23

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I told him.

He’d come in almost silently. I hadn’t heard him as much as sensed movement of air, but it was enough. At “bathroom” his movement came to a stop so abrupt that it made a sound: a near-inaudible clunk of the soles of sneakers banging together. Surprise, maybe: What, a request? No hysteria? He didn’t answer, so I repeated it. “I really have to go.”

“Tough shit.” Pete Delaney made no attempt to disguise his voice. Not good. If I had a balance sheet, this wasn’t headed for the assets column. Clearly, he didn’t see me as having a long-term relationship with him—or with anyone.

Harsh, but sociopaths aren’t given to random acts of kindness. The bathroom business was not as dire as it might have been, because I’d already peed twice. That was as repulsive as it sounds. I understood that if I lived, I would be horribly chafed. But I hoped against hope that in letting me go to the bathroom, he might at least turn on a light or loosen the zip ties on my ankles and shins. I could see the space I was in. With luck, I could trip him, kick him, take him down.

“Speaking of tough shit,” he went on, “did you ever hear that people shit out of pure terror.” He stopped for a few seconds as if expecting I would respond, Really? Do they? “Or as they’re dying. Sometimes after, because the muscles relax before rigor mortis sets in.”

Clearly, he planned not just to kill me but also to try to terrify me. He could have gone straight to the killing, except he needed to know what I knew.

And vice versa. I hadn’t an inkling about what he really knew about me. Had he somehow found out I’d been with the bureau? That I had been trained not to show terror unless it was tactically advantageous? During a lecture at Quantico that preceded the demos and then practice, someone had raised her hand and asked: “But if you’re in a really terrifying situation, you may not be rational enough to decide what’s tactically advantageous.” And the lecturer shrugged and said, “Okay, then you’re dead.”

Not yet. I decided for the time being that there was no purpose in my talking. If you were being held captive, you were supposed to humanize yourself, changing yourself from a thing—an enemy, an opponent of your abductor’s beliefs, an adversary who would restrict his freedom—into a fellow human being. Form a relationship with your kidnapper. Except sociopaths like Pete aren’t the relationship type.

So I had to rely on ordinary life. When you know someone, you can read his or her silence: a need for quiet, inward seething, passive aggression, quelling an angry outburst. But if someone’s a stranger or a vague acquaintance? It’s hard to read the words unsaid. So I figured I had a small shot at unnerving him with silence.

Naturally I didn’t expect him to get distraught. No doubt in this second career of his, he’d come across people who determinedly clammed up—though my guess was eventually nearly all of them talked. Still, I wasn’t a total stranger to him. He knew that while I wasn’t a chatterer, I could be congenial, friendly enough, curious about other people’s lives, eager to talk about books and movies. Possibly, not getting anything from me might bother him because it wasn’t my MO.

“I see,” Pete said wearily. “The silent treatment. You know how long that will work? Until I lose my patience. And if you think you’ve ever felt pain before, you’re in for an ugly surprise.”

I thought about praying. Not a beseeching: God, don’t let him do it. Just the traditional prayer, the Shema. Jews are supposed to recite it twice a day and at their deaths; it’s a declaration of the oneness of God and what God expects of you.

That’s the way people do it, go out how they lived. Christians have last rites or prayers. Muslims’ final words are supposed to be: “There is no God but Allah.” I had a nanosecond of regret about never learning what Hindus did.

Except I was pretty sure you were supposed to say the Shema right at your death. What if I lasted for another day or two? Would I remember to do it then? So I said it pretty fast, just in case, figuring that if there was an omniscient God, God would understand I had to get back to the “choose life” business.

Amen. Then right away I began to wonder if there was anything I could do about the zip ties on my ankles, which were 99 percent likely to be in Pete’s line of sight. Speaking of sight, I figured he must be wearing thermal-imaging goggles.

“Having fun yet?” he asked. “Thirsty?” Then came a sound I’d never considered as being unmistakable, but it was: thhhp. The opening of a cooler, the solid plastic kind with the lift-up top you use for water bottles and soda and beer cans for a blistering afternoon outdoors. Then quickly closed to keep the ice frozen because (not counting a person like me, on the way to dying of thirst) who the hell wants a warm root beer?

“Don’t waste what’s left of your energy trying to get me to tell you my life story,” he said. “I know what I am. I’m not one of those who have to boast about it. If you’re thinking you can distract me, you’ve got another thing coming.”

He was good at what he did: a simple sip, not a slurp. Going about drinking as if it were the normal thing to do. A few seconds and then another sip. This would go on until the can was empty. A little later, more soda or beer, maybe along with a sandwich. Guaranteed not Kraft Singles American Cheese. Italian salami, I thought, or maybe liverwurst, so I couldn’t miss the aroma—the possibility—of food.

There was no need to close my eyes, but that’s what you do when you’re concentrating. In my mind, I opened a packet of Excedrin with my teeth, popped two pills, and drank a long glass of cool water. Not ice cold because that could make my headache beyond unbearable. I imagined the Excedrin heading down my esophagus toward my stomach. I watched as it broke into small pieces, then into teeny flakes, then into minuscule dots that traveled through my bloodstream up toward my head. When the sound of Pete sipping broke through my meditation, I imagined him drinking carbonated kale juice. That didn’t work so I changed it to cat piss.

I envisioned him studiously ignoring me, maybe imagining my anguish at the sound of liquid. Except for an instant, I heard a teeny voice. Since I was far from clarity, it took me a minute of: Huh? Wha’? to realize he was listening to something through earphones. Not music. Words, and I remembered him saying at lunch that when he took long trips in a car or a plane, he listened to audiobooks. Had he said history? Maybe a cheery bio of Torquemada.

This wasn’t a plus, I knew, his passing time with a cold drink, an interesting book, watching me through goggles. My guess was that for jobs that required him to gain information, he had a pattern, and this was part of it. I needed to shake him out of his usual way of doing things.

Okay, so did I have any advantage over the other people he’d killed? Well, I assumed he most likely didn’t know them. And even if he ever had to establish some sort of relationship or even rapport, it would be in the service of carrying out a job that would earn him a hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. Also, given the fact that he was likely a sociopath, rapport probably meant zilch.

No doubt I also meant zilch to him. But the difference was that I knew the Pete Delaney who lived on Long Island, designed cute purse-size packaging for tampons, and put gas in his snowblower in October so he wouldn’t be caught by a freak early snowstorm.

So he needed me to answer his questions: How did I know? Who else knew? What did they know? But I had one other qualification. I was probably the one person who could appreciate the extraordinary range of his skills. Sure, he told me he didn’t need to boast. Yet I felt he wouldn’t mind a witness to his brilliance, even for a few moments. And who could better attest to that than the hunter who’d become his prey?

Okay, so I could wait till he finished chapter nineteen of his audiobook, but by then I’d be weaker than I was now, possibly dead. I remembered reading some memo when I was on the Joint Terrorism Task Force about how to handle being kidnapped. There was a bullet point about electrolytes and what happens when you didn’t have enough of them. It discussed the downward incline, complete with graph, of how your strength ebbs and your intellect … One of the women on the task force whose cubicle was next to mine, Nadia, read that part aloud. She said: “If my intellect wasn’t already shot to shit, I wouldn’t be here.” I’d laughed and that was all I could recollect about assessing my electrolytes.

I had to interrupt his program with an announcement: “Pete!”

It took a couple of minutes for him to respond, though almost immediately I saw a brief pinprick of light as—I guessed—he turned off his phone or headphones. The blink (though it didn’t last as long as that) wasn’t right up close. Though I was an abysmal judge of distance, it appeared to come from beyond the point where he could just reach out and touch me—at least ten feet, maybe more.

Still, he didn’t say anything. Possibly my calling him Pete unsettled him, since I doubted his victims were on a first-name basis with him.

Finally he answered: “What?” I could have been reading too much into it, but in spite of his attempt to sound indifferent, the final t in the word was emphasized, almost spit out, as if he were pissed.

No point in theatrics like: You’ve made a terrible mistake! I didn’t have time enough and he wouldn’t have the patience. Pete Delaney, Shorehaven’s nice guy, was probably reluctant to risk the identity he’d built up, which included his family and a business as a packaging designer, unless he was 99 percent sure I was a serious threat. So I said: “What made you take notice of me?”

“What are you trying to do? Form some kind of bond so I won’t be able to kill you?”

“No. I don’t think that’s possible.”

Anybody with even one shred of humanity would be dying to ask: Hey, why don’t you think it’s possible? And I had no doubt that the shred was there. Not that he cared about my opinion: he cared how he was perceived. Could I somehow have picked up that he was soulless? Also, he was deeply concerned if there was anyone else who felt the same way or whether I’d shared my suspicions about him. It wasn’t in his nature to ask directly: Hey, why don’t you believe forming a bond with me is possible? So it would force him to find out indirectly.

Not that I actually thought all this out. I wasn’t up to that. It was simply what I knew from life and training and reading. Like if you throw out an idea: He is unlike others in that he is utterly unfeeling, then people (even the subject himself) will need to know: Huh? What makes you think so? How did you find out? He’s married, has kids. Doesn’t he have bonds with them? People want more than an explanation when you tell them someone can be born without a conscience. They want the story. I’d read some article by a philosopher who said human beings are hard-wired for narrative; she didn’t make an exception for sociopaths.

Time to rephrase the question, more directly. I asked: “What made you view me as a threat?”

“You were different from the others. I saw that a few months after you joined the group. Remember? There was a gigantic crack of thunder during lunch. Everyone else either jumped or screamed. Someone said, ‘What the fuck?’” I shrugged. “You don’t remember it?” I shook my head this time, and since he didn’t demand any more of an answer, I decided my goggles theory was correct. “It was incredibly loud, like a Magnum revolver,” he added. “You know what that is?”

“A big gun?”

I thought I heard an impatient exhalation, but maybe I just thought a sigh of irritation belonged in the narrative. “There was another time,” he went on. “Fire engines went by the restaurant, around that curve onto Shore Road, and suddenly turned on the sirens. They screamed. They’re made to disturb people, to get attention. And I looked at you. I don’t think you even blinked. At some point, I guess the next Wednesday, you were across the table and I asked you something in a little lower than normal voice, to check your hearing. You heard it. So I asked myself, what kind of person is so cool under fire?”

“I don’t see how you could decide that. For all you know, I could have some sort of cognitive disability.”

“I don’t have time for this shit,” he said. I wouldn’t say he became highly emotional, but he did sound exceedingly cranky. I tried to think of a comeback, but before I could he said, “You know what you reminded me of? You reminded me of me. Not just cool under pressure. Cold. Like you’ve been trained. Or just experienced, at something. I remember one time I was talking about a design job in St. Louis, but I’m also checking you out every once in a while, just to see if you’re reacting to anything I’m saying.”

“Was I?”

“No, because you were basically doing the same thing I was. You were taking green peppers out of something you were eating but also checking me out. But barely looking at me. An amateur would really think you were more into the green peppers, but I knew. What’s that old saying? Takes one to know one.”

“Takes one what?” I asked.

“Shut up! Do you remember that big cockroach?”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re talking about the one that came out of the breadbasket at that first restaurant, right? After that, we changed to La Cuisine.”

“Do you remember what you said? Everyone else was disgusted. A couple were practically hysterical. And you said …”

He waited for me to fill in the blank. “I don’t remember,” I told him. “Was it something sarcastic?”

“You said, ‘I guess I’ll have to pass on the sourdough.’” I could hear he was angry that I’d been so offhand, so snotty. Maybe it was that he hated snide women. But my guess was it was more about the roach—that he’d been afraid of it, but I hadn’t. “You didn’t even goddamn flinch,” he said.

“I had a boyfriend who went to medical school in Miami,” I explained. “He had a room in a house where they had palmetto bugs. They’re like two inches long. And they flew. At first I was beyond freaked, but it cured me of all my bug fears.”

“I never met a woman who was completely not afraid of bugs,” he said.

“I’m sure there are women entomologists and—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

For a while there was silence. I figured he must have been upset because he lost control. After what seemed like a long time, I thought I heard the little voice from his audiobook again. I strained, and then, when I was sure that’s what it was, I started sawing again, twenty seconds on, ten off. I was making some progress. When I slanted my hands toward the left, the right angle of the post where I’d been working seemed to fit into a notch in the zip tie that was more pronounced than it had been earlier. At the least, I’d cut through the rounded edge of the tie; I had no idea what they called it, but it was the plastic equivalent of a rolled hem of a scarf.

When I stopped sawing to rest, I didn’t hear the audio anymore, so I stayed still. I didn’t hear anything else, but I did pick up a scent that I guessed was one of those prewet wipes people use on camping trips or when changing a baby’s diaper. In that second, I really wanted to kill him, put my hands around his cool neck and bang his head against the wall.

“I’m always on guard duty,” Pete said suddenly. “Always watching, always listening.” As I was wondering what, if anything, I should say to this, he kept going: “People don’t realize it, but I keep an eye on everyone. Our garbage guy? There’s not a day I don’t walk out and give him a friendly hello, like with friends. Except I’m watching every bit of stuff in those cans, even the shredded papers in black bags, get into the back of that truck. Early on, I told him I was still a kid at heart and loved to see the blade shovel the trash against the moving wall in the back. Do I give a crap if he thinks I’m a kid, or just suspicious? I always get a smile and he gets a big fat tip at Christmas.”

I knew where he was going. “Sounds like a workable arrangement,” I said.

“So obviously, I saw your car—well, not your car—one day when I went out. The second I got back into the house, I grabbed my binoculars and bingo, managed to get the plate number. Checked one of my databases, found out it was a rental, and double bingo. A loaner car from North Coast Subaru. Called, pretended I was a cop. Car making a left turn from the right lane. Do I have to tell you the et cetera?”

“What databases do you use?” I asked.

“Ticktock. Your time’s running out. Want to hear about my databases?”

“No.”

“I keep my eyes open and my ears open. One day at lunch, before you got to the restaurant, Lucy and John were talking about you, how you’d only been living on Long Island for three years. And that was how long you’d been married, three years. Some people might have let that go, but not me.”

He appeared to be waiting for a response. I asked: “So what did you do?”

“I’m a success because I’m a nonstop analyzer. You come across very ordinary. A wisecrack here or there, but mostly just a regular married lady—who happens to have nerves of steel. I’m the only one who would have picked up on that aspect. My guess is most people see you as okay, friendly, someone with a job that’s a little unusual but other than that not important. You seem to like what you’re doing but not love it. You don’t seem under any serious pressure to grow your business.”

“Given the economics of publishing—”

“If I don’t ask you to say something, keep your fucking mouth shut. So at first I thought, ‘Why would she be under pressure? She’s got a rich husband.’ Isn’t just a stepmother but adopted his kid. Good move. Shrewd. Catch him, then make it hard for him to get out of the deal. But I told you I’m an analyzer. Does it make sense that this kind of woman would spend ten or twenty years reading books in Arabic? You see, Mrs. Judge Geller, your CV doesn’t compute. You’re more like someone who changed course in midstream.” I was going by his rules so I said nothing. He must have needed a response because he said, “Go ahead. You can talk.”

“I’m one of those … sort of geeks who like doing things that don’t appeal to most people. I love reading Arabic-language literature, learning about all the diverse cultures in which the language is spoken.”

“With nerves like steel. And later I thought like someone maybe trained in one of those terrorist camps. Maybe you were following me because you knew I suspected you of something.” It was only my alleged nerves of steel that kept me from rolling my eyes, just in case he had some super-tech thermal imaging goggles that allowed him to make out facial expressions.

“A terrorist?” I said. “In Shorehaven?”

“You don’t make your living from knowing French. You make it from Arabic. I figured, ‘Maybe she is a sleeper, who in a week or a year they can say go and blow up the Empire State Building and you’ll do it.’ But believe it or not, I’m a fair guy.” I heard him take another sip from his soda can, but it must have been unpleasantly warm, because he opened the cooler again. “A nice icy bottle of water,” he said. “And don’t you wish you could have some?” I didn’t answer. “I said,” he yelled, “don’t you wish you could have some? When I ask you a question, you answer.”

“Yes, I wish I could have some.”

“That’s better. You’re not getting any, but you knew that. So I did some more detective work on you. You think I want a terrorist living in town? You see something, say something, and all that shit. You know what I did? I called the Queens College alumni office. I asked Phoebe and Iris one day where you went to school because I thought you looked familiar, and one of them told me Queens College.”

Of course I was listening intently, but the headache was worse and moving even a fraction of an inch made me feel my skull couldn’t take any more pressure.

“Here’s what I did. I called up the placement office and told them I needed to clear up some confusion, that I called earlier about a job applicant, Corie Geller, class of … I wasn’t sure, but she was mid- to late thirties. They put me on to the alumni office, but they said no Corie Geller was there.” Not loud glugs, but he was definitely having more water. “They said no one by that name, and I told her, the lady there, that we were trying to do due diligence since one of our trainees seemed to have deleted the applicant’s maiden name and could they possibly check for someone named Corie. She was applying for a top-tier job in our company and we’d like to hire her ASAP. We pride ourselves on being a great company to work for. An engineering company.”

Pete was on a roll, relishing his story, but he was wasting what was left of my time.

“The lady was very cooperative. It took her maybe a minute to say there was no Corie, but there was a Coral Schottland. Except we don’t have a school of engineering. She majored in Asian and Middle Eastern studies. Emphasis on Arabic literature. So what did I say? I said actually, we’re not looking for an engineer, but we have an opening in Dubai in our human resources department and thought she’d be fine as administrator. A real people person. How about that, Coral Schottland?”

“Good,” I said. Tell them what they need to hear: “Inventive.” Actually, okay but not great. C+ to B–.

Pete went on. “Arabic, Arabic. I had two choices. Terrorist or spook.”

He stopped talking, so I considered that he was hoping for another word like inventive. “Spook as in spy?” I asked. “Like the CIA? No, but I have to give you credit. You’re in the right zone.” I tried to sound exhausted, as if I were fading fast. The role wasn’t a stretch. “I was a translator for NSA. I spent nine and a half years of my life sitting in front of a computer.”

“I’m warning you now, if you want your life shortened by, say, forty or fifty years, play it that way.” Like he was going to let me live. We’d go back to our lives: I’d ask him to pass the Splenda at next Wednesday’s lunch. “No one gets used to explosion noise sitting in front of a computer in Washington,” he said. “A giant clap of thunder. Fire engines that all start their sirens right practically where you’re sitting. No one sees a giant cockroach—” It hadn’t even been an inch long. “—and doesn’t blink, just makes a snotty remark. But when Billy Gregson in Galveston described who attacked him, I knew for sure you weren’t a terrorist. And I had to get to you before you got to me.”