Wilder Animals

by Geonn Cannon

  “Pay me back by being safe, okay?”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  Diana smiled. “That’s not as reassuring as you think it is. You’re good at a lot of things, Ariadne, but watching your own back isn’t really in your wheelhouse.”

  “That’s why I have Dale.”

  “Ah. Then give her my best.”

  Ari promised she would and headed for the parking garage. She hoped Wilcox had written something about the mysterious meeting, otherwise she was back at square one with no other avenues to follow.

  #

  Ari had stretched out on the couch with Wilcox’s memoirs. Dale was at her desk in the outer office, singing softly under her breath. Ari hated the sound of people singing under ordinary circumstances. She couldn’t even bear karaoke. She tapped her foot against the arm of the couch and offered harmony when whatever Dale was singing required it. They went through Brandi Carlile, to Adele, to Radiation Canary, back to Brandi as Ari skimmed through the writing. It was sad, when she thought about it. Wilcox, sitting in his office, writing about a dashing and heroic figure that he would never actually be.

  She went to the end of the memoirs and looked for the start of the last entry. She finally found it and began reading. “I’d done this sort of thing a million times,” he wrote, “and I still get the same thrill as I did the first time. I was told to meet the big man in a specific lot, an empty warehouse rising up like a broken tombstone in front of me. Gravel under my feet. I had my Glock under my jacket tucked into my belt. I could hear the water in the canal but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sound of tires crushing the tiny stones on the ground under my feet.”

  Ari grimaced at his writing and reformed everything in what she felt was a more realistic light. Someone - the “big man” - had arranged a meeting in the middle of nowhere. Wilcox showed up and was scared enough that he’d brought a gun. It sounded like he was keyed up.

  “Turns out,” Wilcox continued, “the big man decided not to show up himself. I should’ve known. He sent a flunky. The moke’s name—”

  Ari said, “Dale, he used the word ‘moke.’”

  “Don’t make fun of the dead.”

  Ari whimpered and continued reading.

  “There was no reason to keep my ace in the hole, so I took out my gun and made sure he knew I had it. He didn’t even slow down. ‘There’s no need for that, Mr. Wilcox. We’re just here to hopefully come to an agreement. My employer doesn’t appreciate messages like the one you left him. He doesn’t like being threatened by people like you.’

  ‘It’s not a threat,’ I told him. ‘I’m just telling him how it will be. Do you know what’s on that video? You know what he did, and you’re still here defending him?’

  ‘I’m here to do my job, Mr. Wilcox. My job is to protect my client at all costs.’

  ‘You’ve said my name twice, but I don’t know yours.’

  ‘Let’s skip names for right now. No names. You can just call me ombudsman. It’s a nice word. It has gravitas.’

  I didn’t like the way he looked at me. Like he was better than me. Probably was, with his fancy-ass suit and his shellacked hairdo. I wanted to punch him on principal.’”

  Ari put the iPad down and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Principle,” she muttered too low for Dale to hear. After a few seconds to forget the misspelling she sighed and began reading again.

  “‘There isn’t anything complicated about this, ombudsman,’ I said. ‘How much is he going to spend if this gets out? How much is he gonna lose? It’s so much cheaper to just pay me and move on.’

  ‘I have another option. You are going to be ruined, Mr. Wilcox. You are going to wish you never laid eyes on that video. The man you are threatening is not an enemy you want, but you’ve made him angry. He’s read up on you and he doesn’t like what he’s found. You’re the shit he scrapes off his shoe whenever he’s forced to travel too close to Boeing Field. And you think you can extort money from him? You think you have some measure of power over a man like that?’

  I was unshaken. ‘Seems like your boss is the one hiding.’

  He smiled. ‘My employer doesn’t want to waste his time out here with something like this. The only thing required from this meeting is to send a message, and that message is this: if you release that tape, we will make you regret it. If that video becomes common knowledge, my employer will suffer, and he will make sure that your suffering is ten times worse. He has friends. He has people who will make it their life’s mission to destroy your world. People like me, Mr. Wilcox.’

  He smiled then. He looked like a shark.

  ‘We won’t stop with you. We’ll make Tiffany Knight’s life hell, too. We’ll ruin her present and her future and we’ll make certain she knows that all the pain is your fault. She will curse the day she ever met you. Can you live with that? Knowing you destroyed her life before it ever had a chance to start? You know what we’re capable of, Mr. Wilcox. Think about whether you want to subject her to that.’

  He turned around to walk away, but I stopped him. I told him what I thought about his offer. I told him what would happen if he went after Tiffany and I wiped that smirk off his face. Then I walked back to my car and slipped behind the wheel. He was still staring slack-jawed after me as I pulled away. I reached down and felt the flash drive in my pocket and wished I could figure out what to do with it.’”

  That was the last thing he’d written. The ending made Ari sad. Obviously Wilcox had been trying to rewrite history with the perfect comeback, the sort of rejoinder that would have put him back on top. And it was just as obvious that he hadn’t come up with anything. So after meeting the ombudsman of whoever he was trying to blackmail, Wilcox had gone back home for the night. Then he went to the office and spent the entire day trying to think of a way out of his predicament. Almost twenty-four whole hours behind the locked door looking for an answer, finally finding it in his gun. He mentioned a flash drive in his pocket. There was no reason to change the iPad to a flash drive, so it had to be real. But she hadn’t seen one in his office or his apartment.

  “Dale.”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “Did you watch all the blackmail tapes?”

  Dale said, “I think about eighty percent of them. Drugs and sex. Very little rock and roll.”

  “Anything world-ending? Anything big enough to threaten destroying the life of everyone who came into contact with it?”

  Dale said, “Nothing that big. Why?”

  “Because there’s another video out there, on a flash drive. Wilcox must not have left a copy on the iPad. Whatever drove Wilcox to suicide has to be on that flash drive. It was sensitive enough for threats, so it must have been too sensitive to keep with all the others.”

  “So where’s the drive?”

  Ari closed her eyes and pictured the places Wilcox frequented. His home and his office. Somewhere between those two points was a flash drive with the answer to everything. She pictured his fancy new home appliances. She pictured his office with the splash of red behind his chair. The Creep Cousins ransacked the apartment. The police went over his office with a fine-toothed comb. But somewhere between his home and…

  She rolled onto her side and sat up. She grabbed her jacket off the hook. “I’m going to go get it.”

  “But if it was in his office or his apartment, then the cops or the Creep Cousins or whoever this new supervillain is probably already found it.”

  “Not if Wilcox hid it where I think he did.” She leaned across the desk and kissed Dale’s lips. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Dale said, “Where are you going?”

  “Wilcox’s apartment building. I’m guessing all the people who searched it in the past few weeks made the same mistake I did.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “We took the stairs.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The elevator doors were still propped open, and the same disgusting scent wafted out when Ari got close to
it. She wondered if it was as potent to anyone without a canidae senses. She kept her breathing shallow as she stepped over the Wet Floor sign propping the doors open and stepped inside the car. The light was burnt out, but the lobby was bright enough that she could still see well enough. The button fixture was loose and canted to one side, revealing the innards of the device. She bent down to look inside but didn’t see a flash drive.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  She looked out into the lobby and saw a man at the foot of the stairs, a shopping bag clutched to his chest. He gestured at the elevator and repeated his warning.

  “I wouldn’t. It might be a lot of stairs, but that thing is a hazard. Only people who use that are fellas trying to get their date caught between floors for a few hours. Don’t risk it.”

  Ari said, “Thanks for the warning.”

  He shrugged, his civic duty complete, and Ari went back to her search. The carpet was threadbare in the corners from years of people standing and pacing, but there were no telltale lumps revealing something hidden underneath. She thought about climbing onto the handrail to check the service hatch or the light fixture, but she realized that Wilcox would’ve had to do the same thing in order to hide it. If the handrail didn’t look capable of holding her weight, it definitely wouldn’t have held Wilcox. The hiding spot had to be somewhere within easy reach but not readily apparent.

  Of course, she could also be completely wrong about where he’d hidden the flash drive. She stepped out of the elevator and avoided the Wet Floor sign again, but this time she noticed something she missed before; something was wrapped around one leg of the sign. It looked like just a piece of random trash tangled against an obstacle, but the closer she looked, the more unnatural it seemed. She crouched down and discovered it was the handle of a plastic bag, the rest of which had been pushed through the crack where the doors would ordinarily close. She fished it back up, twisting it a little to get the contents lined up right to come through the narrow opening. She held it up and saw the distinctive shape of a flash drive in the bottom of the bag.

  “Okay,” she whispered, “that was pretty clever, Wilcox. I’ll give you this one.”

  She retrieved the drive and put it in her pocket as she stood up. It felt as if she’d been working on Wilcox’s suicide for years, but now she was confident answers were at hand.

  She tried not to think about what she would find as she drove back to the office. It could be another dead end, but she doubted it. Wilcox had been scared. Even in his ideal world, where he could muster up all the bravery and charm he required in any given situation, he’d come up empty. When he hid the drive, he was a man at the end of his hope. She knew that whatever was on the drive would be the key to knowing why he’d done something so drastic.

  When she got back to the office, she held up the drive like a trophy. Dale quietly applauded her.

  “So what’s your bet?” Ari asked. “Sex or drugs?”

  “Oh, sex. Without question. Drugs, you just do your time in rehab or you go to jail, like the Creep Cousins. This is something a lot bigger. Sex with a prostitute. A male prostitute. Underage.”

  Ari said, “I like your odds. I’ll let you know what I find.”

  She went into her office and shut the door. She turned on the computer and plugged in the drive. The mechanisms hummed and growled, then a folder popped up on screen. There was only one file, and its thumbnail showed the wall of a hotel room. It was aimed at the nightstand between two beds, the center of the frame taken up by a light brown wall and a half-circle lamp. Ari clicked play and the video opened. Wilcox apparently used high-quality cameras, because the image was pristine and crystal-clear. The video ran for forty-seven minutes, so she was prepared to fast forward until something actually happened, but almost immediately she heard the sound of the door opening.

  A woman laughed and crossed the room, passing in front of the camera. Ari caught a glimpse of a red dress and pale skin, but not much else. A man spoke from the doorway and turned on the light, but his voice was just a hollow grumble. The woman laughed again; she sounded drunk. The man appeared and moved to the foot of the bed, revealing a middle-aged man in a tuxedo. He tossed his jacket onto the bed and turned to look toward the woman, revealing his face for the first time.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Ari leaned forward in her seat and paused the video so she could get a good look at the man’s face. He had movie star good looks, with a rakish grin that accompanied every television ad and appearance on the local news. State Senator Michael Irwin was charming, liberal, and the man Ari planned to vote for in the next gubernatorial race. And now she had a video of him doing something in a hotel room that Wilcox had considered blackmail-worthy. Ari felt a tickle of dread as she hit play again. The woman moved into frame checking her phone. It was a hard angle to determine age, but she was definitely an adult.

  “At least it’s not someone underage,” Ari muttered. The woman was probably someone’s wife, or a member of his staff. That sort of scandal was survivable.

  Irwin moved to stand in front of her, invading her personal space as he unfastened his cufflinks. “Are you sure you have to leave? The hotel gave me a ton of complimentary room service. I’ll feel bad if it goes to waste.”

  “Thanks, but I better get going. I have a ton of calls to make after tonight.”

  “Speaking as your boss, I think I would understand if those waited until tomorrow.”

  She chuckled politely and started to step aside. “Really. It’s late.”

  He put his hand on her arm. “Right. So why don’t you just stay?”

  Ari straightened in her seat and muttered, “Oh, no, no, no.”

  “Michael,” the woman said, stepping back out of his reach. “I really need to go.”

  His grip tightened and he moved closer to her, crowding against her. He took the phone from her and tossed it onto one bed as he began roughly urging her toward the other. Her attempt to evade him became less polite, and his grip tightened on her arms.

  “Michael… okay, Michael, stop.”

  Ari stood up quickly, hands tightening into fists at her sides. She wanted to yank the drive out to make it stop, but she knew she couldn’t risk corrupting the file. She turned away from the screen and faced the large clock on the wall, staring at it as she tried to get her breathing under control. She could hear everything happening on the video; she didn’t need to see it to comprehend those sounds. The woman made it crystal clear what was happening. Irwin’s voice lost any trace of charm and became rough and cruel. Something ripped and Ari brought a hand up to cover her eyes as if she was still looking at the screen.

  Eventually she bit back her nausea enough to return to the desk. She jabbed a finger at the keyboard until the sound went away. In the corner of her eye she could see movement, but she ignored it as she moved the tracking to the very end of the video. When she looked again, Irwin was sitting on the other bed. The woman was lying on the other bed with her back to him and to the camera. She was still mostly dressed, but she wasn’t moving.

  “Move,” Ari whispered. “C’mon, honey, move…”

  Irwin was in his underwear, and he stood up and leaned over the woman. She cringed away, but he still apparently managed to kiss her. Ari was too relieved that she was alive to be disgusted by the kiss. She turned the volume back up.

  “—shower if you want. And the room service… like I said…”

  “Just go.”

  He said, “Suit yourself,” and disappeared out of frame. Ari heard the bathroom door close. A few seconds passed before the woman sat up and gathered her clothes. She picked up her shoes where they had fallen and carried them out of frame. The image froze as the video ended, and Ari shut the window. She wanted to scrub down her computer, but she settled for pulling the flash drive out and putting it on the very edge of her desk. She put her elbows on the desk and covered her face with both hands.

  She didn’t know how long she sat like that. It was more than a minute, less
than five, before Dale knocked and stuck her head in. “Hey, is it ov— hey!” She came into the room and knelt next to Ari’s chair. She rubbed Ari’s back. “What happened? How bad was it?”

  “Bad.”

  Dale reached for the flash drive.

  “No! Don’t watch it. I don’t want you to see that.”

  Dale withdrew her hand. “Who was in the video, puppy?”

  Ari sat up and took a steadying breath. “Michael Irwin.”

  “The guy running for governor? Is he having an affair?”

  “He’s…” Ari closed her eyes. “He raped a woman in a hotel room.”

  Dale hissed and put her head on Ari’s shoulder. “Oh, lord. I’m so sorry you had to see that. Are you okay?”

  “I will be.” She covered Dale’s hand with hers. “Obviously whoever Wilcox met with at the canal worked for Irwin’s campaign.” She looked at the computer as if the video was still imprinted on the screen. She shivered. “I don’t know who the woman was.”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dale took the flash drive. “Let me see what I can find.”

  “Dale…”

  “Let me see what I can find,” she said again. She kissed Ari’s forehead and temple. “Do you want me to call Diana?”

  “I… don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ari said, “I mean… I don’t know what I want to do with the video.”

  Dale furrowed her brow. “There aren’t a lot of options, Ari. The man is a rapist, and we have proof right here. Are you thinking of blackmailing him, too?”

  “No, of course not. I’m just trying to think through all the consequences here. Irwin is running for governor. And he’s… he’s the good guy, Dale. Equal rights, living wage, climate, he’s on the right side of every single issue. If he drops out of the race, then his opponent automatically wins. The guy who makes Arizona’s immigration policy look moderate.”

  “But… okay, I don’t care if Irwin says the right things when a microphone is shoved in his face. If he’s this kind of monster in private, then I don’t give a damn where he stands on the issues.”