by Eric Beetner
“How did this happen to you?”
In some ways, this part was going to be harder to explain.
“Because I work for them. It was them who tried to kill me because I tried to quit. I got forced into it. They were gonna kill me. That happened almost three years ago. I’ve been on their payroll ever since.”
I let the news sink in, staying as still as the images frozen on screen. Blake nodded slowly to tell me he understood the broad strokes portion of it, if not the entire crazy thing.
“They want the case to go away. Now they have someone willing to do anything to make that happen. I’m sure even Calder and Rizzo didn’t think she would go this nuts with it. But she is. And I have no idea what’s next, only that her next target is Lucas. If I try to find him myself I’d be leading her right to him. If I can see her view, she can see mine. I need a third party. That’s you.”
I wanted to take his hand again, to play my old game. I stopped myself. I don’t think it came from that new this is wrong part of my brain. I’d like to think I stopped myself of my own free will because it was wrong.
“Okay. I find him and then what?”
“We need to bring down Calder and Rizzo.”
“Do they have a case?”
“They’re close. Whatever they don’t have, I can fill in the rest.”
“By implicating yourself.”
“I don’t have a choice.” I stared Blake down with as much intensity as I ever have in my life. “Lucas will hate me after this. I know that. You’ll hate me. I’ll go to jail. But I’m not going to let him die. I couldn’t stop this, but I can stop them from getting to him with your help. He needs to know what’s going on, tell him he needs to gather his case files and tell him I’m coming to break the case wide open.”
I’d like to think it went beyond my new do-good brain, that falling on my sword would be something I’d do anyway. I wasn’t obeying the good part of me, only the me part of me. The one Lucas fell in love with.
Blake turned back to the dual images of me on the monitors. I could see his logical brain trying to deny it, but he looked at nine screens of evidence. And Blake is an evidence man. Atheist, driven to law enforcement, a hardcore innocent-until-proven-guilty guy.
He turned back to me. “Okay. I’ll find him. We need to take these guys down.”
“I knew I could count on you.”
When I leaned over to him I wasn’t being manipulative, in that moment he deserved a hug.
FIRST THINGS FIRST…
Before we left we locked up that floor tight. Like I said, it was a bunker built into a building so when the heavy blast doors were closed, it sealed off the offices from any unwanted attention. Not that other people—agents, security with proper clearance—didn’t have the key. But it would buy us time. Once this got out, and my face along with it, things were going to get more difficult.
We went to the bank. Lucas did a good job of backing up his files and he kept one of his three backup drives in a safe deposit box. Ever since the engagement he’d been anxious to do things that made him feel more like a married man, so he said. I don’t know if he was trying to impress me with what he thought I wanted, like a joint checking account and the time he sat me down all serious to tell me his online passwords. I didn’t really care one way or another. I think if it was up to him we would have flown to Vegas and eloped. Waiting another ten months for the ceremony had been driving him nuts.
So since we opened the joint account, he also put my signature on the safe deposit box. Little did he know his box of secrets lay three rows over and one row down from my box of cash from Calder and Rizzo.
I wanted to get his backup drives and have Blake take them to Lucas.
It felt odd to be in public, walking around an ordinary place like a bank with everything going on. I felt sure people would be looking at me like a weirdo but they didn’t know I had an evil twin like some refugee from a soap opera out there stalking everyone in my life trying to kill them.
Blake relied on his training and remained very calm and looked the part of an average bank customer. I’m sure I looked like a hungover housewife who’d fallen out of a rented limo the night before. Not a single person looked my way. Must not be as bad as I thought.
I signed the card, smiled as the teller checked my photo on his computer screen with my actual face. Enough of the landmarks must have still been visible under the scrapes and scabs because he smiled back and buzzed the door to let me in the vault.
“Wait here,” I said to Blake.
“Okay honey,” he said, playing a part he’d invented in his head. I’d already filled my brain quota of alternate realities for the day so I shot him a good skunk eye as I passed through the door.
The teller handed me the box and then left. I opened it and saw papers. Only papers. Lucas’ will, the deed to his house, his childhood savings bonds. No hard drives. I lifted the papers and looked under them thinking possibly Lucas transferred his files onto a smaller drive like those ones about the size of a stick of chewing gum, but no luck.
She’d been there.
Or, maybe not. Lucas is smart. When I sent him out of the house last night he very well could have made gathering his files a priority. He could have come by early and cleared out the box.
“Back again?” asked a female teller in a navy pantsuit. She looked at me with a half smile, half curious look. I had my answer. Sam had been here.
“Was I here?” I asked.
“Oh, I thought it was you,” the teller said, embarrassed she may have it wrong. “Miss Whelan, right?” She seemed to catch herself and wonder why she needed to explain to me that I’d been in her bank. Wouldn’t I know if I’d been there the same day? “Yes, about a half hour ago.”
“Right. Half hour. Okay, thank you.” God, I desperately wanted to make up a lie to give her something else to think about other than my strange behavior. Not only could I not force one out of my mouth, I couldn’t even make myself think of a lie to not be able to say.
“Quit joking around honey, we’re going to be late.” Blake stood near the door of the bank tapping his watch.
“Excuse me,” I said to the teller. She smiled an obligatory and very fake smile.
Blake held the door open for me and took my arm by the crook of my elbow when I stepped out. I wanted to check the other safe deposit box for my money, but the risk would be too high. If it feels like you oughta get the hell out of a place, Daddy used to say, get out while the gettin’ is good. I bet she didn’t even stop for the money. Not exactly her priority with the payday she had coming.
“It’s gone,” I said.
“Her?”
“Yeah. The teller said she saw me a half hour ago.”
“But she saw her.” Blake tried to wrap his mind around my situation and force it to make sense.
“Yeah.” We walked quickly to his car. “There’s a chance Lucas got here first and she left empty handed too, but I doubt it. He’d keep his backups spread out, especially if he thought he was in trouble.”
“So what now? She’s one step ahead of you.”
“She’s not one step ahead, she is me.”
We reached his car. He swung my elbow to make me face him. “So what would your next step be?”
Blake, my little genius.
“The courthouse building. Lucas’ office, see if anyone there knew where he might be.”
“You think that would be her move too?”
“I don’t know.”
I shut my eyes, trying to pick up anything from her. I knew I must have looked like the kid from The Shining, but Blake would have to deal. I tried harder, reached further across the black than before. I’d been building up these strange new muscles apparently. I pinched my eyelids shut until I saw stars, then out of the sparkling lights came brief flashes of her vision.
A door held open. Elevator buttons being pushed. She moved something around in her pocket. They were dist
ant, like transmissions from outer space. The broken images were like seeing what a broadcast from the very bottom of a radio dial would look like.
“Samantha, you all right?” Blake asked, touching my arm.
As soon as he touched me the signal went dead. “No, don’t touch me.” I squeezed my eyes harder. They started to ache. All I got next was sound, but I knew where she was. Shoes on a marble floor. The mid-40s opulence of the courthouse. I loved the sound of heels on that floor. The slight echo, the solid click of a spike heel on the hard surface. It sounded like Europe is what I told Lucas. Like an old cathedral or something.
He said it sounded like justice, but to most people justice sounds like Judge Judy’s voice.
Sam was at the courthouse looking for Lucas. One step ahead.
This time it was me who pulled at Blake’s elbow. “We gotta go.”
BABY, YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR
Blake drove. I started to tell him to drive fast, but my mouth wouldn’t form the words. Instead I explained how I couldn’t drive fast because of the…whatever it was. He got the hint.
In the passenger seat I closed my eyes. I must have looked like someone who is terrified to death of driving because I sat there with my eyes squeezed shut like a kid their first time on a roller coaster after they barely make the height requirement.
The images coming through were the same as watching a movie on a broken projector and a really shitty speaker from and old transistor radio.
Here’s what I saw:
She knew where she wanted to go. Of course she did. I did, so she did too. I saw several of Lucas’s coworkers wave to her/me. Everyone gave her smiles and nice-to-see-you waves. The sound only came in pops and buzzes, but I could tell she asked if anyone had seen Lucas.
“Was he expecting you?” someone said. Her head shook and I heard, “No. I thought I’d—” Surprise him I guess is what she probably said. Yeah, surprise him with a bullet in his liver.
She kept at it, determined. She stopped at every damn desk on the fourth floor. She asked people I’d never seen before and I’d been to two Christmas parties with these people. She looked at everything. She looked at cubicle walls, into their coffee mugs and water bottles (a lot of that for some reason). She left no stone unturned.
I knew Lucas wasn’t so dumb as to go into hiding inside his own office though. Right? Still, she knew something I didn’t to make the desk to desk interviews worth her time.
I could feel Blake weaving through traffic. I started to get a little nauseous to go along with my headache. Riding in a car with your eyes closed is a weird sensation.
“Are we close?” I asked.
“Getting there. Five minutes. No, less.”
One thing regular cops have on the DEA? Sirens. We were in a nondescript navy blue sedan. No one got out of our way. I couldn’t see it but I knew some of the horn blasts came with raised middle fingers aimed our way. My God it would feel good to flip someone the bird again. I vowed if I ever got out of this madness I’d flip off whoever, whenever I wanted. Jerk who doesn’t signal when changing lanes? Finger. Guy talking on his cell phone while I’m at dinner? Flipped. Crying baby in the checkout line? FU, kid.
I thought for a second my view through Sam’s eyes was stuck on some sort of loop. Asking people, linger a while, move on, ask someone else. She literally went desk to desk.
She knocked on a door. She’d exhausted the secretarial pool and the paralegals, time for the big guns.
Daniel Graves. Assistant District Attorney. Nice guy. Big, black, sharp suits. He smiled when she came in. She handed him a mug of something. Coffee I guess. Buttering him up isn’t gonna get you any closer to Lucas, babe.
Graves shook his head. Hadn’t seen Lucas today. She moved on.
A conference room. She knocked once and went inside with a pitcher of water. Is she applying for a job in there or something? Why is she being so damn nice?
Something didn’t click. This woman is pure evil. For her to be handing out beverages, trying to get answers she damn well knows she isn’t going to get made me really nervous.
“Here we go,” Blake said.
I opened my eyes. The light blasted me and I blinked like I’d been pepper sprayed and my eyes teared up immediately.
Blake double parked but stayed in the driver’s seat. “You want me to come with you?”
“No. Go find Lucas. Tell him what you know.”
“Are you sure? What’s going to happen when you two are in the same room?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you think she won’t hurt you?”
“Not without hurting herself.”
“Okay.” His face radiated confusion and concern. I hated making him do my dirty work. I laid a hand over his on the steering wheel.
“Thank you, Blake. I honestly think you’re the only person I can trust right now.”
He either had nothing to say or a million things to say. Either way, nothing came out.
“If something goes wrong,” I said, making sure he looked me in the eye. “Tell people everything you know. You’ve got to bring down Calder and Rizzo. Don’t worry about trying to protect my good name.” At least my good brain allowed sarcasm.
Pictures danced over his face. Sam was leaving. She waved to the receptionist and punched the elevator button. I didn’t have much time.
“Go. I’ll call you later,” I said.
I got out and slammed the door. I ran across the brick courtyard, between the trees and their plaques commemorating great quotes of Supreme Court Justices. I nearly tripped over “It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” Justice William O. Douglas, 1959.
I turned and saw Blake peel away.
I tried to get a good signal with my eyes open, but nothing usable came through with so much light, so much to concentrate on like not falling down and not looking like a threat. Security at the courthouse stayed on permanent Orange alert.
I expected to enter the lobby and run into myself. That would be quite a show for the people waiting around to see a judge about their DUI. She wasn’t there. I could try to chase her, but then what? Another stand off? Honestly I had no idea how to stop her but I knew I couldn’t do it alone, not without being able to fight or shoot her.
What I really wanted to know was what the hell she was doing up on the fourth floor. A sharp pain spiked through my head like someone had run a needle and thread into my eye and pulled it out the back of my skull. When all this ended, if this ended, no way my brain would ever be the same.
I signed in and tried to act casual. I got one crooked look from a female guard on the metal detector who seemed like she thought I’d come through here not too long before, but then I think she resigned herself to the idea all white people look the same and she shrugged it off and went back to scanning waistbands and under jackets for bulges.
When I got off on four the receptionist, Melanie I think, greeted me with a sympathetic, “Forget something?”
It goes to show you how unobservant many people are. I walked by her, the same face but in a totally different outfit and she didn’t notice one bit.
“Yeah,” I said and made a beeline for Lucas’ office. I know it sounds paranoid, but even though everyone in the place said they hadn’t seen him, I needed to make sure for myself.
Empty. He always kept a neat workspace so it was hard to tell if he had been there and cleared anything out. At least there wasn’t a corpse on the floor or anything. The way my day had gone I started to be thankful for any small miracle.
I spun out of the room and headed deeper down the hall to Daniel Graves’ office. None of that talk to the underlings stuff for me. Straight to the top. I knocked once and entered without listening for any “come in.”
Graves was still behind his desk but he didn’t look well. His forehead glistened with sweat and he looked like he might throw u
p. He lifted his eyes using the barest minimum of effort.
“Samantha…” He choked down a dry heave. “I’m sorry, now is not really a good time.”
“What did I ask you before?”
He placed a hand on his desk to brace himself. “What?”
“When I was in here earlier, what did I ask you?”
“You asked if I’d seen Lucas.” His breathing got heavy. I thought asthma attack.
“Is that all?” He nodded, couldn’t speak. “Do you have an inhaler or something?”
The hand bracing him up on his desk slid off and he fell, clanking his chin on the corner of the desk and cracking his jaws together so hard my teeth hurt.
At the risk of being too Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws: this was no asthma attack.
I circled the desk to where Graves crumpled to the floor. I found his wrist pinned under his body and dug it out, putting two fingers on his artery. I got nothing. I pushed back his head to roll his face off the rug and saw a trickle of blood from his nose.
I backed out into the hall and shot forward toward the conference room. Through the wide glass wall I could see five of the six people inside all in the same state as Graves right before he dropped. I opened the door and the one man not hunched over ready to hurl turned to me with fear on his face usually reserved for the first guy to die in a zombie movie.
“What’s happening?” he said. I thought I knew.
“Did you drink any of that?” I pointed to the water pitcher Sam brought in.
“No.” He eyed it like a grenade about to go off.
“Did they?”
“I think so.”
The sound of the first person hitting the floor snapped his head around. Four other body falls followed quickly. He started crying. “Don’t drink anything and you’ll be fine,” I said. I left the conference room, leaving him with five fresh corpses.
Back down the hall I started to hear moaning, then another body hitting the carpet. Panicked voices of the few who hadn’t been dosed tried to revive the dead and dying. I crossed into a cluster of workspaces and two people stood rushing from desk to desk trying to tend to six more keeled over on the floor.
