Gone Before Goodbye

Chapter Eighteen

Maggie makes two calls before she gets back in the VIP elevator. The first is to her former classmate and suck-up student Bonnie Tillman. She needs to ask for a quick favor because Bonnie was class president and will definitely know.

Maggie gets right to the point.

“I need Steve Schipner’s mobile number.”

Bonnie groans. “Sleazy Steve?”

“Yep.”

“The Boob Whisperer? Do you know he calls himself that?”

“I do, yes.”

“Gross,” Bonnie says, in case the groan hadn’t been obvious enough. “Look, Maggie, I know you’re going through a tough time out there—”

“It’s for a medical consult.”

“And only Steve can help? Come on, Maggie.”

Maggie doesn’t have time for this. “Do you have his number or not?”

With a theatrical sigh, Bonnie gives it to her.

It’s midnight here in Dubai, but Maggie is hardly worried about waking him. The phone Charles gave her has Maggie’s name on the caller ID. She figures that there’s an excellent chance Charles or one of his people is listening in on the calls, but at this stage she doesn’t really care.

Steve picks up on the third ring. His voice doesn’t hide his surprise. “Well, well, well, is this really the Maggie McCabe?”

“Hey, Steve.”

She hears classical music in the background. One of Chopin’s preludes. A bit of a surprise for Steve. She’d expected something more like Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” or Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure of a late-night call?”

Maggie tries not to roll her eyes. “I’m in Dubai—”

“What, now?”

“Yes.”

“I hear music. Are you at a club?”

“I am.”

“Which one? I know them all.”

Big surprise. “Etoile Adiona.”

Steve gives a low whistle. “Exclusive.”

“Yeah, there’s only like a thousand people here.”

“It should start filling up now.”

“With lots of young tail, I’m sure.”

“What?” He laughs. “Oh, Maggie, I was only kidding with that. Look, give me ten minutes to get ready—”

“I’m on my way out,” she says, “but I do need your expertise.”

“Oh?”

“Will you be at Apollo Longevity tomorrow?”

Steve’s voice grows a touch wary. “I should be, yes.”

“I have a patient. A twenty-four-year-old woman. I performed a breast augmentation on her.”

“Wait. Wasn’t your medical license revoked?”

“Can I bring her to see you in the morning?”

“If you did something illegal—”

“It’s nothing like that. Can we meet first thing in the morning? I’ll explain everything then.”

There is a long pause. Then: “What’s the patient’s name?”

“Nadia Strauss. Can you see her?”

Steve tells her that he can squeeze her in at ten a.m., right when Apollo Longevity opens. He then tries to convince Maggie to stay at Etoile Adiona or perhaps, if it would be more convenient, his apartment building has a members-only club in it, which would be the perfect place for a quiet drink. Maggie gets off the phone with as much kindness as she can muster.

She finds Nadia on the way to the elevator. “I found a way for us to get into Apollo Longevity.”

They agree to meet in the lobby a few minutes before ten in the morning. Nadia walks Maggie to the elevator. When the doors open, Maggie is caught off guard when Nadia gives her a big hug.

“I still don’t trust you,” Nadia whispers in her ear, “but I trust them even less.”

Nadia doesn’t say who “them” refers to — Ragoravich, Brovski, Lockwood — but she assumes, the same as Maggie herself, all of the above.

“Uh, ditto,” Maggie manages as she steps inside the elevator.

The ground floor of Etoile Adiona is in full swing now, and full swing here is defined as complete pandemonium. Maggie has no idea how many new people have come in during the half hour or so she was gone, but it feels like one more and the club would collapse a level or two. The dance floor is dark, lit only by the flicker from the strobe lights. The DJ is rocking out to something super-loud with a super-deep bass — so deep that Maggie can feel the lining in her lungs quake.

She tries to cross the dance floor, but it’s slow going. There are simply too many bodies crushed together in too small a space. She squeezes herself between any cracks in the crowd, but there aren’t many. She ends up making karate-chop hands and crowbarring her way through. The music transitions into something even louder and more aggressive. Maggie wants to cover her ears, but she needs both hands to slice through the crush of flesh. The entire dance floor has been transformed into a manic mosh pit now. The partygoers wearing the creepy Venetian masks are made more nightmarish by the strobe lights.

The whole effect is beyond dizzying.

Near the stage is what looks like a diving board. Patrons climb the ladder, spread their arms, and fall back into the heart of the dance floor. The crowd catches them and carries them along like waves at the ocean. Maggie can’t quite get her footing. She’s jostled to and fro, blindly pinballing closer to what she hopes is the exit.

Do people really enjoy this?

Maggie has never been claustrophobic, but she’s finding it a little hard to breathe now. How often, she wonders, does someone have a panic attack in a place like this? Worse, if you do have one, there is no real reprieve or recourse. You are trapped. Maggie wonders how many of these nightclubbers are on a pharmaceutical hallucinogen. A fair number, she’d guess. She wonders, too, whether that would make this experience easier or harder, and the answer is probably both.

When Maggie was a college sophomore, a boy she had a crush on gave her a pill at a two-day outdoor music festival in western Massachusetts. She still doesn’t know what was in the pill, but it made her freak out with paranoia. A paramedic took her and the boy to the “Chill Out Tent,” where they were fed oranges and activated charcoal and had saline pumped into their veins.

Strange memory.

Maggie is wedging herself through two beefy men when someone grabs her arm.

It’s not a casual or accidental grab. The grip is a straight-up iron claw. She tries to pull away. Nothing. She turns to see who it is, but through the mass of partygoers, she can only see a big, meaty hand on her forearm. Without warning, the big hand jerks her hard toward him. Maggie nearly loses her balance. The big hand pulls harder, dragging her back in the other direction.

Maggie isn’t sure what to do here. She’s being pulled through a human car wash. She tries to dig her heels in, tries to stop her momentum, but the pull is too strong. She yells out to stop, to let go of her, but the music is so loud she can’t even hear her own shouts.

With her free hand, Maggie finds the man’s index finger and tries to pry it off. His grip doesn’t waver. His fingers clutch like eagle talons to the point she fears he may break skin. She thinks about spearing his hand with a fingernail — breaking his skin rather than hers — but her nails are all cut down to surgery length, which means there is nothing to spear him with. She sees the back of him now, the broad shoulders and big back, but with the crowd, with the crush of people, she can’t rear back and kick him. She’d been taught pressure points that could possibly free her here, but pressure points never seem to work in the real world or on moving targets. She’s just about to try one anyway when the man suddenly stops.

He turns around and takes off his mask.

Maggie freezes.

His eyes are bloodshot and blackened. His face is swollen. He has a thin bandage across the bridge of his nose. She’s about to strike him — one shot to that new nose will finish him — but her eyes meet his and what she sees surprises her.

Fear.

It’s Oleg Ragoravich.

With a head tilt, he signals for her to stay with him.

Maggie isn’t sure what to do here, but curiosity gets the better of her. She nods and stops fighting him. His grip is lighter now, though it remains firm. She’s good with that. She needs this hand on her arm so that she doesn’t lose him in the crush.

The music’s volume lowers a bit, the frantic beat decelerating as the DJ transitions the crowd into a slow song. The patrons quiet like particles when you turn down the flame. Everyone remains packed together, but now instead of rapid, frenetic movement, the bodies gently sway back and forth.

When Oleg and Maggie reach a bit of a clearing, Maggie frees her arm with a sudden tug. Oleg Ragoravich spins toward her. She again sees the fear in his eyes before he lowers the mask back into place. He puts his hands on Maggie’s shoulders. She shrugs them off, but her first thought comes from her physician lizard brain: She needs to examine her patient and make sure he’s okay. She needs to make sure the surgery took hold, especially the experimental 3D-printed scaffolding in his nose.

“How are you feeling?” she asks. “I should take a look—”

“I warned you,” he says, and his voice chokes up. “I told you not to believe a word Nadia says.”

“What’s going on?” Maggie asks. “Why are you here?”

“You need to help me.”

“Help you how?”

“They’re trying to kill me.”

“Who? What happened? Why did you run?”

His head is on a swivel now. “You don’t understand.”

“Yeah, I know,” Maggie says, trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “That’s why I am asking. Why did you run?”

“You have to get me out of here.”

“And take you where, Oleg?”

“Maggie, listen to me. You can’t trust anyone.”

“That I know.”

“It’s all a lie. All of it.”

“What’s a lie? Why did you run away?”

“I’m—”

And that is when several things happen seemingly all at once.

The music picks up the pace again. It grows louder — louder and more aggressive than ever. The room goes dark, and the flicker strobes turn everything into time-warping, dreamlike bursts of light. A group in Venetian masks swarm around them, separating her from Ragoravich, their dancing fevered and fast. Maggie loses sight of Ragoravich for a moment. She reaches out and finds his hand.

Her grip tightens. He holds on too.

She is staring into Ragoravich’s eyes when she sees them go wide.

Too wide.

His grip on her hand slackens. Maggie tries to hang on to him, to grasp his hand even tighter. She tries to pull him back toward her, but she’s losing him.

His hand slips away.

“Oleg!”

But her cry is lost in the music. The masked crowd moves between them, pushing them apart. Ragoravich is tumbling away from her, almost out of sight.

“Oleg!”

She desperately tries to get back to him. There are too many masked people in the way now. Maggie shoves them hard, throwing punches even, anything to find Oleg.

There.

She sees him. Oleg is only a few feet away. She’s almost back to him, close enough to touch. She reaches out to him.

That’s when she sees a gloved hand pull a blade from Oleg’s chest.

Blood spreads across his white shirt.

Maggie screams. But the music — the damn music — swallows the sound away. Out of nowhere, someone delivers a body blow, almost knocking Maggie off her feet. She starts to spin, tries to regain her footing. But she can’t quite steady herself. Through the flickers from the strobe, she can see that everyone around her is wearing a mask.

She can’t find Oleg.

“Help!”

Nothing.

“A man’s been stabbed!”

She can barely hear her own voice.

Where the hell is Oleg?

She lashes out now, panicked. But she can’t find him. She starts throwing punches again. She searches frantically for Oleg or for blood or for a gloved hand carrying a blade — anything — but the room is too crowded, too dark, too filled with stuttering strobes.

She looks up, toward the open roof and the serenity of the night sky, and in her periphery, she sees a man being carried above the crowd mosh-pit style.

It’s Oleg.

He is already at least ten, maybe twenty yards away from her. She starts flesh-swimming toward him. A beefy man in a black masquerade mask gets in her way. When she knees him in the balls, he folds like a lawn chair. Another dancer bumps her. Hard. Maggie throws an elbow. It lands in his rib cage. Someone else rams into her. And then someone slams her with an open hand on the side of the head.

Maggie staggers and sees stars.

The music still blares. The party patrons surround her, consume her. She reaches out blindly toward the man who just slapped her. Her fingers find his mask. She grabs hold and pulls it down.

It’s CinderBlock.

What the...?

He shoves her hard and turns to hurry away. Maggie bounces against someone behind her, and using that momentum, she leaps on CinderBlock’s back. She’s still screaming for help, but no one is paying attention. Even now, even with her leaping on a man’s back, she doesn’t stick out in this crowd. No one does. Everyone is in constant motion — jumping, dancing, leaping, raising their fists in the air, shouting along with the music.

From her new vantage point on CinderBlock’s back, Maggie scans the dance floor. She sees two people surfing the crowd.

Neither is Oleg.

He’s gone.

CinderBlock tries to buck her off, but Maggie wraps her legs around his waist and then ankle-locks them into place. Her right arm snakes around his nearly indecipherable neck.

Then she squeezes for all she’s worth, choking him.

CinderBlock’s hands start reaching behind him, flailing to grab her. She lowers her face into the back of his head — close enough so he can’t get to her eyes, close enough so she can move with him if he tries a back headbutt.

She regrips and squeezes harder on his windpipe.

His hand movements grow more frenzied, more desperate to reach her, to get free for even a moment so as to get fresh oxygen.

But she has him.

She keeps squeezing. His knees start to wobble. She shuts her eyes and holds on. She will not let go. She will not let go until...

Whack.

A fist slams into Maggie’s lower back, just beneath her ribs. The knuckles land flush on her kidney. The pain is a white-hot piercing stab. A coppery taste flows into her mouth. The blow shuts down muscles, organs maybe, incapacitates her. Maggie tries to hang on through it, tries to finish this off.

But then another punch lands in the same place.

Maggie feels everything in her close down.

Someone grabs her shoulders from behind and pulls her off CinderBlock’s back. Maggie crashes to the floor. People dance all around her, some stamping on her legs and back. She tries to fight through them, to get back up, but there are just too many people. She keeps battling, keeps trying to get up, keeps getting knocked down.

She screams and then screams again. But no one hears her. No one stops.

The crowd parties on.