Authors: John Lutz

Tags: #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Espionage, #General

Pulse (17 page)

BOOK: Pulse

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New York, the present

Q
uinn’s immediate thought when Pearl went to the door and let in Jody Jason was that she looked nothing like Pearl.

Then he realized that was her attitude. Whoever this girl—woman—was, she stood like a wayward waif, her springy red hair sticking out over her ears as if there might be a mild current of electricity running through her. She was wearing jeans and a pale green blouse. Once you looked more closely at her, at the angle of her nose, the shape of her head, her ears, the look in her eyes—yes, Pearl was there. She was busty like Pearl, though the rest of her was much thinner than her mother. When she moved toward him, she moved like Pearl.

Quinn stood his ground.
What the hell am I supposed to do?

Jody continued toward him, visibly gaining courage as she came. When she reached him she didn’t hesitate, but gave him a brief, hard hug that almost made him whoosh out a breath of air. He couldn’t help but think it:
Her breasts feel like Pearl’s.

“There hasn’t been time to have heard much about you,” Jody said through Pearl’s smile, “but everything I’ve heard has been good.”

Quinn grinned stupidly. Felt like it, anyway. “All true,” he said.
When in doubt, be witty. Sure.

“Of course,” Jody said, stepping back. “Mom wouldn’t lie.”

Oh-ho!
“No,” he said, “she wouldn’t.”

Pearl was giving him a look he was glad Jody couldn’t see.

“Come all the way in,” he said, “and sit down. Something to drink?”

“A beer, if you have it,” Jody said.

“Easy,” Quinn said, and went into the kitchen.

He could hear the two of them talking while he got three Heineken cans from the refrigerator and opened them.

“Glass?” he called in.

“For sissies,” Jody called back. Or maybe it was Pearl. Quinn smiled. Suddenly, unaccountably, he liked this unexpected development. Like that.
Flip
. That was how it worked. Jody was a fact, and he’d have to learn to deal with her. Maybe it would be more than tolerable. Maybe it would be fun.

He returned to the living room with the three beer cans held in one huge hand. Jody and Pearl quickly relieved him of two of the frosty cans. Quinn raised his beer, grinning, and they clicked the cans together in a metallic toast. He felt some of his beer run down between his fingers, but he didn’t care.

“Welcome to the almost family,” he said.

Pearl was grinning her widest grin, nodding at Quinn as if he’d passed some kind of test.
Good boy!
said her eyes.

The landline phone rang, and he went to the table by the sofa, lifted the receiver, and identified himself.

“Captain Quinn?” said the voice. “I’ve been calling and calling Pearl’s cell phone, but there’s always a click and a message saying half of something, and then there’s a terrible buzzing noise. Technology will kill us all.”

Quinn held the receiver out toward Pearl but was looking at Jody when he spoke: “It’s your grandmother.”

Jody’s eyes widened and then took on a look of comprehension. Quinn couldn’t help but notice that she’d grasped this sudden overload of information fast.

Pearl thought,
Jumpin’ Jesus!

Pearl went to Quinn slowly. She took the receiver from his hand as if it were a live thing that might bite her any second.

Quinn heard Pearl’s mother’s rasping voice even four feet from the phone.

“It’s your mother, dear, checking to see if you’re alive or dead, and if you are alive—and God willing you are—what is going on in your life?”

“Well,” Pearl said, feeling her nerves vibrate like cello strings, “there is some news.”

Penny and her supervisor, the austere Ms. Culver, were alone in the library except for a few people browsing the stacks, and a man operating one of the microfiche machines in the research department. The Albert A. Aal library had never computerized its newspaper and periodical files.

Penny was pushing a cart stacked with returned books to be replaced in their correct order on the shelves. The library was familiar to her. Working here was almost like having returned home.

When she was finished replacing the books, she wheeled the cart back to its place behind the front desk, where it could gradually be reloaded as books were returned.

Ms. Culver was wearing a severe gray dress with black low heels, had her mud-colored hair in a bun, and was as impeccable as ever. If librarians were manufactured somewhere, Ms. Culver must be the prototype.

Yet there was something in her severity that didn’t ring true. Penny thought she saw a slight tremor in Ms. Culver’s right hand when she dropped a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
onto the cart Penny had just wheeled up. Or maybe it struck her odd that Ms. Culver didn’t place the book down in the cart more gently, and square it neatly in a wooden corner. Ms. Culver worshipped symmetry.

“Is anything wrong?” Penny asked.

“Wrong as in what?”

“As in not right,” Penny said.

Ms. Culver placed both her hands flat on the return desk. She seemed to be debating internally whether to confide in Penny.

“DVDs,” she said.

Penny stared at her.

“Last week, for the first time, we had more DVDs out on loan than books.”

“Kids love them,” Penny said. “Video games with car chases and shootouts and violence. The comic books of today.”

“It wasn’t only kids that borrowed them. Same with audiobooks. More and more people are
listening
to books while they sit in traffic, or do something else that demands half their attention, or fall asleep in their recliners.”

“You might be right.”

“I am right. I know by the declining percentage of actual books we loan. And by the decreasing number of library patrons who come and go here because they go someplace else. And that someplace else is the Internet. They use Wi-Fi, whatever that is. Where they can download e-books for their electronic readers or computers. There’s no
paper
involved in any of this, Penny. It’s as if we’ve reverted to oral history and fiction, storytelling passed down through generations while sitting around campfires. We read something on a screen, and then it goes from substance to memory, just the way those ancient stories did. They’re nothing but electronic impulses. When they’re deleted from the machines, they no longer exist. There are fewer and fewer actual, tangible
books
.”

“Yes, what you say is true. So we’re worried about unemployment.”

But both women knew Penny wasn’t worried about it. She had a husband, another wage earner, and there were other kinds of jobs she could get. Ms. Culver was a librarian, had always been a librarian, and always would be. The way an obsolete buggy whip would always be a buggy whip.

Ms. Culver was watching Penny through rimless glasses as if reading her thoughts. “I’m worried about the future,” she said. “I have nieces, nephews.”

Penny hadn’t known that.

“We’re just dipping our toes in a new era,” Penny said. “Like the era following the invention of the printing press, only everything’s moving faster. Your nieces and nephews will adapt.”

“That’s the problem. They have adapted. They don’t type; they keyboard. They’ve made
keyboard
a verb, Penny. They’ve made
text
a verb. They don’t read text in books, and hardly ever do on a computer screen. Not for pleasure, anyway. It’s distressing.”

Returning to her job at the library might have been a mistake, Penny thought. She’d sought solace and security here, a shelter from the world of worry about all the things that could happen to Feds and to her, to their marriage. Maybe Feds was right and there was no real security. If you lived, you risked. Even if you weren’t a cop. Feds’s enemies were the bad guys. Ms. Culver’s enemies were e-books.

“You know how the French say the more things change the more they stay the same,” Penny said, trying to brighten Ms. Culver’s mood. “Books are books, even if they’re electronic books.”

“All the books in this library could be stored on one chip,” Ms. Culver said. “And I’m not French. Now I suggest you go straighten up the magazines.”

Penny did, but she was thinking about this evening, when Feds would be working late. She’d told him she didn’t mind, that she wasn’t worried about him. But she was. Only now she was doing something about her worries. Something for others but, ultimately, something for Feds and herself and their marriage. He wouldn’t approve.

But then, he didn’t know.

S
he liked imagining herself in the old movie she’d watched last night,
Rear Window,
but she’d rather have been Grace Kelly. Instead she was James Stewart, sitting at a window with his leg propped up, helplessly watching the world go by.

Deena Vess’s ankle had stopped aching, but it itched like crazy under the plaster cast. Day after tomorrow she was supposed to go back to the doctor and get the cast removed, to be replaced by a plastic one that could be taken off occasionally and was sure to be more comfortable.

From where she sat, she could look out her apartment window at the street below if she strained herself. A fly buzzed frantically and futilely against the lower pane, trying to get on the other side of the invisible glass barrier. She knew how it felt.

It was a hot day, and there were fewer people than normal down there on the baking sidewalks. Traffic wasn’t very heavy, either.

But there was the foreshortened figure of Jeff the postman, crossing the street to his mail truck. He stepped up into the truck and drove away.

Okay, something to do! Get the mail.
A chore that required her attention.

It would hurt slightly, but it was worth the pain. And worth it to escape daytime television. Or roaming Facebook or Twitter. She’d tired of sending out messages about her aching ankle. The social network didn’t want to hear you bitch any more than people standing right next to you.

She used one of the metal crutches she’d bought at Duane Reade to brace herself as she stood up from her chair. Then she hobbled toward the door. From the corner of her eye she saw the cat that wasn’t Empress stretch and edge toward the kitchen door as if stalking something. She still couldn’t work up any fondness for the cat, and how it had taken Empress’s place was still a mystery that sometimes kept her up at night, wondering. The longer she and the cat shared the apartment, the less the animal looked like the real Empress.

But what you couldn’t understand you at last got tired of thinking about. She’d posted a status on Facebook asking if anyone could explain the bizarre cat substitution. The answers from her “friends” strongly implied that she might be insane and should seek help. Sure, Deena should hobble into a psychoanalyst’s office with a cat under her arm and say it was impersonating another cat.

She reached the door to the hall, opened it, and clattered out into the tiled hall on her crutches. After closing the door, she used the crutches to make her way to the elevator. There was some pain, but it was bearable. And going down to the foyer and getting her mail was one of the few things she looked forward to these days. She needed to get off these damn crutches and back on her skates, if she was still employed at Roller Steak. The boss had assured her the job would be there for her, but what was that worth?

Deena hobbled out of the elevator and over to the bank of brass mailboxes. She glimpsed white through the slot in her box.
Mail!

A disappointed Deena discovered that her mail consisted of an ad for Viagra.

She returned to the elevator, pressed the up button, and momentarily got one of her crutches caught in the crack between elevator and floor. Finally safe inside the elevator and leaning on the wall near the control panel, she pressed the button for her floor.

By the time she was back in her chair, facing the muted TV playing
Sex and the City
reruns, her ankle was throbbing. Probably these mail-fetching missions every day weren’t the best thing for the ankle, but she had to do
something
to get out.

She’d been sitting there for almost an hour when it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the Empress imposter since returning from her mail pickup. She knew she’d closed the door behind her and—

Someone knocked on her apartment door hard enough to startle her, then continued to knock, softer but insistently.

Deena cursed, snatched up her clattering crutches, and hobbled over to look out the peephole.

An eye was staring right back at her. She hated it when people did that.

A male voice in the hall said, “I have a cat somebody told me was yours.”

Deena peered through the peephole again. This time a guy was standing back, farther from the door. He was holding up a cat that, even distorted by the peephole glass, looked more like Empress than the imposter.

Deena worked the dead bolt, then opened the door, leaving it on the chain.

The man looked in at her and held the cat up again for her inspection. Definitely the real Empress.

But then—

“I ran some
found cat
ads in the paper,” the man said. He was a good-looking guy, storybook handsome but not effeminate. “I’m a cat person, and I knew this one was loved and had an owner in the neighborhood who must be worried stiff about her.”

Empress waved a paw at Deena and mewed.

Deena detached the chain lock and opened the door all the way. “It’s odd,” she said. “There was this other cat—”

The man threw a yowling Empress into Deena’s face and at the same time kicked her injured ankle and pushed her backward. She fell with a sharp intake of breath and a clatter of aluminum.

He was on her while she was too shocked to utter another sound. She saw and then felt the sticky gray rectangle of duct tape slapped over her half-open mouth. He gripped her wrists and kept her hands away from her face while she struggled and tried to scream. He was laughing. That was what for some reason terrified her more than anything, his soft, amused laughter.

He stood up, crouched over her, still squeezing her wrists hard enough that her hands were twisted into claws. She couldn’t stop working her legs, fighting to stand up despite the agonizing pain in her ankle.

Smiling, he waited patiently until he had the opportunity and then kicked her broken ankle again, this time as hard as he could, grunting with the effort.

The pain carried her to a place where she could no longer hear her muffled screams.

To where she melted to nothing and consciousness stole away.

BOOK: Pulse

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