I obeyed with gusto; my right hand pressed the phone against my ear to the point where I started losing circulation. My left hand gripped the wheel as if preparing to tear it off.
“Get on Route Four heading west.”
I took the right turn and jug-handled onto the highway. I looked in my rearview mirror to see if anyone was following me. Hard to tell.
The robotic voice said, “You’ll see a strip mall.”
“There’s a million strip malls,” I said.
“It’s on the right, next to a store selling baby cribs. In front of the Paramus Road exit.”
I saw it. “Okay.”
“Pull in there. You’ll see a driveway on the left. Take it to the back and kill the engine. Have the money ready for me.”
I understood immediately why the kidnapper had picked this spot. There was only one way in. The stores were all for rent, except for the baby-crib place. That was on the far right. In other words, it was self-contained and directly off a highway. There was no way anyone could come around back or even slow down without being noticed.
I hope the feds understood that.
When I reached the back of the building, I saw a man standing by a van. He wore a red-and-black flannel shirt with black jeans, dark sunglasses, and a Yankee baseball cap. I tried to find something distinct, but the word that came to mind wasaverage . Average height, average build. The only thing was his nose. Even from this distance I could see it was misshapen, like an ex-boxer’s. But was that real or some kind of disguise? I didn’t know.
I checked out the van. There was a sign for “B & T Electricians” of Ridgewood, New Jersey. No phone number or address. The license plate was from New Jersey. I memorized it.
The man raised a cell phone to his lips walkie-talkie style, and I heard the mechanical voice say, “I’m going to approach. Pass the money through the window. Do not get out of the car. Do not say a word to me. When we’re safely away with the money, I’ll call and tell you where to pick up your daughter.”
The man in red flannel and black jeans lowered the phone and approached. His shirt was untucked. Did he have a gun? I couldn’t tell. And even if he did, what could I do about it now? I hit the button to open the windows. They didn’t budge. The key needed to be turned. The man was getting closer. The Yankee cap was pulled down until the brim touched the sunglasses. I reached for the key and gave it a tiny twist. The lights on the dashboard sprung to life. I pressed the button again. The window slid down.
Again I tried to find something about the man that was distinct. His walk was slightly off balance, as though maybe he’d had a drink or two, but he didn’t look nervous. His face was unshaven and patchy. His hands were dirty. His black jeans were ripped in the right knee. His sneakers, canvas high-tops from Converse, had seen better days.
When the man was only two steps from the car, I pushed the bag up to the window and braced myself. I held my breath. Without breaking stride, the man took the money and swirled toward the van. He hurried his step now. The van’s back doors opened and he leapt in, the door immediately closing behind him. It was as if the van had swallowed him whole.
The driver gunned the engine. The van sped off and now, for the first time, I realized that there was a back entrance onto a side road. The van shot down it and was gone.
I was alone.
I stayed where I was and waited for the cell phone to ring. My heart pounded. My shirt was drenched in sweat. No other car traveled back here. The pavement was cracked. Cardboard boxes jutted out of the garbage Dumpster. Broken bottles littered the ground. My eyes stared hard at the ground, trying to make out the words on faded beer labels.
Fifteen minutes passed.
I kept picturing my reunion with my daughter, how I would find her and pick her up and cradle her and hush her with gentle sounds. The cell phone. The cell phone was supposed to ring. That was part of what I was picturing. The phone ringing, the robotic voice giving me instructions. Those were parts one and two. Why wasn’t the damn phone cooperating?
A Buick Le Sabre pulled into the lot, keeping a decent distance away from me. I did not recognize the driver, but Tickner was in the passenger seat. Our eyes met. I tried to read something in his expression, but he was still pure stoic.
I stared now at the cell phone, not daring to look away. The tick-tick was back, this time slow and thudding.
Ten more minutes passed before the phone grudgingly issued its tinny song. I had it to my ear before the sound had a chance to travel.
“Hello?” I said.
Nothing.
Tickner watched me closely. He gave me a slight nod, though I had no idea why. His driver still had both hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock.
“Hello?” I tried again.
The robotic voice said, “I warned you about contacting the cops.”
Ice flooded my veins.
“No second chance.”
And then the phone went dead.
Chapter 6
There was noescape.
I longed for the numb. I longed for the comatose state of the hospital. I longed for that IV bag and the free flow of anesthetics. My skin had been torn off. My nerve endings were exposed now. I could feel everything.
Fear and helplessness overwhelmed me. The fear locked me in a room, while the helplessness—the awful knowing that I had blown it and could do nothing to alleviate my child’s pain—wrapped me in a straitjacket and turned out the lights. I may very well have been losing my mind.
Days passed in a syrupy haze. Most of the time I sat by the phone—by several phones, actually. My home phone, my cell phone, and the kidnapper’s cell phone. I bought a charger for the kidnapper’s cell, so I could keep it working. I stayed on the couch. The phones sat on my right. I tried to look away, to watch television even, because I remembered that old saying about a watched kettle never boiling. I still stole glances at those damn phones, fearing that they might somehow flee, willing them to ring.
I tried to mine that supernatural father-daughter connection again, the one that had insisted earlier that Tara was still alive. The pulse was still there, I thought (or at least, made myself believe), beating faintly, the connection now tenuous at best.
“No second chance . . .”
To add to my guilt, I had dreamt last night of a woman other than Monica—my old love, Rachel. It was one of those time-and-reality warp dreams, the ones where the world is totally alien and even contradictory and yet you don’t question any of it. Rachel and I were together. We had never broken up yet we had been apart all these years. I was still thirty-four, but she hadn’t aged since the day she left me. Tara was still my daughter in the dream—she had, in fact, never been kidnapped—but somehow she was also Rachel’s, though Rachel wasn’t the mother. You’ve probably had dreams like this. Nothing really makes sense, but you don’t challenge what you see. When I woke up, the dream faded into smoke the way dreams always do. I was left with an aftertaste and a longing that pulled with unexpected force.