Page 104 of Stay Awake
I don’t fall for his kindness. I know who he really is. I know that he killed Amy and Marco, and that he probably intends to kill me.
I stare at the wordsSTAY AWAKEwritten on the backs of my hands under my knuckles. From Ted’s phone messages that I went through at the Korean restaurant, I know that every time I fall asleep I forget everything that has happened since the day Amy and Marco were killed. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep, repeatingStay Awake, Stay Awake, Stay Awakeover and over in my head like a primal scream.
Sometime later, the car engine falls silent. He unclips his seat beltand gets out, locking me inside. I hear his footsteps recede, followed by murmured voices interlaced with the rush of cars speeding past. I take the risk of opening my eyes to sneak a peek. He’s a few yards from the car, his back is to me as he talks on the phone. I assume he’s returning the call that came while we were driving.
Keeping an eye on his back, I take the cell phone and the Korean take-out menu from the pocket of my jeans. I quickly type in the phone number of the female detective that I scribbled on the take-out menu and share my location with her.
Help me,I text her.
I press Send, then turn the phone to silent and slip it back into my pocket. The take-out menu has fallen to the floor of the car, but it’s too risky to retrieve it. I kick it under my seat and pretend to sleep with my forehead against the passenger window. The driver’s door opens and the car heaves as he gets in.
He fires up the ignition and pulls the car back into traffic. I feel his eyes boring into me. He must be trying to figure out if I really am sleeping. I force myself to breathe slowly and steadily as he watches me. He gently pushes my bangs off my face.
“It’s a damn shame you and that friend of yours had to start poking around in the past,” he says to himself.
A while later, he puts on instrumental jazz. The mellow music contrasts starkly with the cold terror gripping me so tightly that every nerve is on edge. I open my eyes for a millisecond to see we’re driving through an unlit industrial area lined with warehouses. Gravel crunches under the car tires. We bounce over several deep potholes. Then we stop.
Chapter
Sixty
Wednesday 11:14P.M.
I stay frozen, pretending to sleep, after he stops the car. All my senses are focused on trying to figure out what’s going on and where we are. I’m too afraid to open my eyes to see our location. I sense that he is watching me. I need him to think that I’m still asleep.
He leans toward me, his breath warm against my skin. I force myself to stay still. This time he doesn’t touch my hair. He flips open the glove compartment and takes something out. I don’t know what it is until I hear a series of metal clicks. It sounds like a gun being loaded with a magazine of bullets.
“Wake up, Liv.” He shakes my shoulders roughly and unbuckles my seat belt.
If I have any chance of getting away from him, I have to let him believe that I’ve just woken and thus lost my memory again. I give an exaggerated yawn and rub my eyes with exhaustion. “Where are we?”
“We’re here to meet Amy.” It chills me to hear him say her name in light of everything I’ve learned tonight.
“Amy’s here?” I play along.
“She’s waiting for you.” He glances at his wristwatch. “We’re running late.”
I scramble out of the car. My knees are so weak they almost buckle under me. He holds on to my upper arm with pretend solicitousness. His grip is tight. There’s no way I can break free. I don’t let on that it hurts. The longer I keep this charade going, the longer I’ll stay alive.
A cold wind buffets us as we walk toward an abandoned warehouse. Our way forward is lit up by the beam of his flashlight.
“What are we doing here?”
“Remember, Amy got tickets to a new production ofMacbethset in a dystopian world. You know how much she loves avant-garde theater. Personally, I think it’s a bore, but I don’t like to disappoint her.”
We step over puddles as we approach the derelict building. The windows are boarded up and defaced with spray-painted expletives and crude drawings.
“I hope the audience gets to sit this time,” I say, going along with his charade. “Last time Amy took me to one of these avant-garde plays, it was at an old brewery. We had to stand the whole time. My feet were in agony by the end of the evening.”
“I’m pretty sure this performance is seated,” he says, escorting me around to the back of the building. “Amy will be annoyed that we’re so late.”
He kicks in a board on a basement window at the back of the building, ruining any pretense that we’re here to watch a play. He shoves me roughly through the window opening. I groan as I land hard on a concrete floor in a dark storeroom.
Hundreds of plastic bucket chairs are piled in stacks of varying heights. Old metal filing cabinets litter the floor, some tipped on their sides. Others stand upright. Boxes are stacked in unstable towers. Amass of desks is shoved against a wall. There are swivel chairs, too, dozens of them arranged in untidy rows.
High-pitched squeaking startles me. Rats. He points the flashlight at a rodent scampering along a window frame. Picking up a dusty folder from a desk, he throws it like a Frisbee at the rat. It hits its mark. The animals scatter. It makes my skin crawl. He eases his grip on my upper arm as he throws another folder.
I take my chance. I pull away from him and dive behind a desk. From there I slide on my belly under stacks of chairs until I’m far away from him. A flashlight beam moves across the concrete floor as he looks for me. I stay where I am, crouching in a ball under a stack of chairs. I watch his legs move through the gaps between the piled-up furniture as he searches for me.
