Low Life (16 page)

But something was wrong. Something out here had changed – in a bad way, in a way that had something to do with what was happening to him.

He closed his eyes and tried to create an image of what the street had looked like earlier, when he had left for the college this morning. He laid that image over what the street looked like
right now, like a transparency, trying to see the difference. Something had been added or removed. Something had changed.

After a moment he knew. His Volvo was gone.

When he first arrived this morning he’d parked his Volvo on the street about six houses down, but now someone’s yellow Mustang was parked there.

Someone had taken it. Someone was manipulating things. Someone who could be in many places simultaneously, or coordinate several people.

He took a deep drag from his cigarette and exhaled through his nostrils.

He needed to walk, to think about this, to figure out what to do next. He started down the sidewalk, heading toward Colorado. He had no destination in mind. He just needed to move, to get blood
flowing through his brain so he could think. He felt dull and stupid. He felt scared.

An engine roared to life, a pair of headlight beams splashed across his back. He froze a moment, considered glancing over his shoulder, but changed his mind. He would just keep walking,
pretending he wasn’t bothered, and see what the car did. It was probably nothing, just some guy who worked nights. As he walked the car rolled along behind him. It didn’t gain speed and
take off down the street. It simply followed.

Unable to resist any longer Simon glanced over his shoulder. A Cadillac – big and rectangular and funereal – was rolling along behind him. He thought it was black, but color was a
strange thing beneath the light of the moon, and because of the headlights shining in his eyes he could not see who was driving.

He continued walking. No matter how much he tried to resist the urge to increase his speed, he found himself moving faster and faster. By the time he reached Colorado he was running, and still
the Cadillac was behind him, following him.

He ran along Colorado, glancing behind him again and again as he did, feeling cool night air stinging his throat. The Cadillac was still there. It was in the right lane, simply following him,
other cars swerving around it. He ran through the night from shadow to light, shadow to light, through the spotlights of the street lamps on the boulevard. A stitch sewed itself into his side. His
legs started to feel rubbery and weak. Closed businesses sat dark on either side of him.

He turned down a side street and kept running. The car turned behind him and continued to follow.

A train was nearby. The sound of metal wheels rolling along metal tracks, the wind that the train’s motion was creating, the screech of the train braking.

He looked around, saw steps leading down to the Memorial Park train platform. He saw the light rail train stop and the doors open. It was only three cars long, as almost no one was using the
metro at this late hour. A few people got on and a few people got off.

He leaped down the stairs, in two long strides, and ran for the train.

The doors closed when he was still ten feet away.

He pounded the button and the doors opened.

He looked over his shoulder and saw a shadowy figure in sunglasses and a black suit coming down the stairs toward the train, black tie flapping over the left shoulder.

He stepped on. The doors closed. The figure was still outside.

The train started moving, rolling along the tracks.

The figure stood on the platform outside and watched him as the train rolled away.

He rode the train – past Highland Park and Chinatown – to the end of the line. All the doors opened. A voice over a loudspeaker said everyone had to get off. The
train was now out of service. He stepped onto a platform. Amtrak and Metro-Link trains were stopped at other platforms. People were standing and sitting with luggage piled beside them.

For a moment Simon considered getting on one of those trains, a train that led out of town, away from all of this. It was a great urge, but he suspected that whatever this was, whatever was
going on, it couldn’t be remedied geographically. Walk the mile: he had to see this to the end, whatever it was.

He took the stairs down into Union Station.

It was nearly empty inside. A janitor was pushing a dust mop back and forth across the red and black concrete. His face was skeletal, cheekbones large and jutting, hollows in his cheeks like he
was sucking them in, eyes like two black holes, mouth droopy on the left side and a little bit of drool hanging there.

Simon knew he was being paranoid, but he couldn’t help but feel that the man was watching him as he walked by. He didn’t turn his head as Simon passed, but his eyes seemed to follow
him.

After looking at a map of the various train routes, Simon made his way down two sets of escalators to the subway, walking beneath a concrete ceiling that looked like it was
dripping sewage through several cracks, brownish-yellow stalactites clinging on up there as liquid ran down them and splashed to the ground beneath. Orange cones blocked off the corridor beneath
the worst of the drippage. The Red Line would take him to within a quarter mile of the Filboyd Apartments. Then he could walk the rest of the way.

He didn’t know where else to go.

Whoever was following him knew where Shackleford lived, but he might not know where Simon’s apartment was. He might, of course – but he might not. And he needed to get a grip on what
was happening here, to wrap his mind around it.

The Volvo was parked on the street in front of the Filboyd Apartments. It was empty and dark, the doors locked. It just sat there being a car and Simon stood looking at it as
if he expected it to do otherwise.

‘Well, take him.’

He spun around. The sidewalk was empty. He was sure, though, that he’d heard Helmut Müller’s thin voice. It still echoed in his mind.

He pushed his way through the front doors and walked up the narrow flight of stairs toward his apartment. As he walked up he saw someone’s back, and then a pair of legs
and feet at the top of the stairs. The shoes were old suede, slick with age. The sport coat the man was wearing was brown corduroy with leather elbow patches. The hair was gray. He was
spray-painting something onto the wall opposite the stairs. There was a hissing sound coming from his direction.

‘Hey!’

Simon ran up the last several steps.

The man in the corduroy coat finished painting quickly and darted left, out of Simon’s sight.

When he reached the top of the stairs he turned left and looked down the corridor. A brown blur vanished around the corner. Simon ran after it, past his apartment, down the leopard-spotted
carpet. He could smell roasting beef coming from an apartment that opened into the corridor. He turned left again, not knowing what was just around the corner.

As soon as he did, something hit him on the forehead – two fists clenched together and brought down like a hammer – knocking him to the ground. The floor rushed up and hit him in the
backside. The ceiling spun. He heard an involuntary grunt escape him, pushed out by the fall.

And then he was being trampled on. He turned over onto his belly, got onto his hands and knees, and then pushed himself up onto his feet. He looked back down the corridor, in the direction from
which he’d just run. It was empty.

He thought he could hear the man thudding down steps.

His heart was pounding in his chest. He walked back through the corridor and looked into the dark stairwell.

Halfway down lay a lump on one of the steps. The stairwell was so dark, he couldn’t tell what it was. He walked down and picked it up. It was a shoe. He recognized it, the old suede, the
broken and tied-together shoelaces. He’d left these shoes back in Pasadena this morning, along with his car and the corduroy coat the man had been wearing. He carried the shoe back
upstairs.

On the wall opposite the stairwell, on a patch of fresh white paint (Leonard must have just had it done earlier today), the graffito said

Simon touched the paint and looked at his finger. It was black, like he’d just been booked down at the police station. He wiped it off on the wall, smearing an ‘s’ above the
lettering.

He stared at it for a long time.

He was inside his apartment and twisting the deadbolt home before he realized that the door had been repaired. He unlocked the door, opened it, looked out into the empty
corridor, then closed it and listened to it latch. He locked it again. He slid the chain into place. Had it still been broken when he came back earlier to get Francine? He couldn’t remember.
He remembered taking out his keys and unlocking the door. He remembered that. But he couldn’t remember whether he’d stuck a key into the doorknob or a padlock. Could Leonard have had it
done today while someone was here painting the corridor wall? It was possible, he supposed, but then wouldn’t there be screw holes in the wood of the door? Certainly Leonard wouldn’t
have replaced—

He turned his back to the door and leaned against it.

He tossed the suede shoe onto the coffee table.

Vertigo swept over him. The world tilted sideways. He grabbed onto the wall to keep himself upright. Once the feeling passed, he looked around the room.

It was empty but for him and the furniture – his old couch, his coffee table.

Someone upstairs flushed a toilet and the pipes in the walls let out a sad cry. He could hear someone’s radio playing, the sounds of traffic coming into the building through the paper-thin
windows; someone with a deep voice boomed laughter.

‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Is anybody here?’

He searched the apartment and found it empty and got a bottle of whiskey from the kitchen and sat down on the couch. Tonight was no night to bother with glasses. He twisted off
the top and drank directly from the bottle. It was harsh and strong and good. There was half a bottle left and he wanted to down it all but he knew he couldn’t allow himself to do that. He
needed his mind working. He already felt confused and afraid as it was and drinking more would only make it worse. It would make him feel better but it would make it worse in the long run. He took
another swig, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, wiped at the corners of his mouth with thumb and index finger, rolled what he found there together between them, flicked it to the floor, and
set the bottle down on the coffee table.

He wanted to go to sleep, but he couldn’t – not here.

That man might be back, or somebody else might, and he’d be defenseless in his sleep.

He had come here to get away, but he’d gotten away from nothing. Until he worked this thing out he could stay neither here nor at the house in Pasadena. He would have to get a motel room.
That man might be back at any moment.

He got to his feet and headed for the door.

His keys were gone. He had found the door unlocked or he would have noticed when he got here. At some point in the day someone must have taken them from his pocket. That
explained how his car had gotten here. Whoever took his keys – the man who was wearing his clothes – had driven it here.

Kate Wilhelm was the only person who’d been close enough to take them but she hadn’t done it alone. She had seduced him, gotten him separated from his keys, and someone else had
taken them. While he had been with Kate in the bedroom someone had sneaked into the living room. That was where he’d left his overcoat, which had had both sets of keys as well as
Jeremy’s wallet stuffed into its pockets. But only one set of keys was taken – Simon’s. And apparently the clothes he was wearing when he arrived in Pasadena this morning.

But what mattered was who was behind this. The man behind the curtain. The Great and Powerful Oz. Someone was organizing this; someone was trying to drive him mad. It had to be Zurasky. The
doctor was the only connection between him and Jeremy, and whoever was doing this knew who he was. Robert still might be involved somehow, maybe simply as an informant, but Zurasky had to be
organizing this. Simon didn’t know why or how, but it had to be him. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed there was no alternative. He had been manipulating Jeremy during their
sessions, must have talked Jeremy into breaking into his apartment, into trying to kill him.

Simon couldn’t remember doing anything that deserved death, but he must have done something to warrant death in someone’s eyes: someone had tried to kill him.

Zurasky would be home in bed at this hour. His office would be empty. His records would be there unguarded. Perhaps there was something in Shackleford’s file that would prove useful, or
maybe something in his own file.

He wanted sleep, but he thought he should take care of this first. If he didn’t do it tonight, it would have to wait another day, and by then – well, who knew what might have
happened by then?

He had no vehicle here. He was a payroll accountant and knew nothing about hot-wiring cars, which meant his Volvo was useless to him. And Los Angeles’s train system
didn’t go within two miles of Zurasky’s office. He had to take the train back to Pasadena to get the Saab, then drive that into North Hollywood. Then he would find a motel room and get
the sleep he so desperately needed.