For the Sake of the Game

by Laurie R. King

  Around midnight, the truth settled over him like a rain-soaked blanket. The invoices and the ledger entries simply didn’t match. And by his loose calculation, ten of thousands of dollars couldn’t be accounted for.

  Raymond. No one else could have done this. And it had been easy. He controlled the books and the money. Carl only saw his business losing ground.

  Then another truth dropped.

  Raymond killed Carl. That thought sounded ridiculous inside his head, but as soon as it sparked to life, he knew it to be true.

  He tugged Carl’s address book from the middle drawer and quickly found Sheriff Blake’s home number. He spun the rotary dial. Blake answered after two rings, his voice heavy with sleep.

  “Sheriff, it’s Billy Whitehead.”

  “Billy, what the hell time is it?”

  “You need to see something.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m over at Draper’s Hardware.”

  He heard shuffling as if Blake was rolling out of bed. “What are you jawing about?”

  A sound. The dream of footsteps. Beyond the closed door.

  “Someone’s here,” Billy whispered.

  “I can’t hear you. What was that?”

  The door swung open. Raymond, a hammer in his right hand.

  “I saw the light beneath the door,” he said. “Thought someone was robbing the place. What’re you doing?”

  “Maybe I should ask why you’re here this time of night?” Billy said.

  Raymond’s gaze danced left, then right, no doubt searching for a reasonable answer. He finally found one, of sorts. “I was just checking on things.”

  “No, you were going to destroy the proof.”

  “Proof? Of what? You’re not making much sense.”

  “It was you,” Billy said.

  Raymond’s gaze now landed on the open ledgers and stacks of invoices on the desk. His face hardened, eyes narrowing. He raised the hammer a notch. “Put the phone down.”

  Billy did, but not in its cradle. He laid the handset on its side, facing Raymond.

  “You’ve been stealing from Carl,” Billy said.

  “The hell I have. Are you crazy?”

  “For nearly three years.”

  “I never . . .”

  “It’s too late, Raymond. The evidence is right here.” Billy waved a hand over the desk. “And you killed Carl when he found out.”

  Raymond’s entire body tensed. He stood frozen for a few seconds, and then charged toward Billy, the hammer high.

  Billy snatched up the closest thing to a weapon that he could see, a fancy letter opener that lay beside the phone.

  It had all happened so quickly and when it was over nausea swept over Billy. Cold sweat erupted on his face. He had managed to hold it together while he hung up with Blake and called Wilbert Scoggins. He then walked to the employee washroom. Just as he finished washing Raymond’s blood from his hands, watching it swirl down the drain, his stomach knotted. He dropped to his knees before the toilet and retched. Only hot, acidic liquid came up. When his stomach finally unwound, he struggled to his feet, grasping the sink for support. The cold water he splashed on his face settled things somewhat.

  Ten minutes later, Billy stood next to Sheriff Blake over Raymond’s body. Blake looked disheveled, shirt wrinkled, eyes sleep swollen, hair flipped up on one side from the pillow he had just vacated. Raymond looked worse. Pale, waxy, mouth slack, a dribble of blood at one corner. The letter opener protruded from his chest, a blossom of red around it.

  “Looks like you hit his heart,” Blake said. “Got a lung, too, I’d surmise.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill him,” Billy said. “But he didn’t give me much choice.”

  “So I heard.” Blake glanced at him. “Clever leaving the phone line open.”

  “I figured if it was me lying there, you’d know who did it and why.”

  “What the hell?”

  Billy turned to see Wilbert Scoggins in the doorway behind him.

  “Raymond messed up,” Blake said. “Badly.”

  Billy explained what he had discovered, and that Raymond had attacked him. He walked to the desk. “Raymond’s been fixing the books. Making it look like everything cost more than it really did. Stealing from Carl and Cora.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Wilbert said.

  “It’s a fact,” Billy said. “Been doing it for years.”

  Wilbert shook his head. “No wonder Carl’s business has been bad.”

  Billy nodded. “Hard to keep a good bottom line when someone’s emptying the pot as fast as you can fill it.”

  Wilbert looked at Billy, then gave a brief nod toward the papers on the desk. “How’d you even know to look at all this?”

  Billy glanced at Blake, and managed a smile. “Sherlock Holmes.”

  BUY A BULLET

  AN ORPHAN X STORY

  by Gregg Hurwitz

  She takes the pain, takes it so well. This is evident the moment she enters the upscale coffee shop in downtown Palo Alto. She is on the arm of a trim man with artfully tousled hair, two-day growth, and Bono sunglasses. Or rather, he is on her arm, his fist wrapped around her slender biceps, steering her, conveying ownership. She winces against the pressure of his grip, allowing a slight crimp of the right eye, but her grin doesn’t so much as flicker. Experience has taught her.

  Bringing up the rear is a head-taller, broad-chested specimen of a bodyguard, ex-military judging by hair and posture. His deferential bearing suggests that when tasked, he also performs the services of a personal assistant, as do most employees in the orbit of the very rich. He is youthful. His body fat is single digit; muscles sheathe him like armor.

  In the corner of the shop, a man notes this little retinue over a lifted cup of espresso. He is around thirty years old, not too handsome, unobtrusive. Just an average guy. At his feet sits a bag bulky with night-vision gear handed to him hours ago through the rear door of a Sand Hill office in exchange for a banded stack of bills. He is not a regular in the Bay Area; having collected what he came for, he has pit-stopped for a quick cup before the five-hour haul back to Los Angeles. But now his interest is piqued by this woman and the man clamped to her.

  The coffee shop on University Avenue gets all kinds—or rather, all Silicon Valley kinds. A trio of Scandinavian engineers in their Dockers and rumpled short-sleeve button-ups. Entrepreneurs-to-be hunched over slender silver laptops, plugged into headsets. Twentysomethings wearing Havianas and slurping free-trade coffee, key-chain carabiners dangling off their belt loops. The wood-paneled confines smell of Guatemalan roast and ambition, and hum with caffeine and a variety of pleasingly accented voices.

  At the couple’s entrance, activity ceases for a moment but it is not, surprisingly, at the woman’s considerable Midwestern beauty. The ensuing stir appears to be due to the man in the yellow-tinted shades. From the whispers making the rounds, a name emerges—Steve Radack.

  The watcher at the corner table lowers his demitasse to the tiny saucer. The name rolls around in his mind for a moment before slotting into place. Radack is a dot-com success story, which makes him, in these parts, royalty. A member of the three comma club, he is unaware of the attention or, more likely, inured to it. His knees jiggle beneath tailored pants. An unlit cigarette bobs from his lips. Sweat sparkles at his hairline. He is amped on something and the condition seems not unfamiliar to him.

  Radack orders the bodyguard to bring him a Dead Eye—three shots of espresso added to drip coffee—and leads the woman to a table, his fingers still indenting her smooth pale skin. Patrons clear a path. At the table, the woman says, “Would you mind getting it to go?” and he slides his hand to her wrist and deals it a cruel twist. Her full lips part but she makes no sound. She lowers her head and sits, her emerald eyes slightly dulled. One side of her neck is streaked with faded bruises. Finger-width. Her nose is sloped just right with a scattering of freckles across the bridge, and her front teeth are Brigitte Bardot–p
ronounced, just shy of buck. She is stunning, and yet there is a blankness behind her features, the blankness of compounded trauma.

  The watcher at the corner table knows this expression. He knows it well.

  He has spent a lifetime in the vicinity of trauma, usually inflicting it. He is known by some as Evan Smoak. To a few, he is known as Orphan X. But generally he is not known at all.

  He decides to extend his visit.

  Steve Radack’s background and proclivities prove to be amply detailed on the World Wide Web. He is the visionary behind Thumbprint, a software that allows one to press a finger to a smartphone and pay for a variety of items in a variety of ways. To the watcher, this doesn’t seem like a concept worth a seven-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar buyout, but he is not an arbiter of the whims of the Silicon Valley gods. Sitting on a muted floral duvet in a Los Altos hotel room, sipping a Grey Goose over ice, he scrolls and clicks.

  Radack is the self-described bad-boy of the software world, and though this seems a comically low bar, his accomplishments in self-debasement are impressive. Shortly after Thumbprint’s acquisition five years ago, he was ousted from the company’s board after the replacement CEO filed battery charges. Radack went on to total a Tesla Model S Signature and an Audi R8 Spyder in a three-day period. After the latter wreck, despite blowing nearly six times the legal blood-alcohol limit, he got his DUI overturned on a technicality by a team of attorneys. A run of thrill-seeking adventures followed, from big-wave surfing in Peru to BASE jumping from Dubai skyscrapers, the party culminating in a protracted cocaine bender that stopped his heart for a full seven minutes. A gaggle of concierge doctors at the Stanford University Medical Center and a pacemaker got him up and running again, and according to various accounts, he hadn’t lost a step. In a recent Wired interview, when asked to give his religion, Radack names Social Darwinism. Expounding upon the rights and obligations of the powerful, he quotes everything from The Art of War to the Leopold and Loeb trial.

  But he is not the watcher’s focus. The focus is Radack’s girlfriend, the lovely Leanne Lattimore, who hails from Kansas City. The daughter of an insurance salesman and a schoolteacher, she came west to attend San Jose State, where she studied computer science. An internship at Thumbprint six summers ago brought her into contact with Radack and she’d been attached to him ever since. Or him to her. The watcher finds footage including her backstage at one of Radack’s TED talks. A well-timed pause captures her in close-up.

  When he finally looks up from the screen, the windows are dark with night. He finishes his vodka, rises, and sets the glass neatly on the tray above the wet bar, nudging it until it is perfectly centered on the paper doily. An urge turns his head. He looks across at the bed and the open laptop on which Leanne’s image is frozen. The situation she is in appears to be unmanageable. It’s a complex problem, one that will require a solution worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

  He stands motionless with his fingertips tented on the brim of the empty glass, regarding Leanne’s image, feeling the pull of instinct and muscle memory, his thoughts reshaping themselves until they form something dark and unyielding and true.

  Perhaps she will be his first.

  In the trunk of his Honda Accord is a black sweatshirt, a pair of Night Owl tactical binoculars, and a Wi-Fi antenna with good gain. A few exits up Interstate 280 in Atherton, he finds Radack’s oft-referenced estate with little trouble. The fifteen-acre compound features multiple safe rooms, a fully stocked fish pond, and self-sustaining gardens and crops in the event of a nuclear winter or zombie attack. The watcher takes a single pass around, noting a sheltered dog run just east of the guest house. He parks on the back side of the compound in a blind spot between cameras mounted on the spike-topped fence. The binoculars’ night vision provides decent vantage through to the main house. He wonders which window Leanne is behind. Then he shakes his head: I never guess, Watson.

  He opens his laptop and, with the help of the antenna and a thirty-dollar long-range Wi-Fi modem, finds the network—TECHWARRIOR. It is password-protected. While he is hardly a tech warrior himself, he knows which tools to apply. Using the Kismet and Aircrack suite of programs, he recons the hidden wireless network and finds the encrypted credentials. These he e-mails off to a double-blind account at Hashkiller, and sets its 131-billion-password cracking engine to work.

  Two Dobermans appear at the fence near his car, vibrating the windows with resonant barks. He checks the time—it took them three minutes and twelve seconds to notice his presence. They are overfed, boxy around the middle, further evidence of their owner’s lack of discipline. It is time to go; even fat dogs can raise an alarm.

  Sliding his laptop onto the passenger seat, he drives off. Ten minutes away in Woodside, he finds an upscale restaurant, The Village Pub. The bar has the usual selection of vodkas. He settles on a Cîroc, up, with a twist, and tells the bartender to bruise it. It pours properly, with a film of ice crystals, and it drinks even better.

  He sips it halfway down, tips the bartender handsomely, returns to his car, and checks the laptop. Hashkiller has already delivered the network authorization passwords. Holmes would have figured them out himself, but that was then.

  He drives back to Radack’s estate, this time parking two blocks away, and inputs the new-found passwords. Access granted. His laptop is now a member of Radack’s internal Wi-Fi network. Once inside the system, he finds the security cameras with ease. The links to the hundred-plus webcam and security feeds are neatly aggregated on a single webpage. The configuration of the web server tells him the location of the router as well as the VPN gateway. Hashkiller makes short work of those credentials as well, and the watcher is set up to access the estate’s security camera feeds over the Internet from any location.

  Heading back to the hotel, he rolls down the window. The maples, spotting the vast lawns, have gone to orange and yellow, and the heavy air tastes of autumn.

  In his room, he scrolls through the feeds. Library, kitchen, bowling alley, screening room, all empty. He finds Radack in the cigar parlor drinking mezcal and playing darts with a pair of bodyguards—the one from the coffee shop and a second man, Hispanic, even more sturdy. The latter strains a T-shirt at the seams and has a circular tattoo covering one biceps. The watcher waits for the right angle to identify the tattoo, but the lighting is tough. Finally, he picks up what looks like a black spear inside the circle. He places it as the emblem from the United States Marine Corps Special Operations Command. Both men look to be in their late twenties, far too young to be out of MARSOC for any good reason, which points to disciplinary discharge or drug-testing. He picks up names from the banter—Kane and Padilla. Padilla sports a hip-holstered Glock, while Kane wears a single-action revolver in an upside-down shoulder holster. Radack throws back another shot and spreads his hand on the dart board, daring his lackeys to a steel-tipped game of chicken. The watcher leaves them to it.

  He clicks through various cameras, finding Leanne trying to sleep in the master bedroom down the hall from the parlor. She is curled around a pillow, covering her exposed ear. Every time a burst of laughter reaches her, she starts.

  He observes her for a time.

  She needs him. She really does.

  When he clicks back to the parlor, Radack and his henchmen have disappeared. All that remains are two empty bottles of mezcal on the bar, next to a few residual lines of cocaine. There is blood on the dartboard.

  He finds the trio in the bowling alley. Radack is firing a submachine gun at a target painted in blood above the middle lane. He is tearing up the wall, Sheetrock dust clouding. The shots climb off the target, the gun running him rather than the other way around.

  Despite the bravado, Radack is afraid of the gun. This is good to know.

  Crimson drips from Padilla’s left hand; he appears to be the dartboard casualty and the fingerpainter behind the target. After Radack empies the magazine, Padilla applauds dutifully, radiating droplets of blood. From his front right pocket, Kane remove
s a baggie and a military folding knife and offers Radack cocaine off the blued tip. As Radack leans over to snort, the submachine gun comes into clear view. It is an H&K 94, illegal in California even without its clandestine conversion to full auto. Radack likes his toys and dislikes protocol.

  The watcher captures the image of Radack’s nose nearing the blade and enlarges it. The knife is an Emerson, popular with former military. This, too, is good to know.

  Back in the bedroom, Leanne sits with her shoulder blades pressed to the corner, hugging her knees, rocking herself. Her lips move but the sub-par audio picks up nothing.

  In the bowling alley, Radack jams home another magazine and, to cheers and encouragement from his paid admirers, resumes shredding the wall above the target. Two hours and three bottles of mezcal later, the men stumble outside, leaning on one another, barely keeping their feet. Radack throws a grenade in the stocked fish pond. The pop is muffled. Water sprays the laughing men and dozens of white spots bob to the surface. They drink more and pass out on the lawn. The Dobermans tentatively approach, pull dead fish from the pond, and feast.

  Inside, Leanne stays in the corner, trembling. She does not sleep.

  The watcher does not either.

  In the morning, he calls the Stanford University Medical Center, Radack’s hospital of choice, and identifies himself as a consulting physician for Ms. Leanne Lattimore. Would they be so kind as to send the medical files from her emergency room visits? They would, provided Ms. Lattimore signs a release. This of course will not happen, but he has confirmed his hunch that Ms. Lattimore is a frequent flier at the Stanford ER.

  A medical supply shop on El Camino Real sells standard teal scrubs. He changes into them in his car, drives to the hospital, and steps into the bracing air-conditioning of the main lobby. Rather than heading for the bustling ER, he detours to the medical floor, lingering by a water fountain until he sees a pretty Indian physician leave her office. He waits for a break in foot traffic and slips inside. The doctor has left her computer logged on to the Epic medical records system. The watcher types in Leanne Lattimore and brings up her files.