Termination Man

by Edward Trimnell

  Nick wondered if Shawn’s claims were true. Had he really nailed that tall blonde with the incredible legs and the haughty expression? Nick had smiled at her once in the parking lot and she had given him an icy, forbidding expression before immediately looking away. A stuck-up bitch like that would never mess with a guy who actually worked for a living—a guy who got his hands dirty.

  Nick grudgingly admitted to himself that Shawn’s story might be true—or at least partially true. The corporate types were bedding each other all the time, weren’t they? That was how they sealed their secretive deals and traded power.

  Still, Nick felt the impulse to needle Shawn, to detract from his triumph.

  “Claire’s not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all. But you can’t call her a college girl. She looks like she’s pushing thirty. Thirty-five, maybe.”

  “I’ve had college girls,” Shawn said, more than a little defensively. “You know, I went to Ohio State, right here in Columbus. And while I was there, I had more than my share of college girls.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, seizing on another chance to push Shawn’s buttons. “But those girls would be as old as you are now.”

  “But they weren’t then!” Shawn said, with the passionate insistence of the very intoxicated. “Let me tell you, there was this one little number named Tina. Real cute little thing. Wild one, too. She gave me a lot of trouble, though.”

  “Trouble?” Nick prodded. Trouble was good. A man who had troubles was exploitable.

  “Aw. I don’t want to talk about it.” Shawn downed the last of his current adult beverage—a Vesper Martini with gin and vodka. He raised his hand to summon a waitress for another.

  But the next drink came, and it didn’t take Nick long to cajole Shawn into talking about it. Shawn told him all about the coed named Tina Shields—how she had resisted him at first, and the steps that Shawn had ultimately taken to bring about her “surrender.”

  “You probably think I’m a real bastard,” Shawn said, after the tale was told.

  “Not at all,” Nick said. “Not at all. Sometimes a woman needs a little help with saying yes. You ask me—you put that bitch in her place. And it sounds like you were smart enough to cover your tracks.”

  “Well,” Shawn allowed. “My dad helped with that part. My dad and Bernie Chapman.”

  The mention of the corporate lawyer’s name provoked in Nick a flash of raw anger. The arrogant lawyer with the ridiculous beard and the weak chin had spoken of prosecuting him, then he had bullied him into signing a paper that more or less tied his hands. So Chapman had also worked his magic for his boss’s son all those years ago. It seemed to Nick that his worst suspicions about the suits in the front office were confirmed. They were all one big cozy family. Nick wondered: Had that bitch Beth Fisk also been involved in covering up the crimes of Shawn’s college years?

  Nick had no intention of revealing any of these thoughts to Shawn, of course. He wanted to keep Mr. Silver Spoon off his guard. Myers had already had enough drinks to make most men falling down drunk.

  Keep him talking, Nick thought. The closet that contained one skeleton usually contained several. Shawn’s story about raping and beating a coed in an alleyway fifteen years ago suggested a character with many shadows, many dark corners.

  What else have you got hidden in there, Shawn?

  “Your father and the legal eagle did what had to be done,” Nick said. “A man’s got to be smart enough to clean up his messes, even if he needs some help with the tricky parts.”

  “I don’t always need my dad’s help,” Shawn said. “If that’s what you’re thinking. I did something bad once—something really bad. Nobody ever found out about it, though.”

  Nick could feel his spirits brightening. Shawn had just confessed to rape and aggravated assault. Setting that as the benchmark, what would something “really bad” be? Nick believed that he had an idea. There was only one step downward from rape and aggravated assault.

  And there was only one way to find out.

  “What did you, do, kill somebody?” Nick asked, affecting the most casual tone that he could muster.

  “Ah, man, you got me,” Shawn said.

  It was difficult for Nick to tell if Shawn’s reaction to his accurate guess was embarrassment, pride—or relief. Nick had learned in prison that some men feel compelled to talk about their crimes, especially the ones for which they were never prosecuted. They seem to believe in the power of confession, as if any random cellmate or drinking buddy could provide the absolution of a priest. Nick knew better: he always kept his own counsel.

  “Are you sure you want to hear this? And can I trust you?” Shawn asked.

  “Shawn, buddy, you know you can trust me. And yeah, I wanna hear this. Spit it out already.”

  What proceeded next, beneath the blare of the strip bar’s speakers and the ubiquitous din of the patrons’ conversations, was a tale that exceeded even the one Shawn had told him a few minutes ago. It was a story about two uppity coeds—stuck-up bitches, Shawn called them—who had humiliated him in an off-campus bar one night fifteen years ago. And those two bitches had paid, by the sound of it. They had paid the ultimate price for their offense.

  In Shawn’s eyes, Nick had apparently made that crucial transition from buddy to priest. Once the long-ago rape and the two murders were confessed, Shawn began to open up about his more recent unsavory actions. Something about a teenaged girl and her mother, the cleaning woman at the UP&S factory. Shawn’s attempts to get friendly with the girl had backfired. The legal troubles that resulted from this had nearly been put to bed, when…who should materialize out of nowhere—but Tina Shields, the woman Shawn had raped and beaten in Columbus.

  “She was out there in the parking lot one night,” Shawn said. “Talking to that asshole Craig Walker. I was working late that night, and I saw Craig talking to some woman. I knew that it could be nothing but trouble. And she looked kind of familiar, you see. So I had one of the security guards pull the closed circuit video. I knew right then that it was her. But I still had to be sure, so I did an Internet search on Tina Shields. It seems that she’s become a do-gooder in recent years, working with some organization that supposedly helps women who’ve been assaulted. Then I knew what was going on: Somehow, Tina Shields found out about my problems with that little teenaged tease, and she’s trying to make trouble for me.”

  Nick nodded, but there was one name mentioned in Shawn’s jeremiad that he did not recognize.

  “Who is Craig Walker?”

  “He’s the asshole who got you fired.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  What followed was another explanation—not as sensational as the stories of Shawn’s misdeeds, but one that carried a personal impact. Nick couldn’t grasp every last detail: Somehow this Craig Walker was an employee of UP&S—but he really wasn’t. He was some sort of a consultant. Nick had heard of consultants. Since TP Automotive had purchased the company, the factory had been crawling with them. Most consultants, however, were easily recognizable: They wore expensive three-piece suits, were mostly young, and seemed to spend most of their time wandering around the plant, annoying people with stopwatches and clipboards. He had never heard of a consultant who operated undercover, like this Craig Walker apparently did.

  Nick felt his anger rising: They had set him up—Shawn’s old man, the corporate lawyer, Beth Fisk, and the consultant. True, he had been stealing from the company; but there was something dishonest about the way they had caught him. They had spied on him. It was dirty pool.

  But now he had something on them—didn’t he? The pilfering scheme that he and O’Rourke had orchestrated was small potatoes compared to what Shawn had done.

  They watched the women onstage in silence for a while after that, and Nick brooded, sifting through the unexpected mother lode of secrets that Shawn had laid in his lap.

  Shawn leaned against his shoulder, clearly drunk out of his gourd.

  “I’ve had enough,�
�� Shawn said. “Let’s get outa here.” He began to fumble around in his pocket for his car keys.

  Nick laughed. “Buddy, you are about as shitfaced as I’ve ever seen a dude. Don’t you remember—we came in my truck?”

  This much was true, and Nick was thankful for it. If Shawn had been driving his high-end Audi, their life expectancy on the highway home would have been about ten minutes.

  Nick drove Shawn home, and followed him into his living quarters without being explicitly invited. He was always anxious to see how the other half lived. Shawn resided in a nice condo. The place was filled with leather-upholstered furniture and artwork that screamed out its expensiveness. Nick doubted that Shawn had much of an eye for such things. It wouldn’t have mattered, though: With the bucks that this guy must be hauling in, he could easily afford to hire an interior decorator.

  He helped Shawn onto the couch. The younger Myers was practically incapacitated now; and Nick thought for a moment how easy it would be to snatch his wallet on the way out, or maybe an expensive souvenir from the condo. That would be silly, though. He had finally found the goose that was going to lay golden eggs for him. No sense in killing it now, before it had even started to lay.

  “You know, Shawn, old buddy, old pal, I’ve really enjoyed this little get-together tonight. But you see—I still have a problem. Your old man’s company fired my ass, and here I am out of a job.”

  “It’s not my old man’s company,” Shawn said. “My dad is the vice president of—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Nick cut him off.

  Shawn looked up at him from the couch, nonplussed. Nick could see that he was unaccustomed to being interrupted. It was time for a shift in the balance of power in this relationship, Nick decided.

  “Did I ever tell you about my prison time, Shawn?” he asked.

  Shawn shook his head slowly. No—of course he would have no idea about that. Nick had arranged for the erasure of the six months he had spent in the Ohio penal system. This had cost him a pretty penny, of course, via the services of a lawyer who was a little more than a lawyer. A lawyer who boasted of connections in the state office that housed such records. “Nicky, my boy, for the right amount of money a criminal conviction record can sometimes be made to disappear from the state’s database,” the lawyer had told him.

  The general concept of records erasure, at least, was a subject that Shawn Myers would know about—based on what he had revealed over the course of the evening. Enough of that, though. The two of them had more important things to discuss.

  “You see, Shawn, buddy, its like this: You’ve given me some information tonight. And I’m kind of in a tough spot. And here you are—a big shot who’s hauling down big bucks at the company that just fired me. That gives me no choice but to use this information you gave me to my advantage.”

  A frown crossed Shawn’s face, and a little ripple of fear along with it. Nick savored the latter. I wonder if he still thinks it was a good idea to befriend the guy working on the loading dock, Nick wondered.

  For a split second Shawn looked ready to put up a fight, and then the moment passed. Could Shawn overpower him if it came to that? No—not in his present state, at least. So far as Nick could ascertain from tonight’s stories, Shawn Myers had never successfully overpowered anyone who wasn’t female and considerably smaller.

  “Are you saying that you’re going to fucking blackmail me?” Shawn asked.

  Nick thought for a moment. What Shawn had just suggested was tempting—but ultimately self-defeating. If he outright blackmailed Shawn, then he would become Shawn’s enemy in that instant. And that would make him forever vulnerable, unless he was willing to preemptively kill this silver-spoon rich kid.

  He didn't want to kill Shawn; there was no money in that. He wanted to milk him, to string him along. And he had to accomplish this without provoking feelings of open enmity. The managers of Nick’s erstwhile employer all assumed that he was stupid, no doubt; but he had more brains than they gave him credit for. His experience of being busted for the embezzling scheme had taught him that this particular group of silver-spooners was more than willing to play by jailhouse rules. They would fight dirty if pushed too hard. That meant that he had to instill fear in Shawn, but also a sense that they were fundamentally on the same side. Better to make Shawn beholden to him. Otherwise, this son of Mr. Kurt Myers—vice president of such-and-such and chief executive asshole of this-and-that—would only find a way to get him.

  “No,” Nick said simply. “I’m not going to blackmail you. Because I’m your friend, Shawn. I’m your buddy. And buddies don’t blackmail each other.”

  “It sure sounded like blackmail to me,” Shawn said.

  “No, no, no. Get that outa your mind. What I’m proposing is more of a—what’s that word you management types always say—a ‘strategic partnership.’ Yeah, that’s it. The way I see it, you’ve got a couple of problems. First, you’ve got this Tina Shields bitch, who has all this dirt on you from a long time ago. Who does she think she is—bringing up all that old shit after all these years? That ain’t fair.”

  “Ain’t fair at all,” Shawn agreed, he was leaning his head against the wall now. He squinted hard, trying to speak coherently despite the many beers and mixed drinks that he had consumed over the evening. “And then there’s that little Chalmers bitch! Who the hell does she think she is?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I hear you, buddy,” Nick said. “I hear you. But from what you said, your biggest and most immediate problem is that Tina Shields bitch. The fifteen year-old girl is saying that you groped her. The other woman is saying that you went all the way—raped her, and then beat her up besides. Then there’s your problem regarding those other two women, the ones you—”

  “There’s no way Tina Shields could know the truth about that! That was months before I—set her straight.”

  “Dude, the fact of the matter is that you don’t know what this Tina Shields knows and what she don’t know. You weren’t expecting her to show up here all of a sudden like that, and start making trouble for you, were you? So how do you really know what she knows? How do you know what she saw fifteen years ago? It doesn’t sound like you were exactly paying great attention back then. Maybe Tina’s been watching you, targeting you somehow.”

  Shawn paused contemplatively for a moment, and then nodded vigorously, this line of logic apparently quite appealing to him. “You’re right. She’s obviously got it out for me—because I’ve got money, and because I’m a man. But still, I don’t think she would be able to know the truth about those two girls in that apartment. I was very careful, you see.”

  “She doesn’t have to know anything, Shawn, old buddy. All she has to do is look through some old newspaper stories—anyone can find old shit like that on the Internet—and then start stringing together accusations of things that you might have done, could have done.”

  Now Shawn, despite his heavily inebriated state, appeared to be suffering from genuine alarm. The puzzle pieces were coming together in his mind; and he didn’t like the picture that they formed.

  “So Tina,” Nick went on. “She starts making these wild accusations. Things that could be true—even if she doesn’t know for sure that they’re really true. Then someone else—say some nosy detective in Columbus—starts digging around. Then he finds evidence that you maybe overlooked back then. You said you were careful, Shawn, but you were—what—maybe nineteen or twenty years old?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you might have made a mistake. If you made a mistake, you can be sure that the police will find it. They might have already found it—some stray hair fiber or fingerprint. The evidence needed to send you to death row might already be on a shelf in a Columbus police station. All the police need is your name, so they can link it to you. There ain’t no statute of limitations for murder, Shawn, old buddy; and they keep those cold case files alive for years. When I was in stir, I met some old convict who’d recently been sent away for a mur
der he’d committed thirty years earlier. It took the cops that long to finally link him to the crime.”

  Nick could tell that his words had exerted a galvanizing effect on Shawn.

  “I’m screwed, then,” Shawn said.

  “No, you ain’t. Don’t be such a loser...a—what do you call it—defeatist. There’s a way out of this.”

  “How?” Shawn asked. Nick had the feeling that Shawn was safely regarding him as an ally once again.

  “That’s where I come in, buddy. It’ll cost you a little something, but trust me—it’ll be well worth the money.”

  Chapter 63

  I never learned exactly what sort of work Tina Shields did. I guessed that the irregular nature of her personal life was mirrored by an equally irregular work life. She likely cobbled together a living from various patchwork sources; and her police record indicated that some of those were—or had been, at least—illegal.

  Tina had told me that she would be spending some time in Columbus. Maybe she really had come here from Akron for the sole purpose of counseling abused women in the area—women who had entrusted themselves to the agency she claimed to represent. Perhaps she was actually in Columbus for a job interview or a boyfriend—maybe a married one—or another scam like the ones that had landed her in trouble with the Columbus police years before.

  There were many possibilities where Tina Shields was concerned. Not much would have surprised me. However, I did not expect to learn that Tina Shields had died in Columbus. That was what I discovered in the online edition of The Columbus Dispatch, on the Tuesday morning after Lucy Browning had shot herself. Sitting at Craig Parker’s desk at UP&S, I read the article in bits and pieces, my mind reeling from the tragedy and shock of this new development.

  “This morning a body was found on the banks of the Olentangy River, which flows through Columbus…. Police have identified the body as that of Tina Shields, aged 34, of Akron, Ohio…A spokesperson from the Franklin County Coroner’s Office issued a statement that Ms. Shields died of strangulation….The Franklin County Sheriff’s Department and the Columbus Division of Police are presently interviewing several persons of interest.”