Hooked (15 page)

37

T
he first time I almost died from delirium, I was seven years old. I was sleeping on sheets with bright red fire trucks soaked through with sweat. My temperature had hit 105 degrees. I was so sick and delirious that I didn’t have the strength to cry. Luckily, my mother came to check on me. She called the doctor, who told her to pack me into a bathtub of ice. I remember looking up at my mother from the bathtub and thinking: She really loves me.

The symptoms I felt acutely in Santa Cruz were not letting up, so I put Erin behind the wheel and scribbled directions to the Daly City studio. I lay down in the backseat and used a pair of gym shorts for a pillow. I was a six-foot nerve ending. I felt each bump in the road, each piece of gravel embedded in my skin. The sounds of passing cars became feverish images.

Annie sat on the dock. Her feet dangled over the water. She held a mouse by its tail. A dark figure took shape below the water. It leapt. It broke the surface of the water in a splash. It snagged the mouse in its mouth. It was me.

“No!” I screamed.

I felt a hand on my face. “It’s the liver,” said a voice.

I opened my eyes. Samantha was touching my cheek. Her other hand was probing my body. Like a doctor checking a child for an appendix.

“C’mon, sweetie. We’ll get you fixed right up.”

I tried to protest. We had to go. There was no time for acupuncture or whatever the Witch had in mind. In my delirium, my subconscious had been at work. Some things had begun to fall into place—as unbelievable as they seemed. On wobbly knees, I walked to the trunk, pulled out the computer.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Erin took a step toward me. So did Samantha. I surveyed my compatriots. Samantha, granola and tofu incarnate. Bullseye, a human protractor with jagged edges. Erin . . . a striking balance—between dignity and vulnerability. Wasn’t she?

I stumbled. Erin moved forward quickly. She held out her hands. I took them. What was wrong with me?

“I’m sorry I doubted you,” I said.

She squeezed my hands.

I felt a spasm of pain in my head. I collapsed.

38

S
amantha’s alchemy defied all the conventions I’d learned growing up. It mocked my medical training. True, medical students learn respect for the unexpected. The divine. The weird. That’s one reason the most oft-heard phrase among doctors is: “I can’t rule anything out.”

Doctor, is it possible this surgery could lead to com- plications?

I seriously doubt it, but I can’t rule anything out.

Doctor, can some self-taught spiritual guru reeking of herb-based deodorant poke needles into my back and pull me from the brink of collapse?

I seriously doubt it, but I can’t rule anything out.

I lay on an acupuncture table in Samantha’s studio.

The walls had a maroon hue. Soft light shone from a lamp with a white Japanese shade. A foot table near the door held incense and a CD player.

She pressed the play button on the CD player. The room came alive with the ethereal sounds of flutes and a distant wind. I had a hazy memory of Bullseye carrying me onto the table.

I pushed up on my palms.

“I have to go, Sam,” I said. “There’s no time.”

My instinct told me I had to move, to act. But my brain was too foggy to remember or piece together why. The laptop, it had to do with that, and the café, and Erin and me wanted for murders that someone else committed. Rotten police, and a gnawing feeling that, given all the violence, Annie really was dead, and not from an accident but as part of some conspiracy I couldn’t see and that now was visiting me. But it hurt too much to try to put it together.

She put a hand on the back of my neck. She held it there. For more than a minute. I relaxed my arms, my resolve melted.

“Let go now,” she said.

My bare chest felt cool against crisp white sheets. The music began to make its way into my consciousness. I flashed back. To the dozens of other times Samantha had worked her witchery. I always was conscious of the first pinpricks. They reinforced my skepticism. But slowly, I would focus instead on the music. The notes carried me away. I would float along with them, imagining them as animate objects, mostly animals, like brightly colored elephants and chimpanzees and flying fish.

Eventually, I laughed. No matter the stress in my life. Samantha said it was the proof that I’d let go of the stress. Spit out the poison from my viscera and cleared my eyes, nose, throat, gullet, and windpipe.

Can the Witch save me?

I can’t rule anything out.

Samantha put the first pins into me. I blanched. It was more painful than I remembered—white heat puncturing my taut outer casing.

I flashed on the cages. Rats locked up, ignited into a funeral pyre. Samantha put a pin inside my elbow. I nearly jumped off the table.

She again put her hand on the back of my neck. Her fingers rough, but pointed. They found their button. Slowly, I felt calmer. She kept her hand there. She put a needle into the fold behind my knee.

I began to feel the music flow like syrup. My lips turn slightly upward into a smile. The Witch was in control. “Time to let you cook.”

I barely heard Samantha’s words. It meant she had filled me full of needles, and set them to conduct vibrations and heat. The pins were connected through thin wires to an electrical system. It made some pins warm and others vibrate. Crazy, but I didn’t question the Witch.

I heard her leave the room.

As she left the room, I entered a tunnel filled with soaring harmonies. I saw floating notes and strange animated creatures on the horizon. Time passed. Seconds. Minutes. A millennium.

Eventually, I felt the door open. I must, I thought, be fully cooked. I smiled limply and didn’t bother to open my eyes. Samantha would tell me when it was time to come back to life. I felt a hand graze the back of my neck. Then grip it. Rougher than usual.

“Where is the laptop?” said a man’s voice.

Samantha?

I began to lift my head. First slowly, in a haze. Then with a jerk. I didn’t get very far. The hand around my neck pinned me to the table.

That’s when I experienced a stab of excruciating pain.

Whoever was pinning me down had pushed an acupuncture needle into the square of my back.

“There isn’t much time,” the man said, sounding almost gentle. “Where is the laptop?”

Andy’s laptop, I thought. Hadn’t I given it to Bullseye?

He pushed the needle deeper. I screamed.

39

S
uddenly, blessed relief. The man steering the needle extracted it from the middle of my back. Mercy. Pain’s most wicked incarnation.

Someone was holding down my neck, while someone else restrained my feet.

“Andy’s laptop. Where is it?” said the man holding on to my neck.

He took a needle and reinserted the tip into the base of my neck. I could feel it break the skin, and for an instant I imagined the cells dividing. But he didn’t push very hard, just enough for me to feel my muscle’s desperate resistance.

“What happened to Annie?” I breathed out.

He responded by applying pressure, slow but persistent. I saw a flash of white. I realized it was only the start. He could hit a major vessel and, at some point, my spinal column.

I looked to my right. I could see a pant leg, blue fabric. I reached for it and pulled, weakly attacking. He twisted the needle, and I pulled back, the leg moving easily outside my grasp.

“We’ll tell you what you want to know when you tell us where the computer is,” said the person holding my feet.

I recognized the voice, just at the same moment that I realized something about the person holding down my head. On his arm, near his elbow, was a red rash, scaly. Psoriasis. It all jibed with what the clerk from the Santa Cruz Police Department had told me.

They were partners. Velarde had been the behemoth cop who had investigated Annie’s drowning. He was doing the intravenous work on my neck while Danny Weller tightened the grip on my feet.

Amazingly, Samantha’s treatment had actually had an impact. I was feeling the most clearheaded I’d been in days.

“This is making me sick,” Velarde suddenly said, easing off. He pulled out a pair of cuffs and locked my right arm to the table.

“What are you doing?” Danny asked him.

“This New Age shit is making my brain hurt.”

Velarde turned off the CD player and put on the radio. He tuned in to a light rock radio station. I was going to be tortured to the soaring sounds of Celine Dion.

“This one is for Timmy Aravelo,” Officer Velarde said. The cop I’d helped put in jail for battery. He began twisting a needle on top of my right shoulder—preparing it for deep insertion and a direct shot into muscle.

“Ease off, Ed,” Danny said. “Aravelo was a blight. Like his brother.”

“Brothers in arms,” Velarde responded. “Besides, don’t forget who’s paying your medical bills.”

Whitney Houston came on the radio singing “The Greatest Love of All,” and Velarde started to hum along. He steadied a needle against my neck. I could feel him about to press it in again. I winced in anticipation and realized the extent of my fear; Samantha had placed at least a dozen needles all over my backside. He could pierce my lower back, the inside of my elbow, the tender flesh behind my knee. I felt woozy, like I might pass out.

“Tell me what I need to know,” he said. “Or you can take the eternal swim in the Pacific with your girlfriend.”

I couldn’t muster a response.

“We’ll get there, Edward,” Danny said, calming his partner. He loosened the grip on my feet, but held them tight enough to prevent me from getting up.

“Listen, Nathaniel,” he said. “I tried to get you to cooperate. But these guys—they don’t have a lot of patience.”

He was the good cop again.

“We just ran out of time. And they were getting pretty angry with all the poking around you were doing.”

“Danny, tell me—what do they want? What does Glenn Kindle want? Give a dying man a little parting gift.”

He brushed past me.

“So if you’ll just help us out and get us that fairy’s laptop back, we can all go about our business.”

“Okay,” I said. “Hold on. Let me catch my breath.”

I felt his grip loosen. Was there any possibility of escape?

“Aravelo—they didn’t reopen the investigation into him,” I said. “You made that up, Danny.”

I felt him cuff my leg to the table.

“That’s right. I needed to create some trust between us.”

“Yeah, okay, you needed information. I get it. A little misdirection is one thing,” I said. “But
this
isn’t you.”

Danny let go of my right leg. I yanked at it and got two inches off the table before the metal bit into me.

“This is useless. Have at him,” Danny said.

“What could she possibly be thinking?” Velarde said, as Whitney Houston was hitting the big key change in the final chorus. “How could she marry a jackass like Bobby Brown?”

I tried one more appeal to Danny.

“You’re a compassionate man, Sergeant. All that stuff about your father. Was this the son he raised?”

He’d talked at length about his relationship to his ailing dad. A torturer didn’t do that, did he?

“It’ll make him feel better to get the money for his new liver,” he said, then added quietly, “I’ve made up my mind.”

“Enough,” Velarde said. “I’m giving you one more chance. We’ll put you to sleep, just like the waitress.”

“Erin?”

“I did you a favor with her,” Velarde said offhandedly. “They found some nasty shit at her apartment.”

“What are you talking about? It was planted, right?”

“You’re still way behind the eight ball, buddy boy.”

“What the hell are you talking about!?”

I started struggling again, now maniacally. Velarde let out a rodeo whoop. I realized he must still be screwing with my head about Erin, just before the pain began to set in. He put his thumb onto the needle. I took a flyer.

“Wait. Is this more fun than killing lab rats?”

“Quiet down, Sherlock.”

“
You
burned down the lab. You destroyed the evidence of that . . . freaky neurology experiment,” I said, fishing. “You killed those poor animals and torched the place. You are a crazy . . . fuck.”

If any part of me still doubted how dire my straits were, the denial was quickly disappearing.

“Interesting theory,” he said.

I felt the needle start to sink into my skin.

“You’re right about one thing. I’m a crazy fuck. Now, where is the laptop?”

I gripped the sides of the legs of the table, bracing for pain. I found my mind wandering—to the hero algorithm. I calculated. Was there any way to save myself, or should I go down in a hail of false bravado?

I could tell them I’d given the laptop to Bullseye. They’d probably then hunt him down, and bounce anvils off his head until he confessed to the computer’s whereabouts. As a bonus, I figured once they got what they needed out of him and me, they’d bleed us both.

Alternatively, I could play tough, or mute. I could spare Bullseye and probably Samantha. Besides, how many chances do you get to be a hero?

From the radio, the sultry voice of Norah Jones filled the room. Just as Danny joined the act. I felt him press gently on a needle stuck into the fleshy part of my calf.

“Danny, there are half a dozen people who know I’ve been talking to you,” I said. “You’ll be the first place they look.”

Velarde tightened his grip on my neck. I fought for air.

“Idle threats.” Danny sounded tired and resigned.

“Please.”

“Last chance, Vance.”

It was hopeless.

I said, “I can’t.” As much bravery as I could muster.

I felt the pressure lessen on my neck. Velarde leaned in close. “I warned you.”

I gripped the sides of the table in preparation. I was not disappointed. Velarde found his leverage on the needle poked into my neck. Then, finally, it came. Full force. He shoved down like he was digging for China. I wondered if he’d found my spinal column, in an odd moment of intellectual curiosity. And a surreal, unspoken plea: Why couldn’t I be killed to Springsteen?

Then white-hot agony. Just before I passed out, Velarde removed the needle. The relief was instant. Consuming.

“I’m just getting a better grip,” Velarde said. “Here comes the fat lady.”

I let my mind flow free. I indeed imagined a lady. A beautiful, dark-skinned angel. Annie. I reached to her, looked into her eyes, and searched them for an answer.

When I felt the needle enter my body, I opened my throat and let out a wild cry. Nothing came out. Nothing was left.

In the far distance, I heard a click, clack, click of an ethereal Peace Train. Underneath its wail, a voice, “I’ll finish him,” and the sound of a metallic click. The last thing I heard was a series of pops. Commotion. Then blackness.