It wasn’t the banging at the front door that woke him, or even the dry, brittle shattering of the glass in the window, but the soft rasp of breath in the bedroom doorway. Joe jerked upright in the sheets and fumbled in the darkness for his glasses. He knocked them halfway across the nightstand. The heavy horn rims grated before Joe managed to snare them in trembling fingers and fumble them onto his face. There was a woman standing in the doorway; a woman who radiated danger like a bloody halo. The gun in her hand, a long, thick-bodied automatic pistol, certainly didn’t detract from the image.
“Rise and shine, old man!” she hissed.
Old man…? Joe looked down at his hands. They clutched at the edges of his blanket with failing strength, age-spotted and bony, with paper-thin skin alternately stretched and bagging at every joint. Joe shook his head slowly, stupidly. What was going on? She flipped the light switch and his eyes fought to adjust.
“I work for Carson,” the dangerous thing at the door said. “You know what I’m here for.”
Carson. The name tickled at him, persistent as a flea bite. A city in Arizona. Scarlet Carson. The red roses from that silly rebel movie a few years back, but…
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Joe cried sincerely. The woman narrowed her eyes at him, making them into scowls to match the one on her dark lips. “I swear I don’t!”
She was on him in two steps and half as many seconds, grabbing Joe by the front of his nightshirt and yanking him out of bed. His arms windmilled wildly as he struggled in vain not to fall, but she caught his thin wrist in a vice-like grip and held him up. She jammed the gun against his temple. Her breath smelled like cinnamon and alder.
“You give me the negatives, grandpa, or I make sure you never see the inside of a rest home. You have five minutes to get them, or I’ll put a bullet in your skull. Got it?”
“What negatives?” Joe asked wildly. “What the hell are you talking about?”
She curled her fist in his shirt, choking him. His glasses slipped down his nose, but he didn’t need them to see the bright spots of color suddenly swimming in his vision. What the hell was going on? But all of this seemed familiar and somehow vaguely disappointing.
“Don’t get cute with me,” she said, and let him go.
Joe staggered and caught himself against the nightstand. He straightened and pushed his thick glasses back up to their proper perch. No matter how much he protested, this woman was clearly convinced he had something that her employer wanted. If he didn’t produce it, she would take back an equal payment of blood. The sick knot in his stomach told Joe that the price would be far too high for his taste. She meant to use that gun.
“Okay, okay,” Joe panted. “I just… I just don’t remember where I put them, okay? I need to look for the uh…”
Damn it! He couldn’t seem to put his finger on what the she-goon had demanded. He spread his hands and held them out as if to an animal. His dry old shoulders popped like bubble-wrap. Joe winced. The sound was just a little too much like a gunshot for his comfort.
“The negatives,” she finished impatiently. “Move your skinny ass, old man. Find them and we’ll make Carson a happy man. Maybe you’ll live long enough to die in diapers at a rest home.”
She laughed cruelly. Joe looked anywhere but at her and noticed his bedroom for the first time. His jaw dropped open in wonder and he had to force it shut. The bed was a huge four-poster affair, with a lush canopy and drapes of dark blue velvet. The nightstand he leaned against was made of gnarled teak and the edges finished in gold leaf.
“Is this my house?” he asked falteringly.
She stopped laughing and cuffed his shoulder. “What the hell kind of question is that? It’s sure not the YMCA.”
All this is mine…? Joe shuffled past her and out into the house. The hallway was so wide that either of them would have had to lay down and stretch out fingers and toes to touch both sides. Walnut-paneled walls were hung with paintings behind glass and lit with S-shaped lights that shone with a sterile bluish light. To preserve the paint, he supposed.
A broad staircase spilled out into a lavish foyer with marble floors and stylish wall sconces that flickered with fake firelight. Joe stopped and cocked his head at the French doors that led outside. They were flanked on either side by suits of armor that looked authentic, but those were not what gave him pause.
The handles were some brushed bronze-colored metal in keeping with the old-fashioned feel of the rest of the house, but the lock was stainless steel. It shone flatly in the paste-gem light just like the woman’s gun. He looked up and down. There were matching locks at the top of the joint where the two doors came together, and another at the bottom. The hinges were of similar thick, functional and paranoid construction.
Who even needs locks like that? The crime rate here must be horrible.
The goonette jabbed him in the spine with her pistol and Joe couldn’t help the hysterical titter that escaped him. Check that, the crime rate was abysmal. But he could hear nothing from outside. Not the grumble of cars or the shrill barking of poorly trained dogs. None of the usual hallmarks of a bad neighborhood. Joe moved on, not willing to risk that the next prod from the woman might be made with a bullet.
The door’s still locked and there’s no broken glass. She must’ve gotten in another way. Maybe another door I can use to get away…
Joe shook his head and felt like his brain was rattling around in his head, bouncing against the bone on a few tenuous tethers. Make a break for it? Not a chance! Her bullets ran a lot faster than his old legs could.
Still… No! No, don’t be an idiot.
The hallway encircled the stairs and split off in two directions. Joe took the left-hand turn and found himself in an expansive kitchen. Just to feed one man? A refrigerator large enough to house a family of misplaced Inuit, an expansive island stove and cavernous oven. There was a neat line of plastic amber bottles on the counter. His captor grabbed one of them and turned the white label up to catch the wan moonlight coming in through a plant-filled bay window above the sink.
“I suppose at your age, everything is falling apart,” she said, and dropped the bottle. It clattered over on the countertop and rolled in a tight circle. Joe picked it up and pushed his glasses high on his nose to read the label.
“Reminyl.” He replaced the little cylinder of pills neatly beside the others. “Isn’t that for Alzheimer’s?”
She shrugged and prodded Joe with the gun again. “I don’t care if it’s for explosive diarrhea, you old bastard. Just find me the damned negatives.”
Joe hurried from the kitchen. There were two doors, but only one with light coming through. A living room lay beyond, set up with a blocky U shape of overstuffed couches and an elegant coffee table in the middle. The table was piled high and precariously with magazines and newspapers. It didn’t seem at all a likely place to find the negatives that she wanted, but if he didn’t want to get shot tonight, Joe supposed he had better start looking somewhere.
Joints creaking, he sat on the edge of the couch and riffled through the top layers of the pile. He picked up a Baltimore Times.
Mayor Carson unveils plans for new library
Carson? No wonder he knew the name! Of course, Andrew Carson was serving his second term as Baltimore’s mayor. He was the youngest in a century and well-loved by his constituency for his dedication to public works and wholesome family values, whatever those were supposed to be.
The picture under the headline showed Carson standing over a cutout model of the new building, smiling and pointing at some unimportant detail. There was a pretty, if rather stiff-looking, young woman on his arm. His wife, he knew, a locally famous heiress and religious champion.
I don’t even recognize my own house, but I know who the mayor is married to? Who am I? What’s going on? The answer is right in front of me, but I just can’t see it!
The woman standing over his shoulder grunted. “Nothing here. Move along,” she said.
She sounded for all the world like one of those policemen who ushered everyone past a gruesome crime scene while assuring them that nothing of interest had happened. Joe put the newspaper down and followed the waving of her gun.
Out the left door, down a short hallway and he was in a library. At least, that was the only thing Joe could think of to call it. The room was no less extravagant than the one he had just left, but slightly smaller and lined in bookshelves. But not a one of them seemed to have a title that Joe could see.
He crossed to the nearest bookshelf, a towering thing that stretched all the way up to the high ceiling and had a wheeled ladder on a track standing in front of it. Joe squinted through his glasses, but his first glance had been quite correct. None of the books were marked. They were thick leather-bound volumes.
How strange!
He had all but forgotten about the gun-wielding woman watching his every movement with sharp, suspicious eyes. There was a mystery in this house and in himself. He found himself a more than willing captive in the search for his own secrets.
Joe hooked a few books off of their shelves and carried them to a monolithic armchair in front of the cold fireplace. They were surprisingly light in his gnarled hands. He twisted the knob under the shade of a nearby lamp and opened the topmost book.
Photographs.
It was a photo album. They were all photo albums. There were pictures of men and woman, many in sharp, smart suits. In parks, in kitchens, in hotel rooms, in offices. Not just photographs… Joe turned a page and found a shredded memo painstakingly taped back together and pasted into the book.
Joe slapped the album closed, pushed his glasses up again, and yanked open the next one. More photos and a bill from a massage parlor, brown with some sort of stain. He shoved it out of his lap and stared at the next.
An inspector’s report spotted with rust-colored flecks of dried blood.
An empty plastic bag labeled biohazard in big, stark letters.
A series of photographs depicting a half-dressed girl hanging on a young man’s arm.
Embracing him.
Kissing him.
Joe stopped. He recognized the man in the pictures. Andrew Carson! The raven-haired little minx with a wicked grin and her hand thrust into his back pocket certainly wasn’t the mayor’s wife…
“Who took these?” Joe asked in a faltering voice.
“Who do you think, grandpa?” she said in quiet disgust. “Fifty grand a month for a couple of bad snapshots.”
“I did this to Mayor Carson?”
The woman yanked the album out of his spotty, shaking hands and tucked it under her free arm. “And a hell of a lot of other people, it looks like,” she hissed, gesturing at the bookshelves.
There had to be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of albums. A lifetime of secrets that Joe couldn’t remember. But this library was just a showcase. He was forgetting something, something right before his eyes.
Safe…
“The negatives aren’t here,” he said. “I keep them somewhere safe.”
Unasked, he was on his feet again hurrying purposefully through a narrower hallway. There was golden light spilling from around the corner. Joe chased it and stumbled into the office. It had none of the majestic overtures of the rest of the house. Here was a small room with a battered desk crouching in the middle, under a lamp with a tacky, dented tin shade painted a hideous pea-soup-gone-bad green. The ugly lamp was switched on and filled the misplaced office with a warm amber light like airborne honey.
The door to a combination safe, thick and black and ominous, dominated the wall to the left of the desk. Joe padded over to stand before the safe. Joe straightened his glasses and stared at the worn, number-strewn knob in the center. All he had to do was get it open and hand over Carson’s negatives. Then he could go back to forgetting all of this.
It’ll be over soon.
“Well? Open it up, old man!” she snapped.
Joe was sweating, his glasses slipping down his nose again on the salty drops. What was the combination?
He pushed his glasses up again. There was something written on the safe, scratched into the dark-finished steel in a jagged patois of his own handwriting:
Right before your eyes
Joe let out a wheezing cry of frustration. What was right in front of him? The safe? What the hell kind of note was that?
“Open it!” the woman yelled at him. “Get it open now!”
Joe didn’t answer. All he could do was stare at the safe, the hideous altar to a career of blackmail and extortion.
“Open it!”
“I can’t,” he cried. “I can’t remember the combination!”
“If you can’t get that beast open and give me the negatives, I’ll have to shut you up with a bullet.” She held the gun to his chest like a challenge. “You’d better figure it out!”
Right before your eyes… He closed his eyes.
“I can’t. Scream and threaten all you want, but I can’t get the safe open,” Joe sighed. Something that may have been regret flickered like a wind-blown candle in the woman’s eyes.
She pulled the trigger. There was a clap of empty thunder and the bullet tore through Joe’s guts, spraying sticky red across the front of the safe. He staggered, sagged and fell to the hard floor. She turned on her heels and stalked out of the office.
Joe stared up at the safe, at all the secrets forever out of his reach. His blood pooled around him in a waxing halo and his vision started going blurry. He couldn’t focus on the safe anymore, only the wide horn rims of his glasses.
There was something written there, right before his eyes.
R19 L28 R14
