Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  “Quiet,” she ordered. “Be still!”

  She left the computer and came back over to where he lay on his side on the floor. Picking up the hammer, she waved it in front of his face. “Do not make a sound,” she said.

  Richard understood that the hammer was a very real threat. He fell silent.

  “Where’s the money I gave you?” Mina said. “I want it. I also want my thumb drive.”

  Richard tried to make sense of this. She was robbing him of the money she had paid him? Worried about the possibility of some drug-crazed addict breaking into his house, Richard had hidden the money, and he had hidden it well, but it had never occurred to him that Mina might be the one trying to take it away.

  But it was his money. He had worked for it. She owed him for getting her damned UAVs back in the air, and he would not give her back that money, not in a thousand years. The same thing with the thumb drive. He looked at her and shook his head.

  That seemed to throw Mina into a fit of rage. She ran back to the dining room and cleared his mother’s curio shelves of Richard’s entire model airplane collection, knocking them to the floor, where she stepped on them and ground them to pieces.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  With his mouth taped shut, he couldn’t have told her if he had wanted. But it was a grudge match now. He wouldn’t tell her no matter what. He shook his head. Emphatically.

  She disappeared from view for a time. When she returned, she was carrying his mother’s old kitchen shears. At first he thought she was going to cut through the tape and free him. Instead, she walked behind him. The pain when it came was astonishing. Even with the tape over his mouth, he howled in agony.

  When he could breathe again, tears were streaming down his face. She came around and dangled the remains of one of his fingers in his face.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He knew then that he was going to die, and the only satisfaction he could have was to deny this woman what she wanted. Twice more she went behind him. Twice more Richard’s world exploded in absolute agony. He passed out then. When he came to sometime later, he was aware of a peculiar racket, and the air around him was filled with the stale odor he always connected with his mother’s old vacuum cleaner.

  Why is that running now?

  Then she appeared again, bringing with her another of the dining room chairs. She set the chair close to his head and then sat on it.

  “Tell me,” she said again.

  “No,” he managed. Even with the tape over his mouth, it sounded like what he meant to say, “N-O!”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere a plastic bag appeared. With a single deft movement, she pulled the cloudy plastic down over his head.

  “Tell me and I’ll let you live.”

  Richard was an experienced liar. So was Mina Blaylock. He knew that, no matter what, she going to kill him anyway. So since it would make no difference, Richard would not give her his money. No matter what.

  He heard her tear loose a swath of transparent packing tape. He felt it tighten around his neck. For a few moments—a minute or so—there was enough air to breathe inside the bag. As the plastic went in and out with each breath, he could see her sitting there, watching and waiting, hoping he would give in.

  He didn’t. Instead, he closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see her. Soon he felt himself struggling for breath as the oxygen inside the bag became depleted.

  “Tell me,” he heard her say from very far away.

  He shook his head once more, and had a fleeting moment of victory. He knew he was dying, but he also knew he had won and Mina Blaylock had lost.

  13

  Sedona, Arizona

  Ali’s phone rang as she pulled out of the Sugarloaf parking lot. “Hey, Ali,” her very pregnant daughter-in-law said. “Are you busy?”

  Knowing a little of Athena’s background, Ali did her best to tread lightly in the mother-in-law department. There was enough bad blood between Athena and her own parents that Athena’s folks hadn’t been invited to Chris and Athena’s wedding. The only family member who had broken ranks with everyone else and attended the wedding was Athena’s paternal grandmother, Betsy Peterson.

  The rift with Chris’s in-laws was something Ali couldn’t understand. As far as she could see, Athena was a remarkable young woman. She had served in the Iraq War with the Minnesota National Guard and had returned home as a wounded warrior. She was a double amputee, minus her right arm from above the elbow and her right leg from below the knee. When her first husband divorced her—while she was still recovering from her injuries in Walter Reed—Athena’s parents for some unaccountable reason stuck with their former son-in-law and his new wife. The previous summer Chris and Athena had made the trek to Minnesota in hopes of normalizing relations, but nothing had changed. The ex-son-in-law was still more acceptable to Athena’s parents than their own daughter.

  Chris and Athena had met while they were both working at Sedona High School, where Chris taught American history and welding technology and Athena taught math. Athena was fiercely independent, and Ali admired both her spirit and her spunk. Athena had taught herself to do most things, including playing basketball, with her left hand, although she now had a realistic-looking prosthesis in place of her right arm. Getting pregnant, and especially getting pregnant with twins, had set her back some in the self-confidence department. And having two babies this early in their marriage wasn’t something that had been in Chris and Athena’s game plan either.

  As far as Ali was concerned, the appearance of twins was no surprise. After all, Chris’s grandmother was a twin, so the tendency was right there in his DNA. Athena’s ob-gyn, Dr. Dixon, had allayed many of Athena’s worries by telling her that people who can get pregnant usually can be pregnant. She had also said that studies with pregnant women who had been born missing whole or parts of limbs due to the drug thalidomide had been able to carry babies successfully. Their only major difficulty had been maintaining balance late in their term.

  A counselor from the VA had put Athena in touch with another young woman who was also an amputee and a new mother—although she was only a single amputee with a single baby. It helped Athena to know that she wasn’t alone, that there was someone else out there with similar problems and dilemmas.

  “Just on my way home from the Sugarloaf. Why, is there something you need?”

  Athena sighed. She sounded upset. “Yes. I could really use your help. I’d appreciate it if you could come by for a little while.”

  “Of course,” Ali said. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Just let yourself in when you get here,” Athena said. “I’m supposed to be on full bed rest.”

  Ali glanced at her watch. At 2:45 Chris was probably still at school. Then instead of heading home, she drove up to her old place on Andante Drive, where Chris and Athena now lived. Ali had inherited the place from her aunt Evie, her mother’s twin, and had sold it to Chris and Athena when she moved on to Manzanita Hills Drive.

  The house was actually a “manufactured home,” a nonmobile mobile that had been permanently attached to a set of footings and a concrete slab built into the steep hillside, an unusual set of construction circumstances that allowed for an actual basement, which Chris used as a studio for his metal artwork.

  As soon as Ali opened the front door, she caught a whiff of fresh paint. With the twins, Colin and Colleen, due within the next three weeks, Ali knew that Chris had been intent on pulling the nursery together. Athena was lying on the living room couch with one of Edie Larson’s colorful quilts pulled up over her baby mound.

  “How’s it going?” Ali asked, closing the door behind her.

  “After I took that little tumble last week, Chris made me promise that I’d stay put while he was gone.”

  Some of Athena’s fellow teachers had thrown a shower on Athena’s behalf. On the way back to the house, loaded down with gifts and determined to carry them herself, Athena had tripped and fallen. She had scraped both knees and her
one elbow but had suffered no major damage. Chris, however, had been beyond upset.

  “So what’s going on?” Ali asked. “Are you okay?”

  “The twins obviously aren’t on the same schedule,” Athena said with a wan smile. “When one of them is asleep, the other one is wide awake and kicking like crazy. So I’m not getting much sleep, and neither is Chris.”

  Ali smiled. “That’s going to get a lot worse for both of you before it gets better. Is there something I can do to help?”

  “It’s about the nursery,” Athena said.

  “What about it?”

  “We had a big fight about it before he left for school this morning.”

  “What about?” Ali asked.

  To Ali’s amazement, Athena burst into tears. Since Athena was one tough cookie, Ali figured it was either something terribly serious or else it was about nothing more than a storm of late-pregnancy rampaging hormones.

  “Chris is determined to have the nursery completely finished before your parents come home tomorrow, so he’s been working like crazy, painting until all hours. Last night he managed to get all the furniture put together too—the changing tables and the chests of drawers and the cribs.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Ali ventured.

  Athena nodded and blew her nose. “We managed to get all the clothes washed and dried, but when he started to sort them, it turns out he’s completely hopeless. I ended up dumping everything back out into one of the cribs. I could sort them myself, but I’m not supposed to be on my feet that long.”

  “I suspect you both have a bad case of impending parenthood nerves,” Ali said. “And I’m happy to do it. Thrilled, even. Now let me at ’em.”

  Athena offered a thin smile and then allowed Ali to help her off the sofa. She led Ali to the nursery that had once been Chris’s room. The room smelled of freshly applied paint. Two walls were pink; two were blue. The changing tables, dressers, and cribs were white. In one crib was a mountain of baby gear—some of it new and some of it secondhand. With Athena sitting in the rocker supervising the process, Ali commenced folding all the incredibly tiny outfits and separating them first by sort (blankets, shirts, nightgowns, and snuggle outfits) and second by colors (blues and greens, pinks and yellows). The blues and greens were destined for Colin’s drawers while the pinks and yellows would go to Colleen’s.

  As Ali did the sorting and folding, she also listened. In the process she couldn’t help but think about and be grateful for how different Chris and Athena’s situation was from what hers had been when Chris was born. His father, Dean, had died of a glioblastoma weeks before Chris appeared on the scene. Ali had been a single mother from day one—from before day one, actually.

  Chris and Athena were in this together. They expected that Athena would be going back to work as soon as possible after the babies were born. The school district had accepted Chris’s request to stay home on parental leave. Ali knew he was hoping that he’d be able to look after the twins and still do some metal sculpture work in his basement studio. Ali had sincere doubts about his ability to carry that one off, but she was careful not to mention her motherly case of skepticism. Experience had taught her that looking after two babies would make welding metal artwork pieces an impossible pipe dream.

  “You know,” Ali said, casually, “I don’t mind doing this, but even if he doesn’t do it quite the way you want it done, shouldn’t Chris be in on this? Once the babies get here, you’ll be lucky to get the clothes out of the dryer and into the basket, to say nothing of drawers, but if he’s going to be the one staying home, it seems to me he should be in charge of putting all this stuff away.”

  Athena shook her head. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” Ali asked, although something in Athena’s tone suggested that whatever it was, Ali might not want to know about it.

  Athena sighed. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but your son is color-blind. Not completely. Primary colors he can do. Reds and greens at stoplights he can do. Pastels? Not so much. According to him, all these clothes are gray.” She waved her one good hand in the direction of the stacks of clothing, now properly sorted by color.

  Ali was thunderstruck. “Are you kidding? You’re telling me my own son is color-blind?”

  The news came as a complete surprise. Eventually, though, Ali dissolved in a hopeless case of giggles. Before long Athena was laughing too.

  “I never knew,” Ali gasped at last. “I had no idea. From the time he was little he gravitated to blues and reds. I thought he just liked them.”

  “No,” Athena said, sobering. “Those are the only colors he could see. So tell me, how long will it be before the twins can choose their own clothes?”

  “They probably start doing that when they’re three or four.”

  “I hope they hurry,” Athena said. “Between now and then, with their father dressing them, it’s not going to be pretty.”

  By the time Ali had the last of the clothing put away, Chris turned up with a bouquet of store-bought flowers and a sweet thinking-of-you card. The guy may have been color-blind, but he knew when it was time to turn up with a fistful of flowers.

  Ali left Chris and Athena’s house still feeling bemused. She and Chris had always been close, and she was incredibly proud of him, but as it turned out, Ali Reynolds didn’t know her own son nearly as well as she thought she did.

  San Diego, California

  Mark Blaylock set off for San Diego that Friday morning tired and hungover but elated. After months of watching their financial situation deteriorate and then more months of worrying about the programming, he had cause to feel happy. It seemed to him that they were about to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

  Wednesday’s flawless early morning test flight had put his programming worries to rest once and for all. Both reprogrammed UAVs had flown properly. Both had taken off as expected and had followed their prescribed flight plans. The first one had landed exactly as the flight plan dictated, while an operator-issued command had blown the second drone to smithereens.

  That night he and Mina had driven into Palm Springs for a celebratory dinner. The next morning Mina had set off for Grass Valley in her older-model Lincoln. She had flown up to meet with Richard that first time, but since then, not wanting to deal with TSA scrutiny or to leave much of a paper trail, she had driven back and forth. The trip usually took a couple of days. Knowing how much Mina despised living in the cramped cabin in Salton City, Mark tried not to begrudge her her periodic absences.

  Mark had especially made it a point not to think about her monthly trips to see Richard Lowensdale, give him his partial payment, and check on his progress. If sex with Mina was part of what was keeping Richard on the job, Mark was prepared to overlook it. After all, he had his own occasional dalliances, and he wasn’t enough of a hypocrite to begrudge Mina hers. Besides, this was the end of it. Once the program fixes had been installed in the rest of the UAVs, they wouldn’t need Richard Lowensdale anymore.

  “See you on Sunday,” she said, when he kissed her goodbye.

  “Stay safe,” he told her.

  Knowing he’d need to spend a couple of days in San Diego, Mina had left him a fistful of welcome cash to cover food and lodging. Much as he tried not to, Mark couldn’t help regarding it as being given an allowance. To regain a little self-respect, he spent most of the day on Thursday drinking and gambling at his favorite hangout, the Red Earth Casino. With some luck and what he liked to regard as skill, he managed to add to that initial sum. On Friday morning, with a smile on his face and money in his pocket, he finally set off for San Diego to fulfill his part of the bargain and install Richard’s programming fix in each of their remaining UAVs.

  He didn’t rush. He stopped off for a beer here and there along the way. One thing he really missed on the drive was the Sirius radio he used to have in his Mercedes. That was one of the problems with being kicked downstairs. Now, tooling along in a secondhand Honda, inste
ad of being able to hum along with the country-western tunes he preferred on the Roadhouse or Willie’s Place, he had to search through what was available—mostly Spanish-speaking stations or blabbing news.

  So losing the Mercedes was a noticeable blow that was both economic and emotional. When he reached the industrial park complex that had once been home to Rutherford International, he took another hit as he drove past what had once been their official headquarters. There was a new name on the sign above the door, and Mark couldn’t help but take the change personally. Rutherford’s failure was Mark’s failure, and he was grateful that Mina had found a way to breathe some life into the smoldering ashes of their financial catastrophe.

  He drove through the familiar maze of light industrial and warehouse streets. When they had been looking for a location, having their office address on Opportunity Road had seemed exactly right. And having their warehouse/manufacturing facility on Engineer Road had seemed perfect as well, especially considering the proximity of Montgomery Field, where they had expected to do their test flights.

  Whether based on hubris or unbounded optimism, their assumption that they would actually win the much sought-after drone contract had been naive. Mark’s contacts had led them to believe that they had an “inside track” and that it was a “done deal.” They had leveraged everything they owned to grab the opportunity, and when the contract went elsewhere, they lost big and were still left holding leases they could no longer afford.

  Unfortunately their misfortunes coincided with what was going on in the general economy. As they were taking their financial hits, so was everyone else. California commercial real estate went into a downward spiral right along with the residential market, and that was as true for this office park as it was for similar projects throughout the country. Buildings that had once been fully occupied and busy now stood empty and forlorn, their entrances weedy, their walls covered with gang-related tags. Mark was relieved when he saw that no new tags were in evidence on the part of the one building that still had Rutherford International stenciled on the doors.