Zero history

33. BURJ

She got the iPhone out of her purse in the little bronze elevator, hit Heidi’s cell number as she stepped out. It was ringing as she walked along the hallway, doors to her right, weird twisted brown medieval timbers to her left. Heidi picked up as she was fiddling the key into the lock.

“Fuck-” Against a wash of what sounded to Hollis like exclusively male pub ruckus.

“Tell me what’s happened to Garreth. Now.” She opened the door. Saw white towels where she’d left them on the bed, the Blue Ant figurine on the built-in bedside table, big crazy gold fake Chinese scribbles on the blood-red walls. It was like stepping into a life-size Barbie’s Shanghai Brothel kit.

“Hold on. Get the fuck over! Not you. Had to get out of that bench thing.”

“I thought you weren’t drinking.”

“Red Bull. Cutting it with ginger ale.”

“Tell me. Now.”

“Don’t look on YouTube.”

“At what, on YouTube?”

“Burj Khalifa world-championship base jump.”

“That hotel? Looks like an Arabian Nights sailboat? What happened?”

“That’s Burj Al Arab. Burj Khalifa’s the world’s tallest building-”

“Shit-”

“The jump on YouTube, that wasn’t him. That was earlier. That guy high-pulled, they say here. That’s when-”

“What happened to Garreth?”

“The guy on YouTube holds the world’s record now for jumping out of a building. Your boy figured a way to get in and go off it higher up. They still hadn’t finished closing all the windows at the top. There was this crane-”

“Oh God-”

“And the security had of course gotten lots tighter, since YouTube guy did his, but your boy’s an expert at-”

“Tell me!”

“He was on the way up, however he was managing that, and they got onto him. He got up to the point where the windows weren’t installed, and went off from there. Actually a little lower than YouTube guy-

“Heidi!”

“Did the bat-suit thing. Took it really far out, really low, probably pissed that he’d jumped from below the record point. Trying for points on style.”

Hollis was crying now.

“Had to come down on a freeway. Four in the morning, there was a vintage Lotus Elan-”

Hollis started sobbing. She was sitting on the bed now, but didn’t know how she’d gotten there.

“He’s okay! Well, he’s alive, okay? My boy says he must’ve been super well connected, because the ambulance that picked him up put him straight on an air ambulance, a jet, into a high-end trauma center in Singapore. Where you go, there, if you need shit-hot medical attention.”

“He’s alive? Alive?”

“Fuck yes. I told you already. Leg’s messed up. I know he was in Singapore, six weeks, then it gets fuzzy. Some people say he went to the States from there, to get stuff done they couldn’t do in Singapore. Military doctors. You said he wasn’t military.”

“Connected. The old man…”

“Story is, that air ambulance had some kind of local royal crest.”

“Where is he?”

“These boys at my gym, they’re ex-military. Maybe ex-. Fuzzy. Doesn’t matter how much they drink, the story just trails off, at a certain point. Runs up against some prime directive. They know who he is, but from the jumping. They’re big fans of that. Also because he’s English. Tribal thing. That secret-life shit you told me about, I don’t think they’d get that. Or maybe they would. They’re all batshit in their own way.”

Hollis was wiping her face, mechanically, with a towel smeared with makeup. “He’s alive. Say he’s alive.”

“They think he went into some funny arrangement, Stateside, where they work on messed-up Delta Force guys, like that. That impresses them deeply. Then they order another round, talk football, and I fall asleep.”

“That’s all you’ve been able to find out?”

“All? I’ve done everything short of trying to fuck it out of them, and I wouldn’t say they’d made it exceptionally easy not to do that either. You were the one told me to leave the civilians alone, weren’t you?”

“Sorry, Heidi.”

“It’s okay. They never ran into anybody thought they were civilians before. Kind of worth it. You know how to get in touch with him?”

“Maybe.”

“Now you’ve got an excuse. Gotta go. They want me to throw darts. They bet. Take care of yourself. You back tomorrow? We’ll have dinner.”

“You’re sure he’s alive?”

“I think these guys would know, if he wasn’t. He’s like a football player to them. They’d hear. Where are you?”

“At the hotel.”

“Get some sleep. Tomorrow.”

“Bye, Heidi.”

The pale gold bullshit ideograms still swimming in tears.