Dead Time Read online

  I wasn’t planning to cooperate if he tried to bind my hands.

  The rules of abduction are much more predictable than the rules of dreams. Abduction rule number one is: Good things never happen when the bad guy takes you someplace else. I wasn’t willingly going anyplace else. Having my hands bound would be the first step toward going someplace else.

  He reached around me and stuck a roll of duct tape into my gut. He said, “Take this. Wrap her mouth, all the way around her head. Do it good, a few times.”

  I took the tape from his gloved hand. I did what I was told. Amy’s eyes were pleading with me the whole time to do anything but what I was doing.

  He stuck another roll of tape in front of me. Filament tape. He’d come prepared. “Now her hands,” he said. “Use this. Figure eights around her wrists.”

  I had already begun contemplating a plan. My strategy was to spin hard toward Amy—that way if I managed to hit the guy’s gun hand with my raised wrist as I turned, the barrel of the weapon would rotate away from her. If my fancy spin move failed, I would try to get my elbow elevated high so I could land a sharp blow someplace important, like the guy’s face. My first thought had been to use a simple backward kick with my heel into the man’s nuts. If I missed and hit his knee or his thigh, though, I’d probably not be alive long enough to apologize for my bad aim.

  I would scream my head off the entire time.

  I refined my strategy while I finished binding Amy’s wrists. It was at that point in my planning process that the man either shot me or pounded me on side of the head once with something hard.

  Unconsciousness prevented me from knowing which option he’d selected.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  The first thing I did when I regained consciousness was puke on my shoes.

  The man said, “Oh, Lord in heaven. Was that necessary? Open a window. Darn it, what did you eat?”

  I fumbled for the window switch. Before I found it, he opened all four windows using the driver’s controls.

  I didn’t remember what I’d eaten. I didn’t remember the man beside me. I didn’t recall why my wrists and ankles were bound together with what seemed like bushels of tape or how I’d gotten into the front seat of the car I was in.

  The left side of my head felt like someone had whacked it with a mallet. Although I didn’t recall any blow to my head that might have left me amnesic and nauseous, I was assuming a connection between my headache and some unrecalled closed-head trauma.

  I sat up straight so I could look around.

  A man I didn’t know was driving. He looked like a younger version of Sam. His hair was cut short. He was big and strong—taller and heavier than me, I was guessing six-two, two hundred-plus pounds. His waist was protruding over his belt more, I was sure, than he liked. He wore dark sunglasses and an L.A. Angels cap that was stained from plenty of use.

  Traffic was thin. At that moment, nonexistent. The car we were in was on a two-lane rural road in one of those geographical transitional areas where sparse chaparral has given way to desert.

  I’m in California, I remembered. I felt like I deserved a gold star.

  My bound wrists and ankles were a reliable clue that I was in an unfortunate predicament of some kind. I said, “Where am I?”

  Suddenly, I recalled spooning naked with Amy. The context escaped me. But the image focused me, as naked memories with pretty girls do, and I discovered fragmentary recollections of the old Ford pickup and a rusty Iowa license tag. Gophers, too—I remembered gophers.

  The pieces felt like remnants of some strange psychological scavenger hunt. I couldn’t fit any of the items into a context that would have allowed a naked encounter with a young woman.

  I remembered I was married. “Where’s Amy?” I asked.

  A muted roar from the backseat—“elllllllll eeeeeeee”—offered a clue. I turned to look behind me. An electric pain—a mini lightning bolt—shot from my injured head into my neck and shoulder. Amy was curled up on the floor behind my seat. She had tape winding over her mouth and behind her head. The roar I heard had been her attempted scream for help.

  Newspaper pages were taped to the side windows of the back doors.

  As I came back around I noticed the GPS device near my left knee. Another clue. I remembered Chloe, the watercolorist. The Camry. We were in my rented Camry. I so much wanted to turn the screen of the GPS my way so Chloe could whisper a clue about where the hell I was. Chloe would know. The woman was a mensch.

  The man pulled the car to a gradual stop on the side of the road beside a wide field that seemed to have been most recently cultivated with a cash crop of tumbleweeds. “Throw the floor mat out the window. Can’t stand that smell. Just do it.”

  It wasn’t easy with my wrists taped, but I managed to toss the floor mat out the window without spilling any vomit. I didn’t think I would like what the man would do if I spilled the vomit.

  The carpet mat was almost the same shade of brown as the dirt on the shoulder beside the road.

  Every movement I made caused my head to ache more. I figured I had a concussion. Any notion of the precipitant continued to elude me.

  The man shifted the car back into Drive and hesitated. Before he took off he said, “Are you going to be quiet, or do I need to tape your mouth? You get difficult, I’ll truss you up like I did her. You know how small the trunk is in this thing? Because of the darn hybrid batteries?”

  I said, “No. I don’t think I ever looked.” If I had looked, I didn’t remember.

  “If it was any bigger, you’d be in it. So would she.”

  If I survived this, I’d try to remember to send the Toyota designers a thank-you note. I didn’t like the idea of vomiting into a barrier of duct tape, or of getting hogtied and dumped on the floor of the backseat. “I’ll be quiet,” I said. “One question? Please?”

  “Sure.”

  I asked, “Are you taking us someplace?”

  He looked at me for a second and chuckled. It wasn’t a mocking or denigrating laugh. He was simply amused. He pulled back onto the road. He said, “I am indeed.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  “What do you do?” he asked me ten or so miles down the road.

  The topography indicated we’d completed the transitioning into the desert. I had no idea which one, but I guessed that we were east of L.A. I guessed that only because that was where the closest deserts were. I hadn’t seen a road sign. I couldn’t see Chloe’s video screen from where I was sitting.

  “I’m a psychologist,” I said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her? What does she do? I don’t recognize her, either.”

  The man said he didn’t recognize us. In the context, I assumed that meant there might have been someone around that he thought he would have recognized. That simple insight led nowhere. I had nothing. Blanks.

  “She works in Hollywood. A script…coordinator. Supervisor. I don’t know.” I couldn’t remember. “She keeps track of…dialogue.”

  Amy roared into the tape again. “Eeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaa.” I was trying to treat her outbursts like sound effects—I hoped the man was doing the same. I didn’t want his focus to be on her. I feared her continued screams were going to make him angry and attract his attention.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaa.”

  “What’s she like?” he asked. He glanced toward the backseat. At Amy. “She’s kind of hot.”

  Oh God. What’s the right answer to that question? That she’s a saint? That she’s a bitch? That she’s not that attractive? How do I keep this man from mistaking his dominance over her for lust?

  “I just met her today,” I said.

  “Yesterday,” he corrected me. “That’s more likely.”

  “Yeah, yesterday.”

  He dropped it. “You’re a shrink. Tell me something—how is it that a thing can go so well for so long and then all of a sudden turn to crud?”

  In my office with a patient, I would have sat silently, wait
ing for more. At most, I might have said, “Tell me.” I was so not in my office. I decided to be a little bit more assertive. “Your life?” I guessed.

  He contemplated for a moment. “I got into a thing. Maybe shouldn’t have—it was impulsive like—but I did it. I convinced myself I had a fall guy, you know, the guy I’d pin it on if things got tight. Things got tight. I should have seen it coming. Didn’t, whatever. I got out of the thing. Getting out wasn’t easy, wasn’t pretty, but I did it. Still had my fall guy, like an ace up my sleeve. Life was okay then. Life, you know?” He made a dismissive sound with his lips. “It’s always some kind of mess. Now the darn thing has crawled back out of the grave and won’t leave me alone. I don’t think I’m going to get away from it this time. I just don’t think I am.”

  “Your fall guy?”

  “My fall guy didn’t work out the way I expected.”

  There were wise things that someone with my training might have said right then. I didn’t say any of them. I said, “You could let us go. That might help.”

  He chuckled. “Nice try. See, I think I could get lucky again. Doing this same exact thing earned me a few years last time I was here. Maybe it will work this time too. Though this one has more variables. The variables get you. They do.”

  Following the ripped threads of his story was an excruciating task for my concussed brain. “Doing what exact thing?”

  “What we’re doing.”

  “Doing this earned you…what…a few years in prison?”

  He chuckled. “Nope. Never been. Don’t plan to ever go. No…way. Earned me freedom, bought me time, peace. Doing this, that’s what I’m talking about. You take some risks, you cross your fingers. I had to protect what I had then. I did it. I have a family, got to do it again. I need more time.” He sighed. “So here I am again, taking some risks, crossing my fingers.”

  I responded to the only piece of his speech that I understood. “Me too,” I said. “I have a family.”

  He said, “I’m not worried about your family. I don’t want to know. I don’t care.”

  He said it in a way that left me no doubt it was true.

  “Why us?” I said.

  “You found the darn body before I could dump it. I was waiting for all of you to leave so I could take the body and be on my way.”

  The body? Suddenly I remembered the blood in the garage in Tarzana. Tarzana, damn. Merideth and Mel and Lisa. Jules. Eric. Kanyn. YouTube.

  I said, “In the truck? The red pickup?”

  “That one. You’re having trouble with your memory, aren’t you? I might have hit you too hard back there. Bad luck for you. Wasn’t sure you were going to wake up at all. You were knocked out for a long stretch.”

  I wondered about the “bad luck” I had suffered. The too-hard head hit? Or finding the body? Maybe both. Or maybe something that hadn’t happened to me yet.

  The body has to be either Lisa or Jack. I recalled Amy telling me that Kanyn had been hiding Lisa in the other half of the duplex. Did this guy learn she was there? How?

  I said, “We didn’t see a body. Just…stains.”

  “Still,” he said. “That’s enough. One thing leads to another. Always has for me. Always. Somebody learns one little thing. They take advantage. Pretty soon…You know? Ever tried to keep everything quiet, you know, to cover your tracks? Hardest darn thing. Damn computers. I hate ’em. Hate ’em. Swear my next job won’t have any computers.” He exhaled audibly. “Need a lot of luck. A lot.”

  I replayed the sequence of events I could recall in Tarzana and wondered how desperate my captor might be. He hadn’t seemed too worried about being discovered by anyone when he ambushed us in the converted barn. Were the people who were still in the house the ones he would have recognized? Had he killed them all before he confronted Amy and me? My mind manufactured an image of a massacre in the midcentury living room.

  I spotted the grip of a handgun flat on the seat between his legs. The barrel was under his left thigh. Odds were he was right-handed. To shoot me he’d have to grab the gun and get it turned toward me in the narrow air space above the console. That awkward motion might prove to be a minor advantage for me.

  In my head, I began to choreograph some moves. The fact that I was bound at my wrists and ankles was a major complication. The moves I was considering were fine—grabbing, kicking, biting. The fast-forwarded outcomes of the ensuing close-quarter combat always involved me getting shot, which wasn’t the ending I was hoping for.

  The handgun caused me to reflect on the first rule of abduction. The reflection reminded me that I had already allowed the rule to be broken. “You’re taking us someplace to kill us, aren’t you?” I said, naïve surprise in my voice.

  “Most people wouldn’t say it out loud,” he said. “You just did. Give you credit for that. The other two, they just whimpered the whole time.” He chuckled. “I ended up putting them both in the darn trunk.”

  He got quiet. After a moment, he lowered his voice a little and said, “So you know, do something stupid, I’ll kill you right here and then take you someplace to dump you. The order doesn’t make any difference to me. This ain’t my car. I don’t care.”

  “I don’t care” was beginning to sound like his trademark phrase.

  I’d known at some level he was taking us someplace to kill us. At that moment I knew it at the conscious, here-and-now level. I felt a chill spread across my back.

  I wondered about the “last time” the man had referred to. He’d done this errand—killing and dumping—before. With two people—“the other two.” Which two people?

  Jaana was only one.

  Lisa was one.

  Jack was one.

  The Grand Canyon story I’d been learning over the past week didn’t have any parts where two people went missing.

  “Does this have to do with the Grand Canyon?” I asked. I figured I had nothing to lose by exposing the fact that I knew about what happened back then—there was no sense dying with cards left to turn over.

  He turned his head toward me, his eyebrows jumping up from under his shades. “You know about that?”

  “Just what was in the papers.”

  “I do my best to stay out of the darn papers.”

  My head was finally clear enough that I thought I knew who had abducted us. You’re Lincoln Oden, I thought. I recalled Sam’s theory that Oden had cut a deal with the kid in Las Vegas, Nick Paulson.

  Why would Oden’s deal with Paulson require him to kill people and dump bodies in the desert? I was hoping a multiple choice would appear in my brain and that I could choose an answer from a list. But nothing.

  Was I with Oden right then because Sam had visited Paulson’s office in Las Vegas? The connections weren’t apparent. I didn’t know why I was about to die at the hands of Lincoln Oden.

  But I was thinking that I was about to die and was wondering how it would happen. Without seriously considering any alternatives, I had already decided to do my best to go down fighting.

  I was trying not to think about my family. My children did not need any more losses.

  “You hear that?” the man said. “Dag…nabbit.”

  I didn’t hear anything. I listened more intently.

  After five seconds, I did hear it. The sound was far away. But it was a siren.

  I had an insight right then: If I had been praying, I would be thinking that my prayers had just been answered.

  But since I hadn’t been praying, it was all just chance.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Oden lifted the gun from below his thigh. The gun was a revolver. Big, but not too big. Sam had once shown me a .38. Oden’s pistol looked like a .38. Oden raised the handgun with a fluid motion of his left hand. He was comfortable with it in his hand.

  Had I ended up playing the odds about his hand dominance, the house would have won. I would already be dead.

  He pointed the gun at me. A dowel stuck in the hollow in the barrel would have run straight to my neck, low, below
my Adam’s apple. He said, “Don’t be a hero.”

  I hadn’t yet figured out how to be a hero, but I was working on it. I’d reached a sobering conclusion that where I got shot—here in the car, or someplace in a forsaken part of the California desert—was inconsequential to me. I was intent on either finding a way not to get shot at all or finding a way to get shot that might increase Amy’s odds of escaping.

  Helping Amy survive wasn’t purely magnanimous. It was a product of my simple acknowledgment that as bad as my predicament was, hers was worse. She was gagged and trussed—her bound wrists were taped to her bound ankles behind her back—on the floor of the car. She was in no position to be magnanimous or chivalrous and maneuver to take a bullet that might save me.

  I felt my adrenaline spike as the siren’s wail approached. The hormonal surge—my primitive limbic system read the siren’s screeching as hopeful—only underlined how weary I was. I was so tired that I had to remind myself to exhale. Except for the period when I’d been unconscious, I’d been awake for well over a day.

  Oden dropped the car’s speed to just over the posted limit. He kept the gun leveled at me with a casualness that was disconcerting. Of all the variables he was concerned about at that moment, he was least concerned with me.

  I had to find a way to take advantage of that fact.

  His eyes were flicking back and forth between the rearview mirror and the ribbon of road in front of us. “There he is. He’s coming. He’s coming,” he said. “He’s…flying.”

  His tone was a paste of anticipation, awe, and dread. And just a little excitement, too. The excitement component worried me: Oden wasn’t totally averse to a confrontation. I didn’t turn to look back. The changing pitch of the squeal of the siren indicated a rapid approach.

  Oden’s index finger pulsed into and out of the trigger guard. Ambivalence? Nervousness? I wished I knew.

  I had to act. I didn’t know when my last chance to act would come. But I suspected there was a decent chance my opportunity would expire in the next few seconds.