Stew scanned the black-and-white photos. Snapshots of perfect moments. The joyous children. The beautiful wife. It appeared to Ben that Stew was absorbing the pictures. Sucking them into his sick psyche. And that made Ben very uneasy. He stood.
“Please,” said Ben. “I think we’re done.”
“My wife and I,” ignored Stew. “We’re starting a family. Gotta say, I was worried that I’d make a lousy father. Not anymore, though. That’s cuz I’ve moved on. Out of the past and into today. You know what I mean, right?”
Then Stew held his palms toward that collage of family images and made a swirling gesture.
“I can see here that you’ve moved on, too,” smiled Stew. “And that’s awesome, man. You and me. We’ve both done it. Changed. Moved on, yeah?”
“Sure we have,” said Ben, just wishing Stew would grab the door handle, pull it, and be gone.
“In The Program we advise to learn from the past. But once you’ve learned, always look ahead.”
“Important safety tip,” said Ben a bit too glibly.
The smile on Stew’s face faded marginally as he tried to interpret the intent of Ben’s jibe. Then Stew broke into a laugh.
“I get it,” said Stew. “Safety tip from the Safety Guy.”
“That’s me,” said Ben weakly.
“Hey, man. You have a good day,” said Stew with an affirmative nod. He reached for the door, yanked it wide open and walked out.
Stew was gone.
And Ben suddenly felt as if he had the flu. His muscles ached. He was chilled to his ever-tightening ligaments and tendons.
He found himself manically leveling the rows of framed, family photos to their former, uniform and squared-to-the-ceiling positions. After that, he walked as if half-drunk into the outer office and snatched the men’s room key from the soap dish on Josie’s desk. The dish itself was a Disney collector’s curio, emblazoned with a cheerful message: Greetings from the Happiest Place on Earth.
Ben had himself a powerful urge.
Not that he actually needed to use the toilet. He merely desired to lock himself inside a cave where nobody could touch him, hear him, or see or smell the fear on him. The men’s room was the nearest place Ben could think of for isolation. He needed to work his bearings back into place.
It was a quick step out the door, a hard left, eleven paces, then a ninety-degree right at a slivered window that overlooked the exit to the underground parking structure. Ben fumbled and jiggled a key that felt as if it couldn’t possibly turn the lock. Wondering if he had mistakenly grabbed the women’s room key, he checked and found it was attached to a tiny, plastic Mickey Mouse keychain. If it were the ladies’ room key, it would have been dangling on an equally cute Minnie Mouse keychain. Both the charms and the soap dish, whimsical mementos from a brief consulting gig handed Ben by the Burbank-based Disney Corporation.
But right now the happiest place on earth for Ben was going to be inside the men’s room. If he could only get in.
He tried the key once more. And the lock turned like it had been greased. In an instant, Ben slipped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. The motion-controlled sensor flicked on a double-strip of cool-white fluorescents revealing a bathroom that hadn’t received much more than a basic facelift since the sixties. There was a urinal and a toilet in a stall. Double sinks set into a Formica countertop below a large mirror. One waste can, one paper-towel dispenser. All surrounded by stacked white tiles rising from a polished concrete floor with a collection drain at the center.
Ben avoided his own reflection as he turned on the faucet and splashed cold water up into his face. He then withdrew his mobile phone and scrolled for Gonzo’s telephone number. He had to tell someone. Purge himself of what had just happened inside his office. Most of all, he needed advice on what to do next. Should he call the police? Was he a witness to a confession of sorts? And if it had been a confession, would it be anything more than Ben’s word versus Stew’s—
“You’ve reached the voicemail box of Lydia Gonzalez. Please leave a message.”
Before Ben could think, there was a beep, followed by an unconscious flow of broken sentences.
“Lydia. It’s me... Ben. I was just... He knows. He knows about me and was here. The sonofabitch showed up at my office and... He was just here when I arrived this... It’s so weird. I don’t know how or what to think about the apology. Did I say that? He came to apologize. That’s what he said... apologize for his side of the street. But he says he doesn’t remember any of it... Remembered you, yeah. Remembered you. Says he changed. Says we’ve all changed and we’ve moved on. Christ, I wanted to kill him. Right there. How the hell he found me I—”
Beep.
And like that, Ben stopped, realizing how much he was babbling. He thought of redialing her. Starting over from the beginning. Less panicked. More cogent. But most likely that would lead to another voicemail beep followed by yet more verbal diarrhea.
The water gushed from the spigot. Ben placed his cell phone on the counter, grabbed a handful of loosely stacked paper towels, then as he dabbed at his face he unwittingly caught himself staring at his own reflection. He appeared weary with broken capillaries overpowering the whites of his eyes, his skin a shade paler than an albino stripper’s. Then came the convulsion. His stomach was preparing to flip-flop and send his breakfast back over his gums. Ben spun and dove for the stall.
He loathed vomiting. Not just the vile smell and taste of regurgitated food. But the idea of handing over momentary control of his bodily functions to a return-reflux system while kneeling at a toilet bowl? It was nine parts repugnant, one part relief until the act was finished and he had gargled with Listerine and was chewing twin sticks of spearmint gum.
But in this purge, Ben felt no relief whatsoever. He held his nose, pressed the handle on the toilet, and puked a second and third time until his stomach had scraped itself clean. With his head hanging over the bowl, the constant sound of flushing was akin to that at the base of Niagara Falls.
So overpowering was the rushing noise in his ears that Ben hadn’t heard the key in the lock, the bathroom door swinging open, or the leather footfalls of size fourteen shoes.
“Shoulda figured a guy like you wouldn’t have the stomach.”
Ben heard the voice, but couldn’t make out the words, let alone place the voice.
“Sorry,” said Ben, still squatting, embarrassed, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and then lying, “must be some kinda food poisoning.”
Ben’s memory sped backward to the moment he had entered the bathroom. He couldn’t recall the part where he fumbled with the key, let alone throwing the privacy latch.
“Need the stall?” asked Ben. He anchored himself on the seat, stood, and opened the stall’s door while wiping his hands on a wad of toilet paper.
Then Ben’s eyes lifted.
Standing before him was the same Stew Raymo in the same sadly-tailored navy jacket. Only his chest strained at his shirt buttons as it heaved in and out and his face had turned to the pigment of a feral pig. The vein that forked above the bridge of his nose pulsed as if he had sprinted up ten flights of stairs.
“How’d you get—”
“You’re a mother fuckin’ skunk,” interrupted Stew. As Stew punctuated his own curse with his left middle and ring finger, Ben’s question was answered when he saw the key with the Minnie Mouse charm wedged in Stew’s palm.
The women’s room key.
If Stew had been interested, he could have explained to Ben that most commercial contractors and building supers were too lackadaisical to key men’s and women’s restrooms with different keys. It was a better than fifty-fifty shot that the Minnie Mouse key would open the door to the room stenciled “Men.”
Ben’s error had been in not sliding the privacy bolt closed.
“Said you’d think on it,” said Stew as he angled closer. “But I could see your face. That’s right. I read you, mister. After I come to you like a man and apolo
gize. But no. You’re not forgettin’ shit, are you? You’re gonna push this until it gets ugly.”
“Nobody here’s lookin’ for trouble.”
“Called your cop friend?” nodded Stew toward the cell phone in a puddle on the countertop. If Stew had looked harder he would have seen the sink had begun to overflow, the drain stopped-up by the fistful of spent paper towels left there by Ben moments earlier.
“Please,” said Ben in full defensive mode, his hands thrust forward, palms squared in the universal sign of “stop.” The man closing in was clearly bent with rage. Ben braced himself for the imminent attack.
As the big man lunged, all Ben could manage was a quick retreat backward into the stall. He slammed the door shut and locked it, only to have the latch snap and explode with a ping. A flying screw scored Ben’s left cheek. Ben felt a massive hand reach in and snag his hair, jerking him from the stall.
If not for those size-fourteen Rockport shoes with leather soles. Worn leather soles built for style. Leather soles that weren’t designed for traction on a wet, polished, concrete floor.
The sink had bubbled over and produced a drain-seeking, lazy stream across the restroom’s floor. The spill was at the precise spot where a man of Stew’s weight and structure needed a solid purchase to both kick in the stall’s door and remain vertical.
Stew’s left food slipped from under him. Gravity took over and sucked the big man to the floor. Making matters worse, he hadn’t let go of Ben’s hair. Stew’s skull slapped the concrete surface a microsecond before the full weight of Ben landed on his chest.
Thud. Wheeze.
Ben felt the man’s entire body vibrate as Stew groaned and rolled in a momentary daze. Ben scrambled away, found his feet, and considered running.
Considered?
There was nothing in the human body’s primitive, fight-or-flight response that accounted for weighing options. It was a simple axiom. And automatic. To advance or retreat didn’t require permission from any of the brain’s logic centers. Still, as Stew struggled to recover, Ben was making the choice. And in that perplexing instant, he felt as if he had all the time in the world to choose.
Fight or flight?
Stew was temporarily immobilized, straining for air as his lungs hadn’t yet fully inflated. All Ben needed to manage were those three steps to the door and he could then flee to the nearest phone to dial 911.
Only Ben found himself drawn closer to Stew. And as he neared, his fingertips curled up into his palms until his knuckles turned white. Ben had never hit a man in his life. Not a blow or so much as a drunken, roundhouse, swing and a miss.
“Motherfucker,” growled Stew, sitting partway up, dizzy, in a bout to find his equilibrium. His eyes were glazed and unfocused. Then as if his neck was the ball-and-socket-joint to which his head was attached, Stew’s mandible turned robotically up and to the left. Through an obvious haze, his eyes leveled and focused on Ben’s balled fists. This is when Stew’s eyes lifted, swiveling up the length of Ben’s body until he had reckoned with the owner.
“Huh,” said Stew. “You’re still fuckin’ here.”
Ben didn’t need to think another second. The rest came either naturally or from his tangled database of movies and television shows. Ben swung the laces of his left shoe into Stew’s face with a force that returned the big man back to the concrete. Next he circled counterclockwise and followed with three—correct that—five swift kicks into Stew’s rib cage. Each strike landed with a satisfying thud. Stew wheezed and cried out in pain while trying to roll away.
Ben lowered himself. He spiked one knee into Stew’s shoulder, thus pinning his target to the floor while he dropped a heavy fist into Stew’s face. The adrenalin thrust into the nerve endings of Ben’s white knuckles masking any pain, allowing him to cock, reload, and punch again and again. All the while, Ben found himself huffing with the mantra, “Welcome to my side of the street, motherfucker!”
Then a word popped into Ben’s head.
Bloodrite.
A word that was all his own. A word that seemed to justify each successive lick he pounded into Stew who, unnoticed by Ben, had stopped flailing, lost consciousness, and gone totally limp.
But Ben didn’t stop until the pounding on the door got louder than the bestial grunts he was uttering from a place deep in his solar plexus.
“Everything okay in there?” shouted the voice. Distinctively Irish. Ben clocked it as one of the software testers who shared an office suite at the other end of the corridor.
“Call nine-one-one,” said Ben, his voice so raspy it bordered on laryngitis.
“What did you say?”
Ben swung off of Stew, took a moment to find his balance, then lunged for the door. He threw the privacy bolt and pulled it open.
“Call nine-one-one,” repeated Ben, sucking for air.
“What happened?”
“There’s been an assault.”
Then as Ben leaned into the jamb, the young software tester pushed at the door until he saw big Stew, fully prostrate on the floor, soaked in a sour-looking mix of sink-water and blood.
“Please call!” said Ben, exhausted, plunging out of the restroom and into the corridor where he crashed against the opposite wall. That’s when Ben’s knees turned to oatmeal. He slid all the way to the carpet, head in his hands, trembling.
8
BARELY SIXTY-EIGHT MINUTES had elapsed from the time Ben had crossed the threshold of his office that Monday to the moment the Burbank PD flooded into the building. As coffee breaks unfolded and tongues wagged, rumors swirled that a man had been brutally murdered in the third floor men’s room and the killer was still at large within the property.
Ben excused Josie for the day without much explanation. Upon her return from McDonalds, Ben had asked her to leave in order to spare her from feeling as if she needed to care for him and his bloodied right hand. From Ben’s perspective the battle had been his. He was the underdog, had been attacked, and he had won. He made his initial statement to the uniformed officers upon their arrival with the EMTs, before he was asked to wait until detectives arrived for formal questioning. With an officer posted outside his office door, Ben gladly agreed to wait inside. There, alone with his turbo-charged brain, he paced the spartan interior, never once sitting while he hatched an entire list of new worries.
He made no phone calls.
Foremost on Ben’s list of concerns was Alex. He had promised her that the whole Stew Raymo issue would vanish and be gone from both their lives. He had broken that vow the day he let the 170 choose his fate, knocked on Stew Raymo’s door and met the man’s tawny wife, Pam. But what Alex didn’t know might not hurt her. After all, Stew Raymo had showed up at his office. Stew Raymo had attacked him. The sympathy quotient alone should be enough to wash away Alex’s feelings of betrayal. Or so Ben hoped. He hated having to calculate on his wife’s emotional reactions. And it felt dishonest as hell.
Because you were dishonest, Ben.
Between worrying about everything from the effect of the attack on his home life to prayers that the case file on his first family’s murder would be reopened, Ben’s scattered brain surfed from his upcoming calendar—to taking stock of his life choices—to a critical rundown of his office’s dated décor. He should remodel, or even move. While his thoughts ran on, Ben would have to peel a bloody Kleenex off his knuckles and replace it with another every five minutes. His hand throbbed and felt heavy, sending him into Josie’s desk in search for bottles full of any over-the-counter anti-inflammatory pills. It was in the midst of this mission that Ben was visited by a pair of plainclothes Burbank PD detectives. They entered, noted Ben’s injured hand, and took up separate positions opposite Josie’s horseshoe-shaped desk. One asked Ben if he would mind if his answers were recorded.
“Of course not,” said Ben, who glanced at his watch. It was 11:20, better than an hour that Ben had been waiting in his office.
“You got someplace to go?” asked Detective Grossman,
who was in a brown, polyblend suit and shaped more like a bodybuilder-turned-couch-potato than what Ben imagined a modern detective should be. Grossman’s partner was a younger, freckled fellow named Phillips who wore khakis, a blue-black threaded sport coat, and a tie that looked as if it had been picked out by his four-year-old. Phillips placed a pocket recorder on the table in front of Ben, and returned to his near-silent post, leaning back against the closed door.
“This your place of business?” asked Grossman.
“Yes,” answered Ben.
“What do you do?”
“Safety consultant,” said Ben.
“Business good?”
“No complaints.”
“Better safe than sorry, huh?” added Phillips.
“Shut up,” said Grossman, revealing an unguarded smile. “Bet he’s heard ’em all. Isn’t that right?”
“Yeah,” confirmed Ben. “Heard ’em all.”
“Can we talk about that statement you made?”
“I’m all yours.”
“In your statement, you claim that while in the men’s restroom, Mr. Raymo entered and attacked you.”
“A few words passed between us before,” corrected Ben, “But yeah. He seemed intent on—”
“Did he intend to attack?” asked Grossman. “Or did he attack you?”
“He attacked me,” said Ben. “Just looked to me like that was his plan, so...”
“You didn’t say anything that would make him attack you? Provoke him into...”
“What in the world could I say to make anyone assault me?”
“You tell me,” said Grossman. “It’s a men’s room. Men are exposed. Stuff gets said.”
“You get a lot of assaults in men’s rooms?” asked Ben.
“You’d be surprised.”
It made sense. Just about every bar on the planet had a men’s room. A small space where men who had consumed overwhelming amounts to drink were suddenly in close proximity. Too close.
“I didn’t say anything to provoke him,” said Ben.
“So you’d be surprised if Mr. Raymo tells a different story?”
The Safety Expert Page 25
