Deadline (8 page)

‘Nada. I'm coming home and I want the place to myself, OK?' I didn't want her to see me this unnerved, and I didn't want her to watch me hovering anxiously by a telephone and willing the goddam thing to ring, and I didn't want her to hear what I said the next time the man called.

If
he called.

No if. He'd call because he wanted something. But what? Money? If I sold the house and cars and cashed in insurance policies and emptied bank accounts, I could probably come up with a million at a stretch. If the kidnapper wanted a load of cash quickly, he could have chosen somebody in a better position to oblige.

The police
, I thought. That's where I ought to go. I had a few connections in the LAPD; I'd worked with a couple of their psychological cases, victims of the stress of imposing law and order. I had only to dial a number and I'd find a sympathetic listener. But I discarded that option, because the voice on the telephone had instructed me to tell nobody, and the tone had left me in no doubt that if I spoke to anyone in authority about Sondra I'd never see her again.

I was alone in this. It was me and the man on the telephone.

Consuela said, ‘OK. I go home. But you explain to Sondra. This is your decision. No my decision. Yours. OK. You tell Sondra.'

‘Leave it to me,' I said.

Twenty minutes later, when I reached my street, I parked outside the house. I tried to focus and be calm. I went inside.

I half-expected Sondra to be sitting on the brown leather sofa near the window in the living room, legs curled up under her body, a book or magazine in her lap.

You're home early, my love
, she'd say.

Yes, I needed to see you.

The sofa was unoccupied. She was somewhere in the world, but she wasn't here. So now all I could do was wait.

I thought back to when we'd met, and how quickly that easy friendship had changed to love. She'd been doing PR for a local radio station and I'd been a guest on a late-night talk show, one of those quasi-serious programs where the host went head-to-head with the guest; basically it was fluff dressed-up as intelligent conversation. I didn't remember a word of it now. All I could recall was how Sondra had been standing on the other side of the glass booth, a cigarette in one hand, webby little smoke-drifts creating an impression of mystery about her. Her hair then had been long, down to her shoulders, and was lighter in color than it subsequently became.

She had a way of pouting slightly when she was looking serious, a faint forward thrust of the lower lip. Kissable – my mind kept wandering to those lips on the other side of the glass booth. That mouth. Later, when the show was over, I invited her to have a drink, a coffee, anything, what did it matter as long as she agreed to spend some time in my company?

Her first words to me were:
You're really nervous for a shrink. How do you get your patients to relax?

And I said something like,
I drug them copiously, of course.

… And now this intelligent, funny, lovable woman I'd married was gone. She'd disappeared out of our world.

I stood at the window and shut my eyes. I tried to make-believe I was psychic, that if I concentrated with all my strength I'd receive pictures transmitted across mystic space, I'd know her location and I'd go there without hesitation and rescue her. How naïve desperation makes us: loss renders us vulnerable to crazy notions. I squeezed my brain until my head felt as if it were about to come off my shoulders –

And, yes, I saw Sondra, I saw her as one might see a long-dead young woman in a faded daguerreotype. She was in a pale-green room; the door was locked, and the window had a view of what looked like a field of purple grass; she was touching the pane with her fingertips, but she couldn't break the glass because there were others in the room, people who watched her every movement –

I was being ludicrous, trying to make my mind zoom across this great city like a heat-seeking missile programmed to detect my missing wife. I saw her only because I wanted to see her; I could no more make my brain produce a map to Sondra's location than I could dial a phone number on Mars.

I looked from the window: the city lay under a gasoline sun. I thought of the unborn child. And suddenly I hated the man who'd telephoned – I hated him in such a way that the feeling swarmed my mind like a black flurry of iron-filings hurrying towards a powerful magnet.

The telephone rang. I picked it up.

‘You're home. You run like a Swiss clock. That's good, Lomax. That's very good.'

I tried to picture this man. I tried to imagine the face behind the voice, but I couldn't get any images. Tall, short, dark, fair – the voice gave little away. It was deep: the guy was maybe in his late forties, early fifties. The accent wasn't one I could identify. Midwest maybe. He spoke in complete sentences; he rarely slipped into unfinished phrases. His slang expressions were sparse. He was educated, no street gangster. He gave me the impression that in any kind of negotiation he'd be utterly inflexible.

‘Tell me what you want from me,' I said. ‘Tell me exactly what it will take to get my wife back.'

A pause. ‘This is what I want you to do, Lomax. Go inside your bathroom.'

‘My bathroom? Why?'

‘This is lesson number one, Lomax. Always do exactly what I say.'

I took the handset and walked out of the living-room. Why did he want me to go inside the bathroom? I paused, stood very still, listened to the way my pulses beat.

‘Keep going,' he said. ‘It's only a few yards down the hall from your living-room.'

Only a few yards.

He knew the house-plan.

Had he been here when we were out? The thought spooked me. A stranger or strangers going through the rooms. The place had been violated. Our home. Entered and explored.

I stepped into the hallway that led to the bathroom.

‘You there yet?'

‘Almost.' I looked along the hall at the half-open bathroom door.

‘Keep going.'

I heard it then, the sound of water running quietly into the bathtub.

‘Open the bathroom door. Go inside.'

I nudged the door open with my hand.

‘You inside now?'

I crossed the threshold. ‘Yeah. I'm inside.'

‘Look in the tub.' My eye had already traveled to the bathtub, where both faucets trickled water.

The tub was filling up very slowly.

She lay, flat on her back, duct-tape strapped across her mouth. Her hair and clothes were sodden, her eyes shut. The water had risen above her lips. In a minute, maybe a little more, she'd be drowning.

I dropped the phone on the floor, reached inside the tub and turned off the faucets and yanked the plug. Then I raised her body up to a sitting position, and as gently as I could I tore the tape from her mouth. Straining, I got her out of the tub and spread her on the floor. I searched for a pulse, any sign of life. It was weak, hard to find. I wrapped her in dry towels, and she moved her lips, but the only sound that emerged was a sing-song little moan.

I caught her face between the palms of my hands. I forced one of her eyes open. The pupil was dilated. But she wasn't seeing anything. What had they done to her?

Then I saw the bottle on the floor near the washbasin. I picked it up. It was a small plastic 100-tab container from the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. It had contained about twenty-five tabs of Restoril, a sedative; I'd kept it in the medicine cabinet where I stored a small selection of drugs in the event of weekend or after-hours calls from insomniac or panic-stricken patients. I picked up the container and tipped what remained of the contents into the palm of my hand. I counted quickly – ten maroon and sky-blue capsules. I understood. Christ, oh yes, I understood. She needed the hospital. She needed her stomach pumped before it was too late.

I grabbed for the phone and the man on the phone said, ‘You found her all right?'

‘This is monstrous. She's not involved in whatever this thing is. This is just downright …' I couldn't find the word I needed and I didn't have time to hunt it down.

The voice said, ‘I want you to have absolutely no doubt in your mind, Lomax. We're serious. And that's how you'll treat us – seriously. Understand?'

My throat felt dry and constricted. ‘She's our housekeeper, for God's sake –'

‘She's just the hired help,' the voice said. ‘Go get yourself another one. LA's full of them. Meantime, enjoy the thought that you just saved the woman from death by drowning.' He was silent a moment, then he added: ‘Think of this, Lomax. It could have been your wife you found in the tub.'

‘You're a fucking miserable piece of shit,' I said.

‘I'm breathless, Lomax. That's hardly the language of a respected professional in the health field.'

‘For Christ's sake, for the last goddam time, just tell me what you want.'

A pause. ‘You had a patient.'

‘I've had lots of patients.'

‘I'm thinking of one in particular.'

12.50 p.m.

Consuela was in a coma. Someone had forced her to swallow between 300 and 400mg of Restoril; the normal dosage was 30-40mg at bedtime. She was limp and heavy, and I maneuvered her downstairs with considerable difficulty. I made it into the street, hoisted her into the passenger-seat of my car, and buckled her seat-belt. Her long damp hair was glossy in the sunlight.

I drove fast down through the canyons where trees blocked the sun and threw occasional twilights across the day. I ignored speed limits. I was operating on automatic; instincts pulled all my strings. I'd do what I needed to do, what I'd been
told
to do, and in a few hours I'd have Sondra back. The ethics of my profession, the concept of confidentiality, didn't enter my thinking. I
wasn't
thinking. I couldn't afford to. If I paused to analyze the situation, I'd find objections to what I was planning to do, so I didn't contemplate anything, I just drove, just kept an image of Sondra in the front of my mind.

The way she'd looked on the deck. How we'd made love under the sky. Her tenderness. How she'd cried so unexpectedly afterwards.
I want to be a good mother, Jerry. Yes, love. You will be. I know you will.

I used my cellphone to call a young physician I knew at Valley Samaritan Hospital. His name was Kit Webb; I'd treated him for stress a year or so ago. I told him I was bringing a woman to emergency, a drug OD, but I couldn't explain the reason for her condition; I also told him I needed him to be discreet and ‘forget' about filing an incident report for the next few hours. He agreed. One physician's favor to another; the freemasonry of doctors.

When I got to the hospital, I backed the BMW up as close as I could get to the Emergency entrance. Kit was already there, tall and lean and white-coated, clipboard in hand, red hair flopping down over his forehead. He helped me get Consuela out of the car and into a wheelchair and we pushed her inside the building.

He examined her face quickly, gently. He had long white fingers. He pushed her eyelids open. ‘What did she take?'

‘Restoril,' I said.

He looked at me. ‘You just came across her on the street, huh?'

‘That's good enough.'

‘For the moment,' he said. ‘Are you in trouble, Jerry?'

‘I can't talk, Kit. Sorry.'

‘OK. But I can't overlook this forever. You better call me.' He wheeled Consuela, whose head hung loosely to one side, along the corridor, past other casualties of the great metropolis – broken people who sat in chairs and waited their turn, people with gunshot wounds, a biker with a shattered leg, a pretty Thai woman holding a handkerchief to her face, which had been cut. Blood slid down her wrist, stained her white blouse. Her eyes were shut; I noticed the delicate sky-blue veins in her eyelids.

Another victim of the city.

Another outrage.

I walked hurriedly to my car, drove out of the hospital parking-lot. I reached my building on Wilshire, rushed inside, rode the elevator to the seventh floor. Jane Steel was behind her desk and she looked at me with concern as I entered. She didn't say anything – she was too discreet to ask questions – but if I wanted to talk, she'd listen. I touched her briefly on the back of her hand, a gesture meant to convey normality, that nothing was wrong, everything was functioning.

‘It's going to be fine, just fine,' I said.

‘Mrs Lomax is all right?'

I said, ‘Yes. Take a lunch break, Jane.'

‘You're sure?'

‘Positive.'

I went inside my office and closed the door. I pushed a chair away from a spot at the center of the Persian rug, then I rolled the rug back. I removed a square section of the wooden floor, under which the safe was concealed. It was made of steel, and measured about twenty-four inches by twenty; I went down on my knees and looked at the combination lock and for a bad moment I couldn't remember the sequence of numbers – my mind quit, my memory lapsed, the numbers were lost in the soup of my brain.

What in God's name were they? I concentrated, tried to remember when I'd last used the safe, the numbers I'd turned: lost, lost, lost. On hands and knees, gazing down into this secret space under the floorboards of my office, I felt like some dumb animal, an ox whose progress had been halted by an unexpected obstacle. I felt shackled.

Numbers. There was a four, a six, a nine, something else, some other goddam number. I watched a cockroach scurry across the face of the safe, climbing over the lock before disappearing into the darkness of the struts that supported the floor. Four … six … nine … then what?

I was sweating, the air in the room was warm, the smell that rose from beneath the boards suggested a long-shut attic opened for the first time in years, everything inside dehydrated, rotted old clothing destroyed by moths. I'd written the number down on a scrap of paper and stuffed it inside a book someplace at home, but now I couldn't even remember which book –