The Day Trader

by Stephen Frey

Mary screams, and my eyes flash back to the far corner where Slammer has her pressed face first against the wall, the end of the .44’s barrel moving slowly along her cheek toward her mouth.

  “Why don’t you like me, Sassy?” Slammer demands.

  “I do like you,” she sobs. “I do.”

  “No, you don’t,” he hisses, his upper lip quivering as he tries to pry her clenched teeth open with the gun. “Open your mouth,” he orders.

  “No, no, Max, please!” she begs, metal scraping her teeth. She turns her face away, but he forces her back to where he wants her. “Why are you doing this to me?” she asks pitifully. Still he slides the barrel roughly past her lips and down her throat.

  “Stop it!” I yell, my voice sounding faraway because I haven’t fully recovered my hearing. I know the violent reaction my shout may cause, but I can’t help it. I can’t watch this. “Max! Look at me!”

  He pulls the silver barrel from Mary’s lips, points the gun at me from across the room, and fires again. Another bullet blows past and I throw myself to the floor, hands over my head. Roger whimpers a few feet away, moaning that he just wants to see his wife and children again. Roger Junior and Alicia—he cries their names softly, over and over.

  I peer between my fingers and see that Slammer has spun Mary around so that she’s facing him now. Her back is pressed to the wall, the gun just a few inches from her mouth. She’s sobbing uncontrollably and her cheeks are smeared with mascara.

  “Why do you like Gus so much?” Slammer demands.

  But Mary’s sobs are so powerful she can’t speak. She’s fighting for air as tears rush down her face, and she just shakes her head.

  “Goddamn it!” he roars. “Answer me!”

  But she still can’t produce words. Her chest is heaving too violently.

  Slammer slowly pulls the hammer of the gun back and cocks it.

  “Please,” she’s finally able to moan. “Please don’t. I’m begging you.”

  Slammer’s upper lip quivers, and he turns his head slightly to the side as he aims the .44 directly at her face.

  I get ready for another deafening roar and the horror that will cover the wall behind Mary after the bullet tears through her head. Just as I’m sure Slammer is about to pull the trigger, his lip stops quivering and he slowly lowers the gun and uncocks the hammer. A moment later he turns and strides quickly to a phone on top of a credenza near the conference room door. “Come here, Gus,” he orders.

  I scramble up off the floor and hurry toward him so he doesn’t have time to think about going back after Mary.

  “Slow down,” he warns, backing away from the credenza and training the gun on me as I approach. “Call the lobby and get Seaver on the phone,” he demands.

  “Right away, Max.” I pick up the receiver and dial zero, not expecting anyone to answer. If they’re smart, everyone at Bedford has gotten out of the building and they’ve warned people on the other floors to do the same thing.

  But someone at the other end picks up the phone on the first ring. “Who is this?” a male voice demands.

  “This is Augustus McKnight. I’m calling from the conference room at the back corner of the trading floor.”

  There’s a slight pause. Whoever answered put his hand over the mouthpiece and is talking to someone else in the background. It occurs to me that the police may have already made it to the scene and taken up strategic positions in the Bedford lobby. Perhaps tactical units are crawling through the trading floor toward us right now, though that seems unlikely as I think about it. It’s been only a few minutes since Slammer shot Daniel, and it seems more likely that the police would try to negotiate with a gunman before storming in. Especially when they know he has hostages.

  “What was your name again?” the voice asks. The background noise grows louder when he removes his hand from the mouthpiece.

  “Augustus McKnight,” I repeat slowly. “Who is this?”

  There’s another muffled silence, but the man is back to me quickly this time. “This is Officer Grant of the Fairfax County police department. Is Maxwell Frasier with you?”

  “Yes,” I answer, not making eye contact with Slammer.

  “What’s going on back there?” the officer demands. “We’ve been advised that there were shots fired. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. We’re all fine.” I don’t want to say anything about Daniel because I don’t want Slammer to hear me tell someone on the outside that there’s been a killing. It might make him even more desperate if he realizes the police know he’s a murderer.

  “But there were gunshots,” the officer says. “Confirm that for me.”

  “Yes there were, but—”

  “Get Seaver,” Slammer hisses.

  “We need Michael Seaver on the line,” I say, making certain not to address the man as “officer.” “He’s the owner of Bedford and Associates.”

  “How many people are in that room?” the officer asks, ignoring me.

  “Four.”

  “Get Seaver!” Slammer shouts at the top of his lungs.

  “Please get Seaver,” I urge.

  “All right, all right,” comes the response. The officer has heard Slammer’s frantic tone.

  There’s a flurry of activity and shouting at the other end of the line, then the officer is back. “It’s going to take a few minutes to patch Seaver in. The building’s been evacuated, and we’ll need to find him outside.”

  “They’re looking for him,” I tell Slammer. “The building has been evacuated.”

  “Who are you talking to?” he asks suspiciously.

  “Fairfax police,” I answer. I can’t lie to him at this point.

  “Let me talk to Mr. Frasier,” the officer requests.

  I hold the receiver out toward Slammer. “They want to talk to you.”

  “Not a chance,” he says, pointing the gun at the receiver and taking a step back. “You talk.”

  “Mr. Frasier doesn’t want to speak to you,” I reply. “I’ll be the spokesman during this, and he wants Mr. Seaver on the line now.”

  “I told you, we’re looking for him,” the officer says. “It’s going to take time to find him. Mr. Frasier is going to have to be patient. Now tell me who else is back there with you and Mr. Frasier.”

  I look over at Slammer. “They want to know who’s back here,” I relay to him, trying to build a psychological bridge. “Should I tell them?”

  “No!”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t give you that information.”

  “Has anyone been hurt?” Grant asks.

  “Everyone in here is fine,” I answer calmly.

  Slammer nods his approval as he listens. I was right. He doesn’t want them to know about Daniel, which may mean he’s trying to get himself out of this thing alive. At least he isn’t planning some murder-suicide situation where he’s going to take all of us with him, then turn the gun on himself as the police are breaking down the door. Not yet, anyway.

  A couple of minutes later Seaver comes onto the line. He’s being connected from somewhere downstairs, the officer informs me.

  “Hello.”

  “Seaver?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Augustus McKnight.” I can hear the officer breathing heavily into the phone.

  “Are you all right?” he asks, his voice shaky.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Is that Seaver?” Slammer demands.

  I nod.

  “Tell him I want all my money back in fifteen minutes or Mary takes a bullet to the head. It comes to fifty grand. All the money I’ve lost to this rip-off operation he runs. I swear I’ll kill her if he doesn’t do exactly what I say.”

  At Slammer’s direction, Mary has taken a seat beside Roger on the floor, and I can hear her whimper at Slammer’s threat. “Did you hear the demand, Seaver?” I ask.

  “I heard it,” he replies grimly. “But I can’t get fifty thousand dollars together in fifteen minutes. That’s simply impossible.”<
br />
  “He says it’s going to take some time,” I relay.

  “Then the woman’s going to die,” Slammer shouts, leaning close to the mouthpiece so Seaver can hear. He raises the gun and shoots at the ceiling, and I dive to the floor, dropping the phone. “You motherfuckers!”

  I grab the phone again as I lie prone on the floor, and Roger and Mary hold on tightly to each other. “Did you hear that?” I gasp.

  “Is everyone all right?” the officer yells. “Jesus!”

  “I can get some of the money quickly!” Seaver promises. “Maybe ten thousand.”

  “He says he can get ten thousand right away, Max.”

  “No! It’s fifty right away or she dies.” Slammer leans down and grabs the phone from me. “Listen to me, you slimy son of a bitch! You get me that money. You go to your bank and get me the money, or I’m going to kill this woman and throw her body out the window so all of those people down on the street can watch. You get me fifty thousand dollars. No, make it a hundred grand to make up for all the pain and suffering you and your damn day trading firm have put me through. Do you understand? A hundred thousand. Send one person in here with it in a bag. They knock on the conference room door, then they leave it outside and run! Got it? Fifteen minutes, Seaver, or you’ll see her body come flying out the window!” With that, he holds the receiver out away from his body, aims the gun at it, and pulls the trigger. Instantly the phone disintegrates into a hundred tiny pieces. “Think he got the message?” Slammer asks, staring down at me wild-eyed with what’s left of the phone still shaking in his hand.

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “I think he got it.”

  “Please don’t kill me, Max,” Mary whines. “Please.”

  Slammer pays no attention to her. “Get back over there with the others, Gus.”

  Slowly I pick myself up off the floor and move to Roger and Mary. I kneel down beside her, taking her shaking hand in mine. “It’s all right. Calm down. Everything will be fine.”

  “He’s going to kill me,” Mary sobs. “I’ve never done anything to him. Why is he going to do this to me?”

  I shake my head and smile. “He isn’t going to do anything to you, Mary. He isn’t going to do anything to anybody.”

  After I say this I stand up again. “What are you doing? Be careful, Augustus,” she warns.

  “Sit down!” Slammer shouts.

  I turn toward him. “Give me the gun, Slammer.”

  He laughs incredulously. “Shut up.”

  “Give me the gun,” I repeat calmly.

  “Go to hell.”

  “It’s over, Max.”

  “It’s far from over,” he snaps angrily. “In a few minutes they’re going to bring me a hundred thousand dollars, and I’m going to walk out of here with a human shield around me.”

  “No,” I say, taking a step toward him, “you’re not.”

  He raises the gun and points it at my face. “Take one more step and I’ll kill you.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “God help me, I will.”

  “Then do it,” I dare him, taking another deliberate step toward him and holding my arms out to my sides. “Come on.”

  “Don’t tempt me, Gus. I’ve already killed one man. I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

  As I take another step forward, he aims the gun directly at my chest, but I keep going.

  “No, Augustus!” Mary screams.

  Slammer pulls the trigger and the hammer falls. But there’s only a sharp metallic click. Nothing else.

  I lunge the last few feet between us, grab him, and pull him to the ground, beating his wrist mercilessly against the floor until the gun flies from his hand. Instantly Mary scrambles to her feet and bolts for the door, followed a split second later by Roger.

  Slammer lands a nice right cross to my jaw that stuns me momentarily and he’s able to push me away. As he tries to make it to his feet, I grab his lower leg and trip him, sending him hard to the floor. Mary and Roger are racing toward the lobby and in seconds this place will be crawling with cops. He must realize it’s over. He must realize that his freedom can now be measured in seconds.

  Slammer makes it to his feet again, but instead of chasing after Mary and Roger, he turns and stares intently at me for several seconds. Then he spins to his left, runs toward the window at a full sprint, and leaps, crashing through the glass and plunging toward the cement nine floors down.

  CHAPTER 15

  It’s been six hours and what seems like an ocean of scotch since Slammer committed suicide by crashing through the Bedford window. Nine stories down with nothing but unforgiving pavement below. I heard from another Bedford trader who saw the whole thing from the street that it was a gruesome sight when his body hit the sidewalk. The guy started to describe the bloody impact once more for one of several television crews who had flocked to the scene, but I turned away when the red light above the camera lit up and the reporter began firing questions. I couldn’t listen to the horrible details.

  Slammer was never my friend, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was the one who had set him off. If I hadn’t charged into his cubicle and challenged him the way I did, he wouldn’t have pulled the gun, wouldn’t have murdered Daniel, and wouldn’t have taken his own life. I can try to make myself feel better by thinking about how people have to accept accountability for their own actions. I know that Slammer was ultimately responsible for everything that happened this morning, but I was the match that lit the fuse. That single fact is indisputable, and it torments me.

  After all these drinks it still seems like it was only minutes ago that Slammer took one last look at me—a look equal parts desperation and terror—and hurtled through the window. Desperation because he felt there was no other choice. Terror, I believe, not of the mind-numbing plunge and that momentary physical suffering he was about to endure, but of what lay beyond. As we locked eyes for that split second, it seemed to me that he was petrified of what he might find. He hadn’t made peace with himself, which must be a terrible way to go.

  The ice cubes in my glass rattle as I lift them to my lips. My hands are still shaking, and I plan on drinking until they stop. Maybe the police will pull me over on the way home and force me to spend the night behind bars, but I won’t care. In fact, I may ask them to lock me up.

  “You were so brave, Augustus,” Mary says, sipping her fourth glass of white wine. She sits beside me in a comfortable booth at a dark bar a few miles from Bedford where she, Roger, and I have taken refuge to try to deal with what’s happened. Mary and I are alone for the moment while Roger visits the men’s room. “I couldn’t believe it when you walked straight at Max while he was pointing the gun at you.” One of her hands is resting on my leg. “For the first time in my life I really thought I was going to die. You saved my life, Augustus.”

  “I wasn’t that brave,” I mutter. “That was a six-shot revolver, and I knew when I approached him that he was out of bullets. He’d fired all six rounds. The one that killed Daniel, three at me, one into the ceiling, and one that blew up the phone.” I recount the shots as if by rote, my voice a low monotone.

  I must be in shock, or maybe I’m just exhausted, because I haven’t been able to show much emotion—except for my trembling hands—since moving slowly to the window to gaze nine stories down at Slammer’s body lying crumpled on the pavement. While I watched, the people on the ground rushed to where he lay, forming an ever-expanding circle around his body. As I stood there and looked down through the shattered window, its broken blind hanging limply by one bolt, a warm wind rushing past my face, I wondered what Melanie was thinking as she lay in that alley, her throat slashed wide open, her life ebbing away. She was probably conscious for twenty or thirty seconds after the attack, unable to move or speak as her blood pressure plummeted. I wondered if she experienced any kind of freedom as the physical pain subsided and the inevitable overtook her. Freedom from the day-to-day concerns and insecurities that rule us all, and sometimes make our lives hell,
whether we admit it or not. I’ve often wondered whether there is that final freedom.

  I actually placed one foot up on the windowsill as I looked down at Slammer’s body so far below me. I was about to pull the other leg up, but then the police poured into the room, guns drawn, and they were all over me, guiding me to a chair to make certain I was unharmed.

  I don’t know why I stepped up onto the sill like that. I’ve never come close to committing suicide, never even considered it. But suddenly it seemed like I was standing in the middle of a railroad track in the dead of night as a speeding train bore down on me, whistle blaring and brakes shrieking as the engineer tried to stop it. I was frozen in its headlight until an unseen force pushed me out of the way at the last second, and the train raced past. That’s what it was like this morning. I could feel the rush of wind as death swept right past me. Then there were cops all around me, asking me where the gun was, and I couldn’t tell them.

  I wonder if I would have taken that last step if they hadn’t burst into the room when they did. For the first time in my life I was ready for that final freedom.

  “And you didn’t even go right at Slammer after he fired the last time,” Mary continues.

  “I knew I could get to him before he had a chance to reload,” I explain. “There was no reason to rush.”

  “You are so brave,” she says for the tenth time. “How in the world did you have the presence of mind to count the number of shots? I couldn’t have even told you my name, I was so scared in there.”

  “I don’t know,” I answer honestly. It wasn’t as if I was counting all along. The fact that Slammer was out of bullets hit me out of nowhere when the phone blew apart in his hand. Something snapped, and I realized it was over. “I just wish there could have been another way,” I murmur.

  The strange thing about the whole ordeal was that I never felt like I was in any real physical danger, even when Slammer first leveled the gun at me in his cubicle. I thought about how it might feel if the bullet tore into me, but I wasn’t frightened.

  “Max Frasier was an evil man,” Mary says with conviction. “The world is better off without him. He murdered poor Daniel.”