Relentless (14 page)

“So what did he tell you?” Penny asked me.

I sighed in exasperation.

“Probably something really bloody, strange, and scary,” Milo said. “Or a sex thing, ’cause from what I know about it, that’s totally weird.”

“How do you know anything about sex?” Penny asked.

“Collateral information. While I’m reading about other things.”

“How much collateral information?”

“Not much,” Milo said. “Relax. I’m not interested in it.”

“You better not be interested in it.”

“It’s boring,” Milo said.

“It’s even more boring than it is weird,” Penny assured him.

“It’s not all
that
boring,” I said.

Milo said, “I guess someday it finally won’t bore me.”

“Someday,” Penny agreed, “but that’s decades from now.”

“I figure seven years,” Milo said.

“When you’ve conquered the problem of time travel,” Penny informed him,
“then
I’ll let you date.”

“I don’t think time travel is possible,” Milo said.

“Then I won’t need to worry about having a daughter-in-law with two nose rings, a pierced tongue, seven tattoos, jeweled teeth, a shaved head, and attitude.”

“Never bring home a girl with attitude,” I advised Milo. “Your mother will just have to beat the crap out of her.”

“I don’t understand why we can’t just go to a hotel,” Penny said. “But if we can’t—then where do we go? Maybe to my folks’ place?”

“No. Somewhere Waxx is unlikely to look.”

“What about Marty and Celine’s place?”

Marty and Celine were good friends who lived only a mile from us. They had flown to Wyoming to take care of Celine’s parents, who had been nearly killed in an avalanche.

Since Monday, Penny had been checking on their house once a day, taking in mail and newspapers, watering plants as needed.

“I feel a little funny about it,” I said.

“Marty and Celine won’t mind.”

“I mean … I wonder if friends as close as Marty and Celine are too
much of a connection to us. Clitherow seemed adamant that we had to drop off the radar.”

“But if somehow Waxx could find out who our closest friends are,” she said, “he’d still need time, a lot of time, to do it.”

“Maybe he already knows,” Milo said.

The boy’s suggestion was the intellectual equivalent of a shock from a Taser.

In spite of what Clitherow had told me about the many similar phrases in the reviews of
Mr. Bluebird
and
One O’Clock Jump
, I had continued to operate under the assumption that John had become a target for destruction because of the letter he had written to Waxx’s editor and that I had earned a promise of doom merely by conspiring to get a look at the great man in Roxie’s Bistro.

Waxx’s assaults on John and on us were no less psychotic but a great deal more logical, strategically and tactically, if we assumed that he had planned to kill us and our families
before
he published reviews of our novels. Harder to credit was that his violation of our house twice, the planting of sophisticated packages of explosives, and the Tasering were part of an
impromptu
response to the encounter in the bistro men’s room, all within fourteen hours of Milo’s brief misdirection of his stream.

I remembered what Clitherow had said about Waxx being less a critic with opinions than one with an agenda. Understanding that agenda would be key to survival.

“What about the Balboa sinkhole?” Penny said as she turned onto Pacific Coast Highway.

Marty was an architect and Celine was a Realtor, but they were primarily entrepreneurs. Over the years, they carefully acquired prime properties for the land value, tore down the existing houses, built new houses, and sold for a profit.

Usually they had two projects going at once, sometimes three. Fortunately, they foresaw the coming real-estate bust. By the time values began plummeting, they had only one project left to sell. Because it was a harborside house on Balboa Peninsula, because it had been on the market two years without an offer, and because they would make no profit from it, they called it the Balboa sinkhole.

When they left their keys with Penny before flying to Wyoming, they also left the keys to the peninsula house on the same ring, in the unlikely event that someone wanted to tour the place. Like many high-end homes, this one could be shown by appointment only and strictly to qualified buyers; therefore, no key was left on-site in a lockbox.

“Sounds plausible,” I said. “Let’s check it out.”

   From the street, the Balboa sinkhole was a handsome contemporary structure faced in limestone, with two double garage doors.

A remote-control fob on the house key operated the roll-up doors. Penny parked in the only available space, beside three pickup trucks, all fully restored classics. Marty had a collection of these vehicles too large to fit in his own garage.

From the luggage in the Explorer, we took only two overnight bags for Penny and me, and one of the huge suitcases with wheels, nearly as big as a steamer trunk, which Milo insisted he needed.

Penny had the code to the alarm system.

In the house, Lassie scampered off to investigate every room, as any dog will when set loose in a new place.

The residence spanned two lots, and the side facing the harbor featured floor-to-ceiling glass. A private pier led to a boat slip that would accommodate at least a sixty-foot craft.

The view enchanted. Pleasure boats of all sizes plied the near and farther channels, though not as many as on a summer day.

A sleek white yacht motoring out to the Pacific, perhaps a 120-footer, filled me with envy, not of the owners’ fortune, but of their carefree existence and of the freedom that the open sea offered them. Impossible to imagine that they would ever be stalked by a bow-tied psychopath or in fact by a lunatic favoring another kind of neckwear.

Because empty rooms are off-putting, the sinkhole had been professionally staged. This hadn’t lured a buyer, but the furnishings made the house almost as cozy as our own.

While Penny, Milo, and Lassie settled in, I went out to cash a check for living money and to buy a disposable cell phone. We also needed sandwich fixings, snacks, and sodas to last a couple of days.

I was loath to leave them alone. But Penny insisted that Waxx had no way of knowing where we had gone.

A baseball cap made an adequate disguise for a quick shopping trip. Bestselling writers are not as widely recognized as actors. My hair is my most memorable feature. In articles about me, it has been described as “unruly” by the kinder journalists, although the cheap-shot artists have called it a “weird thatch” and a “convincing argument for shaved heads.” A simple cap rendered me anonymous.

I drove one of Marty’s classic trucks: a 1933 Ford V8, turquoise with bright yellow wire wheels. If I had not been worried about my wife and son being murdered, I would have felt so cool.

Midmorning, when I returned to our plush hideout, I found Penny in the huge kitchen, at the secretary, online with her laptop.

Because the house offered a few dazzling entertainment centers, including a home theater, cable service was maintained to allow the best possible demonstration of those features to potential buyers. Consequently, we had quick Internet access by cable.

In the vast family room to which the kitchen opened, Milo sat on
the floor at a half-acre coffee table on which he had established
his
laptop and had linked it to an array of other devices, some of which he had designed and constructed from items I had purchased for him. A spiderweb of extension cords radiated to a series of wall plugs.

He looked like an elf who had forsaken his traditional magic spells and charms for techno wizardry. I trusted that he would not turn out to be a pint-size Frankenstein.

Earlier, Penny turned on one of three Sub-Zero refrigerators, in which I now stowed most of the food and beverages I had bought.

Focused on her computer, Penny said, “Did you know Shearman Waxx is an enema?”

“Yes. Milo informed me of that the day before yesterday.”

“Same source says he was born in 1868.”

“Wow, almost a decade before Edison invented the light bulb.”

She said, “All his reviews from the past ten years are archived. Forcing terrorist suspects to read them aloud would be a form of torture more cruel than applying pliers to their genitals.”

“It’s the bad syntax,” I said, pulling up a dinette chair to the secretary and sitting beside her.

“Partly. But it’s also two other things. The butt-kissing factor is so high, when you’re reading, you can hear his lips smacking.”

“Whose butt is he kissing?”

“The literary Brahmins and whatever writer is the darling of the hour. The other thing is his seething hatred, which he disguises as a concern for quote ‘cultural truths and societal evolution.’”

“What does he hate?”

“Everything before the twentieth century and most of everything thereafter. I’m still getting a handle on him.”

Swiveling her chair toward me, taking her hands, lowering my voice to spare Milo from the story, I told Penny about my phone conversation with John Clitherow.

Her beautiful blue eyes, which were of a shade for which I had never found an adequate adjective, did not cloud or darken, or do any of the things that eyes are sometimes said to do in works of fiction. When I told her that Clitherow’s parents had been murdered, however, I saw in the directness of her gaze, in the stopped-time steadiness of it, a solemnity more profound than I had ever seen before.

Upon hearing that Margaret Clitherow and her two daughters were likewise murdered, Penny closed her eyes. As I told her the rest of what I knew, I studied her pale lids, wondering if, when those two curtains raised, I would infer from her eyes fear or, worse, despair, or the steely resolve that would be more in character.

Without opening her eyes, she asked, “How did they die?”

“He didn’t say. I’m going to research it.”

“You’re certain it was really Clitherow?”

“I’ve never heard his voice, but I’m sure it was him.”

“It couldn’t have been Waxx, another bit of terrorist theater?”

“No. This voice was different from what I know of Waxx’s.” After a silence, she opened her eyes, which were as clear as ice water, and said, “The sonofabitch can’t have Milo.”

“He won’t get any of us,” I assured her. I wondered how I could deliver on such a promise, but I would not hesitate to die trying.

She squeezed my hands once, let go of them, and turned to her computer. “I want to read more of this bullshit, see if I can better understand the bull himself. Meanwhile … put on the alarm system.”

   From the kitchen, I went into the adjoining family room to have a word with Milo.

On an overcast day like this, the polarized glass of the large triple-pane windows was not tinted. The house faced southeast, and on a bright morning, the glass would darken to control incoming sunlight without diminishing the view, which seemed no less spectacular now than in the moment when I had first seen it, during construction.

Sitting on the sectional sofa, overlooking Milo at his coffee-table workstation, I said, “You okay?”

“Pretty much.”

“But not entirely.”

He shrugged but kept his attention on the computer. “The house— that hurts.”

“We’ll get another house.”

“I know. But it won’t be the same.”

“It’ll be better,” I promised.

“Maybe. I guess it could be.”

On his computer screen, something that might have been a three-dimensional blueprint of an elaborate silo-like structure with numerous stacked chambers rotated to his command.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Where did it come from?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

After a silence, I said, “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No.”

“Sooner or later,” I told him, “every kid thinks his old man’s an idiot.”

Six-year-olds openly express affection. Most teenagers go through a period of sullen withdrawal or open hostility. Twenty-somethings have recovered from teenage hormonal madness, but have acquired a certain reserve.