I didn’t pay much attention then. But after I picked up the girls, there it was again a block behind me.
My first thought was that my wife had a detective on me. She wanted full custody so she could take them with her to Chicago once the divorce was final. But detectives don’t usually drive sixty-thousand-dollar Beamers, at least not those who work in a small Pennsylvania town like ours. Nor do they follow so close and obvious, unless it was about intimidation of some kind. But that made no sense.
“Your mom will pick you guys up right after the game. Go kick some butt.”
They laughed. I gave them a group hug and then watched the finest two little girls on earth run off towards the soccer field. I felt that mix of love and pride daughters give a man, plus the fear that this divorce was going to be painful for them.
I waved to the coach, who waved back. Then I turned my attention to the car that had been following me, but now it was nowhere to be seen.
When I left and got about half a block up the road, the black BMW reappeared in my rearview mirror. The driver hit his lights and then his horn.
What the hell is this? I wondered as I pulled over. I looked back and was surprised as hell to see my old college football teammate, Paul Snyder, get out of the BMW. He’d put on a few pounds but otherwise looked the same since I saw him two years ago.
After exiting my aging Ford Escape, I walked over. “Paul Snyder. Hell, man, I heard you were in Bali or Australia or somewhere.”
We exchanged shoulder bumps. Snyder wasn’t what you would call a good friend, but he was one of the originals. We were Billtown, Pennsylvania, boys. We’d played against each other in high school—me a tight end, Snyder a linebacker at Baker High—but later we were teammates at Penn State.
“Bali will have to wait. How you doing, Roger Dodger?”
Nobody had called me by my nickname in a while. “I’m doing more good than harm, I hope,” I said. “What brings you back to this morgue on the Susquehanna?”
Snyder had a strained expression. Maybe somebody had, in fact, died. “I need to talk to you,” he said.
He need money? One of the problems with success, and inheritance, is that you suddenly have money, and with it comes old friends with their hands out.
“I spotted you following me a couple times. Somebody follows me when I have my girls onboard, gets me a little nervous.”
Snyder emitted a dry snort. “Sorry ’bout that. But we got us a bit of a problem, my friend, that’ll make you a lot more nervous.”
“We?” I couldn’t imagine any problem Snyder and I would have in common. We lived in different towns, different worlds, and we rarely saw each other since our football days.
“It’s definitely a we,” he said. “I had a second little chat last night with our old buddy, Freddie.”
I stared at Snyder and waited for the kicker. “As in Fast Freddie Vance?”
“Yeah. He’s got a big problem,” Snyder said.
“What is it this time? He want bailed out of debtor’s prison?” Freddie Vance had a major gambling issue and lived in the worst of all worlds for a guy like him: Vegas.
“Not exactly,” Snyder said. He glanced around like somebody or something might be chasing him. “It’s better I show you than tell you.”
“Show me what? What the hell is going on?”
“Roger, get in the car. I want to show you a video.”
The tone of his voice, the look on his face, ratcheted up my discomfort level a couple notches.
I climbed into the passenger seat of his new Beamer as he slid behind the wheel. He reached in the glove box and brought out a smartphone.
“There’s a little video on here you need to look at. One of Freddie’s. It’s a copy, of course.”
“Video of what?”
Freddie was always shooting with his damn phone. Especially at parties. He had put some stuff up on the net and been sued at least once. My gut was already tightening—my day that had started so well turned south.
“Just take a look. Remember that after-game party at Jason Wyrick’s place?”
Oh, Jesus—not that, I thought. Right off, this smelled really ugly. There were many crazy “after-game” parties that got a little over the top. Fast Freddie always ended up at these parties, and he was like the chronicler. Snyder didn’t drive back here from outside Pittsburg to reminisce.
But that party had left a bad taste. It was a particularly bad night of excess, and I didn’t really want to be reminded. “I’m vaguely aware of that event.”
“There are moments in your past—negative ones—that you want to keep there, buried, dead,” Snyder said. “Unfortunately, there’s always a fucking Freddie somewhere around to make sure that doesn’t happen. Who was it said, ‘The past is never dead, it’s not even past’?”
“Faulkner, I think.” Not that I had been a great student of literature, but I did remember that quote for some reason.
He had the video going. He put the smartphone on the dash, where it would stay without him holding it.
It took a moment to get oriented as to what I was looking at, and there was nothing good about it. “No way. What the hell…?”
“Did you know that sonofabitch was filming us in the pool house with that girl?”
I pulled myself up out of the initial shock. “I was so messed up, I didn’t know what was going on. This is crazy.”
“No shit,” Snyder said. “Eight years after the fact.”
A horrendous thought staggered me. “Jesus…it’s not up on the fucking Internet, is it?” My heart missed a beat or two. The girl was obviously young and very drunk.
“No,” Paul said. “No money in that for him. But he can be vengeful as hell. He’ll do it if we don’t give him what he wants.”
“What does he want?”
“What else?” Snyder said. “Freddie’s got himself in a fix with some bookies or some shit like that. Big time. He wants money—lot of money—and he wants it fast. Says he’s a dead man, he doesn’t get it by the end of the week. He’s panicked, talking crazy. He has a thousand party videos, but this is the one with money in it because of you.”
Processing this started getting me crazy.
Snyder said, “Freddie’s always taking videos of everything that happened. He wanted to get into the Girls Gone Wild thing. He said, one day, he was gonna make a fortune with some bullshit about Internet poker featuring hot chicks in strip poker. Guy’s got an idea a minute. Fucking Fast Freddie and his big ideas. He just got off on other people getting some was his whole deal. He had that freaky side to him.”
I hated watching the video. It was a horror show, but there was no denying that, drunk out of my brain as I might have been, it was me leaning on the pool house bar, and this girl I didn’t know was on the floor and Snyder was all over her. Christ, I thought. In a couple years, it could be one of my girls. It made me sick to my stomach. I hated seeing what was coming next.
Snyder said, “It’s gonna get nasty.”
My chest was tight. This was like a lightning strike out of the past and had the potential to ruin my life, my relationship with my girls. “Freddie and me been friends since, like, fourth grade,” I stammered.
“Yeah, welcome to long-term friendships. I’ve known him since sixth grade. ‘Blackmail your friends’ must be Freddie’s new mantra.”
“I didn’t do anything to that girl,” I said in lame protest.
“Doesn’t matter, dude, you were there. She was fifteen years old.”
“What?”
“Yeah. She looked older, but she was fifteen. This gets out, we’re gonna be destroyed. And it will if he doesn’t get money.”
I glanced back at the screen. The girl wasn’t even moving. Snyder was starting to strip her. I said, “How much?”
“One hundred fifty grand. Nice of him to use round numbers.”
“Is he nuts?”
Snyder looked at me like that was a given. “He knows you have money. He wants cash as soon as
he gets here.”
This couldn’t be happening. Now he had the girl’s top off. “My money is in the house and my business, and my wife is suing me for a divorce. I can’t suddenly be moving a lot of cash around.”
“Yeah, well, I’m cash strapped and I just took out a big loan,” Snyder said. “So we need to figure something out. You aren’t getting it. He’s deadly serious. He’s not messing around.”
He continued the video. It was Snyder and the girl and it just got worse and worse.
Freddie didn’t get much of me, but enough. I was baked, leaning against the pool house bar, it holding me up as I appeared in near pass-out mode.
The girl on the floor looked to be out cold and pretty well stripped of her clothes, as Snyder, twice her size, was all over her. It was very hard for me to look at.
But I had to see if I did anything. It appeared I wasn’t in a state to do more than keep from falling off the stool at the pool-house bar. I didn’t actually move, and it looked like Freddie shot the scene from off to my left and behind me.
It didn’t matter. I was there while a rape of an unconscious fifteen year old was taking place. It couldn’t get any worse.
“Yeah, this is bad,” Snyder said.
I looked at him with no small amount of disgust. “What happened to the girl? Who was she? She didn’t kill herself or something, did she?”
“No. She was the assistant basketball coach’s granddaughter. She was visiting from Arizona.”
“She never did anything, said anything, about that night?”
“No. Making it public is always worse for girls.”
My cell buzzed, and I jumped. “Jesus!”
“Not Freddie, is it?” Snyder asked as I got my cell out.
“No.”
It was my wife. She started rambling about how, though she was supposed to pick the girls up, she had this thing she wanted to do and could I get them? I told her no way, that I was busy.
I hung up on her. If she ever found out any of this, I would be crucified.
The goddamn video continued to run and it was now more than I could handle. But I watched until it was over.
“That little slut lured us into this,” Snyder said.
“Don’t get so big on that we shit. She was unconscious, for Christ’s sake. That kinda takes the slut part out of the equation.”
He turned it off and glanced at me. “Hey, wake up. She came into the pool house with us. Maybe you were too drunk to fuck her, but that’s not the issue right now, is it?”
“Doesn’t that make Freddie as culpable as we are?”
“Sure. But he doesn’t think it’ll ever go to that point. He thinks we’ll pay. And he didn’t record himself, so he’s got potential denial. Could have been anybody taking that video.”
Out the windshield, I watched a flock of birds cruising across the sky. I suddenly envied them their freedom. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“I was up all night thinking about that,” Snyder said. “He’s not going to be talked out of it. He made that clear.”
“I can’t give him the money,” I said. “And I can’t handle a scandal. Has the statute of limitations run out?”
Snyder shook his head. “It’s twelve years. I checked.”
We sat in grim silence for a long time.
Snyder said, “I can’t get the money freed up, even if I wanted to. I told Freddie that, but he doesn’t care how or where we get it, or how much trouble it is. He’s got us by the balls. I think he’s pulled shit like this on other people.”
You raped the girl, you asshole, I thought. But he was right—I was there.
After another long silence, and now at a total loss, I said, “So what do we do? You’ve obviously been thinking about this. What do we do?”
Snyder stared out the windshield for a moment, then shrugged and said, “I’m sure as hell not going to end up broke, or in prison, because of him. Maybe the only answer is to kill the bastard.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said with a quick snap to my voice. “Murder to cover up rape? That’s a pleasant combination. No way.”
Snyder said, “If you have an alternative, I’m all ears. You got a wife who wants to bury you, two beautiful little girls who love you, and a reputation that lets you do business in this town. And we both know Freddie. Look, I’ve thought about this ever since he contacted me three days ago. I can’t see a way out.”
I just sat there for the longest time. It’s like I was locked down. My brain didn’t want to process this. But eventually, I had to deal with a really preposterous, fantastic idea. “I need some time to think,” I said.
“Where the hell are you living? I had a hard time finding you,” Snyder said.
“I have a cabin up Needle Creek,” I said. “We’re separated, so that was the best place for me to go until this is all resolved. Look, I need to go think. I’ll give you my cell number.”
“No. No regular phone calls. I got a couple burner throwaways. Last year, me and a couple guys visited Freddie in Vegas. Tore the town up. Freddie always uses burners. He says they got apps now so you don’t have to actually buy the damn phones, but I did anyway.”
He gave me one of them.
“You don’t have long,” Snyder said. “And from this moment on, we need to be a little careful, because if we have to take care of this the hard way, we need to be really smart. He’s on his way from Vegas. It’ll take two days driving. You can’t mess around. We don’t have time. I have some ideas how to handle this. Let’s meet at the old hangout. The cliffs. Say about nine. We’ll figure this out.”
“Why up there?”
“Because we shouldn’t be seen together. And that’s where I told Freddie we’d meet him with the money when he comes into town. That way, whatever we decide, the whole world doesn’t have to be involved.”
Christ, I thought as I got out, this bastard has it all figured out. To him it’s a done deal.
I walked back to my car as Paul Snyder drove off.
Nothing I’d faced in my life was quite like this. I could lose my girls, my business, my freedom. Everything.
So I considered something that would have seemed impossible to me until this moment:
Killing a childhood buddy.
Committing murder couldn’t be the only option. There had to be some other way.
2
My cabin is peace incarnate. It’s very private, the creek wide and constant just off my back deck. It flows quietly, steadily down from the mountain springs and on to the Susquehanna. My girls love coming out here. Actually, it’s where they were conceived.
Goddamn, Freddie, you can’t do this, I thought as I sat on the screened deck watching the afternoon grow old. We had so much damn fun as kids. The Racketeers. Raising hell, running the streets and the hills. Then came sports and we became jocks.
The idea that Freddie would do this—threaten my life, my whole world—was really hard to get hold of. He went straight to this, to full-on blackmail, rather than first come begging. He had to be in deep shit to pull this off.
And I thought about that girl I didn’t know, how Snyder had brutalized her, and how Freddie had filmed it all. Even if I didn’t participate, I was still ashamed at having been there.
But it was what it was. I had two young girls and a life to protect…and goddamn both Freddie and Paul Snyder.
We used to joke that if Freddie had half a brain, he’d be dangerous. Well, at the moment, he was very dangerous. That video obsession of his was going to be his end. Or ours.
We’re trapped, I thought. There’s no sane way out of this.
Still, I wanted to talk to Freddie and find a way out of this if one existed. I wanted to look in the bastard’s eyes.
***
I left the cabin at 8:30 that night, drove up to the Poco Hills, then took the road that would get me up to the big cement cross high above town.
I headed up the old logging road above the old cross, going slow over the roots and rut
s.
A quarter mile through the trees was what we called the cliffs. When we were kids, going up to the cliffs was a great escape from the adult world. No parents, no cops. Just us.
I saw Snyder’s Beamer in my headlights. I pulled in beside his car, then took my flashlight and headed into the trees. I followed an old trail to the big rock clearing that had been our headquarters as kids. It overlooked the entire valley and city.
It was easy on top of the mountain to move through the trees because they had all been planted in neat rows during the Roosevelt era to replace the strip cutting during the logging boom. That’s how, for a time, our town had more millionaires per capita than any place on earth. I saw Snyder in the moonlight sitting on one of the log seats next to a flat granite rock near the cliff drop-off.
Me, Freddie, Snyder, and a few others in our group would come up here to smoke, drink beer, play cards, joke, and laugh.
The city’s oldest and best kept cemetery was well down the mountain below us, and that meant no houses, no lights, and no roads coming up this far.
Snyder turned as I came up and said, “I talked to Freddie a little bit ago. He could be here as early as tomorrow night.”
Snyder had a six-pack of Bud sitting on a flat stone beside the one he was on. Just like in the old days.
I grabbed one, snapped the top off, and sat down.
“He’s driving all night,” Snyder said. “He’s high on something. Sounds nuts. Says he’s going to give us the original video. He swears he only made just the one copy. He’s all apologetic. Says it’s just a loan to tide him over.”
“Blackmail is an interesting way to get a loan,” I said sarcastically.
Snyder said, “Yeah, but effective. He insists he’s going to pay us back. Says it’s a temporary setback. He’s got something big in the works.”
“His whole life is a setback,” I said. “He always had something big in the works, and it always backfires. He really thinks we have that kind of cash lying around?”
Snyder said, “He’s heard you have, as he put it, a ton of money.”
“That so?”
“He knows about the coin collection you inherited that’s supposedly worth half a million. And that your construction business is doing well.”
The Murder Option Page 4
