy, I’m in all kinds of trouble.”

  “If I help you, will you leave me alone?”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Nellie,” Simon whispered into his ear; his breath was warm and moist, his tone unbearably intimate. “Not for you and me.”

  3

  Emergency rooms, with their gurneys, sparsely furnished cubicles, rolling carts, folding screens, and curtained-off beds, had always seemed to Pender to have a sort of makeshift feel about them, as if they were temporary, and not very well suited, accommodations to be utilized until permanent quarters were ready. He couldn’t wait to get out; as soon as his cast was dry and his arm in a sling, he went searching for Dorie.

  She wasn’t hard to find—a uniformed cop was stationed on a folding chair outside the door of her cubicle. He recognized Pender, tipped him a little salute, then leaned over without getting up, and opened the door for him.

  “Helluva job,” said the cop.

  “Sure is,” Pender replied pleasantly.

  “No, I mean you did a helluva job.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” Pender was slightly taken aback—locals weren’t usually all that appreciative of federal help. Still, it was a good job, he thought, closing the door behind him. And there before him was the proof, sitting up in bed, her dark hair fanned out across the pillow, looking surprisingly good for a woman with a broken nose and two black eyes.

  Dorie was equally glad to see Pender. There had been times, sitting next to him in the basement, or upstairs, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the ambulance, or in the ER before they were wheeled off to separate cubicles, when she’d wanted to express her gratitude to this man who hadn’t given up on her, who’d risked his life to save hers. But every time she looked at him, the feelings just welled up inside, threatening to overwhelm her. And above all, Dorie did not want to be overwhelmed by anything right now; she was having a hard enough time holding it together as it was.

  Now she looked up shyly. “How’s the arm?”

  “Good as new in six weeks. I had ’em put the cast on with my elbow in putting position. How about you?”

  Dorie shrugged. “They tried to talk me into a nose job, till I told them I didn’t have any insurance. They still want to keep me overnight—somebody came by from admissions to ask me if I had a credit card with me. I told her the guy who kidnapped me forgot to bring my purse along.”

  “Have they taken your statement?”

  “Repeatedly,” said Dorie. “Berkeley cops, your FBI guys, detectives from San Francisco—I even talked to Wayne’s uncle. He sounded, I don’t know, almost relieved Wayne had been murdered, instead of having killed himself.”

  “I’ve seen that before. Are you staying overnight?”

  “Not if I have a choice.”

  “Think you can drive?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Wanna blow this pop stand?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  4

  After the initial shock had worn off, Nelson Carpenter was pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it was to surrender, and how simple it made his life. Instead of being afraid of everything, he only had to be afraid of Simon Childs, and instead of being ruled by the scrupulous and demanding (his shrink said obsessive-compulsive) daily routine he had developed to keep fear at bay, all he had to do was play Simon Says; everybody knows how to play Simon Says.

  Of course, not having to worry about darkness or intruders anymore, or fire or food poisoning or spiders or spooks, would have come as more of a relief to Nelson had it not been for the nagging certainty that Simon planned to kill him as soon as he was done with him. Dead man walking, he whispered to himself; dead man whispering to himself.

  Fortunately, Simon had neither demanded nor welcomed conversation at first. Once they had the Mercedes safely stowed in the garage (there was plenty of room, Simon had pointed out: it was only a matter of clearing out Nelson’s junk), Simon announced that he was famished. Nelson cooked dinner—boned chicken breasts, broccoli, and Rice-A-Roni—while Simon brooded at the kitchen table; they ate in the dining room. Click of silverware, the unpleasant sounds of mastication, intensified by the ambient suburban silence.

  Simon cleaned his plate, then pushed it away. “My compliments to the chef. Love that Rice-A-Roni.”

  “It’s the San Francisco treat,” said Nelson—what else was there to say about Rice-A-Roni?

  “What time do you have?” Simon had left his wristwatch back in the basement of 2500—he’d taken it off to bathe Dorie.

  Nelson glanced at his Rolex, which was the only timepiece in the house. Chronomentrophobia—fear of clocks. “Almost six.”

  “Time for the news.”

  “I never watch the news.”

  “That’s all right, just come keep me company,” replied Simon pleasantly. It was easy for him to be pleasant about the matter under discussion—he’d never had any intention of allowing Nelson to watch the news in the first place. It was going to be hard enough to keep his old pal from flipping out prematurely—Simon certainly didn’t want him finding out how far the fear game had advanced since the comparatively innocent days of the Horror Club, at least not until Simon was good and ready for him to find out.

  “But how will I—”

  “Nellie,” Simon said quietly. That was his warning tone; after all these years Nelson still recognized it.

  “Yes, Simon?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Yes, Simon.”

  5

  Twenty-five hundred Grizzly Rock Road had been transformed into a crime scene. Floodlit, yellow-taped, crawling with cops, besieged by reporters and mobile uplink news vans, the grand old dame was being accorded no more privacy than the corpse of a murder victim when Pender and Dorie arrived from the hospital in the back of a squad car, accompanied by a preppy-looking Berkeley homicide detective.

  Special Agent Eddie Erickson, from the San Francisco field office, offered them a walk-through. Dorie, dressed in a set of borrowed pink scrubs, declined with a shudder, preferring to wait for Pender in his rented Toyota, which was still parked on the street near the bottom of the steep driveway, where he’d left it only—it hardly seemed possible—six hours earlier.

  Every inch of the basement was brightly illuminated; Erickson led Pender through the maze to a chamber where a tech from the Evidence Response Team was using what looked like an alien-technology metal detector to sweep the smooth, level cement floor, which was higher by several inches than the rest of the basement, while another tech monitored a computer readout—they were employing state-of-the-art infrared heat-sensing technology to look for bodies.

  “What’s the count so far?” asked Erickson.

  “Just the one—but the wet cement’s throwing off my calibration—and of course if a skeleton’s clean enough, it won’t put out enough heat for us to pick it up.” The second tech turned to Pender. “The top layer of cement was put down pretty recently. It’s only about two centimeters thick except over in that corner, where it goes down almost two meters. I have a hunch that once we take ’er down to there, we’re gonna be in business.”

  After a quick stop-off in a chamber that housed a jackhammer, kidney belt, protective eyewear, shovel, spade, and several bags of lime and Quik-Dry cement, Erickson led Pender back upstairs. The living room was still being dusted for prints; up in the master bedroom, Special Agent Ben Wing, from the San Jose resident
agency, was seated at Childs’s computer terminal.

  “Any luck?” Erickson asked him.

  “Yes, sir,” said Wing. “All bad. One of the local yokels—” He glanced at the Berkeley detective trailing along behind Erickson and Pender. “Whoops, sorry. I mean, one of the indigenous experts up here tried to access it without checking for booby traps. The first key he pressed trashed the hard drive—what I’m doing now is the cyber equivalent of sifting through the ashes.”

  “Could Childs have rigged it himself?”

  “He’d almost have had to. Or hired some gunslinger—no reputable security consultant would install a fail-safe device to nuke the client’s system in the event of a breach.”

  “That gunslinger idea—that might be worth following up,” suggested Pender.

  “You think?” said Wing, archly.

  “Us local yokels are already on it,” explained the detective, as Wing turned back to the machine. “By tomorrow we’ll have his bank records, and take it from there.”

  Pender followed Agent Erickson back downstairs. “Looks like you guys are all over it,” he said—he felt as if he were expected to say something.

  “Yeah—yeah, I think our chances are pretty good. It’s not like he has much experience, rich fucker on the run. Take good care of Miss Bell, though—if there’s any trouble with the warrant, I at least want to be able to put him away for kidnapping with special circumstances and bodily harm.”

  “Don’t forget assault,” Pender reminded Erickson, nodding toward his broken right arm, which had begun to throb as the anesthetic started to wear off. “With intent,” he added—after all, if Childs’s blow had been an inch or two to the right, there would have been three more bodies under two meters of Quik-Dry cement in that last chamber: his, Dorie’s, and Nurse Apple’s.

  6

  Simon, sitting in the comfy chair, had watched the news. Nelson, lying at Simon’s feet with his back to the TV, head pillowed on his arms and his ears stuffed with cotton balls, had watched Simon—for fifty-five boring, soul-deadening minutes, though it had been obvious that Simon had stopped paying any attention after the lead story.

  Around seven o’clock, Nelson tried clearing his throat—no reaction. He sat up, half expecting a blow or a kick, but Simon didn’t seem to notice. He removed the cotton from his ears, then took the remote from Simon’s unresisting fingers, pointed it behind him, and switched off the TV without turning around. (Nelson’s viewing was always carefully planned, and he never surfed: sometimes it seemed to him as if there were an unwritten rule that in any given time slot, there had to be at least one channel showing a program about deadly snakes.)

  Simon shook his head like a man coming out of a trance; he seemed to notice Nelson for the first time. “You think there’s an afterlife, Nellie?”

  “Are you talking about heaven and hell, or about…” Nelson couldn’t bring himself to say the word ghosts. He never said witches, either, or ghouls or spooks or vampires, lest he somehow call them into being. He knew it was only foolish superstition; he also knew that superstition was mankind’s only defense against the supernatural.

  “Heaven and hell.”

  “Heaven, I’m hoping for; hell I’m sure about. I’ve been living there most of my life. Why?”

  “Missy’s dead.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Nelson. He’d liked Missy, spoiled brat though she was. But he wasn’t surprised—the way Simon always talked about her, she’d been dying since Nelson had met her. “Her heart?”

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  “It was on the news?”

  Simon ignored the question. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

  “Upstairs—there’s only the one.”

  “In the entire house?”

  Nelson explained his reasoning as he led Simon up to the bedroom. Originally there’d been a wall phone in the kitchen, but the very first night he’d moved in, Nelson found himself lying awake thinking about a story Simon had told him at one of the earliest Horror Club meetings, the one about the woman who gets a call from a slasher, and the police tell her if he calls again, keep him on the phone and we’ll trace it. He does, and they do—the story ends with the woman learning that the call is coming from her own house, from the downstairs extension. Run, the cop screams over the phone, get out of the house—but of course it’s too late. Next morning, Nelson told Simon, he’d called Pac Bell to have the kitchen phone removed, jack and all.

  “I’m extremely flattered,” said Simon, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Did it ever occur to you to buy a cordless?”

  “You kidding? Those things give you cancer.”

  “Nellie, your continued survival is living proof that Darwin was wrong. Put that cotton back in your ears and wait in the bathroom…No—leave the door open so I can see what you’re up to.”

  “Zap, it’s Simon….

  “Yes, I know I’m all over the news. Don’t believe everything you hear….

  “Yes, well, I hope you understand that if they do, I’ll flip you like a half-cooked hamburger….

  “I thought you would. Now, here’s what I need. This FBI man, this E. L. Pender—I want all the information you can get for me….

  “Like where he lives to start with, who his friends are, is he married? does he have a lover? that sort of thing. Ultimately, I’d like to find out what he fears, but I know that’s not likely to be—

  “No, not feels, fears—what he’s afraid of…

  “Okay, just Google him to start with. If I need you to hack the FBI site, I’ll let you—

  “That’s your problem, Strummy old boy. My problem is, he killed my sister, and—

  “Of course that’s not what they’re saying. Trust me on this, though—Missy’s dead and Pender’s to blame,” asserted Simon, with utter conviction. He then went on to embellish what he knew in his heart to be the righteous truth, in order to sound more convincing: Pender had tricked Missy into letting him into the house without a warrant, then attacked Simon; Missy tried to stop him, and there was a scuffle; Simon was forced to flee, but Missy had been alive when he left the house; the struggle with Pender had probably overtaxed her poor heart. By the time Simon had finished, the details of the embellishment had been imbued with the authority of his emotional investment: for a sociopath, there was no other truth.

  “So how long and how much?” he concluded.

  “No, I’ll call you. And don’t even think about—

  “I know you wouldn’t. But a man in my position can’t be too—

  “Okay, I’ll call you later.”

  As he replaced the receiver in the cradle and turned back to Nelson, Simon felt more like himself again. Except for the unaccustomed pangs of grief, of course, but it didn’t take Simon long to discover that grief, unlike guilt or self-doubt or boredom, was bearable, even welcome. It sharpened the senses and focused the mind.

  And suddenly Simon realized why he’d been drawn here, of all places, in his time of grief.

  “Nelson?” he called.

  Nelson stuck his head out of the bathroom. “Yes, Simon?”

  “I think it’s time for a game.”

  7

  They had no business driving, no business operating any heavy machinery, according to the caution labels on their respective pain medications, but neither of them felt right suggesting a motel.

  Instead they drank bad road coffee and harmonized on oldies to keep themselves awake—Pender sang a high, sweet tenor and Dorie a ballsy alto—and took turns behind the wheel of the rented Toyota, with Dorie manipulating the automatic gearshift for the one-armed Pender.

  Dorie drove the last leg of the two-and-a-half-hour journey. Rounding the Seaside curve on Highway 1 and seeing the twinkling lights of the peninsula circling the great black sweep of Monterey Bay put a coming-home lump in her throat. Pender’s, too, though he’d only been here twice before. Of course, the buzz from the two Vicodins he’d taken before they left might have had something to do
with that.

  They continued on past Monterey, Pacific Grove, and Pebble Beach; Dorie took the Ocean Avenue exit into Carmel, then a right on San Carlos and a quick left on Fifth; she pulled over into the first available parking space. “I’ll just be a minute,” she told Pender; “there’s something I have to do.”

  Dorie was halfway up the block before the big man managed to extricate himself from the little car; Pender caught up to her in front of a women’s clothing store. “What—”

  Dorie put a finger to her lips, then pointed to the mannequin in the shop window. It was dressed in a black-and-white-checked hooded robe; a simple black mask covered its eyes.

  “Oh,” said Pender, moving back a step.

  She stood there for a few minutes, staring at the mask in the window, still as the mannequin save for the gentle rise and fall of her chest; when she turned away, there were tears in her eyes.

  “You okay?” Pender asked.

  “I think so,” replied Dorie. “It’s just gonna take some getting used to, you know?”

  “I can imagine,” said Pender, crooking his good elbow. Dorie slipped her hand through it, and they walked back to the car arm in arm.

  Mary Cassatt was parked in Dorie’s driveway when they pulled up to the house. Half a dozen parking citations were stuck under the windshield wiper, along with a note from Wynn Mackey telling Dorie not to worry about them.

  “Nice kid,” said Pender.

  “Yeah, he turned out pretty good,” Dorie allowed grudgingly. “He was a handful when he was little, though—you never saw such a brat. Last kid in the world you’d figure would have grown up to be a cop. When he was eight, the little bastard rolled a lit firecracker under the bathroom door while I was on the throne.”

  “When I was eight, I dropped a cherry bomb down my parents’ chimney,” Pender offered. “Damn near set the house on fire.”