by Nick Thacker
Generic, standoffish.
It was dark, too. There were lights on, but it was as if a thick blanket of darkness had been placed over everything and sucked all of the light away and only let a quarter of it through. A lamp on an antique end table, a hanging chandelier with most of its bulbs not working, ambient light spilling in and getting stuck in the blanket from somewhere deeper in the house.
This wasn’t a home, just a house. It was a house that was rarely used, if at all. Maybe a simple checkpoint between the owner’s real home and their vacation home, but this wasn’t either of them. This was something else.
It felt dead.
“Is my son dead?”
The woman’s voice reached him before the grayish light reached her face. She was standing at the end of the hallway, having reached that spot by swinging in from the right, and she took the single step up to join Gareth in the long entryway, both of them at either side of the stretch.
He nodded.
She nodded back.
“I told him it was stupid,” she said.
“You — you’re the woman on the phone. You work at the bank?”
She smiled. Like Latia’s, thin and discontent, but hers was from a different sort of pain, one he could read on her face as if it were written there like on the pages of a book. A pain of loss, one of realization, of recognition. It was over. She knew it. She was trying to battle with it, but her smile suggested it was something that took second place in her mind. There was another battle she was struggling with.
“I own the bank.”
He didn’t flinch, though it was hard not to. He nodded, again. Solemn, respectful, yet still confused. Both of them were reading the other, he could see that now. She was as good as he was — possibly better.
“You didn’t know that.”
He shook his head. “Your son wasn’t exactly open with information like that.”
“No, I suppose he wouldn’t have been.”
She walked forward, taking a step toward him while simultaneously coming farther into the light. She was wearing a nightgown, of all things, as if she had just woken up. Maybe she had. He didn’t know, didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, his job was over, the enemy killed. He wanted to know answers, but that was more for his own interest and vanity. He’d wasted days on this mission, over a week even. He didn’t really care about the outcome now, except for the fact that he was still alive and he’d prefer to keep it that way.
But she was no threat to him. The nightgown was light blue, almost pewter, and it clung to her, revealing a surprisingly attractive shape for the woman’s age. He pegged her at around sixty, probably just a bit older. Old enough for Roderick to be her son, but young enough for it to be a tricky guess. She’d taken care of herself. In shape, fit, and beautiful, she would have been a showstopper thirty years prior. Still, Gareth could see the attraction. Her eyes were warm, honest. Her mannerisms, likely practiced over a lifetime of hobnobbing and elbow-rubbing, were perfected to the point that Gareth momentarily forgot who she was.
“All of this is because of you.”
He didn’t need to state his implication. Your son is dead because of you.
“I wanted this to end, just as you do.”
“I don’t even know what this is,” he replied.
Again, that smile. “Don’t you?”
He shook his head.
“What do you know?”
“You ran a ‘ring,’ keeping children out in those shitty excuses for shelters, selling them out to the highest bidders. For years.”
“You have met Latia, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“She was always a troubled youth,” she started. “Always struggling with the reality of —”
“Save it, lady. I don’t want you to even try to justify yourself to me. That —” he pointed behind him — “that is unacceptable, in any universe I can imagine. This is going to end, right here, right now, and —”
“It’s already ended, Gareth.”
He squinted.
“It’s over. It’s been over. For some time, now. Latia and her sister, if she’s still alive, have been planning this since they first started at Likur Holdings. But they’re too late. They’re just doing what they’ve planned, even though it doesn’t matter.”
“Seems to matter to her.”
She nodded. “Come in. Shut the door. I don’t want to see my son until I’m ready.” She sighed, walked into the room to Gareth’s left. The same room Gaspar was in. “I always knew it would come to this. He was always so protective, so one-sided.”
“I’m not here for tea,” Gareth said. “I want answers.”
“Then let’s discuss it like adults, Gareth. Do you know why I hired you? Do you know truly?”
“Roderick said it was ‘because of my past.’ He wouldn’t elaborate.”
“That’s because he didn’t know your past.”
Gareth bristled. “He seemed pretty knowledgeable. At least about me.”
The woman looked down, shook her head, and straightened her gown as she sat down in a leatherback chair that sat near the same spot Gaspar’s ridiculous armchair sat. He sat opposite. The fireplace to his left. The garish, yet oddly vague, paintings on the walls. One of a rainforest mounted high behind her.
“I told him enough to trust me. That you were the right person for the job because you would know what needed to be done, when the time came.”
“And what was that?”
She cocked an eyebrow. He got the message. This.
“Okay, fair enough. Here I am. I made it. Your son’s dead. Latia’s almost done with her mission, and her sister —” he stopped himself.
The woman didn’t care. “Yes, I suppose she is nearing completion. What will she do after?”
Gareth sighed. “I — I don’t know. I tried to tell her, to explain to her…”
“That her mission is just a disguise.”
“Yeah.”
“It is a shame.”
“You’re responsible for it, you realize that?”
“I’m partly responsible, yes. But I did not build Likur. I built the bank, buying shares of smaller establishments until I found myself at the head of a conglomerate I could hardly control. Likur was one of many purchases, and I purchased it naively.”
“You didn’t know what it was?”
“I knew pieces, but not the whole story. I was young then, but my biggest mistake was in not shutting it down immediately. I left it running, convincing myself I could cleanse it, repair it. Make it a viable enterprise.”
“How in the world could any of that be ‘viable?’”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I ever believed it, really, but I thought I was better than that. I should have killed it. Should have just closed the books on it. But I didn’t. I left it open, left it running. For too long. It grew, it was profitable. Very profitable. I was greedy.”
Gareth nodded, not wanting her to stop.
“By then Latia and her sister had already escaped. I worked to shut it all down, but it was too late. The company had grown, had become quite successful. There was a lot of money in it, and it was bringing in more and more each month.”
“Why didn’t you walk away?”
“It was a Catch-22, Gareth. I run the bank, but I’m not alone. There is a board, advisors, investors. I was seen as the woman who had created this profit machine, and Likur Holdings was a part of it. To them it was a holding company, simply a tax umbrella for many smaller organizations within it. There was no reason to suspect that it was primarily engaged in some unscrupulous activities.”
“Unscrupulous. That’s an understatement.”
“So to come clean would mean that I had knowingly bought into this company. To keep it secret meant that I had knowingly bought into this company. Don’t you see?”
“Your career was on the line.”
“Exactly —”
“Yet these children’s’ lives were
on the line, too.”
She nodded. Hung her head. “I — know. I made the wrong call. To save my career. I convinced myself that I could beat it, you know? That I could disband the company and make it right, blame it on the Russian economy or something else vague and inexplicit.”
“But you didn't.”
“I tried, Gareth. That’s why you’re here, now. And that’s why…” she choked up. Gareth watched her, at first not feeling anything, then slight remorse then nothing again.
“You sent Roderick to fix it.”
“He was already employed by us, as a ‘contracted security expert.’ He is — was — well-trained. Very much so. You probably would agree with that. He had experience, and he was looking for something to do, and I paid him very well.”
“But he didn’t want it to end, did he?”
She shook her head. “No. He started poking around, trying to figure out what it was I was trying to get him to stop. He is — was — smart, Gareth. He knew what this was all about, even before I realized he did. I just wanted Latia and her sister out of the picture, as I was already wrapping things up. The company was being liquidated, shut down. Slowly, so no one would bat an eye. It all looked perfectly tame. I would be able to write it off as a business expense, even. A company shutting down. That happens weekly for us, and Likur would have been no exception.”
“Except that the owners were dying. Being murdered, brutally and efficiently.”
“Exactly. So I got Roderick involved. He was trained for it, really. I tried to keep things subtle, to give him just enough to go off of. I told him about Latia, told him she was trying to kill our clients, and I gave him the list. Told him I had hired you to help.”
“The list was in the wrong order.”
“Of course it was. I didn’t know that until you did, but of course it was. It makes perfect sense now.”
“How?”
“We thought it was based on the size of the liquidations. The amounts the other owners deposited. The first ones were just like that.”
“But it was something else.”
“Obviously. It was the time.”
Gareth nodded. He thought back to the first place he’d been, the coldest town in the world, and the man — with a similar warehouse, ostensibly in the ‘exporting’ business — watching the clock. Knowing it was coming. He’d known his death was upon him, even the moment it would happen. 3:33. Gareth looked up at the painting above the woman’s head. It was huge, a monstrous size, even for a room this large. Gold lacquered frame, embellished with the best a custom framer could do on a budget, the brass showing through the paint in some sections. The painting itself was of a rainforest, generic in its description yet recognizable like any proper landscape should be.
“They all — the clients of mine — joined Likur Holdings, over the years, at different times. But Latia would never know that. So it wasn’t that.”
Gareth waited.
“Have you seen the warehouse?”
He stared at her, not expecting that.
“Outside. The warehouse, that’s what I call it. Looks like a disheveled warehouse, right? That’s where they kept the ‘employees.’”
“Yeah, Latia filled me in.”
“Well have you seen it?”
He shook his head. Why would I want to?
“You should see it.”
“Why?”
“To understand.”
“To understand the depths of their depravity, or to understand why you think you’re innocent?”
She tried the smile again, but it failed. Went back into her mouth as quickly as it had come out. “I do not think I’m innocent. I just want you to understand.”
“Fine.”
She stood up, even before he’d agreed, and started toward the entry hallway again. He watched her for a moment, looking to the right, out the front door, then changing her mind and walking left.
He felt a slight release of tension. Roderick would still be on the porch. She’d chosen to go out the garage.
33
THE WAREHOUSE, AS SHE CALLED it, was every bit as disheveled as he’d originally thought. The door couldn’t open without a great creaking and breaking sound, the age-old boards barely able to fight with physics and gravity. It was a wooden door, but one made of graying vertical planks with a single diagonal plank slapped across the front of it. A simple latch had been added, and — he noticed as she pulled on it — affixed to the outside of the large building.
To lock them in.
He shuddered.
He didn’t want to go in, but he wanted to know the truth. To see it. He’d gotten this far.
The room inside was unsurprisingly dark. She flicked a switch and an industrial work light hanging on its own cord from the ceiling illuminated the terrible interior.
Beds lined both walls. Small, petite beds that looked smaller than even the twin-sized bed they’d had in their apartment years ago, for guests. It was too small, and they’d fought about it. They hadn’t had the money for a queen, and a full was hardly bigger than the twin. Nothing about the memory or the reality in front of him made him smile.
The beds were bare, just empty mattresses, and he wasn’t sure if they had always been that way or if they had been stripped of their sheets long ago. Did it matter? The beds were on simple metal frames, springs beneath them that sprung little and softened nothing. Long, thin beds, to match the long, thin, people that used to lay on them. The single light above his head seemed to be the only light around, and the opposite end of the warehouse loomed in the darkness far away.
“There’s a restroom at the end,” she said, as if she were showing him around a new house. “A single closet with cleaning supplies next to it, but they had to remove everything in it.”
“Why?”
“Suicides.”
He nodded in the dark. “Why are you showing me this?”
“What do you see?”
“Hopelessness.”
The woman sighed. “Yes. What else.”
“Sickness. Stupidity. The devil incarnate.” He felt his anger growing, and he tried, in vain, to push it back down. “What the hell do you want me to see here? Why would you take me here?”
She pointed, to the left side of the building, toward the floor. “That one right there, third from the end, was Latia’s bed.”
“I thought she wasn’t here?”
“She wasn’t. But they are all the same. This building, the one in Vladivostok, the fourteen others across the continent. All built the same. So the managers could travel, know what to expect, fewer interruptions.”
Gareth scowled.
“So she slept there.”
“Yes. Her sister was across from her.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked again. “Why does it even matter?”
She pointed up at the wall, directly above where Latia’s sister would have slept.
A clock. It was an old analog relic, one he might have seen in a public school classroom, the cheapest you could buy. Plastic bubble case over a simple, flat-faced clock with two thick arms and a second hand.
“The clock?” Gareth turned to see the woman nodding, still looking up at it.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s in every warehouse Likur had. Same place, exactly.”
“So?”
“So Latia would have seen it. Nothing else to see, really. She would have stared at it, hour after hour, until…”
The woman’s voice trailed off, into a whimper of a cry. The start of a sob.
“Until they came for her.”
She nodded.
“They came at the same time?”
“They ordered her at the same time. These were businessmen. On a tight schedule. Sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, others every few months. But always right on schedule. This was one area of their lives they couldn’t afford to take liberties with.”
“They came at the same time every time?”
“Again, they ordered for her
at the same time. Depending on their location when they were in the same town as her warehouse, how long it would take to get her to their hotel, or their home, or wherever they were staying. Some even would come here. Hence the houses.”
Gareth knew what she was talking about. He thought about the mansion they’d seen outside of Vladivostok, the smaller, older, more tired version of the same thing here. It was like a hotel, he realized. They could order what they wanted, like a delivery, or walk in and stay there, like a hotel. Room service.
He shuddered again. It was either colder in the warehouse somehow or he had only realized just now that he wasn’t dressed for the weather.
“But they called for her at the same time?”
She nodded. “It probably got to the point where she knew who it was by the time. There were only a few clients that maintained regular schedules, and Latia was —” the woman cleared her throat, trying to get the sentence out without choking up — “one of the best. They called for her often, so the managers moved her closer to the restroom. That means she was in an elite group. She was no longer just a general ‘call girl,’ but one that was requested only by those with enough money for an exclusive. She would wait here, all day, every day, while her sisters and brothers were called away, until her ‘clients’ called for her specifically.”
“At the same time, every time.”
“Every time.”
“So she got to know them by their time. ‘3:33’ meant it was one person, ‘8:58’ meant another.”
The woman nodded. “Exactly.”
“But that doesn’t make sense — how would she be able to determine who was first and last on the list, just by the time on the clock?”
The woman shook her head. “No, it’s not that simple. I had to dig around a bit to figure it out, but the time is only the when. That’s when she will kill them. But the list itself — the order of when she’ll kill us — that’s based on when she met her clients for the first time.”
The reality struck him, hard. He knew it was true. It had to be. It makes perfect sense. Of course she would have organized it like that. Taking out the clients, mark after mark, one at a time, until they were all dead. The first one she’d ever seen ‘exclusively,’ followed by the next, until…
