by The Behrg
Their daughter was down there.
Evaline.
That he had awoken to a day that would be filled with new horrors he had no doubt, but the memories of his daughter, her tiny fingers gripped around his one, were more than he could bear. He started down the path toward her, tree branches slapping against his arms and shoulders, raking across his face. He tripped over a root or rock, one knee scraping against the ground, leaving a smeared stain of rotting leaves and soil. The soft burble of a brook drew near, though no water had passed here for months. It wasn’t trickling water; it was the sound of racking sobs.
A blade of sunlight brought him back to their bedroom. It slid through slanted shutters, past shaded screens and wood partitions to break into the room. He realized that he wasn’t shackled. Joje had either forgotten or no longer considered Blake a threat.
He sat up, glancing around the room. Throw pillows had been discarded in a tangle at the foot of the half wall separating the upper landing with their bed from the rest of the room, but beyond that the bedroom was immaculate. Immaculate and sad. The glossy-eyed baby alligator head on the nightstand was the only item in the room he and Jenna had purchased together. The COO at a midsize oil company in Mississippi had insisted on taking him and Jenna on a safari cruise much different from the one they had experienced at Disneyland. They had purchased the head as a souvenir, laughing the entire time.
God, he missed her laugh, missed that feeling of being in love.
Her excitement the day she had told him she was pregnant. Pulling that urine-stained stick that looked like a purple and blue thermometer from her purse at the Lemaire in Richmond, fumbling it in her excitement, the waiter bending down to retrieve it and holding it out, proudly displaying it for Blake to see. “Congratulations,” he had said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to wash my hands.”
Blake washed his own, after relieving himself in the bathroom. He could barely look at his reflection in the mirror, and in those brief glances, all he saw was contempt.
Suds of soap overflowed from the small basin at the sink, but his hands were still dirty, covered in filth and dirt and broken leaves.
And hair.
Matted in blood.
It clung to his fingers and the backs of his hands like sap. He was crying again, not sure he wanted it removed. The last of his baby girl; they had already taken the body away.
Her face was covered by tangles of hair, as it often was, her thin brown curls as obedient as the child they belonged to, but it was the angle of her head that was wrong, an equation that simply didn’t work. One arm lost beneath her, the other outstretched, tiny fingers splayed as if reaching for something just out of grasp. Maybe life.
A bird chirped, its woodland song belonging in that moment no more than any of them, and then Blake was rushing past his fallen wife and forgotten son, picking her up, bringing her to his chest, cradling her cold skin against his own, her cheek touching his cheek, his hand running through her crusted hair, patting her back, twisting her neck back into place only to watch it flump back again, his tears bathing her face, soaking her locks and the collar of her sundress, its bright orange and yellow flowers turning a muddied amber and molten brown. He called her name. Sang it. Screamed it. Waiting for her to place her hands against his face, squeeze his cheeks and bury her nose into his as she did every morning, or at least the mornings he was home. Her name became a prayer, became a word so holy he could no longer say it, his speech dissolving into the anguished cries of a father who has lost everything, sending squirrels and birds fleeing. And all the while Adam’s illicit voice, like a merry-go-round’s jilted tune, “It’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my fault.”
Had he ever told his son that it wasn’t?
Blake shut the water off, drying his hands. A storm was growing behind his eyelids; this time it just might sink him.
He dressed, blue jeans and a faded black Rolling Stones T-shirt. There were no pretenses to keep up any longer. He went down the hall and descended the stairs, feeling like he was riding an escalator, that dreamlike sensation of moving without moving, a hamster on a wheel.
The deep groove in the hallway floor led him to the family room. What he witnessed came as a complete surprise.
Jenna was at the fridge, the open door blocking her face, the top of a wheelchair poking above the back of the island counter. Joje and Adam laughed at the far end of the island, seated on the swing-out chairs. Drew was seated on the couch where Jenna had been lying, the first to spot Blake, a smug look on his face. Even the doctor was no longer tied up; his arm was in a sling, and he walked from the pantry back into the kitchen.
They all seemed so . . . normal.
They could have been a regular family on an ordinary weekend, catching up, enjoying their time together. At least if you removed the shattered TV and the Japanese sword leaning against the couch, and both Drew’s and Jenna’s multiple bruises.
“Dad!” Adam called.
“Welcome to the land of the living,” Joje said with a laugh.
The waahnd of the wiving. Blake wasn’t sure it was a place he wanted to be a part of.
The fridge door closed, and Jenna held Blake’s gaze. “You’re okay.” Not a question, though she certainly looked to have her doubts. The square clock above her showed quarter of twelve.
“Sorry,” Blake said, not knowing if it was because he had slept in or if he was merely apologizing for a lifetime of mistakes.
“Did you know your son knows how to twirl a gun? Like in the Old West,” Joje said, jumping up from his seat. “Show him!”
Adam only kicked his chair out from the island, letting it reel him back in. “Nah, that’s okay.”
“Come on, show him,” Joje pressed. Adam stood reluctantly. “Now turn this way, Bwake. That’s it, like you’re about to duel.”
Adam stood facing Blake, half a room apart.
“Now!” Joje shouted.
Adam swiped at his side, twirling a pistol from his belt forward and pointing it directly at Blake.
“Bang,” Joje said.
Adam spun the gun in his hand before rotating it back, slipping it into his belt.
It took a conscious effort to breathe. Blake glanced at Jenna who just turned her head, looking away. “We don’t play with guns,” he said lamely.
“Just stuff we learned in Scouts,” Adam said.
“I don’t want my son playing with guns,” Blake repeated.
“The party pooper’s arrived,” Joje said.
“May I use your restroom?” Dr. Cheverou asked, bowing slightly to Joje. His hostility to his captor seemed to have fled.
“Go,” Joje said, shooing the doctor away. “We got a response, Bwake. From the fax you sent. Your mystery man is on the case!”
Blake felt his stomach tighten. He had almost hoped Rory would refuse, had expected he might. If he had accepted, that meant he had also completed his part, deleting the files and any evidence of Joje and Drew’s stay. Deleting the only means of someone coming to their aid.
“I need to . . . need to sit,” Blake said. He moved to the love seat, falling into it. Drew didn’t bother to even lift his outstretched feet.
If the fax had come in, not only would Rory have completed his part, he’d have listed his demands. Payment for services rendered.
Doing business with Rory was unlike any Blake had conducted—the price was never discussed beforehand, arriving only after Rory had accomplished what others might deem impossible. There were no negotiations, no backing out. And Rory always collected, one way or another.
Blake had heard rumors of those who refused to pay, who thought the price he demanded too extreme. Every one of them ended not in financial ruin, but in public extirpation. It wasn’t enough to steal your identity, wipe your bank accounts, erase your history; those were events someone could climb back from. No, these rumors ended with life sentences for inside trading or embezzlement, children and spouses taken and sold into sex trafficking rings, one-w
ay admissions into experimental hospitals where pleas of sanity fell on deaf walls. These were the consequences for those who didn’t pay, disasters you couldn’t come back from. The senator that had first introduced Blake to Rory had warned him he’d be better off selling his soul to the devil. At least that way Blake would know what he was giving up.
Joje pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, looking it over. “He deleted the files. Even wiped them from a C-T-O-S computer.”
“That’s a—it’s not a specific computer. It means the chief technology officer’s computer,” Blake said. “JT wasn’t taking his threat lightly.”
“What threat . . . what’s going on?” Jenna asked.
“Your husband is just fixing one of his many mistakes,” Joje said.
“My phone, it recorded everything that’s happened over the past few days,” Blake said.
“And you’re helping them destroy those files?” Jenna asked, a thickness to her voice that wasn’t from the Vitamin Water she was drinking. “You and Adam both. You’re going to get us killed.”
She wheeled her chair away from him, bumping into the kitchen table with a jolt.
“Did I miss something?” Blake asked.
“That crazy decorator chick came over earlier when Jenna was asleep,” Adam said. “She got mad I sent her away.”
Probably saved her life, Blake thought, though he wasn’t willing to voice it right now. Jenna’s words hung on him like weights. Everything he was doing was to protect her and Adam, couldn’t she see that? The rolling of her wheels on wood softened to carpet, the vaulted living room only amplifying her sobs.
Without a word Drew stood, grabbing his sword and silently following Blake’s wife.
Joje returned to the fax. “There’s more. Says here he couldn’t get into one of the outside storage centers because it’s offline. Is that a problem?”
Blake paused. “Yeah.”
“And then there’s something about a zip drive, but he thinks it’s JT’s? I don’t know.” Joje came over, handing the paper to Blake. “I thought you said he was expensive?”
Blake snatched the page, reading through the bullets of info that always accompanied Rory’s acceptance and list of demands. Joje was right, two loose ends—a storage facility in Lancaster and, far worse, the zip drive, most likely JT’s based on the IP address of the computer. It made Rory’s services nearly useless, far too many copies available to staunch the flow. Yet it hadn’t stopped from him listing his demands. What Joje hadn’t been right about was Rory being inexpensive.
For payment he asked just two things: a nickel and a strand of hair.
The nickel was a 1913 Liberty nickel. Blake had come across an article about JT a few years back when he had just begun his relationship with Symbio that centered around the CEO’s purchase of a five-cent piece for over five million dollars. The article went into some detail about the coin, apparently one of the most sought-after collector’s items in the history of the US. All Blake had thought about when reading the article was how many nickels it would take to make five million dollars. He had done the math: one hundred million. At twenty-two pounds of weight per hundred dollars, it came to a grand total of a million and one hundred thousand pounds of nickels. Blake had one of his programmers in China to thank for those details.
The article had been more an insight into the mind of JT; a man willing to spend that kind of cash on something that couldn’t purchase a lollypop in today’s economy was a man you could influence through ego. Ego and perception. With Rory asking for the one item that defined JT along with a strand of his hair, he might as well have been asking Blake to murder his old boss.
“It’s impossible,” Blake said. “What he’s asking us to do? What he wants?”
“You told me you could fix this,” Joje said. His tic began pressing on his face like an invisible string pulling at his bottom lip and the skin around his eye.
“You’re talking breaking and entering. And even if we got into this storage facility, I wouldn’t begin to know how to wipe just the data we need. If JT has a backup, it’s pointless anyway. It’s going to get out.”
“Not if we stop JT,” Joje said.
“And how do you propose we do that?”
“Second page,” Joje said.
A cancerous pit grew in Blake’s stomach as he continued reading. The specs of the warehouse were included as well as a guarantee that security cameras and alarms would be disabled after eleven. Tonight only. As to JT, Rory had left a back door open into his laptop that would immediately notify him the next time the machine booted up and connected to the Internet. He would scramble any attempt at accessing the flash drive for the next two days. Payment was expected on the third.
Blake closed his eyes, massaging the pressure points beneath his eyebrows.
“Can it be done?” Joje asked.
Can it be done. A question Blake had never answered no to. Because if you wanted something badly enough, there was always a way.
“Bwake, can it be done?”
“Maybe,” he said, answering a question much more important than whether they could get the phone’s data. Because maybe, just maybe, he’d be able to get his family out of this alive.
“Can I help?” Adam asked.
“No!” Blake said, but Joje’s “sure” seemed to trump his reply.
Joje continued, “We’ll need a third man. Dwew can’t help. He’ll be watching these two.” He paused, then moved toward the bathroom. “Everything coming out okay, Doc? Been in there awhile.”
The bathroom door looked split, doorknob hanging loose and knocking against the wood as Joje gave it a light shove. He stopped just inside the doorway. Adam pushed off from the chair on the counter and crossed through the family room, following him.
“Adam, wait,” Blake said, but his son continued without a pause.
When his son turned to look back at him, his face was long and unflinching. Joje joined him, completely unfazed. “Staycation’s over,” Joje said. “Doc decided to check out early.”
2
Blood. At the sink, dripping down the basin, globs on the marble floor, coagulating along the grains of grout, pooling near the base of the toilet, smeared against its side, its cover, the walls, the towels, the glass partitions to the tub. Some of the stains showed where the doctor’s trembling fingers had swiped in the final throes of death. As quietly as he had gone out, he had made sure to leave his mark.
They moved his body outside, wrapping him in the Persian rug that had occupied most of their family room. One arm swung out, dangling down from the folded carpet, Dr. Cheverou’s wrist split wide like a fish opening its mouth. Joje set Drew on digging duty. Blake was on cleanup.
Red-drenched towels gave way to copper-stained rags piled against the bathroom wall like the sopped aftermath of a carwash fundraiser. Adam moved the towels into a black trash bag, the pattering drips against the tile floor louder than they had any right to be.
Blake was on his hands and knees with a safety pin, running the grout of the tile, scratching out the grime and dried blood, when Joje entered.
“Who knew it took so long to clean up after a dead body? All those CSI shows seem to skip that part,” he said. Blake caught his smile in the reflection of the cracked mirror. “What are we doing for dinner?”
The lingering stink of blood and death masked beneath ammonia caused Blake to gag. At least he didn’t vomit; not that he hadn’t earlier. “Just . . . order something,” he finally said.
“Easy, Bwake. It’s not like I offed the good doc.”
Yeah, but he knew it was coming, Blake thought. Am I the only blind one who can’t see it?
“I need some air,” he said, standing and walking out of the small bathroom. Those walls had shrunk over the past several hours.
He went to the back door, throwing it open and stepping out. Sunlight glinted off of the ocean just beyond their backyard, wavering like a mirage. He breathed deep, holding it in, the crisp sea air ig
niting something in him, reminding him what he was fighting for. A light breeze tossed his hair, caressed his whiskered face.
“Bwake?”
Joje passed the pool and continued to the cliff’s edge, the large palm trees to the right offering intertwining columns of shade from the sun now on its decline. Blake didn’t remember walking to the edge. Maybe that was something you never remembered.
They stood there in silence, watching the moving sea with a quiet reverence.
“I want to bring Jenna out here,” Blake said. “Can I bring her out?”
Five minutes later, Blake was sitting beside his wife on the white piano bench. He had set it near the edge of the cliff but not close enough for her to fall or purposely leap from. As distant as they had become, he still knew her well. Joje had brought out a small stool they kept in the pantry for her legs to rest on. She was as comfortable as she could be under the circumstances. Joje remained unseen behind them, for the first time in a long time, silently observing.
Jenna looked on the verge of crying, tears held in by sheer force of will. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
Blake only nodded. He wanted so badly to wrap his arms around her but wasn’t sure the gesture would be reciprocated. Glassy reflections of light danced across the water.
“Do you think, the doctor . . . maybe that’s our only way out?”
“No,” Blake said, too quickly.
A moment passed before she spoke again. “Nothing will ever be the same.”
“Nothing ever has,” Blake said, knowing he was speaking of this week as well as the past two years.
She leaned her head on his shoulder, speaking even softer, her voice barely audible above the breaking waves. “They killed the family that lived here before us. Drew told me. The neighbor was right. They were here before we were. Both of them.”
She paused, giving him time to lean his head onto the top of hers. “What does it mean?”
Blake hated his response but had no idea what else to tell her. “They’ve had this planned a long time.”
