Trust Your Eyes

FIFTY-FIVE

The woman said, “So you’re Ray.”

“Yes,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the ice pick.

She tugged on Thomas’s hair. “And this one? Thomas? He’s your brother?”

“Yes.”

“Ray, no one has to get hurt here if you don’t do anything stupid.”

“Okay,” I said. “Please don’t hurt him.”

Thomas looked like he was standing out in the cold. His body was trembling. I couldn’t see his hands, but I bet they were shaking. In our life together, I had never seen him look more terrified.

“Ray, tell her to let me go!”

“It’s okay, Thomas. I’m going to give her whatever she wants.”

“That’s good, Ray,” the woman said. “So long as you cooperate, everything will be fine.” I noticed she had one of those Bluetooth thingies in her ear that was mostly hidden by blond hair that fell to her shoulders. “You’re clear to come in,” she said, like she was talking to her shoulder. “We’re in the basement.”

“Just tell me what you want,” I said.

“Right now I want you to be quiet,” she said, still holding Thomas by the hair, the ice pick dimpling his neck. “Things’ll be moving along shortly.”

Even from down in the basement, I thought I could hear a car pulling up to the house. A distant sound of crunching gravel, then a door opening and closing. About half a minute later, the front door opened, and seconds after that, I heard someone coming down the steps behind me. I turned my head around, and once the man had descended far enough for the bare bulb to cast light on his face, I got a look at him. Tall, bald, heavyset, a nose that had been broken at some point.

He looked at me. “So you’re Ray Kilbride.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Who’s that?”

“This is the brother,” the woman said. “Thomas.”

“Hello, Thomas,” the man said, his voice even. “I’m Lewis. I see you’ve met Nicole.” As he came up alongside me I noticed a bulge under his leather bomber jacket that was larger than an ice pick. Slung over his shoulder was a small backpack.

“There’s not much here but you’re welcome to it,” I said.

“Not my computer!” Thomas blurted.

Lewis cocked his head slightly to look me in the eye. “You think this is a robbery? Is that what you think?”

“They can’t have my computer,” Thomas repeated. “You can have my dad’s.”

“What do you want, then?” I asked.

“I want you to put your hands behind your back,” Lewis said. He unzipped the backpack and took out a set of plastic handcuffs, the kind you see riot police using on protesters.

“Please,” I said. “This is some kind of mistake.”

Lewis said, “If I have to ask you again to put your hands behind your back, my friend’s going to let some air into your brother’s neck.”

His voice carried a calm sense of authority. Coplike. My guess was, if he’d ever been one, he wasn’t now.

I put my hands behind me. He slipped the narrow plastic bands over both wrists and pulled them snug. They bit cruelly into my skin. I immediately wiggled my fingers, wondering how long it would be before I started losing feeling in them.

“You good, Lewis?” the woman asked.

It worried me that they didn’t care if we knew their names. I tried to calm myself with the thought that maybe they were using assumed ones. But that struck me as unlikely.

“Yeah,” he said, at which point the woman took the pick away from Thomas’s throat and released her grip on his hair. She gave him a small shove in my direction.

“I’m scared, Ray,” he said. He turned enough that I could see his wrists were already cuffed similarly to mine.

“I know,” I said. “Me, too.”

“We take them both?” Nicole asked Lewis.

“Good question,” he said. “Let me think on that. First, I’m gonna do a walk-through of the house. Make sure there isn’t anyone else around.”

He went back upstairs, leaving Thomas and me with Nicole.

“Listen,” I said to her, “we’re-”

“Shut up,” she said.

Lewis was back in two minutes. He had a puzzled expression on his face as he descended the stairs.

“What’s the story upstairs?” he asked.

“The maps?” I said.

“Yeah. And the computer.”

“They’re mine,” Thomas said. “I hope you didn’t touch any of them.”

“I think we need to move this party upstairs,” Lewis said.

I nodded. I nudged my shoulder up against Thomas. “Come on, man,” I said. “We’ll do what they say and then everything’ll be okay.” I didn’t know what else to do but lie.

Thomas went up the stairs after Lewis, and Nicole followed me. Thomas and I both took the steps cautiously since we couldn’t grab the two-by-four banister. I thought about spinning around and giving the woman a good kick in the face, and maybe if it had just been her, I’d have tried. But that would leave Lewis up in the kitchen, and if that bulge in his jacket was a gun, as I suspected, he’d make quick work of the two of us.

We crossed the first floor and went up the stairs to second-floor hallway.

Nicole had not seen what Lewis had already found. A hallway with maps stuck to the walls everywhere. She cast her eyes everywhere, across maps of South America, Australia, India, as well as detailed street maps including San Francisco, Cape Town, Denver. And that was just in a two-foot stretch.

“It gets better in here,” Lewis said, pushing open the door to Thomas’s room.

Nicole went in first, seemingly mesmerized by the walls, done up just like the hall. She said nothing as her eyes roamed over the maps. At one point, she reached out toward a map of Australia and, almost dreamily, touched her index finger to Sydney.

“And look at this,” Lewis said to her, pointing to the computer monitors. Each of the three screens offered a different vantage point of the same street. “Where is that?” he asked me.

“I have no idea.”

Thomas said, “Lisbon.”

“Lisbon,” Lewis repeated. “This is Whirl360, right?”

Thomas nodded.

“Whose computer is this?”

“Mine,” my brother said.

“Why are you looking at Lisbon?”

“I look at everything,” he said.

“What do you mean, everything?”

“He means everything,” I said. “He looks at cities all over the world.”

“Why?”

“It’s a hobby,” I said.

Thomas shot me a look, obviously wondering why I was lying. Then, to Lewis he said, “You already know, don’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“About the maps disappearing, and how I’m going to help the black-ops people.”

Nicole said, “What the fuck?”

“You’re the bad guys,” Thomas said, like we were all kids playing cops and robbers.

Lewis cracked a smile. “I guess we are. So, let me ask you boys this. Which one of you was looking up Orchard Street on here?” He looked at me. “I thought it was you, since you’re the one who came knocking on the door.”

I felt a chill. It was starting to become clear just how much trouble we were in.

“The neighbor,” I said.

Lewis shook his head. “Motion-activated camera. Trained on the apartment door.”

So now we knew. “Oh,” I said.

“Got a picture of what you were holding in your hand.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“So who was it?”

“I found it,” Thomas said, a hint of pride in his voice. “I saw the lady with the bag over her head. Ray went to check it out for me.”

Lewis looked at Nicole and said, “Well, I guess that answers your question.” When she raised a questioning eyebrow, he added, “About whether we’re taking one of them or both.”