Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“But how will I-”

“Nellie,” Simon said quietly. That was his warning tone; after all these years Nelson still recognized it.

“Yes, Simon?”

“Trust me.”

“Yes, Simon.”

Twenty-five hundred Grizzly Rock Road had been transformed into a crime scene. Floodlit, yellow-taped, crawling with cops, besieged by reporters and mobile uplink news vans, the grand old dame was being accorded no more privacy than the corpse of a murder victim when Pender and Dorie arrived from the hospital in the back of a squad car, accompanied by a preppy-looking Berkeley homicide detective.

Special Agent Eddie Erickson, from the San Francisco field office, offered them a walk-through. Dorie, dressed in a set of borrowed pink scrubs, declined with a shudder, preferring to wait for Pender in his rented Toyota, which was still parked on the street near the bottom of the steep driveway, where he’d left it only-it hardly seemed possible-six hours earlier.

Every inch of the basement was brightly illuminated; Erickson led Pender through the maze to a chamber where a tech from the Evidence Response Team was using what looked like an alien-technology metal detector to sweep the smooth, level cement floor, which was higher by several inches than the rest of the basement, while another tech monitored a computer readout-they were employing state-of-the-art infrared heat-sensing technology to look for bodies.

“What’s the count so far?” asked Erickson.

“Just the one-but the wet cement’s throwing off my calibration-and of course if a skeleton’s clean enough, it won’t put out enough heat for us to pick it up.” The second tech turned to Pender. “The top layer of cement was put down pretty recently. It’s only about two centimeters thick except over in that corner, where it goes down almost two meters. I have a hunch that once we take ’er down to there, we’re gonna be in business.”

After a quick stop-off in a chamber that housed a jackhammer, kidney belt, protective eyewear, shovel, spade, and several bags of lime and Quik-Dry cement, Erickson led Pender back upstairs. The living room was still being dusted for prints; up in the master bedroom, Special Agent Ben Wing, from the San Jose resident agency, was seated at Childs’s computer terminal.

“Any luck?” Erickson asked him.

“Yes, sir,” said Wing. “All bad. One of the local yokels-” He glanced at the Berkeley detective trailing along behind Erickson and Pender. “Whoops, sorry. I mean, one of the indigenous experts up here tried to access it without checking for booby traps. The first key he pressed trashed the hard drive-what I’m doing now is the cyber equivalent of sifting through the ashes.”

“Could Childs have rigged it himself?”

“He’d almost have had to. Or hired some gunslinger-no reputable security consultant would install a fail-safe device to nuke the client’s system in the event of a breach.”

“That gunslinger idea-that might be worth following up,” suggested Pender.

“You think?” said Wing, archly.

“Us local yokels are already on it,” explained the detective, as Wing turned back to the machine. “By tomorrow we’ll have his bank records, and take it from there.”

Pender followed Agent Erickson back downstairs. “Looks like you guys are all over it,” he said-he felt as if he were expected to say something.

“Yeah-yeah, I think our chances are pretty good. It’s not like he has much experience, rich fucker on the run. Take good care of Miss Bell, though-if there’s any trouble with the warrant, I at least want to be able to put him away for kidnapping with special circumstances and bodily harm.”

“Don’t forget assault,” Pender reminded Erickson, nodding toward his broken right arm, which had begun to throb as the anesthetic started to wear off. “With intent,” he added-after all, if Childs’s blow had been an inch or two to the right, there would have been three more bodies under two meters of Quik-Dry cement in that last chamber: his, Dorie’s, and Nurse Apple’s.

Simon, sitting in the comfy chair, had watched the news. Nelson, lying at Simon’s feet with his back to the TV, head pillowed on his arms and his ears stuffed with cotton balls, had watched Simon-for fifty-five boring, soul-deadening minutes, though it had been obvious that Simon had stopped paying any attention after the lead story.

Around seven o’clock, Nelson tried clearing his throat-no reaction. He sat up, half expecting a blow or a kick, but Simon didn’t seem to notice. He removed the cotton from his ears, then took the remote from Simon’s unresisting fingers, pointed it behind him, and switched off the TV without turning around. (Nelson’s viewing was always carefully planned, and he never surfed: sometimes it seemed to him as if there were an unwritten rule that in any given time slot, there had to be at least one channel showing a program about deadly snakes.)

Simon shook his head like a man coming out of a trance; he seemed to notice Nelson for the first time. “You think there’s an afterlife, Nellie?”

“Are you talking about heaven and hell, or about…” Nelson couldn’t bring himself to say the word ghosts. He never said witches, either, or ghouls or spooks or vampires, lest he somehow call them into being. He knew it was only foolish superstition; he also knew that superstition was mankind’s only defense against the supernatural.

“Heaven and hell.”

“Heaven, I’m hoping for; hell I’m sure about. I’ve been living there most of my life. Why?”

“Missy’s dead.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Nelson. He’d liked Missy, spoiled brat though she was. But he wasn’t surprised-the way Simon always talked about her, she’d been dying since Nelson had met her. “Her heart?”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“It was on the news?”

Simon ignored the question. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

“Upstairs-there’s only the one.”

“In the entire house?”

Nelson explained his reasoning as he led Simon up to the bedroom. Originally there’d been a wall phone in the kitchen, but the very first night he’d moved in, Nelson found himself lying awake thinking about a story Simon had told him at one of the earliest Horror Club meetings, the one about the woman who gets a call from a slasher, and the police tell her if he calls again, keep him on the phone and we’ll trace it. He does, and they do-the story ends with the woman learning that the call is coming from her own house, from the downstairs extension. Run, the cop screams over the phone, get out of the house-but of course it’s too late. Next morning, Nelson told Simon, he’d called Pac Bell to have the kitchen phone removed, jack and all.

“I’m extremely flattered,” said Simon, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Did it ever occur to you to buy a cordless?”

“You kidding? Those things give you cancer.”

“Nellie, your continued survival is living proof that Darwin was wrong. Put that cotton back in your ears and wait in the bathroom…No-leave the door open so I can see what you’re up to.”

“Zap, it’s Simon….

“Yes, I know I’m all over the news. Don’t believe everything you hear….

“Yes, well, I hope you understand that if they do, I’ll flip you like a half-cooked hamburger….

“I thought you would. Now, here’s what I need. This FBI man, this E. L. Pender-I want all the information you can get for me….

“Like where he lives to start with, who his friends are, is he married? does he have a lover? that sort of thing. Ultimately, I’d like to find out what he fears, but I know that’s not likely to be-