by Joshua Corin
She was silent for a moment.
“That was when they turned on Ezra. Locked him in a closet until he confessed. And Ezra was all alone. And in that mind of his…the next morning, when his parents got up, they unlocked the closet to get their last remaining son all bathed and fed for his brother’s funeral and they found him hanging from the clothes rod.”
The emotional weight in the room had doubled in density and was bearing down on all of them now, crushing each of them.
Henry Hoyt brought it home. “The parents…their marriage didn’t last out the year. But they continued on with their fucked-up lives. What other choice did they have? Plus, the business they had started was becoming even more successful than ever.”
“A charity,” said Xana, realizing.
“Yeah. After divorcing, the wife took her maiden name: Rothstein. Jessabelle Rothstein.”
“And her ex-husband,” Konquist concluded, “Aaron Solo.”
Chapter 42
At this point, two cats wandered in from another room. One was black and one was several different shades of orange. They both yawned their way over to the sofa and nuzzled along the ankles of the new arrivals.
“There was an investigation,” said Dotty. “The county needed to make sure I wasn’t at fault for what happened to Omar.”
“Or see if they could make you the scapegoat,” Henry sneered.
“Either way, come August 2011, I was in the classroom with a new group of kids. And I was so happy to be there. You have no idea.”
Xana kept her mouth shut, but yes, she had some idea. Dotty had been blameless, and so she had escaped punishment. She had been allowed to return to her beloved job. Xana had been culpable—for years, really—and had been barred forever. Then again, those blameless didn’t always escape punishment. For example: Ezra.
For example: Hayley.
For example: the many-oranged cat currently looking up at her with a pair of green eyes made glassy from…
“Jesus, is that cat stoned?” muttered Chau.
“September eighth, around three P.M. I was leaving the school parking lot and I reached the part where the parking lot met the main road and there was traffic and so I put my foot on the brake so I could wait until the coast was clear…and my car continued forward. I wasn’t going fast, but it didn’t matter. I was rolling straight into the main road where the cars were going fast. Twenty miles per hour when the school zone light was blinking but it stopped blinking after three P.M. I pushed and pushed on the brake pedal. I was kicking at it. I heard honking coming from my left and…”
“She was in a coma for eight days,” said Henry. His hands were trembling. Even now. Enough pent-up emotion to split an atom. “The longest eight days of my life.”
“I was lucky. I could have been dead. I got T-boned by a Ford F-150 going thirty miles per hour. My left arm was broken in three places. And I’d suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. I had to relearn how to speak. How to walk. Have you ever had to go through physical therapy? You’ll find hatred you don’t even know existed inside you.”
“You skipped a part, Dotty.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. I was thinking about physical therapy. The second day I was conscious, an elderly couple came to visit.”
“I was there too,” Henry told them. “I’d just come back from the cafeteria.”
“I didn’t recognize them, but I’d just been in a car accident. I figured my memory was jumbled. So I said hi and Henry said hi and they said hi and they were very pleasant and they said they couldn’t stay but they wanted to come see me and give me a message. I figured maybe they were the parents or the grandparents of one of my kids. So the woman came close to my bed and she said to me, ‘I hope you’re in a lot of pain for a long, long time.’ ”
“I mean, who comes into the room of someone who’s in the hospital and tells them that?”
“Friedrich and Alice Van Dyke,” Xana said. “Or was their last name Solo? Or was it Rothstein?”
The orange cat was purring insistently at her feet. Wanting to be petted. Rescued. Fed Doritos.
“They didn’t tell me their names. What they told me was that Aaron and Jessabelle did this to me. Because there always must be consequences, they said. They wanted me to know. They wanted me to know.”
“That was when I told them to get the hell out. Then I told them to stay where they were. I took out my phone. I was going to call it in. These people come here and threaten my wife?”
“Then the man said, ‘If you tell anyone, if you do anything, someone you love will die. There always must be consequences.’ ”
“You work the streets, you hear a lot of people crowing about how tough they are, and you know most of it is swagger. Heck, it’s the same in the locker room, right? You talk tough so you don’t have to act tough. Only crazies want a confrontation. But the way they said what they said…the vibe they were giving off…you can call me whatever you want. Chickenshit. Whatever. You weren’t there. Your wife wasn’t the one they’d just put in a coma. And suddenly I’m thinking about my brother out in Baton Rouge and Dotty’s got family in Delaware and we have friends and…so you judge me all you want. But till you’re in my shoes, you don’t know.”
“Still doesn’t explain why you up and left the reservation, Officer.”
Henry Hoyt nodded toward the man in the wheelchair. “You want to tell this part of the story, you pothead loser fuck, or you want me to keep going?”
“Keep going,” Walker mumbled, his mouth stuffed with fried meat.
“Like I said, what happened to us was five years ago. Dotty went through her physical therapy like a trouper and she decided to get her PhD and we’d moved on with our lives. Then last month, out of the blue, I get a phone call from this pathetic motherfucker over here. Says we got a lot in common. Now, I can’t imagine what I could possibly have in common with a waste of space like this, but I humor him and I listen and he tells me. He tells me what happened to him, which, since you’re here, you must have figured out. He tells me about the old couple that paid him a visit in the hospital. He tells me what they did to us, they did to seventeen other people. I’m the first one he’s called, on account of me being a cop. I ask him how he found out about me and Dotty. That’s when he tells me about how a burnout friend of his from high school found out about him.”
“Hey. Gary’s no burnout. He’s got a family. Show some respect.”
“Oh, is that where the line is for you?” said Dotty. “The point is, Walker’s friend Gary had provided him with the information on what Aaron and Jessabelle had been up to. And I want you to know, Detectives, Henry wanted to let sleeping dogs lie. I was the one who pushed him to take action. When I found out they were doing this to other people…I assumed it had just been a one-time thing! They targeted me because of what happened to Omar and Ezra. The end. Except…do you know the Oresteia? It’s a series of plays by Aeschylus. Twenty-five hundred years old. Some of the oldest works of literature we’ve got, and they’re about revenge. First play: Clytemnestra kills her husband, Agamemnon, because he sacrificed their daughter to help him win the Trojan War. Revenge. Second play: Their son, Orestes, comes home, finds his mother’s killed his father and so he kills her. Revenge. Third play: The Furies show up to claim Orestes and take him to hell for having killed his mother and it looks like it’s going to happen too until Athena, goddess of wisdom, forces there to be a trial. The jury deadlocks and Orestes is set free and Athena gives a nice speech about the value of mercy. It’s a nice lesson. Doesn’t really help Clytemnestra, though, or Agamemnon, or the daughter he sacrificed, or the Trojans he and his fellow Greeks killed out of revenge for their having stolen Helen. The point is, there’s only one way to stop what Aaron and Jessabelle are doing, and that’s justice.”
“We needed evidence,” Henry continued. “We couldn’t use the stolen data. We needed to catch them in the act.”
“With Phillip Wilkerson.”
“Yes.”
&nb
sp; “So what happened?”
“Yeah, smart guy,” chuckled Walker, “what happened?”
“Fuck you. At least I tried.”
Konquist made sure to catch Henry’s gaze. “Officer, what happened?”
“I knew where it was going down. I knew when. I knew who was going to do it. I made sure me and Officer Cumen were in the vicinity of the hotel. But we couldn’t just hang out in the lobby. Maybe I should have told her. I wanted it to be clean. Earlier that day, I made contact with a friend of a friend who worked at the hotel and told him to contact me the moment he saw Hercule Dacy. I even gave him a picture of the guy that I got off his passport. Everything was set. But my guy never contacted me. I even loitered around, made an excuse to get cupcakes. Nothing. Because Phillip Wilkerson had already knocked him out and stolen his uniform. Of all the people he could have chosen, right? The one guy who was there to save him.”
“You were there to save him,” Walker said. “You’re the one who fucked up.”
“Hey, at least I was able to save those two witnesses.”
Compassionately, Konquist said, “You put them on the plane to Paris to protect them from Aaron and Jessabelle.”
“I was afraid what they might do. Loose ends and all that.”
“You didn’t have to run. You could have told us all this at your house.”
“You still don’t get it.” Dotty was very pale. “We weren’t running from you. We were running from them.”
“Same reason I got you guys to think I was coming after her.” Henry pointed to Xana. “To protect her from them. Because she’s next on their list. You’ve only got, like, twenty-four hours at most. They’ve already got someone coming after you.”
“Who?” asked Xana.
Chapter 43
“Sorry, but we can’t tell you. That’s our only bargaining chip. Isn’t that right, Detectives?”
They were right. And Xana knew they were right. If they hoped to avoid prosecution here, or at least make a deal for a reduced sentence, they had to give the authorities something, and the data, as Henry had noted, was illegally obtained. But if he could tell them when the attack on Xana was set to happen, if they caught the culprit in the act…
Then again, hadn’t Henry just admitted this to be the exact same plan he’d tried a few days ago?
“Relax, lady,” Walker slurred from the kitchen table, followed by the sound of bubbles. Then the sound of inhalation. Oh sure. What a perfect time for a bong hit. “They haven’t killed anyone. Yet.”
“So if that’s your plan, Henry, then what are you waiting for? You’re here. We’re here. People know that we’re here. You don’t have a whole lot of time. Let’s negotiate.”
From buried in between the couch’s cushions warbled a cantata of Homer Simpson “D’oh”s.
The orange cat bolted, terrified, paranoid, into another room.
Walker coughed and then said, “Hey, can you get that? That’s my phone.”
The three on the couch fished for the device. Detective Chau found it and handed it off to Henry, who handed it off to Walker.
“What a team,” said Walker, and he read his text message, and he announced to the room, “OK, so who wants to give me a ride?”
“Now?” Dotty was incredulous.
Her husband was more decisive. “No.”
“Sorry, but it’s Gary. Says it’s an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency?”
Walker texted back the very same question, in not so many letters.
Then:
“He typed back nine-one-one.”
“What exactly does he expect you to do?”
“I don’t know. Help him out.”
“Can you drive?”
“Well, normally I’d call this cab company that gives discounts to cripples and retards but why spend money when you don’t have to, right? He’s not far.”
“And which are you, Walker? A cripple or a retard?”
“Go fuck a blender.”
“You’re not going,” Henry reiterated.
“Hey, OK, I hear you, but he typed nine-one-one.”
At which point Xana piped in, “Gary’s your weed connection, isn’t he?”
“In reconnecting after all these years, it came to our attention that we share a few mutual habits…”
“Christ.”
“Actually,” offered Xana, “it’s not the worst idea. He’s already involved with the hacking and whatnot. Might as well bring him all the way in. Then we can all talk this through and come at the problem together and maybe reach a solution that doesn’t involve us being chained here for the rest of our lives, because I, for one, need to piss like a thoroughbred.”
“I’ll drive him,” volunteered Detective Chau.
Walker rolled toward the door. “Great.”
“No.” Henry chewed on his lip. “The cops need to stay.”
“Can your wife drive?”
Henry shook his head, and then said to Xana, “You do it.”
“I would, but I don’t have my license.”
“It’s just five minutes from here,” Walker repeated. He sounded like a petulant child. “He typed nine-one-one.”
Now Konquist added his two cents. “If someone’s going to take him, it has to be you. Just don’t get pulled over. Show up, drag this dopehead hacker what’s-his-name into the car, and come back. Then we settle this. Isn’t that right, Officer Hoyt?”
Henry nodded.
Which was how Xana, who had not been behind the wheel of an automobile since plowing her own into the home of the Edmondses, ended up chauffeuring Walker Berno in Konquist’s sizable Buick to the home of the Willards.
But first, she had to start the engine. She looked down at the driver’s-side floor. The right pedal was the accelerator, right? She trusted her muscle memory would kick in once they got started, but just in case, she tested her feet on each of the pedals. Hmm. Maybe it would help if the engine were running. She turned the ignition. The Buick rumbled around her like a thunderstorm. Had it really been this loud when Konquist had driven it? She again tested the pedals. The right one did indeed gun the engine. Good. Now, where was the gearshift…
“You’re going to get us killed,” said Walker, “aren’t you?”
“Your cats are stoned,” she deflected.
“That’s because I know what’s good for them.” His wheelchair was in the trunk. He had an unopened tall boy between his thighs. He waited until they were out of the parking lot to relax enough to pop its top and slurp down some suds. After a minute, the lower segment of his beard began to sparkle with yellow froth. “Want to buy a stoned cat?”
The Willards did in fact live only five minutes away…if one were traveling at a reasonable speed. Xana of course was traveling unreasonably slowly, and each stop sign brought a pounding of the brake and the acceleration of torsos into seatbelts, not to mention the spillage of beer on Walker’s trousers. At least the route Walker directed her to take allowed them to keep mostly to side streets.
What neither of them expected was the assortment of vehicles already in the Willards’ driveway. Three cars in all. Xana had no choice but to park by the curb, which she did, give or take a foot.
“Expecting a party?” she asked Walker.
“That’s the thing about parties,” he replied. “The best ones are surprises.”
Xana could not have disagreed more. She also could not avoid the sinking feeling she felt in her gut that Gary Willard’s sudden middle-of-the-day emergency was a trap. And so, after easing Walker into his wheelchair, she told him to head up to the front door as if everything were normal, while she was going to slink around back. The last she saw him, he was cursing a slow path around the large metal obstacles in driveway.
The Willards’ two-story home had a decent-sized yard—neither expansive and verdant like the Edmondses’, nor constricted and rocky like Walker Berno’s. To quote the folktale, it was just right. Xana walked along the eastern wall, ducking under
neath a window. She was well aware that her caution made her look like the type of criminal she was trying to be cautious of, but hers had never been an irony-free life.
At least her phone was off. Hayley’s father could be calling her right now. Em could be replying to her texts. Life would have to wait. She rounded the corner and approached the back porch. It was enclosed inside a green tent of mosquito netting, making it difficult to see, at least from a distance, exactly what or who may have been there. Meanwhile, she could hear the unmistakable creak of a door opening. The front door, probably.
If this was a trap, either created by Aaron and Jessabelle or by some random third party, how exactly was Xana going to diffuse it? She was unarmed. At the moment, she had the element of surprise, but she could hardly rely on Walker Berno keeping his mouth shut.
Maybe turn the phone on? Maybe call for backup?
Call who?
She had a number for Konquist and Chau, but would Henry Hoyt allow them to answer their phones? Of course not. He needed to maintain control over there. Cops were able crooks.
She could dial the actual 911…and say what exactly?
She spotted a garden hose coiled underneath a faucet at the back of the house. At the open end of the garden hose was a plastic sprinkler. Well, beggars can’t be choosers. Xana unscrewed the hose from the faucet. She hoisted the coil around a shoulder. The sprinkler dangled, banging against her knee with every step. And so, after all this nonsense over the past few days, after receiving a threat of violence, the first bruising she actually incurred was self-inflicted. No, not at all an irony-free life.
Xana neared the back porch. The door was more of a zippered portal. She pressed her face against the netting to better get a view of what she was about to walk into.
First she smelled Gary’s marijuana.
