TWENTY-NINE

IN WHISPERS, IN MURMURS, WITH BATED BREATH, SOTTO voce, in voce velata, softly we conducted the conversation, not solely because the syphilitic-suicide-bomber-mad-cow woman and her pals might hear us, but I think also because we superstitiously felt that the wrong word, spoken too loud, would trigger the bomb.

Stripping the spelunker's strap off my arm and setting it aside with the flashlight, I said, "Where are they?"

"I don't know. Odd, you have to get out of here."

"Do they leave you by yourself for long periods?"

"They check in maybe once an hour. She was just here about fifteen minutes ago. Call Wyatt Porter."

"This isn't in his jurisdiction."

"So he'll call Sheriff Amory."

"If police get into this, you'll die."

"So who do you want to call-the sanitation department?"

"I just know you'll die. The way I know things. Can this package be detonated whenever they want?"

"Yeah. She showed me a remote control. She said it would be as easy as changing TV channels."

"Who is she?"

"Her name's Datura. Two guys are with her. I don't know their names. There was a third sonofabitch."

"I found his body. What happened to him?"

"I didn't see it. He was…strange. So are the other two."

As I began to cut the tape on his left forearm, I said, "What's her first name?"

"Datura. I don't know her last. Odd, what're you doing? I can't get up from this chair."

"You might as well be ready to get up in case the situation changes. Who is she?"

"Odd, she'll kill you. She will. You've got to get out of here."

"Not without you," I said, sawing the tape that bound his right wrist to the chair.

Danny shook his head. "I don't want you to die for me."

"Then who am I gonna die for? Some total stranger? What sense does that make? Who is she?"

He let out a low sound of abject misery. "You're gonna think I'm such a loser."

"You're not a loser. You're a geek, I'm a geek, but we're not losers."

"You're not a geek," he said.

Cutting the second set of bonds on his right arm, I said, "I'm a fry cook when I'm working, and when I added a sweater vest to my wardrobe it was more change than I could handle. I see dead people, and I talk to Elvis, so don't tell me I'm not a geek. Who is she?"

"Promise you won't tell Dad."

He wasn't talking about Simon Makepeace, his biological father. He meant his stepfather. He didn't know Dr. Jessup was dead.

This wasn't the best time to tell him. He would be devastated. I needed him to be focused, and game.

Something he saw in my eyes, in my expression, made him frown, and he said, "What?"

"I won't tell him," I promised, and turned my attention to the bonds securing his right ankle to the leg of the chair.

"You swear?"

"If I ever tell him, I'll give back my Venusian-methane-slime-beast card."

"You still have it?"

"I told you I'm a geek. Who is Datura?"

Danny took a deep breath, held it until I thought that he was going after a Guinness World Record, then let it out with two words: "Phone sex."

I blinked at him, briefly confused. "Phone sex?"

Blushing, mortified, he said, "I'm sure this is a colossal surprise to you, but I've never done the real thing with a girl."

"Not even with Demi Moore?"

"Bastard," he hissed.

"Could you have passed up a shot like that?"

"No," he admitted. "But being a virgin at twenty-one makes me the king of losers."

"No way I'm gonna start calling you Your Highness. Anyway, a hundred years ago, guys like you and me would be called gentlemen. Funny what a big difference a century makes."

"You?" he said. "Don't try to tell me you are a member of the club. I'm inexperienced but I'm not naive."

"Believe what you want," I said, sawing the bonds at his left ankle, "but I'm a member in good standing."

Danny knew that Stormy and I had been an item since we were sixteen, in high school. He didn't know that we'd never made love.

As a child, she had been molested by an adoptive father. For a long time, she'd felt unclean.

She wanted to wait for marriage before we did the deed because she felt that by delaying our gratification, we would be purifying her past. She was determined that those bad memories of abuse would not haunt her in our bed.

Stormy had said sex between us should feel clean and right and wonderful. She wanted it to be sacred; and it would have been.

Then she died, and we never experienced that one bliss together, which was all right, because we experienced so many others. We packed a lifetime into four years.

Danny Jessup didn't need to hear any details. They are my most private memories, and precious to me.

Without looking up from his left ankle, I said, "Phone sex?"

After a hesitation, he said, "I wanted to know what it was like to talk about it, you know, with a girl. A girl who didn't know what I look like."

I took longer cutting the tape than was required, keeping my head down, giving him time.

He said, "I have some money of my own." He designs web sites. "I pay the bills for my phone. Dad didn't see the nine-hundred-number charges."

Having freed his ankle, I busied myself cleaning the tape-gummed blade of the knife on my jeans. I couldn't cut the bonds around his chest because the same loops held the bomb level and in place.

"For a couple minutes," he continued, "it was exciting. But then pretty soon it seemed gross. Ugly." His voice quavered. "You probably think I'm a pervert."

"I think you're human. I like that in a friend."

He took a deep breath and went on: "It seemed gross… and then stupid. So I asked the girl, could we just talk, not about sex, about other things, anything. She said sure, that was all right."

Phone-sex services charge by the minute. Danny could have held forth for hours about the qualities of various laundry soaps, and she would have pretended to be enthralled.

"We chatted half an hour, just about things we like and don't like-you know, books, movies, food. It was wonderful, Odd. I can't explain how wonderful it was, the glow I got from it. It was just… it was so nice."

I wouldn't have thought that the word nice could break my heart, but it almost did.

"That particular service will let you make an appointment with a girl you like. I mean for another conversation."

"This was Datura."

"Yes. The second time I talked to her, I found out she has this real fascination with the supernatural, ghosts and stuff."

I folded shut the knife and returned it to my backpack.

"She's read like a thousand books on the subject, visited lots of haunted houses. She's into all kinds of paranormal phenomena."

I went around behind his chair and knelt on the floor.

"What're you doing?" he asked nervously.

"Nothing. Relax. I'm just studying the situation. Tell me about Datura."

"This is the hardest part, Odd."

"I know. It's okay."

His voice grew even softer: "Well… the third time I called her, pretty much the only thing we talked about was supernatural stuff- from the Bermuda Triangle to spontaneous human combustion to the ghosts that supposedly haunt the White House. I don't know… I don't know why I wanted so bad to impress her."

I am no expert on bomb-making. I had encountered only one other in my life-the previous August, in the same incident that involved the mall shootings.

"I mean," Danny said, "she was just this girl who talked filthy to men for money. But it was important to me that she liked me, maybe even thought I was a little cool. So I told her I had a friend who could see ghosts."

I closed my eyes.

"I didn't use your name at first, and at first she didn't really believe me. But the stories I told her about you were so detailed and so unusual, she began to realize they were true."