Excerpt of Dragon's Eye by Gregor Pratt

The Gamble House

Victoria Road

Nelson, New Zealand

March 9, 2033 

6:30 p.m.

My cell phone rang. I rushed to grab it. Caller ID told me it was Detective Wirihana on her private number. As soon as she left here this morning, I put it on my phone.

“Yes, yes. Hello?”

“Mr. Gamble, Jack?”

“Yes, speaking,” I said as I was walking out the back door to the rear porch so the children wouldn't hear me. They had both come home from school, bounding in, looking for their mother. I had lied to them again, but I couldn't keep that up for long. I didn't want to worry them needlessly. I could still remember when my parents had been killed in a car accident when I was young. The realization that they would never be coming home, not ever, was with me always. I didn't want that to be true for my kids, not if I could help it. 

“Detective Wirihana here. I have some news.”

“Yes, Detective. Do you know where Maddy is?”

“Not yet, but we're getting closer. We found your wife's Tesla parked on Nile Street. It was legally parked, and one of the neighbors said he thought it had been there all night. A red Tesla kind of stands out.”

“Nile Street? Where exactly is that?”

“Nile Street West is a fairly quiet side street, mostly residential, that intersects Rutherford Street, a busier commercial street. The Tesla was parked about a block and a half from Rutherford Street. Two blocks down Rutherford Street is a place called the Palazzo Motor Lodge; it sits in an area with lots of hotels. Are you familiar with it?”

“No, should I be?”

“Not necessarily, but we think your wife was.”

“What do you mean?”

“This morning, the cleaning crew was making its rounds. They were surprised to find that one of their guests had left early. A man named Li Wei had taken all of his things and left even though he was paid up through the fifteenth when he was supposed to leave.”

“Li Wei, you mean like the student Li Wei my wife was tutoring?”

“We feel certain they are the same, Mr. Gamble. This Li Wei was Chinese, according to the desk clerk, and had arrived with a group of other Chinese men, all of whom have checked out in the last couple of days. We have tracked these men from their hotel check out dates to flights out of New Zealand, some to Malagasy, some to Cincinnati, Ohio, others to other countries. Even though the desk clerk said they were Chinese or at least spoke Chinese, none of them went to China. Li Wei had a Vietnamese passport that he used for identification at check-in. I have a copy if you would like to see it. What do you think that all means?”

“No, the passport wouldn't mean anything to me. I never met Li Wei. And I don't know what it all means. Why do you ask me like that?” I used both hands to pull my hair back.

“Well, sir, for starters Malagasy was the scene of your last great international adventure and Cincinnati, Ohio is where you used to live. Are you sure you don't have anything to tell me?”

“I see. Is there something more Detective, something to do with Maddy?”

Detective Wirihana paused, apparently digesting my answer. “Yes, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the cleaning crew found a pair of sparkly blue Manolo Blahnik pumps under the bed in Li Wei's room. And when we showed the desk clerk Maddy's picture, he remembered seeing her here last week with Li Wei; they were in the lobby to get a soft drink and laughing. He said they were touching each other, fighting to be the first to buy a drink. The clerk thought they seemed to be in love.”

What? Maddy in love? With someone else? A student. “The clerk must be mistaken, Detective. Maddy wasn't in love with anyone but me.”

“I am sorry. The people at the Nelson English Centre said they often saw Maddy and Li Wei together and alone.”
I sat on the floor of the porch. Maddy? 

“As I said, I am so very sorry. There doesn't seem to be much else for us to do here. Would you like to come get the car? We're done with that and have no good place to keep a car like that. We would like to keep the shoes just in case.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I'll get the car tomorrow sometime. Where is it?”

“Police headquarters.”

“How did you get it there?”

“One of our officers drove it. To tell you the truth three officers fought over who got to drive it.”

“How, I mean you don’t have a key?”

The detective laughed softly. “Ever since car makers allowed cell phones to start cars we have always been able, in this country at least, to call the manufacture with a Vin number and explain ourselves and they give us a code that will start and operate the car for seventy two hours.”

“That’s kind of scary,” I said.

“Jack?” she said softly.

“Yes?”

“If it's any consolation, I think they're still in New Zealand somewhere. I have checked airports and ships leaving here, and no Li Wei has been on any of the passenger manifests or Maddy Gamble either, and Li Wei still has a plane ticket for the fifteenth, leaving from Auckland and ending up in New York.”

I wasn't sure how to respond, so I didn't. I knew more small talk about the car was not working. I leaned back against the house. Maddy. Come home. Why oh why?

“Maybe she'll come home,” she said, and then she hung up.

My thoughts rushed back over my life. Had I been wrong to trust Maddy? After my parents had died, I had lived with a whole cast of different relatives when I was young. All nice enough if you were a stranger, but none of them loved me. And from them, I had learned that love was not real, just a pretense put on to get what you wanted. That had been reinforced by Barbara, my college girlfriend. When we were inseparable after years together, she had dropped me because I wasn't rich enough to keep her usual style. After that, I had grown good at pretending and was vengeful about making money. As a high-profile lawyer in Cincinnati, I had made bundles and, along the way, had bedded many a beautiful woman. At first, that's all Maddy was to me, but then I came to believe in her, to believe that she loved me. That she loved me like my mother had, only better. She had come to Madagascar to rescue me from the men who were trying to kill me to cover up their heinous crimes. And we were in love; I know we were. We had come here together, halfway around the world from Ohio to New Zealand, and we had settled down and started a family. And I thought she was happy. I was. Maybe I should have seen something coming. Was I just naive? Had the law job and the teaching only been a way to get out and meet others? Other men? Oh, my God, Maddy? Not you. And this detective, could I trust her? She had gone from accusing to sympathetic in about thirty seconds. It had to be manufactured emotion, just doing her job, trying to get me to slip up, still suspicious of me. And I couldn't blame her. Malagasy and Cincinnati made it look bad and even though Maddy had confided in me about some of these placements for her students I couldn't calm my own lawyerly suspicions.