Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  He paused, then gave me this paternal smile. “Mr. DeGange says the two of you are actually going to become close. I wouldn’t say he’ll become a father figure, because he’s a generation beyond that. Maybe a grandfather figure. You’ll come to see him as a mentor, a confidant.”

  I felt my sarcasm returning.

  “Yeah, sure. I’m going to become best pals with the guy who is forcing me to murder my wife. Absolutely.”

  “I know it seems hard to believe, but it’s true. You even told him about—”

  Rogers stopped himself abruptly.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what?”

  “Forget it. I shouldn’t have said anything. It wasn’t . . . it’s nothing.”

  “At this point, nothing is nothing. What does Mr. DeGange, my future best friend, supposedly know about me?”

  Rogers wore another one of his inscrutable looks.

  Then, softly, he said, “He knows about Mr. White.”

  At the mere mention of the name, my mouth went dry. If there were anything left in my stomach, I probably would have vomited again.

  Mr. White, named for his hair color, was the prime exemplar of my mother’s terrible taste in men. He was wealthy, suave, and about fifteen years older than my mother—which was strange, because she usually went for younger men. I was aware, even back then, that the relationship was not so much romantic as transactional. He constantly found ways to use his money to ingratiate himself to us: toys for me, jewelry for her, a little help with the rent check now and then, even a new refrigerator when ours went on the fritz.

  What he got out of the deal?

  Me.

  Mr. White was a pedophile. He would “look after” me while my mother was off for another one of her hour-and-a-half self-torture sessions at the gym. He played these games that were essentially an excuse to molest me.

  I was eight.

  Even after my mother dumped him—because, truly, he wasn’t into her—he kept finding excuses to hang around for the next four years or so, until I started going through puberty and he lost interest.

  By the time it finally clicked in that what he had been doing to me was wrong—very, very wrong—he was already long gone. He had found a new desperate single mother with a young son to prey on.

  I’d done my best to forget about it and move on, though I always knew it shaped me. It was around that time that I found competitive swimming, and, looking back, there’s no question in my mind why I took to it the way that I did. Practicing hard, pushing myself for new personal bests, it was a way of taking control of the body that someone else was trying to usurp.

  When #MeToo first hit, I felt emboldened to finally do something about Mr. White. Even though he would have been getting up there in years, I had to make sure he wasn’t still on the prowl. I did an internet search for him, looking to see if he had finally turned up on the sex offender registry. It turned out he had been shot and killed a few years after he’d left us. According to a Daily News article, police said it was a robbery gone wrong.

  I doubted that then and still do. It was probably a family who’d discovered what Mr. White really was and decided to enact their own justice.

  Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to believe.

  I’d never told my mother about Mr. White. I knew—even at age fourteen, or sixteen, or whenever it was that I fully realized what had happened—that it would have sent her spiraling into one of her depressions. And I didn’t want to have to deal with another one of those.

  The only person I had ever told was Jenny.

  And now, apparently, at some point in the future, Mr. DeGange.

  Which was a lot to wrap my head around at the moment.

  “Sorry,” Rogers said. “I know I’m probably not supposed to know about that. As you’ll discover, we don’t have a lot of secrets in the Praesidium.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said casually. “Maybe it would have been more traumatic for someone else. For me, it was just another weird part of my childhood. I got over it. It really wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, look at how normal I am now.”

  I grinned, aware that my lame attempt at humor was just a defense mechanism.

  Just then, from the next room, Cate let out a cry. It wasn’t a real cry. Just the mournful, I-need-attention cry she used when I had been ignoring her for too long. But it would continue to ramp up until she got what she wanted.

  “Now that sounds like a big deal,” I said. “I think I have to go.”

  “That’s okay. So do I,” Rogers said, glancing at his watch.

  “I guess I’ll, what, see you later?”

  “Yes,” he said, and then with all the gravity it was due, added: “Afterward.”

  Just the one word was enough to trigger a spurt of anxiety in me. Predictably, Cate started making more noise.

  I kept talking over her. “It might not happen, you know. There’s still the possibility Jenny’s firm is going to pull the plug on the CP and L lawsuit. She’s meeting with the executive committee this afternoon, and—”

  Rogers was shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry, that vote is not going to help you,” Rogers said quietly.

  “Okay,” I said. “I just . . . well, if it doesn’t, what do I . . . what exactly am I supposed to do?”

  “You still have the gun I gave you, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. First of all you might need this,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a piece of black cylindrical metal.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a silencer for the pistol I gave you. Jenny will have a protective detail outside. They’ll come running if they hear a gunshot. With this thing on, it won’t be much louder than a book dropping. There are grooves in the barrel of the pistol. All you have to do is screw it on.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling enormous culpability just by accepting it.

  “Wait until your wife goes to sleep. Then put on gloves, long pants, and a long-sleeve shirt. Make sure you cover as much of your exposed skin as you can. That’s to protect it from both blood spatter and gunshot residue. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “At nine forty-five, you enter the room. You make sure she’s sleeping. You summon your courage. And then, at nine forty-seven, you put the gun next to her head, and—”

  He dipped his head. I was glad he didn’t actually articulate what my action would be.

  “Then, we’ll come in and help with cleanup,” he finished.

  “Don’t I have to call you?”

  “We’ll hear the gunshot.”

  “But if it’s as soft as a book dropping—”

  “We’ll hear it,” he said more firmly.

  He accompanied this with direct eye contact, which I then broke. Of course they’d hear the gunshot.

  It wasn’t just that Rogers probably had some kind of listening device turned toward the house. The Praesidium seemed to hear—and know—everything.

  “Right,” I said softly.

  “Don’t start doing anything on your own,” he warned. “Let us handle it. Promise me that. I don’t want you turning into another Buck McBride. You have to trust us.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Cate redoubled her efforts.

  “Daddy, Cate-Cate is crying,” Parker called out.

  “I’ll be right there,” I hollered back.

  “That’s okay,” Rogers said as he moved toward the door. “I really do have to go. Good luck.”

  He held out his hand. I shook it.

  “I’ll see you on the other side,” he said. “I know you might not believe this, but just remember: a billion lives are at stake. You really are doing the right thing.”

  CHAPTER 33

  JENNY

  The meeting was scheduled for 5:00 p.m.

  Jenny knew that was likely the only time on Friday that all nine members of the executive committee were free.

&n
bsp; Still, it felt like it had been scheduled specifically so she could be given bad news and then sent home for the weekend to mope, moan, and recover from the disappointment, such that she could then be firmly back in the saddle come Monday morning, generating revenue for Carter, Morgan & Ross.

  That’s if she lost the vote.

  But Jenny had no intention of losing.

  She checked herself in the mirror on the back of her office door, making sure her red power suit was hanging just right. Then she double-checked it in the elevator mirror on the ride up to the conference room on the top floor.

  It was part of CMR culture that meetings began precisely on time—it was an if-you’re-not-five-minutes-early-you’re-late kind of firm—but Jenny didn’t want to be forced to make a bunch of idle small talk.

  So she waited until 4:59, then made what she hoped was a commanding entrance.

  The firm’s chairman, Lawrence Coates—he of the shaved head, bushy eyebrows, and head-of-the-table seat—was the first to greet her.

  “Ah, there she is,” Coates said. “Shall we get underway? I know the weekend awaits.”

  There were murmurs of consent around the room.

  “Before I turn this over to you, Jenny, I’d like to say, on behalf of the entire partnership, that we’re glad you’re in one piece after yesterday’s incident. My latest report from Barry Khadem said he hadn’t been able to shed any more light on it. Is that still true?”

  “As far as I know, yes,” Jenny said.

  “Well, I hope that changes. In the meantime, we’re going to continue to have Barry’s people keep an eye on you. I know it’s a little intrusive but hopefully it’s just temporary.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Okay then,” Coates said. “I think you’re aware of the agenda for this meeting, so why don’t you just take it away?”

  Jenny smiled at all of them as if they were all best friends—even Albert Dickel, who sat on Coates’ right.

  “Thank you, Lawrence. I’m going to keep this as brief as I can, because I know some of you are looking forward to getting home to your families and the rest of you are looking forward to getting home to the bar.”

  There were chuckles around the room, and Jenny smiled again. Jokes about booze seldom missed in a room full of lawyers.

  “But I also have some other people on my mind every time I think about this lawsuit, and those are the plaintiffs, some of whom won’t be going to the bar or to their families tonight. There are two hundred and eighty of them altogether. I have met with each and every one of them—either the plaintiff themselves or their surviving family members. I have sat in their living rooms and heard them take labored breaths. I have watched them slowly suffocating. I have even attended their funerals.”

  The room was now silent. Every eye was on Jenny.

  “Now, being strictly calculating about this for a moment, I think about how this will play in front of a jury. And, PS, it’ll play great. These are ordinary folks who were just trying to live their lives when this terrible thing happened to them. And their suffering is the kind that anyone—anyone—can easily imagine. Who among us hasn’t, at some point, been grateful just to be able to take a nice, deep breath?”

  She stopped, inhaled deeply, and let it out slowly.

  “But can we actually not be calculating about this for a moment?” she said. “Can we forget about the money and, for a second, talk about justice? This case is really about the most basic right I can think of: the right to breathe air that doesn’t make you sick. It’s a right that’s been denied to these people, most of whom are poor, disenfranchised, and don’t have a lot of people looking out for them. And if you think back to why you became lawyers—”

  “Jenny, I’m sorry to interrupt,” came a voice from near the head of the table.

  Dickel.

  And he wasn’t sorry.

  “You’re making a lovely speech, and justice is nice. But this case has already pulled more than a million dollars out of our collective pockets. And that only includes what we’ve paid our people and other expenses we can directly tabulate—the experts and the doctors and whatnot. It doesn’t take into account the opportunity cost that while you and other members of your practice group are focused on this, you’re not generating revenue on other, more immediately remunerative projects.

  “When this group deliberates, we do so as fiduciaries for every partner in this firm,” Dickel continued. “We have a responsibility to make decisions for their benefit, not the benefit of two hundred and eighty strangers. I realize we sometimes take on matters pro bono that we feel will serve the community, but I don’t think you’re arguing this case belongs in that category. So unless you can make a convincing argument as to why continuing this suit benefits the partnership as a whole, I don’t see where we really have a lot to talk about here. Can you win this thing or not?”

  Jenny smiled at him with both warmth and confidence.

  “Thank you, Albert. You’re actually giving me a perfect segue, because the second thing I wanted to talk about is the viability of this case. This is something I have not mentioned or put in writing—not even in our internal discussions about this case. No one else in the practice group knows about it. I haven’t even told my husband. I’d ask that you keep the following in the strictest of confidence. This cannot leave the room.”

  Any momentum she had lost from Dickel’s interruption was now gained back. The partners were again riveted as she continued.

  “I have been working with an anonymous source who has been providing me documents that CP and L conveniently left out of discovery. They are damning, to say the least. They show that CP and L was aware its Shockoe Generation Plant was beyond obsolete and failing in any number of areas, including its air-pollution controls. It is also clear from documents that were included in discovery that CP and L couldn’t take the plant off-line and keep the grid fully supplied and that replacing the plant would be prohibitively expensive. In other words, CP and L was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I have a memo from the head of the generation division to the lead supervisor at Shockoe where he acknowledges the plant’s overwhelming pollution problems but advises what he calls a ‘Band-Aid approach’ to keeping the plant in operation.”

  Jenny paused to make sure that jaws around the room were dropping to the appropriate degree before she finished.

  “I’m asking for your absolute discretion here, because I promised my source I would protect his identity at all costs. But this is the right lawsuit, we’re in it for the right reasons, and with these documents, it’s one we absolutely can win. Any questions?”

  The room went silent until Lawrence Coates let out a low whistle.

  “Hot damn,” he said. “That’s something.”

  Another one of the executive committee members raised his hand.

  “I have a question,” he said. “Can all those who are in favor of continuing full speed ahead on the CP and L lawsuit raise their hand?”

  Every hand in the room went in the air.

  Even Dickel’s.

  CHAPTER 34

  NATE

  I didn’t need to ask Jenny how the vote had gone.

  One glance at her as she came through the door—with a burst of buoyant energy—and I already knew.

  But, really, hadn’t I known before then? Everything Rogers told me had turned out to be true. Why should this have been any different?

  Jenny wasn’t going to drop the lawsuit of her own volition.

  And her firm wasn’t going to drop it either.

  My last best chance of being spared this terrible choice—if I’d ever really had a choice—had come and gone.

  I went through the motions of inquiry all the same, though I couldn’t much look at her beyond that. I just pretended to be busy with dishes.

  When she came over and kissed me on the cheek, I tried not to think about where else her mouth had been.

  She didn’t seem to notice that I practically recoiled from her t
ouch. She was too distracted by her own triumph, not realizing how much she had actually lost.

  We had all lost.

  Brushing past me, she commenced her usual evening routine with the girls, and I once again retreated into replaying my final interaction with Rogers.

  Hearing him talk about Mr. White had been a bizarreness I can’t describe. It was like this stranger—and, really, that’s what Rogers still was—using a can opener on my skull, reaching inside, pulling out the most sensitive thing he could find.

  What I had told Rogers about Mr. White was at least somewhat true. It really hadn’t traumatized me—mainly because I’d buried it so deep I’d never even given it the chance. That was why I hadn’t told my mother or anyone else. It was all about making sure it could never climb out of the pit I had stuffed it down into, rather than allowing it to roam free and become some defining part of my childhood.

  So why would I have told Vanslow DeGange? I couldn’t imagine a universe where I had shared that strange chapter of my life with some random ninety-something-year-old guy—or with anyone other than my most intimate partner.

  But I had obviously done it at some time that hadn’t happened yet (at least not to me) but also had happened—in the cosmic, next-Tuesday place that only Vanslow DeGange could detect.

  For me, still bound here in the present, it was like receiving a message from my future self:

  You trust this man.

  You share everything with him.

  Even your deepest secrets.

  And if that was true . . .

  Good God.

  But, really, what more evidence did I need? If I were on a jury right now, I would be forced to rule—beyond a reasonable doubt—that Vanslow DeGange was both a prophet and a savant.

  He had risen from humble beginnings to become one of the richest men in the world, and he had—even more remarkably—done it almost entirely unnoticed. He knew which silver mines still contained hidden treasure, which stocks to pick, and which leaders to kill. He’d known the exact moment that Marcus Sakey’s pointless life was going to end. He had accurately forecast a tornado, the most unpredictable force in nature.