He needed somebody who was willing to do a little dirty work. Someone he could trust, but who was not overly connected to him. That person could make sure that the kid was at the house when they arrived and that no one else got to the kid first.
His bookie. Perfect. His bookie couldn't afford to stab him in the back. And his bookie had a history of bending the law when a little money was involved.
He picked up the phone. No speakerphone for this one.
“Rob Rice,” the bookie greeted him.
“Hey, guess what,” Rob said. “Instead of making foolish bets first and then owing you money, this time I'm just going to skip that step and give you the money.”
“I like those odds.”
They laughed.
“I need some help with an errand,” Rob explained. “A time-sensitive, important errand.”
“We can do errands.”
“You know that expression, where someone needs something done, and you say, 'I know some guys' in western Mass, upstate New York, wherever? You know some of those guys, right?” He listened to a response on the line. “Yeah, someone who can watch a house. Follow a guy. And, uh, make sure no one else bothers him. That part is real important.”
“No problem,” the bookie said. “I know lots of people who are desperate to make a little cash.”
“No cokeheads, though.”
“No, no, nothing like that. I have just the guy in mind. He does errands sometimes.”
“Perfect,” Rob said. “I'll send you a gift basket. Now all I need to figure out is what to say to this little punk when I see him.”
“Rob Rice, the psychologist,” the bookie said.
Yeah, yeah, very funny. And they hung up.
Rob went back to tapping the desk. Rob Rice, the psychologist. Very funny, Mr. Bookie. But that was the problem, in fact. Rob Rice didn't know anything about kids. He didn't like kids. His main relationship with kids was defined by trying to engage in kid-making activity without actually making any kids. He was about as far from being a child psychologist as you could get.
A child psychologist. Now there was an idea. Maybe someone else could help him. Did he know any psychologists?
His mind's eye flipped through the several hundred people he knew.
Sarah, he thought. Sarah Somebody. Sarah the Child Psychologist. He and Sarah had met when he was on business out East. New York, he believed. They had bumped into each other in the hotel lobby and he had taken her for a drink. Then dinner. She was gorgeous. She was an animal, he remembered. It had been an action-packed evening.
Plus, she was tough, he bet. She was good at what she did. She would be perfect for this thing. She could handle a “morally ambiguous situation,” or whatever they might get themselves into. And he wouldn't mind seeing Sarah again at all. He always liked to kill two birds with one stone — especially when one of the birds looked like she did.
Time to call Sarah the Psychologist. He picked up the phone and glanced at his watch.
Five minutes later he was saying to her, “We don't know if it's a kid. We think it's a kid. My guy who was online with him thinks he's a kid. But we know for sure, whether he's a kid or not, he's unusual.”
He and Jared would be leaving for the airport in ten minutes. He leaned back in his chair and thought about the words Jared had first said in his office: Rob, I don't know whether this is a kid or a lunatic, but I've found somebody I gotta tell you about.
I hope he's not a kid, Rob thought. You can't reason with kids. I'd rather deal with a lunatic.
THE GAMBLER
Southern Vermont
23 hrs to Birth
Willard woke up in the darkness of his backyard with the distinct feeling that he was not alone.
Like most irrational fears, this one was not entirely without basis. He owed a lot of money to a couple of shady characters, and there was a chance at any time that one of them would show up looking for money. It's just a matter of time, he thought.
Is someone out there? Behind him, the lights in the house were off, but the stars and the moon shone down on the backyard with a pale glow. Motionless in his lawn chair, he looked out over the burning embers of the fire pit and studied the shadowy edge of his backyard. The bumpy field of grass and snow sloped gently downhill away from the house and gave way to the trees of the surrounding vast woods. It was at that boundary — the arc where the trees loomed in darkness — where someone would be hiding, if someone was there.
He fondled the shotgun by his chair. He rarely fired it, though on occasion he allowed himself the luxury of blowing the crap out of something at the edge of his backyard. Someone at the edge of the yard might be able to see the shotgun next to him. In the clearing where Willard was sitting, the moonlight reflected off the snow.
His eyes slowly moved from left to right across the line of trees. He couldn't see anything. But it would have been impossible to see anything in that darkness.
Was it a dream? In the back of his head, he dimly recalled a dream. He was doing a job, making a delivery. He had gotten in his white Ford F150 with some suspicious stuff packed under a blue tarp in the truck bed. He drove the white truck down out of the mountains and eventually into some gray flat empty space in the middle of nowhere, maybe somewhere in upstate New York. It was a vast frozen tundra, and he had stopped where a couple highways crossed. It was time for the handoff, before dawn was coming. As usual, there was a lot of money at stake (though, also as usual, he saw very little of it). He scanned the washed-out gray horizon, but no one was there and no one was coming. It didn't make sense for them not to show; it was bad news. He could sit and wait, which was not a good situation, or maybe his bookie would call him and ask him to take the delivery somewhere else or do something with it, and that situation would be even worse. Either way it was a bad situation, and he was glued to the horizon and to his phone, wondering, Is there someone out there? And then he woke up.
His dog, Cartman, stirred at his feet. Cartman was a well-groomed, two-year-old white English bulldog with brown splotches. Cartman hoisted himself up on his short bowed legs and turned and looked up at Willard with a tiny bit of his pink tongue stuck out between his jowls. Cartman was the only living being that he could tolerate having around on a regular basis.
Maybe it was just a dream, and no one was out there, at the edge of the woods. But he couldn't shake the feeling he wasn't alone.
Something caught the corner of his eye: a small flashing light. Nestled in a miniature bank of snow was his phone, flashing silently. He was in the habit of tossing it across the lawn at the conclusion of conversations.
With great effort and a grunt he got up from the chair. He picked up the phone just as he missed the call that was coming in. Low battery. Silent mode. It was 1 a.m. Twenty-three missed calls. That's a lot of calls, he thought.
The calls were all from his bookie. One missed call from the bookie meant nothing; it meant, “You owe me money, Willard,” and he knew that. But twenty-three missed calls from the bookie meant, “I have something I need you to do,” and that way Willard would make some money, and that was a lot more useful.
The phone was his primary connection to the world. He had no land line, no cable TV, no Internet, pretty much nothing. He had gone “off the grid,” as he called it, as completely as possible, to stop gambling. But he needed a phone to do his delivery jobs.
His delivery work consisted mostly of bringing truckloads of wood down to Boston. It didn't pay much, but it was reliable cash. He also did other deliveries. He would deliver pretty much anything, at the right price. One guy had him deliver explosives. That paid well, because it was illegal and dangerous. Once he delivered something that he suspected was a dead guy. And one of his clients shipped human organs, though he didn't know where they were from or what they were for. He didn't usually truck drugs. Delivering drugs was more like a team sport, and he worked alone.
The phone rang in his hand. It was his bookie, calling for the twenty-fourth time.
“Hello.”
“Willard! Where have you been, man?”
“Writing in my diary.”
“Whatever. Look, I have a job for you.”
Mr. Bookie described the job. His client was going to Boston tomorrow to make the acquaintance of a kid who lived in Cambridge, MA. All Willard had to do was keep tabs on the kid. Watch his house, tail him if he went anywhere. But not disturb him: the kid didn't know anybody was coming for him, and Willard's client didn't want him jittery or freaked out for their first meeting.
Sounds pretty easy, Willard thought.
“There's one other thing.” There was a slim chance that someone else would show up looking for this kid. They didn't think anybody was coming, but if someone did show up, Willard had to make sure such an individual didn't talk to the kid and that he was out of the way when the client arrived.
Out of the way, Willard thought. He tried to the gauge the level of violence in these instructions. Asking never helped, because the client didn't want to talk about it or think about it — that's what Willard was getting paid for. And when there was any doubt about it, there was usually violence involved.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don't deal with other people. And I definitely don't, ah, get other people out of the way.”
“No Willard, it's not like that. I mean, yes, that's part of the job, sure. But, we have no reason to think that someone is going to be in the picture. Nine times out of ten you don't talk to a soul. You just sit in the car outside the house and get the money when they arrive.”
Sure, sure, Willard thought, walking in slow circles around the fire. That was what they always said. If no one showed up, it was the easiest job there could be. If someone showed up, then it was a pretty difficult, expensive job, and he didn't really do that kind.
The man spoke up. “We'll give you a good rate.” The bookie named a figure. It was excellent pay — excessive pay, even — for a few hours of sitting there. What were the odds someone showed up?
“That's only a good rate if no one shows up,” Willard observed. Cartman licked his boot.
The bookie relented: if anyone showed up at all, for any reason, and Willard took care of the situation, Willard would get a bonus. He named the bonus, and it was big. The bonus was more than he had ever been paid for any job, by a lot. That would eliminate his debt. He had some massive gambling debts. His debt was the reason he was up in Vermont in the first place: to get himself off the Internet and as far away from gambling as possible.
The deal was a little risky, but in all likelihood, he was going to sit there and make some easy money. And if anything did go wrong, he could get the bonus, and the bonus could make everything right in one go. Something going wrong could make everything go right. It was a betting man's kind of deal.
Additionally, Willard thought about the fact that he was dealing with his bookie. This guy's job was to know the odds, and he was good at it. And the bonus was big. It meant that it was almost certain that no one was going to show up.
“Okay,” he said.
“Good,” the bookie said. “When the client shows up in the morning, just present yourself to him.”
“How will I know it's him?”
“You'll know. He'll probably be in a limo. Oh, and there's one other thing. We're not really sure who this kid is. It might not be a kid. He might be kind of weird.”
“Weird? What does that mean?”
“I don't know. Weird. Maybe he's crazy or something, so keep your eyes peeled.”
This sounds like a huge pain in the ass, Willard thought.
They hung up. He absently tossed the phone into the snow. Getting off the phone with that idiot was the greatest pleasure he'd had all day. He stared through the night into the woods around his backyard. It was cool and dark. You could see the stars perfectly out there. Off the grid.
Remembering that he might need his phone, he crouched to pick it out of the snow. Cartman greeted him down at that level. “Hey, boy,” he said, petting Cartman. “We're gonna make some money.”
He walked to the shed, which was slightly uphill at the side of his house, not far from the white F150 in the driveway. His boots crunched in the patches of snow. Cartman waddled after him.
As he faced the door of the shed, he was conscious of the empty, quiet backyard behind him. If anyone was there, at the edge of the trees, Willard's back was to that person. He would have to rely on Cartman's superior eyes and nose and ears.
He pulled the latch and opened the shed. It looked like the arsenal for a militia: rows of guns and explosives. They were neatly organized, too — especially for a man who left beer cans lying in his backyard. He had them lined up in precise rows on the dust-free and dry shelves of the shed, in part, because he knew little about them and he didn't want his entire property going up in a blast.
The guns he had were mostly handguns, the kind you concealed. Those were the types of guns he delivered, and he had occasionally taken a firearm or two for his collection. There weren't too many buyers looking for big boxes of rifles or semi-automatics; those weren't practical.
He opted for a Glock. It was a favorite among people who carried concealed weapons, although he wasn't sure why. He barely knew how to use it, and he would avoid using it at all costs. Nevertheless, a smooth, black little Glock with a silencer (he started poking around for one of those in the shed) would look serious. That Glock could convince anyone who showed up without a gun at the kid's house to get lost.
He set aside the gun and the silencer. He procured an empty blue dufflebag from the shed and dropped it in the snow.
Next: explosives. You never know when you'll need a big pile of explosives, he figured. If things went completely wrong, he could use an explosion as a distraction. Or to get rid of his truck. Or as money. The stuff went for a good price. It was like explodable money.
He began filling the blue dufflebag with white blocks of C4. Cartman sniffed at the bag and followed him as he turned back and forth from the shed.
He wasn't sure what you used to detonate C4, but whatever you used, he did not have. So he grabbed three grenades and put them in the dufflebag. That's right: he had a few grenades. No problem that a couple grenades can't solve.
C4, he judged, was the explosive he was least likely to blow up accidentally. He had a vague idea of its handling. You could actually shape the stuff with your hands. He had once delivered C4 to a couple of real idiots. They were on drugs or something. One of them had been inspecting the white, plastic blocks that had been carefully packaged in the back of Willard's 150, and without warning the guy had spun around and hurled it at his buddy. The white plastic block pegged his buddy right in the stomach, hard enough to leave a welt, probably. Willard's heart had skipped a beat. But the C4 didn't go off. Apparently the stuff was pretty safe to transport.
Sort of. It was safe to transport, if no one saw it. A cop who pulled him over for speeding would not be happy to find 40 pounds of C4 in the back of his Ford, since that much explosive was enough to blow a wall off of a building. If that cop got curious, he would be none too happy to discover that Willard had an unlicensed concealed weapon with a silencer. And three grenades.
He added the gun, a spare magazine, and the silencer in the duffle and zipped the bag up. He wasn't planning on using any of this crap. But the card he played when he got into tricky situations was a willingness to get crazy. People could respect that, he found.
Straightening up, he looked back in the shed. As a final gesture, he procured a big knife in a holster and pulled up his jeans and strapped the knife around his calf. It was a nice touch of Extra Crazy.
He went in the house and splashed some water on his face. He changed his underwear. All of his clothes were from Walmart. He had no money and he didn't need anything fancy, so that meant Walmart. Plus that clothing was the most anonymous.
He walked back out to the truck. He boarded and started to back out. He looked back at the dark house when he reached the edge o
f the long gravel driveway. Any people, animals or ghosts lurking in his backyard were about to be left in the snow.
Cartman, whom he had left in the house, was upright with his paws on the front windowsill.
“Don't worry, boy,” he said out the window. “I'll be back soon.” Cartman would be able to amuse himself. More than once, he had returned from a delivery to find a dead squirrel by the doggie door. How Cartman, with those stubby legs, could catch a squirrel was beyond him.
As he sent the truck headlong down the mountain (on bumpy roads poorly lit by the truck's headlights, but which he knew well), he was conscious of how fast he'd have to drive to reach Boston on time. But he was also speculating already about what he would face when he got there.
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