Lisa Miscione - Twice

“Where are you?” she answered.

“Hello, Lydia.”

She let silence be her answer as dread swelled within her. His voice had a nasal quality, a kind of raspy edge to it that she recognized even though she’d heard him speak only a few times. The room seemed to spin around her.

“You don’t have to answer. I know you know who this is, old friend.”

She didn’t say anything because she couldn’t. Fear had lodged itself in her throat like a chicken bone.

“It’s been too long. We must get together, Lydia. It’ll be a party. Your beloved Jeffrey and your friend and guardian Dax have already joined me. It wouldn’t be the same without you. But, darling, it’s a private party. Do not contact your friend Ford or Agent Goban. Come alone, come as you are, and come quickly.”

“You don’t have them,” she managed, clinging to denial. This wasn’t happening. It was too much like a nightmare. “I don’t believe you.”

Her mind raced. Wasn’t this phone tapped? And then she remembered that no, only the land line was trapped. The cell transmissions weren’t always monitored.

“We’ve been through so much together. Do you think I’d lie to you?”

When she said nothing, his voice changed from mocking, crooning, to razor-sharp.

“Think about it. Do you really think you’d be alone right now if I didn’t? For such well-armed, well-trained men, it was really ridiculously easy.”

“Where are you?” she said, suppressing a wave of nausea.

He told her where he wanted her to meet him.

“Remember, Lydia: One phone call from you to anyone and the party is over. Do you understand me?”

“I do.”

The line went dead. Lydia waited, blood rushing in her ears, throat dry as sand, heart thumping. She waited to wake up in her bed, Jeffrey breathing beside her. When she didn’t, she ran upstairs to their bedroom. She pulled off her shirt and pulled on a black ribbed Calvin Klein sweater of Jeffrey’s. She traded the yoga pants she was wearing for comfort, since her abdomen was still swollen from surgery, for a pair of Levi’s. She unlocked the safe in the floor and removed a Smith and Wesson.38 Special and a shoulder holster.

Downstairs, she took the Glock from her bag and stuffed it in the back of her jeans, donned her leather jacket and a pair of soft black leather motorcycle boots at the door, and she was gone. Adrenaline had taken care of her pain and fatigue, for the time being at least.

He recognized the smell, but he just couldn’t see through the blackness that surrounded him; it was a copious dark in which not even a pinprick of light had survived. He could feel the space, cold and concrete, damp. As he fought to hold on to consciousness, his head nothing but a house of pain, he knew something was not as it should be. He just couldn’t remember what. There was an odd tightness in his limbs. He was having difficulty breathing and he felt as if the room were spinning… or maybe his head was spinning. He tried to piece together the last events of his memory, but they eluded him, like the fading images of a dream.

There was a low groan to the left of him. And in hearing it, memory came rushing back like a kick in the teeth.

He’d taken the call from Dax and rushed to meet him, uneasiness buzzing in his subconscious. Something about Dax’s voice, something about the way he’d said Jeff’s name. Normally, his accent seemed to drag the word out, imbuing it with a rising and falling of tone, like Jay-eh-f . There was usually something pleasant about his tone, even when it was gruff, something musical and comforting about that Aussie accent. But that night, he’d seemed terse, his accent strained. If it hadn’t been for the caller ID announcing his number, Jeffrey might not have recognized Dax’s voice at all. But he’d ignored the alarm bells ringing, told himself that Dax was just excited and in a rush.

There are a few significant ways in which life is not like movies. Here, bound in the darkness, scared and disoriented, Jeffrey thought of one of those ways. In the real world, sometimes people disappear and no one who loves them ever knows what happened to them. Like the West Village couple who were expecting friends for dinner one fall evening a couple of years back. When their friends arrived and rang the buzzer, no answer. After waiting around for an hour or so, they figured that there had been a misunderstanding about date and time and left. But three days later, the superintendent lets NYPD into that apartment, after numerous calls from family and friends, and the table is set for entertaining, food is on the stove and in the oven; their shoes are by the door. It was as if something had sucked them from their life still in their stocking feet.

There was a dispute between the couple-middle-aged, childless, working good jobs, the woman in publishing, the man a public school teacher-and their landlord. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment that, if they vacated, could be rented for four times what they were paying for it, having lived there since the late seventies. For weeks there were news stories, posters all over the city. Then nothing; they faded from the city’s memory. Jeffrey remembered the maddening feeling that they wouldn’t ever be found, that no one would ever be certain if they were alive or dead, or what they might have endured in their last few hours on this planet. A life interrupted, no reason why.

Their disappearances coincided within a few weeks of police finding dismembered limbs on the Jersey side of the Henry Hudson. A couple of legs, some arms, a hand. Thought to be the work of the Russian mob, and in conjunction with allegations that the landlord had connections with the same organization, police thought initially that the mystery had been solved, as least as far as their end was concerned. Turns out the limbs belonged to someone else. Never identified. Another unsolved mystery… another miserable end.

He thought about Lydia now, feeling his heart begin pounding in his chest with fear for her, fear for himself. Where was she? Where was Jed McIntyre? Was this his plan, to keep Dax and Jeff locked up until he’d finished with her? He struggled against his bindings, which felt as if they must be duct tape. Panic was a swelling tide within him and he tried to keep it from choking him. He’d failed her so many times in the last few months, failed to protect her, failed to protect their child. He could barely stand the thoughts that were racing through his mind. Again the groan, bringing him back to himself.

“Dax?”

“Why the fuck did you come, man? That was the worst Australian accent I’d ever heard,” said the darkness. “Christ, you’re stupid.”

“I saw your number on the caller ID,” he said lamely, hating himself for ignoring his instincts. Fucked by technology.

“He took my phone,” said Dax miserably, somewhere down and to the left.

The other way in which life differed significantly from the movies was that much of it is a series of stupid mistakes, unplotted, unplanned, reactionary.

When he’d pulled up to the warehouse in the meatpacking district, he first saw the Rover, parked, headlights on, driver’s door standing open. Next, he’d seen Dax lying face down in a pool of blood. Forgetting every moment of training he’d ever had, not even thinking for a second who could be lurking in the darkness, he’d jumped from the Kompressor and run to help his friend. He saw too late that Dax’s mouth was gagged, his eyes open and wild with warning. Out of the corner of his vision, he saw a small form emerge from the darkness. In a surreal moment, a midget raised a blackjack and nailed him in the temple.

“Was there a midget?” Jeffrey asked Dax.