Messages, a Psychological Thriller Read online

  MESSAGES

  Christine Dougherty

  MESSAGES

  Copyright © 2011 by Christine Dougherty

  All Rights Reserved

  Messages is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  www.christinedoughertybooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Excerpt from The Boat

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Also by Christine Dougherty

  About the Author

  Dedication

  For my husband, Steve; he knows why.

  Love you, Biggie.

  Chapter 1

  James idles at the third light of his morning commute. He looks left and sees three Asians waiting at the bus stop in front of iHop. It’s always Asians, always different, always three.

  Today, each Asian is elderly and host to three pieces of accessory. One has a red, paper Macy’s shopping bag, a cardboard box tied up with twine, and a typewriter case trailing a swatch of cream silk. The second has two bags, identical but from a shop unknown to James, and a small Hello Kitty pocketbook held tight under the arm. The third has a bright blue backpack slung over one emaciated shoulder, a cardboard shipping tube, and a purple ball cap pulled low but to the side.

  James adds the number of Asians at the bus stop, then adds the number of accessories, then divides the Asians into their accessories and comes up with three. He wants to see if the bus has a three on the license plate, but traffic moves before the bus comes.

  The bus, on the days he gets to see it, is always the same or at least appears to be. It has no markings to indicate where it’s from or where it’s going. It’s a bland, not really yellow, tour bus-type bus. The windows are clouded, but he can still see Asians evenly dispersed among the seats. He posits more accessories from the rows of black-haired heads. There is an itchy hole in his mind where he would like to put the number of Asians on the bus divided into the number of their accessories.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he sees three heads turn to track his progress. He blinks and sees his own car as if from their perspective: a gray Impala, pulling away, piloted by himself, brownish hair and forgettable features. Then he blinks again, and the world is normal.

  At the sixth light, he turns off the highway onto a smaller, two-lane rural road. He doesn’t get far before he is up against the taillights of the car in front of him. He pulls a little left to gaze down the row of stopped vehicles–he counts eighteen before the line is too haphazard to manage with his eyes. He divides six–for the sixth light of his commute–into the eighteen cars and comes up with three.

  He sighs and leans his head back against the headrest. The radio is talking about three dirty cops in Philly, involved in the sale of drugs. He reaches up to adjust his rearview mirror and catches a quick glimpse of himself. The same. He looks the same as ever.

  He looks to his right, and there is one groundhog, dead, on the shoulder of the road. It is on its side, back legs spread wide by its bloated mid-body. There is a small rill of blood from its mouth, but other than that, it looks okay, James thinks; it looks good.

  Its head is upside down, and if it could see, it would see James, an upside-down commuter, straining to peer at it over the doorjamb.

  Its arm is up, and one sharp-toed paw is pointing back the way James came. Groundhog is a tiny seer warning him to go back, go back.

  Because James is going to get fired from his job today.

  At work, he pulls into parking space 12B. Because of the number of years he’s been here, he should have parked closer to the building, in the A lot. In spot 37. He would have tried to trade with 12A, but 12A was senior to him, so James had to trade with a blonde in marketing who is supposed to park in the B lot. He’d told her it was his lucky number. He actually just likes the thought of the four wheels dividing over and over into the white-stenciled twelve throughout the day, pulsing, bathing the car and parking space in three, three, three…it gives him a comforting thought to pin his mind to.

  Two very fat, middle-aged women in Walmart clothes are smoking together near the front doors. Their pockmarky fat places are visible through the thin cloth of their tight leggings. Lunar landscapes of butt and thigh. James stands near them but turns his back. This building has over three hundred employees, and James doesn’t know these women. He is standing here because they are a means to an end.

  He pretends to be absorbed in texting something important to someone who matters. He puts a look of concentration onto his face, even shakes his head once in feigned disgust at the text that isn’t appearing on his phone. His hair flops over his forehead. He’ll have to ask Lacey to cut it. He’ll have to do it soon. So he’ll be ready when the time comes.

  Now, they are speaking in whispers; their voices becoming threatening. His shoulders tighten and aggravation is accreting up his spine with each sibilant ess that slithers from their fat, pursed lips. He knows they are looking at him; in fact, he can feel it. Their eyes bulge from the sockets in an attempt to see him better. He thinks maybe some of the ess noise is from small areas of pressure from within their heads–their bulging eyes whistling like tiny, globular teakettles.

  He turns sharply to confront them but sees only their elephantine, undulating butts as they are just about to disappear through the doors. He stands for a split second, shocked, then hurries to catch up. Three long strides and he is behind them, drafting in their big-assed, acrid smoke wake.

  They travel through the vestibule together, and he slides through every door they open without having to touch the doors himself. But he peels off at the stairs, leaving them to crowd, herd-like, into the elevators. You couldn’t get him in there on a bet. Or a dare. In fact, there is no arbitrary social contract that would make him put himself in harm’s way.

  I am too valuable, he thinks.

  He trots up the stairs, staying in the middle, ignoring the railing and coming down hard on every third step…one two three, one two three. These stairs are constructed in a double-switchback with two landings for each floor–the landing without the door and the landing with. There are eleven risers per switchback. He counts the landings as a step. He travels up four flights. That’s eight switchbacks, times twelve stairs, divided by four floors. He divides the switchbacks back into the total and there you have it. Surely, there’s never been anything f
urther from coincidence, he thinks.

  His cubicle is halfway down the second row. Each cubicle has three sides. They are constructed with a featureless gray fabric that holds dust but is a lot less dependable with pushpins. There is a hand-written note from his boss: James See Me Dick. James sits heavily in his chair and sighs. This is one of the reasons I don’t mind getting fired, he thinks. The note is fourteen letters divided by four syllables. That means nothing. Less than nothing.

  Why not: Jim See Me Dick? James would never refer to himself as ‘Jim’ but a boss might. Would. James pulls the note over. He whites out the a, e, and s, inserts an i and then stares at the new note. It is not perfect; there is too much space between the ‘m’ in Jim and the ‘S’ in See.

  Jim See Me Dick.

  But, it’s not bad. Certainly, it is better. His stomach unknots. He smiles at the note. He crumbles it into a ball and tosses it in the trash. He snugs the white-out back into the drawer. It is the only thing left in there since James had packed his desk up last night. In anticipation. He considers the white-out in the drawer and picks it back out. He puts it in his pocket and smiles. It’s not like he’s stealing–this company doesn’t provide its employees with white-out. He’d had to bring his own from home. He pats his pocket. Waste not, want not.

  He goes to see Dick.

  Dick isn’t anything anyone would aspire to. Swollen, balding, middle-aged, red-faced, purple-nosed, and you can see his undershirt outlined under his cheap button down. He wears short sleeves, even in the winter. Sometimes his undershirt sleeves peek out from beneath his shirtsleeves. Sometimes they bunch up, and his upper arms look as though he’d bloated and deflated, leaving a weird layer of elephantine-wrinkled skin. He has sausage fingers and grease-spotted glasses. He has a fantastic amount of hair curling from his nostrils. Like tusks.

  But he does have a cubicle ‘office’. It has a door. He is toward the inner section of the building, so no window, and his walls don’t go to the ceiling…but still…there is that door.

  Maybe Dick does have a place in the scheme, James thinks, maybe he doesn’t. I have to assume not everyone does. It’s hard to figure out where the messages are coming from. But James senses himself getting closer to the answer, day by day.

  James knocks on the clear plexiglass ‘window’ in the middle of the door, and he sees the vibration of his knock travel through the plastic walls of the cubicle, shaking the papers precariously push-pinned to the wall. Dick waves in an expansive, two-armed ‘come in, come in’ gesture as though he is waving James in for a landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Although Dick and his desk are, in reality, only three feet from the door.

  He tells James that his numbers have not been coming out right. He tells him that they aren’t normal accounting errors. He says that the company isn’t even sure if it’s illegal, accidental, malevolent, or what.

  He asks, “James, are you listening?”

  James leans forward in the chair, concentrating, trying to catch the words beneath the words. He runs his tie through his thumb and first two fingers. Three fingers total. Over and over. There are nine color variations in this tie; he’d checked when he bought it. That’s why it takes three fingers, hitting each color, to make nine divided by three to equal three.

  Dick says, “Do you understand?”

  James squints and thinks, am I supposed to understand something other than being fired? Is there more to this?

  Is this the start of it? Or the end?

  Finally, Dick stands, so James stands. Dick’s sausage-fingered, pink and yellow hand reaches across the desk. James shakes it. A glove full of hot, soft vomit. We’ve made a compact, James thinks, but one of us is not privy to the terms.

  James walks out of the building, careful to bunt doors open with the side of his arm. If he has to grasp a handle, he drops a shoulder and lets his sleeve fall down over his hand–a protective barrier. But when that does happen, he knows to have the shirt laundered. He wouldn’t want to wear it after it had been sullied.

  It’s an odd time of day to be out. Mid-morning. Usually, this time is reserved for weekends and vacations. The world is off center. James is dazed and disoriented. He stands at the front of the building, and the sun is just starting to get warm. May, he thinks. That’s three letters. Good. A good time for a fresh start. He takes his tie off and looks at it. He thinks he should do something symbolic. Something that will send a message.

  He turns to the large, concrete ring that used to serve as a planter. Now it grows cigarette butts. He loops the tie into three circles and then lays it on the butt-littered surface of the planter. Three inter-connecting loops.

  He goes to his Impala and stands at the trunk. He divides the four tires into the stenciled twelve over and over, clearing his mind. Trying to make way for the message he knows he has heard but which he has yet to decipher.

  Where did the messages come from? That was probably the question that troubled his mind the most. Who was sending them? Were they receiving James’ messages back? He’d have to assume they were…he’d been fired for it, after all. Put on the street.

  James had been doing his ‘special work’ for just over a year, could it be that, finally, it was coming to fruition?

  James drives back the way he had come that morning. He is confused, but confident everything is going according to plan. But whose plan? his mind questions before he has a chance to stop it. He clamps down, driving that question away. He won’t think about that right now. Won’t. Won’t.

  He turns the wheel sharply and pulls into a gas station, tires protesting.

  The gas station is inhabited by one white minivan piloted by one woman wearing a hooded, white sweatshirt. She wears oversized sunglasses and tracks James’ Impala as he drives in. As he pulls around, a glare from his windshield passes over her face, but she doesn’t react. She is blank, blind, insectile.

  James comes to idle at the pumps opposite hers. He looks her way as he turns off his engine. Now she is facing away from him. From this angle, he sees that there is no pump attached to her minivan. She sits, inactive. Waiting? Waiting for him?

  The attendant comes from the small shed at the back of the lot and leans over James’ window.

  “Fill it. Regular,” James says.

  The attendant’s eyes are dark, dark brown, and some of the pigment is leaking into the whites. His muddied gaze carries extra weight. It is heavy with spilled grit. James has an urge to rub his own eyes, but he resists.

  “Cash or credit?” the attendant asks. His words are clipped, his accent foreign. James slides his debit card into the attendant’s hand like a secret, like a bribe.

  “Debit,” he says. The attendant nods deeply, once, and James feels something important has transpired between them. James glances past the attendant to the minivan, and the attendant looks back over his own shoulder. Then he returns his gaze to James, eyebrows raised.

  James nods once. Deeply.

  The attendant’s features contract, but then he nods, too.

  “Yes, sir,” he says and slides the debit card deftly into the pump. He does not look at James again as the gas flows, but James watches the man stand, arms crossed at his chest, and stare past the white minivan, and the man nods, and nods again.

  Small, deliberate dips of his head. Seeming to indicate the van, the van, the van.

  James looks back to check on the minivan, and the woman is standing at his door, and he jumps, heart racing. Her hands are stuffed in the pockets of her hoodie. She is so close, he can see himself reflected in her sunglasses. Two of him. Tiny and shocked, mouths hanging open. Little, dark, imbecile versions of the real him. He snaps his mouth shut.

  “Can I help you?” he asks. The woman doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch. Did he actually speak at all?

  “Hey,” he says. In his mind, he shouts it. What he hears is a faintly whispered…hey. He puts one hand on the door handle. His other hand is on his seatbelt release. Then the attendant hands the woman a card
. She takes the card, glances down at it, stuffs it into the pocket of her jeans, and turns away. James relaxes, pent-up breath pouring out in a whoosh.

  But, was it part of the message?

  James pulls out onto the highway, going in the direction of home. Should he talk to Lacey about it? he wonders. He’s never sure what she knows. He alternates between thinking she’s brilliant, she’s an imbecile; she’s brilliant, she’s an imbecile. He loves her, but she can be kind of…shallow, kind of clueless.

  A motorized wheelchair is trundling down the shoulder of the highway. One man, impossibly old and misshapen, gives everyone the finger. He has no legs. A tattered American flag flies over his peeling head.

  James drives slowly past, staring at the man out his passenger side window. He takes in the defiantly out-thrust arm, the fingerless glove, the middle finger. The man is grizzled, dirty, and as James slides past, the man turns and looks right at him. The man’s eyes are a faded, bleached-out gray, red-rimmed and watering.

  James blinks and sees himself through his own passenger side window, hands tight on the steering wheel, mouth tense and grim. He blinks again and sees the man is no longer looking at him. His wheelchair bounces slightly from side to side, and a small parcel falls from the pack strapped to the back.

  Accessory, James thinks, and a balloon of excitement swells through his stomach and up into his chest. Something is coming. Get ready. Be ready.

  At the next intersection, there is an accident. One car has tried to mold its front to the back of another car. Unsuccessfully. There is one cop, flagging traffic. As he waves James through, he turns his head and spits blood onto the highway. James looks down and sees three bright spots. Two are shiny in the centers and just beginning to dry at the outer, outer edges. The third, the one the cop just spit, is all shiny. No dried edges. Three spots of blood. James is further alerted. Tension tightens his tendons. Something is coming–a message, the message. He can feel it.

  Three teenagers with backpacks stand at the corner, watching the cop, waiting to be waved across. They are nearly identical in their dress and demeanor. Their pants are dark and too tight, their T-shirts thin and colorless. Their eyes are half-lidded, suspicious and defiant. They watch the cop without looking directly at him. The cop glances at them and then away, dismissive. The cop’s stance is open-legged and robust. He crosses his arms over his chest. He is definitely in charge of this intersection.