That Was Before

by Dan Lawton

  Then it happened. The breaking news came across the television screen and she held her breath. But then the live reports started and she knew something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. The mission was not to hurt anybody else—one piece of collateral damage was enough, and that was only emotional scarring that would heal. Just one victim with physical harm. Just her husband.

  And she thought she would faint when she heard his voice—the husband who should have been dead—ring through the house as if he were a ghost haunting her. She laughed at the man-boy’s joke—who was on the other end of the phone—despite it not humoring her and quickly flipped off the television. Then she grabbed a butcher’s knife from the block and held it close to her chest in case she needed to use it in self-defense. The event had gone wrong, obviously, but did he know? He had not answered or responded to her calls and messages from hours earlier—which were all for show in case there was ever an investigation that tried to accuse her of being involved—so maybe he did. If so, he could have been angry. Really angry. Revengeful angry. She had to be prepared to fight.

  It was quickly apparent he did not know a thing.

  She rushed over to the man-boy’s after and had the angriest, most domineering sex of her life, and waited for him to tell her what he knew. He must have known what happened, and what went so horribly wrong. But he said nothing.

  It went on like this for a while—she, pretending nothing was wrong while patiently waiting for him to acknowledge there was; he, not. Eventually he did once she forced the issue, and he confirmed what she knew all along—he was working with someone else, though she did not know who. It was to be expected. How else would the device be planted? He assured her everything was under control, and she believed him since he told her where they could go to track down this person—he had a contact in a call center who gave him call records.

  Genius.

  All the while, Shay remained at an arm’s length from Cheyenne, which was the plan—Cheyenne would reach out when it was done, and they would run off and escape with their newfound wealth and leave the man-boy to take the fall—it was his device, after all; a simple anonymous tip called in to the local police would indicate he was behind it and the rest would take care of itself. He would crack under the pressure of an investigation and take the fall. He may or may not have turned on Cheyenne, but that did not matter—she had carefully covered her tracks. The Cheyenne he knew never existed and would be impossible to track down. Meanwhile, she would not lose two-thirds of the combined nest egg she and her husband shared, or the significant chunk of cash that was untouchable; as the victim’s wife, she would get everything.

  It was the perfect plan.

  Until it was not. Until she saw Shay—the same Shay she had grown passionately in love with; the same Shay who she was planning a new life with once this was over—and she knew the plan had somehow gone haywire.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Benji was aware his mouth was open, but he could not help it. He felt so exposed, so humiliated. Everything had been a lie. It was laughable almost, not possible. The story Cheyenne described was inconceivable.

  Or at least that was what he told himself.

  It was more plausible than he would initially acknowledge. He was embarrassed—not only that he fell victim to the game but also that his vulnerability was exposed for everyone to judge him. He was enraged.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” he said. His eyes threw flames at the Cheyenne he thought he knew—the one who played him like a fiddle.

  “I’m sorry,” Cheyenne said. “And I mean that. But it is what it is.”

  “This is my life we’re talking about here. How could you do that to someone?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

  “This is bullshit.” He walked farther into the room for the first time and sat on the sofa. He felt deflated.

  What am I going to do now? I’m fucked.

  Then he remembered something. And it could change everything.

  He popped up as if on fire with the realization. The energy radiated off him and surrounded him in a halo; he suddenly felt invincible. “Not so fast.”

  Everyone faced him.

  It was Cheyenne who spoke: “What?”

  “You’ll never get away with it.”

  “Oh, sure I will.”

  “Wrong. Remember the guy from the airport? He’s coming here, remember?”

  “I’ll be long gone before he gets here.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He’ll find you.”

  “Who’s coming here?” Cheyenne’s son said.

  “I may not have been totally forthcoming with you about the conversation he and I had,” Benji said.

  Something on Cheyenne’s expression changed. Fear, maybe. Or disbelief. She was not the only one who had protected herself in this.

  “That’s right,” Benji said. “My turn to tell a little story.”

  . . . . .

  Shay was supposed to call him after the event had been carried out. But she did not. He knew right away trouble was brewing. He was not oblivious to the world around him, despite the perception others may have had about him. He knew the stereotype—no college degree, worked at a dead-end job and probably would for the rest of his life, a pothead. The truth was, he was heavily left-brained but lacked a reason to find a traditional, unfulfilling day job—a life so many miserable people insisted they had but hated. But that did not mean he was unintelligent.

  He built stuff. Like the explosive device that was supposed to be used for Cheyenne’s husband but somehow went horribly wrong. A pipe bomb. To what extent it malfunctioned, there was no way to know. Not without the device back in his possession so he could reverse-engineer it. And that, certainly, was not going to happen.

  After he failed to hear from Shay and saw the report about the entire supermarket having gone up in flames, he feared the worst—a mechanical failure that caused the detonation before it was supposed to, one that proved to be devastating. Not just for Shay, but for other innocent people too. That was never part of the plan—nobody else was supposed to get hurt.

  Cheyenne had not known who he was working with or what their roles were when it came to executing her husband. He told her the capital he needed to design the contraption—including a hefty markup to account for his services, of course—and she provided it. He made clean, untraceable purchases of the supplies via the dark web—many separate orders, all drop-shipped to various locations throughout the city, always using Bitcoin as currency—and assembled the device in his apartment. When the time came, he handed it off to Shay, who was to transfer it to the husband. Then boom, his truck would go up in flames.

  But that was not what happened. And he still did not know why.

  When he finally heard from Shay, the relief he felt was indescribable. He had not, in fact, unintentionally killed the woman he loved, which would have torn him up beyond comprehension. He thought that perhaps she panicked and ran off—maybe something happened or someone saw something—so he gave her some leeway. But after too much time passed without answers, he dug and found some, and pursued her like it was his job—both to ensure she was safe, and to find out what went wrong.

  Then came the man from the airport—the overly aggressive, combative, intimidating man who took him into the private room—and everything he thought he knew was challenged.

  The man took out his phone and showed Benji the grainy security tape he had already hacked into himself, and he pointed at the screen. “That’s your girlfriend?”

  “That’s her.”

  “I’ll be damned,” the man said. “Well then, my friend. Benji. I think we may be able to help each other out here.” />
  “Is that so?”

  “More than you know.”

  Benji quietly pondered it, wondered how so. “What are you proposing?”

  The man walked toward the table and pulled out a seat, then motioned for Benji to do the same which he did.

  “You’re going after this girl, aren’t you?”

  Benji shifted in his seat, which was stiff and cold and not comfortable. “Why do you say that?”

  “Why else would you be flying to Nebraska?”

  Benji thought about that, said nothing.

  “I’m following her too, but for a different reason than you. I was following her, actually. But I lost the track.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who I am doesn’t matter.”

  Benji stood, started toward the door. “Then no deal.”

  “Do you always hack into security tapes, Benjamin?”—Benji stopped—”Or build explosive devices?”

  Benji turned and faced the man. Sweat filled his pores. “How do you—”

  “You’re looking at up to twenty years for the hacking alone. Double that for the explosive device. When you account for all the damage—”

  “What do you want?”

  “Come. Sit. Let’s talk.”

  Benji did because he saw no other path forward that would result in something that favored him; he had no choice now but to at least listen to the man. He crossed his arms and waited.

  “You help me find this girl and I’ll do what I can to make this all go away,” the man said.

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No. But my contacts go above the police. I could have the county DA on the phone within the hour. You’re just an immature kid with an overactive imagination and no prior record who got himself into some trouble this one time. Right? Help clean up the trash downtown, maybe kiss a few babies, plant some trees. A little slap on the wrist, if you will. Not even a misdemeanor.”

  Benji breathed heavily. Was there a choice? It did not seem so. “What do I have to do?”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “What do you want with her?”

  “It’s nothing that involves you.”

  Benji did not like the answer, but he got the sense that was all he was going to get from the man. He told him about the phone records.

  “Smart move,” the man said. “Your resourcefulness is impressive.”

  Benji nodded.

  “Once you find her, you let me know. And we’ll never speak again and forget all of this ever happened. Are we clear?”

  “How will I contact you?”

  “You won’t. I’ll contact you.”

  The plan seemed flawed, but who was he to challenge the man on it? “Okay.”

  The man stood. “Well good. I’m glad we understand each other. Now that we’re friends, are you going to tell me who that woman is that you’re with?”

  “Are you going to tell me who you are?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “Then nope.” Benji stood and walked out, and the man let him.

  The next day, Benji received a text message from an unknown number. The person on the other end claimed they knew who he was with and about the money she paid him. And he now had forty-eight hours to find the girl, or the deal was off.

  It was a good thing Cheyenne’s son called when they were stuck in a hotel room in a strange town with an even stranger gas station attendant and no ideas on how to move forward or leads to track down. The universe worked in mysterious ways.

  . . . . .

  Now Cheyenne’s mouth was the one that was opened. Except she was smiling.

  “You sly dog, you,” she said. “I’m almost impressed.”

  Benji said nothing.

  “Tell me, what was your plan?” Cheyenne said. “I have to know.”

  He looked at Shay, whose head was down. He almost felt bad for her. “I may or may not have recorded our interactions in my apartment.”

  “You what!”

  “Audio and video. All of our conversations...not as private as you thought.”

  And the trysts—those videos were for him too. Just for later.

  “You sick mother—”

  “Once your husband was dead and you collected your money, I was going to reappear in your life, threaten to go to the police.”

  “You were going to blackmail me?”

  Benji smiled at her.

  “Then what? Ride off into the sunset with her?” She meant Shay.

  He kept smiling.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Patricia shook her head. Randolph knew that look—she was hurt. He was hurt too, as was this man-boy—Benji, his name was. Sheila or Shay or whoever she was, was a serial heartbreaker.

  He felt Sheila’s presence lurk behind him, smelled the cheap hotel shampoo. He longed to hold her, to comfort her, to look in her eyes and beg her to tell him what he just heard was not true. But he knew it was—all of it. The passion in which his wife and the man-boy spoke about their experiences with Sheila—or Shay, as they knew her—told him it was shrouded in truth. And for that, he felt broken. Because he thought he and Sheila had formed a genuine bond. Love.

  Sheila.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Patricia said.

  Neither did anyone else. So they did not. Bruce sipped the clear liquid as his posture slouched. The gulp of his throat was the only sound until Max fussed somewhere down the hallway. Randolph did not know where to go from here.

  He thought about what Benji said—about the explosive device he made. That explained what happened at the supermarket, and why Sheila acted so strangely whenever he mentioned the topic. Though he struggled to place how it could have happened.

  The scene replayed in his mind as if on a reel. He remembered walking into the supermarket after checking himself in the reflection of the glass, grabbing a hand of bananas, and approaching Sheila’s line. He remembered how much his torso shook when he approached her, how tied his tongue felt. How he wondered if he was going to have the courage to strike up a conversation with her. He remembered their exchange—the awkwardness when she initially rejected him, then changed her mind. And how she gave him a sheet of register tape and a pen and told him her number instead of writing it down herself. Then he paid her for the bananas. Then . . .

  Wait.

  Reverse.

  She tore off a sheet of register tape and handed him a pen from her breast pocket and said, “No, keep it.” And he would have, had he not been distracted by pulling out his wallet and paying for the bananas. He left the pen near the credit card terminal and walked out. It should have been on his person.

  “It was the pen,” he said, having come to the realization. Not a question. “The bomb was inside the pen.”

  It felt as if an elephant had intruded the room. The tension was so heavy it nearly took his breath away while he awaited someone’s confirmation.

  Sheila burst into tears. “I’m sorry!” she cried out. “I’m so sorry.”

  Randolph dropped his head and shook it. Despite knowing the answer, knowing did not make it land any easier. Everything between them was a sham. Their entire relationship was a lie.

  “I need another drink,” Bruce said, and he left the room.

  “Was any of it real?” Randolph asked. He felt the tears well up behind his eyes, but he would not give her—any of them, really—the satisfaction of seeing him break down. Everyone in this room wanted him dead.

  Sheila grab
bed his hand, but he quickly yanked it away. “It was real,” she said. “You have to believe me. After we got to know one another, I knew I could never go through with it. What was supposed to happen, that was before.”

  “Please stop patronizing me. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Randolph, please! Listen. I knew when you came to the hospital that you were different. No one’s ever treated me the way you have—kindly, sweetly, like I have value. You’re the best man I’ve ever met. Why do you think I agreed to go with you? It was the only way I could escape what I’d so stupidly got wrapped up in. I do love you.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe you. I’m sorry.”

  Sheila collapsed to her knees and wailed something sharp and pained from the back of her throat and wept. A combination of regret and guilt and pity for herself, he imagined, for being exposed. She was a fraud in every sense of the word. She was malicious.

  “I could never love someone like you,” Randolph said. And he meant it. “I don’t know how anyone could.”

  Sheila sprung to her feet as if it were the worst thing anyone had ever said to her, and Randolph was glad. He wanted to hurt her, just like she hurt him. She ran down the hallway and slammed the bathroom door. Randolph heard her weep like a lonely child.

  Patricia sat down on the sofa and dropped her face in her hands. Benji stood near the door with his hands in his pockets. All of them ached for the woman they thought they loved. The irony was both disturbing and unfathomable, yet it was their reality. They all loved the same woman—their own version of her—and she did not love any of them back. What a strange world they lived in.

  Eventually, Patricia showed her face—streaked with black smudges like an athlete might put under their eyes to block the sun—which was flushed. “I’ll sign whatever papers you want. The divorce paperwork, the beneficiary removal, forms to remove me from all the bank accounts. Anything. I want nothing.”