The Program

by Stephen White

  Or I watched for anything else that might feel out of the ordinary. I told myself that my task was like that Supreme Court justice’s assessment of obscenity—I couldn’t quite define what I was looking for, but I was positive that I’d know it when I saw it.

  As I sipped my tall glass of sweet tea and the ice jiggled in the glass, the sound I actually heard was the tinkling of the spent .22 shells as they danced on the concrete near my husband Robert’s head.

  That, by the way, is a killer whale.

  I FELT THE distance to my daughter deep in my chest as though it could be measured in light years and not small-town blocks and imagined what my life would be like with just one more loss and I couldn’t imagine that it could still be called living.

  I caressed the cameo that hung around my neck—Robert had given it to me for our last anniversary—and I thought about justice. The concept was distant and imaginary, as full of promise as the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, and just as elusive.

  That’s what I was doing when the portable phone rang on the table beside the chair.

  I said, “Hello,” my attention momentarily diverted from my emptiness and my vigil on the street.

  Matilda’s friend’s mother said, “Is this Katherine? Katherine, this is Libby Larsen. Now tell me once again, what does your ex-husband look like, exactly? I think there’s a—”

  “There’s a what?”

  “It’s one of those big SUVs,” she said, drawing out the last letter, the V, as though its agent had succeeded in negotiating top billing. “It’s a black one. Big and shiny.”

  “Where?”

  “Under the magnolia in front of Mrs. Marter’s house. It’s—”

  “Are the girls okay, Libby?” I was trying hard not to let my fear ignite panic in my voice.

  “They’re right here on the living room floor playing with—”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said and threw down the phone. Once inside the house I wasted ten steps running to get my keys from the hook in the kitchen before deciding it would be faster to walk—no!—run, then thinking twice and backtracking for my keys after all because I might need the car to chase that SUV.

  I was fumbling to get the key into the ignition when I remembered to run back inside and get my gun. Arriving at the locked case in which I kept it, I realized I’d left my keys in the car’s ignition and had to retrace my steps all over again. I was losing minutes when I didn’t even have seconds to spare.

  “Remember this,” he’d said, pointing at me over the

  defense table. “Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.”

  The man’s words had chilled me for a minute that day in court but I’d shrugged off his threat. It certainly wasn’t the first threat I’d ever heard from a desperate con that I was prosecuting.

  I figured that it wouldn’t be the last.

  But then the man in court had sent the man in the chinos to New Orleans and he’d killed Robert right in front of my eyes on the sidewalk in front of Galatoire’s.

  And now there was a big black SUV parked under Mrs. Marter’s magnolia tree and I was sure it was driven by a small man wearing chinos but I kept thinking it’s way too warm for him to be wearing a windbreaker.

  The entire three-block drive I wondered what he would be draping over his arm instead.

  HERE’S A BELUGA:

  Before we were lovers, or even friends, even before I knew I wanted him to be my lover, Robert and I shared our first long weekend away at a mutual friend’s cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. Robert and I arrived separately, and we were two of ten people sharing the spacious vacation home. The second night of our holiday, after an evening of revelry that included a sojourn in a steaming hot tub on the edge of the adjacent woods, Robert pulled me away from the group and with the softest amber eyes in the world told me that I had the most lovely back he had ever seen.

  That’s right. He was talking about my back. His first heartfelt compliment to me was about my back.

  If the man had been paying attention that night, and I assumed that he was, he’d had the fleeting opportunity to see my breasts, to gaze at the full length of my legs, and to study the then still-youthful contours of my ass, yet the man I would soon choose to marry wanted to reflect on the beauty of my back.

  These are the types of things I remember now. Even at moments when I’m careening around corners and speeding three blocks to save my daughter from assassination.

  I don’t understand.

  It’s just a beluga.

  THE NATURAL ROUTE to Matilda’s friend’s house caused me to approach the big SUV—it was one of those obscenely immense Ford things—from the front. I screeched my Audi to a stop halfway between the stubborn-looking snout of the monstrosity and the front door of the house that held my daughter, and I parked on the wrong side of the road, something that just isn’t done in Slaughter.

  Two men sat in the front seat of the huge vehicle. One wore a ball cap, and both shaded their eyes with sunglasses. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell how tall they were or what clothes they were wearing.

  Libby Larsen stood on the edge of the large, tidy lawn in front of her house, shading her eyes with the hand that wasn’t supporting the toddler perched on her outstretched hip. I turned to face her and watched her mouth. “Is that him?” she was asking.

  I shrugged my shoulders as I walked toward her. She tried not to move her lips as she said, “Don’t look, but they’re getting out of the car, now.”

  I barely understood her words but knew what to do next. “Why don’t you go back inside with the girls, Libby? Do you have a cellar? Pretend there’s a tornado drill or something, will you do that? Take them down to your cellar. You hear anything out of the ordinary, you don’t hesitate to call 911.”

  She didn’t know me well enough to know my determination about things, but she attended to my words as though I were a preacher who knew the path to eternal bliss, and she skipped away to find the girls and squirrel them into the cellar.

  The two men who got out of the SUV weren’t anywhere nearly as tall as it was. They both walked my way. There was no hurry in their steps. Neither of them was carrying a jacket or anything that could be used to shield a silenced handgun, though the one who was wearing the ball cap seemed to have his left hand tucked back behind his buttocks.

  I watched that one, the one with the ball cap, as I fingered the trigger of my pistol, which weighed heavily inside the front pouch of my sleeveless sweatshirt. The sweatshirt had been Robert’s. I’d cut the sleeves off for him. On the front it was embroidered LSU, his alma mater.

  The man I was watching closely raised his free hand, the right one, and tipped the ball cap my way, saying, “Ma’am.”

  I nodded, trying not to be distracted from the hand that was still hidden behind his back.

  He said, “We’d be looking for Missus Marter,” while tilting his head back in the direction of the magnolia tree.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The other man, the one without the cap, said, “We tried but she’s not answering her bell.”

  I replied without allowing my attention to waver from the man with the ball cap. “Then I imagine she must not be home. Is she expecting you?”

  “Indeed. Our appointment was a while ago.” He tapped his watch.

  “Appointment for?”

  “Air-conditioning. She wants a bid to install air-conditioning.”

  “I’ll tell her you came by. Do you have a card?”

  The man with the ball cap moved, his hidden hand thrust forward with a suddenness that caused me to jerk my hand and tangle the pistol in the fabric of the pouch of my sweatshirt. I couldn’t extricate the darn gun. It took too many seconds for my eyes to recognize that the hidden hand, now extended my way, held nothing more than a business card.

  Leaving the pistol tangled in the pouch of my sweatshirt, I reached out and took the card from him and read it. “You’re with Buster’s?” I asked. Buster’s Sheet Metal and Ai
r-Conditioning. I thought I remembered seeing a sign on a ramshackle building over by the supermarket.

  “Yes.”

  “Missus Marter will be sorry she missed you, especially on a day as wicked as this one. The summer will be a long one, don’t you think?”

  “Fierce,” he agreed.

  You betcha.

  3

  Matilda’s new friend in Slaughter was named Jennifer. The two of them became buddies the way only little girls can. That end-of-the-school-year visit at Jennifer’s house led to another at ours, which led to a sleepover at Jennifer’s—“Mom, don’t call her Jenny”—and to the required reciprocation. Soon, there were long nightly phone calls between the two girls and loud protests of eternal devotion that I couldn’t help from overhearing.

  Believe me, I tried.

  By the time June was ending they’d been best friends for a fortnight and had already endured at least two spats that, in much of the animal kingdom, would have left one of their carcasses rotting in the sun.

  As far as I could tell, my little girl never faltered in her quest to reinvent herself and become this child named Matilda. She fell into her ever-evolving encyclopedia of lies with an affinity that frightened me. The child could piece together the strands of her fictitious life with the facility of a master weaver. Not once did I hear her lose her place as she recounted details of her new story to her new friend. Often, I worried what bruises her fantasies were screening from my view, or of greater concern, from her own.

  I was terrified that I didn’t know how to measure her pain.

  My own? I felt that my own bruises were invisible to others but that they were potentially crippling to me. In my mind they were like subdural hematomas. But in my heart I knew that it wasn’t my brain that the swollen clots were pressuring.

  It was my soul.

  • • •

  AT BEDTIME EACH night Matilda listened with feigned patience to my litany of concerns and my admonitions about how important it was that she understand how to react around strangers. Before long she was able to recite the rules to me the same way she had learned to recite the lines of Goodnight Moon as I turned each page for her when she was two years old. When she was small, no matter which book we read first, or second, or third each night, she always insisted that the last book we read was Goodnight Moon.

  That meant that the final words before dark, the last words before “I love you,” were always, “Good night noises everywhere.”

  After we resettled in Slaughter, we talked most nights at bedtime about Robert, her daddy, and at least once or twice a week she asked questions about the bad man who had killed him. “Did he do something to make him mad?” she’d want to know, and I told her that her daddy was the sweetest man on the planet, she knew that. “What does he look like?” she’d ask, but I wouldn’t tell her about the chinos because I didn’t want her to grow phobic about khakis. “Is he big?” she would wonder, but I never told her that by the time she was twelve I was sure she would be taller than the bad man who had killed her daddy.

  Right from the start, though, she seemed to understand that the bad man who was responsible hadn’t been caught and that we were going to hide in Slaughter until he was behind prison bars. But her grief over Robert’s death was as immature as she was, and I remained worried that she hadn’t shed as many tears over her dead father as I felt were required.

  • • •

  ALMOST A FULL month passed without another sighting of the two men in the big SUV from Buster’s Sheet Metal and Air-Conditioning. I had checked them out, of course. The business was legitimate. Buster’s was. And the two men worked there. I’d watched them show up for work the very next morning after I’d met them outside Mrs. Marter’s house. And a simple phone call confirmed that Mrs. Marter was indeed considering air-conditioning her home, but the prices had taken her breath away as surely as had the previous July’s humidity.

  Slowly, as the days passed, I began to feel some renewed safety and insulation in the security provided by the routines of Slaughter, Louisiana. The call that finally shook me from that false security and stiffened my spine came from an old colleague in the district attorney’s office in New Orleans.

  THE MAN WHO’D threatened me that day in court, the man I was sure had arranged to assassinate my husband, the man whom I’d sent to prison for more years than even a Galápagos tortoise could hope to survive—that man—had just suffered a major personal tragedy.

  The man’s name was Ernesto Castro. He had been a big shot in the cocaine trade, a local boss for the Colombian drug cartels, running an operation that delivered major quantities of cocaine from Miami all the way up to D.C. and Baltimore.

  When I met him, he was residing in the Mississippi River town of Welcome, halfway between Louisiana and Baton Rouge. He’d been arrested for suspicion of committing a brutal rape on a wheelchair-bound forty-six-year-old woman in the elevator of the office building where she worked as a legal secretary. The New Orleans police quickly concluded that Ernesto was responsible for at least two additional recent rapes, equally depraved, equally vicious.

  Fortunately for the legal justice system, Ernesto was much more brutal than he was clever. I was assigned to prosecute him, and I had no trouble winning convictions on each and every count. I felt confident that Castro would never again see the light of the Louisiana sun as a free man.

  It was the day of his sentencing that he threatened me in open court.

  A day in court that began like a hundred others.

  As I approached the bench at the judge’s request, Castro unexpectedly stood up behind me at the defense table and raised his shackled hands. He lifted the fat index finger of his left hand, and he pointed it right at me. “You! Bitch! Hey!” he called.

  I turned my head. Not even my whole body. Just my head. I wasn’t even certain that I was the bitch he was talking to.

  The judge pounded her gavel. I could tell that she didn’t know if she was the bitch he was talking to, either. The bailiffs awoke from their reverie and moved toward the convict.

  “Remember this,” Ernesto Castro said before the burly bailiffs could restrain him. Thees. “Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.” Doo.

  I don’t even recall the look on his face as he spoke those words to me. Despite the melodrama of the moment, the threat felt relatively inconsequential, as though it were just one of too many interactions during which I’d felt soiled by the vermin I prosecuted. In my journal, on those rare days when I had the time and emotional awareness to reflect on some way I’d been treated particularly badly in court, I would note that I had been slimed that day.

  That was my word for it. Slimed.

  Do you remember Ghostbusters? No? It’s not important. Trust me, I was slimed that day.

  So what was Mr. Castro’s more recent tragedy, the one my friend in the DA’s office was telling me about as I hid out in Slaughter? Castro’s mother had been on her way to visit him in prison when her car was hit head-on by a bread truck full of snack cakes. The driver of the bakery truck had fallen asleep at the wheel and crossed the highway median. Mrs. Castro had died in a veritable sea of Twinkies.

  “Every precious thing I lose,” were the words he’d spoken to me. His mother was a precious thing, right? To him? Certainly.

  He could hold me responsible, right? Of course he could.

  From the moment I heard the news of Castro’s mother’s death, I lost more sleep wondering if Señora Castro’s death meant that I now owed Ernesto Castro one more loss of my own, or three more losses of my own?

  My Robert, did he really only count for one?

  Matilda, dear God, she would count for dozens.

  If Castro got to Matilda, I knew I’d go all by myself to the prison where he lived and I would cut out his organs, one by one, until he died. I’d flay him open and first remove the organs that wouldn’t kill him quickly, his appendix and his gall bladder and his spleen, and I’d stuff them in his mouth and I’d force them do
wn his throat until he began to choke on his own evil.

  Images like that never became part of my pod of whales. No, they never dived, they never ran deep. They became my daydreams, the thoughts that filled my head while I sipped sweet tea on the porch in the heat of the afternoon and watched the road for small men in chinos.

  SHE WAS A soccer player, my Matilda. And so was her new friend, Jennifer. The Larsens had a front yard that was large enough to kick a ball around in, and we didn’t. The girls spent hours that summer working on their game, which meant that they were at the Larsens’ house more often than they were at ours. Mr. Larsen had constructed a makeshift goal out of PVC pipe and fishing net that he set up between some flowering bushes on the north side of the big lawn.

  If Robert had been alive, he would have offered to help Mr. Larsen with the net, and he probably would have managed to totally screw up the project. Robert wasn’t exactly what you would call handy. But, then, if Robert had been alive, Matilda and I wouldn’t have been in Slaughter.

  I’m embarrassed to admit it, but—even though I’m the one who got him killed—I occasionally cursed Robert for dying.

  BY THE WEEKEND before the Fourth of July, I was complacent enough about Matilda’s visits to Jennifer’s house that I was able to sit and read or clean the house during her absences. But I wasn’t so complacent that I would run an errand away from the house and maybe risk missing the phone call from Libby Larsen informing me that the short man with the ball cap and the chinos was back in my life.

  THE PHONE CALL, when it did come, was brief, even cryptic. Libby said, “Katherine? I think you should come over. Right away.”

  “Is she okay?” I said. “Is Matilda okay?”

  “The police are on the way,” Libby said, her voice admonishing, not reassuring. “She isn’t Matilda. And it wasn’t your ex-husband.”

  I threw down the damn phone, grabbed my purse—which I knew already contained my keys and my gun—and drove the three blocks to the Larsens’ like the mad woman I was.