I rubbed my eyes and listened to the dial tone, then put the receiver back in the cradle and got out of bed. It was cold, and I put on my robe and my slippers. The cable box on the television was reading 3:48.
I went out to the top of the stairs and listened.
Nothing but rain.
The steps creaked when I descended, and I hadn’t noticed how irritating that was until now. It was stupid, too, because that, more than anything else, made me feel nervous. Creaking stairs and rain on the roof, and a phone call in the dead of night. Maybe it had just been some reporter with a clever way of trying to find out if I was sleeping with someone. Hell, maybe it was a reporter who knew Dyke Tracy had paid me a visit, and was hoping she’d stayed. Clearly a chunk of my subconscious had done the same.
The alarm panel was showing red lights when I checked it, armed. The LCD said that we were safely in “Stay” mode, with “all portals secure.”
Not a bad title for a song, maybe. All portals secure. No way in. No way out.
I went back upstairs and found my notebook in the nightstand, wrote, “All Portals Secure!” in it, then underlined it. I left the book out, so that I’d see it in the morning. I probably wouldn’t even remember why I thought the line was so intriguing when I woke up.
I took off my robe and my slippers and got back under the covers, clicking out the light. I listened to the rain overhead, to the layers of sound. One instrument, many notes, I thought.
When I fell asleep, I didn’t have any more nightmares.
The next time the phone woke me it was day. The cable box said it was 10:12 , and the voice on the phone said it was Fred Chapel.
“I heard from Detective Marcus this morning,” Chapel told me. “He informs me that the Portland police are not pursuing you as a suspect in your brother’s murder.”
“Oh, goody,” I said.
“They’re going to want your help. They’ll most likely come by in the next few days for a follow-up interview, to see if they missed anything, and they’ll have questions about the pictures as well as your brother. I’d still prefer it if I were with you should that come to pass, but for now, you’re off the hook.”
I didn’t tell him he was a day late and a dollar short, and that I’d already tried being helpful to the cops, and it hadn’t gone very well.
“Does that mean I can go back to the bottle?” I asked.
He didn’t think it was a joke. “If that’s your thing, go ahead.”
Showered and dressed and with a fresh cup of Peet’s blend in my hand, a cigarette cornered in my mouth, I went to shut off the alarm and get the morning paper. When I opened the door, a FedEx envelope fell inward, onto my bare feet. I picked it up and there wasn’t an address tag on it, just the envelope. It didn’t feel like there was anything inside.
I got the paper, brought it and the envelope back to the table. I pulled the tab and tore it open. The contents refused to dump out when I shook it, and I had to reach in to free them. There were two items, a piece of paper, and a thicker sheet, a little tacky on one side.
It took a moment for me to realize that the tacky sheet was a photograph. I’d never seen one like it. It was eight by ten, and it felt fresh, as if it had just come from some one-hour place. The image was in shades of red, popping out of a black background. People seen in red.
I was looking at my bedroom. I was looking at myself, asleep, in bed.
With a man, standing beside me, and holding a thing that wasn’t as red as I was, or as he was, in his hand. Pointing it at my head.
A man pointing a gun at my head.
I dropped the coffee and the cigarette and the photograph all at once, felt the scald as the liquid splattered from the mug to my leg. The cigarette died with a sizzle in the spill.
The other piece, the paper, was a typed photocopy, with toner streaks across its face. It read:
GO ASK TOMMY WHY I’M HOLDING A GUN TO YOUR HEAD.
I dropped that one, too.
In my chest I could feel my heart beating so savagely and so hard, I imagined bruises rising on my skin.
I had to get out of this house. It wasn’t a safe place, it wasn’t my place, it had become someone else’s. I picked up the photograph and the paper, each of them now stained with spilled coffee, and stuffed them back in the envelope, panicked trying to find my keys and my coat.
And I went.
All portals secure.
Bullshit.
CHAPTER 24
Maybe there’s a lower brain, or a higher one, or something, a part that understands before the conscious kicks in.
Maybe I was just so worked up, I didn’t even realize that I was thinking.
I was racing in the Jeep, and I wasn’t trying to think at all, but I was realizing shit left and right. By the time I’d hit Broadway I understood my nightmare on a whole different level, knew that at least one of the cameras had been literal.
The man with the gun, he was alone, I was sure he was alone, because the angle, it was from the bureau, and that was where he had set the camera holding his fancy film. Working in the dark, without the light, and he had set the auto feature or whatever it was, and gone and posed with his gun and my head, and the camera had snapped, and in my dream last night, that was the noise that had registered.
I was crossing the Broadway bridge, passing people illegally, and I had to brake hard at the curve, where the road turns unexpectedly north-south. I passed the post office, turned west again, heading up Flanders. I ran the lights at Eighteenth and Nineteenth, over the freeway, not even realizing I had done it until the sound of horns penetrated my shell. I didn’t slow down, climbing the hill, and I was sure that was where Tommy would be. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Mikel’s.
Parked on the street, out of the car holding the envelope so tight it hurt, bending the cardboard in my fist, and with my other fist, I pounded on the door. Mikel’s Land Rover was still in its spot, and there was another car in the berth next to it, an older Ford SUV, dingy and dinged. I was trying to remember if I had seen it before when I heard the door open.
I turned, starting to say “Tommy—” and then I didn’t say anything else, because it wasn’t Tommy I was looking at.
The man standing there was about six or seven inches taller than me, wide, but how wide I couldn’t tell, because he was wearing a big black Columbia rain parka, the kind with flaps and pockets and an oversized hood, and it hid a lot of his shape. The hood was up, and in that frozen instant when the door opened and I took it all in, I remember thinking he didn’t have a face inside that hood, that it was just darkness, nothing more.
Both of his hands came up, gloved in black leather, but in one of them was a gun, maybe the same gun from the photograph. I tried to react, to step back and shout and escape, but he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me inside. I fell coming over the threshold, hitting the wall, and I dropped the envelope and brought my hands up to protect my face.
The door slammed, and I felt a hand against my back, felt the palm between my shoulder blades, and the Parka Man shoved me, and I twisted to keep from getting my nose smashed against the wall. He held me upright, pressed against the wall, and he put the gun against my neck. The emptiness in the hood leaned closer, and I saw his eyes and his mouth through narrow holes in the mask.
“You’ve sure grown up,” the Parka Man said in my ear.
The hand on my back bunched into a fist, taking my coat, and he yanked hard, pulling me off my feet. He was probably twice as heavy as I was, and it seemed like he was twice as strong, and I felt like a straw doll when he forced me down the hall, the gun still biting into my neck. When we reached the entrance to the living room, his fist opened, and he shoved forward, hard, and I staggered, lost my balance, and went sprawling onto the carpet.