Man of Wax (Man of Wax Trilogy)

by Robert Swartwood

  “Choking her? You bet he is. But that’s not all. He’s fucking her too. Fucking her and choking her at the same time.”

  The Kid explained how he’d come across this particular scene two days ago. After the woman was dead, the man—he was listed as The Joker—went to some motel room, where he threw up and then showered for three or four hours. The next morning he started out into the city (after a half hour the Kid narrowed it down to Tampa) and just began walking the streets.

  “The Joker?” Carver asked.

  The Kid nodded and typed a mile a minute and brought up another screen. On it was the picture of a man who looked to be in his thirties, pale and overweight, badly losing his hair. There were a few paragraphs about him, where he’d been born and where he went to school and his hobbies, his likes and dislikes, where he worked.

  “They don’t seem to list real names,” the Kid said. “They always give codenames of sorts, though they identify each person to an extent. Like the guy you just saw choking that girl? In his bio it said he’d always wanted to be a comedian, had even done some of his material on open mic nights at clubs. Hence he’s The Joker.”

  The Kid continued to show Carver what else he’d come across. A list of other people—what Carver and the Kid quickly assumed were contestants—that included names like The Writer, The Poet, The Singer, Woman of Gold, Man of Cars, and so on. No real names were ever given. Another page, linked to the bios, told about each person’s families. Their husbands and wives, their children, sometimes even their parents. Evidently these family members were being held captive (something that was freely mentioned on the site to its users), which forced these people, these contestants, to do what was asked of them.

  “They’re given instructions,” the Kid told Carver, when he took a break and they were in the kitchen. The microwave was humming, popping a bag of Orville Redenbacher. “From what I can tell their only contact is someone named Simon. You know, Simon Says? This guy tells them what to do, how to do it, all that shit. Though, to be honest, I can’t be one hundred percent sure it’s the same guy every time. From what it looks like, the people who do this shit are very well connected, and there’re a lot of them. Make good money, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From what I can tell those people who aren’t as web savvy as someone like me—just normal people like you, for instance—pay a shitload to access these shows. Depending on what each person wants to see or witness or even experience, it all ranges from thousands of dollars up to tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands. I mean, these sick fucks are major high rollers.”

  “But how can we be certain it’s even real?” Carver asked, trying his best to play devil’s advocate.

  The Kid said, “Dude, you’ve seen shit like this before, only a lot tamer. You just know when it’s real and when it’s not. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  No, as much as Carver wanted to, he couldn’t tell the Kid he was wrong. It was a feeling Carver always got in his gut, the one that said this wasn’t just some bullshit a bunch of kids were trying to play as a prank. And he’d seen his share of websites offering the promise of dark desires and pleasures, like those people who loved watching snuff films. He’d seen so many he could tell almost at once when one was real and when one wasn’t.

  Back in the basement, surrounded by Terry Gilliam movie posters, with the computers again, Carver asked why the websites had disappeared before. The Kid explained they all seemed to be timed to stay in one place for any given hour, sometimes half an hour, and then move to another spot. This made it difficult for hackers or anybody else who was interested to try to infiltrate the system. The Kid even admitted—a little abashedly—that there had been a few instances when he’d been having a hell of a time tracking down where the sites went to next. His thought was whoever paid to get the full show was sent constant links, so they never missed a minute of the action ... though really, with the cameras on the contestant twenty-four-seven, the action was limited. Most of the time the person was either sleeping or riding in some form of transportation, that was all. But then the time came, no matter how brief, when something did happen. So far the Kid had witnessed two murders, a rape, and a man who sliced open a living donkey and began eating the intestines raw. And those were for the sites he’d managed to locate and track.

  “I have to be careful myself, though,” the Kid said. His bowl of popcorn was beside him and he ate it happily, shoving handfuls into his mouth. They were staring at the one monitor, again watching the man listed only as The Joker as he cleaned himself up after murdering the woman. He was in the bathroom, having just thrown up in the toilet, and was now washing off his face, crying.

  Carver asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Like I told you before, whoever’s doing this stuff knows their shit. They can probably tell when an outside source has found any given site. They might try to move the site faster than planned, or they might try to put a trace on whoever’s stumbled across their show. Or maybe both. All I can say is thank God I have up-to-date anti-tracking software. Fuck the stuff from last month.”

  Based on everything the Kid had shown him, Carver was certain he could bring this to his supervisor. He had yet to hear of any progress from the other team who’d been assigned to the case, and was beginning to suspect no team had actually been assigned. He had even looked into it himself and came up with nothing. He asked the Kid to copy some of the saved files and then took it to work with him on Monday and showed his supervisor.

  His supervisor sat quietly for a long time behind his desk before sighing and leaning back in his chair. He asked Carver why he’d blatantly disregarded an order. Carver explained that he’d been troubled by what he’d seen, that he’d been working on this at home on his free time (he wasn’t about to mention the Kid’s assistance in this matter), and that from the evidence he’d collected it seemed a full out investigation should be conducted.

  For a long time there was silence. Then his supervisor said, “Good work,” stood up and extended his hand for Carver to shake. “I can’t promise anything but I’ll see if I can get a team together to work on this exclusively. I’ll put you in charge.”

  At home that night, Carver decided not to tell Sandra about what had happened. He’d wait until his supervisor made everything official before telling her anything. Besides, even if things did go through, he was leery of telling her about what he knew. She was a woman who spooked easily and the last thing he wanted to do was scare her.

  Much later, while Sandra was sleeping, Leon started fussing in the next room. Carver got up and took him out of his crib, began rocking him back to sleep. He stared at the pictures stenciled on the walls of the nursery, the ones his wife was very slowly going about painting. Scenes from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll being Sandra’s favorite children’s author. Carver sort of felt like Alice now, going down that rabbit hole, uncertain what he would find. Eventually he placed his son back in his crib, stared down at him for a very long time, and returned to bed.

  When Carver woke that morning he was not in his bed. He was not in his bedroom. He was not even in his house.

  He was in what appeared to be a rundown motel room, the kind with stains on the ceilings and cigarette burns on the carpet. What had woken him was the phone ringing beside the bed. He answered it and listened to a dark voice introduce itself as Simon.

  “It seems you’ve gotten a little too close to what we do, Carver, so we thought we’d include you in on the fun. You’re going to play a game. As long as you do everything I say you’ll see your wife Sandra again. If not, she dies.”

  “Fuck you,” Carver said. He scrambled up from the bed, looking around, trying to spot the cameras in the corners, hidden in the vent, wherever. A pair of glasses sat on the bedside table beside the phone.

  Simon said, “That’s not very nice, Carver. Either you’ll play nice or you won’t play at all. Now are you ready for the first part of the game? It’s easy.
Go take a piss.”

  Even though everything in Carver’s mind told him not to, he started toward the bathroom. It was dark inside and he expected someone to be waiting in there, someone who might be his supervisor though he doubted his supervisor would be stupid enough to place himself at the scene. Then again maybe his supervisor had nothing to do with this. But someone sure as hell did. Someone had sold him out, and now Carver was certain he was very close to finding out who.

  But then he went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and stepped toward the toilet.

  Lying in the water, facedown, was his son.

  35

  Carver’s story wasn’t told uninterrupted. Not with the utility van shot up the way it was. Simon would take care of his own people, Carver explained, make sure the police didn’t get involved right away in case any of the escorts were still alive, but that didn’t mean an APB hadn’t already been put out on the van. One hadn’t come across on their own radar yet, but the fact was they needed new wheels and they needed them fast.

  At that point I was just along for the ride, listening to Carver tell his story while first they checked me for any tracking devices (in my clothes and shoes) then while we got off at the first exit and searched for a new van to steal. That came pretty quickly, the driver and passenger jumping out and breaking into a new van and then we were in there too, Carver and myself, leaving the old van behind.

  “What about the others?” I asked at one point, and Carver said, “They know what to do and will meet up with us later,” and before I knew it I broke down and started crying. This man claimed my wife and daughter were dead, that they’d been dead from the start, but I refused to believe it. I couldn’t give up that hope. All I had left was the promise of seeing them again, of hearing their voices, of hugging them and never letting go, and the only way to do that was to understand what exactly was going on.

  So I stopped crying, wiped my tears, and asked, “Then what did you do? After you found your ...” But I couldn’t say it, because it made me think of Casey.

  Carver didn’t answer me for the longest time. He just stared off into space, shaking his head almost imperceptibly, and sighed. “I took him out and ... he was bloated, so bad I could hardly even recognize him. I laid him down on the bed, wrapped him in a sheet, said a prayer, and left.” He paused and looked at me. “I just turned around and walked away.”

  “But your wife,” I said. “You let her ...” Again I couldn’t say it.

  Carver’s dark face continued staring back at me. “I knew there was no outlet. I’d seen the game played before. Nobody ever wins. They’re forced to do whatever Simon tells them to do with the hope they’ll win and get their family back. But they never do. My wife was already dead, just like my son, and I refused to play Simon’s game.”

  He’d left, finding himself in a mountainous region of the country, coniferous trees everywhere. He stripped off his clothes, thinking there might be some kind of tracking device in them, and continued through the woods. Eventually he came to a nearby town. Managed to steal some clothes at night while nobody was around and then hitchhiked to the next town, where he learned he was in Maine, in the county of Wytopitlock. There he contacted the Kid, explained what had happened, to which the Kid had said, “I know, dude. I watched you wake up.”

  Apparently Carver’s show had been listed as the Man of Honor.

  “Your show’s listed as the Man of Wax,” Carver said. Something was different about his voice, it didn’t sound completely there, and I wondered just how often he thought about that moment in the motel room in Maine, the moment he woke up and realized his world had changed forever. “The only reason I know your real name’s Benjamin Anderson is when that delivery girl dropped off that package to you the first day.”

  I only nodded. I was hoping this man wouldn’t get into the reason for why my “show” had been listed as it had. I remembered what Simon had told me, how that grin had been so clear in his voice.

  “So then what?” I asked finally. We were driving through the streets of Chicago now, an entire other world outside the windows that I could barely see, nor see myself ever living in again.

  “That was three years ago,” Carver said. “I’ve made it my mission to stop these people anyway I can ever since. For the past five years or so the Kid’s been working as a white hat hacker for major businesses. In his spare time he monitors the web for when a new show’s posted, then tries to determine the location, and I go there with my people to try to stop it. Just like back in Reno.”

  “Your people.”

  Carver nodded toward the front. “That’s Bronson driving and that’s David in the passenger seat. There are three others I’ve saved in the past three years. There was one other but she”—he shook his head—“she wanted to continue playing the game. Suffice it to say she’s no longer alive.”

  I closed my eyes, took a breath. “This is just so ... unbelievable.” Except it wasn’t, not after everything I’d done in the past five days, but it was something that needed to be said, if not to maintain my own piece of mind. “You said you were FBI. Why didn’t you go back?”

  “Are you kidding me? Either my supervisor or one of the higher ups was involved in this. You have to understand these people are very powerful. They have resources like you’d never believe. What I did do was contact someone I knew at the New York Times. He looked into things, was going to blow the story wide open. Then I found out he killed himself. A forty-three-year-old Harvard grad hanging himself by a noose in his high-rise condo in Manhattan. Don’t you get it? When you start fucking with them, they make sure to fuck you first.”

  “So now what?” I asked.

  “Now we lay low for a day or two. Simon’s people are going to be looking for us. Especially you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because they want you to keep playing the game.”

  I shook my head. “That ... that’s insane.”

  “Maybe. But it’s happened before. Simon can be very persuasive when he wants to be.”

  Carver touched his earpiece, listened for a moment, and said, “Shit.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He ignored me and called up front, “Bronson, did you hear that?”

  Bronson was nodding, already turning off onto a side street.

  “What is it?” I asked again.

  “This van was just reported stolen. We’re going to need to go without wheels for awhile.”

  David called back, “There’s an L station coming up.”

  “Let’s do it,” Carver said. “Call Larry and let them know.”

  Seconds later the van was parked and the doors opened and we all piled out. I stepped onto the pavement, for the first time actually feeling the presence of the city around me. Traffic loud on the street, people walking the sidewalks, that ubiquitous smell of exhaust. I had to squint to see the tall buildings around us and then my arm was gripped and I was being pulled forward.

  “We need to take you someplace and get you new clothes, new shoes, everything.” Carver was talking while we hurried down the sidewalk. Bronson and David were behind us, bags over their shoulders. “Do you know your prescription off the top of your head? If not, we’ll figure it out and get you new glasses so you can actually see.”

  We headed up the steps toward the train.

  “What about the cameras?” I asked.

  “Keep your head down. They can hack into practically any security system.”

  I kept my head down as we reached the platform and whispered, “But what—what if they come after us on the train with guns and stuff?”

  “This isn’t the movies,” Carver said. “What happened back on the highway was a fluke, since they thought they could contain us quickly. They’re not going to chase and shoot at us through a crowd of people. Too many witnesses. Besides, that’s not the way they work.”

  “How do they work?”

  Carver shook his head, shrugging off the question, and stepped forward as
a train came screeching to a halt in front of us.

  36

  At the same time the three of us were getting on the Brown Line train at Sedgwick, a young cop named James Henley was working his shift less than three miles away by Navy Pier. He was twenty-five and had wanted to be a cop ever since he was a kid. His life’s ambition was to become a detective. But before he could do that he had to work the street, and today he was working bicycle patrol. Unlike some of the other men, he preferred the bike to the patrol car. In the car it could become cramped, stuffy, while with the bike he had the freedom to take a break and stretch his legs, to not have to roll down his window if he wanted some fresh air. Of course he wasn’t fond of wearing the helmet constantly, but regulations were regulations.

  He had been married for just two years. He and his wife had found out they were pregnant four months ago. The ultrasound said they were having twins.

  I like to think he was thinking of this in the final moments of his life. Pedaling his Trek around the plaza, the wind coming in off Lake Michigan, taxis and cars and buses making their deposits and pick ups. Coasting over the sidewalk, watching the people but also thinking about his wife, about the twins he would be raising in the next couple years.

  It was almost one o’clock and people were everywhere, tourists mostly carrying cameras and backpacks and shopping bags. They were headed toward any number of places—Bubba Gump or Capi’s Italian Kitchen, the IMAX theater, the Children’s Museum, the Crystal Gardens—or else they had set out early and were finished for the day, heading away from the mall with souvenirs and snacks. Maybe James was watching them and didn’t notice the man approaching from behind. Or maybe James had been watching the man the entire time, had even begun to suspect that something was wrong. It’s impossible to say, just as it’s impossible to know if the man said something to James before taking out his gun and shooting the cop three times in the chest. What is possible to know is that he was thrown a couple feet from the bike, the helmet doing little to protect an already dead James Henley. What is also possible to know is that there were witnesses who claimed they’d seen everything. There was even one witness who said he managed to snap off a picture of the cop killer’s face before the killer hurried away.