Sever looked at me, his mouth slightly agape. Then he muttered something into the phone and hung up.
Wydell fixed his dark brown eyes on mine. "If you want to stay off the radar, that's fine by us. But it's important-no, essential-to national security that we don't confuse the press or the public. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
"Not really."
"The threat is over. It's important that the public be made to feel at ease again."
"Listen," I said, "I don't want to have to go home and puzzle out what you're trying to say. So just be clear about what you mean. Please."
His brow furrowed. "Okay. If you choose not to be officially recognized, we'd like you not to talk about the events of early this morning. Least of all to the press or media. It's a closed chapter that's best left that way. If there's anything you have to say about it-anything at all, ever-our understanding is that you're to come to us first. And as I said earlier, if there's any way we can thank you for what you did, please let us know."
"There is one thing I'd like," I said.
"Anything."
I looked across at Sever. "Evelyn Plotkin, my neighbor. The one you shoved back into her apartment. She's a nice lady. Collects Hummels. Member of Amnesty International. T-shirt with a picture of her grandkids on the front. That sort of stuff. I'd like you to apologize to her."
Sever's tan face flexed, accenting the muscle beneath his cheeks.
Wydell said, "That's it? That's all you want?"
"That's all."
He nodded at Sever. "I think we can arrange that."
I pulled on my sneakers. "Oh-sorry. One other thing."
Sever looked less obliging now. "What's that?"
I stood, cinching the hospital gown around my waist as best I could. "Can you help me get home?"
I followed them out, Charlie's key rattling soundlessly inside the heel of my shoe.
Chapter 7
A few ribbons of yellow crime-scene tape had been stretched haphazardly across the open doorway, a spiderweb that had lost its momentum. My door rested flat in the middle of my torn-up living room. I stood for a few moments in the hall, contemplating the mess. I was wearing an I L.A. T-shirt and baggy muscle pants from the hospital gift shop. My head was throbbing-I could feel the pulse intensified in the cut on my cheek-and the hallway lights seemed unusually bright. My mouth tasted bitter, like the rind of some fruit. I had been looking forward to getting home so much that it hadn't occurred to me what would be waiting.
I stepped through the tape, picked up the door, and rested it carefully back in place. I walked around and checked all the locks. Stupid, I know, given that the door was leaning against the frame, but old habits are hard to kill. I closed all the blinds, then surveyed the condo. When I got home, I usually checked that none of my things were out of place, another part of the ritual, but what was the point? Every drawer had been dumped. My books, bills, and papers had been rifled through and dropped unceremoniously.
The TV had been moved to the carpet and Frank's old steamer trunk flipped, jaws to the carpet, its contents strewn around my bedroom. I hadn't gone through them in years. My first baseball trophy, broken at the base. The Punisher's debut in Spider-Man. My dad, still smoking, still smiling in Kodachrome. All these artifacts, imprinted in my memory so strongly that seeing them felt like deja vu. But they were also somehow altered, diminished. The shine of the trophy had worn off. The baseball cards looked faded. My father's smile wasn't as relaxed as I'd remembered, and it held an element of self-righteousness.
Callie's sketches had landed over by the IKEA bureau. The back porch of Frank's house.
Fernando Valenzuela at the near-topple phase of his Charlie Brown windup. A pear on our battle-scarred kitchen table. They transported me back in time as swiftly and vividly as the smell of fresh-mowed outfield grass. I unrolled the portrait of Frank and sat cross-legged on the floor with it. I'd forgotten how capable Callie was. She'd accented Frank's lips and given him the benefit of the doubt on his nose, making him not more handsome but perhaps more refined. Yet she'd captured precisely the creases in his face, the depth and vigilance of those dark pupils.
An image knifed into consciousness-me cradling that face while the body beneath it shuddered and failed. Half my life I'd spent running from that spotlit moment and the fallout from it.
The ache in my knees drew me back into my present confusion. Tufts of couch stuffing, key in my shoe, the charcoal portrait of Frank in my lap. The acid flicking at the walls of my stomach reminded me why I'd consigned the sketch to the trunk, why the trunk had stayed closed. I rolled up the drawing and put it away with everything else, then set the TV back on the trunk to prevent it from leaping open like a horror-movie effect.
My discomfort came to life as an itch under my skin. I clicked the remote, hoping the background noise would make me feel less alone. A "Reelect Bilton" spot oozed from the TV with an inspiring symphonic track. The commander in chief decked out in a sweater and khakis before the Oval Office desk, his high-school sweetheart still sedated at his side, surrounded by three generations of Biltons- grown children, it-generation grandkids, and a few burbling great-grandsons. "Senator Caruthers says he doesn't 'understand family values.' Do you really want someone in the White House who's proud to make that claim?"
Three channels over I found Wile E. Coyote on a precipice, about to misjudge his pendulum swing.
I took a deep breath, contemplated my next move. I'd missed a morning interview, not good considering I was beholden to my ex-girlfriend for setting it up. Induma, a software engineer when we'd dated, had sold a storage-management application to IBM or Oracle for an obscene amount of money and for stock options that turned out to be worth even more. She now acted as a part-time guru, helping troubleshoot for the hundreds of companies and institutions using her system. They included Pepperdine, which offered a joint M.B.A./Master of Public Policy I'd had my eye on for a while.
In the last eight years, I'd worked my way from soup-kitchen ladler to co-executive director of an umbrella charity that channeled money to various programs for L.A.'s homeless. At thirty-five I had just convinced myself I was ready for something bigger. Last week I'd left to explore options and start studying for the standardized tests required for Pepperdine's joint-degree program. And Induma had hooked me up with an informational interview with a dean of admissions; I didn't want to screw up my chances, but even more I didn't want to make her look bad.
I picked up my cordless phone to give her a call. A chill tensed the skin on my arms, and I threw the phone down on the bed. I found a screwdriver among the dumped-out tools at the bottom of the coat closet and pried the phone's casing open. I lifted out the perforated disk of the receiver. No C-4. And no bugs, but I knew from Law amp; Order that these days they tapped calls from outdoor junction boxes. Deciding to play it safe, I left the phone dismantled on the kitchen counter.
I headed into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and at long last wiggled the key from the sole of my shoe. Brass, like I remembered. Thicker than a house key. Stamped on the front, three uneven numbers: 229. On the back: U.S. GOV'T, UNLAWFUL TO DUPLICATE.
An office in the Secret Service Building? A government vault? A safe-deposit box?
A knock at the front door startled me. As I sprang up, a thud vibrated the floor. Jamming the key back into the air pocket of my sneaker, I scrambled out into my bedroom.
A ginger-haired young man in his early twenties stood at an uncomfortable forward tilt, peering apologetically into my apartment, his fist still raised from knocking. He wore a white shirt, almost the shade of his skin, and a red paisley bow tie. The front door lay flat on its side just inside the threshold. We regarded each other, startled. I looked like an idiot or a schizophrenic-muscle pants, gift-shop T-shirt, eyes glassy with fatigue.