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  Assault

  with a

  Deadly Lie

  A Nick Hoffman Novel of Suspense

  Lev Raphael

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street

  London WC2E 8LU, England

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Lev Raphael

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Raphael, Lev, author.

  Assault with a deadly lie: a Nick Hoffman novel of suspense /

  Lev Raphael.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-299-30230-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-30233-7 (e-book)

  1. Hoffman, Nick (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Stalking—Fiction. 3. College teachers—Fiction.

  4. English teachers—Fiction. 5. Gay men—Fiction.

  6. Michigan—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.A5988A94 2014

  813′.54—dc23

  2014007468

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and places are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  For

  Marie

  and

  Gene

  “ … we wallow here on the stormy sea of fortune.”

  Boethius

  Assault

  with a

  Deadly Lie

  1

  I confess I’d been watching too much terror TV. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t get enough of 24, NCIS, Homeland, Sleeper Cell, MI-5, and The State Within. I watched them all. I watched the reruns and I rented the DVDs, sometimes more than once. These shows and miniseries drew me the way other people were hypnotized by the corniest disaster movies. You know, the ones with “all-star” casts and warbling theme songs.

  It wasn’t just because of 9/11, which had branded the calendar over a decade ago. And it’s not as if I really thought anything in those shows could happen to me: kidnapping, bomb threats, torture. But I had inexplicably been involved in enough crime at the State University of Michigan (SUM) to realize that even the sanest existence—mine as a bibliographer of Edith Wharton—could be struck by lightning like a lone tree in a field, blasted and fried.

  Maybe I was superstitious. My life had calmed down considerably after getting tenure, becoming a full professor, and being appointed to oversee a departmental speaker’s program endowed by a former straight-A student of mine. He had made it big in a dot.com, died young of cancer, and left money in his will to the university, with me as the sole administrator. With my new status, crime and instability had disappeared from my world, and so maybe I was trying to fill it with sensationalistic visions of chaos to ward off actual chaos by sympathetic magic. I failed.

  That warm late May evening, I was putting out the lights downstairs in our typical 1950s Michiganapolis center hall Colonial. It was a beautiful house on a street where the maples grew so thick and tall that their foliage formed a canopy over the street from spring into the fall. There was always something mildly ceremonial when you drove along it in the warm, green months.

  I’d grown up in New York City—the Upper West Side specifically—as the child of immigrants, Jewish refugees from 1930s Europe. A different world entirely: brownstones, massive apartment buildings, endless noise and commotion. Traffic on Broadway, traffic on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, traffic on the West Side Highway. But it was safe despite the commotion.

  Still, my Michiganapolis home had seemed an even stronger bulwark against the kind of horror my parents had survived by fleeing and building a very comfortable life in America. Yes, my cousin Sharon lovingly derided where I lived as very Father Knows Best, but that was okay by me. If you can’t indulge in fantasy in your own home, you might as well never buy a house, and as fantasies go, it was pretty tame. But then what would you expect of a bibliographer? We don’t dream of winning literary prizes, we just hope nobody finds an error in our indexes and gloats about it in print. As writers go, we’re not fierce and stately wolves, we’re more like prairie dogs ducking down into our tunnels at the first sign of threat.

  At least that’s what I thought.

  As I turned off the last lamp in our spacious blue and gold living room, the kind of relaxed, cozy room that would sell a house even in a bad real estate market, I could see flashing lights in the distance through the nearest window. Two black armored personnel carriers hurtled down our quiet Michiganapolis street, and I wasn’t shocked as much as resigned. I’d seen the SWAT team vehicles in our local newspaper in an article about “domestic preparedness,” but never in action of any kind.

  “This is it,” I thought. There were terrorists in our college town. On my street. Of course. It had to happen. We were an unlikely target, which made it all the more possible.

  And then the APCs shuddered to a stop right in front of our house.

  That’s when I started to panic, and felt rooted to the living room window, even though a voice inside me shouted “Run!” Upstairs, out the back, anywhere. Run.

  My throat tightened, my face felt icy cold despite the balmy air bringing in the rich scent of lilacs and viburnums from the front and back yards. In novels, people’s stomachs are always churning when they face the worst, but I felt paralyzed from the neck down, hell, from the neck up, too. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t blink, I could barely breathe.

  The APC doors burst open and a dozen men encased in black combat boots, black uniforms, kneepads, helmets, ski masks, and body armor surged across our yard like some crazy little tidal wave. They carried MP-5 submachine guns, pointed slightly down, but I knew from what I’d read that their fingers were on the triggers—just in case. I flashed on the opening of Matt Damon’s disaster movie Hereafter. If the whole house had been rocked off its foundation right then, and swept down the street by a giant wall of water, if I had started to drown, I would not have been surprised.

  I was drowning. In fear.

  Someone pounded on the door, shouting, and I could make out two words: “police” and “warrant.” Lights flashed on all up and down the street with the frenzy of paparazzi outside the hottest new club, and still I couldn’t move. I felt as weirdly distant as if I were having a near-death experience, hovering above my body on a hospital table, surrounded by doctors, machines, all of it laboring to keep me alive, to bring me back.

  My partner Stefan rushed down the stairs from our bedroom at the back of the house,
wearing only thin cotton pajama pants. “Is there a fire? What happened?” He was squinting and looked half-asleep. He clearly hadn’t seen or heard the APCs pull up.

  He stepped to the door and before I could say anything, he opened it.

  “Stefan Borowski? We have a warrant to search this house.” There was more, but I couldn’t take in the words that were being barked at him as if he were an inmate in a prison camp being ordered to his knees for execution. Teams of cops shot off into the house like hunting dogs on the scent of prey.

  Others surrounded him. At least half a dozen of the black-clad warriors dragged him out onto the front lawn and I thought with horrible clarity: “They’re going to kill him and me and I’ll never know why.” He didn’t resist—how could he?—but then neither did I when it was my turn. As a handful of the SWAT team headed toward me, I felt very small and weak. Their guns, belts, badges, helmets, and masks seemed to swell up like portents in a nightmare. I was too shocked to do anything as I felt myself lifted up and almost hurled out of my own house onto the freshly cut grass.

  Someone held me down and if I hadn’t been breathless, I would have started to cry. I couldn’t see anything but the grass in front of my eyes, and my face felt weirdly cold and hot at the same time. Behind me, through what must have been the open door, I heard men stomping up and down the stairs. The smell of the grass was overpowering, it made me even dizzier than I was already, and for a moment I thought I might pass out, but I knew I had to stay alert. Somehow. The sting of the cold, cut grass on my face helped.

  My arms were yanked behind me and I could hear and feel handcuffs being clamped onto my wrists, unbelievably cold and frightening. My shoulders started to ache.

  I tried to turn my head to see where Stefan was lying stretched out and a bass voice close to my ear growled, “Keep the fuck down or I will crush your fucking skull, faggot.” I couldn’t tell exactly where the cop was standing or how many of our neighbors were out on the street staring at the bizarre spectacle, but there must have been some gawkers because the same ugly voice started ordering people away and back into their houses. “Police business! Get the fuck out of here! And you—no cameras!”

  I couldn’t tell you if time stood still or sped up or entirely disappeared. All I know is that I had never before felt so terrified and alone, and for the first time I understood the awful lines from King Lear about man being a poor, forked creature. There was no raging storm around me, no thunder, wind or rain. But there might as well have been.

  I wanted to call out to Stefan, but I was too cowardly to speak, and the shame of that made me wish they had killed me.

  And then, something even more bizarre happened, if that were possible.

  “Officer, my name is Vanessa Liberati. I’m an attorney and I represent these men. What’s going on here? May I see your warrant?”

  I recognized the Brooklyn-accented voice from her first word, which sounded almost like “Orfficuh.” Vanessa was our new neighbor from across the street, and she was known in Michiganapolis as one of the city’s best defense lawyers. She was pure New York. There was a steely edge to her questions now that filled me with wild hope: cast-iron fist in an ultra-suede glove. We barely knew each other, since she’d moved in just a few months ago, so her appearing on our lawn felt like a deus ex machina.

  “Are these men being arrested? Where are you taking them? Can you at least let them sit up? They’re clearly unarmed.”

  But I didn’t want to sit up, I didn’t want anyone to see my face. I wanted to sink into the ground and never emerge. I felt horribly exposed. What would my neighbors think? That I was a drug dealer, for sure.

  “Stay calm and don’t say anything,” Vanessa said to me sotto voce, and she must have gone over to talk to Stefan, who lay I don’t know how many feet away. I heard her give her spiel again to another cop, I guess. She returned and crouched by my side. “I will take care of this. You’re gonna be fine. Just relax.”

  There was something almost hypnotic in her assurance, and crazily, I did start to feel less freaked out.

  I managed to move my head a bit and peered up at her. Tall, slim, green-eyed and freckled, with masses of pre-Raphaelite auburn hair, she was wearing a form-fitting black suit that made her look like she’d stepped right out of a courtroom, though it was much too late at night for that.

  Vanessa winked at me, and then nodded as if to remind me to keep quiet. She stood up.

  “Who’s the officer in charge?” she asked loudly, as if challenging him to personal combat. Someone told her, “Detective Quinn. He’s back at the station.” I heard her start making calls, softly, and from what I could hear, it seemed she was getting someone to cover her court schedule for the next day.

  This was what it must be like, I thought, to have made it off a sinking ship and after weeks in a lifeboat, finally see hope on the horizon. I was so helpless, she seemed almost godlike. Nobody was insulting her or ordering her around, and that in itself gave me the stirrings of confidence.

  “I’m going inside,” she told me and I may have passed out briefly or fallen asleep. I came to when her hand touched my shoulder and she said, “I don’t know what they were looking for, but they haven’t found anything. They’re taking your partner in, it’s standard procedure. But they’re letting you go. I’ll follow him to the county jail. You make some coffee and wait for me, it’s going to be a long night. I left my cell number on your kitchen counter. I promise I’ll get your partner back to you pronto.”

  And she was right about them not taking me off. A SWAT team goon uncuffed me and let me back into my house. One of the black APCs was gone, and so was Stefan. I shut the front door behind me and fell to my knees shaking, because all I could imagine was that I’d never see him again, despite Vanessa’s assurances. And then our Westie puppy, Marco, appeared from wherever he’d been hiding during the onslaught and started climbing up me to lick my face. He seemed remarkably unperturbed, but as always, tuned right in to how I was feeling.

  I was profoundly ashamed: How had I forgotten him in the attack? I scooped him up into my arms and made a slow circuit of both floors to see the damage. I expected a whirlwind of destruction, books flung from shelves, couches, chairs, and mattresses ripped open—you know, like in the movies—but there were only a few lamps knocked over, some pictures askew, as if the cops had merely bumped into things in their frantic search—for what? It couldn’t be drugs. We were both harmless academics; Stefan was the university’s writer-in-residence.

  There was no reason to target us for an attack like this.

  I put Marco down, and everywhere we went in the house I had once thought was so beautiful, I turned on lights. Darkness would have chilled me. And with each flicked switch, I felt the shock all over again of armed, hostile invaders stomping through my house, ripping the quiet fabric of my life to shreds. The SWAT team hadn’t used tear gas, but they might as well have. My eyes stung no matter where I looked.

  Marco was always eager and curious, and he trotted after me now as if we were playing a new kind of game. Though he was a rescue dog, he surprisingly did not seem at all agitated by the invasion we’d suffered, and I was glad to have him by my side at every step. When I put up a pot of coffee and also made myself a cup of espresso in the new Gaggia machine Stefan had splurged on, Marco settled down on his little dog bed and fell instantly asleep.

  I wished my life could be that simple. I stared down at the notepad by the phone where Vanessa Liberati had left two numbers, home and cell, with a big “Stay calm!” scrawled underneath.

  I was calm, I guess. And that scared me. The glittering kitchen with its gray-blue granite-topped island seemed as exposed as if a tornado had ripped the roof off our house and shattered everything inside. I had stopped shaking.

  But I wondered if I would ever feel safe again in this house, or safe anywhere I went, no matter how far from the scene of this nightmare.

  2

  I drank enough coffee that night to stay awake al
l summer. What was happening to Stefan? Where was he? Was he in a cell? Was he being interrogated? Tortured even? Nothing seemed too crazy, too impossible.

  But then I reminded myself that Vanessa was at the jail too, and would be protecting him somehow. Wouldn’t she?

  I sat in the kitchen, too anxious to even leave the room. I drank coffee and watched Marco breathe. Friends with kids have told me that what I’ve felt watching him sleep is exactly how they felt when they had infants: deep abiding wonderment and a fascination that seemed bottomless. Marco had been abused by his previous owner, and every good moment he had with us struck me as a triumph over his hateful past.

  I studied him as he drifted into a dream now and then, making little “whoop-whoop” noises, his feet and tail twitching. Was he chasing a rabbit? Or was he dreaming about our home invasion? What would my dreams be like whenever I finally did fall asleep? Would I be able to sleep without wondering if it would happen again?

  Every little noise I thought I heard in the house now made me freeze. “They’re back,” I thought, hoping that was nonsense, but dreading it just the same. I turned on the kitchen laptop to stream classical music. I needed something to cover the quiet that seemed ominous.

  They were playing Rachmaninov, a cello trio, and its fierce mournfulness couldn’t have fit the moment any better.

  I had never felt so alone before. I thought of calling my cousin Sharon in New York because she was like a sister to me. Over the years, we had often spoken to each other in the middle of the night when trouble squeezed us in its fist. But this all seemed so alien, so incomprehensible, I didn’t think I could talk to anyone. What the hell would I say? Where would I start? How could I start?

  I was ashamed, profoundly ashamed and couldn’t bear the thought of opening up that wound even to Sharon. I hadn’t done anything, yet I felt the SWAT team had humiliated me, stripped me of my dignity forever. How could I drive down our street again or even take out my trash? People would be staring at me, whispering about me and Stefan, speculating as to what had brought the police to our house and violated the peace of one of Michiganapolis’s prettiest neighborhoods.