Then he remembered where he was, and he realized that his conversation with Janet Porter had taken place in the middle of the office. The location of his desk at the front of the room likely made his words inaudible; and little could have been gathered from his side of the conversation anyway. Nevertheless, he had been made to appear weak. He noticed that a woman in the accounting department was openly staring at him. Was his shock evident on his face? And what about his guilt?
Shawn put his cell phone into his pocket, arose from his seat, and started toward the main entrance of the plant. He had to escape the confines of the office—he had to breathe some fresh air.
The parking lot was frigid, despite the winter sun that shone overhead. Shawn did not notice the cold. Nor did he notice the large truck that lumbered by on the adjacent rural highway.
Shawn was now elsewhere. He suddenly found himself back in an off-campus bar in the late fall of 1996. There were two young women sitting at a table. They had publicly humiliated him; and they mistakenly believed that they could walk away from their outrage without suffering any consequences. He had answered their conceits that very night in the foyer of their apartment, with a crowbar that he transformed into a tool of vengeance, the ultimate comeuppance for the two young women who had so grievously overstepped themselves.
It was time once again to take decisive action. No one who truly understood the situation could fault him, could they? He had given Donna Chalmers and her daughter Alyssa the option of walking away. Hadn’t he even gone out of his way to warn the girl? He had told her what would happen if she didn't call off the bloodhounds. But the girl had decided to test him. She and her mother had decided that they were going to ruin his career, his relationship with his father—his life. Who did they think they were, anyway?
And exactly who was he? He could run, sure—but that wasn't much of a solution. To spend his life moving from place to place, constantly looking over his shoulder, waiting for the day when his money or his luck ran out. Better to be dead.
Better yet to stand and fight. There was still time to engineer a reversal, to take the sort of proactive steps that men like his father always touted when rallying their troops for a new company initiative. He could beat this thing. But he had to act quickly.
He removed his cell phone and dialed Nick King’s number.
“Tonight,” he said, when Nick answered. “We do it tonight.”
Chapter 78
It was Friday, the one night of the week when the one-woman operation of the Chalmers Cleaning Service did not clean any offices. I had made arrangements to take Donna and Alyssa out. We were going to drive into Columbus for dinner at the Barcelona Restaurant & Bar. From what I could see in the online restaurant directories, this was the city’s only source of authentic Spanish cuisine.
I was getting ready to leave when my cell phone rang. Donna. I assumed that she wanted to confirm that I was on my way.
“Be there in about thirty minutes,” I said.
The panic in her voice told me that his was no routine pre-date phone call.
“There’s someone sitting in a car outside the house,” she said. “A real shady-looking character.”
My first thought was Adam Seitz. That would have been annoying enough; but I was now convinced that Adam Seitz—large and physically imposing though he was—was just for show. Though I wouldn’t tolerate him harassing Donna and Alyssa, I didn’t have the authority to tell him to vacate a public street. Nor could I rely on the New Hastings police department for help.
I would have a little chat with Adam. Now that I knew about his upper-middle class background and law school fiancée, he loomed a lot less fearsome in my mind. I was still the Termination Man, after all; I could make life unpleasant for Adam if he tried to make further trouble.
“Is he a large bald guy?” I asked.
“No. He’s got sort of long hair. He looks mean. Wait a minute. I’m going to take a picture of him.”
I was about to tell her to stop, to take Alyssa, go into a bedroom and lock the door behind them. Before I could respond, though, I heard her jerk the phone away, and the whoosh of air as she carried it somewhere. In less than a minute she spoke again.
“I’m going to send you the photo now.”
A few seconds later there was the chime of the photo arriving as an instant message. The camera on Donna’s cell phone could not have had a resolution of more than five megapixels; and she had presumably snapped the photo from her living room window. Nevertheless, the man in the photo—who was hunkered behind the wheel of an old pickup truck—was almost certainly Nick King.
I recalled the email that Shawn had sent to Nick King—the one I had detected using NetBit Sniffer. King had a criminal record and he was now out of work. He was obviously working with Shawn. If Nick King was outside Donna’s house, it was a serious matter.
“Did he see you?” I asked her.
“I don’t think so.”
“Listen: I know the man in that picture: He’s an ex-employee of UP&S. His name is Nick King.”
“Why would an ex-employee of UP&S be parking outside my house?”
“He also keeps company with Shawn Myers.”
“Craig! Does that mean—”
“I don’t know for sure what it means. But I’m going to find out. Take Alyssa and lock yourselves somewhere secure until I get there. I’m going to talk to Nick first. Then I’ll call you on your cell phone.”
Chapter 79
Even though I had been alarmed by the sight of Adam Seitz in the street that night, a part of me had believed that a man like Kurt Myers would stop short of actually resorting to physical violence. The vice president of strategic operations simply had too much to lose.
Nick King was another matter. He had done time behind bars; my research had told me that. And if he was now in cahoots with Shawn, he might also know the full story behind his firing from UP&S. He wouldn’t hesitate to bring a gun to a meeting like this; and he wouldn’t hesitate to draw it on me.
This prospect made me aware of my own limitations. I was a tough guy, in my own way. I had played football in high school and college. I’d been in my share of scuffles during my adolescent and teenage years. Nothing serious, mind you—just the sort of thing that is bound to occur when you mix testosterone-filled young males with silly reasons for conflict. Most of my fisticuffs had been over sports or girls.
This was a conflict of another magnitude. I had never faced a man with a gun; and I had never contemplated the use of a gun to solve my problems before.
Let me rephrase that: I suppose that I had contemplated the purchase of a gun for purely defensive purposes. My undercover identities were reasonably airtight; but I had always been vaguely fearful that someday my double life would catch up with me. The Termination Man had created a lot of disgruntled ex-employees over the years.
Most of them would never guess that I had been the source of their firing or forced resignation. However, there was always a chance that one of them would somehow connect the dots. A person who could do that would likely have the ingenuity to learn my real identity and track me down.
This anxiety had prompted me to browse through handguns in online catalogues. I wouldn’t need something outlandish. No semi-automatics with huge ammo clips, nothing like that. All I would need would be a basic revolver. Based on my research, I had concluded that a .38 special would probably be the gun that would fulfill my needs. Coincidentally, this was the gun that Claire carried in her purse.
But I had a minor problem: I had no experience with firearms. My father had never been a gun enthusiast. Nor did my boyhood years include a grandfather or favorite uncle who was a hunter or recreational shooter. Guns had never entered my life.
I would therefore need to learn how to safely handle a firearm, probably by taking a course. This should not have been an exceedingly difficult undertaking for a man who had a Wharton MBA and his own management consulting company.
Many times I had mad
e note of available firearms training companies online and in the phone book. But I had never actually signed up for a certification class. At the end of the day, the real reason for my delay was not procrastination but pure vanity: Craig Walker was the Termination Man, the slick consultant who was always one step ahead of the game. I did not want to admit to myself that my life might someday depend on my ability to gun down another person. A person who had been a line item on one of my consulting jobs.
Here was the result of all that vanity: I was in a situation where a handgun would have been a reassuring backup; and I didn't have one. I would therefore need to use my wits—such as they were—to resolve the situation at Donna’s house. But I knew that my wits might not be enough. As I slipped my coat on, I noticed the dollar sign paperweight sitting on the hotel room bureau: It was the one that Lucy had given me the night of the holiday party, when she had opened up that dark window into her soul. The paperweight wasn’t a gun, of course. Nevertheless, it might serve as a makeshift weapon. I could certainly throw it at Nick King if it came to that.
What a plan, I reflected sourly. I had now reached the level where I might be reduced to the hurling of blunt objects. But right now I had to improvise, if necessary, and focus on warding off the immediate threat to Donna and Alyssa. I opened the front door of my room, thinking about guns and paperweights, and suddenly I was staring down the muzzle of a real gun.
“There you are, you bastard!”
I had not seen Alan Ferguson since the day he was fired from UP&S—since the meeting in which he had suggested that I was not what I appeared to be. I had not expected to ever see him again. But here he was.
In that final meeting at UP&S, Alan had been the helpless one. Now he was standing before me with a pistol leveled in my direction.
He lowered the gun to waist level. The hotel parking lot appeared to be empty. Had anyone seen him raise the pistol? Probably not.
I glanced down at the weapon. This one was not a revolver, like the .38 special that I had considered buying. This one was a semiautomatic. Alan was standing only a few feet from me. Even if he was a poor shot, he would not miss at this distance.
“How long have you been standing out there waiting for me?” I asked him. Although this detail really wasn’t important, it was the only intelligible comment I could manage.
“Get inside,” Alan said. “Don’t make a sound, Craig. Not another word out of you.”
I did as he said. What choice did I have, after all? If he shot me here in the doorway of my hotel room, there would be no escape for him. But perhaps Alan Ferguson did not have escape in mind. Perhaps his plan was to take his own life here and now—only minutes or seconds after taking mine.
Get him talking, I thought. Get him talking and keep him talking.
“What the hell are you doing here, Alan?” I asked, ignoring his injunction against speaking.
“I should be asking you that,” Alan said, with a self-righteousness that struck me as insane, given the circumstances. “Sit down,” he commanded, gesturing to one of the hotel room beds.
I did as he instructed, and he sat on the bed opposite me. There was something oddly intimate about this. It reminded me of our numerous chats in the UP&S cafeteria, the ones in which Alan’s attempts to speak at length—to expound on his pet ideas and theories—were usually overwhelmed by Lucy’s gabbiness.
Things were almost the same as they had been—except that now Lucy was dead, and Alan was aiming a gun at me. He held the gun in his lap. Had he pulled the trigger now, the resulting discharge would have blown a hole in the middle of my chest.
“I’ve been in communication with an old friend of yours,” Alan said. “A guy named Kevin Lang.”
Under different circumstances, I might have had the wherewithal to attempt a denial or a diversion. There is something about the dark, empty bore of a gun that takes away your internal resources, stripping you down to only what is essential. I was also acutely aware that while I was sitting there, Shawn or Nick might be pointing a similar weapon at Donna and Alyssa.
“So now you know,” I said, those four words constituting an admission of everything.
“That’s right, Craig. I know everything. But I can’t take the full credit. Kevin Lang was the one who figured it out: He got to thinking about that guy in the bar, the one who just happened to show up on the barstool beside him and strike up a conversation about smoking marijuana. Then he considered how the very next day he was called in to be fired, and how one of the people in that meeting looked oddly familiar.
“How did you and Kevin find each other?” I asked.
Alan laughed.
“You people,” Alan shook his head. “You think you’re so much smarter than the average working stiff. You think that you can manipulate working men and women like we’re puppets. How did we find each other? Have you ever heard of the Internet, Craig? There is an entire message board dedicated to TP Automotive and its many shenanigans. Do you think that you have to be a six-figure consultant in order to carry out online research?”
Common sense would suggest that it is never a good idea to argue with a man who is holding a gun. However, Alan had a self-righteous streak that had always annoyed me. It had annoyed me on occasion during my undercover weeks at UP&S. And it annoyed me now.
“Don’t pull that class warfare crap on me, Alan. I’ve seen your resume. You’re not some blue-collar working class hero. You don’t run a lathe or unload crates from a truck for a living. You’ve got an accounting degree from Ohio State. You’ve got about half of an MBA, too.”
Alan paused for a moment, seeming to seriously consider this. “I never said I was a blue-collar man,” he said. “In the big scheme of things, I’m comparatively privileged. I’ll admit that. But I’m not a liar. I don't cheat the system. I don't screw over people who are trapped.”
“What are you talking about, Alan? TP Automotive wasn't holding you at your job. If you didn't like it, you could have voted with your feet at any time. But instead of taking responsibility for your own destiny, you stayed put and played the role of the professional malcontent. And now you’re holding a gun on me because the company wanted to get rid of you.”
“Easy for you to say,” he said. “Mister hotshot consultant. What about Lucy?”
“You think I didn’t care about Lucy?” I asked.
Alan snorted. “You’re the son-of-a-bitch who killed her.”
“Whoa. Hold on a minute, Alan. Lucy killed herself.” There were limits to what I was willing to endure in the way of Alan’s hyperbolic accusations—even in moments like this.
“She was weak,” Alan said. “She couldn’t take the impact of being fired.”
“From a job that she hated? And what about you, Alan? Why did you remain at UP&S, considering how much you despised the new management? Tell me: Were you even looking for another job? Why didn’t you take your destiny into your own hands?”
It suddenly occurred to me that I sounded more than a little like Kurt Myers. And in this one regard, I might have agreed with him—just a little. But we were back to that old debate again—the one that I had been having with myself for weeks now: Why was a task that was easy for some people so difficult for others? And what obligations do people like Claire and I bear toward the Lucies and the Alans out there? What do the people who can adapt to a coldly Darwinian system owe to those who can’t?
These were all questions that I could think about later. While I was sitting there with Alan, engaged in this quasi-philosophical debate, Nick King and Shawn Myers threatened Donna and Alyssa. And I still had to cope with the very real and immediate threat of Alan’s gun.
“Alan,” I said. “I don't think you came here with the intention of hurting either one of us with that thing. And you’re making me nervous—pointing it at me like that.”
I knew that this was a desperate gamble. My remark probably would have provoked a truly homicidal and suicidal individual into a shooting spree. But I believed that
I knew Alan by this point; and I was willing to bet that he wasn't going to end our lives with a murder-suicide. It was a bet that I had no choice but to make.
Alan lowered the gun. “You’re right. I’m not going to shoot you. I only wanted to scare the hell out of you.”
And this being Alan—his explanation somehow seemed perfectly reasonable.
“Well, suffice it to say that you did, Alan. And I’d like to stay and talk with you about this some more. But I have to get going. Right now I have reason to believe that Shawn Myers—or someone hired by Shawn Myers—is about to harm an innocent woman and her daughter. You remember Donna Chalmers—the woman who used to clean the office at UP&S at night?”
“Sure,” Alan nodded. Suddenly it was as if he had never waved the gun in my face. “What does she have to do with Shawn Myers? Why would Shawn want to harm her?”
“It's a long story. And I don’t have the time to tell you now. But I have a favor to ask of you.”
“Okay,” Alan said. “And what would that be?”
“I need to borrow that gun.”
Alan raised his eyebrows. He was back to being the know-it-all.
“You want to borrow this gun, Craig? Do you even know how to use it?” He held up the weapon. This time, thankfully, he was not aiming it in my direction. “This is a 9mm Luger. It’s got a hammer fired trigger system and adjustable 3-dot sights. You familiar with a gun like this?”
I admitted that my knowledge of firearms was nearly nonexistent.
“Well, in that case, Craig,” Alan said. “I’m not going to give you this gun. Instead, I’m going to give you more than you bargained for. I was a junior target shooting champ in my teens.”
I raced toward New Hastings on I-70, hoping that no police car would attempt to pull me over.
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