The Devil's Own Game

by Annie Hogsett

  Iona was getting the job done. The kid always had presence. Now he had polish. It made me happy and sad at the same time. I wanted Rune here. I wanted him safely away.

  I hugged him more than he considered reasonable. “Come back soon, Rune. I haven’t been in that pool yet either.”

  * * *

  “Otis, is ‘Everett’ Shadow Man’s real name?”

  “One of ’em, Allie. Maybe.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Friday, June 1

  9:57 p.m.

  The sniper put us on hold.

  Left us to mark time in the uneasy limbo of his silence. Sent no messages, postal or lethal. For the rest of March, all of April, and May, Margo’s wish came true. The sniper—Code Name: Mercury—left us alone. We were grateful not to hear from him. Afraid to relax. Trying to forget he was out there. Not thinking, for even one minute, he was gone.

  The inevitable result? We were on pins and needles from one end of spring to the other.

  Mercury had set it up that way when he walked out of the Millard Fillmore Presidential Library on the evening of Wednesday, March 7, and took himself off to put the finishing touches on his big, deadly, avaricious plan. I gave us credit, however, for not spending that stretch of hard time locked up indoors. To quote Margo, “It’s bleeping spring, dammit. I have no intention of wasting it on that evil, slippery guy. Especially since I have friends with a water park.”

  She did too. The rains melted the snow. The lawn crew—all vetted by Otis—removed downed limbs, trimmed away the dried-up remnants of perennials, and extricated the snowdrops popping up under the pine trees from the debris of winter. The air quit smelling like iron and auto exhaust and warmed to the fragrance of pine and thawing water.

  We, the T&A, presided over the grand opening of the pool, the patios, and the decks, and dragged out the assorted tables and reclining furniture. Jay and Lisa raised the umbrellas, bright gestures of defiance, barely twenty-four hours after the last flake of snow evaporated. Valerio showed up and shook his head. Well into April, we still had an occasional day under forty degrees, and we didn’t see seventies worth a darn until May, but Margo pronounced any high above fifty “temperate.”

  “Besides, the pool is heated. So who cares?”

  As she frequently reminded us, this was the “deep doo-doo” she’d predicted, but the snow had more or less stopped, and we’d all survived this far at least.

  We discussed Mercury, naturally. We agreed Margo’s choice of his code name was spot on. She found it on Wikipedia. “Listen to this, you guys. He’s ‘the god of messages, trickery, and thieves?’ If that doesn’t fit that fucking rat bastard—with those icky, creepy silvery eyes—I don’t know what would. Gives me chills to think about him.”

  ‘Yeah, Margo,” Jay agreed, “And any name that doesn’t include ‘our’ or ‘sniper’ is an improvement. Plus ‘Fucking Rat Bastard’ is too many syllables.”

  Otis was particularly inspired by the kitchen on the patio with its massive grill. He reported it to be good as brand new. “I don’t see Patti cookin’—especially outdoors—and I assume Steve never figured out how to turn it on.”

  I searched Otis for indicators of his state of mind. It was set on “Alert” all the time, in the zone between Orange for “High” and Yellow for “Significant.” He never stood all the way down.

  He’d assessed our current state of affairs as the lull before the killer’s next offensive, and although he was always calm and steady, he never let us forget how ruthless the man could be. He kept the security team on their toes, even as he delivered their barbecue to the garage, but I took it to be an encouraging sign that Shadow Man wasn’t so much a fixture these days.

  In spite of our determination to wring every warming breeze out of April and May, the feature of our outdoor recreation area that saw the most action on the days when a faint breeze off the lake could take your breath away was the firepit.

  A feature of the lawn nearest the lake, it was Jay’s pride and joy. He’d wheedled it into the budget by telling Patti it would be her beacon on the shore. “Like a lighthouse.” He said she’d only half bought into that notion. “Whatever.” He shrugged. “She paid for it.”

  A ring of hand-hewn stones surrounded the inner circle of seating, which encircled the fire pit itself. The full “concentric installation,” as Jay liked to call it, might easily accommodate twenty or thirty tipsy Clevelanders singing “Kum Bah Yah.” That had not happened during our tenure, but it could. More important, the circles—which Jay referred to as “Ohio Stonehenge”—included plenty of room around the fire for the eight red Adirondack chairs of the T&A. Including a chair for one guest, usually Olivia.

  At the beginning of May, Tom and Jay engineered the positioning of Predacious, the metal sculpture of a bird of prey poised for flight on the lake edge of the stones. We’d brought it from the former mansion with all its attitude intact. It brooded over its new perch, gazing hungrily out to the horizon. Fierce as the young artist who’d created it. Tom had chosen it in spite of, maybe because of, its many sharp edges. I hoped the installation meant we’d stay here for a while. Be all together here for a while.

  The seven of us were sprawled around the firepit on the first night of June. A line of red-orange flared along the horizon, underscoring the navy blue of the sky and the first spark of Venus, coming in for her landing. We were debating the differences among the “astronomical,” “nautical,” and “civil” twilights when Otis got a call.

  His face, relaxed and burnished by the light from the fire, froze as if it were trying to ward off a cascade of unwelcome emotions.

  “Yes. Okay. No. Fine.”

  “Otis?”

  “Sorry, Allie. Tom. That was the Bratenahl P.D. They got a tip a couple of hours ago. Man said, ‘Check on Patricia Stone. I’m afraid she’s had a bad fall.’ They broke in. Found her dead at the bottom of those stairs.”

  My phone binged. Text incoming.

  Happy June. I closed your case.

  * * *

  “He’s sent us Patti as another “Dead-Human-Being-As-A-Fucking-Message?” What is wrong with these people?”

  So many emotions. So little time.

  Margo, who’d be an alien impersonating the real Margo if she didn’t freely speak her mind, covered several of our bases in that distinctly Margo-esque pair of questions. She wasn’t expecting an answer. Good thing. None of us had one.

  Each of us in the circle around the fire was freaked out for a different reason:

  Tom was furious because once again the T&A’s “big win” had turned out to be, in his words, a “pyrrhic victory.” He was smart and educated like that, but I knew he was feeling both defeated and frightened to death by this news.

  Otis was dealing with the fact that he would never in a million years have predicted Patricia Stone’s murder. He hated being caught off guard.

  Valerio was annoyed. He saw the logic, but the cruelty of it pissed him off anyway.

  Lisa was frustrated because here was another groundbreaking story with angles and twists she’d never be revealing on the six o’clock news. Or talking about with anyone but us. Ever.

  Jay was feeling guilty about how much he’d hated Patti. How he’d led us to her out of spite. Her death was making him despise himself a little.

  I was stabbed by an image of Patti crumpled at the foot of her precipitous staircase—all of her hard, vindictive energy erased. Shocked by the sorrow of that picture. But the driving emotion for me, before I could reject it on humanitarian grounds, was “ticked off.” Whatever happened to justice and gratifying endings? To getting it right for once?

  Patricia Stone would have been disappointed to learn my second reaction to news of her demise was “WTF?” And my third reaction was “I wonder if Heidi’s going to get it all?”

  The fire died. Nobody got up to poke it
. Venus was sinking in earnest, her glittering trail reaching across the water for the horizon as she fell. Darkness rose up all around us. I shuddered. We could see our enemy better now. Track his path too. Like a sharp-edged iron bird blocking out the sky. Predatory.

  I satisfied my urge to psychoanalyze without a license by saying, “Just because he’s not Tito doesn’t mean he’s well-adjusted. And he sure as hell is not a nice guy.’

  In their duel to the death, we’d drawn the winner.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Saturday, June 2

  Skip Castillo, our friend, lawyer, and trusted adviser was present and fully accounted for on the day Tom and I first met Otis in the basement of the ARCO building—the top floor of which was occupied by Skip’s law firm. That was the day I started thinking of him as “my big & tall mama duck.” He’d also arranged for the return of some ransom money we’d not had to pay, and brought his lawyerly gravitas to a meeting we’d held with D.B. at the Cleveland Clinic after D.B. got beaten up by a couple of guys for being my idiot ex.

  More relevant to today’s news was the call Skip had made to me at lunchtime on a Thursday morning last July to explain how someone had tried to hack into Tom’s jackpot.

  Skip and I had in common the fact that neither of us was screamingly tech-savvy.

  His description of hundreds of doorknobs stealthily turning to open the doors of the money was not high-tech, but it worked for me. He was bringing that visual back, here and now in living color. His voice was ashes.

  “The money’s gone, Allie. I’m sorry. We’ve—” He started over. “We’ve not been able to—It’s just—Gone.”

  I took his call from my spot under an umbrella at a table on the deck. The sun was shining. The umbrella was luffing in a stiff breeze coming in off the water. Skip’s news wasn’t a punch in the gut. Not exactly. Not yet. I’d gasped when he said, “Gone.” I was letting go of a breath Tom and I been holding for almost two years. I knew there was a financial asteroid out there, coming to crush us like bugs later in the week. But for now I was—

  Alrighty.

  “So. Skip. How broke are we?”

  Well,” he considered for a long moment, “you still have a savings account at KeyBank that doesn’t appear to have been touched. It’s a decent amount, but not rich-person decent. As I recall, Tom wanted an account with a year’s worth of his teaching salary. Enough to live on for a while. He hasn’t touched that. You paid for the house in full, right?

  “We did. Against advice of legal counsel, as I recall.”

  “Not all of counsel’s advice is smart in all circumstances. As I’m painfully aware today.”

  “And this is one of those circumstances?”

  “Yeah. Tom was smart. You’ll have a roof over your head. I suggest you consider putting it on the market before your tax bill comes due—”

  He sounded way more upset than I was at the moment.

  “Allie. I don’t have to tell you how—awful I feel—calling you up like this. Where’s Tom? I tried his cell but—All of us here are in shock. We’ll do everything we can to get the different—everyone who had the money—to cover your loss—They’ll have to acknowledge the obvious security breach, but those inquiries take forever. An amount this big, and this well-distributed—Years. I’m—”

  “Skip. Listen to me. I’m sure I’ll be upset about this once I’ve thought it through. I may have to reconsider my recent addiction to pricey boots—But you know what we’ve been through because of this money. If we can have it stolen from us and live to tell about it? Cut down on casualties—” Patti Stone skated angrily through my mind, but I brushed her away. “—I’ll remember this call from you pretty fondly. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon.”

  * * *

  I called Tom. “Where are you? We need to talk about something.”

  “You sound funny, Allie.” Thomas Bennington III, master of the unspoken everything.

  “It’s been a strange morning. Where were you and Otis?”

  “Buying a gross of burner phones. Why?”

  Too late on the phones. We probably wouldn’t be getting as many unwanted calls from now on. I wondered if Code Name Mercury was planning to ring us up and say goodbye. “Thanks for the $200+ million.”

  I guess Patti was his lovely parting gift, huh?

  Shh.

  “Come home. Tom. Nobody’s dead. Nobody today, at least. As far as I know. I need to tell you something, but it’ll keep for another—?”

  He filled in the blank. “Fifteen minutes or so. We’re almost there.”

  “Fifteen then.” I hung up.

  I sure hope they kept their receipt for those burners.

  Shh.

  I eased my phone down onto the table as if it were a partially defused bomb, and sat waiting for Tom and Otis. When they showed at the door of the greenhouse, I waved them out. They brought beers. I stalled until they were seated, and I’d had my first major glug of beer. Then I told them.

  We finished our beers.

  The facts were simple and direct, but there was a lot of ricochet in the conversation. We’d be picking up fragments for the foreseeable future. Some things are too big to fit into a coherent thought, but we tried. Sharp exclamations. Long silences. In there, jumping up and down and demanding my attention, was a question I’d been asking myself since ten seconds after Skip said “Gone.”

  “Otis? Where’s Shadow Man? We need him here. Today of all days. Last summer he was able to un-hack all the work of Tito’s guy in twenty minutes. Is he monitoring the accounts? Does he know, do you think? Have you heard from him?”

  I searched my own mental date book. Shadow Man had been more shadowy than usual lately. Had I seen him at the island for morning coffee yesterday? The day before? Now that the decks weren’t covered in heaps of slush, he often came into Otis’s cave through the lower level door. There had been precious little chatting between us—ever—but I couldn’t remember speaking to him at all this week.

  “Otis?” I was trying to stop the bottom from dropping out of yet another fortress of trust. “Otis? Where is he?”

  Otis’s eyes were locked on the far horizon.

  * * *

  Back in May, when life was not quite so World War III, I did some research on the physical properties of two hundred million dollars. Not its value in the market place, not its ethereal presence in the form of Apple Pay, nor its invisible magnetic attraction for death and destruction. The question I asked myself—and the Internet—was “How much space would that amount of money take up if, let’s say, a truck pulled up and dumped it onto your living room floor? Could we, for example, still access the couch?

  I’d hoped it might help both Tom and me if we could consider The Money in the form of an actual, solid object. Bigger than a bread box.

  Maybe we’d be better able to subdue it, manage it, give it away in a sensible, orderly fashion if we didn’t keep imagining it as a ghostly death threat. Or electrical impulses speeding along the pathways of commerce. Flashes of lighting in a dark—deadly dark—cloud.

  Here’s what I found out: one hundred million dollars in hundreds fits “neatly” on a standard size pallet. And, not counting the pallet, it would be roughly four feet by four feet by three feet, so two hundred-plus million would be double that, with a few extra thousands sloshing onto the rug. Big. But not all that big. If we shoved our pallets between the two couches in our living room, they’d be way too big to make a functional coffee table, but not Washington-Monument-over-the-top.

  This afternoon, however, as I wandered from room to room of our about-to-be-former mansion, I meditated on the new reality. Our two palletsful of money had gone “poof” out of our world in a ghost-like instant. They were in the wind. With Mercury. And his brand new partner, Shadow Man.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Sunday, June 3

 
If it’s not a syndrome, it should be.

  Pretend for a second you’re starting your diet on Monday. It’s time. It’s past time. You’re committed. In a possibly perverse way, you’re looking forward to it. It’s Sunday morning. Someone has gone out and brought home a dozen donuts. There’s are four still in the box on the kitchen counter. One of them is a Boston Cream. You could get a head start on virtue and self-denial by having an egg-white omelet right now. Or you could have the Boston Cream and take a full thirty minutes to savor every last, precious bite.

  Or you could eat all four in seven minutes or less.

  Or maybe that’s just me.

  Does this compare in any way to having two hundred million+ dollars in a—as it turned out—not-safe location on Friday night and waking up on Saturday morning to discover it’s time to put your budget on bread and water? For me, the answer was yes.

  But. First.

  You need a really nice outfit for the last big, fancy party you’ll probably ever be invited to—and given free tickets for—because of how rich some people foolishly believe you still are.

  That was me on Sunday morning, the third day of June.

  Otis found me at the kitchen island, not with four donuts but with a bunch of VIP invitations to the Solstice Celebration at the Cleveland Museum of Art, on Saturday, June 23. Tom, Otis and I plus all the members of “our agency” were invited to celebrate the coming of summer in exuberantly lavish, artistic style.

  The other item in front of me on the island was my laptop. When Otis showed up I was surfing fashion sites for dresses about five to twelve hundred dollars above my pay grade. Not including shoes—which I was learning were stunningly expensive, even though you could probably get a hundred of those insubstantial strappy sandals out of one cow.

  I was considering those mind-boggling prices might be a crime—or possibly sin. My mother would definitely say they were. I could almost hear her saying that all the way from out-of-state.

  Do not listen to that voice, Alice Jane. We’re entitled to one last big fling before you go back to your bogus part-time librarian gig. Carpe vanishing fortune.