“She was like this after surgery,” he said. “They thought she wouldn’t make it, and then her fever suddenly dropped. A little miracle. I was glad to be there when she woke up.”
I tried to speak, and Ollie asked, “What is it, Lyda? What do you need?”
“Ganesh,” I said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t understand,” Rovil said.
“It’s the fever talking,” Ollie said. She straightened, but her eyes held mine. Oh, she was so quick. All she needed was the smallest nod to point her in the right direction.
“Call the nurse,” she said to him. “I can’t be here. I’ll see you outside in a couple hours.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The parking lot of the CHRISTUS St. Vincent Medical Center was a black page, the cars set upon it like characters from a metal alphabet. Empty spaces separated the characters into words, and each row formed a sentence. Hospital staff and media people and ordinary visitors had cooperated with the parking lot in the writing of it, and they rewrote it over the course of the day, adding and removing vehicles, adjusting by make and model, by color and year, until finally, just before dawn, the editing subsided and the final message of the night could be read. The sadness of the world’s parking lots was that no one was ever there to decipher it.
Almost never.
Olivia Skarsten leaned against the hood of a black sedan parked at the edge of the lot and considered the pattern laid out before her under the dim lights. The message came to her just as Rovil Gupta stepped out of the hospital’s sliding doors. He saw her standing by his car and began to walk toward her.
“‘The skin of the ground is cold,’” Ollie said. “‘But the sun is coming.’”
“Pardon?” Rovil said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just something somebody told me. How’s Lyda doing?”
“They gave her meds to bring down the fever, and something else to let her sleep,” Rovil said.
They got into the car. “I’m staying in an out-of-the-way place,” Ollie said. “If you could drop me there I’d appreciate it.”
“Of course,” he said. He asked for an address to punch in to the GPS, but she said she’d just direct him. They left the hospital parking lot and turned south.
“I’m going to go back to my hotel and sleep for a few hours, then start the drive home,” he said. “I hate to leave Lyda, but I’ve been away too long.”
“You’ve done enough,” Ollie said. “Turn left at the light.” Eventually they got onto Central Avenue and followed that under the interstate. The sky began to lighten above them. “You and I never got the chance to talk much,” Ollie said.
He smiled. “I just assumed you didn’t like me.”
“I get that a lot,” she said. “I don’t have a spiritual advisor to remind me when I’m being too harsh.”
“It is a great help,” he said.
“Maybe we’d all be better off with a touch of the Numinous,” she said. “Maybe not so much as you and Lyda.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Rovil said. “Then again, most substances turn toxic at extreme levels.”
“Water, for example.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Turn up here.”
“Of course,” he said. “Is your hotel nearby? It seems pretty residential.”
The houses along the street were one-story brown boxes like miniature prisons. The front yards were desert rock and clumps of parched plant life.
“It was cheaper to get a house for a week,” she said. “More like house-sitting. I found it online. Slow down … okay, this one.”
It was another rectangular brown home with a one-car garage and a few clumps of trees to provide some privacy. It had gotten terrible reviews online and was in no danger of being rented soon. An hour ago she’d disabled the amateurish alarm system and moved in. Rovil didn’t think to ask how she’d gotten from the house to the hospital. The silver pickup she’d stolen was sitting in row three, one letter in the parking lot’s little prayer.
Rovil put the car in park. “I’m sure I’ll see you again,” Rovil said. “I hope—” He noticed the pistol in her hands and raised his eyebrows.
The garage door began to open.
“Pull in,” Ollie said.
“What are you doing? Where did you get that gun?”
“We’ll talk more inside,” she said.
She had him turn off the car and give her the keys. The garage door slid down behind them. Then she escorted him into the house and down uncarpeted stairs to the basement. It was dim down there, but not dark: Earlier she’d covered the three narrow windows with cardboard and put fresh mini-fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling lights. The space was unfinished, with a cement floor and walls bare to the studs. Most of the room was taken up with junk: boxes of dishes and plastic ice trays, an old-fashioned plasma TV, a stained loveseat, a toddler-sized carousel with three plastic horses upon a cracked base. Things you didn’t bother to take with you. Ollie had decided that the family that had lived here had planned to make the basement into a rec room, but then the young father lost his job, the marriage hit the rocks, and the woman and her child moved back east.
Ollie made Rovil face the wall, then crouched and quickly tied his ankles together with zip ties. He yelped and nearly lost his balance. She emptied his pockets, then helped him shuffle to the loveseat and drop into it. The gun was in her jacket pocket now.
“This is insane,” Rovil said.
“It’s pretty standard, actually. Hands together.” She cinched his wrists. “One time in Syria I let the guy stay in bed. Figured, we’re going to be here a while, might as well be comfortable.”
“You’re not going to torture me?”
Ollie grinned. “See, I knew you’d looked up my résumé.” She shook her head. “No, we’re just going to talk.”
“Then why are you tying me down?” He delivered this with a well-modulated tremor of desperation, not too over-the-top.
“Because you’re a guy. You’d be tempted to try to overpower me or do something stupid, like yell for help. By the way, the house next door is empty, and the one on the other side is too far away to hear you. But if you do scream, I will gag you, and if you fight me I will have to hurt you. I don’t want that. I’m not like the man you hired. He’s got an antiquated way of dealing with people—Guantanamo Classic.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know who—”
“The cowboy, Rovil.”
“The cowboy? But you can’t think that I—?”
“Breaking your own fingers was a nice touch. Not that many people would have the commitment to the gag. But you were right to do it—just bandaging up your hand wouldn’t have sold it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“It’s okay, Rovil. I know you feel the need to keep up the performance. But we’ll all go home a lot faster if we can get past that.”
He kept professing his ignorance, pretending shock and confusion. While he talked, Ollie arranged the space. She placed a wooden chair a few feet in front of the loveseat. Beside it she set a small pile of rags, including a couple of pillowcases and bath towels that she’d cut into more manageable strips. Nearby was her black backpack, as well as a plastic bucket, a case of bottled water, a jug of Lysol, and a radio. Rovil didn’t ask about any of the items—he just kept talking, reasoning with her.
She sat down in the chair and waited for him to stop babbling. “Can I ask a question?” she asked at last.
Rovil sat back. He breathed deep, then exhaled, performing his exasperation. “Sure.”
“What do you like on your pizza? For later, I mean. I’d like to plan the menu.”
* * *
“Why are you asking me questions if you’re not even listening to the answers?”
“Oh, I’m listening,” Ollie said without looking up. It was late afternoon. They’d been in the basement for ten hours. She’d emptied the piss bucket for him twice. So far he’d resisted the urge to shit—he did not want to do that in front of her—but sooner or later it would have to happen.