by Alan Orloff
“No. Mature is a word I’d never use to describe how I acted. You, on the other hand . . .” He trailed off.
“What?”
“You were sublime.”
Theresa didn’t answer, just gazed off into the distance. Into the past, judging by her unfocused eyes. King usually didn’t find rooting around in his memories to be productive, so he busied his mind with other things whenever the past threatened to choke out his present. Sometimes he wished he could be a character from one of his novels, who, throughout the course of a single book, would overcome his obstacles and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, his life was strictly nonfiction. And painful. He’d hurt a lot of people and had carried himself in a manner that disgusted him now that he was sober. “You keep up with anyone else from those golden years?”
She didn’t look at him as she answered. “Thom Ulrich. Sherry Dade. Boots O’Conner. They’re all good. All still in the biz. I do some freelancing from time to time. Our paths cross. But all in all, I put that chapter behind me a long time ago, pun intended. I’m happily divorced from a mortgage banker. Two kids, all grown up. Life’s good.” She turned to him. “You still with Lanny?”
“Yeah.” If King remembered correctly, Theresa never much liked him. Of course, most people in publishing thought Lanny was a royal pain in the ass. Not always such a bad quality in an agent, although you had to pick your spots. King figured Lanny had lost as much business with his in-your-face manner as he’d generated.
“That’s a long time to be with one agent.”
“I guess.” King squinted against the sun. “So where’s Connelly? On assignment somewhere?”
“Actually, I was expecting to see him today. But he’s not the most reliable guy, is he? Oh well. If we’re lucky, maybe he’ll be at the next funeral.”
“I see you haven’t lost your dry sense of humor. Let’s just hope it isn’t at one of our funerals,” King said.
“Now look who’s the funny one.”
“Better than crying.”
Theresa offered a small smile. “You’re a professor now, right? How does it feel molding young people’s minds?”
“Mostly futile. If I can reach one percent, then I’m happy.”
“Not writing? Aren’t we past due for another Nick Nolan novel?”
“Jesus, not you too. Lanny would wear a dress and kiss me on the lips if I wrote another one of those. I’ve left Nick Nolan behind. It’s probably going to be my legacy, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.” He paused, then snorted. “Actually, I know exactly how I feel about that. Crappy.”
“Those books entertained many people. Propped up portions of both the publishing and motion picture industries. That’s worth something. That’s worth a lot, I’d say.”
“Thanks, but you’re just being kind. I remember what you thought of them back then. Fluff. Popcorn. Drivel. That’s one reason we . . .”
“Went our separate ways? No. I may have expressed those opinions then, before I developed a greater appreciation for mass-market appeal and the almighty dollar, but that wasn’t what broke us up. It was—”
King held up his hand. “I know what broke us up. I did, plain and simple. As you said, I was an asshole. A grade A asshole.”
Theresa laughed. “Yeah. You sure were.”
#
Seeing Theresa at the funeral had awakened a bunch of sleeping memories, including some of his time working with James Connelly. To those who didn’t know the man, Connelly could come off as crass and crusty, but to those who really knew him, he was just crusty.
It had been a while since King had seen him, and he was disappointed Connelly hadn’t been at the funeral, but the man’s Bethesda neighborhood wasn’t more than twenty minutes out of King’s way. Before he left the funeral home, King pulled his road atlas out of the trunk and looked up Connelly’s address. He scratched out a few directions on the back of a take-out menu he found under the passenger’s seat and set off to visit his old friend.
To see how he was getting on, of course.
And to see if he might have insight regarding King’s problem. After all, Connelly had helped King with some of the research for Attack on America.
Fifteen minutes later, King negotiated his way through Connelly’s neighborhood, trying to remember the last time he’d been there. Five or six years ago, for a reception celebrating Connelly’s only daughter’s wedding. He remembered sitting on the back deck by the kidney-shaped pool with Barbara, nursing their mimosas. Happier times, for sure.
King pulled up to a large brick house and checked the address he’d scribbled on the back of the menu against the one on the mailbox. This was the place. Connelly lived alone now; about a year after that wedding reception his wife left him for a younger man, and last King heard, they were sailing around the Caribbean. Based on his limited knowledge of the woman, King thought Connelly was better off.
King killed the engine and got out. He’d thought about calling Connelly just to make sure he’d be around, but King didn’t want to get chased off by any excuses. He knew Connelly was a moody SOB. Some people mellow with age—Connelly hadn’t, as far as King could tell. Better to just show up unannounced and take his chances. If he wasn’t home, King had wasted only a little time.
On the porch, King rang the bell and waited. The bushes flanking the walkway needed trimming, and it had been a while since the rest of the yard had seen a lawn mower. King knew that, given the choice between eradicating weeds and eradicating brain cells, Connelly would choose the bottle of Scotch over the Weedwacker eight days a week.
He pressed the doorbell button again. Still no answer. King waited another few moments, then pulled out his phone and called Connelly. It would be hard for him to come up with a decent excuse if King was right there on the porch. Five rings, then the message machine kicked on. “It’s Mathias King, James. I’m right outside.” King clicked off and made his way around the house. Stopping at the garage door, he peered inside, noticing Connelly’s silver Mercedes.
King continued to circle the house. He unlatched the gate leading to the backyard and passed through it. Maybe Connelly was in the back reading, or working his sources by phone as he lounged by the pool, or even dozing off in the late afternoon sun.
King walked along the flagstone path, ducking and dodging branches; the landscape wasn’t tended any better back there. He rounded the corner but didn’t spot Connelly, or anyone else for that matter, sitting by the pool. Two French doors with large glass panels led into the house. King cupped his hands around his eyes to shield the sun’s reflection off the windows and looked inside.
The first thing he saw was a swarm of flies batting against the glass, trying to get out.
Chapter Thirteen
Past the haze of flies, Connelly’s body sprawled on the kitchen floor in a vast pool of blood, red spatter everywhere, as if a paint bomb had detonated. King jumped back, fighting to keep down the hot dog he’d grabbed right before he’d left for Feinbaum’s funeral service. He bent over, hands on his knees, trying to control his breathing, afraid he was about to hyperventilate. Closing his eyes, he counted to fifty.
When he opened them, nothing had changed. Oh God, poor Connelly.
Slowly the nausea abated. He straightened and fished his phone from his pocket, ready to dial 911, but his trembling fingers never touched the keypad. After a moment, he put the phone back into his pocket and tried the doorknob.
Unlocked.
Girding himself, he glanced inside again. Even from this distance, he could tell there was absolutely no way Connelly was alive. No way. From the looks of the body, it had been a very painful death. A center island blocked much of King’s view, but it appeared as if several of Connelly’s limbs had been cut off, and his body seemed to be in many “chunks,” for lack of a better word.
Something about the macabre tableau beckoned to King.
He opened the door a crack and stepped aside to allow the flies to escape, then he slipped into the
house. The stench of death was almost unbearable. Putrid. Permanent. In many ways, death was the final egalitarian act of nature.
King jammed his nose into the crook of his elbow, and breathing through his mouth as best he could, he approached the body, careful not to step in any blood—a difficult task. As he got closer, he spotted the murder weapon. A circular saw, sitting on the floor, cord still plugged into a wall socket.
Again, King’s lunch threatened to come up. Like a fiery car accident, he didn’t want to keep looking, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the carnage.
His mind leaped back thirty years, when he was using his imagination to devise increasingly bizarre murder weapons. Grapefruit knives, power washers, tiki torches. Back then, it was creative. Fun, in a sick sort of way.
Now, here, thirty years later, gazing upon the bloody body of a former friend, King loathed himself more than words could express. In Attack on America, Dragunov had killed a victim using a circular saw, and he’d cut the man’s body into pieces.
In exactly the same fashion Connelly had been dissected.
King remembered writing that scene, the exhilaration he’d felt describing the murder in explicit detail, thinking how clever he’d been. What a goddamn fucking asshole.
A moment later, King’s lunch finally made an appearance.
#
Precisely sixty minutes later, Colonel Hanson P. Locraft sat at a table in James Connelly’s backyard, overlooking the pool. When he got the initial report from Slattery, he knew the shit was about to fly, but he was prepared to delegate the on-site duties. When Slattery reported in again from the scene and relayed more of the gruesome details, Locraft knew his presence at the scene was required. To get everyone on the same page and to keep things under wraps, as well as to project authority and confidence that the larger situation would be cleared up in short order.
If only he really felt that way.
“Get me Slattery,” he barked to an assistant standing fifteen feet away. The flunky rushed off, and Slattery materialized a moment later, as if he’d been hiding behind a nearby tree waiting to be summoned.
“Sit,” Locraft said.
Slattery took the only other chair and scooted it to one side so his face wouldn’t be hidden in the shade provided by the umbrella sticking out of the table’s center. “We’re almost done here. In five more minutes, no one will be able to tell anyone got so much as a paper cut.”
“Good. Local law enforcement?”
“We invoked Homeland Security concerns, and they were satisfied relinquishing jurisdiction. We didn’t see the need to tell them about the body, at least not yet.”
Christ. The fucking deception, although necessary, rankled Locraft no end. “We sure it was Dragunov?” he asked, although he knew the answer. A circular saw wasn’t the weapon of choice for most murderers.
Slattery nodded. “That’s the assumption we’re making until we learn otherwise. But it would be a coincidence of great magnitude if it wasn’t.”
“Any idea why he picked this guy?”
“We don’t usually like to jump to conclusions, but obviously there’s some connection between King and Connelly. Another friend of King’s . . .” Slattery paused and checked his smartphone. “Fred Feinbaum also died recently. Very recently. After Dragunov’s escape.”
“Feinbaum, huh? Knew the name, never met the man.” Locraft pursed his lips. “Cause of death?”
“We’re checking now.”
Locraft nodded, wondering why this all couldn’t have happened four years from now, after he’d retired. “Okay. Even if Feinbaum’s death is not related, we’ve got to figure King might be on Dragunov’s hit list, too, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Where is King?”
“We let him go. He was clearly agitated, and frankly we didn’t want him in the way while we took care of things here. We’ve got a team watching him. If Dragunov makes a play for King, we’ll nab him.”
“Using King as bait?”
Slattery shifted in his chair. “I wouldn’t frame it in those terms. We’re watching King for his own protection.”
“And King was okay with that?” Locraft asked.
A small smirk appeared on Slattery’s face for a second, then vanished. “We didn’t actually tell him. Didn’t want him to make a fuss or anything. Better if he doesn’t know anyway. Wouldn’t want to scare him. Don’t worry, everything is under control.”
Famous last words.
#
In his thrillers, King put his heroes through the ringer, in every chapter, every scene. He increased the pressure on them, then redoubled it. Then dumped even more crap on their heads. That’s what thrillers were all about.
That’s what his fans had wanted; that’s what he’d delivered. Nick Nolan against insurmountable odds, faced with death. Sometimes he’d escape by the narrowest of margins, other times he’d stay and conquer his foe with astounding examples of derring-do. His exploits were death defying, harrowing, thrilling, and if you wanted to put a fine edge on it, highly implausible.
Oh, the feats Nick Nolan pulled off might have been technically feasible. King had spent incalculable hours researching such esoteric topics as high-tech laser-based weaponry, biological warfare vectors, and plasma dynamics. But at their cores, King’s stories were about the characters. All the rest was window dressing. Crazy, creative—explosive—window dressing, but still the stuff of male adolescent fantasies.
Realism came into play when King depicted how the characters reacted to their dire situations.
And now, King had to react to his situation. When he wrote about all those people in peril, he’d only imagined what they were feeling. Now that he was squarely in Dragunov’s crosshairs, in real fucking life, he knew what it felt like to be a hunted man.
Damn scary.
First Feinbaum. Then Connelly. It didn’t take some kind of genius to know who was next on the list. King wasn’t sure how Dragunov knew about those two, but that didn’t really matter, did it? The proof was in the killing.
When Gosberg and Slattery arrived at Connelly’s house, they’d treated King with kid gloves, ostensibly not wanting to upset him, given the scene he’d just witnessed. They told him he was probably suffering from mild shock—no doubt about that. But King also felt a swirling undercurrent, a sense of mistrust in Gosberg and Slattery and the whole notion of national security. Maybe he still had a negative opinion from his days researching the shadowy parts of the intelligence community, but nothing he’d seen in the past few days had done anything to dispel those feelings.
King wanted no part in their scheming, so he’d told them to fuck off, that he couldn’t possibly tell them anything, feeling the way he did. He’d told them he’d get back in touch with them when he felt better. Of course, it might be years before King felt well enough to talk to them.
When King told them he was leaving, they reluctantly stepped aside and watched him storm off.
King needed some time and space to think about things, and since going home was out, he’d hit the highway. First, he’d driven farther west, toward Front Royal, where he stopped at a diner. He quickly discovered he had no appetite and sat in the restaurant booth drinking coffee for hours, long enough to cause the waitress to ask if he was okay several times.
He wasn’t—not by a long shot—but he’d simply nodded and paid the check.
Then he’d turned around and headed east, back toward DC. It was a big city; he could hide in one of the densely populated suburbs as well as—or better than—in the more rural countryside.
Besides, in the country, no one could hear him scream for help.
Now, he shook aside those morbid thoughts as he searched for an anonymous motel in Annandale. He found one, off Route 236. A one-level, thirty-unit dive called the Stop Inn. A handful of cars were in the lot, mostly old, mostly American built. The concrete block walls looked as if they hadn’t been painted in a decade. A big sign advertised free Wi-Fi, and there
was an adjoining Waffle Shack featuring $4.99 pecan waffles.
Perfect. He could hide there surfing the web and stuffing his face until Dragunov had been caught.
He zipped into a parking space directly in front of the manager’s office, pulled on his Nats cap and shades, then got out and shuffled inside, channeling a semi-homeless old man. The clerk watched King approach with a wary eye, no doubt accustomed to running off vagrants looking for a free place to spend the night.
“Can I help you?” the clerk asked, in a tone that said help was the last thing he wanted to provide.
“I need a room.”
“For how long?”
“A few days. A week perhaps.”
The clerk stepped to one side and ducked a little, trying to see out the window to get a glimpse of the car King drove.
King wasn’t in the mood to play games. “I can pay cash.” He’d hit an ATM two blocks down the street.
That focused the clerk’s attention. “Cash? Okay, then. How about room 108?”
“Actually, do you have anything around back?”
The clerk eyed him.
“I’ll pay extra.” King fished out his wallet, handed the clerk six twenties. “How’s this to start?”
The clerk turned around and plucked an old-fashioned key—no keycards at the Stop Inn—from the pegboard rack. Handed it to King. “Room 123. Around back. Second one from the end. Enjoy your stay. And if there’s anything else I can do for you, please do not hesitate to ask.”
King left, disappointed the clerk hadn’t even asked his name. He’d already picked one out—Sammy Clemens.
He parked around back and entered his room. Small, musty, furnished with stuff that would have been old in the seventies. But there were two twin beds, a dilapidated desk, and a toilet. And an adjoining Waffle Shack. Home sweet home.
First things first. He dumped his messenger bag on one bed, then practically dashed into the bathroom, peeling his clothes off on the way, and jumped into the shower before the water had even heated up. He scrubbed himself raw for ten full minutes, washing any traces of the stench of Connelly’s death from his body. The more he thought about what had happened, the angrier he became. At whom, he wasn’t quite sure.
