What Comes Next (35 page)

“You know that every day I get up and go to my job, just like a nice little parolee?”

Adrian nodded his head. He kept the gun pointed to the front.

“And now you’ve seen me and my mom. Ancient sitcoms and changing adult diapers. Real nice, huh?”

Adrian guessed that the weapon wavered in his grip. He tried to steady his hand.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” Wolfe said. “In fact, you’re going to agree to what I want, because otherwise I won’t help you. And you do need help, don’t you, professor?”

He said this in a mocking, aggressive tone.

Adrian kept quiet. He wanted to push the weapon forward. He didn’t understand why when he held a gun it didn’t scare Wolfe. He tried to sort through this equation in his head. The gun was appropriate stimulus.
Violent painful death.
The reaction should have been readily clear and instantly identifiable.
Cowering unbridled fear.
That it was not confused him.

“So time for a little bargain, professor.”

“I don’t make bargains with people like you,” Adrian weakly replied. This was woefully inadequate, he thought.

“Sure you do. As soon as you knocked on my door there, you were selling something. Or maybe you wanted to buy something. We just have to get the terms of the sale right before we get to continue on to the good part.”

Wolfe seemed relaxed for a man facing a gun barrel.

“I want my mother’s computer back. For obvious reasons. The hard drive is mine and mine alone. Personal stuff. Now, tell me what you want and we can arrange a price.”

“I need to find someone.”

“Okay. Hire a private cop.”

“I am the private cop,” Adrian replied.

Wolfe burst out with a short, harsh laugh.

“You don’t look much like one, except for that heavy-duty artillery piece you keep waving about. You know, for starters, professor, you should keep two hands on the weapon. That will steady it, allow you to sight down the barrel more accurately.”

Wolfe smiled. “There. A little bit of education, and I won’t even charge you for it.”

Adrian balanced conflicting notions in his head. He could lower the weapon, put it away, start negotiating. Or he could try to threaten Wolfe the way he imagined Terri Collins might, but he doubted he had the cop gravitas to make that believable. He was trapped, trying to consider his options, when he heard Brian whisper, “
Use who you were, and who you are, and who you will be
…
That might work.
”

He nodded and felt his brother helping to steady his grip. He raised the gun and pointed it directly at Wolfe. He sighted down the barrel and slowly tightened his finger against the trigger. He installed a little quaver in his voice.

“I’m sick,” Adrian said quietly. “I’m very sick. I’m going to die soon.”

Wolfe looked at him quizzically.

“Your mother, how much do you trust her? Do you think she knows what she’s doing? If it was
her
waving this gun around, how certain would you be she wouldn’t inadvertently pull the trigger and blow a nice huge damn hole in your face and
not have a clue why she did it or how.
And even if she only put a round in your stomach, and you had maybe just a little chance to live through it, do you think she would know enough to call 911? Or do you think maybe she’d start knitting and watching television?”

Wolfe’s eyes narrowed and his face lost its mocking grin.

“Well,” Adrian said slowly. “What I’ve got is something like what your mother has. Only it’s worse. It makes me do all sorts of things that are erratic as hell and I don’t understand at all why I do them. So there’s a real good chance that any second now I’m going to forget why I’m here and maybe this cannon, as you so eloquently put it, Mister Wolfe, will go off, because I won’t remember what I need from you and only that you’re a major league sex offender and an all-round piece of excrement that deserves to go directly to hell. I’m just like that. Unsteady. Like standing on a slippery deck, waves rocking the boat. And I don’t have much time to barter.”

Wolfe seemed to recoil slightly. Adrian had spoken quickly, his voice rising and falling like the waves he’d used to give the whole speech a poetic ring.

“That should make him think and really fuck him up,”
Brian snorted gleefully. “
Good job, Audie. You’ve got him off balance now. Nail him.
”

“Okay, professor.” Wolfe was calculating just as rapidly as Adrian was. “Tell me what you need.”

“I want a guided tour of your world. The midnight world.”

Wolfe nodded.

“It’s a big place. A big fucking place, professor. I need to know why.”

“A pink hat,” Adrian answered. Nonsensical. But it would keep Wolfe unsettled. He took a step forward, keeping the gun at eye height, using both hands. “Is this what you meant?” he asked. “Yes. I see. This seems like a much better way to hold the gun.”

Wolfe recoiled. Adrian saw a flicker of fear in his face.

“You won’t kill me.”

“Probably not. But it seems like a foolish gamble on your part.”

There was a momentary silence in the room. Adrian knew what the sex offender would say next. There was only one logical way out.

“Okay, professor. Let’s do it your way.”

A concession. Probably a lie, but Adrian thought he had managed to balance the authority in the room. It was Wolfe’s home and they would be entering his territory. But Adrian’s mystery—just how erratic was he?—trumped the sex offender’s cold, rational self. Adrian had never thought he’d been particularly clever, but this made him smile. His dying madness was just slightly more compelling than Wolfe’s psychopathic desires. Adrian thought that now he just had to bring these two elements together.

Adrian nudged the satchel with the computer toward the sex offender. “Show me,” he said.

“Show you what?”

“Everything.”

Wolfe shrugged, a motion contradicted by the eagerness with which he reached for the computer.

Time dissolved into a cascade of images. They were all different yet all the same. Races, ages, positions, perversions flooded the television screen after Wolfe hooked up some wires to Rose’s laptop. Like a maestro directing an orchestra, Wolfe displayed to Adrian what was out there in the Internet netherworld. It was a dizzying, never-ending ocean of mind-numbing sex. Passion faked, it had everything to do with being explicit, nothing to do with real connection.

Wolfe was an expert guide. A Virgil to all of Adrian’s inquiries.

He did not know how long they had been at it. He felt adrift. And the discomfort at the explicit intimacy that rolled up in front of him dissipated rapidly. He felt chilled by the constancy of it all.

Wolfe clicked on a couple of keys and the images on the screen changed. A woman encased in skin-tight black leather bondage stared out at them, inviting them into a room for discipline. Membership was a single, onetime fee of $39.99.

“Watch carefully, professor,” Wolfe said.

He typed in a new set of instructions and leather-clad Woman #2 replaced leather-clad Woman #1. She was offering the same disciplinary system, only her price was euro 60 and she was speaking in French. Another rapid-fire series of clicks and leather-clad Woman #3 appeared in front of them. Her price was in Japanese yen and she spoke in that language.

The lesson was not lost on Adrian.

“So, professor, you need to tell me what you’re looking for. Specifically.”

The sex offender grinned. He was clearly enjoying himself.

Wolfe clicked on site after site. Children. Old people. Fat people. Torture. “What intrigues you, professor? What fascinates you? What rings your bell? Maybe gets a little blood pumping? Because whatever it is, it’s out there somewhere.”

Adrian nodded, but the acknowledgment rapidly turned into a head-shaking denial.

“Show me what
you
are interested in, Mister Wolfe.”

Wolfe shifted about. “I don’t think we share the same desires, professor. And I don’t think you want to go along with me all that much.”

Adrian hesitated. He had used the gun to get that far. But as he stared at Wolfe’s eyes, he did not think that the sex offender would let him into his own private world. There had to be another route, though.

He could feel his brother behind him, as if Brian were pacing rapidly in the small space, back and forth, tossing over the dilemma in his mind. He could hear the
clip-clop
of his brother’s footsteps, resounding against a hardwood floor, even though there was carpet everywhere in the sex offender’s home. Adrian sensed Brian stopping, leaning forward, whispering in his ear, like an adviser to the crown.
“Entice him, Audie. Seduce him.”

Easier said than done. “But how?”

He must have said this out loud because he saw Wolfe stiffen in surprise.

“
Who do you both know?
”

Adrian nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “He doesn’t really know why I’m here.”

“Who are you talking to?” Wolfe asked nervously.

Adrian didn’t answer him.

“I need to find Jennifer. Jennifer is young. Sixteen. She’s beautiful.”

“I don’t get it,” Wolfe said. “Now you talking to me?”

“Jennifer is gone,” Adrian continued. “But she is somewhere. I need to find her.”

“This Jennifer, she your granddaughter or something?”

“I need to find her. I’m responsible. I could have stopped them from taking her, but I wasn’t fast enough.”

“Someone stole this Jennifer girl?”

“Yes.”

“From around here?”

“Yes. From in front of my house.”

“And you say I know her? That doesn’t make sense. They don’t let me anywhere near kids that age.”

“You don’t know how you know her but you do. You are connected.”

“You’re not making sense, professor.”

“I am. You just don’t see how. Not yet.”

Wolfe nodded. Somehow this seemed reasonable.

“And the cops…”

“They’re looking. But they don’t know where.”

Wolfe looked frustrated and a bit unsettled. “And you think she’s in here somewhere?”

He pointed at the computer.

Adrian nodded. “It’s the only place to look that holds out the least possibility of hope. If someone stole Jennifer to use her and then kill her, there’s no chance. But if someone stole her to make something… money, maybe… before discarding her, well then…”

“Professor, if this girl is acting in porn movies or posing for sex tapes or engaged in this industry, hell, there’s
no
way we can sit here and find her. Needle in a haystack. There are millions of sites, with millions of girls, eagerly specializing in everything that anyone might possibly think of. Volunteering to do
anything.
Everything under the sun is in here, somewhere. I mean, there is no way.”

“She won’t be a volunteer, Mister Wolfe. She won’t be willing.”

Wolfe hesitated, mouth slightly agape. Then he nodded.

“That narrows the search down,” he acknowledged.

Adrian looked around the small living room, as if searching for one of the voices to direct him, but he was trying to determine what to say without saying too much. When he did speak, it was in a low, fierce voice.

“I get it.”

He narrowed his gaze, fixing it on the sex offender with intensity. He could hear Brian urging him on in the background.

“So you have to look at pictures. It’s the only thing available to you, isn’t it, Mister Wolfe? Pictures aren’t quite the same as the real thing, but for the time being they’re an acceptable substitute, right? And then you allow your imagination to take over. That helps you to control things, doesn’t it, Mister Wolfe? Because you need to buy time. You can’t go to prison again, not now, because your mother needs you. But it’s still there, isn’t it, the big desire? Can’t hide that. So you have to compensate because those wants, they just don’t go away, do they? And that is what the computer gives you. A chance to fantasize and speculate and just balance things out, until something in your life changes and you can go back to doing what you want to do. And you’re feeling not so bad about this, because you go to your job, and you see your therapist, and you think you’ve got him snowed completely, don’t you? Because you’ve figured out that he’s pretty curious about all this dark sex and you can tease him into anything. It’s about control, isn’t it, Mister Wolfe? Right now, you’ve got all these things in your life under control and you’re waiting for the right moment when you can get back to doing what it is you want to do more than anything else.”

Adrian paused. “
Make him show you!
” Brian was ferocious, right beside him.

“Open up one of those personal files,” Adrian said.

The gun came up again. But this time it seemed to have a glow in his hand and he was determined that if he had to he would use it. Wolfe must have sensed the same thing.

He snarled, but it was the weakest look he’d managed since he’d opened the door to Adrian.

Wolfe glanced over at the computer and then to the television screen. He punched a few keys. A picture of a very young girl—maybe eleven—flashed up. She was naked, staring coyly out as if inviting with a knowing look, a glance that would have been professional on the face of some woman twice her age.

Wolfe breathed out hard. “You think you know me, don’t you, professor?”

“I know enough. And you know that.”

He paused. “There are places,” he said slowly, “that cater to
unusual
interests. Very deep places. You don’t want to enter those zones.”

“But I do,” Adrian said. “That will be where Jennifer is.”

Wolfe shrugged. “You’re crazy,” he said.

“I am, indeed,” Adrian replied. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

“If this girl got kidnapped, professor, and even if she’s somewhere in here”—he gestured toward the computer—”you’d be better off just figuring she’s dead. Because that’s what she’ll be sooner or later.”

“We all will, sooner or later,” Adrian responded. “You. Me. Your mother. Everyone has a time to die. It’s just not Jennifer’s. Not yet.”

He said this with conviction backed up by nothing.