by Jamie Mason
I press the gun harder into his head and Jim winces.
“Okay, okay. Your husband has hired us—more specifically me—to have you killed.”
My lungs shut down, the bellows simply refusing to fan full or fold up. There’s enough air in me for another question, maybe two. Beyond that, I’m not sure how I’m going to reboot the next breath.
“Tomorrow morning?”
“That was the plan.” It’s derailing how much sympathy and matter-of-fact detachment Jim can telegraph at the same time from deep down in his sad brown eyes.
My own eyes tear up. But it’s from lack of blinking, not sadness. I’m not devastated yet. I’m barely anything at all, only stiff, brittle, and so cold. A great reservoir of reaction is frozen beyond my reach. I can feel it like sap in a tree waiting for its time.
“Why did I see you at my house a few weeks ago?” My voice falls quiet, but I haven’t turned the volume down consciously. The idea itself isn’t loud. It whispers. I just remember being in my driveway, unconcerned on a beautiful morning, shielding my eyes against the same sun that warmed my body through the comfy cotton robe that I know is hanging right now on its hook in my closet. No, the idea that I almost didn’t have this day isn’t loud. It’s low and cold. “Were you there to—to do it?”
“No.”
“Then why were you?”
“We’d given him a phone when we’d started the deal. He was waffling. I’d come to see why he wasn’t communicating reliably and collect it, if necessary. He decided to keep it. Obviously.”
“And my car? The belt? Did you do that?”
“It was just one of several possible alternatives. Plan Bs and all.”
It’s what I had expected to hear, but the blow knocks my heart out of rhythm and horror finally flits like icy-winged moths, bumping and thumping their heavy way through my middle. My hands and feet buzz with a charge that fizzes up my legs and down through both arms. My knees are thinking about letting go. My throat burns. My head, however, is still on the job. Sort of.
“Okay.” I’m still stunned, but warming up. Life has returned with the first order to flee. I let the pistol drop against my thigh and turn for my own car.
People never do what you expect them to do. This was true for me and true, apparently, for Jim. My simply walking away was not in his playbook. “What?” His bewilderment borders on indignant. “That’s it?”
I stop, zapped sane, and turn around again to face him. “You know what?” I stride back. “You’re probably right.” I raise the gun and shoot him, point-blank, behind the ear.
29
A paintball to the skull from an air pistol is rarely fatal. Well placed, it’s good for a stun. I had been hoping for lights out, but no such luck. Jim never got a good look at the convincing replica before the sting. It had been one of Patrick’s favorite sporty toys, and I had snagged it while my relieved and well-tipped cabdriver waited in my driveway a lifetime ago, or less than ninety minutes ago, maybe. It’s all the same thing now.
Jim falls across the steering wheel, his hand wobbling for the back of his head, but losing its will or its way repeatedly as his senses waver.
Maybe I should wait to see if he’ll fade out entirely, but the moaning is going to be a problem. I wince a quick look over each shoulder, turn the gun butt out so that I’m gripping the barrel, then sidle up to give my batting arm some room to swing.
My first stroke is less than committed. I couldn’t look, so I’m not exactly sure where I clipped him. It has woken him up more than put him out. He yelps and that sets a match to my resolve. A confident thump delivered over the knot I’d already raised and Jim has the decency to go quiet. And limp.
In short order, he’s gagged with his own socks and bound at the wrists by his belt. I trot back to my running car, kill the engine, and lock it up. I fetch some bungee tethers from the trunk and fortify my handiwork, securing Jim’s ankles to finish the job. The shoving struggle to drag him over to the passenger side of his car leaves me trembling and sweaty, but he’s still not come all the way around by the time we pull to the back end of the deserted wasteland behind the Carlisle Inc. compound.
I slam the gearshift back into place, pry the gag from Jim’s mouth, and brace my back against the driver’s door, foot poised to kick a hole into my new friend if he wakes up cross or noisy. As it is, he wakes up slowly and sweetly groggy. When his focus comes back online, I prod him with the toe of my shoe and level the paintball pistol at his face.
“Hiya. How much was I worth?”
“Excuse me?”
I toe-poke him again. “Don’t do that. I’m not in the mood. How much was I worth?”
“Fifteen thousand.”
“Well, now you work for me. I’ll pay you fifteen thousand and twenty-five dollars.”
“What?” He actually laughed.
“I’m sorry. Did you think I’d offer double? I’m not the one who knows what my socks taste like, now am I? How about this: I’ll pay you fifteen thousand twenty-five dollars and not shoot you in the throat.” I press the maw of the barrel into his neck. “Now who do you work for?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to call Patrick and get him over here. And then”—I shrugged—“do what you do.”
“I can’t kill him here.”
“No?” I crane around to look out every window. Early on a Friday evening, the back margin of Carlisle Inc. might as well be the dark side of the moon. “It looks like a nice private place for someone to meet their end, don’t you think?” I put the gun back in his face. “I think it’s perfect, if you have the right incentive to improvise.” His eyes cross and water as they skitter over the gun. I’ve no doubt that he has a crushing headache.
I hold the phone for Jim while he talks Patrick into a detour to Carlisle Inc. on his way home from work. I encourage Jim’s cooperation with the muzzle of the paintball gun jammed firmly into his crotch.
I listen to the one-sided conversation, imagining my husband in his steel-and-glass office building on its carpet of crayon-bright sod, talking to his hired thug on the phone while he admires the fountained lake outside his office window, all blue and sparkling with reflected sky. How does he feel inside that jewel right now? Safe? Impatient? Did a cloud just pass over the sun where he was, canceling out some of the warmth from the air against his cheek? Did the room go suddenly dim in some cool warning that my hand rests right on the other side of the voice in his ear? Can he feel me as a cold spot in the place where he keeps his plan—am I already a ghost in the attic of his mind?
And how does he look to them today, the people who think they know him? Did he seem out of sorts on the day before he bought himself a $15,000 avalanche of sympathy and a wide-open vista of no-strings freedom?
When the call ends, I strangle the steering wheel to squeeze the shakes out of my hands. There is a terrible power in me, jousting with a gut-melting fear. I’m running out of time. The workday is winding down and Patrick will soon be out of his office and on his way to me. Jim is almost irrelevant, especially bound and gagged. But it wouldn’t do for him to know just yet that I will never pay him, and also that I have no intention of letting him kill Patrick either.
A shallow grave or concrete shoes for my husband wouldn’t make me feel any better, or any safer. It would simply be trading one problem for another. I want him in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. I want to catch his eye when they hand down his prison sentence. And the next step is the whole trick. Whatever it’s going to be, I don’t want this happening in our home, behind closed doors and drawn curtains the way everything else has been. But God forbid it should happen out on the front lawn in full view of everyone on our street. That’s not normal.
Everything had gone sharp in the details and clear in the colors since I’d pulled my head out and looked at what my life truly was, not what I insisted that it should be. Everything I’d attempted in the last couple of days, from the search of my house, to the folding
of my husband’s mistress, to the dousing of my brother’s interference, had worked like Swiss gears. Thanks, Mama. But what now? I’ve painted myself into a corner. I’ve assaulted and kidnapped the oddly neutral and very dangerous Jim, rendering myself a felon without a shred of proof against anyone else. Then I’ve invited the one person in the world who wants me dead out here to confront me in a now-deserted construction yard. Brilliant.
My brother would swing every hammer he had to break me out of this mess, but he is as far away as he can be, and by my own doing, deep in his rum dreams.
If it goes wrong, and I don’t even have an idea of what “it” might entail yet, no one will ever know what happened to me. Patrick will probably pay Jim a hazardous-duty bonus and then cash in our Danube cruise or just reissue it in the name of some pretty, sweet woman who cries like a movie star, and I will never know how it all works out in the end.
Well, if I can’t prevent it, then I can at least lengthen my reach. Be it alive or dead, I will not be caught without a say in what happens tomorrow, or in the days after, either.
I scrabble through the scraps of paper in my purse and find the card for Hoyle’s Compounding Pharmacy & Alternative Medicine Center. I bite my lip and dial. The electronic operator asks me to enter a numeric message or wait for the tone to leave a voice recording.
Beep.
“Brian, it’s Dee Vess.” I drop Aldrich preemptively, but whether in premonition or resolve, I can’t tell. “This is the part where I trust you”—I take a big deep breath—“but it’s not going to make a lot of sense right now. I’m sorry for that. Maybe you get this kind of thing all the time. I don’t know. You probably have a weird life. I’m sort of counting on it, to be honest.
“Anyway, my husband, Patrick, is coming out to a place called Carlisle Inc. He doesn’t know I’m here. This is not a good thing. If I don’t leave another message for you in the next two hours, please find a way to lead my brother to this place, he’ll know where it is. Please help him to look into what happened.” I chew the inside of my cheek and slide a look at the regagged Jim. “There’s a guy with me named Jim who knows what’s going on. He works here. But I don’t have solid proof of anything, and I can’t exactly speak to where he’ll end up.” Jim’s eyebrows lift in interest.
I blow out the next breath and wonder if this is a time-limited recording. “I’m sorry to drag you into this. Whatever it is.” I laugh, tickled in the absurdity of it all. “I can’t imagine what the hell I’ll say to try to explain all of this if I get to call you back. How un-Spider am I?” My finger hovers over the End button. “Thank you, though, for being out there, for having that weird life so that you can even take this call. I don’t know that it’s going to do any good, but it was at least nice to have a number to dial. I get it now.”
I hit the call dead and wipe my eyes.
30
There was one of my mother’s lessons I had never needed to revisit—until today. I’d manhandled Jim like a champ. I had put my hands on him with authority and no hesitation. I hadn’t faltered when I felt the warm and unfamiliar bulk of his body, a stranger’s body, sliding under his nylon jacket and twill trousers as I pulled and shoved him across the front seats. Even as I noted the slight, dewy catch of his bare skin where it crossed mine when I tied him, I didn’t flinch away.
This was her guidance. This is what she had told me to do.
Simon had been an athlete from toddlerhood. Not of the all-star or Olympic-hopeful breed, but he knew innately how his body worked. He trusted his balance enviably and frolicked in the automatic calculations of his height and long reach. Our mother encouraged his bounce and dash and tamed it with sports lessons and strict rules in the house.
But my dexterity was mostly between the ears, and she never let me feel less for it.
Some people live here. She playfully pinched Simon’s solid, little biceps. And some people live up here. Her hand coursed over the dome of my head. The luckiest ones have a good balance of both, but it’s always slanted at least a little bit one way or the other.
When I didn’t blossom under karate instruction, track and field, or tennis clinics, my mother found a way to stoke my strengths. My advantage was that I could talk myself into (or out of) almost any mind-set. My mother called it self-possession or pluck on the good days, and a vacation on Planet Dee in the times when it was less than admirable.
She, never in denial, used the world as it was, and our natures as they were, to train us. This was often at some odds to what we were learning elsewhere.
We’re all taught, from preschool on up, to keep our hands to ourselves. We’re flogged with the idea that it is not okay to touch other people. So the good guys mostly don’t.
Civilization is a conflicted dance of cooperative intimacy and guarded personal space. We’ll drive a bayonet into the enemy’s guts, or put our hands, side by side, on a car’s bumper to help push a stranded motorist out of a ditch, but still recoil from a fellow commuter’s heat or even the errant brush of his arm on a crowded train.
The villains of the world aren’t as confined by this inhibition. Someone else’s neck isn’t all that different from a doorknob for them. If it’s an obstacle, they grab it and pull.
My mother coaxed from my tenacity this very trait, the stubborn ability to get past anything obvious, including the ingrained reluctance to put my hands, if need be, on someone I didn’t know. She sent me swimming and steered me into lifeguarding at the YMCA. I took lessons until I was good enough to give lessons, and over the years I saved seven people from drowning.
I’d wrangled every age, gender, and body shape, nearly naked, in the water. The ease of the expertise never left me. In my time, I’d felt smooth, taut muscle under my hands, and aged flab, tired and almost weightless, as it sagged into my arms. I’d hauled grown men to safety and taught little kids to punch a panicked swimmer square in the face to subdue his thrashing.
On the day the topic of self-defense came up in our household, only a few weeks after my mother had returned from the Long Trip, the ambient air of the living room warmed and bristled.
Best-laid plans, Plucky—martial arts, role-playing exercises, defense drills. All those self-disciplines are good. They’re good for confidence and fitness. They’re good practice for feeling how your body moves in space. But the real world isn’t choreographed. And reality has teeth and spikes in all the wrong places. The universe doesn’t know what it can’t do.
You have to know, baby, that I want you to fight. If you’re ever in danger, fight like hell. But if you find that you can’t for some reason, or if it goes wrong—a little or a lot wrong—I would never blame you. You’re pre-forgiven for whatever doesn’t work. Disappointing things happen, but you could never be a disappointment.
Across from where we sat, I looked at the patched hole in our foyer wall. Her eyes followed mine. The plasterers had been good at their job. The casual observer wouldn’t have noticed the expertly feathered border of fresh drywall and paint, blending new over ruined old.
Besides, I’m not worried about you. She talked over my attention’s drift to the wall and its forever untold story. You know what to do, Dee. My lovely girl, you do it four times a week at the Y. You just pull them in close and save them from hurting you.
No one had ever before tried to hurt me. I almost felt sorry for Jim. I’d jumped him before he’d got the chance.
• • •
Forty minutes later, a few deep breaths are the only preparation I’m going to get. I know what I will do once Patrick arrives, which is not even close to the same thing as knowing what I should do. I certainly can’t call it a fully realized design certified for the best possible outcome.
I’m waiting and rehearsing. The roar of blood in my ears is a soaring music, scoring the scene I’ve planned out for Patrick and me. The symphonic ringing in my eardrums vies for authority over the doom-drumming of my heartbeat. And Jim’s fussing is simply kneecapping the grandeur of the moment. I have
already had to threaten him twice with the paintball gun to stop his squirming and mewling, but he’s started it up again anyway. Maybe he has to pee.
“What?” I hook a finger under the tight gag and pry it out, dragging it partway down his chin.
Jim smacks and purses his lips to get them working again. The corners of his mouth are raw and glossy where the skin has rubbed down, and the left side has chafed all the way to bleeding a little. Why would I even feel a twinge at that? But I do. Please tell me there is not an I’m sorry, Jim anywhere in my script. I will turn this gun on my own eyeball if I’m that beatable. I swear I will.
Jim clears his throat. “I just thought you might want to consider the fact that all your husband is going to find when he gets here is a chained-up gate. The last of the crew will have locked it up when they left.”
“What? Son of a bitch. Are you serious? We’re locked in? And Patrick is locked out?”
“Look. This could be a blessing in disguise. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“Pffft. Did you double-check with Patrick when I was the target?”
“Of course I did. Many times.”
“And that’s supposed to give me the warm fuzzies?”
“I’m not in the business of warm fuzzies, but I only sell what a very few people are absolutely sure they want to buy.”
“Great. They’ll probably put that on your tombstone. What the hell am I going to do now?” I scan the horizon as if it might offer up an answer.
“I have a key.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?”
“I hadn’t gotten around to it. And speaking of, when are you going to untie me? I can’t stink-eye him to death, and not to point out the obvious, but the job isn’t going to get done with that.” Jim nods at the paintball pistol. “You’ll have to let me get my big-boy gun.”
