I knew I could not be alone; that there was someone else inside the apartment besides Michael and me. The ashtray smell. It was a familiar smell. I knew that smell as well as I knew myself.
I had no idea how long I’d been standing inside that open door, just staring at the bound image of my ex-husband. A half-second maybe. Or a full minute. Fear warped time, bent it the same way it crippled my insides.
For me, the present moment no longer contained any logic or proportion. I knew I had to do something. What I wanted to do was lift my feet, put one foot in front of the other. I wanted to unbind Michael, rescue him.
But I just stood there doing nothing.
My hesitation must have been exactly what Whalen was counting on when he opened my closet door and stepped out into the bedroom.
Chapter 45
My awakening was as painful as it was sudden.
Michael was gone. Disappeared.
Aside from the sting in my head, his absence was the first thing that caught my attention.
There remained only my cell which had been removed from my jeans pocket, set on the wood floor directly before my eyes. There was a throbbing pain in my head and an egg-sized lump protruding from my forehead directly above my right eye. I touched the lump with the fingers on my right hand only to pull them back quick from the sting.
For the moment, I didn’t quite know where I was. Rather, I knew where I was, but I couldn’t be sure if I had entered into one of my vivid dreams. Had my dreaming progressed from hearing his voice to actually hearing the man; seeing him; smelling him; feeling him? I breathed, tried my hardest to calm myself; tried to focus on ending the dream, going back to sleep.
I wanted it to be morning.
I wanted to wake up to sunshine, to my routine. But every time I closed my eyes, I opened them again to the reality of the moment. All objects inside my periphery were blurry, distorted, depth-of-field spinning, pulsing like an out of control video camera.
Pushing myself up off an exposed hardwood floor, I sat up and felt a great weight inside my head. The throw rug that had covered the floor was gone. I saw the empty place that Michael had occupied in the bed. All that remained now were the crumpled bed sheets, the discarded shirt tossed to the floor.
I pulled the bedroom door open, ran out into the hall. That’s when the cell phone exploded in loud, bursting pulses. Whalen must have adjusted the ringer setting.
Running back into the bedroom, I picked the phone up from off the floor and put it to my ear. But there was no sound coming through the earpiece. In the place of a voice came a notice for a new text.
I thumbed OK on the keypad.
The text appeared on the radiant face of the phone.
Do not run little kitten. Do not call the police. Do not speak. Break the rules and Michael dies. Cry, cry, cry.
I pressed the phone back up against my head.
“Where’s Michael?” I screamed.
Heart pulsing inside my throat, I waited for an answer. A voice. But then I remembered to pull the phone away from my ear, stare down at the screen. The answer revealed itself in the form of another text.
Little kitten broke the rules. Cry. Cry. Cry.
Chapter 46
I felt on the verge of fainting. My breathing became rapid and forced.
I made my way back into the bathroom, yanked up the shade and stared out the window onto the parking lot. Blue and black clouds filled the sky. The occasional flicker of distant lightning lit them up. The usual cars were parked in the lot, including Michael’s truck. From where I stood it was impossible for me to see my Cabriolet.
Turning, I held the phone back up to my face, staring down at the display panel. I thumbed the command that would reveal Whalen’s number. The caller ID came back, “Restricted Number.” With trembling fingers I began to dial 9-1-1.
But before I fingered the second number in the sequence, I stopped myself cold.
I stared out into the thickening darkness and the silence of the apartment. What if the police come to my home? Whalen must be watching me. He must have been watching me now for weeks; months. What will he do when he sees the police car? What kind of revenge will he take out on Michael?
All strength seeped out of me. My hand and the phone it gripped fell to the side. I had no idea which way to turn for help. Not without getting Michael killed in the process.
I sensed someone behind me.
I knew he was there before I actually saw him. Something inside my brain went click. My eyes rolled back into their sockets. The wood floor beneath me turned to mud. I turned around, but did so in slow motion. I screamed but the sound of my voice was like an old vinyl record played at slow speed. When my eyes connected with his, I felt all oxygen leave my lungs. It was as if I’d been kicked in the stomach by an invisible booted foot.
There he was: the source of my fear; the author of my texts.
You are one day early…
He was the old man from the Hollywood Carwash. His was the face from ViCAP. He was the monster from my dreams. He was shaven clean now, and what had been long white hair was now a bald scalp. His face was gaunt, cheeks sallow, chin protruding. His pallor was chalk-pale. Dark round eyes made the paleness all the whiter.
Now for certain I remembered the face. I remembered the man; the monster.
I took in all these details with every single one of my senses as he approached me in the hall of my apartment, dressed in the worn work-boots and the blue uniform of the apartment complex maintenance crew. Standing there I could only wonder how he managed to get Michael out of there without anyone spotting him. He must have wrapped Michael up in the rug, dragged him out the front door like a piece of furniture. There were always people moving in and out of these apartments. Who would notice?
In one hand he held a needle and syringe. In the other, a pistol. He stared into my eyes as I began to feel myself losing all sense of balance.
“My other little kitten is gone,” he sobbed, in a gruff, high-pitched moan.
“Molly died,” I choked.
“Cry, cry, cry,” he whispered, his eyes tearing, his bottom lip protruding out in pout position. “Cry, cry, cry.”
He hadn’t yet touched me with the tip of that needle before I passed out.
Chapter 47
Molly enters the house in the woods before me. She is not bothered by the smell anymore than she is bothered by the creepy feel of spider webs that hang from the ceilings and the walls. In a word, the interior is trashed, with broken furniture scattered all about what was once an open living room. Looking all around me, I see that most of the walls have been opened up probably with claw hammers, almost all of the copper piping and wiring torn away by scrap hunters. There’s an old chandelier that hangs from the ceiling, its bulbs gone along with any crystals that once hung from it.
And that smell. It’s just as bad inside as it is outside.
“ Come on,” Molly says. “I want to show you the upstairs.”
Out the corner of my eye, I make out the staircase that leads up to a second floor. Its treads are no longer level, but leaning inwards. Just looking at them frightens me so that I can’t imagine stepping on them, bearing weight upon them. But Molly isn’t the least bit afraid. She heads to the stairs and in the home’s semi-darkness, begins climbing them, one at a time.
I follow.
As we ascend the staircase in near pitch darkness I begin to smell a new odor. It’s the same smell you get inside an old abandoned barn. The smell of cats and their urine. As we come to the second floor landing, a black cat scurries out from a room at the far end of the hall, runs right past us.