Trust Your Eyes

FIFTY-SEVEN

If it hadn’t been for the tape, I probably would have said something along the lines of holy shit.

But neither Nicole nor Lewis had given the call another thought. They had other things on their minds. Like hitting the road, with Thomas and me as baggage.

Lewis headed out of the room first, the computer tower in his arms. Nicole motioned with her ice pick for us to follow. As we reached the top of the stairs I caught a glimpse of the front door swinging shut, Lewis already outside. My hands still bound behind me, I wondered whether there was anything I could do now that Nicole was, briefly, without her partner.

But what could I hope to accomplish? She had a weapon, and I had no free hand. I thought about something as simple as running. Bolting past Thomas, heading out the back door and into the night. Down the hill, through the creek, and once I was into the fields beyond, keeping low and out of sight until I got to some nearby house, where I could call the police.

It would mean leaving Thomas on his own, but abandoning him-briefly-might be my best chance of saving him.

These thoughts were running through my head-when it was Thomas who bolted.

He jumped down the last couple of steps. I expected him to do what I’d been thinking, and run to the back of the house, but he managed to wedge his foot into the front door before it closed all the way and kicked it open so he could run out onto the porch.

It wasn’t an escape attempt. Thomas was going after his computer tower.

“Lewis!” Nicole shouted from two steps above me. Before I could do anything, she reached down and grabbed my shirt collar. “Don’t even think it,” she said, and I felt the tip of the ice pick touch the soft skin just under my right ear.

Outside, I heard something crash, then some scuffling in the gravel.

We went down the rest of the stairs at a steady pace. By the time we got outside, Thomas was on his back, looking up at Lewis, his body arched awkwardly with his hands cuffed behind him. A couple of feet away, the computer tower was on its side by the back of a white, mostly windowless van.

Lewis dragged Thomas to his feet. Then he and Nicole corralled us at the rear doors of the van, which were still closed.

Nicole held her hand out for Lewis’s backpack. He tossed it over and she produced the tape again, looping it around my knees and ankles. She did the same with Thomas. “You’re going to have to hop in,” she said, opening the two doors at the rear of the van. It was wide open for cargo, with two seats up front. I saw what looked like a small pile of folded moving blankets.

From his backpack, Lewis took out what looked like winter ski masks, with holes for the eyes, mouth, and nose.

He pulled the ski mask down over my head, with the holes at the back. I heard Thomas grunting his objections as his ski mask went on. Someone took me by the shoulders-Nicole, I thought, since the hands felt smaller than a man’s-and led me into a quarter turn. “Two hops and you’re at the bumper,” she said. “Sit down and shoogle yourself in.”

It took three, and I nearly fell over on the third. I felt the bumper at my knee, turned around, sat on the edge, and leaned over carefully until my upper arm touched the floor. Then I slowly shifted my body forward into the vehicle.

“Okay, dumb-ass,” Lewis said to Thomas. “Shuffle on over here.” I felt the van shift as Thomas fell into it. “Move up.”

Then Nicole’s voice. “We’ll be on the road for a few hours. Not a sound out of you. We’ll be making stops. Tolls, gas. Somebody might come up to the window, say something. Don’t be stupid and make any noise. That will get you killed. It’ll also get whoever hears you killed.”

“We already need gas,” Lewis said. “Went through a tank getting here from Burlington.”

I heard some ruffling next to me. The moving blankets. Someone was unfolding them, shaking them out. They were draped over us, I supposed, in case anyone looked inside. I didn’t think it could get any darker, at night, inside the ski mask, but I was wrong. The world went pitch-black, and the sounds around me became more muffled.

The rear doors slammed shut; then the driver’s door opened and closed, followed by the passenger’s. I didn’t know which one of them was driving, not that it mattered. The key was turned and the van rumbled to life. Tires crunching on gravel as we rolled on down the driveway, away from my father’s house, and then turning onto the road.

We’re never coming back here, I thought.

I had a lot of time to think, in my lightless, smothering isolation.

I’d thought, when we first headed out, I’d be able to get some sense of where we were going by the turns the van made. Hadn’t I seen that in a movie somewhere, or a Batman cartoon, or a Sherlock Holmes episode? The hero concentrates on the vehicle’s movements, estimates the speed by the sound of the tires, pictures the landmarks they’re passing, and by the time they come to a stop, he knows exactly where they are.

After three turns I had no idea where we were.

Just after we left the house, we made a stop for gas. I guessed we were at the Exxon, where I’d filled up a couple of times since coming back to Promise Falls. But once we were on the road again, I soon lost my bearings. It wasn’t long before I was certain we were on an interstate. We were doing probably sixty or seventy miles an hour, and we weren’t stopping or slowing down at all. Occasionally, I could hear the roar of eighteen-wheelers passing us, which suggested interstate to me. Every five or six seconds there was a small thunk as the tires went over a pavement seam. The tires would hum, then thunk; hum, then thunk. If I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat, I might not have noticed the repetition, but lying on the cold metal floor of the van, there wasn’t much else to listen to. Every noise and bump was amplified.

And throughout all these various ruminations, one other thought kept surfacing.

Who the hell called Thomas’s phone?

Who had identified himself as Bill Clinton?

Surely not the Bill Clinton.

I’d walked in on Thomas when he was having one of his imaginary chats with the former president, and the receiver had been sitting firmly in the cradle. He had not been on the phone talking to anyone.

But none of us had imagined that phone ringing. I hadn’t imagined Lewis saying the caller had identified himself as Bill Clinton. Lewis handled the call the same way I might have, had I not been familiar with Thomas’s fantasies.

Except now I wasn’t sure what was fantasy and what was real. I couldn’t explain that phone call. It made no sense to me at all.

It couldn’t be Clinton.

Couldn’t be.

But it was somebody.

As I was thinking that, another phone began to ring. We were about half an hour into our trip. At first I wondered whether it might be my cell, which Lewis had slipped from my jacket at one point and tossed into his backpack, but I was pretty sure I’d seen him power it off. Maybe Julie calling to find out what had happened to us, why we weren’t at the house when she arrived. But it was a different ring. Mine sounded like a piano, but this one mimicked an old-fashioned phone. After two rings, I heard Lewis say, “Here.”

I struggled to filter out all other sounds so I could hear his side of the conversation.

“Yeah, we’re on the way back…no problems…Yeah, he’s got a brother, he’s the one found the thing online…he’s kind of weird, a mental case or something…I don’t know, I’m leaving that for you to ask…And the place was freaky, the walls plastered with maps…No, no, like everywhere…Yeah, okay, and I’m bringing back a computer, the tower, they were using to surf that Web site…Yeah, and one other thing, kinda strange, but probably nothing. Phone rang, I answered it, pretended to be the brother with a cold. Anyway, caller said he was, and I’m not making this up, the caller said he was Bill Clinton…No, no real accent, but I only talked to him a second…I mean, yeah, s’what I figured, too, a crank call or something…Okay, see ya at the toy store.”

The next few miles went along in silence. Finally, Lewis said, “You haven’t got much to say.”

“You want to play I Spy?” Nicole said.

“Fine.” More silence. After another couple of miles, Nicole said, “Shit.”

“What?”

“I got a cop in my side mirror.” So Nicole was driving. “Coming up in the passing lane.

“He got his lights on?” Lewis asked. With all the blind spots a panel van offered, Lewis probably couldn’t see the car.

“No, he doesn’t, but-shit.”

“What?”

“He’s got them on now.”

And then we all heard a couple of whoops of the siren. I could sense Thomas stirring close to me. He’d no doubt been listening to everything just as closely as I had, and this most recent development probably had him wondering whether this was cause for hope.

The van slowed.

“Just be cool,” Lewis said.

“You still carry a shield?” Nicole asked. “He thinks you’re NYPD, he might cut us some slack.”

“No.” Lewis called back to us, “Either of you make a sound, cop gets shot.”

The van went off the edge of the shoulder, smooth pavement changing to crushed stone. It came to a stop and Nicole put it into park, left the motor running.

“Pulling in right behind us,” she said. “The door’s opening. Here he-it’s a woman.”

“Shit,” Lewis said. “They’re always worse.”

I heard a window power down. Nicole said, “Officer.”

“License and registration,” she said.

“Sure. Hon, you want to check the glove box?” Nicole asked Lewis, who sounded like he was shuffling through some papers, looking.

“This your van?” the woman asked.

“No, it’s a rental,” Nicole said. “We’re just going to his sister’s in White Plains, helping her move to Albany. Was I speeding?”

“You have a taillight out,” the police officer said.

“Oh, nuts. Is that my fault?” Nicole asked. “Isn’t it the rental agency’s?”

“When the vehicle is in your control, ma’am, you’re responsible for any problems.”

“Okay, well, if that’s the way it is. If I get fined for this, can I go after the rental people?”

Nicole was good. She wasn’t trying to blow her off, get rid of her in a hurry, which would set off alarms.

“That’d be up to you. I’m not going to ticket you. But if you’re going to have this truck for any length of time, you’re going to have to get it fixed. And you can send that bill to your rental company.”

“Appreciate that, Officer. Okay, here’s the registration, and here’s my license.”

“I’m going to take these back to my vehicle, ma’am. Please wait here until I return.”

“Of course.”

I heard the officer’s footsteps as she went back to her cruiser. Nicole said, softly, “Everyone’s being very good.”

A few seconds later, the cop was back at the window, saying, “Okay, here you go. Your license, registration. And like I said, you get that taillight fixed first opportunity.”

“Of course,” Nicole said.

“Thanks, Officer,” Lewis chimed in.

And then the cop, asking, “What you got in there?”

I didn’t know about Thomas, but my heart stopped. The world, at that moment, seemed to freeze, as though we’d drifted into some kind of suspended animation.

I was thinking, Please get out your gun, lady. Get out your gun.

But Nicole didn’t miss a beat. It was like she’d been waiting for the question. She said, “We have a stack of moving blankets so the furniture doesn’t get scratched.”

“You mind opening up the back for me?” the woman said.

“Hmm?” said Nicole.

“Just open it up and then you folks can be on your way.”

“Sure,” Nicole said. I heard a seat belt unbuckle and retract. I wondered whether she was reaching for her ice pick, or if Lewis was getting out his gun.

A door opened and it sounded as though Nicole had gotten out. Two sets of footsteps came down the side of the van, came to a stop around the back.

She’s going to die. The cop is going to die.

“Could you open it, ma’am?” she said.

“Sure thing.”

I was expecting to hear the door unlatch, but instead, there was some kind of electronic squawking. Static. Then the cop saying something unintelligible.

Then, “Good night, ma’am. You can go.” Then footsteps running away, the roar of the police car, tires hitting asphalt and squealing.

A door opened again, and the van shifted slightly as Nicole got back in.

“What the hell happened?” Lewis asked.

“She got some kind of emergency call.”

We got back on the road.

OVER the next hour, there was the sound of more traffic. We weren’t able to maintain a steady rate of speed. The humming of the tires sounded hollow as we crossed a bridge.

We were clearly in a more densely populated area. There were the sounds of other cars, radios, horns. We turned left and then right, and left again. More turns than I could count or remember.

Finally, the van lurched to a stop, then backed up, turning sharply. The sound of the engine echoed back at us, like we were in a garage, or an alley.

Nicole killed the engine and the two of them got out. Seconds later, the back doors opened.

“Okay, kids, we’re here,” Nicole said.