The Syndrome

And Bonilla… She felt stricken because she couldn’t get the image of Bonilla out of her head. It kept playing over and over again behind her eyelids: the soft sound he made, lying there, the pink froth in the corners of his mouth. And it was all because of her, because she’d insisted on coming here.

And she hadn’t taken his pulse, and she hadn’t called 911—there hadn’t been time. So maybe he isn’t dead, she thought. Maybe… Of course he’s dead. He was shot five times, front to back. And now she was on her own, crouching in the dark with this psychopath who’d killed her sister—and saved her life.

More than once, bags of trash hurtled down the chute from the floors above. The sound didn’t so much startle her as set her to thinking that there was a parallel universe just beyond the door—a world of ordinary people doing ordinary things. While she—

“Let’s go.” He was still whispering.

Together, they stepped into the empty corridor, and looked around. There was no one. She followed Duran down the hall to the stairs, where they went up, instead of down. She was climbing blindly, without thinking, emerging finally on the ninth floor. In front of them was a set of double doors emblazoned with the words HEALTH CLUB.

Inside, a single man in a wet, gray T-shirt sat on the back of a LifeCycle, pedaling furiously in front of a television set. Glancing at Adrie

“It’s usually crowded,” Duran said, his voice filled with disappointment. “I was hoping… c’mon.”

He grabbed a towel from a stack by the door, wet it in the water fountain and handed it to Adrie

She scrubbed at it furiously, and looked at the pink residue on the towel, then tossed it into the bin. A moment later, they were in the corridor again.

“Where are we going?” Adrie

“We gotta get out of the building,” Duran told her. “He’s still here. I’m sure of it.”

For a moment, she was tempted to pull away from him. But no: he was all she had, the only game in town. “He’ll be watching the lobby,” she said.

“Then we’ll take the stairs. There’s a service entrance on the ground floor,” Duran told her. He started off.

“But what if he’s watching the stairs?”

He stopped. “Then we should take the elevator.”

“But—”

“Got a coin?” he asked, sarcasm vying with urgency.

She shook her head.

“Then which is it? You decide.”

She thought about it. Finally, she said, “The lobby. There’s a security guard, right? And it’s a public place.” She reached out and gave the call button a decisive push, although when her fingers touched the metal, she got a sensation like a shock. Three floors down, Duran’s floor, she realized, the elevator stopped—and so, for a moment, did her heart. She felt as if all her nerve endings had migrated to the surface of her skin—the tension unbearable as she waited for the doors to open.

But when they drew back, there was only a pimply kid from Domino’s, holding a red, white, and blue plastic pizza warmer. Stepping into the elevator, he glanced at Duran, and leaned against the wall. “Three pizzas, and they give me half a buck.” He shook his head. “The bullshit I go through…”

Chapter 19

“Where to?”

The taxi had just deposited an elderly gentleman on the front steps of Duran’s apartment building, when the two of them piled into the backseat as if it were the last chopper out of Saigon. “Police station,” Adrie

The cabbie eyed them in the rearview mirror. “Which one?” he asked.

“Any one,” Adrie

“There’s one on Park,” the driver suggested.

“Park would be good!” Duran said.

“You got it,” the driver replied, and picking up his clipboard, began to print the destination as if it were a recipe for high explosives. Then he glanced at his watch, and noted the time, and—

“Just go!” Adrie

“Gotta do the paperwork,” the driver insisted. “Otherwise, you forget.” Putting his pen and clipboard aside, he unhitched the microphone from his CB radio, and mumbled into it. “41 at 2300 Co

“I have to turn around,” the driver said. “It may take a minute.” Neither of them cared. For the first time in an hour, they were able to take a deep breath. Adrie

“What are you looking for?” Duran asked.

“I want to see if we’re being followed,” she muttered, for some reason not wanting the driver to hear. The words sounded crazy in what was, after all, ‘broad daylight.’ Even so, when a police car hove into view, Adrie

It was then that the driver made the first of three right turns that put them back on Co

Hunkering deeper into her seat, Adrie

Two men dead on the floor in Duran’s apartment—and her in a cab with Duran himself. Her psycho savior.

She shook her head, and groaned. Duran turned to her with a puzzled and sympathetic expression. Talk about “good-looking,” he was thinking. Talk about “unhappy.”

“I keep seeing Eddie,” she told him. “And that other man. Maybe we should just… go to a pay phone. Call 911.”

Hearing the numbers, the driver’s eyes lifted in the rearview mirror. Reflexively, Duran leaned forward and closed the Plexiglas panel between the front and backseats. Then he turned to Adrie

She nodded as he took her hand in his own, surprised to find how cold it was.

“You sure?” he asked.

She nodded for the second time, then jerked her hand away. “What was that all about with the file?” she asked.

Duran looked puzzled. “Which file?”

“My sister’s file. You only had two! What were you trying to pull?”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t trying to ‘pull’ anything.”

“Then why was it empty?”

Duran made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. I don’t know why it was like that.”

“It’s crazy! How many clients do you have, anyway?”

Duran looked away. He didn’t like to talk about this. This was just the kind of thing that made him hyperventilate.

“How many?” she demanded.

“Two,” he replied.

“Two? How can you have just two clients?”

Duran looked away, and shook his head. She glared at him for a long moment. When he didn’t reply, but just sat there, breathing heavily, as if he were waiting for an oxygen mask to drop—she waded in. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“The fact that you don’t add up! Not at all. Not at all at all! I mean, you aren’t even who you think you are, for God’s sake!” Duran began to reply, but she wasn’t listening. “Two clients?! That’s not a practice, that’s a—I don’t know. A sideline. A hobby.”