The Program

by Stephen White

  Landon started to whimper. “Don’t hurt my mommy,” she said. “Don’t hurt my mommy.”

  Krist stepped two steps closer, paused, and then stepped one more time. He smiled at Dr. Gregory and said, “Dr. Gregory? I’m waiting for you to tell me where I can find her mother.”

  Gregory tried to think. The gun that the man was pointing at him didn’t help him focus. Gregory was terrified by his options. Landon was in serious jeopardy already. Peyton was certainly dead the moment she walked in the door. Lauren and his unborn child were likely casualties, too. Alan Gregory made a choice. He said, “She’s on the run. My wife and I are watching her daughter for her.”

  The grin still on his face, Krist raised the gun up so he could sight it, adjusted the aim just once, and pulled the trigger. A pfffft/clap sound was almost lost in the ensuing thud. A shell casing ejected from the gun and landed on the floor beside one of the legs on the pool table.

  Landon screamed. “He shot Daphne.”

  Daphne was Landon’s teddy bear. The bear had been snuggled tightly in the crook of her left arm.

  Krist said, “I’m a very good shot. Next time you’re uncooperative with me, I won’t hit the bear.”

  The grin had degenerated into a smirk. Gregory thought that the man was enjoying himself. He also assumed that the next shot would be directed at Landon, not the bear.

  Dr. Gregory said, “She’s on a walk with my wife. They shouldn’t be gone very long.”

  “Your wife said around thirty minutes. We’re probably down to twenty-five by now.”

  “Probably.”

  “That big dog of yours, too, right?”

  “Yes, the dog is with them.”

  “Who’s Adrienne?”

  “My neighbor across the way. She has nothing to do with this.”

  “Everyone who shows up at this house from this point on will be considered to have something to do with this.”

  Gregory felt sweat dripping down the crease of his back.

  Landon held up her bear and said, “She’s not dead. Daphne isn’t dead. She’s only wounded. You have to hit them in the head to kill them.”

  The bad man smiled at the girl’s conclusion about guns and bullets, but he addressed Dr. Gregory. He said, “I don’t think you’re lying to me at the moment. But in case you are, here is the reason you are still alive: If I discover that you’ve lied to me, the first thing that will happen is that you will tell me the truth, then you will die slowly and painfully. If it turns out you’ve already been truthful, you’ll die the same death as Daphne.”

  Landon said, “Daphne is not dead. See?” She spun the bear and pointed it at Krist. The hole from the slug was almost invisible in the toy’s abundant fur. “As a matter-of-fact, Daphne is the epitome of not dead.”

  The man ignored her. “So is there anything you would like to add to what you’ve told me, Dr. Gregory?”

  Gregory thought, This man doesn’t know about Carl. “No,” Gregory said, “I have nothing to add.”

  “Good. Put your hands on your head and go sit in that chair.” Gregory moved closer to Landon. The man said, “No, not next to her. That one, there. Yes… good.” He inhaled deeply. “I like that smell. Cordite. Don’t you?”

  Landon whispered, “Is he the man who shot my daddy?”

  “I don’t think so, honey.” What Alan left unsaid was that he thought this was the man who was going to shoot her mommy.

  The man asked, “You have a cell phone in the house?”

  “It’s in my car. In the garage. I leave it there most of the time.”

  “Your wife? She have one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I’d have to check to be sure, but it’s probably charging on a little desk in the kitchen.” He tilted his head toward the front of the house in the general direction of the kitchen. “She charges it every day when she gets home from work. The charger’s on the desk.”

  The man backed away toward the kitchen. Without warning, he ducked inside for a moment and returned a few seconds later with Lauren’s flip phone. “This is it? Your wife’s phone?”

  “Yes.”

  The man dropped it on the hardwood floor and pounded on it with the heel of one of his Mephistos. It skittered away in one piece. He retrieved it, and after looking around for a hard vertical surface to fling it against, he threw it as hard as he could into the floor. The phone busted into three pieces.

  “That should take care of the phone problem. You expecting any visitors besides this Adrienne person your wife was talking about?”

  Alan saw Landon begin to open her mouth. He cut her off before she could say something that might reveal Carl’s presence. “Adrienne’s a doctor. She’s coming over with a strep test for the girl. She’s the only visitor we’re expecting tonight.”

  Krist smirked. He said, “No one else is coming?”

  “No. We’re not expecting anyone.”

  Krist said, “But then again, you didn’t exactly expect me, did you?”

  7

  As Carl trudged up the hill he figured he was either being totally paranoid about the car with the surveying equipment, or he was about to meet a pro, most likely somebody Prowler had sent to clean up after what happened to Barbara Barbara Turner.

  Carl was still a good fifty yards from the house when he spotted the telephone cable dangling like squid-ink spaghetti from a weathered post on the far side of Gregory’s house. That’s when Carl knew for certain that he wasn’t being paranoid about the car. He stared at the cable for almost ten seconds, then muttered, “I’d only go to that kind of trouble if I was planning on camping out in there.” His conclusion: Prowler’s new pro wasn’t sure what he was going to find inside the doctor’s house. So the guy had prepared himself for a lengthy stay.

  Carl slowed his pace as he approached the garden level of the house. Even though the basement window lock had been jimmied by a careful person, Carl recognized the damage immediately. Nonetheless, Carl was impressed by the quality of the work. Not surprised, but impressed. This wasn’t some bozo with a hammer and a rag.

  Carl circled the house on the north and entered the Gregorys’ garage through the side door. He paused and perused the good doctor’s inventory of garden tools, ultimately choosing a hatchet that looked old enough to have belonged to Gregory when he was a Boy Scout.

  Carl recognized his doctor’s car. It was on the far side of the garage. The car closest to the side door of the garage had to be Lauren’s. The passenger-side door of the car was locked. The driver’s side door wasn’t. Carl let himself in, slid onto the driver’s seat and tried the glove box door. As Lauren had promised, it was locked.

  Without hesitation Carl swung the hatchet against the lock. He didn’t get much of an arc in the confined space inside the car and the blade on the ax was so dull that the first stroke barely dented the hard plastic on the dashboard. He flipped the hatchet over and pounded at the little door three more times—whap, whap, whap—with the blunt back side of the tool.

  The door popped.

  He reached in and grabbed Lauren’s Beretta, checked the magazine, and flicked off the safety. Then he chambered a round, placed the gun on his lap and checked his pulse. Calm and steady at seventy-eight.

  “It’s just like riding a bike,” he said to himself, and he retraced his steps toward the basement window with the jimmied lock.

  CARL COULD BARELY wriggle through the opening. His shoulders got stuck first. After he finally got them through, his hips got caught. Eventually, he had to twist sideways to get inside the damn house. As he lowered himself headfirst to the carpeted floor of the basement, he concluded that the new guy that Prowler had sent was either a snake or a midget.

  Carl lifted himself from his prone position and a single loud thud shook the floor above his head. He froze and began to count. The counting was a prison reflex—he used to time the approach of the guards as they neared his cell. When his count reached the number thirteen, C
arl heard another sound upstairs, this one sharper, as something hit the same location on the floor.

  Carl sprinted toward the staircase.

  He was close to them now.

  Now he could hear voices.

  He began to climb the stairs. Two steps from the top he heard Prowler’s man say, “But then again, you didn’t exactly expect me, did you?”

  8

  “They may not have expected you,” Carl said. “But I did.”

  Carl Luppo hadn’t stayed alive in La Cosa Nostra for so many years by playing fair. Once he saw the gun that the man was pointing at Dr. Gregory, Carl didn’t wait for the guy holding the weapon to turn around to even the odds. Carl shot the man right in the back, grouping three slugs between the man’s shoulder blades into an area about the size of a navel orange.

  Maybe a grapefruit.

  Lauren’s Beretta had roared in the confined space, and the smell of burnt powder hung in the air like a metallic mist.

  Though his ears were ringing, Carl thought he could hear Landon screaming from across the room.

  He said, “Dr. Gregory? Is the girl okay?” But he couldn’t even hear his own voice, let alone the doctor’s reply.

  9

  Time stood at attention. Perfectly still, like the guards outside Buckingham Palace.

  What are those guys called anyway? Oh, it doesn’t matter.

  Every precious thing …

  Every precious thing …

  From the moment Carl Luppo had begun crabbing up that hillside of golden grasses until the moment I heard the gunfire explode from Dr. Gregory’s house could have been a minute, an hour, a day, a year.

  All I know is that it was a lifetime.

  After Carl warned us to stay away from the house, Lauren had tugged me and the two dogs back up to the intersection of the dirt lanes. She wanted to be in position to flag down Adrienne before her neighbor drove unwittingly into whatever was happening in the house.

  We stood there waiting to learn what was happening to my daughter and her husband. We talked little, and I can no longer remember a word that passed between us while we paced at the intersection of the lanes. I do recall the fading light—the night was more than halfway done stealing the relics of the day. And I recall my fear that the sunset was a metaphor for something I didn’t want to imagine.

  Lauren held Emily’s leash. I squeezed Anvil in my arms. The rapid pace of his heart—faster even than my own—helped me pretend that I was calm.

  The sudden sound of the gunfire that came from the house caused both Lauren and me to jump back as though we were dodging bullets. The big dog’s ears went down and she whimpered.

  An instant later Lauren yelled, “Alan!” and began to run down the lane.

  I said, “My baby!” and I dropped Anvil to the ground. I was past Lauren in a second, the dog beside me on my left.

  Everybody knows that in the face of panic, mothers can outrun mere wives.

  And I like to think I can outrun an eight-months-pregnant woman any day of the week.

  chapter

  eleven

  SUBURBAN BLUES

  1

  As I burst in the front door the smell hit me first.

  Burnt powder.

  Maybe twenty feet from the door I saw a man sprawled on the floor. He was bent in ways that proclaimed death, an arm twisted below him, his neck wrenched sideways. The back of the taupe sofa behind him was polka-dotted with dark spots of different sizes. I knew the spots were his blood. The man’s face was turned away from me but he was small, too small to be my doctor, too thin to be Carl Luppo.

  I wanted to scream for my daughter but I didn’t know what I’d walked into, and I didn’t want to put her in any more danger than she was already in.

  Every precious thing …

  Lauren joined me in the open doorway. I watched her eyes as she saw the man who was dead on the floor and then as she spotted two handguns lying on the table near the top of the stairs. One of the two pistols was elongated by a silencer. She covered her mouth with her spread fingers and quietly said, “Oh my God.”

  Emily began barking at the corpse on the floor. The dog was baring her fangs, ignoring commands from Lauren to quiet. Lauren used all her strength to control the leash. Anvil joined in the chorus of barking, but his yip was high-pitched and lacked fervor. His heart wasn’t really in it.

  I think he was just trying to belong.

  Carl heard the commotion the dogs were making and stepped into the doorway that led to the living room from the deck. “Hi,” he said. “I was outside trying to signal you guys everything was over up here.”

  The dogs quieted. I wasn’t at all sure why.

  I spit out the solitary word, “Landon?”

  He tilted his head. “She’s good. She’s back in the bedroom with the doctor. We didn’t think she should be here with … you know … the guy.”

  “Did she …?” I couldn’t finish my own thought.

  Carl knew. He said, “She heard what happened but she didn’t actually see anything. The jerk shot her bear.”

  “He shot her bear? Daphne?”

  Lauren said, “My husband? Alan’s okay?”

  “Absolutely, absolutely. Things got a little testy … but… hey, you know. It turned out for the best.”

  I looked at the man on the floor. “Carl, who, um, is he?”

  Carl shrugged. “Didn’t give his name. Some guy with a gun. He was here to do a piece of work and he was looking for you, Peyton. He told Dr. Gregory he was looking for you.”

  I started to shake. I started to cry.

  Lauren’s voice was hollow. She said, “We need to call the police.”

  Carl said, “Yeah. But the phones are dead. He cut the lines. Busted up somebody’s cell phone, too.”

  Behind me, I heard a car approaching on the lane. Emily turned her head and growled.

  Lauren put her arms around me to try to provide some comfort. She said, “That’ll be Adrienne with the strep tests. She’ll have a phone. You don’t know her but my guess is she’ll be pissed off that she missed all the excitement.”

  To no one, to myself, I said, “I need to calm down, stop crying, so I can go see my baby.”

  “Sure, sure,” Lauren said. As she embraced me I could feel her baby kicking at the walls of her womb.

  A car door slammed.

  Ten seconds later Jack Tarpin walked in the door of the house.

  Immediately I pushed Lauren away from me and I stopped crying.

  My first thought was that Jack hadn’t changed much in all these years.

  2

  My second thought?

  Jack was wearing chinos.

  I swear. Also, beat-up old boat shoes without socks and a striped polo shirt that had once been brown and yellow but was now beige and off-white. But most definitely chinos.

  Jack Tarpin was a fresh whale dressed in chinos.

  That’s how I knew that he was here to kill me.

  I said, “Jack.”

  I USED EVERY bit of self-control I had in order to refrain from running wildly toward the bedrooms to find Landon. I didn’t even flick a glance that way.

  Jack said, “Hello, Kirsten. I’d say ‘good-to-see-you after all this time’ but it’s really not.” He puffed a little air through his nostrils in some expression of derision. “All these years and you can’t let something go. Don’t know if it makes any difference to you, but the cops never trusted you.” He filled his cheeks with air and then exhaled through pursed lips. “You two ladies step away from those guns there on that table, please.”

  Before he even finished his sentence, I heard a clatter behind me and turned my head to see Carl’s wide back and shoulders as he crossed the narrow deck and launched himself headfirst over the railing.

  I hadn’t seen Jack holding a gun—I don’t know where on his body he’d had it stashed—but before I turned back to him, he unleashed a round that whizzed right past my head. The roar caused my gut to grip.

>   He’d shot at Carl.

  Before I had a chance to scream, Jack was past me, running toward the glass doors. He hurdled the sofa like a steeplechaser, and his front shoulder sent the screen door off its tracks as he blasted toward the spot where Carl had propelled himself from the deck.

  I yelled, “Carl! Watch out!”

  Jack spent about five seconds scouring the area below the deck, but the night was upon us and he apparently didn’t see anything he thought was worth shooting. I watched him touch a spot on the railing with the pinky of his free hand. He lifted the finger until it was just below his nose and he sniffed. When he looked up again, he narrowed his eyes and raised the gun so it pointed right at my belly.

  “I take it that was your wiseguy?” he said to me.

  “What?”

  He raised his pinky in an odd salute. “I think I got him. There’s some blood out here.”

  He started to laugh, but he stopped as soon as he was far enough back into the room to focus his eyes on the dead man who was on the floor by the sofa. It was as if he was seeing the guy for the first time.

  “Hell’s bells,” he said, shaking his head. “I sure wish I knew what the hey was going on here.” He pointed at the man with the barrel of his handgun. “Who the heck is this?”

  Neither Lauren nor I answered.

  He raised his voice. “The dead guy. Who is it?”

  I said, “Somebody broke into the house. My friend shot him.”

  Jack seemed to consider my story while he rubbed his face with the heel of his free hand. More to himself than to Lauren and me, he said, “Another one of Prowler’s, I bet. I’m glad I came.”

  Lauren said, “What?”

  He shook his head. “I want you two to go lie down on top of that pool table over there.” He waved the gun. “Go on, the both of you. Where I can see you. I sure didn’t expect such a crowd at this place. Thought it was just going to be me talking to some doctor.” He ran the fingers of his free hand through his thick white hair and sighed. “I have to take a minute to figure out exactly how I’m going to do this and have any prayer of getting away with it.”