Rough Draft (11 page)

“This is your first novel.”

“That's right. I found it here, on the coffee table.”

“Well, I didn't put it there, if that's what you're asking.”

“Then who did?”

“I don't know. I'm sure it wasn't there this morning when I came in. I remember straightening up, putting all the magazines in nice neat stacks.”

“Maybe one of your other clients.”

“Monday I do my writing. Reports, all the crap I haven't gotten to. Randall's the only client I see on Mondays.”

“No one else was in today?”

“What is it, Hannah? What's the problem?”

Randall was staring at her too. His face tightening in worry.

She drew a slow breath, tried to soften the strain in her face.

“Nothing,” she said. “It's nothing at all.”

“You can have the book if you want. It doesn't belong to anyone I know.”

She handed the book back to Hannah.

“Could you come in for a couple of minutes, Hannah? A quick chat.”

Hannah followed her into the back office. Her pulse surging. A stab of panic flashed through her gut. She looked back at Randall. He was sitting on the couch, paging through the tattoo magazine. Studying the lavish blue designs and the woeful bodies they were etched on.

She shut the door. Janet was sitting behind her desk, tapping a pen against her ink blotter.

“What's wrong?” asked Hannah.

“Randall's quite upset.”

“Well, of course, he is. That's why we're here.”

“No, this is something new. This is something that's just emerged.”

“What? What is it?”

“Sit down, Hannah. Relax.”

She had the copy of
First Light
in her hand. It was as heavy as iron. Her ears buzzed with static.

“I'll stand. I can't stay long.”

Janet English said Fine, stand, sit, it didn't matter.

Hannah took another sip of air. Feeling her heart rolling around, a seasick wobble in her legs.

“What is it? Tell me about Randall.”

“He's extremely agitated. As upset as I've ever seen him. But he can't articulate it. He talks around it, so I know its shape. I know it's large and I know it's scaring him. But he can't open himself to it.”

“Soccer? His wardrobe? I know it can't be that.”

“Those are manifestations. He wants new clothes because
he wants a new identity. Soccer takes him outside in the open, makes him vulnerable, exposes him. He wants to hide, wants to disappear from view. He wants to stay inside where it's safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“Think about it, Hannah. What would he fear the most? What began everything?”

“Finding his grandparents' bodies. The horror of seeing them dead. Of losing these people he loved in such a violent way.”

“And what else?”

“Why don't you just tell me, Janet? If you know something, then please, just say it.”

“The killers,” she said. “He's afraid of the killers.”

“What? Coming back for him?”

“That's right.”

“But that doesn't make any sense.”

“It does to Randall.”

“So he doesn't want to go outside. He's frightened of the exposure. That's what you're saying? He literally thinks the killers are coming back for him?”

“Literally or metaphorically. It hardly matters to an eleven-year-old.”

“Well, what set this off? Five years later, what's going on? Did he say anything about that?”

“These things can lie dormant. They're like land mines. We bury them, forget they're there. Come back later and stumble over one. Something trivial might have set this off, or something not so trivial. It's hard to say. Especially when he refuses to discuss the issue. We get close, he shies away, makes a joke, changes the subject. You know how he is.”

“He's crafty, yes.”

“Crafty, but very scared. Terrified, Hannah. Absolutely terrified.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I don't want to alarm you. I just want you to be on alert. He's at a critical place.”

“How critical?”

“Critical,” Janet said. “Just stay aware. Keep on alert. Be there for him when he needs you. Even the slightest jolt could have serious consequences.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

It was quarter after five and Hannah was caught in virtual gridlock on US 1. Trying to get over to the far-left lane to make her turn at Sunset Drive, but no one was giving an inch. Every time she left as much as half a car length in front of her, another hero cut into the space and pushed her farther back into the pack. She was focused on that, on the traffic and driving. Trying not to deal with these other things yet. J. J. Fielding's signature in her book, Randall's new elevated level of fear, the legal maneuverings of an amoral pervert who had fathered her son.

Randall had picked up the copy of
First Light
from the console and was looking through it.

“What's this?”

“It's my first novel.”

“I
know
that. What's with all the scribbling?”

“I'm not sure. Probably one of my strange fans. He got carried away.”

He leafed through it for a moment or two, then turned back to the front pages.

“‘This is how to find me,'” he said. “Did you see that?”

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“And these numbers right below it, that's code,” Randall said.

“It is?”

“Yeah, some kind of code. Want me to crack it?”

“You're a cryptographer now? They teach you that at Pinecrest Middle?”

“If you want,” he said, “I could try.”

“Sure. Be my guest.”

Randall took a ballpoint pen from the coin tray and busied himself with the book while Hannah inched through traffic.

Her pulse was jangling. A raucous clatter ricocheting inside her skull. Randall was making marks beside the list of numbers. Flipping through the book, counting words and lines, circling things.

Clawing for every inch, forced to be aggressive by all the super-aggressive assholes around her, she finally made it to the far-left lane. Ten minutes later, she was at the light at Sunset, waiting her turn to go left when Randall dropped the book on the floor at his feet.

He sat there looking straight ahead.

“So?” she said. “You figure it out?”

“Yeah.”

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not kidding. It's a simple code.”

“Well, what's it say?”

He kept his eyes on the traffic. The light finished its cycle, turned yellow, then red. Five of the cars just ahead of her turned left after the red. She halted at the head of the line and the guy behind her leaned on his horn.

“It's not like it was very complicated. The first number in each set refers to the page, the second number is the line on that page and the last few numbers are the words on that line.”

“Five minutes and you figured that out?”

“You could've figured it out, Mom. It was that simple.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Randall swallowed and licked his lips. He slumped deeper in the bucket seat.

“What is it, Randall? What's wrong?”

“I haven't written out the whole thing. But it's like a story. Whoever did it pulled out a few words here and a few more there, you know, like sentence fragments or whatever, and it's like, I don't know, like he's telling a story.”

Hannah watched the traffic streaming across the intersection.

“Some wacko,” she said. “Just forget about it.”

Randall tucked his chin against his chest.

“What's wrong, Randall? Talk to me.”

He took a deep breath and blew it out, fluttering his lips like a horse.

“I didn't read the whole thing. I stopped.”

“Okay, so tell me what you read.”

“Do I have to?”

“Not if you don't want to. Of course not.”

“It starts out with three guys,” he said.

“Three guys, okay.”

She glanced up at the red light, then looked back at Randall. He lifted his eyes and met hers and the flesh on her arms rippled. The boy's face was rigid, lips pressed tight. Her son was terrified.

“What, Randall?”

He shifted in the seat, looking down at the toes of his shoes. His voice was far away.

She got the green arrow and immediately the asshole behind her honked. Hannah stayed put. Looking at Randall as he stared blankly out the windshield.

“Three guys dressed like house painters,” he said. “They sneak into a house in the morning and shoot a man who's getting dressed for work and his wife making breakfast. That's as far as I got. Three guys dressed like house painters.”

The man behind her continued to blast his horn through the complete cycle of the green.

“It's just some crazy fan,” said Gisela. “That's all it is. A weird guy with a rotten sense of humor.”

“No,” Hannah said. “I don't think so. I think it's a lot more than that.”

Hannah lifted her squat glass and swallowed more of the potent margarita. In the last few minutes her tongue had gone partially numb, but so far the drink had done little to relax the bear-hug pressure around her chest.

Eyeing her uneasily, Gisela took another sip of her margarita and set the glass on the plastic side table. Gisela had heavy eyebrows, dark drowsy eyes, and full lips. She was wearing white tennis shorts and a lime green shirt with avocado and mango slices printed on it. Leaning back in her aluminum chair, she propped her feet up on the chrome rail.

They were sitting on the roof of Gisela's houseboat, the
Margaritaville,
which was anchored in slip A-12 at the Dinner Key Marina. To the west the sunset's crimson sheen was spreading across the harbor like a gorgeous oil slick. All around them the halyards tinkled in the light breeze, while twenty yards off the bow of Gisela's boat laughing gulls plunged into the still water after a school of bait fish, then climbed back into the air and plunged again.

“Randall seems pretty upset.”

“He's shaken, yeah. I told him it was just some kook, but I don't think he believed me.”

Randall stood at the end of the dock staring out at the sunset. He'd been quiet ever since decoding the list of numbers.
Eyes straight ahead. Answering in monosyllables. Now he had a hand on one of the pilings, keeping his back to her. But she knew he was probably sailing beyond the watery landscape, drifting back to that mid-July morning when he'd stepped into his grandparents' house and found their bodies, then tunneled into a pile of Hannah's clothes and waited for the police to arrive.

From the galley below, Gisela's tape deck pumped out Jimmy Buffett's mindlessly soothing voice, song after song celebrating pirates and booze and long torpid days. Gisela was a parrothead—a devoted follower of that simple-minded Key West blend of acoustic guitars and the jingly steel drums and plink-plonk of cruise ship reggae. A double margarita and Jimmy B. blaring from the tape deck was her evening antidote to her daily overload of sleaze.

Last month Gisela had had the
Margaritaville
painted a mustard yellow with cherry trim, and now it looked like a gaudy Haitian riverboat that sold jerked chicken from one village to the next. Brightly painted gewgaws were crammed on every shelf and nook throughout the cabin below, goofy paraphernalia from Key West tourist shops. Sculptures of macaws and purple manatees, giraffes and zebras, and a vast collection of fanciful animals formed out of blown glass. On her dining table sat a large sand-filled terrarium where a band of miniature pirates fought a never-ending battle against an array of plastic dinosaurs.

“Three guys dressed like house painters. They break into a house at breakfast time to shoot an old couple. All those words came from
First Light
?”

“They're my words, yeah. But he took them completely out of context Like someone snipping up a newspaper to make a ransom note.”

“Randall figured that out?”

Hannah said, “He took one look at that list of numbers, he knew it was some kind of code. I'm sitting there waiting for a red light and he solved it.”

“He's some kind of whiz, isn't he?”

“Well, yeah, he's smart, but this didn't require any genius.
Take a look at it. It's like some code from a second-grade puzzle book.”

Hannah handed her the book and the scribbled page, a single paragraph she'd extracted from First Light, using the code. She'd pulled off in a Shell station and gone through the list of numbers, finding each word, adding to the paragraph. By the last sentence Hannah could barely hold the pen, her hand was quivering so badly.

 Three men dressed like house painters enter the house early in the day. The wife is cooking breakfast, the husband is getting dressed for work. The tall killer aims and shoots the wife three times then goes after the husband. The old man has a gun but doesn't fire. He is wearing a white shirt, a tie with blue sailboats. Three shots kill the old man. Then the killer fixes his own face to the victim's face. Now he waits for you. 2649 Bayshore Drive, at nine tomorrow morning. Your name is the next key.

When Gisela finished reading, she took another sip of her margarita and waved hello to the guy puttering down the channel in an inflatable raft. The man wore a red bandanna around his throat and his miniature collie had a matching one tied around its neck.

“Yeah, it's pretty transparent,” Gisela said. “So tell me, why the hell does somebody bother putting something in code, if the code's so easy to break, even idiots like you and me can see through it?”

“Good question.”

“Okay, okay, so if it's not some wacko fan,” Gisela said, “then what is it?”

Gathering her hair in one hand, Hannah lifted the hot mass off her neck and let the sluggish breeze move across her flesh for a moment. She took a breath of air but it didn't seem to fill her lungs. She blew it out and tried again with the same result. She let go of her hair.