Page 115 of Gone Before Goodbye

“Can I bring her to see you in the morning?”

“If you did something illegal—”

“It’s nothing like that. Can we meet first thing in the morning? I’ll explain everything then.”

There is a long pause. Then: “What’s the patient’s name?”

“Nadia Strauss. Can you see her?”

Steve tells her that he can squeeze her in at ten a.m., right when Apollo Longevity opens. He then tries to convince Maggie to stay at Etoile Adiona or perhaps, if it would be more convenient, his apartment building has a members-only club in it, which would be the perfect place for a quiet drink. Maggie gets off the phone with as much kindness as she can muster.

She finds Nadia on the way to the elevator. “I found a way for us to get into Apollo Longevity.”

They agree to meet in the lobby a few minutes before ten in the morning. Nadia walks Maggie to the elevator. When the doors open, Maggie is caught off guard when Nadia gives her a big hug.

“I still don’t trust you,” Nadia whispers in her ear, “but I trust them even less.”

Nadia doesn’t say who “them” refers to—Ragoravich, Brovski, Lockwood—but she assumes, the same as Maggie herself, all of the above.

“Uh, ditto,” Maggie manages as she steps inside the elevator.

The ground floor of Etoile Adiona is in full swing now, and full swing here is defined as complete pandemonium. Maggie has no idea how many new people have come in during the half hour or so she was gone, but it feels like one more and the club would collapse a level or two. The dance floor is dark, lit only by the flicker from the strobe lights. The DJ is rocking out to something super-loud with a super-deep bass—so deep that Maggie can feel the lining in her lungs quake.

She tries to cross the dance floor, but it’s slow going. There are simply too many bodies crushed together in too small a space. Shesqueezes herself between any cracks in the crowd, but there aren’t many. She ends up making karate-chop hands and crowbarring her way through. The music transitions into something even louder and more aggressive. Maggie wants to cover her ears, but she needs both hands to slice through the crush of flesh. The entire dance floor has been transformed into a manic mosh pit now. The partygoers wearing the creepy Venetian masks are made more nightmarish by the strobe lights.

The whole effect is beyond dizzying.

Near the stage is what looks like a diving board. Patrons climb the ladder, spread their arms, and fall back into the heart of the dance floor. The crowd catches them and carries them along like waves at the ocean. Maggie can’t quite get her footing. She’s jostled to and fro, blindly pinballing closer to what she hopes is the exit.

Do people really enjoy this?

Maggie has never been claustrophobic, but she’s finding it a little hard to breathe now. How often, she wonders, does someone have a panic attack in a place like this? Worse, if you do have one, there is no real reprieve or recourse. You are trapped. Maggie wonders how many of these nightclubbers are on a pharmaceutical hallucinogen. A fair number, she’d guess. She wonders, too, whether that would make this experience easier or harder, and the answer is probably both.

When Maggie was a college sophomore, a boy she had a crush on gave her a pill at a two-day outdoor music festival in western Massachusetts. She still doesn’t know what was in the pill, but it made her freak out with paranoia. A paramedic took her and the boy to the “Chill Out Tent,” where they were fed oranges and activated charcoal and had saline pumped into their veins.

Strange memory.

Maggie is wedging herself through two beefy men when someone grabs her arm.

It’s not a casual or accidental grab. The grip is a straight-up iron claw. She tries to pull away. Nothing. She turns to see who it is, but through the mass of partygoers, she can only see a big, meaty hand on her forearm. Without warning, the big hand jerks her hard toward him. Maggie nearly loses her balance. The big hand pulls harder, dragging her back in the other direction.

Maggie isn’t sure what to do here. She’s being pulled through a human car wash. She tries to dig her heels in, tries to stop her momentum, but the pull is too strong. She yells out to stop, to let go of her, but the music is so loud she can’t even hear her own shouts.

With her free hand, Maggie finds the man’s index finger and tries to pry it off. His grip doesn’t waver. His fingers clutch like eagle talons to the point she fears he may break skin. She thinks about spearing his hand with a fingernail—breaking his skin rather than hers—but her nails are all cut down to surgery length, which means there is nothing to spear him with. She sees the back of him now, the broad shoulders and big back, but with the crowd, with the crush of people, she can’t rear back and kick him. She’d been taught pressure points that could possibly free her here, but pressure points never seem to work in the real world or on moving targets. She’s just about to try one anyway when the man suddenly stops.

He turns around and takes off his mask.

Maggie freezes.

His eyes are bloodshot and blackened. His face is swollen. He has a thin bandage across the bridge of his nose. She’s about to strike him—one shot to that new nose will finish him—but her eyes meet his and what she sees surprises her.

Fear.

It’s Oleg Ragoravich.

With a head tilt, he signals for her to stay with him.

Maggie isn’t sure what to do here, but curiosity gets the better ofher. She nods and stops fighting him. His grip is lighter now, though it remains firm. She’s good with that. She needs this hand on her arm so that she doesn’t lose him in the crush.