The Intruders

chapter

THIRTY-EIGHT

When the phone rang, Todd yanked it out of his pocket so fast it slipped and went skittering across the sidewalk. He crawled after it on hands and knees, people snorting and laughing and not moving out of the way. He was beyond noticing. He’d spent three hours walking the streets. He couldn’t have gone back to his office, dealt with Bianca or the rest of them. He couldn’t possibly go home. He had to do something, and so he’d walked, attempting to lose himself in the press of normal people, trying not to feel once again that the streets were even more crowded than they looked, growing more so as the evening came on, that this feeling was worse than ever before.

“Yes?” he said into the phone.

It was Rose. She gave him the address. It was where it was supposed to be. Todd knew it well. A long time ago, he’d spent many hours in the building, supervising shoots, sitting in a chair with his name stenciled on it, selecting which PA would receive the offer of a quick and expensive dinner somewhere discreet. Since then, more than once, he’d raised the question of selling it. He had not been allowed to. Even though it was never used anymore and had small trees growing out of the roof, apparently it had to be kept. Maybe now he knew why.

As soon as Rose had gone, he called his daughter’s number. He gripped the phone till it nearly broke. Finally the other end picked up.

“Todd.” The little girl’s voice.

“It’s happening,” he said. “Now.”

“Excellent.”

“It’s in—”

“Belltown?”

“How did you know she’d choose where you wanted?”

“Because I’m a clever little girl. They changed the locks. They have something there that belongs to me.”

“Let me talk to my daughter.”

“She’s fine. How else do you think I’m going to get there? You remember what her car looks like, I assume?”

“Of course I—”

“Keep an eye out for it.”

Todd shouted in the street, a hopeless sound. He reeled off the main sidewalk and into an alley between buildings, away from normal people. He knew that the police couldn’t help him now, that this was about that building, and those people, and the things he’d never tried to understand.

He started to run.

When he got to the address, he was appalled to see police cars parked in the street. A tall black guy was hollering as he was manhandled into the back of one of them, barely twenty feet away from the door to the building.

Todd’s head was pounding from the journey, and his lungs were on fire. He looked at his watch—he’d made it here in fifteen minutes. Would the police be moving on in the next twenty? If not…Todd suddenly came to believe he was about to have a heart attack.

He stopped, made himself breathe evenly. Walked across the street and positioned himself under the awning of a gallery that had closed for the night. He watched as the black guy fought the law, and he called upon whichever sleek god looked after admen of a certain age to send the junkie motherfucker a heart attack of his own. Now. Right now.

That god was not listening, however, unless he operated with kindness and through the offices of a cop from the second car, who eventually came over and helped his colleague shove the guy sharply into the backseat. Then the policemen stood around for a while, talking, pointing this way and that. Todd watched them, aware of nothing but these men, knowing dismally that they would take an hour or so to wrap this up and he would never see his daughter alive again.

But then, unbelievably, the cops all got in their cars and drove away. It was over. With five minutes to spare.

Todd’s phone rang. He didn’t know what to do when he saw who it was, but he knew she wouldn’t just go away.

“Hey,” he said. “Look, honey, I’m really busy.”

“For God’s sake,” Livvie said, entering the conversation at full tilt, a skill of hers. “You’re supposed to be here.”

Todd had no idea what she was talking about. Then he remembered. New clients. Japanese. Due at his house for dinner in…about an hour.

“Christ, I—”

“No, Todd. No. There is no conceivable end to that sentence that is going to work for me. So don’t even finish it. Just come home.”

“I will. I’m…look…”

For a split second, he remembered the Livvie of twenty-five years ago, when life had been brighter and so much more straightforward. He wanted everything that had happened since to have not happened. He wanted to wipe all the slates clean, to do whatever it would take to make Livvie not angry at him all the time, to find inside her the raucous college girl he’d not been able to stop thinking about, who had for a while made the rest of her sex obsolete. Most of all he wanted to tell her what was going on now and ask her to help, for her to make everything all right. In the end that’s what men want most of women, and the thing they can never ask for out loud.

Then he saw it. A pale green VW Beetle, his twenty-first-birthday present to his daughter. It was coming quickly up the street.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

He closed the phone on whatever his wife was now saying and ran across the road.

The car pulled over just past the building. Todd ran up to it, heart thumping. Rachel was hollow-eyed in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. The passenger-side window was already rolled down. The girl was sitting there.

“Observe my hand,” she said.

Todd had already seen that the girl’s arm was up against his daughter’s stomach and that something hidden in her sleeve protruded a little past the tips of her fingers. Also that there was a splash of dried blood under Rachel’s nose and a livid bruise on the side of her head.

“Baby, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Rachel said. Her voice was dry, quiet.

“Open the front door,” the girl said. “Go inside, leave it ajar.”

“No. You—”

“Do what she says, Dad,” Rachel said. “Please.”

Todd turned, walked stiffly over to the building. Found a key on his ring that he hadn’t used in six or seven years. Opened the door and went inside, leaving it open behind him. He turned back to watch what happened in the car, wondering if he could make it there in time.

He saw the girl talking to Rachel. Saw his daughter nod her head, slowly. He saw in her face the tiny being he’d held in his arms, the ghost of that long-ago child. And he wondered what, if anything, was left inside Todd Crane, what dead thing unable to comprehend or affect the cramped prison it had built around itself.

The little girl got out of the car, came across the sidewalk and toward the building. Past her shoulder Todd saw his daughter slump forward until her head rested on the steering wheel. His stomach rolled over.

But then he saw Rachel’s head lift again and turn toward him. Her eyes locked with his.

The girl walked straight past him and into the hallway of the building, pulling the door shut behind her.

The sudden darkness made Todd’s eyeballs twitch. He moved back involuntarily, as if he were here not with a child but with someone larger and older and incomparably more dangerous. Which he was, of course. He knew that now. It made no sense, but there was no other way it could be. He realized he should have listened harder to the voice within him that had said it recognized the parting shot of the child who’d been led out of his office by Bianca the previous afternoon. An expression he’d heard a certain man use a long time ago, a man he’d had few dealings with but had instinctively disliked a very great deal.

There was a click. A strong white beam of light from a flashlight illuminated the little girl’s face as she stood there between Todd and the door.

She cocked her head. “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page here, Todd,” she said.

The girl let the long knife slip smoothly out of the sleeve of her nice, expensive coat. “You hearing me?”

Crane felt sick. “Yes, Marcus, I hear you loud and clear.”

She smiled. “Glad you got there in the end.”