Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

I give myself some credit here. It would've been a lot easier to just let her go. Let her go and forget about her. Then I could've finished up with the Realtor, cleaned out the house, put it on the market and gone home, back to the Hill. I could've walked away from this, from all of it, even from the End of Civilization as We Know It. I mean, what was that to me?

But the thing is, when you take charge of someone, you take responsibility for her, too. If I've learned nothing else in life, I've learned that. So I took a sizable chomp out of a piece of toast. And chewing on the mouthful, I said, "Why don't you sit down, Serena."

"I gotta go," she insisted.

"Sit down," I insisted back.

She snorted with scorn. "Yeah, right. Like you're gonna make me? I didn't think so. 'Bye."

"Sit down. Right now."

"Oh? Or, like, what? You'll spank me? I know you're into all that sick shit."

I cracked up. I dropped my forehead into my hand, laughing. Kids. "For crying out loud, Serena. Would you sit down, please?"

"Stop laughing at me, God damn it! All right, that's it! I'll hitchhike."

She started to flounce off. I sighed. I reached out from my seat and grabbed hold of her arm. It was so thin, my thumb touched my knuckles.

"Let go of me!" She yanked away violently. I let her go and she stumbled back a step. "You fucking pervert."

I stood up, towered over her, blocked her way. "Sit. Down. Now. I'm not kidding."

Her eyes moved to the door. She thought of trying to rush past me. Then she thought better of it: She wouldn't have made it. She gave me her angry teenaged fish frown-she waggled it up at me.

"This is, like, kidnapping, you know. You could, like, go to jail for this."

"Call the police then."

She started, and her face went blank as if a little shock had gone through her. I seized the moment. I grabbed the purse out of her hand.

"Give that back!" she said, but weakly.

I snapped the purse open. I dug out her cell phone. I tossed the purse on the table. Held the phone out at her.

"Call them," I said. "Tell them you're being kidnapped. Call 911. Go ahead. I'll wait."

For once, she couldn't think of anything to say. No childish taunts, no naive threats, no ignorant arguments. The whole teen arsenal was shot. Her pale face trembled; her eyes pleaded and grew damp.

"Now sit down, Serena," I said. "I'm not going to tell you again."

She sank slowly, resentfully, back into her chair. I stood above her, looking down at the top of her head. I could see her white scalp through the part in her dark hair. It made her seem very vulnerable somehow. I felt for her.

"Now who got killed?" I asked.

She looked up suddenly, shocked and terrified.

"Last night," I said. "You said you didn't know they would kill him. Who were you talking about?"

She lied in answer without any hope that I'd believe her. She let her head sink again, her gaze on the table. She didn't even bother to meet my eyes. "I didn't say… I don't remember saying anything like that."

I opened her phone. I laid it down open on the table in front of her, right under her nose. I pressed the numbers. As I pressed them, they showed up on the readout screen, large and bright. 9.1.1. I held my finger over the CALL button.

"Let me explain how this works," I said. "I'm the grown-up. You're the child. When I tell you to do something, you do it. All right? Now let's give it a try. Answer my question, Serena. Who got killed?"

She didn't answer. I heard her swallow.

I pressed the CALL button.

Her two hands fluttered out together. They seized the phone and snapped it shut. Her head sunk down, she clutched the phone close to her belly as if she were afraid I'd snatch it away again.

"If you call the police, they'll know," she said softly. "They'll know it was me."

"Who'll know?"

"The people. The people who… did it. They have guys who listen. To the radios. They can get into the computers, too. They'll know if the police find out. They'll know it was me who told them. There's no one else it could be."

She lifted her face to me then, her little-girl face, helpless and sick and pleading. I looked down at her and my heart just sank-it felt like a stone inside me dropping into a well of fathomless darkness.

I could see it now. I couldn't see it last night, but now in the morning light it was obvious. I could see the resemblance between us. I was certain she was mine.

"If you call the police," she said very quietly, "these people-they'll know. They'll know and they'll kill me, too."

Then, crying, she told me her story.

It happened about a month ago. Serena was still living at home then. She was out on the town one night, the way she was almost every night, doing the clubs just as she was last night when I found her. She was wild and muddy-minded on Ecstasy and booze-same as last night. And same as last night, she ended up dancing in The Den with the fake flames throwing her shadow up among the other dancing shadows on the fake-rock walls.

She was out on the dance floor with a couple of girlfriends. Soon a guy broke in on them and separated her from the pack. She and the boy convulsed in unison to the Morse-code music and the stampede beat. Their hands waved in the air above their heads; their hips pulsed toward each other across an ever-smaller gap of darkness stroked by whirling colored lights. After a while, the music changed. It got sparkly and slow. Serena ended up hanging off the boy's neck like a pendant, her face against his chest. It was cozy dancing that way. She liked how he smelled. She decided she would spend the night with him.

She never found out his name. He told it to her, but she couldn't hear it over the music. He was a white guy, though; she remembered that. Most of the guys she hung out with were some shade of brown or yellow, some mix of bloodlines. But this guy was as white as she was-which was so white, it sometimes seemed to her a kind of racial nakedness. Sometimes she was vaguely embarrassed by her own whiteness. And she looked down on most of the white boys she met. But tonight, for some reason, the white of the boy against her whiteness struck her as exotic and attractive. She liked it.

The boy was unusual in other ways, too. Tall and narrowly built, he was disheveled and soft. He wasn't gym-rat ripped like a lot of guys she knew with their heroic pecs and washboard abs. He wasn't all skin and bones, either, like some guys who did more meth than food. There was soft extra flesh on him, all of it pale. She could imagine him in his college dorm room drinking non-diet Coke and eating baloney on buttered white bread while he studied. The image made her smile against him as they danced.

What else did she remember about him? He had short blond hair; slow-blinking hazel eyes behind wireless glasses. His shirt didn't hang loose in the going guy fashion, though half the tail had worked free from where he'd tucked it into his khaki slacks. Up top, his shirt was unbuttoned to show a wedge of chest, white and shiny with sweat and as hairless, Serena said, as an Asian guy's. Oh, yeah-and he was wearing something around his neck. She felt it when she put her cheek against him. She reached into his open shirt and took the thing out and looked it over in a drunken, flirtatious way. She might even have asked him what it was, but she couldn't remember what he told her. It looked to her like some kind of nail or a little spike or something hanging on a leather lanyard. It was weird, she said; sort of gothic, sort of violent like a gang symbol or a cult sign or something. (Listening to her, I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I was pretty sure it was one of those "passion nails" some Christians took to wearing after that movie, The Passion of the Christ, came out.)