Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

The film proved to be a lot more enjoyable on Ecstasy, but not good enough to stay awake through. Eventually exhaustion and serotonin trumped the crosstops: Simon fell asleep in the Barcalounger. Not surprisingly, Nelson featured prominently in his dream. They were kids again-or kids still, however it works in dreams. They were bicycling through Tilden Park, as they often had. Nelson skidded to a stop, pointed to something in the bushes by the side of the trail. It was a body. A man’s body, nude, face-down. Nelson ran away, leaving Simon alone with the body. Simon wanted to run away, too, but he knew somehow that Grandfather Childs was waiting at the head of the trail-he’d get a beating if he went running out like that scaredy-cat Nelson. He rolled the body over, brushed the mud, the damp leaves and clinging leaf mold, from the face.

“Who’s that?” Grandfather Childs had somehow materialized, and was standing over him.

“It’s Nelson, sir,” said Simon. “That’s what he looks like now.” Simon had also turned into his present, grown-up, self, and the body was now in the tub of the master bathroom of 2500.

“Did you kill him?”

“Sort of. Sir.” An adult now, Simon was no longer cowed by the old man-he just wanted to show him how he could do everything by the book.

“Sort me no sort of s, boy. You either did or you did not.”

“Indirectly, sir. I glued him to the bathtub, but he turned on the water by himself.”

“Going to bury him in the basement with the others?”

“You know about the others?”

“Of course I know about the others. Don’t be stupid. And, boy?”

“Yes, sir?”

“While you’re at it, dig yourself a hole this time.”

“I’ll see you in H E double L first,” said Simon.

“Yes,” said the old man in the dream. “Most likely you will.”

In the basement, Linda was sure he’d left the horror movies on to torment her. The screams, the spooky organ music-it had to have been deliberate.

But it was also pointless. What kind of wusses does he take us for? she asked the coral, rhetorically. By now, she was as glad for its companionship as it seemed to be for hers, and as she went back to sawing at the rope binding her wrists, she would have been willing to stake her life-she was, in fact, staking her life-that at this point in their relationship, the coral was no more likely to bite her than she was to bite it.

By morning, however, that would all change.

A cold snap had swept in overnight; when the breeze came up just before dawn, Simon could hear the brittle autumn leaves whispering to each other. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand tiny conversations, all on the same subject: frost coming, death, a great falling.

Until then, enjoy the show, thought Simon, standing on the back porch with a blanket drawn over his bare shoulders. And what a show it was: the sun rising behind him; the dew sparkling on the brightly colored leaves and the grass, and turning even the cobwebs into strings of diamonds; the sunlight glinting off the still, dark green water of the canal; the dawn mist rising.

But on his way back into the house, Simon was startled from his reverie by the sight of a reflection in the glass door: tottering toward him, clutching a blanket around its shoulders like a refugee, was an unshaven, haggard scarecrow with eyes like two pee-holes in the snow. He winked at it; Grandfather Childs winked back. Shaken, Simon reached for the door handle; so did Grandfather Childs.

The last strands of the rope parted around dawn. There were no windows in the cellar, no visible cracks in the plank flooring overhead, but enough light had seeped in from somewhere for Linda to be able to make out the outline of the coral. Thank you, God, she whispered: of all the factors beyond Linda’s control over the course of the long night-the cold, the thirst, the pain, basically everything except the fear and the endless sawing-the one she’d spent the most time talking to God about was the coral. Please, God, let it be there when I’m ready.

And it was, coiled loosely and still sound asleep, to all appearances. Maybe it’s hibernating, she told herself hopefully, as she drew her right arm from behind her back, slowly, so as not to alert the snake, and in stages, because that’s the only way her stiff, sore shoulder would move. Maybe it’s hibernating and it will just lie there all day.

Yeah, right. Hope springs eternal. For your fucking throat. Frankly, Linda wasn’t sure whether the feat she had in mind could be accomplished even by a strong, healthy individual, but she was relatively certain that her chance of grasping the coral behind the head and hanging on to it until Childs returned was better than the chance that it would remain where it was.

As she waited for feeling and mobility to return to her right hand and arm-the fingertips of the left were an uncomfortable combination of numb and pins-and-needles-Linda thought about all the ways this could go bad on her. She’d seen how fast the coral could move; she knew she’d only get the one shot at it. If she missed, it would certainly escape; if she grasped it incorrectly, it might turn on her. She thought of Gloria. Unimaginable, to die that way, in pain, alone, gasping for air.

And even if she grasped it correctly, how long would she be able to hold on? If it were angry, if it thrashed in her grip? If she fell asleep, if her attention wavered for a-

No! She caught herself. This is where you came in, Abrootz. You can go around on that merry-go-round until Childs comes for you, or you can grab the bull by the, I mean the snake first catch the snake then worry about holding on to it but what if oh fuck just do it you sound like a Nike ad just do it oh fuck oh fuck oh-

One thing about insomnia: it made getting up at four-thirty in the morning seem like the lesser of two evils.

Despite her threat, Dorie had let Pender sleep. She also let him drive-all she had to do was shift the lever into “R,” then into “D” once they were out of the driveway, and it was beddy-bye in the backseat for Dorie; he wouldn’t need her again until they turned the car in at the airport.

Pender didn’t miss the conversation. Instead of turning on the radio, Pender went over the Childs case in his mind as he drove. Still unaware of the events of the previous evening, he was trying to put himself in Childs’s place. Where does he go when he leaves Concord? A man with his money, wouldn’t Childs have bought himself a hideaway somewhere? Possibly in another country. Mexico was closest, of course. Canada, however, was more reluctant to extradite prisoners who faced the death penalty.

Then there was Costa Rica, favored by your wealthier fugitives; Brazil-or do we have an extradition treaty with them now? Damn, I used to know that.

So never mind where he’s going to go, concentrate on how he’s going to get there. One thing for sure-almost for sure-he didn’t drive that Volvo over either border. The airports and bus stations were already covered-how about on foot? Or…

He worked on the possibilities for most of the drive to the airport, and all he came up with after nearly two hours were a few long shots. Find out if Childs had paid any property taxes to foreign countries. See if he’d ever taken Missy out of this country-he might have a phony passport for himself, but would he have gotten one for her?

Once they’d dropped the car off, Pender turned his attention to Dorie. He understood enough about phobias by now to know that it was not flying per se that she feared, but the fear of flying. She was less afraid of a crash than she was that she’d lose control, have a panic attack, maybe pass out. So he didn’t bother reassuring her about the safety of air travel or reciting the statistics that said you were more likely to die in your car within ten miles of home than in an airplane accident.