The Program

by Stephen White

  I comforted myself with the knowledge that of all the things that Jack had been accused of being during his less-than-illustrious career—drunk, coward, incompetent—he’d never been accused of being a genius.

  Lauren’s skin was so pale I was afraid she was going to pass out. I led her by her clammy hand and helped her climb onto the felt-lined slate of the pool table. She never relinquished hold of Emily’s leash. The dog was uncharacteristically restrained.

  To me Lauren whimpered, “He can’t kill my baby, can he? He won’t kill my baby?”

  Jack spoke again. “While I’m thinking here, you go ahead and put your arms over your heads, you know, like you were doing jumping jacks or diving backward into a pool or something.” We did. He said, “Good. Stay that way.”

  It seemed to me Jack was making a mistake by ignoring the big dog. But then I didn’t know the dog very well. Still quiet, Emily was sitting at the far end of the pool table. Anvil was right next to her.

  My thoughts leapt back to Landon.

  Every precious thing …

  A few seconds later Lauren surprised me by saying, “It was you who got the call that day, wasn’t it? It wasn’t your partner.”

  From my position on the pool table I couldn’t see Jack’s face. I actually didn’t even know where he was in the room. Seconds passed and I was almost convinced that he wasn’t going to answer her.

  Finally, he said, “So you know all about it, do you? You must be the lawyer who was talking to my Pamela.” His voice was as melodious as a brogue.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you’re here today, little lady. What a mess to be a part of. A bun in the oven, too. I’m very sorry you’re here. I’m sorry for both of us.” He paused. “A little more sorry for myself than I am for you, but I’m sorry nonetheless.”

  As though she hadn’t even registered the threat Jack was making, Lauren pressed him. “You got the call from Pat Lieber, though, right? That day at the station. You’re the one who re-did the GSR? Then you set up your partner in case things went wrong?”

  Jack didn’t answer.

  “Just tell me if I’m right.”

  The lilt disappeared from Jack’s tone as he replied, “Shut up, why don’t you. I’m thinking, here.”

  I raised my head and saw that Jack was sitting across the room on a straight-back chair. He’d chosen a position where he could not only see outside toward the deck in case Carl returned, but he could also keep an eye on the front door and on the stairs that came up from the basement.

  I craned my neck a little farther—the two guns that had been on the entry table were no longer there.

  Jack was well armed.

  I lowered my head and prayed for Landon.

  I wondered about Dr. Gregory.

  I wondered about Carl.

  I prayed some more.

  Jack stood and stepped close to the pool table. I raised my head again so that I could see him. He had a big automatic handgun in his right hand. He asked, “Is there anybody else in this house. Like back there?” He was pointing at the hallway that led to the master bedroom.

  Toward Landon.

  I said, “No. No one else is here.”

  “Where’s your kid, Kirsten? You have a little girl.”

  I hesitated a split second as I constructed a lie. Jack saw me hesitate.

  “She’s here, isn’t she?” he asked, even before I could tell him my lie.

  “No,” is all I said. The solitary word was more protest than denial. I raised my voice. “No! No! Don’t go in there.” Dr. Gregory and Landon had to have heard me.

  They had to.

  Jack was already moving past the pool table toward the bedroom. He stopped. “Get up,” he commanded Lauren.

  When she’d struggled to her feet, he placed her in front of him as a shield and began pushing her down the hallway toward the bedroom. Over his shoulder he told me not to move an inch or he’d kill my daughter.

  I stayed on my back on the pool table and prayed while I steeled myself for the roar of a gun.

  Emily barked. Anvil yipped, too.

  3

  Alan had, of course, heard the roar of the shot that Jack Tarpin had unleashed at Carl Luppo as Carl dove off the deck. Immediately, Alan had spirited Landon outside onto the master bedroom deck and lowered her over the side, eventually dropping her to the ground, and he hoped, to relative safety.

  Alan followed Landon over the railing. He found her underneath the deck sitting next to Carl Luppo.

  “They shot Uncle Carl,” Landon said in a rapid whisper. “But he’s not going to die because they got him in the leg, not in the head. My daddy was shot in the head, and that’s where they have to get you if they want you to die.”

  Carl said, “That’s not exactly true, pumpkin.”

  Alan said, “How bad is it, Carl?”

  Carl flicked a glance at Landon. “Not good,” he said. “Not good. He didn’t hit me with no .22. I’m losing some serious blood here.”

  Alan lowered his head and tried to examine the wound, which was high on Carl’s thigh a few inches below his buttocks. Carl already had his belt wrapped around his leg near his groin as a tourniquet.

  “Who’s in there with them?” Alan asked. “Who shot you?”

  “Peyton called him Jack. I don’t know. You gotta go do something for the women, Doc. Take my gun.”

  “You have a gun?”

  “I borrowed it from this woman I met recently. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.”

  Alan said, “I have a phone in my car. I’m going to call the police.”

  “You don’t have time. That man’s here to kill Peyton. He’s not going to let your wife witness that and live. He’ll kill her too.”

  Alan looked at Carl while he weighed the gun in his hand. “Is this ready to fire? I don’t know much about guns.”

  Carl checked to make certain a round was chambered. “Yeah, it’s ready. But it’s a .22. A small caliber. You’re going to have to get close enough to the guy to hit him in the head.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s a big guy. This thing doesn’t have stopping power like a .38 or a .44 or even a .9mm. You’ll have to get him in the head to make it stick so he doesn’t turn around and get the women after you shoot him.”

  “I told you,” said Landon.

  Carl gestured behind him. “The basement window is open. You can go back in that way if you want.”

  Alan swallowed and considered his options. “If I have to get as close as you say, I’m thinking of another plan. Take care of Carl, Landon, okay?”

  She said she would.

  Alan took off around the house. He arrived out front just in time to see the headlights of Adrienne’s Chevrolet Suburban bouncing down the lane. Instantly, he revised his plan and jogged out to meet her car.

  ADRIENNE AGREED TO hit the doorbell that was next to Alan and Lauren’s front door before she ran back over to her house. She promised to call 911 on her cell phone as soon as she was safely inside with Jonas and his nanny.

  While Adrienne hit the bell, Alan waited crouched down low in the driver’s seat of her Suburban, which he’d parked ten feet from his front door. The .22 pistol that Carl had given him was tucked between his right thigh and the seat of the car. The engine was running. The headlights were on. The brights were on. The huge vehicle was in four-wheel drive. And it was in gear.

  Alan could barely see over the rim of the dashboard. But he could clearly see the fan-shaped window that was cut high into the front door of his house.

  He fixed his eyes on that window, and he waited.

  4

  While Jack and Lauren were gone searching the master bedroom, time stopped for me again. I don’t know how long it actually took them to come back into the room. It felt like a year or two.

  But it was probably a minute or so.

  Jack immediately ordered Lauren back onto the pool table and then walked out of my line of vision.


  He said, “Where’s your kid?”

  “With friends,” I said. I’d anticipated the question and had a pack of lies all ready to go.

  He didn’t ask for any more of my lies though.

  For two or three minutes the room was as quiet as the night. The only sounds I heard were the dogs breathing and the pounding of my heart.

  Finally Jack said, “We’re going to have to go someplace else. I don’t want to do what I have to do here.”

  “You mean kill us?” I said. I don’t know why I wanted him to admit his plans, but I did.

  Before he could respond, the doorbell rang and the dogs started barking as though the world was ending. Emily tore off toward the front door. Lauren barely had time to grab the handle on her leash. The dog almost succeeded in yanking her master off the table. I kept a firm grip on Anvil’s lead so he couldn’t take off toward the door.

  “You know who that is?” asked Jack over Emily’s barking, which was almost cacophonous.

  Lauren raised herself to her elbows and said, “My neighbor’s coming over. She’s a doctor. She’s dropping something by on her way home from work. She doesn’t know about any of this. Just go to the door and tell her I’ll call her later. If you want me to, I’ll do it.”

  “Stay where you are. What if I don’t answer?”

  “She heard the dogs. She may come in to get them. Her son likes to play with our dogs.”

  “She has a key to your house?”

  “Yes, she has a key to the house.”

  Jack Tarpin faced us. “Either of you two moves, you’re dead.”

  I said, “We’re dead anyway.”

  With the gun in his hand he walked toward the front door.

  I whispered to Lauren, “How far is the drop off the deck?”

  “About ten feet.”

  “We have to do it.”

  She grabbed her belly. “My baby. She won’t make it if I jump.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “She definitely won’t make it if you don’t. He’s going to kill us.”

  “Alan will come.”

  “No, Lauren,” I said. “We have to jump. I’ll help you over the rail. On three. One, two—”

  Before I could say “three,” the front of the house seemed to explode and bright lights flashed into the room. The roar was deafening and a cloud of dust billowed back into our faces.

  I grabbed Lauren’s arm and yanked her toward the deck.

  5

  Alan saw a shadow fall across the window that was cut into the door a split second before he saw the pink face that followed.

  He didn’t hesitate.

  He pounded on the gas pedal of Adrienne’s huge Suburban. The front end seemed to falter momentarily before it lurched across the few feet of gravel and hopped up the solitary step to the porch. The two decorative columns that supported the entryway blew away from the path of the car and a moment later the blunt face of the Suburban decimated the doorway of the house. Alan sat back against the seat and braced himself for the explosion of the air bag. When it came, it still stunned him.

  The front door and its entire frame collapsed inward. The car hesitated once more. Alan sat up higher in the seat and kept full pressure on the gas. He thought he heard a scream but the echo of the airbag detonation and the noise of the destruction were too intense for him to be certain.

  Ten feet or so into the house the Suburban came to a grinding stop.

  Alan grabbed the gun that was wedged beneath his leg and climbed out the driver’s door into the destruction of the entryway of his house.

  Frantically he searched the rubble in front of the Suburban for signs of the man with the pink face. The air was thick with dust and the brash glare from the headlights reflected back into his eyes. He spotted a weathered boat shoe near his own feet. Then he found the collapsed front door. It was resting almost flat on the floor. The man was not underneath it.

  Alan leaned over to search beneath the car. He felt a hand close hard around his ankle. Before he could react the hand yanked him from his feet.

  As he fell he saw the orange disks of Emily’s eyes as she peered through the dust and debris. Her mouth was opening and closing as she barked, but Alan couldn’t hear her roar.

  The gunfire was too loud.

  The man with the pink face was trapped beneath the Suburban. One of his hands gripped Alan’s ankle like a vise. The other hand, pinned by part of the front-door frame, held a semiautomatic pistol. The man was firing back toward Alan, but the arm with the gun was totally restrained by the door frame, and the man couldn’t rotate his wrist quite far enough to aim correctly to hit his target. With each shot, though, he was getting closer.

  Alan lifted the .22. Through the haze and dust he spotted the man’s head and chest beneath the oil pan of the Suburban’s engine. Alan raised his gun, the barrel only three feet away from the man’s head, maybe four. He leaned back and aimed, remembering Carl’s warning that he had to be close enough to be certain he could hit the man’s head.

  The man fired again. The bullet whipped into the wall inches from Alan’s chest.

  Alan closed his eyes and fired.

  He didn’t open his eyes again until the grip relaxed on his leg.

  Finally, he heard barking and in the distance, sirens.

  chapter

  twelve

  ON KINNIKINIC

  1

  The State of Florida executed Khalid Granger early on the morning of my thirty-sixth birthday, three days shy of his own.

  I stayed up late the night that he was electrocuted. I sat in front of my new computer, glued to the Internet, waiting with futility for word that the governor of my home state would show enough courage to spare the life of a very bad man who absolutely didn’t deserve to die at the hands of the people.

  The final word from his spokesman was that the governor went to bed at his usual time. It was much earlier than I went to bed that night. I’m afraid that the governor slept better than I did, too.

  Did he sleep better than Carl Luppo?

  Or better than Ernesto Castro?

  I somehow doubted it. I was already of the belief that all hit men sleep like babies.

  LAUREN AND I had tried. God, had we tried. I thought we had a good story. A great story even. But, in Florida, during every autumn football season, our culprit, Pat Lieber, was more popular than God. And the truth was, we didn’t have a bit of actual proof to back up our claims that Lieber had bribed Jack Tarpin to set up Khalid Granger for the murder of the two Mennonites in the Sarasota convenience store.

  Lauren told me that what we really had was the best recipe for slander that she’d ever seen in her life.

  I heeded her frequent pleas for caution, so we proceeded carefully. But we made scant progress.

  We were able to prove that Jack took a phone call from Pat Lieber at the police station on the day of the crime. The timing though? We could never pin that down with any certainty. What was said? Lieber certainly wasn’t talking, wasn’t even returning our messages. My last attempt to reach him by phone earned me a referral to an attorney in a Miami law firm. The lawyer specialized in libel and slander cases.

  Jack Tarpin, of course, wasn’t talking either. Jack had died in the ruins of Alan and Lauren’s entryway from a single gunshot to his head.

  Pamela, Jack’s widow, freely admitted to us that she had written the letter to Dave Curtiss about Khalid’s innocence. At the time she thought, of course, that by writing the letter she was not only being a good citizen but was also blowing the whistle on Mickey Redondo, not on her own husband. Her admission didn’t matter, though; everything she knew about the case was part of the assortment of lies that had been packaged and wrapped by her now dead husband. She wasn’t able to tell Lauren and me anything that assisted us.

  Police firing-range records confirmed that Jack and Mickey had gone to the range the night of the murders to practice shooting. It was an act that one of their colleagues told me was, “Absolutely in
explicable the night of a double homicide. Meshuga. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

  Mickey Redondo maintained all along that he didn’t know a thing about what Jack might have been up to. He didn’t remember anything about spilling coffee and switching out the GSR envelopes. Mickey never wavered from his position that Khalid Granger was as guilty as an adolescent at confession and that Jack Tarpin wasn’t smart enough to frame a picture, let alone an innocent man. I think one of two things was true: Mickey was either an integral part of the whole mess or he was just too humiliated to admit that he’d been duped by someone he disrespected as much as he disrespected Jack.

  Sometimes I figured the first was true; other times I was sure it was really the second.

  We were able to discover that during the winter after the murders in the convenience store Jack’s oldest son received a full-ride academic scholarship to the University of Tennessee, which happened to be Lieber’s alma mater. Pat Lieber, it turned out, had written a glowing letter in support of the scholarship application. An admissions officer admitted to us off the record that Jack Tarpin’s kid was “barely deserving” of the award he’d received. Had the grant process been corrupted? No one was saying. We couldn’t prove that it had been. But Lieber’s recommendation letter in support of Jack’s son’s application was so laudatory it glowed like the Hope diamond in the noonday sun.

  Was that surprising? Only if you considered the fact that we were never able to ascertain that Pat Lieber had ever actually met the young Mr. Tarpin.

  Lauren and I suspected that the scholarship was the payoff that Lieber arranged for Jack Tarpin’s help in framing Khalid. As a payoff, the strategy was elegant. No money ever actually changed hands. No financial transactions could be traced by zealous prosecutors.

  Like us.