Painful Truths

by Brian Spangler

  That was the plan, the original idea that led to partnering with Nerd—I’d work so that Steve didn’t have to. But without some actual dollars in hand, I wouldn’t be able to nudge Steve in the direction I wanted, push him the way I believed he needed to go. He was languishing, wallowing in resent and anger more and more. I could see it. The kids could see it. And I’m sure Charlie could see it too. If his first dream of becoming a lawyer didn’t spark something in him again, I wasn’t sure what would.

  “You said you had another surprise?” I asked, reminding Nerd. He raised his hands from his keyboard and the office fell quiet save for the high ceiling fan paddling the air. I propped my hand up and rubbed my fingers together, making the universal symbol for money.

  “Right, right. Yes!” Nerd said, and brought up his bag, opening it enough to reveal a dark green binder with a silver embroidered design on the front cover. I craned my neck enough to see an official logo. “Our incorporation papers. These are mostly for show since everything is electronic, anyway. And I also took care of the occupancy and business permits, and—”

  “These are great, but what I meant was money,” I pinched my fingers together again, anxious. “And speaking of funds, how did you pay for everything?”

  “I was getting to that,” he answered, sitting back and sliding the binder in my direction. “We couldn’t produce a paycheck until we became a company. With Team Two incorporated, we can issue payroll checks.” And then I saw what I’d wanted to see since we’d started all of this: a white envelope. Nerd held the envelope, and it caught enough light from the window to show a ghostly tinge of green paper bleeding through. I squinted to read the words. I made out Pay to the Order of . . .

  “Thank you,” I told him and snatched the envelope from his hands. “And all of this?”

  “Paid out of the business account as expenses,” he quickly answered. “Gotta spend money to make money. And, by the way, depending on how complicated things get, we may need an accountant.”

  I tore into the envelope, revealing the product of my hard work, imagining what Steve’s face would look like when I showed him. I saw my name and the amount on the check, but felt certain a zero was missing, maybe two. Dismayed and feeling disappointed, I raised the paycheck and shook my head. If I’d done the math right, there should have been more. A lot more.

  “Is this right?” I asked. Nerd caught my tone and lifted his chin. I could tell he had known I would ask. “Are you staggering the checks or something?”

  “Yes and no,” he answered. I blinked and lifted my hand impatiently to encourage him to continue. “We’ve got three more months of that coming in—that’s the staggering part. I’m spreading what we have thin to cover some time, but then we’ll be dry. We’ve also got an operating reserve to carry the office for at least six months. But we’ll need another case, and soon.”

  I shook my head, thinking that there was no way the numbers were right, and added, “It still seems short.”

  “You do realize we’re not getting a full return on the exchange?” he answered with a sincere question in his tone. I didn’t know the first thing about Bitcoin, and maybe I had made the mistake of assuming it carried the same value as the dollar.

  “What do you mean?” My tone softened. The disappointment spread, weighing heavily on me. I dropped my first paycheck on the table.

  “I set all of this up so that we could be official, could draw a paycheck, pay taxes, so maybe later we could even pay into a benefits plan. But the challenge? We can’t document what we’re doing. As a company, we have to show we’re producing something.”

  “Right. I know,” I said and reminded him of something else. “You said that you had a plan to make it look like we were a legitimate business.”

  He nodded, “Exactly. But to make that happen, we have to pay. There’s no way around it.”

  “What does our company do?”

  “Team Two publishes books—hundreds and hundreds of digital e-books. A contact I made spreads purchases across dummy accounts.”

  “We launder?” I said, questioning.

  He half nodded, confirming. “That’s one word for it. As for my contact—our main buyer—he’s a ghost. Untouchable. That’s one of the reasons I gave him such a good deal.”

  “The missing zero,” I mumbled to myself.

  “As long as I keep feeding him Bitcoin, the Team Two books sell.”

  “And the cost?” I asked, beginning to understand the expense. “How much are we losing per dollar?”

  Nerd briefly looked away, reluctant to tell me. “A little over fifty percent.”

  “Seriously?” I snapped. “We’re getting less than half?”

  He chewed on his lip, rolled his chair to the other side of his desk. “It’s actually a bit worse than that,” he added, speaking under his breath. But I heard every word.

  “What do you mean?” I yelled. Heat crawled up my neck and face. “How could it be worse than losing half of our money?”

  Nerd said nothing.

  The look on his face took me back to when I’d nearly killed him. A part of me regretted having done that, but another part of me believed it helped establish who we were. I was the boss, and there was no fucking with the boss or the boss’s money. Part of me liked seeing that my tone scared him, but I needed to know more. For his sake, I raised my hands, indicating I’d calm down and back off. Beyond the anger, there was a stir of emotion—my goal disappearing. After a moment of quiet, he inched his chair forward.

  “We have to pay taxes on what we earn,” he answered, motioning to my paycheck. “That will legitimize Team Two as a company, and us as employees. More important, the IRS won’t come sniffing around.”

  “I need that money,” I said, lowering my head and fixing a sad gaze on my paycheck. The numbers screamed at me, telling me it wouldn’t be enough to cover the tuition and our living expenses, telling me Steve couldn’t leave his job. “What if I doubled the number of cases to make up the difference?”

  “More cases . . .” Nerd said, repeating me. “Equals more money.”

  “It’s a good plan,” I said solemnly, reminding myself to appreciate all his hard work. My voice sounded shaky and cracked. “It’s a very good plan. We’ll take on more cases—make up the difference. What’s your buyer’s cut?”

  His fingers brushed over the keys, making a sound like the scurry of a mouse behind walls. “Let’s take a dollar. Ten cents goes to the buyer and thirty cents goes to the e-book vendors. From the royalties paid to us, another twenty cents goes to our overhead. Add it all up and we’re left with forty cents.”

  “So we really do sell e-books.” I stated, intrigued. “How in the world did you come up with the idea of selling e-books?” Nerd’s face lit up, his smile broadening as he typed and finally smacked the Enter key.

  “I just sent you a link,” he answered. “Found this article about how thousands upon thousands of new e-books are published every day. The number of e-books is in the millions. It’s a river of new books, dumping into an ocean. And where better to hide than an ocean!”

  “Ocean? But the buyers . . . how do they know which books to buy?”

  “Easy,” he said, waving his hands. “I wrote a script that generates crappy self-help books, publishes them, and then transfers a list to him, along with the Bitcoin. Every sale generates a royalty back to us. And the best part is that we get a tax form at the end of the year.”

  “Tax form? How did you—”

  “Hope you don’t mind, I filed on your behalf . . . electronically, of course.”

  “An ocean to hide in,” I said, muttering. “It’s brilliant, Brian.”

  “I thought so too,” he said sounding almost arrogant.

  “More cases it is, then,” I told him. “To make up what I need.”

  A smile creased his face, the kind that told me he was unsure of what to do next. But I knew what to do next. I refreshed the links on my screen and began searching the listings. Doubling the
number of cases was the only way to cut the overhead.

  Would that be so bad?

  I didn’t think so.

  SEVEN

  I MISS KATIE. BUT, as they say, she’s alive in my memories. I’ve never subscribed to that saying before, and might even hate it a little. Not that I had occasion to use it before anyway. There has been something going on since her death, and I’m not at all sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. What I know for certain is that it is my thing—mine and Katie’s. My car’s tires rumbled onto the bridge over Neshaminy Creek, clipping the side of a dead squirrel.

  I slowed the car to a near-crawl at the steely apex and glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure that nobody was behind me. I was alone. Passing over the narrow stretch of water, I sat up as high as I could to catch a brief look at the slow-moving creek. Sunlight bounced from the surface, stirring starbursts, but something wasn’t the same. The creek was dangerously low, I realized. That concerned me enough to want to take a closer look.

  The winter thaw had already passed—a fast and steady flow that emptied into the bay, leaving the creek shallow. The pale faces of ancient boulders had surfaced and were drying in the sun, the slow current trickling around them. I’d never been able to see them before. But it was the dry gravel beds that I took as a real warning. The dense river stone was home to a handful of my murder weapons, and with the waters this low, I couldn’t risk throwing anything new over. I thought of the stun gun and Ghoul. I thought of the syringe and the bottle of poison used to kill Todd Wilts. By now the creek had swept them up and crashed them against the rocks, pulverizing them into dust.

  “Dust?” I asked, my mind suddenly filled with images of Katie’s gravesite. “Has her body turned to dust by now?”

  I knew it wasn’t healthy to think of her as often as I did, but a part of me took comfort in it, took comfort in needing to.

  Does time stand still for the dead?

  While my life had moved on, hers had stopped. Wondering what happened next needled my thoughts. I knew it was guilt playing with me, teasing, nipping at my emotions, wanting me to lash out.

  “I’m sorry, Katie,” I said, apologizing yet again. I moved the car closer to the rail, wanting to get out just for a minute. A car horn blared, breaking my gaze, breaking my thoughts. I waved the car by, but the old man behind the wheel hit his horn again, the woman next to him egging him on, the waddle of her chin swaying while she yelled. Their car lurched forward, crossed the double yellow line with tires squealing on the bridge’s metal decking grate. They fixed me with a stare from behind a dirty window, her crooked finger wagging at me. I prepared a finger gesture of my own, but then decided just to wave, rocking my hand back and forth like a beauty queen in a parade. The old man stomped on the gas and sped across the bridge—after they had passed I let my middle finger peg the sky.

  Romeo’s. I heard Katie’s voice in my head and agreed. Romeo’s was where I was headed, and she knew it. She needed to talk.

  Maybe she really is alive in my memories. Would that be so bad?

  I say that only because I talk to her, and she talks to me. Sounds crazy, even to me. But I do. Some days, like today, I’ll go to Romeo’s and imagine she is sitting across from me. I imagine talking to her like we used to.

  All at once, I stopped breathing, my heart in my throat. A choked sound came from my mouth as my knuckles strained and tightened around the steering wheel. I gulped at the air but found nothing. Another panic attack?

  You’re fine, I lied to myself, feeling overwhelmed and stricken with grief.

  Breathe, I heard Katie tell me, her voice in my head making the guilt even worse. I tried to calm down, tried to settle my racing heart by sheer will. I searched the waterline passing beneath the bridge and found a current breaking over some shallow rocks to focus on. Calming. But the image disappeared when sharp lights flew across my eyelids. My body felt like it was filling with sand; it was pouring into me like an hourglass, filling my legs and chest and lungs and about to reach my throat, to suffocate me.

  Breathe, I screamed in my mind. Just a tiny panic attack. Nothing to worry about.

  I sipped at the air, blinking away the sharp lights. The attacks were new, coming whenever I talked to Katie. I thought of them as penance for what I’d done, but they were more than that. The attacks were pure guilt, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

  “Are you okay?” I heard a man’s voice call out. I kept my foot on the brake and squinted, trying to focus through the lights bouncing in front of me. “Do you need help?”

  I finally got enough air to stop the attack. The heavy sands drained from my body, freeing me of the weight, of the guilt. I could move. On the other side of my car I saw a man in a convertible—the sight of him was surreal, like something out of a magazine. I blinked, thinking I must have passed out, thinking he was a mirage, a crazily dreamed fantasy of handsome features and country-club clothes, driving an expensive sports car. Certainly nothing we’d see around our neighborhood.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I answered, deciding he was real after all. My words broke, cracking. I cleared my throat, which only made me sound worse. “Just felt a little sick.”

  “Okay, then,” he answered as he revved his motor. I cringed at my unconvincing reply, but as his convertible rolled back and he shifted it into gear, it was already too late to say anything else. “Just doing my civic duty.”

  He glanced back briefly, taking his eyes from the road, giving them to me. Their color was hazel and endless, and I stayed there with him until he winked and turned away. Mr. Country Club let off the clutch, hit the gas, and sped away. I broke my gaze to face the road again, seeking out the other side of the bridge. I had nearly forgotten where I was headed.

  “Romeo’s!” I said aloud, feeling better and pretending that Katie was still with me.

  Within minutes, I was parking. I heard the turn in my belly—an innocent plea for food. The parking lot was empty and the time on the car’s dash told me it was still a little early, but Romeo’s would serve me lunch anyway, I knew. I was arriving early to get our table like I had a dozen times before. The maître d’ recognized me at once and pulled me out a menu. He held up two fingers, silently asking if anyone would be joining me. I shook my head and suddenly felt a little stupid about planning a lunch date with a ghost.

  “The window?” he asked. I nodded. Katie had always picked a table closest to the windows, a favorite of mine too. It warmed me to know she’d sat in the same chair, breathed on the same glass, her wet kisses left behind. I followed the trail of blackbirds swooping down from the roof as I thought about her.

  The maître d’ held my seat out for me as a waitress filled my glass with water. The young woman picked at the settings across from me, clearing the flatware and dishes, piling them on top of each other. I flinched at the glass and metal clacking and raised my hand, motioning to her to stop.

  “Could you—” I began, then hesitated, knowing how my request would sound. “Could you leave them?”

  “Are you expecting someone?” she asked, her eyes moving from me to the maître d’. He gave her a short shake of his head and motioned to the table, telling her to leave the setting.

  “Thank you,” I told her, wondering what she must be thinking.

  “Drink, ma’am?” she asked next.

  “Whiskey,” I answered, knowing it was early but not caring in the least. I’d already showed the waitress some of my cards. If she was going to judge me, she had already.

  As the waitress left to get my drink, I slid my glass of water across the table, pretending it was for Katie. Emotion crept into me like an abrupt storm. I didn’t want to cry so I bit my lip, forcing myself to stay composed. Katie came to me then. She came to me as she had before, sitting quietly and patiently, the light from the window showing her beauty. She raised the glass I had placed for her and sipped the water, tears on her cheeks swallowing the sunlight like a black hole. Her phone rang, and she rushed
to hammer a reply on the screen, her nails erupting in a ticking chorus like the ghosts of an ancient typing pool. Only she was the ghost, and I welcomed seeing her every time.

  I welcomed the whiskey too, having developed a taste of it after the White Bear—though no whiskey I’d had since had tasted quite as good. The whiskey was something I shared with nobody, save for the playdates I continued having with Skank.

  A girl’s got to practice.

  I tilted my glass in Katie’s direction. She tilted hers in return, toasting to our friendship.

  I ate my meal and drank two more whiskeys, all the while continuing to talk to Katie. The maître d’ stopped by to apologize for the waitress, thinking that she’d made me feel uncomfortable. I shrugged it off, wondering what he’d think if he knew I was talking to dead people on a regular basis.

  Does that make me even more psycho than I already think I am? Probably.

  I half laughed when he unknowingly nodded in agreement. He offered me a small decanter of wine, insisting it would complement the meal. I hesitated, but accepted when he said it was on the house. I thanked him and raised my glass to Katie a second time. This time, though, she didn’t raise her glass. This time she stared absently out the window, not focused on anything outside. She pressed her hand against the glass. It moved smoothly through the pane. She turned to me with a desperate sadness on her face. I’d seen that look before and loathed what I knew was going to happen next.

  The images were coming. I tried to brace myself.

  Our conversations always ended this way—in a nightmare.

  “You did this to me,” she said. “You took me from my boys.” Her face grew pale. Darkness crept onto her face like a plague. Her eyes sunk into her skull and her cheeks began to look hollow. Her flawless skin tightened and shrank like the peel of a delicious fruit left out to rot.

  “No, no, no,” I whispered and shut my eyes, pressing them closed until I saw after-images of her face burning in the emptiness. “You’re not here.” I slipped my hand over the tablecloth, feeling the linen with my fingertips, crawling them along until I reached the heavy base of my whiskey glass. “You’re not really here, so why ruin our lunch? Why do you always have to ruin our lunch?”