Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

His eyes gleamed. “I took her home and we stood on the steps of her parents’ house — she was still living with them. We talked for a while more then she said she had to get to bed. You catch that? Like she could’ve said, ‘I have to be going.’ Or just ‘Good night.’ But she worked the word bed into it. I know, you’re in love, you look for messages like that. Only in this case, it wasn’t Manko’s imagination working overtime, no sir.”

Outside, a light rain had started falling and the wind had come up. I rose and shut the window.

“The next day I kept getting distracted at work. I’d think about her face, her voice. No woman’s ever affected me like that. On break I called her and asked her out for the next weekend. She said sure and said she was glad to hear from me. That set up my day. Hell, it set up my week. After work I went to the library and looked some things up. I found out about her last name. Morgan — if you spell it a little different — it means ‘morning’ in German. And I dug up some articles about the family. Like, they’re rich. Filthy. The house in Hillborne wasn’t their only place. There was one in Aspen, too, and one in Vermont. Oh, and an apartment in New York.”

“A pied-à-terre.”

His brief laugh again. The smile faded. “And then there was her father. Thomas Morgan.” He peered into his coffee cup like a fortune-teller looking at tea leaves. “He’s one of those guys a hundred years ago you’d call him a tycoon.”

“What would you call him now?”

Manko laughed grimly, as if I’d made a clever but cruel joke. He lifted his cup toward me — a toast, it seemed — then continued. “He inherited this company that makes gaskets and nozzles and stuff. He’s about fifty-five and is he tough. A big guy, but not fat. A droopy black mustache, and his eyes look you over like he couldn’t care less about you but at the same time he’s sizing you up, like every fault, every dirty thought you ever had, he knows it.

“We caught sight of each other when I dropped Allison off, and I knew, I just somehow knew that we were going to go head to head some day. I didn’t really think about it then but deep inside, the thought was there.”

“What about her mother?”

“Allison’s mom? She’s a socialite. She flits around, Allison told me. Man, what a great word. Flit. I can picture the old broad going to bridge games and tea parties. Allison’s their only child.” His face suddenly grew dark. “That, I figured out later, explains a lot.”

“What?” I asked.

“Why her father got on my case in a big way. I’ll get to that. Don’t rush the Manko Man, Frankie.”

I smiled in deference.

“Our second date went even better than the first. We saw some movie, I forget what, then I drove her home...” His voice trailed off. Then he said, “I asked her out for a few days after that but she couldn’t make it. Ditto the next day and the next too. I was pissed at first. Then I got paranoid. Was she trying to, you know, dump me?

“But then she explained it. She was working two shifts whenever she could. I thought, This’s pretty funny. I mean, her father’s loaded. But, see, there was a reason. She’s just like me. Independent. She dropped out of college to work in the hospital. She was saving her own money to travel. She didn’t want to owe the old man anything. That’s why she loved listening to me talk, telling her ’bout leaving Kansas when I was seventeen and thumbing around the country and overseas, getting into scrapes. Allison had it in her to do the same thing. Man, that was great. I love having a woman with a mind of her own.”

“Do you, now?” I asked, but Manko was immune to irony.

“In the back of my mind I was thinking about all the places I’d like to go with her. I’d send her clippings from travel magazines. National Geographic s. On our first date she’d told me that she loved poetry so I wrote her poems about traveling. It’s funny. I never wrote anything before in my life — a few letters maybe, some shit in school — but those poems, man, they just poured out of me. A hundred of ’em.

“Well, next thing I knew, bang, we were in love. See, that’s the thing about... transcendent love. It happens right away or it doesn’t happen at all. Two weeks, and we were totally in love. I was ready to propose... Ah, I see that look on your face, Frankie boy. Didn’t know the Manko man had it in him? What can I say? He’s the marryin’ kind after all.

“I went to the credit union and borrowed five hundred bucks and bought this diamond ring. Then I asked her out to dinner on Friday. I was going to give the ring to the waitress and tell her to put it on a plate and bring it to the table when we asked for dessert. Cute, huh?

“So, Friday, I was working the P.M. shift, three to eleven, for the bonus, but I ducked out early, at five, and showed up at her house at six-twenty. There were cars all over the place. Allison came outside, looking all nervous. My stomach twisted. Something funny was going on. She told me her mother was having a party and there was a problem. Two maids had got sick or something. Allison had to stay and help her mother. I thought that was weird. Both of them getting sick at the same time? She said she’d see me in a day or two.”

I saw the exact moment that the thought came into his mind; his eyes went dead as rocks.

“But there was more to it than that,” Manko whispered. “A hell of a lot more.”

“Allison’s father, you mean?”

But he didn’t explain what he meant just then and returned to his story of the aborted proposal. He muttered, “That was one of the worst nights of my life. Here, I’d ditched work, I was in hock because of the ring, and I couldn’t even get five minutes alone with her. Man, it was torture. I drove around all night. Woke up at dawn, in my car, down by the railroad tracks. And when I got home there was no message from her. Jesus, was I depressed.

“That morning I called her at the hospital. She was sorry about the party. I asked her out that night. She said she really shouldn’t, she was so tired — the party’d gone to two in the morning. But how ’bout tomorrow?”

A gleam returned to Manko’s eyes. I thought his expression reflected a pleasant memory about their date.

But I was wrong.

His voice was bitter. “Oh, what a lesson we learned. It’s a mistake to underestimate your enemy, Frankie. You listen to Manko. Never do it. That’s what they taught us in the Corps. Semper Fi. But Allison and me, we got blindsided.

“That next night I came over to pick her up. I was going to take her to this river bluff, like a lover’s lane, you know, to propose. I had my speech down cold. I’d rehearsed all night. I pulled up to the house but she just stood on the porch and waved for me to come up to her. Oh, she was beautiful as ever. I just wanted to hold her. Put my arms around her and hold her forever.

“But she was real distant. She stepped away from me and kept glancing into the house. Her face was pale and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. I didn’t like it that way. I’d told her I liked it when she wore it down. So when I saw the ponytail it was like a signal of some kind. An SOS.

“ ‘What is it?’ I asked her. She started to cry and said she couldn’t see me anymore. ‘What?’ I whispered. God, I couldn’t believe it. You know what it felt like? On Parris Island, basic training, you know? They fire live rounds over your head on the obstacle course. One time I got hit by a ricochet. I had a flak vest on but the slug was a full metal jacket and it knocked me clean on my ass. That’s what it was like.

“I asked her why. She just said she thought it was best and wouldn’t go into any details. But then I started to catch on. She kept looking around and I realized that there was somebody just inside the door, listening. She was scared to death — that’s what it was. She begged me please not to call her or come by and I figured out she wasn’t talking to me so much as saying it for whoever was spying on us. I played along. I said okay, if that’s what she wanted, blah, blah, blah... Then I pulled her close and told her not to worry. I’d look out for her. I whispered it, like a secret message.