Wanted! (2 page)

“You’re a freak for neatness, buddy,” said the intruder. He was panting, as if he had run to get here. “It drives everybody crazy. So those disks should be easy to find.”

Were there two of them? Who was he talking to?

Nobody answered.

From near the door came a grunt. Isolated. It did not sound human. There was a strange solid sound. Heavy. Like a couch being tipped over.

What was happening?

Alice forced herself to move silently and carefully down the two cement steps into the garage. She couldn’t close the kitchen door. Like the front door, it had a very solid latch that practically clanged when you closed it.

She couldn’t drive away. The automatic garage door was noisy. The Corvette was very noisy. Along the top rim of the garage door was a row of tiny windows. Alice looked out.

Whoever was in the house had backed his car into the driveway, tight against the garage door. Blocking her exit.

She saw a plain dark blue minivan, very suburban. Alice’s view was restricted to its roof and rear window. Dad knew his cars by year and make, by reputation and repair record, and liked to call out identifications and give his low opinions of all other cars on the road.

The van was angled in such a way that it hid the front door—and whoever came and went—from the neighbors’ eyes. Not that there were neighbors looking. Single people lived here, or working couples, and on a Wednesday at noon, nobody was home. If they were home, they weren’t looking out the window, because there was nothing to see except the other side of the condo.

“Well, well,” said the voice. It smirked. “Caller ID.”

She could actually hear the tiny click of erasure on the Caller ID. Then she heard drawers being opened, the distinctive ball bearing sound of really good hardware. Dad’s desk.

“Okay, so where are the disks?” The same voice, but angry now. High-pitched and distorted with nerves. She almost recognized it.

He won’t find the disks, thought Alice. I have them. So what will he do now? And how did he get in? He must have a key; they didn’t break in. The only key he could have is Dad’s. How did he get Dad’s key?

I’m locked in with him, Alice thought.

Footsteps. They didn’t sound like two people. She was sure there was only one intruder. But—was the man talking to himself? Or to somebody else? The neatness freak had to be Dad himself. But if Dad were here, this wouldn’t be happening. The man couldn’t be talking to Dad.

“Clothes on the floor,” said the voice. “The kid.” The voice went very soft, and very threatening. The harsh whisper carried in the stillness of the condo. “You still here, kid?”

Alice turned to stone. The heart that had beat too loudly stopped beating altogether. The lungs that had sucked in air like a vacuum cleaner shut down.

What was going on?

What should she do?

There was no place to hide in the garage. The voice was correct; Dad was very neat. There was a place for everything and everything was always in its place. It was another reason for the divorce; her parents hated the way the other one kept house.

Alice had spent a great deal of time informing them that this was very shallow: A man could not leave his marriage because his wife lined the tub with twenty-seven shampoo choices, and a woman could not leave her marriage because the man said if she bought one more stuffed bunny, he was going to have a bonfire.

It turned out that Alice was wrong and people could leave their marriage over that.

If it had been Mom’s garage, the football team could have hidden among the junk. Here at Dad’s, Alice didn’t think you could hide a jelly bean. And there was no regular door out of the garage—only the noisy automatic garage door. She could get in the Corvette, but he would see her.

Alice looked at her lovely dress and wished she had not changed her clothes. She tightened the dress around her and rolled beneath the Corvette. Inched, actually. There was not room to roll.

The Corvette was very low to the ground. But her father was too neat to permit a car to drip oil, so the cement was clean. The Corvette was very long, so lengthwise there was plenty of room.

He’d seen her clothing on the floor, but all teenagers threw their clothes on the floor all the time. It didn’t mean it had happened five minutes ago.

She tugged at the skirt to make sure no flowery fabric showed. Would he come with flashlights—kneel down—tuck his neck around and look under the Corvette?

Who knew what people who broke into houses to steal disks would do?

She closed her fingers tightly around the fanny pack that held the nail polish and the two TWIN disks. What was on those disks?

It must be very important to somebody.

Certainly very important to her father.

What did TWIN stand for? There were no twins in the family. Was it a company name? A client’s logo?

Her father worked for an electronic recovery company. He spent his life retrieving lost data on computers. Usually these were accidentally deleted files or crashed systems. Every now and then it was intentional destruction by hackers. Rarely did he bring work home. Anything here in the condo was personal, and for Dad, that usually meant computer games. He loved games like Doom.

The intruder’s shoes were heavy on the kitchen tile floor. The kitchen was so small he was across it in two strides and Alice knew, though she couldn’t see, that he must be standing in the door. For a moment she thought she would throw up, but she’d better not; she was lying on her back and she’d drown. Alice swallowed hard.

The taste of vomit stayed in her mouth and throat, trying to get her to throw up, and the feet stayed on the step, trying to get her to reveal herself. She tightened her hands into fists to give herself courage. The fake nails dug into her palms like strangers.

The man turned on the garage light.

It was fluorescent and filled every corner.

She pictured big fingers grabbing her, and dragging her out from under the car and tearing her skin on the cement and—

—and what?

She had heard only one voice, only one set of steps. And yet, the man must be speaking to somebody. Could there be two people? Was one motionless by the door? Was one tucking himself into a closet, hiding himself, so he could spring out at her?

Alice tried to remember the voice. She would have to tell the police. But she was beyond memorizing anything; she was even beyond lying here, she was so scared. She wanted to leap up and run, but she was in a tomb: concrete and black pipe and gritty underside.

She started to cry.

I can’t make noise! she thought.

She forced herself to cry silently. Itchy, annoying tears ran down the sides of her face and into her hair and ears. Her nose filled but she let that run, too, because she dared not sniffle.

“I killed him good,” said the voice. It was thinned out like paint, distorted with tension.

Him.

Killed
him.

What
him
did that mean?

Not Alice’s
him.
Not her father. Not that
him.

The man turned off the garage light and the darkness was wonderful: safe and friendly. She listened. He was doing something in the house: something heavy and quick. She could not imagine what it was. She had no imagination right now—or maybe way, way too much. Her mind blotted with emptiness and then surged with the vision of a body—a him!—then hurled itself into a vision of her father, her very own beloved father—the him—killed—covered with blood, or mangled, or—

No, Alice said over and over, no.

Why had the intruder stated
I killed him good
—while standing next to Alice’s hiding place? What kind of announcement was that?

At the other end of the tiny condo, the computer keyboard tapped evenly for a minute or two. It was a placid, gentle sound. Then came the shutdown music of the computer, a single sweet note.

And then the front door closed and an engine started up right next to the garage, and the minivan drove away. Alice could hear the shifting of gears, and she was surprised; hardly anybody had a manual transmission.

It was much harder to get out from under the car than it had been to get under it.

She was filthy.

She felt sick.

She was terrified.

The house seemed perfectly normal, in spite of what she had been hearing. Nothing had been touched that Alice could see. The computer was off. Nothing was out of place.

She was the only thing out of place. Her hair and skirt and hands and face—she was disgusting.

She had to take a shower. She had to cleanse herself, not just from the filth of the car and the garage floor, but also the filth of that voice, that trespass, that terrible presence.

If she washed away the grit and the oil, she could wash away those awful words, the nightmare vision they had put in her eyes.

She bolted the front door to make sure they couldn’t come back in. She should have had it bolted before. Dad would be annoyed with her. The rule was, If you’re home, put on the deadbolt.

Of course, Dad might be annoyed already, because she hadn’t driven to the ice cream place. Well, she would. As soon as she was clean. Maybe she should call him right now. But what number should she call? His office, or the one on Caller ID, the one she hadn’t recognized?

Dad’s bathroom was behind his closet. Alice never used Dad’s bathroom. She used the main bathroom, which faced the tiny center hall. She ripped off the dress and threw it in a bundle between the toilet and the door. She turned the water on high and leaped in and scoured herself, shampooing her hair twice, and all the time feeling full of electricity, little charged particles of horror and fear. What if the intruder got back in somehow while she was in the shower? What if—what if he—

She choked this back and just got clean.

She turbaned her wet hair with one towel, and togaed herself with another and ran into the bedroom for more clothes.

She dressed with amazing speed, like a crazed movie scene, whipping from one thing to another, and in the mirror she could not even tell whether she was dressed, but she felt dressed, she was pretty sure of it, and she ran back to the garage and pressed the door opener and leaped into the Corvette. It was good Dad had automatic. She remembered how he had agonized over that. Real Vette drivers shifted gears. Dad got bored shifting.

Alice shoved the key in and started the engine and inside the closed space it roared like the opening of a race. Alice’s heart was doing the same. Her whole body was revving.

Alice put the Vette in reverse and took her foot off the brake and let it choose its own speed to back up. When she was out of the short driveway, and fully in the cul-de-sac, she swung the wheel much too hard—and the wrong way. She’d turned the car toward the dead end, not the exit. Alice lifted her foot in humiliation and was stranded in the tiny sunlit road.

She did not have enough breath to drive. Who would have thought driving took so much oxygen? Gasping, Alice reentered the little driveway, centered herself, and turned the wheel inside out. When she was sure she was pointed right, she gave the Vette way too much gas and hit the curb with her back tires as she shot backward.

She pressed the remote and the garage door closed slowly back down, and she found Drive, and started forward with a terrifying roar. She could hardly even see over the hood. She had to arch her back and shoulders and even then she had only a partial view of the road in front of her.

She saw somebody on the sidewalk and thought—
it’s him!
—

She was so terrified she gunned the engine again, exploding out of the condominium complex. Luckily there was no traffic because she just barreled out and turned left and was off, racing, the Corvette a low red monster going for the jugular.

A
LICE WAS TOO SMALL
for the driver’s seat. Her father’s legs were much longer. Alice could barely reach the brakes and the accelerator. She had to extend her legs and ankles like a new, badly balanced ballerina.

And the traffic! Trucks towered on one side, vans crunched on the other. Each red light meant gauging when to slow down, and Alice failed, braking as violently as if small children were darting in front of her.

They were not kidding about zero to sixty in five seconds. Compared to her mother’s tinny little Sentra, Alice was in charge of a rocket launcher. Or it was in charge of her.

At last she was out of the city, beyond the developments, free of red lights, hurtling down the long country road toward Salmon River. No matter how slowly she drove, it felt fast. The curves tested her control. The Corvette possessed goals of its own, and if she accelerated a tiny bit, it accelerated a whole lot, and the tires screamed and left patches.

Alice was exhausted.

She was holding the steering wheel way too tightly, but it was all that balanced her, scootched up too far on the leather seat, legs extended, ankles flexed. The fake fingernails gouged her palms, as if somebody else were holding the wheel.

She could grip, steer, look, stare, tense, turn, and brake.

She could not think.

Power vibrated up through her thighs and pressed her spine back into the padded leather, but she did not take her father’s joy in this. She did not have his faint smile, the one that told her he was pretending to be on a racetrack, or have the FBI on his heels.

There was the turnoff, by a low-lying meadow with a narrow glimpse of the beautiful Salmon River. The turn came quicker than Alice expected, and she took her foot off the gas late, braked late, and knew immediately that the best decision was to quit making the turn. Skip the whole thing, keep going straight, turn around later and come back. Too late for that. Alice found herself in the turn with way too much velocity. The tires screamed as if she had run over squirrels and Alice screamed, too, imagining their flat, bloody bodies, but she hung onto the wheel and missed the picket fence of somebody’s yard and even got back onto her side of the road.

Thinking of squirrels had distracted her from thinking of cars. A silver Crown Victoria coming in the opposite direction had to yank into somebody’s hedge to escape collision. Wonderful. The state police drove Crown Vics.