Not that I was going to reveal this. I’d been anticipating the question and had my answer ready.
“That,” I said. “Right. They want me to harvest social-insurance numbers from the patient files.”
Same routine of disappearing and returning pad of paper.
YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE LIED
.
The second trip of the scuffling shoes had been a promise of relief. Now the shoes made a third trip to the electrical outlet, and this one filled me with dread.
“We want to sell the numbers to hackers in Russia!” I said in a half shout. I was ashamed of the panic in my voice. “I used my father’s connections at the hospital to set it up!”
I held my breath, hoping to hear the shoes returning.
Instead, there was the click of the prong being inserted in the outlet. I felt the heat begin to build in the curling irons.
I threw my body as hard as I could against the duct tape that was holding me in place.
Incredibly, something gave.
It wasn’t the tape. It was the pipe I’d been taped against, moving with a creaking sound.
Again I lunged forward. Twice. Three times. On the fourth time, there was a
whoosh of water as the pipe gave way with such suddenness that I banged my head against the cubicle door.
It was a pain I didn’t feel. Not when the insides of my fingers and my palms were screaming at the sun-hot pain inflicted by the curling irons.
With my hands between my knees, I jerked my wrists upward, and the cords snapped loose from the extension cord.
I swiveled to face the broken pipe and let the cold water rush down my arms and onto my hands. I held my wrists in the water for at least a minute, head turned to see if Converse would be back to kick open the cubicle door and attack.
Nothing.
The water pooled at my feet, and the agony of my hands disappeared.
Anger began to replace my fear.
I bounced my shoulder into the cubicle door. Then, when it didn’t pop open, I gave it a full body slam and burst through, rolling onto the washroom floor,
where the water from the burst pipe formed a wide and shallow pool.
I was completely soaked. With the curling irons still taped to my hands.
Before I could roll over and make it onto my knees, two pairs of shoes entered my vision. With them came two voices I recognized.
“So this is what a boys’ bathroom looks like.” This from Jo. “I have to say, Raven, I’ve always wondered.”
First things first. This gym was Billy’s pride. Billy’s life. I needed to stop the gushing water. That would be as simple as reaching the plumbing shut-off valve.
I stood.
“Seriously,” Jo said, looking from me to the busted cubicle door, back to me and the curling irons taped to my hands and then to the extension cord that led to an electrical outlet. “This is sick. Like, depraved sick.”
That was more proof of what I already knew about her. Smart. Very smart. She’d followed the links and immediately come
to the correct conclusion. Someone had been torturing me.
But then, maybe she’d been the one who came up with the idea. Because she was smart. Very smart.
“Who did this?” Jo asked. “Why?”
Jo was not tall. But thin, so she looked taller than she was. The type of thin that comes from living on the streets. She had Asian in her background, and something else, giving her skin a duskiness that was, well, as alluring as the rest of her. Long dark hair. Eyes that were intense brown.
I’d first met her at a park. Some dude had been trying to make life miserable for her, and I couldn’t help but step in, more because I didn’t like the dude’s attitude and less because of trying to impress her. As a result, I didn’t make a good impression on her. Then she had reappeared in my life at a chess match at my school. Bishops Prep. She and Raven had faked student id cards and infiltrated the school, then blackmailed me into helping them.
It had been interesting, their approach, because they had blatantly used the fact that they were hot and knew it. I’d been forced to help them with a couple of their own projects that had barely ended well for them. Worse, from my perspective, they’d dragged Bentley into their messes.
In answer to Jo’s question about the who and why of the curling irons, I shrugged. I didn’t feel like speculating out loud to answer her questions. It seemed too convenient to me that both of them were here right at this time. For all I knew, one of them had been wearing the Converse shoes, and when they’d heard me break the pipes loose, they’d decided to switch roles, from interrogators to surprised visitors.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. That whole thing with the pad and paper. Silence would have been necessary, because speaking or whispering might have made it possible for me to identify them.
As Raven looked from the curling irons on my hands to the electrical outlet, her face showed the same thought process that Jo had followed. Difficult to decide which of the two was smarter. Or, frankly, better-looking. Raven had pale skin, like her ancestors had come from Ireland. She was tall, but not awkward or lanky. She had dark, layered hair down to her shoulders. Hence the name Raven. And she had attitude.
Raven said, “How bad are your hands?”
Maybe that was deliberate irony, based on the two of them being the ones who’d done this to me.
“I’m okay,” I said. “It was only a threat.”
If they’d set this up, I wasn’t giving them the satisfaction of knowing that my fight adrenaline was wearing off and my palms and the insides of my fingers were giving me some serious pain.
I lifted my hands to my mouth and snapped my teeth on a loose strand of duct tape to pull it loose.
“Hey,” Raven said. She reached out to help. “I can save you some time.”
My first impulse was to yank myself out of her reach. I didn’t need or want her help. Not in the mood I was in. With the water from the broken pipe flowing into the drain, an extra minute or two until I reached the shut-off valve wouldn’t do any more damage to Billy’s gym than had already been done.
Then I realized that if they were behind this and were now acting innocent, it would be smart to do some acting of my own. No sense in letting obvious anger on my part show that I was suspicious of them.
“Thanks,” I said, putting a smile on my face that I didn’t feel. I decided I was going to cooperate with them as long as it took to find out if and why they’d done this to me.
I held out my wrists.
Raven leaned over and began to unwind the duct tape. Raven. As in the girl who had once scaled the walls to the mansion where
Bentley and I lived and where Bentley and I suffered. Because of that, Raven knew I came from money. But I doubt she really understood how much money. The mansion, impressive as it was, was no indication of how deep the family fortune was.
With her this close, I could smell fresh shampoo. Like me, and like Jo, she’d wanted to take someone down. Hot-looking as both of them were, I’d not once allowed myself any boy-girl thoughts. The three of us had begun our limited relationship with them blackmailing me into helping them. I’d done what I needed to get them out of my life—until I’d called in a favor to get them to meet me tonight.
Raven finished pulling away the last of the duct tape.
I glanced at my palm and did my best not to let any emotion cross my face. Dime-sized blisters lined my fingers and dotted my palm, like my hand belonged to a gecko.
I used my right hand to free my left hand. I didn’t open my left hand to look at what I knew I’d see, and I took a couple of quick steps to the exposed piping against the far wall. I turned the shut-off valve to stop the water flow from the broken pipe, and the pressure of the valve on my skin made me wince.
I made sure any expression of pain was gone as I turned back to them.
Jo pointed at the yellow sheets of paper that were now pulped in the water and sucked to the drain. She nudged one of the sheets out of the water, but it was as puddled as my skin would have been if the curling irons had been left on any longer.
Jo stepped closer to the toilet cubicle, where the pad was on the floor, away from the water flow and still dry, the fishing line still tied to the hole at the top.
She lifted it and studied the words written across the top page from the last
of the scrawled statements put in front of me by Converse Person. She read it out loud to Raven. “
You should not have lied
.”
Raven snorted. “In my life, it’s telling the truth that gets me in trouble.”
“No,” Jo said. “That’s what’s on this page. These words:
You should not have lied
.”
Jo lifted the fishing line and let the pad dangle from the end of the nearly invisible nylon strand.
“Huh,” she said.
She cocked her head. I could see her thoughts racing.
She walked to a neighboring cubicle, lifted the pad over the door and slid it down the other side, feeding out fishing line. Then she let go, and the pad slipped to the floor.
“Interesting,” Jo said. She looked at me. “Care to explain?”
Before I could answer, a deep voice reached us from the interior of the gym.
“Vancouver Police,” the voice said. “Canine Unit.”
“Crap,” Raven said. For Jo’s benefit, she pointed toward the hallway that led to a back door. “Plan B.” She looked at me. “Meet us at Denny’s. One hour.”
They were in motion before I could answer, abandoning me to the cops.
I followed. I had good enough reasons of my own not to be caught here in the gym by any type of authority.
Just over an hour later we were settled in a booth at a Denny’s restaurant on Davie Street. It was safe and anonymous.
Our salads had just arrived. I know. Salad.
“Why did the two of you break into the gym?” I asked.
I knew I’d locked the doors to work out in privacy.
“We didn’t,” Raven said. “The back door was open, with the lock broken. That’s probably why the police were checking it out. But we would have broken in if we needed to. Security there is a joke. But we don’t have to tell you that, do we?”
I wasn’t going to let her change the subject.
“Then why,” I said, “did you come looking for me? We had agreed to meet in the park.”
“It’s a little exposed out on the point,” Raven said. “Too easy to get trapped.”
“No reason to suspect a trap,” I said. “All I wanted was a meeting.”
I needed them to break into a house for me and steal a Picasso painting worth upward of a quarter million. They owed me, and I wasn’t going to be afraid to let them know it.
“If it had anything to do with curling irons taped to your hands,” Jo said, “then I’d say that’s enough reason for us to suspect a trap.”
“Except,” I said, challenging them, “you couldn’t know about the curling irons ahead of time. Right? And if you didn’t know ahead of time, you still don’t trust me.”
Raven shrugged. “You know where Jo and I come from. Don’t take it personally.
Besides, it’s not all about you. We guessed if you had a reason to set up a meeting with us, then something bad enough was happening behind the scenes that we needed to take precautions.”
Jo said, “We’re always cautious. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here right now. Anyone else back at the gym would have been flushed out by the Canine Unit to the cop in the alley at the back door.”
That had been the obvious exit. Instead, Jo and Raven, with me behind them, had gone to the rooftop. Then they had checked the back alley from above. With the cop below, it meant going to the other side of the roof and jumping across a ten-foot gap to the building beside the gym. And then jumping to another rooftop and finally taking a fire escape down.
Always cautious
. Like, maybe if they thought I had been setting a trap, they’d
decided to break into the gym and pull the curling-iron trick to see if I’d give them up under any kind of pressure.
“Always cautious,” I repeated. “That’s why you followed me after we split up.”
Jo studied me. “For a rich kid, I’m impressed. Not many would have noticed us tailing you. And if we suspected anything, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Why don’t you trust me?” I asked.
“We don’t trust anybody,” Raven said. “Jo and I barely trust each other. That means we have some questions for you. These questions won’t involve a curling iron.”
They must have had a little girl talk while following me here.
“I’m not promising answers,” I said.
“There was some pulped yellow paper in the drain at the gym,” Raven said. “That means you’d already faced some questions before the one I saw on the paper. What did you lie about? How did paper person
know you were lying about whatever the questions were?”
Both of them. Smart. Very smart.
And either the greatest actors of our time or truly innocent. I was on the bubble as to which was the correct of the two choices.
When I didn’t answer, Jo said to me, “Don’t pretend otherwise. Someone was interrogating you and using torture to get the answers. Someone who didn’t want you to know his identity.”
Or
her
identity, I wanted to say but kept silent.
Her hands were flat on the table as she continued, “Someone who forced you to answer enough questions to decide you were lying. At this point, I only know you at the surface level, but that’s enough to know that if someone was trying to make you do something, anything at all, your first response would be to do the opposite, no matter how much it hurt you.”
“Got to go with you on that one,” Raven said to Jo. “He wouldn’t have said a word until the curling irons heated up. And then only to buy some time to figure out how to get out of the situation. Let’s see your hands.”
“I’m a big boy,” I said. “I don’t need sympathy.”
“And you’re usually not an idiot,” Raven said. “Jo and I aren’t worried about your owie. The condition of your hands is significant to us for a much different reason. You show us your hands, or we walk.”
These were not the kind of girls to make empty threats. Unfortunately, I needed them. So I put my wrists on the table and flipped my hands over.