The night erupted with the thunderous sound of moving metal. Lydia took an unconscious step back and brought her hand to her chest. The security shutters were coming down over the doors and windows. Dax had been wrong. There was a security shutter over the door to the kitchen. She fought a rising tide of panic as she looked around on the ground and found a large rock. She pried it from the earth and raced to the door. She placed the rock at the base, holding it there, hoping to keep the door from coming down all the way.
When the door hit the rock it made a terrible grinding sound and stopped, moved halfway back up then came to a final crunching halt, as if the rock had knocked it off its track. She sighed with relief. Jeffrey could still get out, if he would leave believing she was still inside. The lawn flooded with light then and Lydia was exposed.
She heard the sound of footsteps and voices and saw two large forms turn the corner. They stood for a second, looking in her direction. The way the floods were shining, she could only make them out as tall and menacing shadows. One of them pointed. And then they both began running toward her.
Lydia ran. She peered behind her once and caught the impression of bald heads and leather. She thought of the man they’d seen last night and the one who had followed her from her grandmother’s apartment. She felt the icy cold finger of fear on her spine, though her heart was a steam engine, working hard and burning hot. She could hear them gaining on her. They were bigger, had longer legs. There was no way she could outrun them.
Then the Land Rover was pulling in front of her and coming to a squealing stop. The door flew open.
“What the fuck happened? Where’s Jeff?” yelled Dax, starting to drive before she’d closed the door.
“He’s still in there,” she said, breathless, slamming the door. “Loop around. We have to go back.”
Dax gunned the engine and the Rover launched forward. Lydia looked behind to see the two men who’d been chasing her come to a stop in the middle of the street. Dax turned a corner fast and the rubber squealed against the concrete.
“I knocked one of the security doors off its track,” she said, still trying to catch her breath. “The door to the kitchen where he came in… he can still get out that way.”
“I thought…”
“Your guy was wrong or he lied. There was a security door.”
Dax issued a string of expletives that embarrassed even Lydia, who swore like a truck driver without even thinking about it most of the time.
“What do we do?” asked Lydia.
“They won’t expect us to come back,” he said. “I’m going to make a long loop and then we’ll come back around.”
He started talking then about what they would do next, how she shouldn’t worry and how Jeffrey could take care of himself. But she wasn’t listening. All she could hear was a ringing in her ears and the pounding of her heart. She looked at the brown building as they approached again from the opposite direction. It was locked down like a fortress. All she could think was, Jeffrey’s in there. I left him in there.
Thirteen
Some memories don’t fade with time and distance. Some grow more vivid, while the people, events, and places around them, just before or just after, become faint and vague. Like colorized black-and-white films, they remain eerily bright, something just off about them, something that glows. They take on a special cast and over time become mythic in their scope and impact.
Lydia met Jeffrey Mark on the worst day of her life. She was fifteen years old and she had just discovered the murdered body of her mother. She’d sat rigid on the front stoop of her home, unable to respond to the people who tried to help her. She had gotten the idea in her mind that if she didn’t speak, if she sat very still on the stoop and didn’t react to the horror she had just witnessed, that she would wake up to discover she was dreaming. She clung to this idea. It made sense to her.
Lydia remembered sitting on the stoop with a female police officer who had tried her best to console her and to convince her to go inside the house, but Lydia would not move. She could remember clearly the scent of the woman’s shampoo, the feel of her hand on her arm. But her words were just a soothing mumble that Lydia couldn’t understand. She sat there for hours, stone-faced and shivering, while police officers walked to and from the house.
It was sitting on that stoop that she first saw Jeffrey. He pulled up with another man in a black car. She saw him looking at her as the sedan came to a stop, gravel crunching under its wheels. He walked toward her, his eyes on her the whole time. He looked strong and important to her, like someone who would have rescued her mother if he could have. He knelt before her and asked the female officer to leave.
“Lydia,” he said. “I know how afraid and sad you are right now. But I need you to be tough. I need you to help me find the man that hurt your mom.”
He held out his hand to her then. There was something about the way he spoke to her that brought her back to herself, something about his eyes that made her trust him right away. He seemed like a superhero to her, ten feet tall and bulletproof. She took his hand without a word and allowed him to lead her back into the house.
Part of her, even now, nearly twenty years later, still thought of him as a superhero. If anyone could fix the wrong things, it was Jeffrey. For a long time, when she realized that she had fallen in love with him and he with her along the way, she kept him at a distance. To love him like that would be to acknowledge him as human, that his heart could stop beating, that the boundaries of his flesh were weak. It was an idea she could barely stand; her fear of losing him had almost caused her to never allow herself to love him at all.
“Are you with me, Lydia? Are you listening?” Dax had taken a large gun from the glove compartment and was handing it to her. “Pull it together, woman. We have to go get your husband out of there.”
He had pulled the Rover onto a side street and was leaning over her to get another gun from beneath her seat. It was his big Magnum Desert Eagle, the nasty Israeli gun he favored. It was as big and as loud as a cannon.
“He’ll come back to that door,” she said.
“But he won’t leave without you,” Dax said, opening the car door and easing himself onto the street. He looked stiff and as if he was in pain. He went around to the trunk and Lydia saw him take out a crowbar. He stuck the gun in his jacket, kept the crowbar in his hand.
“He’ll know I’m out,” she said as he came around to her side of the car. “Because we agreed to meet back there when we were done or if something went wrong.”
“What if he thinks you got caught?”
“I don’t know,” she said as they started moving quickly to the alleyway she had used before. She noticed how badly Dax was limping.
“Dax-” she started. He put up a hand.
“No arguments. Let’s go.”
“I thought you said there was no way in once the gates were down,” she said.
“No,” he said, giving her an uneasy glance. “I said there was no way to get in quietly.”
Jeffrey wondered if he’d hit the guy too hard, if maybe he’d killed him. He looked young, lying at Jeffrey’s feet, a river of blood flowing from his nose. Jeffrey leaned down and put a finger to his neck. He was relieved to feel the blood pumping through his artery. The kid would have a headache, likely a couple of shiners and a broken nose. That’s what happened when you took the butt of a Glock between the eyes. Jeffrey heard the Nextel beep, and a voice said, “Charley, are you clear? Are you clear?”
Jeffrey took the phone from the kid’s waistband. “I’m clear,” he said into the mike.
“Good. We need you down at the auditorium. It’s possible that there was a second intruder, still on the premises. We need to organize.”