The Program

by Stephen White

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But she spends time with you anyway?”

  “Not much time. A little. Couple of times I’ve seen her. We talk about her troubles. Her issues. I listen. Like I told you, it’s not romantic or anything.”

  “You like being helpful to her?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Good. I was hoping you’d say that.”

  4

  I went back to work on Monday even though I didn’t feel all that much better.

  My last break at work was at four, long before the restaurant was busy for dinner. I wasn’t hungry, so I used the time to call Viv to check on Landon and then tried Andrea at her condo on Longboat Key in Sarasota. She seemed so happy to hear from me that it brought tears to my eyes.

  I missed Robert most of all. After him, I missed my friends.

  “I wondered if you’d call. Hoped you would. You must have heard the news today,” she said.

  I thought, oh boy, and softly sang, “Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.”

  “What?” she said. She didn’t recognize the old Beatles lyrics from “A Day in the Life.” It was on Sergeant Pepper, one of Robert’s favorites.

  “Never mind. It’s not important. Yes, I saw the little blurb about Khalid in USA Today.”

  “I didn’t see that one, but I bet a couple of paragraphs didn’t fill your cup with too many details. Anyhow, with his appeals exhausted, the Khalid story is almost over for us. The case sure brings back memories, doesn’t it? You and Dave and I made quite a team till Robert kidnapped you and took you to New Orleans.”

  I heard something unexpected in her tone but couldn’t be certain what it was. I asked, “You still see Dave since he defected to the private side?”

  “We run into each other professionally. Not socially, though. His wife thinks I’m out to steal her man.”

  “Dave Curtiss? You?” Peyton laughed.

  Andrea said, “His wife is not a well woman.”

  “I like to think that you and Dave and I did some good things on the prosecution side back then, Andrea.”

  I thought I sensed a hesitation, maybe even a quick intake of air before she asked, “Are you including Khalid on that list?”

  I stuck a toe in the water. “Should I? Since I saw the newspaper this morning I’ve been wondering how I’m supposed to feel about being instrumental in someone else’s death. Doesn’t it give you pause?”

  Again I sensed the hesitation before she responded. Even thought I heard the same inhale as before. “Honey,” she asked, “when you talk about being instrumental in someone’s death, are you talking about Khalid Granger or are you talking about your Robert?”

  Just hearing someone suggest out loud that I was culpable for my husband’s murder could cause tiny fangs to tear at my heart. I fought the pain and tried to respond. “That’s just it, I don’t know. Sometimes these days I think I’m talking about Robert no matter what else I’m talking about. With my mom dying last year and then with Robert, I don’t know. Tell me honestly, does this sound crazy? Do you know what? I was actually considering going to see that woman whose husband died at Columbine High School. The teacher who died in the shooting there? I’ve been thinking maybe his wife could teach me something that would help me move on.”

  “You’d just call her out of the blue?”

  “Or go talk to her. It’s not that far from here.” My breath caught in my throat. “Oh my God! I shouldn’t have said that. Please pretend I didn’t say that.”

  “I guess you just told me that you and your li’l darlin’ are living in Colorado, didn’t you?”

  “Please forget I said that. I didn’t just say that, okay?”

  My plea settled like the dust of the day on the silence between us.

  Finally she said, “So what exactly is your plan? You’d just knock on this woman’s door and say you want to have some tea and talk about your murdered husbands?”

  “You think it does sound crazy?”

  She paused again, then she said, “Whatever gets you through the night is what I think.”

  I felt a shiver crawl up my cervical spine. “Andrea, I wonder if that was my first slip. Sometimes I have so much trouble keeping all my secrets straight. I’m so hesitant about things. I even have to stop and think before I tell someone what my name is.”

  “I can only imagine how difficult it must be.”

  We fell silent for too long, the deadness on the line poignant and awkward between old friends.

  She broke the silence. “Is it pretty where you are? I’ve never been, just seen pictures.”

  “Gorgeous. The weather is better here than I ever thought it was. It’s a good place for me and Landon, I think.”

  “Landon?”

  “I didn’t tell you? That’s Matilda’s newest name. Landon. I’m starting to like it. It’s the kind of name Robert would have chosen for her when she was born if I would have let him. He wanted something special for her. Something she didn’t have to share with a hundred other girls. Listen, I have to get back to the hotel where I work. I’m on break.”

  Her voice took on urgency as she said, “Wait, please. I need to know something, Kirsten. What you said before about being instrumental in someone’s death? Do you have any doubts about Khalid?”

  Hearing my real name shocked me. “Call me Peyton, okay? What kind of doubts?”

  “Any kind.”

  A million. A billion million. But I didn’t know why she was asking, so I couldn’t tell her. I wanted to believe she shared my doubts. I said, “Andrea, I’m late getting back. I’ll have to call you another time.”

  I hung up the phone and walked slowly back toward the kitchen at Q’s. I hoped—I prayed—that I wasn’t about to slip and fall on the beans I’d just spilled.

  AN HOUR OR so later I finished cleaning my station. I wasted a few minutes changing out of my checked chefs pants and shedding my double-breasted chefs blouse before I walked down Thirteenth toward my car, which I’d left a couple of blocks away between Spruce and Pine. My car was a late-model four-door something that Ron Kriciak and I had picked out from Hertz’s used car selection the day after I’d arrived in Boulder. The car looked like five thousand other late-model four-door somethings that lined the streets of downtown Boulder at any given point in time. I knew that was the point. Once already, in the parking lot at Target on Twenty-eighth, I’d tried to get into someone else’s late-model four-door something instead of my own.

  I missed my Audi.

  I was quietly singing the few lyrics that I could remember from “A Day in the Life”—A crowd of people stood and stared/They’d seen his face before/Nobody was really sure/If he was from the House of Lords —when I spotted Carl Luppo waiting for me on the steps of the church at the corner of Thirteenth and Spruce.

  Chinos, yes. A light jacket, yes, but over his shoulders, not over his arm. He almost looked preppy. No Abercrombie bag. Instead, his hands were in the pockets of his chinos. I guessed they were Dockers.

  I wasn’t in the mood for Carl. I now knew that after he had killed strangers on the street he had gone home to his family and played catch with his son. I didn’t slow to greet him, didn’t even shift my eyes his way as I passed. I said, “Not now, Carl. I’m not in the mood.” The words didn’t come out the way I’d intended. I was afraid I sounded like I had a headache and wasn’t interested in sex.

  “Fine,” he said gruffly. “But you should probably know that Ron’s waiting for you over there. He’s parked on Pine in sight of your car. He’s not driving that big pickup truck of his this time; he’s driving an even bigger Ford Expedition. A white one. Bet it’s a DEA confiscation. Go check it out yourself.”

  I stopped walking and spun on the concrete sidewalk. I was furious at both of them. Ron and Carl. But Ron wasn’t available, so I turned on Carl, who was available. Robert always used to tell me that I never picked my enemies wit
h the care with which I chose my friends.

  Robert, it seemed, was a damn genius.

  “Who appointed you?” I hissed. Landon hated it when I hissed. She could shrug off my yelling and my screaming, but she would cower when I hissed. I tried to save it for special moments.

  Carl didn’t cower. He looked at the fingernails of his left hand, pushed a cuticle back with his thumbnail. This, of course, wasn’t a man who was accustomed to being hissed at. He stood up. Since he had been sitting on the third or fourth step of the church, he towered above me when he stood, despite his diminutive height. “Nobody appointed me,” he said. “Tell you what, I think maybe meeting you here was a big mistake. I’ll just be going. See ya.”

  I put my hands on my hips and immediately felt silly. Taking them back off my hips would have felt even sillier. I said, “Maybe I arranged to meet Ron after work. Did that possibility ever occur to you? Did it?”

  “But you didn’t,” he said. “You know you didn’t. Listen, I’ve been trying to be helpful to you. Friendly. Thought maybe you could get used to being around someone who gives a shit. Someone who knows maybe what it’s like to be living the life you’re living.”

  “You know nothing—nothing—about my life.”

  “Whatever. Maybe it’s more selfish then. Maybe what I’m doing is I’m making amends. You ever consider that possibility?”

  I didn’t want to be having this conversation at all and certainly not on a busy sidewalk in downtown Boulder. I climbed two steps so I could get closer to him and I lowered my voice but I tried to keep the hiss in it anyway. “I don’t want to be part of your ‘amends,’ Carl. What do you think this is I’m doing with my life? Running some twelve-step program for hit men? I’ve got an idea for you. Why don’t you go down into the church basement and give your, ‘Hi, my name is Carl and I’m-a-hit-man speech’ down there? It’ll go over better with the other twelve-steppers than it will with me, I promise.” Considering the venom in my words, even I realized that the continuation of the hiss was pure redundancy.

  A whale surfaced right then. Right in front of my eyes, like an apparition. It was a Robert whale. Surprisingly, it was a beluga.

  ROBERT AND I having one of our rare fights. About what? I didn’t recall—anyway that wasn’t the point. Robert striding forward slowly and taking my face in both his hands. Robert saying, “Your mind is as sharp as a diamond, K.” Sometimes Robert called me K. In my mind I spelled it C-a-y. Why? I never knew, always figured it was a Florida thing. He said, “You can wield it like a surgeon with a scalpel, or you can slice up people like a street thug with a bowie knife. So how exactly do you want this argument to end? Do you want to heal me or make me bleed to death?”

  The honest-to-God truth? Right then and there I wanted to wield the bowie knife and I wanted Carl Luppo to bleed to death on the granite stoop of the First Congregational Church of Whatever.

  HOW DID CARL respond to my tirade? He shrugged the way he does and said, “If that’s the way you feel.”

  But I couldn’t just let him go. I couldn’t just let him walk away. Why? Because I couldn’t get the Robert whale out of my mind. I dropped my hands to my side and said, the hiss now absent, “So what if he’s following me? Why is it any of your business whether Ron Kriciak is following me?”

  I could tell that he wasn’t sure how to react to my suddenly softer persona. I wasn’t quite crazy enough to think that Carl had been able to see the Robert whale surface and frolic around in my private sea. He said, “It’s not my business. It’s your business. But you can’t really make it your business unless someone tells you it’s happening. So I’m telling you it’s happening. That’s all. You want to ignore the information, then that’s your right.”

  I’d been on my feet nonstop since I’d crawled out of bed at six-thirty that morning. My legs were still attorney’s legs, not cook’s legs, and they were killing me. Muscles in my calves hurt that I didn’t even know I had. I glanced at my watch to see how much time I had before Viv had to leave Landon and go home, then I sat on the flagstone stoop and patted the cold stone next to me. Carl sat, too.

  Pretty women can get men to do all sorts of things. I was a pretty woman and I knew that.

  But Carl sat farther away than the spot I had been patting. This retired Mafioso’s survival skills were still very much intact.

  “You think this is important, don’t you, Carl? All this cloak-and-dagger stuff with Ron. Why can’t I just assume that Ron’s going to some extra effort to keep an eye on me?”

  He sighed. “You can assume that if you want. But the whole point of them putting you into the program and moving you here was that once they’ve ripped your life out from beneath your feet and shredded it into a million little pieces and taped it back together so you can’t even recognize it, then nobody should have to keep an eye on you. I mean that’s the whole point of all the disruption, right? So the fact that Ron is following you means that—”

  “It means that somebody in the program thinks I may still be in some danger. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Yeah,” he said, swallowing a little burp. He placed an open hand over his mouth. “Excuse me. While I was waiting, I had one of those empanadas from that place over there.” He gestured back toward the Mall. “They’re new for me, but I think maybe I’m developing a taste.”

  I knew the little empanada place. It was only a couple of blocks down from the hotel. I liked it, too. “Okay, Carl, what you’re saying makes sense. Show me where Ron is right now.”

  We stood and I followed him down Thirteenth to Pine. At his direction we crossed over one at a time to the north side of the street and reconnoitered behind a FedEx truck. Carl said, “Peek your head out and you’ll see his white Expedition. Three cars from the corner, the other side of the street.”

  I peeked. I saw a man sitting in the driver’s seat of a big white SUV, his elbow resting on the window ledge. I couldn’t see the man’s face but had no reason to believe it wasn’t Ron Kriciak. I still didn’t know what to make of it.

  I stepped back behind the FedEx truck and moved to within a foot of Carl Luppo. He was wearing a subtle cologne that I hadn’t noticed the last time we’d spoken. Something with lemon in it. His nose was slightly crooked and his skin was soft and unwrinkled. Did this man never worry? Even women my age would envy the texture of his complexion. “Same question as last time, Carl. When you spotted Ron today, were you following him or were you following me?”

  Carl’s tone was mildly admonishing, as though he was reprimanding a favorite daughter. “You’re too smart to ask that question again. Don’t you see? Following you, following him. It’s become one and the same thing.”

  I held his eyes. “So what should I do?”

  “I’m not sure. You want me to, I’ll think on it.”

  “I’d like you to, Carl,” I said, then I stepped back, suddenly uncomfortable with our physical proximity.

  “I’ve been thinking something else, too,” he said, and my breath caught in my throat. I feared he was about to ask me for a date. “I’ve been thinking that with your permission I’d look into this guy in prison, this druggie, the one who had your husband whacked.”

  “Ernesto Castro.” Just saying the name turned my stomach.

  “Yes. Ernesto Castro. I was thinking I might make a call or two to some people I trust and see if I can learn his current intentions. See whether he’s been active, what he’s been thinking.” Carl touched his hand to his chest, right above his heart, as though he was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “Of course, I would make these calls only if that’s what you wanted.”

  My own chest felt suddenly as if my lungs had been filled with fluid. I didn’t seem to be able to inhale at all. I finally managed to say, “What do you mean ‘his intentions’? What are you saying?” I was afraid that Carl was using some Mafia vernacular that I was unable to translate.

  “I’m wondering, I think, exactly what you’ve been wondering. Is this Cast
ro guy still looking for you? Does he have people who might have tracked you here? Is that maybe why Ron has punched up the security? Maybe the program has heard about some new threats or maybe they have some intelligence that causes them to worry. It’s possible I could find the answers.”

  “I assume that Castro is still looking for me. I live every day believing that Castro is still looking for me.”

  “You might be right. But you might be wrong about that, too. Occasionally people lose interest. Grudges are sometimes carved from granite. Sometimes they’re carved from ice. Those are the ones that melt. I’ve been there—I know. Your Ernesto Castro is in prison now. Prison causes people to have new priorities. I’ve been there—I know that, too.”

  I wanted to believe him. I said, “You think?”

  “I do. I also think maybe I could check on Mr. Castro’s intentions without too much difficulty. I could make some calls. Maybe I have some friends who are locked up where he’s locked up. I could reach out to them, ask a favor. What prison is he in?”

  I told him. “You can do this without giving away my location?”

  “Your location is my location. I’m a little vulnerable here, too. I try to be extra careful.”

  I have to admit that I’d forgotten that Carl, like me, was on somebody’s hit list. I said, “Let me sleep on it.”

  “You let me know then.”

  “I will. And I’m sorry about before. About the way I acted on the steps at the church.”

  “God forgives.” He shrugged. “Who am I to hold grudges?”

  CARL WALKED AWAY in the direction of Broadway. I retraced my steps to Spruce Street and made my way toward my car by the same route I would have used were I coming from the restaurant.

  Carl was worried about Ernesto Castro’s intentions. That day my instincts told me to worry more about Ron Kriciak’s.

  I drove home slowly. Only once did I lose sight of Ron Kriciak’s big white Ford Expedition as he trailed behind me. He was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap of some kind.

  Robert would have known the team for sure.