“How is it going to help her if you run?”
We were both silent for a minute. Paul sighed.
“Maybe the fed will get us through it somehow.”
I rose to my feet. The TV came to life. Some obscure actor, who looked like that guy I’d dropped at my ex-wife’s house, was working a confusing soap commercial. It featured cows and latex rather prominently. That one would never make it to my show, I thought. And then I thought of Jennifer, and whether or not I would be planning a rescue right now, if it was she who had been kidnapped. Yes, I would be, was the answer. But I would be doing it out of guilt, not love.
“It’s going to be another hour before Brome gets here,” I said. “If you want to shower, go ahead. I’m thinking to take a bath.”
“Showering is overrated,” Paul said. “You have a spare toothbrush, though? I hate the morning taste in my mouth.”
“Yeah, in the bathroom cabinet.”
“I’ll brush after you’re done.”
I turned to go.
“Hey, I knew this guy who was drunk and decided to take a bath in the middle of the night,” he called after me.
“Oh yeah?” I said over my shoulder. “Let me guess. He fell asleep and drowned?”
“Not exactly,” said Paul. “He fell asleep and took a dump.”
Things must be funnier at two in the morning. Or they are funnier when you think you have about five hours to live. Either way, I was still giggling when I entered the bathroom. I did decide to go with the shower, however.
As I stood in the shower, giggles long gone and thoughts of Iris making the water cold, a strange voice began to speak to me. Strange, because it was my own voice, only someone else was talking.
“It’s a trap,” it said.
I opened my eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s a trap,” I heard again, but now faintly, through the noise of running water. Absently, I turned the water off.
“It’s a trap?” I echoed.
“It’s a trap,” my voice repeated. “Dr. Coughlin is a phoney.”
“How do you know?”
“Are you talking out loud? Try and think the words instead. Otherwise I get a terrible static,” the voice complained.
Embarrassed for no reason, I stepped out of the shower box and wrapped a towel around my hips. My hand cleared a window in the mirror’s fog. Staring in it I formed the words in my mind: Who are you?
“I am the employer of the late Lloyd Freud,” a reply came like a tap on the inside wall of my stomach.
So it was I who hired him?
“I just said it was me.”
And you are a separate personality inside my body.
“No, I am not.”
How are you in my head, then?
“I tuned into you.”
What?
“Don’t worry about that now. I’ll teach you later. If you make it.”
“This is insane,” I said and rubbed my face. I must have thought it, too.
“Just relax and take it as it is,” the voice said. “I will help you, but I can’t stay in your head for too long.”
Why, is it too tight?
“Humor is good. It helps. Now listen. Coughlin is with them. The only reason they kidnapped Iris and Dr. Young is to get to you. I have a few ideas why they still want you, but nothing concrete enough for you to bother with at this time. Just assume they want you.”
You’re telling me I shouldn’t try to rescue her.
“Not at all. You should try. Just not the way they want you to.”
What other way is there?
“I have to break away. I am sending you help. Good help. Don’t make a move until he gets in touch.”
The voice in my head was gone. Still wrapped in the towel, I went back to living room. Paul was lying on the couch, watching the news.
“You know, you can turn it on even with the feet up,” he said and looked up at me. “Can I go brush my teeth now or did you leave something in the tub?”
“Something happened,” I said dumbly. Paul sat up and glanced around. “I just had a conversation with a voice in my head.”
“You do that often?”
“I wasn’t talking to myself. Someone else was talking in my head. He said he was Lloyd’s employer.”
“What else did he say?”
“That it was a trap.”
Before Paul could respond, the doorbell rang. After a wide-eyed moment, I went to open it, holding the towel together with my right hand, as though nothing in the world would have protected me better. Paul fell behind me, gun ready. Or rather, gun in hand.
“Who is it?” I called.
“Brome,” the speaker in the door said.
The fed, in civvies-civvies this time, stepped inside like a cat, eyes noting my towel, Paul’s gun and the room behind us all at once. He nodded and looked me square in the face.
“It’s a trap,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“It’s a trap,” Iris said. Her coat was gone, and a sleeve had been ripped off her sweater. A cut on the punched upper lip, and the back of her head, where her hair had been pulled upwards, both hurt like hell. Had she worn eye-shadow, there would have been smudges around her eyes. “It’s a trap,” she repeated. “For him.”
Dr. Young nodded and wheezed, blowing air through the nostrils coated in caked blood. A broken nose was the sum of his injuries, because Dr. Young had been reasonable enough not to resist. But as he crouched in the corner of the gray windowless room that had been revealed to them with the removal of blindfolds, his hand kept returning to touch his nose every thirty seconds or so. Iris suspected the old man had never had his nose broken before.
“I should have known better than to return to the church,” Dr. Young said, probing the side of his nose carefully with a pinky. “Then again, I should have been more persistent with your friend, also. I cannot fathom what’s got into me. How I failed to foresee something this obvious…” He sighed, then suddenly looked up at her in wonder. “A trap for Mr. Whales?”
Iris sat on the floor in the opposite corner, scraped bare knees under her chin. Heels of her black boots stamped the two hems of her red skirt to the floor. “Of course,” she said, a note of irritation in her voice.
“No, no. I am afraid that hypothesis is a little farfetched. There were one or two other targets for a possible trap on my mind, and I have assumed you were talking about the same personages, which is why I permitted myself that expression of accord. But a trap for Mr. Whales, with us as bait? Please, don’t get me wrong, Ms. Iris. We’ve certainly been through several exciting episodes together, and I thought Mr. Whales displayed his fondness of you rather unambiguously, but…
“No. If I were to venture a guess of my own, I would say Mr. Whales is presently two doors down the corridor.”
“And it’s either Freud’s employer or whoever killed that… one of them they are trying to bait,” Iris finished.
“Assuming they are not one and the same… entity, which I personally doubt, precisely.”
Dr. Young touched the tip of his nose and seemed to attempt to examine it with his eyes. Having failed he sighed again.
“No matter now. I doubt very much this trap will be sprung. They are overestimating—”
“Why would they keep us together and Luke separately?” Iris interrupted.
Dr. Young shrugged. “For any number of reasons, really. To make the trap more elaborate, to see who would be the first choice in case there would have to be a choice…” Abruptly, he halted and directed another wondering gaze at her. “But that is not the real question that is on your mind, is it?”
“Why am I here?” she asked.
Dr. Young leaned back against the seam of merging walls, his hair merging with the wall’s gray, and stared at her silently, as though he was just then seeing her for the first time. His fingers levitated almost imperceptibly slowly to touch the blood on one side of his nose, glided over to the other side and hovered there for a long time. For a much longer time, in fact, than the answer to the question required. Iris held his gaze steadily, but inside her a vague anxiety was rising.