The Best Revenge Read online

  I held Lauren’s little phone in my hand as I stood outside on the narrow deck off the living room listening to the sounds of the night. The usual nocturnal symphony was being poisoned by an eruption of noise that was something like a duel between a gasoline-powered leaf blower and a violin being played by a baboon. Just for the record, the sound of a cantankerous fox almost succeeds in causing the caterwaul of a feline in heat to sound like Mozart.

  The phone vibrated in my hand. It was a good thing that it was set to vibrate. Had it only chirped, I might not have heard it over the fox’s screeching and moaning. I flipped it open. “Hi, Sam. It’s Alan.”

  He wasn’t happy that I’d called. “Whose number is this?”

  “Lauren’s cell. I didn’t want your call to wake her, so I’m out on the deck listening to a pissed-off fox.”

  “You woke me. What does a pissed-off fox sound like?”

  I held the phone out into the night for about fifteen seconds before I returned it to my face and said, “Like that.”

  “It’s awful. You guys have to listen to that every night? Is that the price of living in the country?”

  “This is a rare treat. Listen, has Tom Clone been seen since Mon-day afternoon? Like midafternoon?”

  I felt a brief hesitation from Sam before he said, “No.”

  “Then I may have been the last one to see him. I saw him climbing onto a red Vespa on Walnut Street at about three forty-five Monday afternoon.”

  My rationalization? Technically, this bit of news about my patient wasn’t privileged information. Given the media coverage his release from prison had generated recently, Tom was, whether he liked it or not, a public figure, and I could tell Sam what I’d observed him doing outside the confines of my office. If I hadn’t been worried about Tom’s welfare, however, I never would have shared with Sam the fact that I’d watched Tom climb onto a Vespa.

  Even though Sam knew very well that my office was on Walnut Street and he also knew exactly where I spent my weekday afternoons, he was wise enough not to editorialize on either fact.

  He wasn’t wise enough, however, to know what a Vespa was.

  “A red Vespa? What the hell is a Vespa?”

  “It’s an Italian scooter.”

  “Like my kid’s Razor? That kind of scooter?”

  “No, not a kid’s scooter. A motor scooter, the kind that cool people in Rome use to get around the city. That kind of scooter. Like a little motorcycle. I’m sure you’ve seen them.”

  “I haven’t been to Rome lately. Why didn’t you just say motorcycle?”

  I didn’t answer that. I silently counted to three before I said, “I thought you might want to know that Clone was on a . . . vehicle.”

  “You called because of my parable, didn’t you? It got to you, my goofy little story about the old guy with the bonds got to you.”

  “No, I didn’t call because of your parable. I haven’t thought about your parable once since you told it to me.”

  After a delay of a few seconds, Sam asked, “This has kept you from sleeping, hasn’t it? All this guilty knowledge you have about Clone?” His voice was uncommonly compassionate.

  “Yes, it has.”

  “Well, go on back to bed. This should help us. Sometimes it’s easier to find a motorcycle—excuse me, a Vespa—than it is to find a person.”

  When I pressed the button to end the call, all I could hear were the incessant chirps of a few dozen crickets. The fox had stopped its caterwauling.

  PART THREE

  Praying for Monsoons

  CHAPTER 29

  What the . . .” Tom Clone mumbled as he realized he was waking up outdoors. The air tasted different and his nose was assaulted by a sharp scent of pine. A metallic taste coated his tongue. He raised his head and lowered it immediately, trying to quell the flash of pain that was connecting his temples as though a hot spike had been inserted between the two sides of his skull. “Shit,” he said aloud, grimacing.

  Grimacing hurt so much that he grimaced again.

  He attempted to move his feet but they would only slide laterally a few inches. He felt the slick surface of ripstop nylon against the skin on his arms and realized that he was in a sleeping bag.There’s an explanation, he assured himself.There’s a way to explain this. Where was I last night?

  Tom Clone wasn’t one of those Colorado natives who were more comfortable waking up in a mummy bag with his sleep-crusted eyes focused on the streaky skies of morning. Prior to his incarceration, his idea of roughing it involved staying in motels without air-conditioning.

  His memory of the previous night was a black hole. Groaning, he rolled his head to the left and then ever so slowly to the right, half expecting to discover that he was sleeping next to someone, some girl he’d picked up and who’d convinced him against his better judgment to go camping.

  Camping?

  After so long, he thought, he’d have done anything to get laid. Even gone camping. But he didn’t remember getting laid.

  There wasn’t another sleeping bag beside him. He was alone. Oddly, a chain-link fence rose from the ground parallel to the sleeping bag not ten feet from his right side. “God, I must have been drunk to even think about sleeping here,” he mumbled. His tongue felt as though it had been lacquered during the night.

  His brain was trying to answer the simple question of where “here” was. It failed.

  He raised his arms out of the sleeping bag and noticed a pinprick and bruise on the inside of his left wrist. “I don’t know,” he said, as though he was trying to answer his next question. “What the hell did I do to myself?”

  His eyes focused past the evidence of injury on his wrist, and he saw another fence. This one was on his left.

  “What the . . . ?”

  Tom sat up abruptly. Pain radiated out from his spine. “Damn,” he moaned. “Shit,” he added as he rotated at his waist and looked back in the opposite direction.

  The fence surrounded him, creating a square of about twenty feet on a side. He scrambled out of the sleeping bag and yanked himself to his feet. He paced backward around the rumpled sack. The walls around him rose eight feet.

  “What the fuck?” he said. “What the hell is going on? Where’s the damn gate?”

  He approached the links and then jogged all four sides of the interior perimeter. “There’s no gate,” he said. “There’s no gate.” He heard the panic in his voice.

  He realized suddenly that his feet were in dirty white socks. He wasn’t wearing shoes.

  He dove down onto the bag and rooted around to find his shoes inside. They weren’t there. He lowered himself so that he was sitting on the bag, raised his knees, and wrapped his arms around his legs.

  “Think,” he said. “Think, think, think.”

  He was in the mountains, and he was below timberline. A thick pine forest grew in all directions just beyond the fence. Not too far to the west—on the darker side of the dawn sky—a line of snow-capped peaks seemed close enough to touch. He knew there were plenty of Coloradans who would have been able to recognize the vista from memory. He wasn’t one of them.

  Had he been more experienced in the wilderness, the stunted height of the nearby pines would have been a clue that he was somewhere very high in the mountains. But he wasn’t experienced.

  Where was he?

  He didn’t know. It could be anywhere from Cortez to Steamboat Springs as far as he could tell. He could even be in Wyoming or Utah.

  He tried to remember the night before.

  Nothing. Not a thing.

  Damn.

  He hopped to his feet, moved toward the fence, and looked up to the top. From his years in prison, he was so accustomed to the glint of concertina that he expected to see endless coils of razor-sharp stainless steel above this fence, too. But the coils weren’t there. This was just a fence.

  Was this some kind of sick joke?

  He allowed himself a sardonic smile and reached out with one hand to begin to scale the fence
.

  “I wouldn’t do that,”an amplified voice said.

  Tom froze, then spun a full 360 degrees to try to find the person who was speaking to him. He didn’t see anyone. He took a deep, raspy breath and scanned the adjacent forest more carefully. Still nothing.

  He reached again for the fence.

  “I wouldn’t—“

  Tom crumpled in agony at the foot of the fence. He was temporarily paralyzed by the jolt of electricity that had ratcheted through his body. The bottoms of his feet burned like they were on fire.

  He watched with surprise as a dark stain spread on the inside thigh of his trousers. The discoloration spread for at least ten seconds before he felt the warm moisture from his own urine against his skin.

  “Next time, listen to my suggestions. They are valuable. In the meantime, stay away from the fence. It’s uncomfortable to touch it. But I guess you know that by now, don’t you?”

  Tom rolled away from the fence. The voice was obviously male. But he had no associations to it in his memory. He demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m not surprised you don’t recognize me, actually. You don’t have much experience with people like me.”

  “What? You’re my jailer. I know all about jailers.”

  “No, Tom, I’m your conscience. And you don’t know a damn thing about having a conscience.”

  Tom felt suddenly sick. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m right here. Where are you?”

  “Fuck you. What are you doing to me? How did I get here? What the fuck do you want?”

  “I’ll answer a couple of your questions. How did you get here? I drugged you and brought you up here. What do I want? Satisfaction. Now, no more questions. No more answers.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “You know, I’ve been told that thirst tends to improve attitude. I think we’ll do a little empirical study and see if that turns out to be true. In case your internal altimeter isn’t working, we’re well over nine thousand feet above sea level right now, Tom. The weather forecast is for another hot and dry day. Even way up here, it’ll be in the eighties by midafternoon. Humidity should be hovering around twenty percent. That’s dry. Real dry. You enjoy your morning.”

  “Wait!” Tom yelled.

  No reply.

  “Come back!” he tried.

  Nothing.

  “Shit!”

  He was back in prison. He felt it in every cell in his body.

  CHAPTER 30

  Kelda called Tom Clone at his grandfather’s house over her lunch hour on Wednesday. She used a pay phone one block away from the Federal Building. Only after the phone rang six or seven times did she remember that he’d told her that he was starting work that week.

  She called directory assistance and got the number for the pharmacy at Boulder’s Kaiser clinic and dialed. After punching menu choices for about two minutes, she finally reached a human being, and asked the woman who answered if she could speak to Tom Clone.

  “I’m sorry. We don’t have anyone here by that name,” was the reply. Kelda thought the woman sounded as if she was twelve years old.

  “This is the pharmacy?”

  “Yes.”

  Kelda explained, “I’m looking for the new guy. He just started yes-terday, I think. He’s, um—”

  “Oh, him? He didn’t show up yesterday. So, well,” the woman giggled, “he doesn’t, like, even work here. Somebody else has been hired. The new new guy is a friend of Jack’s, I think.”

  “The first new guy didn’t show up today?”

  “No, he didn’t; he didn’t show up at all. Not yesterday, not today. So I can’t help you, I guess. Would you like the extension for Human Resources? Maybe they know something.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  Kelda hung up and tried Tom’s grandfather’s house again. This time she listened to the drone of the phone for fifteen rings before she hung up. She fought a flush of dread. A beige haze masked the western horizon. In the distance, white clouds billowed high above the Divide. The pastiche looked like meringue on top of dirt.

  She dug around in her purse for more coins and a business card and punched a number, another Boulder number, into her phone.

  A distracted voice answered, “Detective Purdy.”

  “Detective? This is Special Agent Kelda James. You and I spoke about Tom Clone.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Purdy said. “Almost like it was yesterday.”

  Which it had been.

  “Have you arrested him?” Kelda asked.

  She could hear Purdy breathing, and wondered whether he was intentionally exhaling directly into the telephone. “Is this a request for professional courtesy, Agent James? If it is, I respectfully decline.”

  In her well-practiced I’m-a-federal-agent-don’t-give-me-any-shit voice, Kelda said, “Look, Detective. I can’t find Tom Clone. I’ll stop looking for him if I know that you have him behind bars. It’s a simple question.”

  In the silence that followed, Kelda assumed that the Boulder detective was considering the advantage she had just offered him. If Tom Clone had been arrested, the detective could play Kelda any number of different ways. If Tom Clone hadn’t been arrested, Purdy was probably playing out the possibilities of why Kelda James wasn’t able to find him.

  One distinct possibility, she knew—and she knew that Purdy knew—was that Tom didn’t want to be found. She tried to consider the ramifications if Tom had gone on the run.

  “If he was under arrest, that would be public record,” Purdy said.

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s not.”

  “Thank you,” she sighed. She didn’t even try to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

  “Not at all. If you do find Clone, I’d like to talk with him. Would you tell him that for me?”

  “Yes, I’ll pass that along. You should probably tell his attorney that, you know.”

  “His office already knows,” Purdy replied. “But the attorney has just left on a safari in Kenya.”

  “Oh.”

  While she was considering Tony Loving’s trip to Africa, Purdy asked her, “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about a red Vespa, would you? It’s apparently like a motor scooter. Maybe it belongs to Clone?”

  She momentarily toyed with being as much of an asshole as Purdy was being. Instead, she decided to answer his question civilly in hopes of getting some cooperation in return. “Yes, I do know some-thing about it, actually. It belongs to his grandfather, not to Tom. His grandfather has a bad hip, uses the scooter to get around town. Apparently, he finds using it more comfortable than getting in and out of cars.”

  “Grandfather probably isn’t using it much right now. Don’t think they allow Vespas in the ICU.”

  The bolus of sarcasm from Purdy was disappointing but not totally unexpected to Kelda. The legendary tension between federal agents and local cops wasn’t just myth. “I imagine not,” she said, intentionally trying not to aggravate the situation.

  “Does Tom ever use it?” Purdy asked.

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “For the same reason you can’t ask him whatever you want to ask him. Because I can’t find him either.”

  “Since when?”

  “He was last seen Monday afternoon. Midafternoon, to be specific. Did you hear from him after that?”

  Without hesitation, she said, “No, I didn’t. And why do you want to know about the Vespa anyway? What does that have to do with it? Did you find the Vespa someplace?” She gave him a couple of seconds to respond. When he didn’t, she prodded, “Come on. I’ve been up-front with you.”

  She felt another echoing exhale in her earpiece before Purdy said evenly, “It’s just a loose end. I’m sure even FBI agents get them some-times. Loose ends, I mean. Not as often as someone like me investigating assaults and minor crap like that in Boulder might get them. But sometimes.”

  She wanted to scream at him. “Can we be frank, Dete
ctive?”

  “That would be refreshing, Special Agent James. Dear God, that would be refreshing.”

  She had been about to divulge to Purdy that Tom Clone had been concerned about his safety, but suddenly her mouth hung open, she blinked her eyes twice, and she completely reconsidered what she had been about to say.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Good-bye, Detective.”

  She hung up the phone and shook her head. Nearby, she saw a couple of support personnel from the Bureau walking along the sidewalk. If she had been alone, she would have thrown something or slammed the receiver against the phone—or something—and she would have screamed, “You goddamn shit!”

  Instead, she adjusted her shoulder bag and pulled her sunglasses down in front of her eyes and crossed the street just as the light changed. The pace she took to the lobby of the Hotel Monaco would have forced almost anybody trying to stay with her to jog.

  She dropped two coins into the lobby pay phone and punched in a familiar number.

  No answer.

  She retrieved the two coins and punched in another familiar number.

  After only one ring, she heard the beginning of a recording from the veterinary practice of Dr. Ira Winslett. The practice, she learned, was temporarily closed due to a family emergency. The doctor’s calls were being taken by—Kelda slammed the phone down before she learned what other vet was covering for Ira. She didn’t really care.

  She cursed under her breath, stepped away from the phone, and closed her eyes, trying to compose herself.

  When she opened her eyes again, she saw the fleeting image of a man in a dark suit moving rapidly along the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

  She thought it might have been Bill Graves.

  “Oh damn,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 31

  The amplified voice said,“In case you’re wondering, it’s one o’clock. How’s your attitude?”

  Tom Clone was sitting with his legs crossed. He was holding the sleeping bag above his head as a shelter against the sun, but the heat was almost intolerable. In reply to the voice, he lifted his right hand out from beneath the bag and raised his middle finger to the sky.