Somebody Somewhere
by Tom Lichtenberg
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 1998 by Tom Lichtenberg
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Prologue
After midnight there is no one on these streets, except the occasional cops who sit in their cars and wait for fools like me who think they can make it home before they fall asleep. I didn't even want to be out there. I should have been dreaming already, all nice and curled up besides my girlfriend with her cat on my head and my hand on her hip. Instead we had one of those fights. I don't even know what the fight was about - I never really do - unless it was just for the sake of it, so we could be mad at each other for a couple of days and then have really good make-up sex on Wednesday. Maybe that's what it was about. Whatever.
The last thing I remember is her saying 'It doesn't matter what you say, you're still an asshole!', and me jumping up off the bed and grabbing my jacket and heading for the door.
Damn, I only remembered when I started the car and was already on the road that I'd left my overnight bag back there. I hoped there wasn't anything in it that I didn't want her to see.
Sometimes you have to keep things back for their own good - they'd get the wrong idea, and wouldn't understand, and it would only lead to trouble that you don't need. I was pretty sure there was nothing in the bag, but with her you never know what might set her off, especially in the frame of mind she was in that night. Oh, I remembered about the fight, of course. It was about those friends of hers, the ones we really don't like but have to go and have dinner with every now and then - Franklin and Jeannie.
She thinks that Jeannie thinks that Franklin thinks that I think that they're a couple of losers and I hate them, whereas I think that she thinks that Franklin thinks that Jeannie thinks she's the better looking of the two of them, and that's what's really bugging her - also that she thinks that I think so too, which I do, because it just happens to be a fact, but it doesn't much matter to me, which she thinks I'm lying about, which I'm not. Or something like that. I was pretty tired in any case, so it's understandable if I was a little fuzzy around the edges. But I wasn't so tired that I couldn't help notice that there were a lot of police cars blocking off the left turn only lane on to Bog Avenue, with their blue and red lights flashing and their radios buzzing with static.
A cop with a flashlight waved me through at the corner, and I thought, woah, there must have been a pretty big accident or something, because Bog Avenue is a major thoroughfare and you don't just go blocking the whole thing off because somebody stalled out or something. I figured I'd turn on the radio just in case I could find out what was happening out there. Well, that's about all there was on the radio at that time.
Apparently, and this is really weird if you ask me, but some guy had gone and kidnapped his girlfriend earlier in the evening - this was out in the Central Valley; I mean it's more than a hundred and twenty miles away. And they came all the way over here, with the cops on their ass the whole way, and then they got off the freeway at the Bog Avenue exit, and turned down our street - I mean my girlfriend's street - and must have driven right by her house. Damn. I mean, what are the odds of that? Then they must've run out of gas or something because they got out of the car and broke into someone's house and were holed up in there right now - just a couple of blocks away - just totally surrounded by cops and then when I heard about it on the news I looked out the window and saw the helicopter hovering overhead and the searchlights from somewhere panning the sky.
The weird thing is it could have been my girlfriend's house they broke into. It could have been anybody's house. From a hundred and twenty miles away. You could never see that one coming. On the news they didn't know if there was anybody home inside that house. They didn't seem to know much of anything. They didn't know who the guy was, or who the girlfriend was, or what was really going on. But how could you really know what the hell was going on in a situation like that? You could get the facts, but you wouldn't really know, if you know what I mean. The last thing I wanted to do that night was kidnap my girlfriend - in fact, I was driving away from her as fast I could without getting caught in a speed trap.
Part One
High Park is a pretty mixed town. It's got a rich part and a poor part and the tricky part sometimes is telling the difference between the two, especially at night. This is because there is so much money in the town that they fixed up the poor part too, so it doesn't look so poor - I mean it's got lots of streetlights, nicely paved sidewalks, clean streets, planted trees, and even the storefronts aren't too shabby, although they are the usual assortment of check cashing lottery selling liquor stores and corner markets. Whereas the richer part has got no sidewalks, hardly any streetlights, and everybody's hidden behind stone walls.
There is a small downtown, but mostly everybody works and shops in College Town, which is only a few miles away. The town itself isn't famous for anything. It started out as a suburb, and it pretty much remained that way. Over the years it had seen its changes of population - the rich part was handed down from one white generation to the next, while the poor part went from Okie to Irish to Black to Hispanic to Laotian and Vietnamese by now. All that really changed in the poor part was the signs on the corner grocery and liquor stores. Lately, though, there had been a housing market boom all over the greater Bay Area, and there were all sorts of better-off people moving into the poorer part, and fixing up the little bungalows that were crowded side by side. On the streets you could see the new For Sale signs and the picket fences blooming, and even smell the paint jobs, while right next door it might be squalor and filth hidden out in the back. It made for certain tensions on the street and in the stores. Are you one of us or one of them?
They call this kind of place a bedroom community, whatever that means. At night there is almost no one on the street, except for the occasional neighbor out walking her German Shepherd, or a drunk, out nursing his beer. It's a sleepy little town. Not too bad a place to raise a child. The schools are said to be okay. The housing prices, though, are getting ridiculous. Well, it's the same all over. That's about all there is to say about the town. You wouldn't even know it existed, except that on the freeway, the Bog Avenue exit sign says Bog Avenue. High Park.' When David Wayne Bailey told Karen Wong to take that exit, she did.
After all, the guy had a gun pointed at her head.
Henry and Valerie Roth, of 314 Seventeenth Street, had been married for eleven years. Almost everything in their house was hers. Henry was away a lot on business, and Valerie kept the home fires burning - literally, in fact. The heater was kept at a toasty seventy eight degrees year round. Valerie couldn't stand to be cold. Her favorite colors were all warm, especially black, her favorite, and she wouldn't eat cold food at all. Nothing less than her version of room temperature would do. Something about the house reminded you of childhood, though the Roth's had no children, and no plans to ever have any. Perhaps it was the wallpaper, a very light blue with tiny white stars, the same wallpaper covering every room except the kitchen, which was white. Or maybe it was the oversized and fluffy furniture, which made their guests feel small and lost and decidedly uncomfortable.
Whenever they had company, which was rarely, everyone would want to be the last to take a seat, and counted themselves lucky if they were forced to sit on one of the simple wicker kitchen chairs. Also, it was crowded. The rooms were small and Valerie had filled them up with lots of beautiful things. She had wood and glass displays in every corner of the living room, each one housing a collection of pretty stone and glass and wooden objects. Paintings and framed photographs were covering each wall of every room - mostly scenes of nature, or still-lifes of flowers or fruit. One by one each thing displayed remarkably good taste. In the aggregate, though, it was way too much.
She spent her days prowling for more, and more, and never knew when to stop. The kitchen was always spotless, as Valerie rarely cooked, and Henry was hardly ever home for meals. A visitor would swear the neatly lined up pots and pans that hung from hooks across the beam had never once been used, and this was probably true for some. Four stools were lined up at the bar, and seemed to never have been moved. The only indication of life in the kitchen was the cat food bowl for Puff, their tiger striped cat, who generally lived outside. Valerie let him in for meals and promptly shooed him out again as soon as he was finished. Occasionally she found him curled up on the bed although she hadn't let him in. Whenever that occurred, she picked him up and tossed him gently out the window. Then she would remove whatever he'd been sitting on and take it immediately to the washing machine out back. Yet Puff was her cat. Henry didn't like the thing at all.
On occasions when the husband was at home, they spent their evenings watching the TV, or rather, he would watch while she pretended to, but actually perused her catalogs and magazines, all the while seething in a rage which had been building up for years. This is how it happened, at nine twenty two p.m., on the evening of December 3rd, that Henry and Valerie Roth were minding their own business, and not talking to each other at all, when some stranger came crashing in by their front door, dragging some unknown girl ahead of him, at gunpoint.
When Chief Inspector Stanley Mole arrived, it was already a mob scene. Sergeant Peterson spotted him on the perimeter and led him in to the hastily formed command center, where Lieutenant Richards was standing with a cell phone holstered loosely on his shoulder. He lit a cigarette and greeted the Inspector.
"Nice night for a walk, eh Stan?"
"Nice night for a walk," Mole replied. It was their standard joke of a greeting. They were gathered behind a mobile rescue van, in front of a bright blue bungalow at the end of Seventeenth near Pine, a dead end in a middle of a nowhere neighborhood. Behind them a phalanx of black and whites were arranged with their red and blue lights flashing and splashing on the puddled streets.
"Made any contact yet?" Mole asked.
"Naah," the Lieutenant replied. "We keep calling, but he just lets it ring awhile, then picks it up just long enough to hang up on us. Oswald over there's still trying."
"Tell him to give it a rest," Mole said.
"Yo, Oz," Richards shouted. "Take a break!" The cop named Oswald shrugged and hooked his radio up in his squad car. There must have been about twenty other cops gathered around, doing nothing. Most of them were standing behind their cars in little groups, chatting. Some were High Park PD, and some were county sheriffs. The rest were CHP.
"So what do we know?" Mole asked.
"Not enough," said Richards. "We've been chasing this guy all night. You know that? All the way from friggin' Sacto."
"How the hell'd he end up here?" Mole was groping around his jacket pocket for a smoke. Richards offered one of his. Mole took it and lit up. He held it tightly in his fist, as if he was trying to keep it going in a hurricane. He took his drags slowly, like someone twenty years his age.
"Go figure," Richards said. "Got off the friggin' freeway, that's how. Made a right, made another, made another, came down Pine, made a left on Seventeenth, all the way to the end. Jumped out, grabbed the girl, busted in the front door. Must've been unlocked."
"Looks quiet enough around here."
"You gotta lock your friggin' door," Richards said. " I don't care where you are. It's the goddman u.s. of a. we're talking about. Friggin' four year olds shoot their dads!"
"So then what?" Mole inquired.
"So then it's you and me and all the rest of us standing out here in the friggin' wet and cold, that's what. Calling the number, letting it ring, him hanging it up. That's it."
"So do we know anything about this guy?"
"Grabbed the girl outside of Sacto, little place called Roseville. Neighbor saw 'em leaving the apartment, noticed the gun, called it in. Got a good look at the car and the plates. CHP got lucky, spotted him getting on the freeway, went after him."
"Any shooting?"
"No shots we know of. None back at the place in Roseville. Nothing on the freeway. We could see he had something pointed at her, though. Made her drive."
"She was driving?"
"Uh huh."
"All the way?"
"Yep."
"Huh." Mole was trying to picture it. The little black Honda was perched in the driveway, halfway in between turned around and smashed against the garage. The driver side door was still open.
"Anybody check out the car yet?"
"No, not yet. Thought it might be too close to the house. Didn't want to spook him. Gimme the word, though, I'll send a couple of guys in there."
"No, not yet," Mole said. There was not enough information to go on. Did the kidnapper know this house? Was it his house? Was there anybody else inside? Who was he and who was the girl? Richards' reply was I dunno' to these and all the other questions he was asked. Mole checked his watch. It was only a quarter past ten. He had a feeling it was going to be a very, very long night.
On the whole, Henry thought, I'd rather be in Singapore. Of course, I'd rather be anywhere than tied up on my own couch in my own living room while some sweaty moron with a gun keeps waving it around and talking nonsense. He tried to shift again to get a little more comfortable. If only I wasn't wearing these stupid Dockers, he thought. They were too big in the back and were all bunched up. He couldn't seem to find the right position. My favorite pants, he thought, are still in Singapore. This was not an unfamiliar longing.
Frequently when he was home in his house with his wife and her things he would wish he was back overseas on a job. Henry was a trade show specialist, what they liked to call a Technical Support Engineer at NGage Technologies, Inc. He spent a lot of his time shuttling around the Pacific Rim, flitting from one show to the next, setting things up, troubleshooting the inevitable glitches, taking things down, and moving on. A regular telecom cowboy. Everywhere he went was a place where he had been before. There were always people he knew who were happy to see him, people he was happy to see. There was always a lot of smiling involved, as he was basically a friendly kind of guy, who was always happy to do whatever it was that the others felt like doing, who would always do the driving, who would buy another round, who would laugh at anybody's joke, who would be there whenever he was needed.
He wasn't much needed at home. Certainly at this moment there wasn't much he could do. He thought that remaining as calm as possible was the best approach. No use saying anything that might upset this whoever he is. And the girl was totally freaked out already. Nothing he could do for her. Seemed like a perfectly nice girl, though. Parents were probably from Taiwan, he thought. He could tell those things. And then there was Valerie. He was sure that she would think of some way she could make things worse - she always did. It was like a gift she had. He didn't even want to glance at her out of the corner of his eye, didn't want to see the expression on her face. He wished that he could make her stop whatever it was she was thinking, just stop, whatever it was. It couldn't be a good thing. He knew her too well for that. But when was the last time she'd done anything he wanted her to do?
It was a very clean house. David had noticed that right away. But there were far too many things in it - carpets, tables, chairs, lamps, paintings, vases, bookshelves, books - there was hardly any room to move in, only narrow pathways through the things. A lot of buildup, he thought. It's probably been years since anyone's made a fresh start around here. The people in the house were exactly what he would expect. Him, early middle aged, quiet, slow, kind of round around the edges. T-shirt. Dockers. Tortoise shell glasses. Stupid looking face.
Undoubtedly a techie. Her, same age but noisier, quicker, trimmer, all in black from shirt to shoes - hair dyed black? or natural? Phony, he decided. He was glad he'd brought along the duct tape, which he'd done in case the push had required a little extra. Now they sat there on their ugly overplush couch, gaping at him like goldfish. The telephone was ringing. Every now and then he picked it up and set it down again. And every time, it started ringing again immediately. Cops, he thought.
'Way too many things in here' he said aloud, to no one in particular. He rubbed his forehead with the hand that held the gun. Karen was standing in the clutter, staring out the window at the blinking lights outside.
'Sit down' he told her. She sat down. The telephone was ringing. Every phone he'd ever heard was ringing in his head. And he had heard a lot of phones. Sometimes when he'd install a line he'd hear a conversation going on, and it always seemed to be familiar. Something about the tone, the topics, the pauses and replies, like one big conversation all the time involving all the world. You could tap into it, plunge into the stream, and if you knew how to listen, you could maybe understand. The house was warm, at least. A little too warm. Gas heat, he thought. He could smell the gas. No one else was in the house. It was small enough that you could cover every room with just a few steps in any direction. There was a clear view to the street out front, from the living room where they were gathered. A wall was partially blocking the view out to the back, but he positioned himself behind the doorway to the kitchen, where he could see his captives and the front and back doors too. Ringing again. He picked the telephone up, and set it back down in its cradle.
'No kids?' he asked, and Valerie shook her head. It seemed to David that she wasn't scared enough. The husband, he was docile and resigned, and that was good. Karen was almost unconscious, which was fine. He hoped she wouldn't remember too much about this. They'd have to work it out later. Valerie was watching him like he was a goddamn TV show. He pointed the gun at her. She didn't look away.
'Bang', he said. That ought to keep her quiet.
It wasn't long until the circus came to town, led by the ubiquitous Caitlin Carpenter of KTVV-TV. She and her newsvan had every angle covered, literally. The other stations' newsvans were stuck behind hers, and she wouldn't let even the FBI trained negotiator's car through at first. Evan Johns, the negotiator - familiar to viewers everywhere as an ever popular pundit - pushed his way through the mass of cables, and soon planted his trademark cane near the foot of Chief Inspector Stanley Mole.
'Got here pretty quick', Mole murmured, half to himself.
'Not really' Johns replied, 'traffic was a bitch. Actually they called me in an hour ago, told me to get in the car and tool around the freeway till the son of a bitch decided where to land'.
'Son of a bitch got a name yet?' Mole inquired.
'Bailey', Johns consulted his notepad. 'David Wayne, 29. Lives in the town of Roseville, out near Sacramento. Originally from Reno, Nevada. Delightful son of Henry and Rosalie Bailey - high school teachers both - and beloved kid brother of one Amelia Brosius of Modesto. Works for The Phone Company.'
'AT&T?' Mole asked.
'That's what I thought', Johns replied, 'but no. Actually is something called The Phone Company - do installation, service, maintenance. Our friend David works the lines'.
'Gets around then', Mole half-said.
'Seems to know the victim' Johns informed him, slyly. Mole got the impression that Johns was holding out on him.
'How come nobody's telling me this stuff?' Mole said.
'Told everyone to wait so's I could fill you in. She's an acquaintance of our friend, at least. Not sure what else, if anything. In any case, he's been seen before in her vicinity. Put it that way for now.
'And she is?' Mole waited for more details to come trickling down his way.
'Karen Sylvia Wong' Johns said. '26, single, roommate, cat, Honda, which we see before us even now. Works for Federated out of Sacramento. Sales and Marketing, they tell me'.
'Huh', Mole said, 'so she gets around too'.
'Meaning?'
'Never know who people meet or where'.
'Oh' Johns said, glancing at Mole as if really noticing him for the first time. Mole had a reputation for muttering and making people wonder what the heck he was talking about. One thing Evan knew for sure about Mole, and it was legendary - he wasn't much of an interrogator. Suspects were always asking him to repeat the question. Meant he probably wasn't going to be much help with this case either.
'Inspector? Inspector?' Caitlin Carpenter had pushed her way into the inner circle and was clamoring to get a comment from the Chief. Mole signaled to Richards to get rid of her.
'Any comment, Inspector?' was the last thing he heard from her as the Lieutenant's man Oswald was escorting her back to her van.
'What else you got?' said Mole.
'People who live here' Johns replied. 'Henry and Valerie Roth. They inside?"
'Appears so' Mole replied. 'Curtains drawn but seems like more than one or two shadows in there'
'Not much on them' Johns said. 'He's got some high-tech gig. She's the happy homemaker. No kids we know of, though."
'Ain't much of a happy home tonight' Mole shrugged, gazing off towards the living room.'We know that much, at least'.
They used to eat lunch in the same restaurant - Monty's down on First Street. That's where he first saw her. David liked the turkey club special with chips and hamburger dills, and coffee with lots of sweetener. Karen he knew liked the avocado omelet, with wheat toast instead of hash browns, and Diet Dr. Pepper. Sometimes she went there with some people from her office. Sometimes she went alone. David had just happened to be in the neighborhood that first time. He had never been to Monty's before. There was a big installation job at the Fourth Fidelity Bank next door. He'd been working hard all day and needed a break.
From the moment he saw her he knew, and sometimes it is like that. When you leave a place and go somewhere else, when you start out on a journey of any kind, you know there is a goal, that something is waiting at the other end, though you may not know what it is. That somebody somewhere is out there. This is one of the wonderful things about life. You will find out when you get there. She was sitting in a corner booth by the front window. He must've passed by her when he came inside but didn't even see her until he was seated at a table where they just happened to put him, in a chair that just happened to have that perfect view. It was nothing that anybody else would have noticed, and even David would have had trouble explaining just what it was.
Something in the way she moved, as the old Beatles song went. Yes, it was exactly like that song. It popped into his head the moment he saw her, and at that moment she was reaching for her glass of Diet Dr. Pepper with her left hand while holding on to the half-folded tabloid with her right. She nearly knocked over the glass but didn't take her eyes off the story while she managed to get the straw to her mouth. It was everything about her. The long dark hair. The slim physique. The tiny black shoes she wore, the dark blue dress, the bright red lips, but mostly it was the way she moved. Later, as he watched her returning to her office in the Federated building, it was the way she walked as well. The phone was ringing again. After awhile, David picked it up and heard Evan Johns' voice say
'David! Lis-' before he put it down again. It wasn't the first time he'd heard his name being spoken, sometimes seemingly at random, on a telephone he just happened to pick up. That kind of thing happens more often than you think. He had first heard Karen's name that way. He knew it was her because he saw her answering the phone in her cubicle. He was halfway into the ceiling, stringing line. It was odd because before he heard her name he hadn't even seen her there, sitting almost directly beneath him, and there was no reason why that name should make him suddenly look down. He remembered her, of course. In fact, she was the reason he had volunteered for this assignment, although he knew the chances of actually finding her inside this huge office complex weren't good. Yet there she was. It was another instance of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow refusing to be denied And so it couldn't have been an accident that his light-pen happened to fall from his shirt pocket directly onto her desk.
'Whoops' David said. The pen startled Karen as it landed on some papers with a sharp crack.
'Sorry about that' she heard a voice say from above. She looked up and saw a head with a sheepish grin peering down from the ceiling.
''I'll come down and get it' David said.
'That's okay' Karen said, 'I can hand it up to you'. She picked it up and tried to stand on her chair but it swiveled and she nearly lost her balance.
'Just a minute' she said, getting down off the chair, and considering the alternatives.
'You could toss it to me' David said, and one of his arms appeared out of the opening, reaching down. Karen tossed the light pen but it didn't nearly reach him, and only landed on the floor. She bent to pick it up, and tried to throw it again, with similar results. By this time both of them were laughing.
'Just don't tell me I throw like a girl' Karen said.
'It's okay, really', David said. 'I'll stop by later and get it when I'm through with this'.
'Okay' Karen said, and set the pen on her desk and watched while David disappeared, crawling through the ceiling, pulling telephone cable behind him. A little while later he did stop by, and managed to have a brief conversation with her while retrieving the pen. She mentioned again her lack of throwing ability, and David saw an opportunity to ask if she liked baseball, which she did. He followed that by mentioning that his brother-in-law worked for the Modesto A's, and if she liked, he'd be happy to take her to a game sometime. She said maybe. He gave her his card and said she could call him anytime. Afterwards he was happy all day, as if he had seen the promised land. He knew it was a good beginning. He was especially pleased with the baseball angle, because it would give him a great opportunity to show his sister that he really was a typical guy, no better or worse than anybody else. She had never thought much of him, and yet he obviously had more skills and intelligence than Charlie, that moron husband of hers. When they were young, she would never stop scolding him about not living up to his potential, about selling himself short, about him being smarter than he thinks, about how he ought to go to college, ought to get into a profession, ought to do this and do that, until it was clear to him that unless he did these things he would never measure up and would never be good enough for her - which put her in the same category as his parents. He would show all of them someday, but that wasn't the important thing to him now. Karen was.
Henry, on the other hand, had a way with women. He didn't know why and never thought about it much. When other men asked him about it, he would shrug and say 'people are nice to people who are nice to them', and decided that was probably the reason. Other men thought it was because he was pretty much unattractive to women, considering that he was a little too heavy, a little too short, a little too bald, and not especially intelligent or interesting, and that would make him safe to be around, and actually all of those things contributed to his popularity instead of working against it. Whatever the reasons were, he was never at a lack for female companionship, and this talent, if you will, followed him all over the globe. Henry was rather proud of the fact that he could get practically any woman to accompany him practically anywhere. But he didn't have to. His job took him to them instead. Whether it was Taipei or Singapore, Tokyo or even Frankfurt, Henry had female friends in every city that hosted a telecommunications trade show. There was always someone meeting him at the airport, putting him up at her house, driving him around town, and it was part of Henry's talent that these women's husbands and boyfriends not only didn't mind, but were nearly as happy to see him as the women themselves were. He kept his own marital problems to himself.
Everyone knew that he was married. They even knew that her name was Valerie, and that she was an interior designer, and that they lived in California, but that was all. He had no photographs of her to show around, which was remarkable because Henry was famous for taking pictures of practically everybody else. Friends joked that it was his calling in life, to meet everyone in the world and have his picture taken with them. Henry would laugh along with the joke, and then say,' but seriously now, it's because I love you guys'. A short sentimental moment would follow, but then quickly the laughter resumed when somebody ordered up another round. The truth was that he had no use for Valerie, and she brought no joy into his life. There was nothing, really, and no reason why they were still together, except inertia. His feelings towards her had taken such a turn in recent years that she was not only the only person in the world he really didn't like, but he poured all of his potential dislike of anybody else into his dislike of her. Just sitting there in the same room with her was enough to make him queasy. He didn't even like the fact that she had touched the clothes he was wearing, even if just to put them in the washing machine. There were times he would actually get up, shower and dress, then go to his office and shower and dress again, but this time in clothes he kept secretly at the office, which he would send out to the laundry after changing back to go home in the evening.
Henry chalked it all up to what he called 'the price you pay', though he would never ever talk about it with anyone. All of the good things in his life - and every other little thing in it was very good indeed - was due to the fact that he paid this price. He sincerely believed in that. And he felt that as long as he kept paying the price, that nothing else bad could ever happen to him. This superstition lived in the very back of his mind, and never made its way into the open. It was a comfort to him, and helped him endure the hours he had to spend in her company. She would just sit there, and he would just sit there, in that hot little house, both steaming. He knew she could see right through him. He knew she could read his mind. He knew she hated him as much as he hated her. It was the perfect stalemate.
From the start, Valerie was just pissed off, but this was almost her natural state lately. Ever since she'd found the thing she'd been on the verge of exploding. And him just sitting there like a piece of wet toast. After all the crap I have to put up with, she said to herself, and now this too? Sure, the creep had a gun, so you pretty much had to do what he said; let the little bitch tie them up with tape; watch the creep go pacing back and forth; sit there in her own damn house while the cops outside just stood around and did NOTHING. Well, they kept trying to call the house. Probably got some expert talker out there. Probably huddling over strategy right now. Where the hell did these people come from? What the hell were they up to? Valerie and Henry knew less about the situation than practically anybody else in the area, and it was happening in their house. The house was the only thing she had left. Certainly the marriage had been less than nothing for years, and the few friends she still had were people she'd admit she despised, if pressed. Well, anyone who liked her husband had to have something wrong with them. He was such a ... fill in the blank, she said to herself. Even now, just sitting there. Hasn't even said a word. She at least had shouted at the intruders when they first came storming in, not that it had done any good. The creep had just ordered her to shut up and sit down. She was too angry to think clearly about the situation. It was all too much. The bitch. The creep. The fill in the blank. Her wrists were hurting already. She had to pee. The telephone kept ringing. She was thirsty. Yet she wasn't frightened.
'I'm thirsty' she said.
'Shut up' David told her.
'It's not fair' she said.
'Shut up' he repeated. The bitch was staring at her now. Valerie made a face at her. Stuck out her tongue. The bitch looked away. Henry, meanwhile, was trying to be invisible, and was succeeding.
'He just keeps hanging up' Johns said. 'We're not going to get very far like this'.
'Gonna be a waiting game' said Mole.
'A friggin' cold one!' Richards added. The three men were huddled together in the street, trying to stay warm through the heat of their cigarettes. It had started to rain again, and the wind was picking up.
'Gotta wonder about these guys' Richards said. 'Why you gonna kidnap your girlfriend? Makes no friggin' sense.'
'You're saying that a criminal's gotta be sensible?' Mole asked him.
'No, I mean, say he ain't no criminal. After all, we got nothin' on this guy, am I right? Nothin' previous?'
'You're right' Johns agreed. 'Nothing but a parking violation'
'So it's a man-woman thing'.
'Now you're saying that a man woman thing has gotta make sense' Mole said.
'But come on, what's he gonna do? Kill her? Coulda done that already. Let her go? Coulda done that too. No way out of it now.'
'He doesn't know what he's gonna do' Mole said. 'The guy just did something stupid and now he's stuck. Jumped in with both feet first, and found out he can't swim.'
'I'm calling again' Johns said. 'Sooner or later he's gonna wanna talk.' The phone rang fourteen times before it was picked up.
'David. Listen. I'm with the FBI. My name is fuck, he hung up on me again'
'Son of a bitch'. Richards said, 'I'm really starting to hate this bastard'. Mole knew that Johns' approach was never going to work, but he considered the chain of command, and didn't give the same advice to Johns he'd given to Oswald earlier in the evening. Let Johns do his thing. Mole would get his chance. It was a waiting game in more ways than one. Johns was predictable. Once you'd caught his act on TV there was nothing else to expect. The calm demeanor. The know-it-all expression on his face. Just waiting to have the last word on everything, every time. Probably rehearsing tomorrow's appearance on Good Morning Bay Area already. The Inspector knew about Johns, but Richards never failed to surprise him. How could the guy be so innocent after all this time, still expecting bad guys to be reasonable, to have reasons, to think and act like normal people do? Mole had been on the force for more than twenty-five years, beginning on the street, then working his way through burglary, arson, vice, and homicide. Now he had his choice of cases, being the Chief Inspector. Everything major came through him. If he decided to deal with it personally, then he did. Otherwise he passed it on. It was cases like this that most intrigued him. When someone committed a seemingly senseless deed, when they were so obviously out of their gourds, just by the mere fact of their action, that was when Mole got interested. Most of the time, he had to admit, the cause was sheer stupidity.
There were a lot more stupid people, who did a lot of incredibly stupid things, than most of us would like to admit. It was like one of those polls the media was always taking, where it turned out that fifty percent of the population didn't believe that men had landed on the moon, and it makes you look around at every other person you see and wonder, is that guy one of them? Is that guy someone who thinks he's been abducted by aliens? It was because he'd seen so much of this stupidity, that he couldn't be like Richards and expect any more from anyone. Yet he still had some faith. And every now and then he'd had the chance to reach someone, and make a difference in their life. At this stage in his career, it was the only thing he hoped for. The man inside that house was obviously desperate, and a desperate man is a dangerous man. He is also a vulnerable man. Mole was already getting an idea.
David was trying to get a clear picture of the situation in his mind, but it wasn't easy, with the constant ringing of the telephone, the increasingly unbearable heat in the stuffy little house, the woman with the foul mouth over there on the couch, and trying to make sure that Karen was okay. He kept offering her something to drink, or something to eat, and asking if she was all right, but all she would do was nod or shake her head a little and stare at one of the few empty spots on the wall in front of her. He didn't know what was going on with her. She was like catatonic. As for the rest of it... He knew it couldn't last. A few hours more, perhaps. Sooner or later, something would have to change. Could they make a run for it? He had scoped out the back yard through the kitchen window, and seen he was surrounded. He could make a dash, but not with Karen, and he wasn't going to leave her like this. The fresh start wasn't just for him, but for both of them, together. He knew it was something that she understood, although he was beginning to doubt that she was ready for it. They had discussed it the day they had lunch together at Monty's. This was a week or so after the encounter with the light-pen. He had noticed her leaving for lunch, and on the chance that she was going to be alone, had followed her to the restaurant. If she had been with company, he would have backed away, but she was by herself - another stroke of luck. He caught up with her near the entrance and they exchanged greetings. If she hadn't liked him at least a little, she wouldn't have accepted his offer to treat. And they had a very nice conversation that day, covering a lot of ground. He talked perhaps a bit too much about himself. Later he berated himself for not always asking about her. Women like that, he reminded himself. Talk about her. Ask about her. But she also talked about herself. She was such a nice young woman. Extremely friendly, and kind as well as beautiful. She was also very happy. She kept talking about her nieces and her little nephew. You could tell she was a good person. David felt an enormous tenderness for her developing inside him, and a desire to protect her. Someone that sweet could not survive for long in this world, David thought, without someone to shelter her. He didn't talk about that, but he talked about the way things happen in life, the way things tend towards complications, until there's too much buildup and then there has to be a new beginning and a cleansing of the old. It's the theory of critical mass. That's what Karen said when she agreed with him. A natural law of physics. So he knew she understood. But now the cops were all around and this was becoming a brand new critical mass, when all he had wanted was the new beginning. He knew they'd keep calling until he talked to them. What did they expect him to say? It briefly occurred to David that the cops outside had no idea who he was or who Karen was or what he wanted or what all this was all about. He also realized that he didn't know who his captives were, not even their names. It had been an hour and a half so far. David had to figure out what to do. Then he realized that the cops didn't care who he was or who Karen was or what he wanted or what all this was all about. As far as they were concerned, it was a guy with a gun holding hostages. Would they storm the place? Not until they'd talked to him first. He knew that much from TV shows. Would they use tear gas then? After he talked to them it was a distinct possibility. They would come in firing after that. But not until he talked to them. Then I won't talk to them, he decided. That would be the plan for now.
Karen's problem began the day she gave him her number. It didn't seem like a bad idea at the time. He was interesting enough, and pretty good looking, too; in fact, she was definitely attracted to him. He was tall and solidly built, had a country-western-singer-type hard-yet-sensitive face, and grayish-green eyes which seemed to have a gentleness in them. He spoke softly and about unusual things. Most of the men she met were in the industry, and prattled on and on about connectivity, interoperability, marketability, and other such things. In her line of work it was subtly understood that no one really knew what anyone else was talking about, and no one was going to give the game away, because they all made too much money, and got to travel and have serious sounding titles on their business cards. It was like a huge international tea party. Talking to David was like visiting another dimension. He saw a different side of things. The first real date they had went well, she thought. Nothing much, just dinner and a movie. She liked it that he took her to a plain old-fashioned type of diner, not unlike the place they'd first had lunch together. She really liked simple food and unpretentious places, and he seemed to guess that about her. He'd brought her roses too, red roses; as if he knew her soft spot. The whole evening was one of him trying to be on the behavior she would like, and she could see him shifting and adjusting to everything she said and did. If she hesitated for a second at the door, he quickly moved to open it for her. If she seemed to lean towards the seat near the window, he stepped back to take the other one. She enjoyed being the center of his attention. The movie was a light-hearted story about a pack of cute little kids who got lost in the big city and ended up rescuing a bag lady who turned out to be an heiress who was really the long-lost grandmother of the cutest little kid. Enough to make you laugh at the appropriate moments and cry a little on cue. David responded in the typical way, which was something else she approved of. She valued the normal above all else. Nothing weird, thank you very much. The rest of the evening, David continued in his gentlemanly manner, properly escorting her home and seeing her to the door. No kiss or attempt at a kiss, just a friendly 'good night' and a 'see you again soon'. He was the perfect cowboy. Karen had a thing for cowboys, and flowers, and babies, and kittens, and the novels of Ayn Rand. Afterwards, he started calling. He called the very next night and asked her out again, and she made some excuse because she didn't like rushing things. She figured he would get the message. She preferred to take things one small step at a time, and actually, for Karen, her pattern consisted of such very tiny steps that only a couple of guys had ever had the patience to persist . Her roommate, Kristi, was always teasing her about it.
'How are you ever going to get a husband that way?' she'd say, and Karen wanted to 'get' a husband, and she wanted to be married, and she wanted to have children, but she always assumed 'she'd know' when the guy was the right guy and the time was the right time, and she rarely doubted it would happen eventually. David was making mistakes, though. She had a very definite procedure and he was stomping all over it. He was being too persistent, and that put her off. He was calling her every night, which at first was flattering, but soon became obnoxious. It seemed the phone was always ringing, and Kristi and Karen had to stop answering it. David left short, awkward messages, saying little.
'Just calling to say hi'.
'Just wondering how you're doing...'
'Just calling to see if you want to go out this Friday'.
'Just calling to see if you're okay'. Karen knew that she would have to give him 'the talk', but in order to do that, she would have to see him face to face, so she put it off for a little while, which only made matters worse. After a couple of weeks she bit the bullet and agreed to meet him for dinner. She gave him the talk. She didn't like being rushed. She didn't like feeling pressured. She liked to go slow. Very very slow. He couldn't keep calling her every day. He couldn't keep stopping by the office to chat. He would have to cool it, back off, settle down, take some time off, give her some space and let things take their natural course. He was apologetic and seemed to understand. He hadn't meant to bother or upset her. It was just that he liked her so much. He agreed to do things her way, and for a week he didn't call even once. When he did call again, she said she didn't want to go out with him anymore. That wasn't fair, according to David. Wasn't he playing by her rules? Now she was the one who wasn't. He seemed to think that she owed it to him to go out with him, like she was in his debt. Karen had been through similar situations before, as had Kristi, and her sisters, and all her women friends, really. Just stick to it and don't give in and he'll go away in time. Guys don't like to feel like idiots any more than women like to be pestered by them. Later on they'll look at you with a hurt little puppy expression on their face, but at least by then they've stopped being a pain. It seemed that David was going to follow the usual pattern, too. There were a couple more of the obligatory difficult conversations, this time on the phone; a series of increasingly more pathetic messages on the answering machine; and finally a respite, a period of nearly a month when she didn't see or hear from him at all. At that point, she thought it was finally over. So easy to get into these things. So hard to get out.
I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be ... you're gonna give your love to me ... if love is love'll not fade away ... if love is love'll not fade away ... All it needs is a little push, he heard somebody say one time, just to get over the hump, and then you're free and clear. Once he realized that, it all became so obvious. Just a little push, to get over the hump, and he knew very well what the hump was. It was Roseville. It was the here and now. It was all of the little things, the incidentals, the accidental people you only happen to know and get mixed up with. Get away from these elements, go somewhere that's fresh and clean, that's free and clear, and make a brand new start. Wasn't it the same way eleven years ago when he left Reno and moved down into the valley? He left those elements behind and made a brand new start, and it worked. They say that every now and then you have to make a sacrifice. Out with the old and in with the new. All the ancient peasant peoples did that all the time. Make a sacrificial thing and break it. Make somebody king and give him all the virgin girls, then one year later, cut his throat and eat his heart. All for the betterment of the community. Had to laugh at that. You see the headlines nowadays - moral standards of the majority - and remember how those standards change in time. So it was a simple matter, really. A little push. That's why he needed the gun. It was the show of force, the sign, the token of the push. When he first got the gun, and that was years ago, it was to use it on himself. Of course he couldn't do that. He made the sacrifice instead, but kept the symbol with him, and now it was becoming something else. That's a good thing, David thought. Transmutation of the soul. And so the push. Once he'd gotten her away from all the little things, the elements, as he called them, then they would make a brand new start. He was thinking Monterey. He liked the sound of that, and he had been there once and thought it was a nice and pretty little town. He had the skills he would need to make it happen. As a professional telephone lineman he could pick up anywhere, especially now in the deregulation era when there were all these little companies starting up all over who thought they'd make a killing in the computer-driven explosion in telecommunications. It all comes down to the connection, he knew, and somebody's got to go out there and do the dirty work of hooking it all together. So that won't be a problem. And he had a little money saved up too, enough to get a place to live and a used but working truck. If she wanted another cat, they could do that too. And she would make new friends, in time, and build up all the residue and incidental conglomeration of stuff that comes with just being alive. You come into the world with nothing and right away there's stuff that just starts glomming on, it sticks to you and keeps accumulating day by day. A little push, 'cause every now and then you have to scrape it off and scrub your body and soul right down to the bone and marrow till its fresh and clean. It was definitely a good thing. The first thing was to get her out of that apartment, where she was shackled with that annoying roommate (Kristin? Krista? Kristine? something like that) who'd just hang up the phone if she answered and it wasn't for her. What kind of person would do a thing like that? Not the kind of roommate you would want to have, he thought, so selfish. And that whiny little cat (Sasha? what kind of name was that?). That whole stupid apartment complex annoyed him, with its one long balcony in common like the deck of a cruise ship or something, and the dinky little swimming pool in back, and that stupid yellow brick wall in front with the pointy iron bars and security gate that never protected anyone. In their new place there would be a real security system that would actually do the job. They would also shed themselves of that creepy neighbor, Gary, who was always leering at the girls and stopping by on some pretense or other - borrowing this, returning that - as if they wanted to see him. Couldn't wait to get rid of that guy, and the whole scene, all of it, was just a pile of stuff that happened to grow and could just as easily not. A little push was all it really needed. Free and clear, starting over all over again. He had thought it through. It was going to be just fine.
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