The Last Thing You See (16 page)

Harper’s message was borderline gibberish, but after playing it a few times, I managed to decipher that she was on her way to my place.  Looking at the time of the missed call, I figured she might arrive within the next half-hour if she had left more or less just after hanging up.

She didn’t.  After forty-five minutes I called her phone, but it just went through to her voicemail.  I supposed she must be driving and didn’t hear it go off or something.

Another half-hour later, I couldn’t help but be worried.  I tried calling again, but she didn’t answer and I didn’t leave a message this time.

Listening to the voicemail she left me once more, she sounded really frantic.  I hoped to hell she hadn’t been in an accident.

It was just shy of eleven-thirty when I called and left a voicemail saying I was on my way over to her place to make sure everything was OK.  I was just about to turn the key in the ignition when my phone played its little jingle.

I sighed in relief when I saw that it was Harper calling.  “Hello?  Everything OK?”

“Nick?” a man’s voice answered.

“Yes, who’s this?”

“It’s me, uh, Orson.”

“I’m not in the mood for any more of you and your mom’s bullshit right now, Orson.  Where’s Harper?”

“She’s not with you?” he asked.

“No, why do you have her phone?”

“Shit, Nick.  Oh shit…”

There was an edge of panic in his voice, one that I’d heard a few times in my life.  My heart beat hard in my chest and I took a deep breath before speaking slowly and clearly.

“Orson.  Listen to me.  What happened?”

“Shit… shit… she was pissed and she went for a run by herself.  I was only a few minutes behind her, I thought I might be able to catch up, but I found her iPod on the ground at the end of the street… and… oh
shit
…”

“And
what
?”

“Blood on the sidewalk.  The police are all over it, but man, I was hoping maybe she tripped and hurt herself, flagged down a taxi or somebody and went to an A&E or your place.  The police are checking with hospitals, but nothing yet.”

I barely heard anything beyond ‘blood on the sidewalk’.  I’d heard those words once before, and they nearly killed me.  This couldn’t be happening again, it couldn’t be like Christie all over again.

A sheen of sweat stood out on my forehead, and I leaned against the steering wheel as everything spun for a moment.  For a few seconds I thought I might throw up, but the sensation passed as I fell back on my training, to keep rational under pressure, under absolute chaos if necessary.

When a person goes missing, for whatever reason, their chances of being found drop off a cliff the longer the search takes.  I wasn’t there when Christie needed me, but Harper had only been gone for an hour or two at the most.  I would find her or die trying.

“Which end of the street did you find the blood?” I asked.

“Just opposite the park.”

“So she would have run past the Holt place?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Maybe nothing.  Keep Harper’s phone with you, I’m on my way.”

*****

Johnny started off by asking me what I was doing calling him at this time of night, but soon flicked the switch to business mode when he heard what was happening.  As I was tearing along in my car, I asked him if he still had access to that license plate software.  He did and I told him to meet me at the Holt Tower.

He met me at the front doors about five minutes after I arrived and swiped us in with his pass card, taking me right up to his office.  The computer seemed to take an infuriatingly long time to turn on.

“The police are already on it, of course?” he asked.

“Yeah, they’re out there now apparently.  I just want to see if the security camera outside Mr. Holt’s house picked up Harper for a start, and then see if there were any cars driving around at the same time.  Who knows, they might have seen something, we can get those details to the police so they can be contacted and questioned.”

Johnny entered his password on the computer and the flat screen on his wall came to life, showing a duplicated display of his computer desktop.  He clicked an icon and entered another username and password on a box that popped up, then began scrolling down a list that appeared.

“What time was it?”

“I’m not sure exactly, can you start at about nine o’clock and fast-forward through until we spot her?”

“Can do.”

The display flicked to the view from the camera outside Jeremy Holt’s house and a moment later, any moving objects on the screen, like cars, people on bikes, and some other couple out running together, began moving at high-speed.  I narrowed my eyes, straining for any sign of Harper, and felt an electric jolt when she finally went past the camera in a blur.

“Back it up, back it up, that was her.  Go back like five minutes and turn on that software.  Give me a pen and paper, I’ll take down the details of anybody that comes up.”

“No need, I can just print it all off.”

Johnny reset the video and played it at normal speed.  Only a couple cars went past before Harper appeared, the little animated labels floating above them the same way I remembered from Johnny’s first demonstration.

Harper was running pretty fast and only stayed on screen for a few seconds, but nobody appeared to be chasing her or following her.  About ten seconds later, a car went by driving slow and going in the same direction as Harper.

The label appeared above the car, showing the little hour-glass as the software pulled the information from wherever the hell it got it from and then showed the driver’s license.  I groaned as I saw the picture and leaned on Johnny’s desk as an invisible iron band wrapped itself around my chest.

“What is it?” asked Johnny.

“That one.  That’s the guy with the acid!  Bring it up again.  Do it,
do it!
”

Johnny tapped at his keyboard and brought the guy’s details up again.  There it was, his address.

“How do I get there? 
How do I get there?
” I yelled.

“I don’t know, Nick.  We should just give the address to the police, right?”

“Fuck that.  I’m going straight there, you give the address to the police when I’m on my way.  Bring up a map!  Go!  Go!”

Johnny copied the address, searched for it online, and then requested directions, which brought up a blue line showing the quickest way to get there from the Holt Tower.  The printer sprang to life without me needing to ask.

“You got a gun here?” I asked.

Johnny opened up a cupboard behind his desk, revealing a safe, which he opened and reached in to grab a handgun.  By the time I snatched the map with directions off the printer, Johnny was unlocking a small metal box he took out of a drawer in his desk that turned out to contain the ammo.

The former Marine sergeant ejected the clip and began loading it up for me with practiced speed.  He double-checked the safety and handed it over.

“You be safe, Nick,”

“If he’s hurt her…”

“Just go, I’ll call the cops.”

The first thing to invade my confused dreams was the sound of somebody humming the theme song for The Last Perfect Day. The next thing I noticed was just how much my head hurt.  It was especially painful at the back, but my whole head was absolutely pounding.

I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep, except I realized I wasn’t even lying down.  I was upright in some kind of chair.  With a groan, I opened my eyelids a crack and felt a jolt of fear that made my head explode with pain and brought up flashes of colored light in front of my eyes.

Something was very wrong, I wasn’t home, and I wasn’t at Nick’s place… I didn’t know where I was.  I lifted my head, wincing at the pain behind my eyes and in my stiff neck, squinting at some man who approached when he heard me stirring.

I tried to blink away the blurriness of my vision and saw that he was maybe in his mid-thirties but had the kind of look on his face like he thought all his birthdays had come at once.  Then I recognized him.

The last time I saw his face, he was wearing sunglasses and was trying to throw a cup of acid on me.  When I tried to stand, to retreat from this madman, I found my hands were tied to the chair behind me and my ankles tied to the legs of the chair.

Everything came rushing back – going on a run and getting tackled in the darkness, being stuffed into the trunk of his car, and blacking out.  I couldn’t stop a whimper from escaping when he kneeled in front of me.

“Harper!  Welcome back, you had me worried for a second there!”

His excitement was palpable.  It was so out of place with the situation, like he had not the slightest inkling that he had done anything wrong.  A man like that might do anything.

“Don’t hurt me.”

I was almost ashamed at the terror I heard in my own voice, like it couldn’t even belong to me.  I wanted the words to come out with confidence, but they simply didn’t.

“Hurt you?  I could never hurt you, Harper.  I love you.”

“You… you tried to attack me with acid, you knocked me out and tied me up here!”

The man looked pained and put his hand on my knee.  I tried to squirm away, but there was nowhere to go with my hands and legs restrained as they were.  He seemed distracted by the touch of his palm on the bare skin of my leg for a moment and I shuddered, which seemed to break him out of his reverie.

“About that… I’m… I’m sorry for calling you a bitch that day.  I was out of line.  You’re not a bitch, you’re the most wonderful woman in the world.  You’re just a bit confused.”

“What are you talking about?”

The man stood, walked over to the wall, and I got my first chance to really look around the room.  Posters from my movies wallpapered all sides.  DVD and Blu-ray cases hung on the wall as if they were family portraits or art.  Shelves were covered in what might have been movie props, and one area was dedicated to some kind of collage of pictures of me cut out from magazines.

Many things looked like they had been signed and he went to one of these, a little promotional poster for The Last Perfect Day.  He read the message there, holding his finger an inch away from the words.

“To Walter, thanks for being my biggest fan!  Love, Harper.  Kiss kiss.”

The man, Walter apparently, looked back to me with a big smile as if the message explained everything.  Maybe prompted by my blank expression, he walked around a single bed towards some other piece of paraphernalia. 

Low on the wall next to the bed, I saw a picture of me from a trip to the beach the previous year when a wave had dislodged my bikini top, resulting in a good payday for some paparazzo.  A hot flush rose to my head and seemed to increase the pressure there, sparking another jolt of pain as Walter pointed at something else.

“To Walter, glad you enjoyed the movie!  Love, Harper.  Don’t you see?” he asked.

“See what?”

“I love you… and you love me.  We were meant to be together.  All the girls I ever knew ignored me or told me to drop dead, but not you.  You’re special.”

“This… this isn’t what you do to somebody you love, Walter,” I said.

“Yes it… this is just a means to an end, though.  You’re so busy, it’s hard for you to find time for me, and our relationship was suffering because of it. 
I
was suffering because of it.  I wanted to do something for you, for
us
.  Something romantic, something to show you how much I love you.  That’s what the acid was about.”

“Please don’t hurt me, Walter,” I repeated, feeling a fresh surge of terror at the mention of acid.  He might have killed me with a rushed splash from a single cup in public, how much worse could he do with all the time in the world and me unable to run away?

Walter continued as if I hadn’t spoken at all.  “You’re always surrounded by such shallow people.  All those people that wait in line with me to see you at your signings when they don’t even love you like I do.  The whole world is shallow, they don’t see you like I do, they don’t see how beautiful you are on the inside, how deep.  That’s what I wanted to show you, I wanted you to see that I would still love you even if you weren’t beautiful anymore.  Isn’t that romantic?  Do you understand now?”

I didn’t answer, I just looked down at my lap through a blur of tears.

“Then that big freak ruined it all and I haven’t been able to get you alone to talk since then.”

The mention of Nick broke my heart and a sob forced its way out of my mouth.  I might die tonight, and there was still the possibility that he thought I was only with him to spite my mom.  He was the love of my short life.  If there was no way out of this, I hoped there was some way he could know that.

“Don’t do it, Walter, I don’t want you to do it.”

Walter stood behind me and tried to wipe my tears away, but I flinched at his touch.  The very feel of his hands on me made my skin crawl.

“Oh, Harper.  Don’t worry.  I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I’ve come up with something even better.”

He went to a shelf and picked up a long thin dagger with elaborate designs on the pommel that I recognized well.  I should.  After all, I had the original back at home.  It was a replica of the weapon my character used to save the world in Those Lost Ones.

“Recognize it?  You do, don’t you?  I was thinking… it would be a shame to ruin your perfect beauty with something so inelegant as
acid
.  If I use this, it’ll be as simple as a quick stab through the heart.  You’ll always be young, strong, beautiful.  I’ll bring you into my…
our
… bed and then shoot myself.  We’ll be together forever!  Like Romeo and Juliet.  They’ll talk about us for hundreds of years!  Don’t you want that, Harper?”

I tried to speak, tried to say no, but all I could do was shake my head, cry, and listen to my own horrified moans. 
I don’t want to die
.