Jonathan Kellerman - Time Bomb

Crisp shifted her giant purse to the other shoulder.

I hesitated.

Crisp looked at her watch and glared.

Blanchard said, “Not to worry, Doctor. We’re the good guys.”

“No offense,” I said. “But sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

His expression said he’d taken offense. But he stuck another smile on his face and said, “Guess it is.”

Crisp tapped her watch and said, “Let’s just come back tomorrow morning with paper, Hoyt.”

Blanchard ignored her and said, “Tell you what, Doctor- how about we give you a number to call? Verify the Task Force.”

“How about if I talk to Detective Sturgis myself?”

“That’s fine in principle, but the problem is he’s unavailable by phone- on radio alert, restricted band.” He put his finger to his mouth and thought. “Tell you what- I can probably get him on the unit in our car.” To Crisp: “Okay, Audrey?”

She gave a bored shrug.

Blanchard turned back to me. “Okay, we’ll try. But Headquarters may not okay the communication; the lines have got to be kept clear at all times.”

“High intrigue,” I said.

“You bet.” Smile.

Crisp was unamused.

“Okay, let’s go down to the car,” said Blanchard. “No. Even better, I’ll go to the car and bring the unit up.”

“Fine.”

He turned and took a step down.

Crisp’s purse slid off her shoulder and thumped on the landing.

I bent, picked it up, and gave it to her. Up close she smelled of cinnamon gum, had gravelly skin under pancake makeup.

“Thanks,” she said. Finally a smile from those disapproving lips.

She used one hand to take the purse, drew back the other and touched her forehead, fixing hair that didn’t need fixing. Then she lowered it and lunged forward suddenly. Hitting me very hard in the solar plexus, using a stiff-fingered karate punch that turned her hand into a dagger.

Electric pain. I lost breath, sucked air, clutched at my belly, and doubled over.

Before I could straighten, someone behind me- it had to be the smiling Blanchard- shoved a hand in the small of my back, rattling my kidneys, and slung an arm around my neck.

A blur of gray sleeve. Gray noose. Under the fabric, hard muscle pressing against my carotid.

My mind knew the right moves- heel on instep, elbows back- but my oxygen-starved body wouldn’t obey. All I could do was flail and gasp.

The gray arm pushed upward, keeping the pressure on and rolling against my neck as if it were dough. Forcing its way under my chin, shoving my head back so hard it whiplashed. Clamping harder against the carotid, relentless.

Consciousness faded. I saw Crisp, watching. Amused.

Blanchard kept squeezing. I wanted to tell him what I thought of him- how unfair he’d been, pretending to be the good cop…

My legs gave out. A heavy, oily blackness oozed up all around me… total eclipse of…

I came to in the back seat of a car- lying across it, my wrists bound behind me. I wiggled my finger, felt something hard- warm, not metal. Not handcuffs. I touched it again. Some kind of plastic tie. The kind the police use for quick trussing.

The kind that had always reminded me of garbage-bag fasteners.

I managed to sit up. My head felt as if it had been squeezed for juice. My throat was raw as tartare. An inside-of-the-seashell noise roared in my head and my eyes were out of focus. I blinked several times to clear them… to catch a view of passing terrain… establish bearings.

Blanchard was driving, Crisp up front, next to him. The car made a quick turn. I rolled, twisted my body, fighting to stay upright, and lost. I hit my head against the door panel. Sharp sting, then nausea ate its way into my gut- a reprise of the sucker punch.

My eyes slammed shut and I gave an involuntary groan.

“It awakens,” said Crisp.

Blanchard laughed.

Crisp laughed back. No internecine conflict now. Two bad cops.

It felt as if we were moving very fast, but that could have been my head spinning. I fought down the queasiness, managed to pull myself up again.

I mouthed words, produced sound: “Wha… who…” My tonsils ached.

“It talks,” said Crisp.

“If it knows what’s best for it, it will shut the fuck up,” said Blanchard.

I pressed my face against the window glass. Cold and soothing. Outside, more greasy black.

Endless black.

Blind-from-birth black.

I felt a stab of vertigo, had to concentrate on not rolling back down, clawed at the seat with my bound hands and felt a fingernail rip.

I looked out the window again, barely able to keep my eyes open. My pupils felt as if they’d been dipped in glue and breaded with grit.

I closed them. The same flat black…

Ladies and gentlemen , tonight the part of Hell will be played by Absolute Darkness.

I bit my lip with frustration, flopped like a beached seal, rubbed my face against the door panel, happy to be chafed. Metal nubs where the handles should have been.

Low conversation from the front. More laughter.

I blinked some more. Opened my eyes and waited for them to accommodate to the darkness. Finally. But everything was still blurred. It hurt to focus.

I looked anyway. Searched for context.

Black turned to gray. Grays. Lots of them. Contours, shading, perspective… Amazing how many grays there were when you just took the time to look…

Dead streets.

“It observes,” said Crisp. She turned and looked down at me. Her monkey face reminded me of a Stephen King book cover. “Want to know where we are, cutie?” she said. “The Valley. Feel like being a Valley Boy tonight?”

Bound but no blindfold.

They didn’t care what I saw.

Garbage didn’t fight back.

I shoved that out of consciousness, worked at staying lucid. Ignoring weak bowels, hammering heart, the drainpipe noise in my head.

Blanchard fed the car more gas and it surged forward. My eyes finally cleared. A darkened shopping center. A lazy streetlight casting a urine-colored glow over boarded-up businesses, cracked and missing signs, texture-coat walls sprayed with gang wisdom. An empty parking lot shot through with weeds.

Bad part of the Valley.

Blanchard made another series of quick turns that my eyes couldn’t make out.

A sprinkling of signs.

CUIDADO CON EL PERRO. BONDED PREMISES… ELEMENT DEPOSITORY… KEEP OUT, THAT MEANS YOU!

Then a reflective orange diamond, gem-bright: PAVEMENT ENDS.

Blanchard kept going, onto a dirt strip that rocked the car, traveled for another few minutes before making a short stop at a padlocked sheet-metal gate.

Crisp got out, letting in more gas stink. I heard fiddling, rattling, rasp, and creak. She got back in and said, “Okay.” The petrol smell lingered, as if it had saturated her clothing.

Blanchard drove through the gate. Crisp got out again, locked it, and returned. The car moved forward, across empty space, past several vehicles parked diagonally. VW bugs. I thought of Charlie Manson’s apocalyptic dream: Veedubs converted to armored dune buggies- heavy artillery for the race war Helter Skelter was going to foment.

Blanchard slowed and pulled up in front of a bank of concrete. I made out metal-railed stairs, a platform. A loading dock. Behind it the outlines of a blocky, flat-faced structure- fifty feet of bulk unrelieved by architectural detail.

Light from the left- a low-wattage bulb surface-scratching the darkness like crayon relief. Dribbling illumination down on the top half of a grated door. To the right, a bigger door, triple-garage width, corrugated steel.

The smaller door opened. Three figures came out. Shadow people.

Blanchard turned off the engine. Crisp bounced out like a kid going to a birthday party.