Acceleration

by Graham McNamee

  “So—what, you’re thinking janitor or something?”

  He shrugs. “Could be. But then there's also the type that goes for a job where they have control over other people. I was reading how a lot of serial killers try to get on the police force at some point, but they always fail the psych test. So they get a job that's like being a cop—private investigator, something military, or…” He leaves it for me to finish.

  “Security guard.”

  “It fits,” Vinny says. “The job would give him, like, the illusion of power. I can’t see this guy in administration, or anywhere you’d need social skills.”

  “But he could be one of the maintenance workers, scrubbing toilets, mopping up.”

  Vinny makes a face, shaking his head. “Possibly. But it doesn’t feel right.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  I make up my mind, squashing all my doubts. Nobody's ever accused me of thinking things all the way through before I act. Look before you leap, people have been telling me for the last seventeen years. But that's just not me.

  “He's a guard,” I say. “Got to be.”

  Jacob sounded pissed when I called in sick today. You don’t get sick days, he said. Food poisoning, I told him.

  I’d go crazy sitting around in the dungeon all day when I’ve got Roach in my sights now.

  It takes a while to find the Yorkdale security office. It's tucked out of the way, down a hall past a long row of pay phones and doors marked MAINTENANCE and ELECTRICAL. I push through the door into a reception area.

  An Asian guy with slicked-back hair sits at a desk, talking on the phone. He's wearing a gray and blue uniform with SECURITY printed above the breast pocket. Behind him, there's another door leading to a back room with rows of security monitors, showing a couple dozen views of the mall.

  Waiting for him to get off the phone, I look around the room. On a bulletin board, under the heading YORKDALE'S TEN LEAST WANTED is a group of Polaroids showing notorious shoplifters. Beside them there's a poster showing three multiracial guards with the caption WE’RE WATCHING TO KEEP YOU SAFE.

  “Can I help you?” the guy at the desk asks, hanging up the phone.

  Because he's Asian, I’ve already crossed him off the list in my head. Doesn’t fit the profile—not white. But how solid is that profile we put together, anyway? I mean, we might as well have pulled it out of a cereal box for all the expertise me and Vin have between us.

  “Hi. I was thinking of applying for security work at the mall.”

  “We’re not hiring right now,” he tells me. “But you’re welcome to fill out an application. We keep them on file for six months.” He pauses, listening to a staticky voice on the walkie-talkie strapped to his shoulder. Then he presses a button and says, “Copy.”

  I nod. “Sure. I'll take an application. That would be great.”

  In the monitor room the lights are slightly dimmed, making the screens glow a green-tinged black and white. I can hear a couple of voices talking baseball in there.

  He grabs the form from a filing cabinet.

  “Here you go,” he says.

  “So how many guards work here?” I ask casually.

  “About fifteen. More around Christmas.”

  “I guess you have to work different shifts.”

  He nods. “Three shifts: six A.M. to two; two to ten; ten to six. Round the clock.”

  “Okay, thanks. I'll fill this out and get it back to you.”

  I leave the office and walk down the hall, staring at the floor, trying to fit all the information together. Someone passing by bumps my arm.

  “Sorry,” I say absently, looking over in time to see the gray and blue security uniform going past. I turn to watch the guard push through into the office. He's red-haired and skinny, a little taller than me.

  He disappears, and I stand there wondering—Is it you? Are you the one? Somehow I think I'll know Roach when I see him—I’ve spent so much time inside his head. But even in my dreams all I see of him is his shadow.

  Vinny's waiting in front of a pet store, watching brightly colored fish swim circles in their aquariums.

  I hand him the application. “Here. Get a job, you bum.”

  He vacuums up the last of his iced coffee with his straw. “Do they get to carry those Taser guns, the ones that zap you with a thousand volts?” I shake my head. “No? How about batons?” Another shake. “Pepper spray? Anything?”

  “Just a polyester uniform, a bad haircut, and a walkie-talkie.”

  “I'll stick to being a bum. Better hours.”

  We could break up and cover more ground in the mall, but I think we'll do better with two sets of eyes focusing on the same thing. That way me and Vin can debate who looks like the most promising candidate.

  Picking up a box of doughnut holes and an Orange Julius, we grab a seat by the escalator on level two. A high-traffic area, with a clear view of the hallway that leads to the security office.

  “So what’ve we got?” I say. “Fifteen guards, working on three shifts?”

  Vinny examines a doughnut hole before popping it into his mouth. “On the graveyard shift they’d only have a skeleton crew working,” he adds, licking the glaze off his fingers. “Say, three of them.”

  “Okay, so that leaves us with six working the morning shift and six for the afternoon, roughly.” I notice Vin digging around trying to pick out the best holes. “Hey, don’t be taking all the chocolate ones.”

  “Come on, I’m not exactly getting paid for this, you know.”

  “What about that Orange Julius you’re drinking, and—” I stop, seeing the red-haired guard who passed by me in the hall. “What about this guy?”

  We watch him walk briskly away.

  “Put him on the list,” Vin says. “We'll call him Red.”

  He gets up and leans on the railing, sipping his drink and looking down at the crowds on level one. “Okay, I’ve got a theory. Remember the women on his hit list, how he had their schedules, their subway stops, and all that? Well, the times he had listed were all between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty. And the stops were all within fifteen minutes of here.”

  I sit there in silence, trying to figure out his point. “And … ?”

  “Try this out,” Vin says. “He gets off work at ten and rides the trains, hunting. That would explain the time frame and the locations of the stops he's staked out.”

  “So he works the closing shift.”

  “Makes sense,” he says. “He does the two-to-ten shift, then squeezes in some stalking before heading home to Granny.”

  “Hey,” I say, shifting things around in my head. “You know that time I followed the woman from his hit list, the one he calls Cherry? She got on the subway at Yorkdale Station. I remember thinking how she looked like she’d just got off work. She was wearing a skirt and tights, but she had running shoes on, like she’d finished work and didn’t want to wear her heels home.”

  “Then she works at the mall?”

  “Maybe. Yeah. When I saw her, it was after ten. Closing time.”

  “What stop did she get off at?” Vinny asks. “Where does she live?”

  “Near Wilson Station.” It takes me a moment, but then things stop shifting and fall into place. “Not far from where all those dots on your map connect. Right in his comfort zone.”

  I take a deep breath and blow it out. I lean back, looking way up to the big skylight. Dark clouds have rolled in, blocking the sun, promising the first rain in forever.

  “If he's working till closing, he should be here right now,” I say. “Starting his shift.”

  “Yeah, but that's a whole lot of guessing going on there,” Vin mumbles, tossing back another doughnut hole.

  Glancing down, I catch sight of a large woman with short blond hair wearing security's gray and blue uniform.

  “Hey, check this out,” I say.

  “That makes three now, including the guy you talked to in the office. Three down, three to go.”

  After a
n hour, my butt hasn’t just fallen asleep, it's gone into a coma. Vinny's powered through a second box of doughnut holes and paces around and around like a mosquito. We’ve counted five guards.

  The Asian guy and the woman don’t fit the profile—not white, not male. Same goes for a black guard Vin spotted. We catch sight of an older guard dragging a very reluctant kid down the hall to the office. Too old to be a contender.

  Then there's Red. He's got potential.

  I get up and try to stretch some feeling back into my numb butt. Vinny's been ranting for the past ten minutes about how Terminator 3 didn’t measure up to the first two, and I’m about ready to toss him over the railing.

  “Wait up. Here we go,” he says.

  “Where?”

  Vin points down to level one. “Number six. Our final contestant.”

  The guard walking past the Body Shop is a big guy. Maybe two hundred and sixty pounds, six feet, and stretching the polyester uniform like Schwarzenegger in spandex. He looks to be in his mid-twenties, has wavy black hair, dark eyes, mustache. He passes beneath us, out of sight.

  I keep expecting something, a jolt of recognition. All I get is confusion, trying to see evil in these strangers’ faces. The thing they say about serial killers—they look pretty normal, nothing special. They look like you and me. What sets them apart is invisible, their lack of conscience, their need to control and manipulate, and kill.

  “What do we do now?” Vinny asks.

  I look down at the crowds of afternoon shoppers, trying to clear my head, to see the next move. Now that we’ve finally started to close the distance, I’m kind of in shock. This might actually work.

  “Now we take the next step,” I hear myself saying. “We follow them home.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It's after five when I get back to the Jungle. I left Vinny at the 7-Eleven; he had to pick up some stuff for his mom. The plan is to meet up later, waiting till about nine to head out.

  In front of B building, on a lawn that's more dirt than grass, Wayne's lying on a towel, tanning. An empty Big Gulp cup and a Chee-tos bag are discarded beside him. He's all oiled and shiny in the late sun. I notice his head is shaved again, smooth as a cue ball and almost as white.

  “Hey, man,” I say. “Shouldn’t you be flipping burgers right about now?”

  Wayne lifts his sunglasses to squint at me. “No way. I’m a free man.”

  “Free how?”

  “Free, as in they fired my butt,” he says. “Retired my uniform.”

  “For what, bad hygiene?”

  He leans up on his elbows, raising his glasses to rest on top of his bald head. “Last week, down at the Barn, six hundred bucks went missing in action.”

  “Six hundred? How?” I shake my head, trying to read Wayne's eyes for the answer I suspect. But he's reading mine, too.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he says.

  “Well, did you?”

  “If I was going to take six hundred—the way I’d do it, they’d never even know they had the money in the first place. This was done without finesse. Too obvious.”

  “Then why did you get canned?”

  He sighs. “Guess I’m the usual suspect. Got that shifty look. And … I might have mentioned to one of the cashier girls about my past brushes with the law. I guess she passed it around.”

  Just like Wayne to try and score some bad boy points with a girl, bragging about his life of crime.

  “Even when I’m clean they think I’m dirty,” he tells me. “I mean, maybe I skimmed a twenty now and then, but they never even knew about that.”

  “So you were taking a commission?”

  “Min-i-mum wage, man! When they pay you squat they expect a little—what's the word—pilferage. Besides, that's not the point. The point is I got shafted. Unjustly accused.”

  Back when we got busted in the great toilet heist, my life of crime ended, but Wayne's only paused long enough for the heat to die down. He always has some scam he's working on. It's like a hobby to him. Years ago, he tried to teach me how to pick a lock, but I just didn’t have the touch for it. He could do it in his sleep. Wayne's a natural, but his criminal ambitions only go as far as what he likes to call victim-less crimes. He's like those vegetarians who won’t eat anything that ever had a face—Wayne won’t do a crime with a face on it.

  “You told me you were going straight,” I say.

  “I am. As of right now. Consider what I just told you my confession.” He smiles. “So, do you absolve me of my sins?”

  Wayne's always going to be Wayne, and his half-assed attempts at staying legal are part of his charm, I guess. But there's a sadness in his smile, and a kind of worn-out edge to his words. Like even he's grown tired of the part he's playing.

  “My son,” I tell him, shaking my head. “You’re absolved.”

  He lies back on the towel. “My soul feels clean again.”

  If only it was that easy.

  “Later,” I say, leaving Wayne to crisp in the sun.

  When I walk in the door, Mom says there's a voice-mail message for me.

  “Who from?”

  “Kim,” she says, with a raised eyebrow.

  In the living room, I pick up the phone and play the message.

  “Hey, Duncan. It's me, Kim. According to the display on my phone, you’ve called four times in the last week. And left zero messages. What's up?”

  Did I really call that much? After the first time, I phoned when I knew she wouldn’t be home, just to hear her voice on the message. Kind of pathetic, but I got my little fix that way.

  “If you need to talk,” she goes on, “you know, we can still talk to each other. We’re not mortal enemies. Anyway, I’m late for practice. I’ve got a game tomorrow night down in Amesbury Park. So this is me leaving a message. See, it's not so hard. It won’t hurt. See ya.”

  Then comes the beep, and a computer voice asking if I want to save this message. I press three to save.

  She's playing down in the park tomorrow. Maybe I could go. We can still talk. It's not so hard, Kim says. But it is. Some people you can’t be friends with, not when you’ve been something more.

  I crash on the couch and turn on the TV.

  Dad comes out of his vampire hibernation a while later, looking like the undead. His hair is plastered flat on one side of his head and sticking straight up on the other. The blackout mask he uses to pretend it's night hangs under his chin. On the way to the bathroom, he squints at me like I look familiar but he can’t exactly place me.

  “Morning, Dad,” I say.

  “Huh?” he grunts, then remembers to take out his earplugs.

  “I said good morning.”

  “Right. Hi, kid.”

  Dad tries to put the earplugs in his pocket, but seeing how he's only wearing boxers, there aren’t any. He keeps trying, though, as he stumbles off toward the bathroom.

  A minute later I hear the water go on. He lets out a yelp. Ever since the heat wave crashed down on us, Dad's been taking his showers cold. He calls it his arctic defibrillator because it shocks his heart back to life. I can hear him gasping.

  In the kitchen Mom's making pizza—well, not actually making, more like defrosting. When it comes out of the box it looks like a cheese-plastered manhole cover, which is close to how it tastes. Because it's not real cheese, nothing that's seen the inside of a cow. It's soy cheese. No cholesterol, no heart attacks, no flavor.

  On TV, Entertainment Tonight is starting. Mary Hart has her serious face on. A minor celebrity has died. They have reactions from other celebrities. He died so young, it's so tragic. When the story ends, Mary perks up instantly to tell us about the new Pepsi commercial. It's all pleasantly shallow. Nothing to worry about, nothing to keep you up nights. I wish I could just sink into the couch and zone out for a couple of weeks.

  But there's a little leather book, with a cover that feels like skin, hiding in my closet.

  When me and Dad used to go fishing, years ago, we would catc
h fish and just throw them back. We were only there for the hell of it, and it didn’t seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then we’d get one that would swallow the hook. We knew he was a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you’ve swallowed the hook, there's no losing it. Me, I’ve swallowed it big-time.

  Dad walks out of the bathroom in his robe, combing his wet hair. “I’m back from the dead,” he announces.

  “Right in time for breakfast,” says Mom, coming in for a quick kiss.

  “You taste like cheese,” he tells her.

  “I’m making you an egg-white omelet. The rest of us are having pizza.”

  “For breakfast?”

  She rubs her fingers over his stubbly cheek. “It's only breakfast on your side of the world.”

  Dad sits down on his recliner. He bends his comb and flicks a few drops of water at me on the couch. “How you handling it, kid?”

  I give him a blank look. My brain's running in circles, going over my plan for tonight, so he catches me off guard.

  “The job,” he says. “How you handling it?”

  “Oh. You know, it's pretty much a mind-numbing, soul-killing waste of time.”

  Dad nods, easing back in his chair and putting his feet up. “Wiser words were never said. That's why you have to go to college, get a future. They used to have this program for rotten kids, where they’d take them into prisons to meet the real hard-core bad guys—to scare them straight. Think of your job that way. You don’t want to end up with a life sentence.”

  “If this job was supposed to be a lesson, then I think I’ve learned it already. Can I quit now?”

  He throws his comb at me. “Flick around and see if there's a Blue Jays game on.”

  When breakfast/dinner is ready, Dad drags in one of the big box fans from their bedroom and positions it so we all get our slice of the breeze. We sit and eat and watch baseball, which must be the most boring sport ever invented. But right here and now, I love it. I love this boring, ordinary meal. Freeze the frame here, and let it last.

  It's like the eye of the storm. Everything's calm and quiet, and I can almost forget what's supposed to happen tonight. So long as I don’t look up and see the wall of the storm that's spinning around me, waiting for my next move.