by Jude Hardin
I eased my key into the front-door lock and turned it slowly until the bolt slid away from the plate, every metallic click seemingly magnified a thousand times. I stepped inside and gently secured the door and made a beeline for the bathroom.
I turned the light on and looked in the mirror. I was filthy. I’d tried to camouflage myself with the moist dirt in the field, but it hadn’t been very effective. I didn’t look like a Special Forces soldier. I looked like a kid who’d been making mud pies. I turned the shower on and waited for it to get warm.
I hoped the running water wouldn’t wake my wife. I didn’t think it would. The main bathroom is a good distance from our bedroom, and Juliet’s a sound sleeper. I climbed in and watched the rich black soil leave my body and circle the drain.
This was Brittney’s bathroom, the one she used when she was home, so her things were in there. Her soap and shampoo and pink razor. I scrubbed myself and rinsed and then scrubbed myself again. Got out and toweled off. I smelled very pretty.
The clothes I’d been wearing were ruined. There was no way they would ever come clean. I shoved the shorts and the polo shirt and my underwear into a plastic grocery store bag, and then tossed the bag into the big Rubbermaid trash can in the garage.
I crept into the bedroom and slid under the covers beside Juliet. She didn’t stir. I was naked, but there wasn’t anything unusual about that.
I didn’t like keeping secrets from my wife, but I kept telling myself it was for the best. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
Ironically, the crucible I’d just been put through—with the bogus enemy operatives and the blanks and the phony hot skillet—had convinced me that Diana was the real deal. If she would go to such great lengths to test my loyalty, then it was a safe bet that she would follow up on her threat against my family members if I ever told anyone about the Circle.
I could have made something up. I could have invented a bunch of details about an investigative case I’d taken, a missing person case or something, a case that didn’t exist, but it never would have flown. I hadn’t been doing that kind of work for a while and really had no intentions of ever doing it again. My little teaching studio was doing OK, and there was no longer a reason for me to slink around with a revoked PI license taking cash under the table from clients desperate enough to hire a guy like me. Juliet knew all that. Plus, she’s pretty good at seeing through me. She can usually tell when I’m lying. It was better that I didn’t have to, if possible.
I closed my eyes and made a mental checklist. I wanted to be sure I’d covered all my tracks. I couldn’t think of anything that might arouse suspicion, except maybe the clothes I’d thrown away. But I didn’t think Juliet would miss one shirt and one pair of shorts. I had dozens. No, she would wake up in the morning none the wiser. My late night escapade would go completely unnoticed.
Like it never happened.
THURSDAY, APRIL 19
Nicholas left the house Sunday night, and he didn’t come back until the wee hours Monday morning. As usual, he’d been drinking. I heard him taking a shower as soon as he got home. Washing away the stench of her, I guess. What else could it be? Why would a husband sneak out in the middle of the night, other than to meet his mistress?
I’ve suspected something for a while now. I need proof before I confront him, so I’m thinking about hiring a PI. I’ve been talking to one, and he seems eager to get started. How ironic. A private investigator following a private investigator.
Our marriage was in trouble before, when Nicholas admitted to sleeping with a woman in Los Angeles. It made me insane for a while, but finally I forgave him. It really wasn’t his fault. He’d been brainwashed. He didn’t even know his own name.
But this time is different. He’s not brainwashed now. He knows perfectly well what he’s doing, and if my suspicions are correct then that will be it. I will divorce him and never speak to him again. It breaks my heart to think about it, but that’s what will happen. I love him, but I could never trust him again.
Nicholas and I are still together, technically, but I’ve never felt more alone. Sometimes I think my work is all I have anymore. All I ever will have.
It went well with Jet today. Her legs are looking a lot better, and there was hardly any drainage on the dressings. Some days she doesn’t feel like talking much, but today we had a lengthy chat. Lengthy and disturbing.
She told me that she and Willy, her estranged husband, had come from New Orleans.
“We lost our house when Katrina came through,” she said. “It was terrible. We were stuck at the Superdome for two days with no food and no fresh water and toilets that wouldn’t flush. Everyone was going nuts. There was fighting, looting, people drunk and jacked up on crack. Old people dying on the floor beside you, little kids running around and raising all kinds of hell. We finally got on a bus to Houston, and from there a friend of Willy’s wired us some money for tickets to Jacksonville. That’s how we ended up here. We stayed with Willy’s friend for a few months until we were able to get our own place.”
“When did he start hitting you?” I said.
“I’ll never forget the first time. We were at a party, and I was having a good time talking and laughing with my friends, and all of a sudden Willy said it was time to go. I had a good buzz, and I was having fun. I didn’t want to go. He kept pestering me, and finally I told him to go on by himself. I told him I would catch a ride with Wanda, who didn’t live that far from us anyway. Willy didn’t like that at all. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of the house and made me get in the car. He grabbed me so hard it left bruises on my arm. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was when we got home.”
“What happened?”
“He marched me inside and pushed me down on the couch. He started shouting, and throwing things around. He called me a stupid fucking bitch, said I made him look like a fool in front of everybody. He said next time he was going to put his foot up my ass. That’s when I lost it. I got up and shouted right back at him. I don’t even remember what I said, but whatever it was made him furious. He slapped me. Hard. My lip started bleeding and I was crying and trying to get to the bathroom, but he grabbed me and threw me on the floor and started kicking my ribs. He didn’t break anything. That time. But I had bruises all up and down my back for a couple of weeks.”
Jet’s problems were even worse than mine. I felt so sorry for her.
“Why didn’t you leave him then?” I said. “Why didn’t you just get out?”
“That’s what everyone says, but it’s not that easy. I didn’t have anywhere to go, for one thing. And the next day he bought me flowers and told me how sorry he was. Said it would never happen again. I know I should have left him. Now I know I should have. But at the time I believed him. I thought I was in love with him, and I thought we could work everything out.”
Jet took a pain pill, and she started getting sleepy after that. I gave her a hug, told her I would see her Sunday.
My first lesson Thursday afternoon was with a kid named Terry Vine. He was a sophomore in high school, and one of my better students. He had potential, but his home life wasn’t so great. He came to me a while back with tears in his eyes and told me that Darrel, his stepfather, had lost another job. That’s the way he’d said it. Another job. As though it were a pattern.
“So I don’t have enough money to continue the lessons,” Terry said. “Darrel’s making me hand my paycheck over to him as soon as I get it. Says food and electricity are more important than guitar lessons.”
I wondered if the money went for food and electricity, or for beer and cigarettes.
“Where’s your guitar?” I said.
“That’s another thing. He took it to a pawnshop while I was at school one day. I came home and he was stinking drunk, passed out on the couch, and my guitar was gone. I found the pawn ticket on the coffee table under an ashtray. I’m going to get it back, though. Soon as I get my hands on a hundred and fifty bucks, I’m going t
o get it back.”
Terry was a good kid. He reminded me of myself at that age. His family situation was even similar. His mother was still alive, but she was in prison, and his real father was in California. So Darrel was all he had.
Despite the lousy hand he’d been dealt, Terry was courteous and respectful and hardworking. He did OK in school, and he worked nights and weekends flipping burgers.
“You’re too good to just quit,” I said. “I’ll loan you a guitar for now. And I won’t charge you for the lessons until things get better. OK?”
“You would do that for me?”
“Yeah. But don’t tell anybody. I don’t want it getting around that I’m a nice guy.”
He wiped away the tears. “You’re too cool, Mr. Colt.”
“Don’t worry about it. You can pay me back someday. And I definitely expect free tickets to your first concert.”
“With backstage passes,” he said.
So Thursday afternoons were my pro bono lessons. I didn’t mind. Terry Vine had the potential to be as good a player as I was in my heyday. Maybe better.
I steered into the parking lot around four fifteen. Someone had taken the spot by the mailbox, so I parked as close as I could to the front door. I grabbed the mail on my way in. There was an insurance bill and a card from a competing alarm company and a credit card offer. I tossed it all on the counter and walked back to the studio room.
I hadn’t heard from Di since she’d slinked off early Monday morning. I wondered if something had happened. Maybe she had decided I wasn’t the right person for the job after all. Maybe she’d already done some work on her own and had found out what she needed to know.
Or maybe she was dead.
If she was, there was no way for me to know about it. I had no contact information. Nobody was going to notify me of anything, because nobody knew I was involved with anything. If I never heard from Diana Dawkins again, all I could do was wonder.
But I didn’t think she was dead. Someone was trying to frame her. Someone was planning to assassinate the president, and they were going to make it look as though Di had done it. They certainly didn’t want her dead. Not yet, anyway. If anything, they would probably try to protect her until the dirty deed was done.
Terry Vine walked in at four-thirty, right on time. I’d left the door to the studio room open, and I was sitting on a stool trying to play some jazz chords. My hand hurt like a bitch.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Hey.”
Terry didn’t look very happy.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah. I’m OK. Just tired, that’s all.”
He was wearing his Burger King uniform, so I knew he was going to work right after the lesson. His face was pale and his hair was greasy and he had dark circles under his eyes.
“Did you work on that stuff I showed you last week?” I said.
“Best I could. I didn’t have a lot of free time.”
“Well, plug in and show me what you got.”
I closed the studio door. There’s a red light above it that alerts me when someone comes through the front entrance. Usually nobody does, unless there’s a lesson scheduled.
Terry set his guitar case on the floor and clicked open the latches. I’d loaned him a 1974 Fender Telecaster Deluxe. You always knew the Deluxe was from 1974, because that’s the only year they made them. Until recently, that is. Fender started producing some kind of reissue a few years ago.
Terry pulled the guitar out of the case, strapped it on, and plugged into the amplifier next to his stool. He warmed up with some scales for a couple of minutes, and after that he tried to play a solo I’d taught him last week.
I stopped him about halfway into it.
“That’s pretty good,” I said. “But you have to really bend that B string in the fourth bar, and your picking isn’t steady. Go ahead and go through it again, from the top. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I hurried up to the front counter to get a metronome. While I was there, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before, something on one of the envelopes I’d brought in from the mailbox. On the left-hand corner of the credit card offer there was a little red dot. It was tiny. It looked exactly like that thing between my toes. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed it. Maybe it was nothing. In a way, I hoped it was nothing.
I usually just feed that kind of mail into the shredder, but the little red dot made me curious.
I tore open the envelope.
As I suspected, it was not a credit card offer.
Terry was waiting for me in the studio room, and I had another lesson scheduled at five, so I didn’t have time to fully examine the contents of the envelope right then. But it definitely wasn’t a credit card offer. It was something from Di. I knew that right away. There was a laminated ID card and some photographs and several pages of instructions. For a minute I couldn’t believe she had sent such sensitive material through the mail, and then it occurred to me she probably hadn’t.
She had probably delivered the envelope herself.
It was actually a fairly secure way for Di to communicate with me, when I thought about it. Every business in the strip mall had its own mailbox, and every mailbox had a unique key, so the chances of any correspondence falling into the wrong hands were remote. It was better than talking on the phone, better than email, and certainly better than meeting in person. I thought about what she’d said, that the organization would kill her if they knew she had contacted me. Mail drops were probably the best way for her to get messages to me, and I had a feeling she would expect me to deliver my responses in a similar fashion.
I crammed everything back into the envelope, opened a drawer under the counter, and dropped it in. The drawer had a lock on it, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put the key. I figured it would be OK. Nobody else ever walked behind the counter. Nobody was going to mess with it.
I went ahead and slid the insurance bill and the alarm advertisement in the drawer as well. I grabbed a metronome and walked back to the studio room.
“I think I have it now,” Terry said. “Check this out.”
“Hold on. I want you to try it with this metronome. You need to get used to working with one. Eventually you’ll be doing studio work, and sometimes you might have to play along with a click track.”
“What’s a click track?”
“It’s a tempo guide they load onto the two-inch master tape or the digital feed or whatever they’re using. It sounds like two drumsticks clicking together.”
“Cool,” he said.
“Most engineers will record the drums first, and the click track helps the drummer keep a perfect beat. Once they lay down the drum tracks, everyone else can use that as their tempo guide. That’s the way it usually works. But some songs might not have drums in the intro, or in other parts of the song, and some songs might not have drums at all, so the lead guitar or the piano or whatever will have to play along with the click track. Make sense?”
“Yeah. You really think I might be making records someday?”
“No doubt about it. Just keep practicing. You’re already better than I was at your age.”
“Really?”
“Really. All right. Here we go.”
I switched on the metronome and set it to the tempo I wanted. Terry started the solo, but right away he was behind the beat. I stopped him, and he tried it again. He played the piece much better the second time, and even better than that on the third. By the time our thirty minutes was up, he was well on his way to mastering it.
“Take the metronome home and practice with it,” I said. “Next week, we’ll pick up where we left off.”
“This is hard,” he said. “But fun. How much does one of these things cost?”
“Don’t worry about it. You can use that one for as long as you need it.”
“Thanks, Mr. Colt. You’re the best teacher ever.”
“Like I said, don’t go telling everyone how nice I am.”
<
br /> He laughed. “Too late. I already have.”
The red light over the studio door flashed on. Someone had come through the front entrance. My five o’clock student, no doubt.
“All right, get your stuff together,” I said. “I have another young fledgling waiting in the wings.”
“But I’m better than him.”
“How do you know? He might be the next Yngwie Malmsteen.”
“Sure.”
“All right, so you’re better than him. But he’s paying me. So hurry up and get your shit and leave.”
Terry laughed. We had the kind of relationship where we could joke around with each other. I liked him. He was a good kid. He wiped his strings down and put the guitar back into its case, along with his cable and his strap and the metronome.
“See you next week,” he said.
“All right. Tell Braden to come on back.”
“I will. Thanks again, Mr. Colt.”
I gave him a thumbs-up, and he turned and left the room.
There were two more lessons after Braden’s, and then a thirty-minute break before the last three students of the day. At six o’clock I was finally able to get back up front and take a look at the envelope from Diana.
I knelt down and reached into the drawer, pulled it out and dumped the contents. A shiny silver disk the size of a dime landed on its edge and almost rolled off the countertop. I caught it and examined it, thinking it was probably some sort of listening device. I set it aside. There were three black-and-white photographs of a man, all of them taken at different angles. He looked to be in his midfifties. He had salt-and-pepper hair that was stylishly mussed, and a clean-shaven face that was stylishly dimpled. Expensive suit, movie-star teeth. He appeared to be in excellent physical condition.
The ID card was like the one Diana had produced the day I met her, but it had a picture of me on it. At first I couldn’t imagine where Di had gotten the photograph, but then it came to me. It was my mug shot, from when I’d been arrested for possession of heroin in Tennessee. It had been doctored, so it really didn’t look like a mug shot anymore, but I recognized my hair from then and the sour expression.
