The Player

by Brad Parks

  I wasn’t ever going to get the chance find out. I felt my throat constrict and my eyes begin to water and I immediately tried to think of something else. Anything else. Turning into a teary heap wasn’t going to help me get out of this.

  Finally, there was a knock at the door.

  “About time,” Barry grumbled. He grabbed one of the guns off the desk and went over to the door. “Who is it?” he asked.

  “It’s the cleaning service,” came a voice from the other side.

  “Where have you been?” Barry said as he opened the door.

  Three men walked in: two thick guys and a thin guy. They were dressed in janitor’s uniforms. One of the thick guys had a radio, a bucket, and a mop. The other guy was pushing a large garbage trolley, brimming with bags full of what appeared to be shredded paper. But they were most certainly not the cleaning service.

  They were here to kill us.

  * * *

  I’m not sure if the thin guy arrived in a bad mood, but he seemed to get into one the moment he got an eyeful of Tommy and me.

  “What the … You said one woman,” he said, then gestured toward us. “You didn’t say nothing about two guys. What’s with them?”

  “Unexpected visitors,” Barry said. “I’ll triple what I was going to pay you.”

  “Damn straight you will. But that’s not the only issue. There are logistics to consider. We weren’t planning on three,” he said. He rubbed his jaw for a moment, then said, “Okay. Think you can get us two more carts?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Barry said.

  “All right,” the thin guy said, then turned to one of the thick guys. “We’re also going to need some more garbage. Why don’t you go down to the Dumpster and grab some nice, full bags.”

  Barry instructed Lisa how to reach the janitor’s supply closet and told the thick guy where to find the Dumpster. He gave them each keys to open the doors they would encounter. As they disappeared to run their respective errands, everyone fell silent.

  Then the thin guy walked over to Tommy and me and toed me with the black loafer he was wearing, like I was a dog and he wanted to see if I would snap at him. “So who are these guys?” he asked.

  “Just a couple of newspaper reporters,” Barry said.

  “Newspaper reporters!” the thin guy said. “Don’t you think someone is going miss them?”

  “I’m sure someone will,” Barry said. “But it doesn’t matter, because no one is going to find them, right?”

  “Yeah,” the thin guy said. “That’s what we do.”

  He stopped talking and went to work, pulling a hood out of the bucket and placing it over Marcia’s head. She had been fully immobilized, so there wasn’t much she could do about it as he secured the hood with duct tape. He wrapped several extra layers around where her mouth was—as if the muzzle she already had weren’t enough—then started removing the garbage bags from the trolley, emptying it out. When he was done, he lifted her torso.

  “Get her feet,” he said to the thick guy, who complied. They dumped her roughly into the trolley and covered her with garbage bags.

  So that was how they planned to get us out of the office unseen: wheeled out like so much trash.

  “Give me your shirt,” the thin guy said to Barry.

  “Why?” Barry asked.

  “Just give me your shirt,” the thin guy said, lacing the instruction with an impolite word.

  Barry complied, stripping down to his T-shirt and handing over his plaid, button-down oxford. The thin guy tore it into two roughly equal strips, then wrapped one of the halves around my head. It was a makeshift hood, one he secured with duct tape.

  With my world now dark—and my chances for a heroic escape dimmed that much further—I could only listen to what came next. There was more duct tape being unpeeled as Tommy’s head got its wrap job. Then there was a knock at the door and Lisa saying, “It’s me.” The door opened and I made out the jouncing of plastic wheels as two more trolleys were brought into the room.

  Then there was another knock, more affirmations of identity, and I heard the rustling of trash bags. “This good?” one of the thick guys said.

  “Yeah,” the thin guy replied. “Help me load these guys.”

  I felt myself being lifted—they had no problem with my 185 pounds—then being dropped into the bottom of one of the trolleys. I was soon covered in a cascade of garbage bags. None of them was terribly heavy, but they still added to the feeling that I was being smothered. As if being bound, gagged, and hooded weren’t enough. I had never known myself to be claustrophobic, but I’m not sure I had ever been wedged into such a narrow space without the ability to move.

  Merely breathing had now become a difficult task. There was but the smallest pocket of air surrounding me, and I could only draw at it with my nose, through a layer of what had once been Barry McAlister’s shirt. It was all I could do to keep myself calm enough and to quiet the thought that I was slowly suffocating. I knew the moment I started panicking, it would only make it worse.

  I heard Tommy being placed in a trolley, followed by his own blanket of trash bags.

  “We good to go?” the thin guy asked.

  Someone must have nodded, because the radio was turned up. It was blaring out some Journey, but with all due respect to that classic American rock band’s most-revered anthem, I had definitely stopped believing.

  The next thing I knew, we were rolling. And that’s when I felt a deep fear settling in. Yes, it was terrifying that I could no longer see, that I couldn’t hear anything over the radio, that I was enclosed in this suffocating prison, that I had no control over what would happen to me next. But it wasn’t so much that my senses had been dulled or my liberties disabled.

  It was that I felt suddenly and irrevocably alone. I no longer knew if Tommy or Marcia was being wheeled alongside me or if we had been separated. I was totally isolated, and my biggest fear—strange as it may sound—was that I was going to die that way. Without Tommy. Without Tina. Without my parents or my unborn child or my siblings. Without anyone who cared to take pity on me in my final moments.

  It was the most terrifying way I could think of to leave this world.

  * * *

  All I could really feel anymore was motion. Or, sporadically, the lack of it. And all I could do was imagine where that motion was taking me. So it was—I think—we went out of the office. Then down the hall. Then into the elevator. Then down to the parking garage.

  Or maybe, for all I knew, we were going up to the roof. I was quickly becoming disoriented, and for as hard as I worked to keep my brain engaged in my surroundings, it was a struggle. I wanted to scream—just in the hope someone would hear me—but the radio kept up its full-throated blaring. Plus, I couldn’t really get a lungful of air. I was fearful that even trying to yell would waste what little oxygen I had.

  It was just darkness. And despair. And I couldn’t very well get myself free or spare myself whatever fate I had coming if I couldn’t move, see, or speak. I wondered if I should start to pray. Nothing in my power was going to change my situation. Maybe I needed a higher one.

  Then the soundtrack changed. Maybe I was just imagining it, but I swore I heard a sharp, percussive banging. Followed by a lot of shouting. The words were mostly blurred. But the ones that came through the loudest, clearest, and sweetest were “state police” and “get down.”

  My next sensation was of garbage bags being removed from on top of me.

  “Hey, someone help me with this guy,” a voice said.

  I was being lifted. Again. But this time in a much better direction. I was being placed gently down on a hard surface. Concrete.

  “Get me some scissors,” the voice said again. Someone shouted something—I couldn’t make it out—and the voice said, “Yeah, from the med kit.”

  Moments later, the tape that encircled my head was being gently cut away. “Just bear with me, sir,” the voice said.

  Since I was quite sure I could bear with anything
that didn’t involve a bullet in the head, I held still. Finally, Barry’s shirt was lifted from my head.

  “Oh, thank God,” I heard myself say, and then I sucked in a few large gasps of air until my lungs started realizing they were going to be okay.

  With that taken care of, I started looking around. The first thing I saw was a New Jersey state trooper in riot gear. The next thing I saw was a whole bunch of state troopers in riot gear.

  I was underground, in the parking garage. Perhaps twenty feet away was Barry McAlister, facedown, with handcuffs securing his wrists behind his back.

  The three thugs were getting the same treatment. I didn’t know if they had resisted or even tried. Based on the noises I had heard, I wasn’t sure if they’d had time. The troopers had been on them too quickly. The whole thing had been over in less than thirty seconds.

  The trooper who removed my hood moved on to my arms and legs next, cutting the tape off me in methodical, efficient fashion. It was around then that I saw my future brother-in-law—still dressed for a rehearsal dinner, but with his badge attached to his belt—idly strolling around, looking like he was doing nothing more taxing than considering the parked cars.

  “Gary!” I said. It came out choked. And surprised. And, I hoped, grateful.

  “You really ought to know better than to be late on your mother,” he said, walking toward me.

  “I figured she’d send the National Guard,” I said. “I didn’t realize she’d start with you guys first.”

  “The National Guard was probably next on her list. But I convinced her we could handle this.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” I said, as Barry and the three thugs were being led to a waiting van.

  “Don’t say nothing,” the thin guy was warning his charges. “Don’t say nothing but ‘lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.’ And remember, whatever they tell you is a lie.”

  Then he was gone. So were the two thick guys. I wasn’t going to miss them.

  “You were very lucky,” Gary was saying. “We had a TEAMS Unit doing a training mission in Kearney this afternoon. So when we figured out you weren’t just late, that you were probably in some kind of trouble, they were already decked out and ready to rumble. From there, it was just a question of getting them here.”

  Gary helped me to my feet. I was a little stiff but otherwise no worse off. I had never known how glorious it could feel to have blood circulating in all parts of my body again.

  He continued: “That editor of yours, Tina, told us that your last known location was the McAlister Properties offices, so that was the first place we looked for you. We had our guys in the second floor of the building across the street, looking in on you with the infrared—those guys love having an excuse to use their infrared. They could see you had been tied up and weren’t moving. It wasn’t hard to figure out that something very wrong was happening, so they went on full alert.”

  “How long were you guys over there?” I said, still flexing various muscles that were overcoming having been seriously cramped.

  “Only about twenty minutes or so,” he said. “We were still assessing the situation, trying to come up with an action plan. We knew you were still alive, because of the infrared. We were fairly certain you were okay for the time being. Then we saw you were on the move. We knew we couldn’t let you out of the building, so we decided to take them out down here.”

  “You seem to have done a pretty good job of it.”

  “It was a fairly straightforward operation,” Gary said. “TEAMS stands for Technical Emergency and Missions Specialists. These guys train for this sort of thing.”

  “They’re good at it,” I said, still swiveling my head, taking in the scene. Then I realized someone was missing. “Where’s Lisa Denbigh?” I asked. “There was a woman with them, too.”

  “She’s over there,” he said, pointing behind me. I turned to see Lisa, with her hands behind her back, talking earnestly to a state trooper with a pad in his hand. “She was begging us for a deal before we even got the cuffs on her. The first thing she said was, ‘I want to testify against Barry.’”

  “Yeah, that sounds like Lisa,” I said. “Self-preservation runs strong in her.”

  “Anyhow, let’s get out of here,” he said.

  In the coming days, I would spend no small amount of time with prosecutors from the attorney general’s office, helping them assemble evidence that would send Barry McAlister to jail for the rest of his life. I would also write a series of articles that, among other things, had legislators in Trenton taking a serious look at the LSRP program and questioning the wisdom of allowing government to outsource its responsibility to protect the health of its citizens. It helped that when my Open Public Records Act request came through, the signature belonging to “Scott Colston” was an easy match for Vaughn McAlister’s handwriting. He had been forging all the documents and using the pizza place as a safe mail drop.

  The law firm of Imperiale & Trautwig announced it would disburse the settlement money—recovered from an account in Grand Cayman—to Newark’s cadmium-poisoning sufferers and continue to pursue the lawsuit filed by Will Imperiale. Quint Jorgensen even kicked a million bucks into the fund. Not because he had to. Just because.

  It would make for a busy series of days.

  But first I had a rehearsal dinner to attend.

  * * *

  The event was being held in a large, private banquet facility. By the time I made it there, word of my imprisonment and pending death—and of the daring rescue—had spread among the guests, a portion of whom were state troopers who were, naturally, pretty charged up about it.

  The first person I saw as I entered the double doors to the room was my dad.

  “You’re late,” he said, grinning, then wrapped me in an extra-tight bear hug.

  Then Mom came running up. She wept on me for a minute or two, begged me to consider a career in public relations, then dried her tears before they smudged her makeup and reminded me that I had a speech to give. And it had better be nice. And thoughtful. And she could look up some Auden on her phone if I wanted.

  A guy from the banquet facility was next. He didn’t cry on me, thankfully. He wanted to affix a small wireless microphone to me. I guess they took their speechifying seriously at this facility and wanted my every precious word to be heard—Gary’s father had been outfitted with one, too.

  As the sound guy fiddled with my blazer, I looked out at the dance floor, where Tommy and my cousin Glenn had already discovered each other. The deejay was playing a peppy pop song. Strangely, Tommy and Glenn were slow-dancing to it. They looked positively enthralled.

  As soon as the mic was secure, my sister glided across the room in a very bride-to-be manner. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, then a punch on the shoulder.

  “I’m putting you under house arrest tomorrow,” she said playfully. “You’re allowed to outshine me during the rehearsal dinner but I’ll be damned if everyone is going to be talking about you during my wedding.”

  “So does that mean I can’t wear white?” I asked.

  “You are such a dork,” she said. “You always have been.”

  “Thanks, Amanda. Love you, too.”

  My brother and his wife came next, and I took another heaping portion of good-natured ribbing—because, unsurprisingly, my family is incapable of being serious about anything for too long. Even near-death experiences.

  Tina approached as soon as my family was done. My city editor/baby mama was wearing a black cocktail dress that I had seen before but that made me grateful to be male every time.

  “Nice entrance, Carter,” she said.

  “Gotta find a way to keep it fresh.”

  “You’re terrible,” she said, but at least she was smiling.

  “So from what Gary tells me, I owe you a pretty big thank-you,” I said.

  “Actually, you should be thankful that Pigeon is deathly afraid of dogs.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I guess you told her to hit Barry
McAlister’s neighborhood and ask around about him?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, forgetting I had even done that.

  “Well, apparently, she was in the midst of fleeing a particularly vicious-looking cocker spaniel when she ran into a guy who saved her from the terror. They got to talking, and he swore to her he had seen Barry at a Rite Aid in Maplewood earlier that day. The guy said he had called out to Barry but that Barry just ran away. I don’t think the guy was even aware Barry had been declared a homicide victim at that point. He just wanted to ask his neighbor if everything was okay after the big fire.”

  “Obviously, this is someone who needs to read our Web site a little more carefully,” I noted.

  “Pigeon told the neighbor what was going on and the guy said he was absolutely certain it was Barry—but that he had dyed his hair.”

  “Worst dye job ever.”

  “Yeah, well, Pigeon was smart enough to realize this was a heck of a development but she didn’t know what to do with it,” Tina said. “I mean, a single source saying a dead guy is not dead. How do you handle that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Anyhow, like a good little intern, she asked her editor what to do. And then her editor called me. At that point, I was already at your parents’ house and we were all wondering where you were. We had been trying to call your cell and it was going straight to voice mail. Your mother kept saying, ‘He’s never late, he’s never late, he’s never late.’ And I had a hunch that if Barry McAlister was on the loose—with some kind of bad disguise, no less—he was probably up to no good and that you might be in trouble.”

  “Good hunch,” I said.

  “But I still didn’t know what to do about it. It was actually that little offhand comment you made about Gary being a state trooper that saved you,” she said. “I called him up, told him what was going on. He was able to locate the TEAMS Unit and send them over to Newark to check out the building. And, of course, they found you there and…”