by Tom Wood
There was no enemy, no assassin readying to make his move, and yet every day was Victor’s last until the next sunrise proved otherwise and the cycle started over.
He ferried his fishing gear to the truck in two trips as he had done each day, placing the items in the load bed under the watchful gaze of Joshua.
Only Joshua wasn’t watching.
He was not standing in the lot close by as he had done yesterday. Nor near to the office as he had done the day before, nor was he in the office watching through the plate-glass window as he had done that first morning.
Victor hadn’t expected this. He had assumed he would find Joshua waiting for him the second he stepped out into the lot.
Victor never liked being wrong.
Michelle’s car wasn’t parked where it was always parked, he noticed. She drove a little yellow Honda that had faded paint and rust spots. Perhaps she was late for work. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to find Joshua’s life preserver. It could have been buried among all sorts of junk in a basement or garage or attic.
Something told Victor that she was more organised than this, that she would not have waited until the morning to find it if it had indeed been put away somewhere hard to find.
He recalled her manner when he had asked to change rooms. She’d pretended to look in the ledger to see what rooms were available. She’d looked for his benefit when she already knew. She was an observant type, perceptive. She noticed little things others did not. She noticed because she was so organised, so on top of things, her efficiency gave her too much time in which to grow bored and search for distraction.
She had come to see him, of course. After Joshua had rushed off to ask her for permission, Michelle had knocked on the door of Victor’s room.
He didn’t invite her inside and she didn’t ask.
‘Joshua tells me you’ve offered to teach him how to fish.’
‘He asked me to,’ Victor corrected. ‘I agreed.’
‘You don’t have to do that, you know?’
‘I know.’
‘I’m not sure it’s such a good idea,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Brutal truth?’
Victor nodded.
‘I don’t know you from Adam.’
‘I understand,’ Victor said. ‘I’m a stranger.’
‘Look, I’m not accusing you of anything,’ she said in a careful tone. ‘I bet you’re the nicest guy in the world. I’m sure there’s not a bad bone in your whole body.’
Victor kept as still as he knew how.
‘But … ’
She didn’t finish. She looked at him with a sympathetic face, apologetic.
‘You can come too,’ Victor said. ‘We can go in the morning before your shift starts. I can have you both back here for seven o’clock.’
‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’
‘You’re not,’ Victor said. ‘You’re helping me out. I don’t know a lot about children so it would be good to have someone along who does. I can teach you at the same time. Then you’ll be able to take Joshua yourself.’
‘I don’t like fish,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘But I guess it would be nice to do something outside with him now and again. Fishing isn’t so much about the fish but the process, right? I can sit in a boat. No big deal. Anyway, why are you being so kind to us, to Joshua?’
Victor said, ‘I wish someone had shown me how to fish when I was his age. My uncle taught me how to shoot but I didn’t want to learn. I didn’t like guns.’
‘Do you feel sorry for Joshua because of his condition? Because you don’t need to. He’s doing just fine.’
There was a guardedness in her tone, an aggression primed and ready to be unleashed. She was used to defending her son from misplaced sympathy as much as mockery.
Victor said, ‘I feel sorry for him because he’s lonely. The reason for that loneliness is irrelevant to my offer.’
She didn’t smile but her face relaxed. ‘Then the answer is yes.’
‘I don’t recall having asked a question.’
‘You can teach him how to fish,’ Michelle said. ‘It’s really sweet of you to want to. But if after you’ve packed up and left he never shuts up about it I’ll make you pay.’ She smiled and clenched her fist. ‘I’ll hunt you down wherever you go.’
Victor raised an eyebrow. ‘Get in line.’
TEN
There was no one behind the motel’s front desk until Victor used the back of his hand to ring a little brass bell. He hadn’t had to do so before.
A guy emerged from a half-open door.
Victor said, ‘Where’s Michelle?’
The guy was in his fifties, big and round. He wore a white dress shirt made of synthetic fibres so it was a little shiny and a little stiff.
The motel manager, no doubt.
‘Michelle isn’t here,’ he said.
Victor enjoyed sarcasm but he resisted saying ‘No kidding’ and settled for, ‘Do you know when she’s coming in?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
The guy was annoyed. Let down by Michelle’s absence. Frustrated he had to deal directly with guests.
Victor said, ‘She didn’t call?’
The reply was blunt. ‘No.’
‘You couldn’t get through to her?’
The manager’s annoyance was increasing. With every passing second, every word. ‘What’s it to you, buddy?’
‘It was just a simple question,’ Victor said. ‘You could have answered in fewer words than it took to ask me why I care.’
The guy leaned forward, big hands spreading across the desk. ‘Listen to me, okay? Michelle hasn’t shown up for work. She hasn’t called and I couldn’t get hold of her when I called her. Maybe you creeped her out with all your weird questions and she won’t be back until you’re gone.’
‘Funny,’ Victor said without inflection.
‘But who knows?’ the manager continued, scratching at the back of his head to relieve some of his irritation. ‘Maybe the no-show is something to do with that retarded son of hers.’
Offence was a concept Victor understood but had no experience of personally. He could not be offended. Words were just words. He didn’t like cursing and he didn’t like blasphemy for reasons he fought hard not to rationalise, yet there was nothing that could be said to him that would offend him. There was nothing that could be said to him that would make him angry because of the arrangement of syllables used. He was a hard man to anger because he cared so little because so little mattered to him.
He knew, however, that he was not representative of wider humanity. To other people, words could have tremendous power to do harm.
The guy behind the desk was pushing a hundred pounds overweight. His neck was over nineteen inches in circumference but it was thick with fat, not muscle.
It was soft beneath Victor’s fingertips.
Squishy.
The windpipe is only a thin tube of cartilage. Even so cushioned by fat, Victor needed only a little of his considerable grip strength to compress the manager’s neck until the tube flattened.
Victor’s arm had shot out so fast, his aim so accurate, his application of force so sudden, so violent, that the motel manager couldn’t even flinch let alone move out of the way.
The whites of his eyes were no longer white by the time his mind caught up with what was happening and he tried to fight back. His fingers snapped around Victor’s wrist in an effort to pull the hand free from his throat.
The muscles in Victor’s forearm were tight as iron, his grip an immovable vice.
The manager’s face was red anyway but it rapidly grew redder and darker.
Now Victor had his full attention.
‘I’m told words can hurt,’ he said to the manager. ‘You wouldn’t want to hurt anyone, would you?’
Behind the desk, the guy’s face darkened to purple. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t wrench away Victor’s grip, but he could shake his head. Withi
n a couple of seconds he had shaken his head a dozen urgent times.
‘Do you think you can choose your words with more care going forward?’ Victor asked in a polite tone. Reasonable.
The guy behind the desk nodded and nodded and nodded and nodded.
Victor released him, and the guy collapsed across the desk, inhaling his first breath of precious oxygen in an eternity before coughing and spluttering for almost as long.
Patience was necessary for a man of Victor’s profession, so he had no problem waiting for the manager to regain control of himself. Which took the approximate amount of time Victor expected based on age, weight and general health.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ the manager wheezed, backing away from the desk.
Victor remained silent.
The guy’s face had returned to its original shade of red but his lips and chin were damp and shiny with saliva. Droplets of it were spattered all over the desk surface.
‘You’re in deep shit.’
‘What did we just agree about choosing your words with more care?’
‘I’m calling the cops.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘You’re screwed. You screwed up big time.’
‘You’re not going to call the police,’ Victor said.
With space and the desk between them, the guy felt safe enough and confident. ‘You can’t stop me.’
‘I don’t need to stop you. Yet you’re going to come to the realisation that it’s not the right thing to do in a few moments.’
‘I am?’
Victor nodded. ‘The red marks on your neck will have faded before they can get here and then it will be your word against mine. The cops are going to talk to us both together, then separately. It might take an hour before we even make statements. Could even insist we accompany them to the precinct to get this sorted if they can’t do so here. It’ll take all afternoon to achieve nothing more than making the local officers think you’re a big timewaster. And who’s going to cover here? You’re already down one member of staff.’
The guy inclined his chin, gesturing at a CCTV camera overlooking the desk. ‘The cops will believe me.’
‘It doesn’t work,’ Victor said. ‘That model is pushing twenty years old. Could be even older if it’s the previous generation. They used the same shell, so I wouldn’t know without taking a look inside. Problem with those early cameras is they run hot. The old electronics require too much juice. You can’t be any slouch with maintenance, or dust builds up and the circuits burn out. I guess that happened five or six years ago and you almost choked on your doughnut when the electrician quoted you a repair price. Almost as much as a brand-new system, right? You figured you could just leave it up there as a deterrent. It’s not like you ever needed it before. This is Canada, after all.’
The guy was silent.
‘Am I close?’
The manager looked from Victor to the camera and back again.
‘Now you’re thinking “How could he possibly know?” and “he must be bluffing”, but the very fact you’re standing there in silence thinking that tells me I’m right. So let’s skip the part where you try and keep the bluff going because I can see the dust on the lens from here. If the camera worked, you would have cleaned it away once the image on the monitor grew hazy.’
The guy didn’t respond.
‘Or shall I vault over the desk and check your back office?’
The manager didn’t reach for the phone either.
‘Take the lesson,’ Victor said. ‘Learn from it. Don’t make another mistake you don’t have to.’
The guy said, ‘What do you want?’
‘You told me Michelle might be absent because of her son. Is this common?’
‘That was just a guess.’
‘Answer my question, please. The quicker you tell me what I want to know the sooner I’ll be gone. That’s what you want? It’s what I want too.’
‘She’s never taken a day off before.’
‘Not even a sick day? Morning off to see the dentist?’
‘No.’
‘How long has she worked here?’
The guy said, ‘Why does it matter? What’s it to you?’
‘Don’t you find it curious that she didn’t show up to work? Didn’t call?’
‘No,’ he said, rubbing at his throat, ‘I don’t. Sooner or later people let you down. I like Michelle. I like her boy too. Just because I like them doesn’t mean she’s a good person or a reliable person. I expect she’s face down on the sofa after a night drinking and she’s going to be calling up to apologise right around noon and begging me to give her a second chance and not fire her.’
‘Do you think that’s likely?’
‘You oversleep on occasion? Ever took a day off?’
‘No,’ Victor said, ‘and no.’
The guy didn’t ask for elaboration and Victor didn’t volunteer it.
‘Are you going to fire her?’ he asked.
‘If she dropped me in it over a hangover, you betcha I am. If there’s a good explanation, then I’ll hear her out first. I’m not an unreasonable man. I don’t want to see her and Joshua out of their home unless she brought it on herself.’
‘Very charitable.’
‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘I’m just a guy on a fishing trip.’
‘You got the hots for Michelle? Is that it? Because I’m pretty sure she has a boyfriend so you might want to set your sights elsewhere.’
Victor said, ‘Do you know where she lives?’
‘Up on the—’ He cut himself off. ‘I’m not telling you that.’
‘Good,’ Victor said as he backed away to the door. ‘You did learn, after all.’
ELEVEN
Michelle’s house was simple enough to find. He knew it wouldn’t be south because south was the border, which left only two highways: north and east. The town proper was north along with the highest concentration of residential properties in the area, so Victor drove north first.
The town was a concise arrangement of buildings, pretty and neat. Overlooking it was a hill bristling with houses.
Up on the— the manager had said before stopping himself saying anything further.
Covering the hill were several neighbourhoods with houses of varying prices all the way up to gated mansions. Victor began at the other end of the scale, taking every street in turn, driving slow enough for his gaze to sweep from the driveways lining one side to the driveways lining the other.
He stopped when he saw a small yellow Honda dotted with rust stains.
It was a one-storey home set back from the street by a strip of overgrown lawn and a narrow driveway of cracked asphalt. The property was separated from its neighbours by a low chain fence that emitted a soft rattle in the wind.
Protocol dictated Victor park at least a street away, but he wasn’t working, wasn’t even remotely connected right now to his profession. He parked out front, noting that an elderly couple sat on the porch of the house to the right were watching him with more than a passing interest. Perhaps they weren’t used to seeing visitors, or they were and knew he had never been here before.
It was a curious experience for Victor to approach the house. Instinct compelled him to put it under surveillance first, to circle it, to check for enemies and ambushes. He knew there was no need here. Michelle was a civilian and no one could have known he would be here. He hadn’t planned this course of action so it could not have been predicted either. Yesterday he had made plans to be out on the lake teaching Joshua how to fish. The day before that, he had planned to be on his way to another continent by now.
He passed the Honda on the driveway, running the back of his hand on the hood to check the temperature. No heat. No indication it had been driven this morning.
The sky was grey without a hint of sun.
He stepped up on to the porch and used a knuckle to compress the buzzer.
There could be no ambush here, yet Victor was c
ompelled to step to one side. He didn’t want to be standing directly before the door when it opened. He stepped left so his right hand was nearest the door, nearest the likely weapon-holding arm of an enemy who stepped out.
No enemy. No answer at all.
He pushed the buzzer a second time.
He wasn’t sure how long to wait. He didn’t know how long civilians took to answer their front doors. If the manager was correct and Michelle was prostrate on the sofa with a hangover, she would be in no rush. She might not even hear the buzzer. But if Michelle was indeed unconscious or wishing she wasn’t, then Joshua would likely be up.
Was he allowed to answer the door?
Was seven and a half too young to do so?
Victor didn’t like dealing with so many unknowns. He would have preferred a full kill team to be hiding inside the house and waiting to ambush him. Then he would know what to do.
He stood still and listened hard.
He heard no voices, no footsteps.
Maybe you creeped her out with all your weird questions and she won’t be back until you’re gone.
Could that be it? Could Michelle be hiding inside her house with Joshua?
He thought back to his previous conversation with Michelle. She had been happy at the end of it, if not excited, at the prospect of Joshua learning to fish. Victor knew he could never understand how ordinary people behaved, but he was a hard man to fool. He couldn’t imagine Michelle having such a dramatic U-turn in opinion as to hide from him.
He was just a guy on a fishing trip.
While they could not see him at such an acute angle, he was aware of the elderly neighbours and how they had looked at him, so he vaulted over the end of the porch and made his way down the far wall of the house where a narrow walkway ran alongside it to the back yard, separated by the low chain fence. He was expecting to pick the lock of the back door but found it unlocked.
He made as little noise as possible opening it and closing it again.
He stepped into the kitchen, seeing the remains of breakfast on the table: two cups for coffee, two glasses for orange juice, and two bowls for cereal. Lowering his head closer to the table told him the milk had not soured.
