Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

“I went home. I waited as long as I could then called, hoping that I’d get her alone. I had to talk to her. I had to hear her voice, like I needed air or water. But nobody picked up the phone. They had an answering machine but I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t get any sleep that weekend — not a single hour. I had a lot to think about. See, I knew what’d happened. I knew exactly.

“Monday morning I got to her hospital at six and waited just outside the entrance. I caught up with her just before she went inside. She was still scared, looking around like somebody was following her, just like on the porch.

“I asked her point-blank, ‘It’s your father, isn’t it?’ She didn’t say anything for a minute then nodded and said that, yeah, he’d forbidden her to see me. Doesn’t that sound funny? Old fashioned? ‘Forbidden.’ ‘He wants you to marry some preppy, is that it? Somebody from his club?’ She said she didn’t know about that, only that he’d told her not to see me anymore. The son of a bitch!”

Manko sipped his coffee and pointed a blunt finger at me. “See, Frankie, love means zip to somebody like Thomas Morgan. Business, society, image, money — that’s what counts to bastards like that. Man, I was so goddamn desperate... It was too much. I threw my arms around her and said, ‘Let’s get away. Now.’

“ ‘Please,’ she said, ‘you have to leave.’

“Then I saw what she’d been looking out for. Her father’d sent one of his security men to spy on her. He saw us and came running. If he touched her I was going to break his neck, I swear I would’ve. But Allison grabbed my arm and begged me to run. ‘He has a gun,’ she said.

“ ‘I don’t care,’ I told her.” Manko lifted an eyebrow. “Not exactly true, Frankie boy, I gotta say. I was scared shitless. But Allison said she didn’t want me to get hurt. And if I left, the guy wouldn’t hurt her. That made sense but I wasn’t going just yet. I turned back and held her hard. ‘Do you love me? Tell me! I have to know. Say it!’

“And she did. She whispered, ‘I love you.’ I could hardly hear it but it was enough for me. I knew everything would be fine. Whatever else, we had each other.

“I got back into the routine of life. Working, playing softball on the plant team. But all the time I kept writing her poetry, sending her articles and letters, you know. I’d put fake return addresses on the envelopes so her father wouldn’t guess it was me writing. I even hid letters in Publishers Clearing House envelopes addressed to her! How’s that for thinking?

“Once in a while I’d see her in person. I found her in a drugstore by herself and snuck up to her. I bought her a cup of coffee. She said how happy she was to see me but also was nervous as hell and I could see why. The goons were outside. We talked for about two minutes is all then one of ’em saw us and I had to vanish. I kicked my way out the back door. After that I began to notice these dark cars driving past my apartment or following me down the street. They said ‘MCP’ on the side. Morgan Chemical Products. They were keeping an eye on me.

“One day this guy came up to me in the hallway of my apartment and said Morgan’d pay me five thousand to leave town. I laughed at him. Then he said if I didn’t stay away from Allison there’d be trouble.

“Suddenly I just snapped. I grabbed him and pulled his gun out of his holster and threw it on the floor then I shoved him against the wall and said, ‘You go back and tell Morgan to leave us alone or he’s the one’s gonna be in trouble. You got me?’

“Then I kicked him down the stairs and threw his gun after him. I gotta say I was pretty shook up. I was seeing just how powerful this guy was.”

“Money is power,” I offered.

“Yeah, you’re right there. Money’s power. And Thomas Morgan was going to use all of his to keep us apart. You know why? ’Cause I was a threat. Fathers are jealous. Turn on any talk show. Oprah. Sally Jesse. Fathers hate their daughters’ boyfriends. It’s like an Oedipus thing. Especially — what I was saying before — with Allison being an only child. Here I was, a rebel, a drifter, making thirteen bucks an hour. It was like a slap in his face, Allison loving me so completely. She was rejecting him and everything he stood for.” Manko’s face shone with pride for Allison’s courage.

Then the smile vanished. “But Morgan was always one step ahead of us. One day I ditched work and snuck into the hospital. I waited for an hour but Allison never showed up. I asked where she was. They told me she wasn’t working there anymore. Nobody’d give me a straight answer but finally I found this young nurse who told me her father’d called and told ’em that Allison was taking a leave of absence. Period. No explanation. She didn’t even clean out her locker. Jesus. All her plans to travel, all her plans with me — gone, just like that. I called the house to get a message to her but he’d changed the number and had it, you know, unlisted. I mean, this guy was in- credible.

“And he didn’t stop there. Next, he comes after me. I go in to work and the foreman tells me I’m fired. Too many unexcused absences. That was bullshit — I didn’t have more than most of the guys. But Morgan must’ve been a friend of the Kroegers. I was still new so the union wouldn’t go to bat for me. I was out. Just like that.

“Well, I couldn’t beat him at his game so I decided to play by my rules.” Manko grinned and scooted forward. Our knees touched and I felt all the energy that was in him pulse against my skin. “Oh, I wasn’t worried for me. But Allison, she’s so...” As he searched for a word his hands made a curious gesture, as if stretching thread between them, a miniature cat’s cradle.

I suggested, “Fragile.”

The snap of his fingers startled me. He sat up. “Ex- actly. Fragile. She didn’t have any defense against her father. I had to do something fast. I went to the police. I wanted ’em to go to the house and see if she was okay. But also it’d be a sign to her father that I wasn’t going to take any crap from him.” Manko whistled. “Mistake, Frankie. Bad mistake. Morgan was one step ahead of me. This sergeant, some big guy, pushed me into a corner and said if I didn’t stay away from Morgan’s daughter, the family’d get a restraining order. I’d end up in a cell. Then he looked me over and said something about did I know all sorts of accidents could happen to prisoners. It was a risky place, jail. Man, was I stupid. I should’ve known the cops’d be on Morgan’s payroll too.

“By then I was going crazy. I hadn’t seen Allison for weeks. Jesus, had he sent her off to a convent or something?”

Serenity returned to his face. “Then she gave me a signal. I was hiding in the bushes in a little park across the street, watching the house with binoculars. I just wanted to see her is all. I wanted to know she was all right. She must’ve seen me because she lifted the shade all the way up. Oh, man, there she was! The light was behind her and it made her hair glow. Like those things, you know, gurus see.”

“Auras.”

“Right, right. She was in a nightgown, and I could just see the outline of her body beneath it. She looked like an angel. I was like I was gonna have a heart attack, it was such an incredible thing. There she was, telling me she was all right and she missed me. Then the shade went down and she shut the light out.

“I spent the next week planning. I was running out of money. Thanks again to Thomas Morgan. He’d put out the word to all the factories in town and nobody’d hire me. I added up what I had and it wasn’t much. Maybe twelve hundred bucks. I figured it’d get us to Florida. Give me a chance to find work with a printer and Allison could get a job in a hospital.”