Kingdom come, p.17
Kingdom Come, page 17
I stood no more than six feet from him now, the thick shotgun barrel aimed at the center of his chest. The gun began to tremble and then shake. My sight grew foggy and I shuddered, sobbing right along with him.
I don't know how long I stood there before I realized she was there too, beside me. Her hand gripping my arm.
"Do it," she said, squeezing her fingers to the bone.
I shook my head no and swore to Jesus.
And pulled the trigger.
47
I blow the air out of my lungs.
He looks at me. His fingertips have strayed to his beard. He strokes it.
"What?" I say.
He shakes his head, like he's breaking free from a bad dream. "Did you do it? Pull the trigger. Or did she?"
"Does it matter?" I ask.
"No," he says, "I guess it doesn't."
"Let me ask you, does a friend try to pick up your wife? Does he dig up shit for the cops?"
"I'm not the judge, man."
"No?" I say. "I see your look."
"Keep going," he says. "It's good to get it out."
I sigh and say, "Whatever. Was it her, me? Both of us? All I know is, she had a plan. I followed her that far and I guess that wasn't the time to stop."
"Killing your best friend?"
"It was easier than James."
"How easy?" he asks.
"Easier to do. Easier to think clearly. Assimilation. It's like that experiment. They put glasses on these people. The glasses turned everything upside-down. In about three weeks, they woke up and saw things right-side-up again. The brain adjusts."
He looks at me like he's expecting a punch line.
"A learning curve," I say. "It's like a secret place in the woods. Once you find it, you know just how to get there the next time. We knew exactly what we had to do."
I touched my ears, which were ringing from the shot.
"We've got to get rid of him," she said, reaching into his pocket and extracting the silver memory stick, about the size of a lighter.
I watched her throw it overhand out into the black water where it disappeared with a small splash.
"I know how," I said. "I know."
My hands shook and the smell of rotting leaves and thick mud pressed in on me. I rested the shotgun against a tree, lifted Ben by the ankles the way you'd lift a wheelbarrow, and set off backwards.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Quicksand," I said.
"I'll help."
She picked up his arms and we carried him through the swamp. My own camouflage boots were rubber and came almost to my knees, they were practically made for dragging a body through the wet dead grass. With Jessica's help, it wasn't hard to take him away from the road, deeper in. There would be no blood trail in the shallow water.
It was nearly a quarter of a mile, the place I knew we had to go. When Jessica tripped and dropped him and he got caught up in some thorns, I dug in with my heels, and pulled him free. She got a grip again and deeper we went.
Two winters ago, I had been part of a deer drive in this section of woods and swamp. When the drive was over, somehow Russel and Scott ended up on the other side of the main artery of water that ran through the swamp. There was no wind, and there was a spot in the water where we could see to the bottom. It looked about three feet deep. The leaves and sticks were dusted with mud. Both Scott and Russel were already wet to the waist from slogging through the swamp, so it was no big deal for them to hold their shotguns up over their heads and wade in.
But when Russel got three quarters of the way across, he simply disappeared. There was a great cloud in the water and bubbles of methane broke on the surface. Scott hadn't been far behind Russel, and with his feet still on the solid creek bed, he reached forward, grabbed the shotgun Russel still clung to with both hands, and with a herculean wrench, dragged him up out of the muck. Russel looked like he'd been dipped in chocolate, and Scott and I had a good laugh at him when he finally stopped choking. The two of them walked the long way back around after that and Bucky told us later that the swamp was full of soft spots like that, where the muck was sometimes ten or fifteen feet deep. He said if Scott hadn't grabbed him right away, a crane couldn't have pulled Russel out of that muck.
"You get four feet into that stuff and it sucks you under like a vacuum cleaner," he said. "The more you fight, the harder it sucks you."
There was a twisted birch tree right by the lip of the creek at that spot and even in the wan light it was easy for me to find. We carried him down along the shallow edge of the creek and stopped when I got to where I knew the soft spot was. There were some stones the size of bread loaves in the side of the bank and I was able to pry five of them loose.
"For his pockets," I said to her.
We stuffed the stones into Ben's coat, under his arms. My fingers were numb from the cold, but I managed to button up his coat tight to his neck. In the large pocket on the side of my pants I had a length of clothesline for dragging dead deer out of the woods. I took it out and wrapped it around the waist of Ben's coat, tying it tight so the stones couldn't slip out.
"What do I do?" she asked.
"I got it."
I sat down at the edge of the water, soaking my bottom. From there, I could shove Ben's body toward the soft spot with my feet, while keeping myself on the relatively solid part of the creek bed.
"Put your hands on my shoulders," I told her. "I'm going to push against you."
I felt her grip me to the bone and stiffen her arms. I braced myself and pushed with my feet. Ben rolled over into the deeper water and bubbled under. We kept doing this, moving farther into the creek until I was sitting in water up to my chest and he was beneath the water's surface. My eye started to twitch.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
Maybe the hole had somehow filled in.
But on the next shove, I felt Ben's body slip quickly away from my feet as if something had snatched him. She helped pull me out and we scrambled back and stood at the water's edge. A small troop of bubbles rose to the surface and popped in the moonlight. The stink of methane filled the air, then floated away.
Everything went still.
Deep inside me, an exhaustion waited to pull me down into my own kind of grave, but I knew we had more to do. We trudged back along the swamp through the moonlight, our muddy hands locked together. We found the spot where my gun and Jessica's flashlight were. I scooped up the spent shell. My flashlight was easy to find, shining there in the brush, and I used it to find the other shell casings from the shots I'd fired on the path. With them in hand, we marched back up the hill to the H2.
"What about his car?" I said.
"Don't touch it," she said. "What's the difference where they find it, as long as they don't find him."
"They won't," I said. "You drop me, then you can take this home."
"Won't someone wonder where it went?" she asked.
"They won't even know," I said. "It's dark. I'll take one of the Cascade Suburbans tomorrow."
As the massive building came into view, I slowed to a stop on the bridge. I put the window down and tossed the spent shotgun shells along with Ben's keys into the lodge pond with a kerplunk. When we got to the lodge, I pulled down into the lower entrance and got out. We said good-bye and then I went into the lodge through the same doors I'd gone through the night I killed James. I stripped down in the mudroom, leaving my boots and taking my outerwear directly to the washroom to throw them into one of the machines with a cupful of soap. Naked except for my boxers, I went into the hot tub room--which was now empty of the bankers--and used the shower.
When I wiped the steam from the mirror, I saw that my face looked like it had been on the wrong end of a wet cat. Long red scratches and welts crisscrossed my cheeks, and even after five full minutes of scrubbing with a washcloth, my fingers still bore the faint shadow of mud underneath the nails. I went to the locker and pulled on a pair of corduroys and a flannel shirt, then slipped into some Timberland shoes before going upstairs. I was just in time for dessert with the bankers. Marty came into the dining room from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel.
"Jesus," he said, wincing at my face. "You get him? Adam heard the shots."
I shook my head with a laugh, raised a glass of red wine to the Japanese bankers, who laughed along with me.
"No," I said, winking at Marty. "All that and the damn thing got away."
"It was two days before they found his car," I say, "and they didn't really know how long it'd been there."
"But they figured it out."
"Bucky did," I say. "Eventually."
"How did you feel?" he asks. "Waiting for them to find it?"
"Part of me felt good to have him out of the way," I say.
"You weren't worried?"
"I didn't think I was going to get caught."
"Really?"
"Or if I did, at least not until we had a way out."
"You were working on that?"
"She was."
48
FAT FLAKES OF SNOW FELL from the dark sky spattering the windshield. Jessica had seen Halloween nights when it was seventy degrees. This one was cold. Tommy sat in the back of her Jeep wedged between Darth Vader and Spiderman. She took a right on Genesee Street and braked for a ghost, a ladybug, and the father carrying a flashlight.
"Can't you just drop us, Mom?" Tommy said from the backseat.
"So you can spray people with shaving cream?" she said, shooting him a glance over her shoulder. Tommy shrugged.
"You don't have to get candy," she said. "You can watch your movie and go to bed. I'll make hot cider."
"Mom."
She took a left on a street of houses and pulled over at the curb. They got out and Jessica told her son to put on his coat.
"Zombies don't wear coats, Mom," he said. "They're dead."
"Well, this zombie has a mother who doesn't want him to catch pneumonia," she said, reaching into the truck and tossing him his coat. "On."
"Andy doesn't have a coat."
"Andy has long underwear, don't you Andy?"
"It's like a long-sleeve T-shirt."
"See?" she said. "Long sleeves. On."
They headed up the street, Jessica in Timberland boots, jeans, and a parka lighting their way over front lawns with her own flashlight. They took a right on the next street and started up the hill. Jessica shivered and took a black knit cap out of her jacket pocket, pulling it down over the tops of her ears. She waved to the other mothers, calling out hi, and at one corner stopped to talk with Neil, the father of a boy on Tommy's basketball team. A big man with awkward feet and hands jammed deep into his yellow North Face pockets. Part of her thought it was sweet, a dad shadowing the kids on Halloween. Thane was at the lodge, partly because of some more bankers, but also because it gave him an excuse to be out there in the woods, brooding.
Her cell phone rang. She looked at the number, expecting Thane, but seeing a New York City area code. She excused herself and waved the boys on with her light, calling for them to go ahead as she snapped open the phone.
"You wanna see Johnny?" asked the gravelly Bronx accent on the other end. Her skin crawled. She hesitated, then said yes.
"Okay," the voice said. "He'll be at Mickey Mantle's on Fifty-ninth Street. He'll meet you at the Essex House next door at ten, ten-thirtyish. Get a room and he'll find you."
Her throat was tight.
"I'm," she said, wanting to explain how far away she was, when the phone went dead. "Shit."
"Sorry?" Neil said. He had bumbled up alongside her, training his flashlight on his two kids as they dashed from one porch to the next.
"Oh, I got cut off. Sorry."
"That's all right. They said 'shit' in Spy Kids. We usually don't take the kids to PG movies, but we thought, you know, they hear it on the bus."
"Neil," she said, "have you got room in your car?"
"A little."
She told him it was a kind of emergency, no one dying, but something she had to do right away. Neil said he could take the boys home when they were done. Jessica told Tommy, who shrugged and asked if they could double back to the big white house because they were giving out full-size boxes of Milk Duds.
Jessica walked double time back to her Jeep, dialing King Corp's chief pilot on the way. She didn't want it to be this way, having to drop everything. She had a child, but they didn't care about that. Still, the fact that she could just order up a private jet and be down in New York within two hours gave her a lift. She went home quick, called her sitter, and threw some things into a bag. She held up three outfits before deciding on a black tapered pants suit with a gray silk blouse. Sexy, but serious. Thane's old leather shaving kit was under the sink. The dust had been knocked off it during the past two weeks. After his knee surgery, his doctor friend had given him four refills of Vicodin, in case. Two weeks ago there were three. Now the second was getting low, but Jessica needed to get through this. Then she'd stop. She took one, put three more in her pocket, and headed out. The plane was waiting in the hangar. Frank, the pilot, asked if Thane was coming.
"He drove down to the Garden State site earlier," she said. "He was already in Binghamton looking at some equipment."
"Drove?"
"He was halfway already, I guess," she said, shrugging.
They taxied out into the snow, the wind already buffeting the plane. They lifted off and headed straight up. The plane bucked and shuddered, twisting in the gusts. The strobe of the wing lights illuminated the flailing snow outside the windows. She dug into her bag and took another pill. The tension melted away. Floating.
They landed a half hour later. On her way through the terminal, she stopped in the ladies' room. Shielding her eyes with her hand from the mirror, she slipped into a stall. When she came out, she washed her hands, keeping her eyes focused on the sink. It was her eyes she couldn't stand to see. Those black rings that no amount of makeup could hide. The crevices at the corners. Age, and something more.
From the back of her limo she watched the skyscrapers of Manhattan before spiraling down into the tunnel. People owned those buildings. People with money. The kind of money she was going to have. The Essex House had a suite looking out over Central Park. Fifteen hundred dollars, but she put it on the corporate card and left a message at the desk for John Garret. The furniture was upholstered in emerald green velvet with ornate arms and legs that were painted gold. She tapped her foot while the bellman placed her bag on the stand in the bedroom. When he left, she tore the sheets off the bed and covered the mirrors.
She was breathing hard by the time she opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the bar and poured herself some. On top of the pills, it acted fast. Standing by the curtains with her forehead against the cool glass, she was halfway through the wine when she heard a soft rapping at the door. She straightened her back, tucked her blouse down into her pants, and absently brushed her slacks. She cracked the door just a bit, then swung it open. He pushed inside, bringing an overpowering smell of Grey Flannel. His hair was slicked back and the milky green eyes glowed at her like opals. The tan suit and white shirt did what they could to disguise his bulk but nothing could hide a neck that thick. Even with heels, her eyes were only level with his chin. She returned his minute smile with one of her own.
He tossed a black duffel bag down on the floor.
"Five hundred thousand," he said. "Don't be calling me for it next time. I'll call you. A deal's a deal with me."
"I wanted to talk to you," she said.
He looked at his watch and said, "You got five minutes. I'm late for a card game."
"Would you like a drink?" she asked. She turned and walked back into the room. She refilled her own glass and poured one for him.
"No," he said, when she offered it. He looked at his watch again. "You got four."
"You know I had to fly down here from Syracuse?"
"So?"
Her heart pattered.
"We've got a deal we want to know if you're interested in."
"What deal?" he said. His hands hung at his sides, fingers curled up like an ape's.
"We want to move some money."
Johnny snorted. "You and every politician in the city. We said cash from the start. There's your cash."
"Not that," she said, angling her head toward the duffel bag. "A hundred million."
He turned his head as if to get his left eye closer to her. The wineglass jiggled and she brought it to her lips.
"Con Trac bills us a hundred million in extras. We pay it," she said, taking a swallow. "Then, Con Trac gets a consultant bill from a Swiss company for ninety million that they pay."
"You mean eighty."
"Oh," she says, looking at her watch. "I guess my time ran out."
"What are you? Sarah Bernhardt? The fucking feds are up my ass," he said, scowling.
"It's ten million," she said. "Found money. Thane wanted to run it through the project down in Miami Beach. They'll do it for ten and be happy. I just thought."
Johnny's face softened. He grinned and stepped closer. Softly, he said, "You got anything else? To sweeten the deal a little?"
He reached out and touched her shoulder.
49
We sit in silence for a moment before he asks if I can talk about what I think happened.
"Nothing. That's just what kind of an asshole he was," I say, shaking my head. "I was pissed at her. Just going down there like that. I actually came home that night, to surprise her. Tommy was sitting there with his buddies watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something and Amy's on the phone talking to her boyfriend. I asked him where his mom was and he gave me this empty stare. But then you have to admire her nerve too."
"She didn't come home?" the shrink asks.
"I was the one who told her the easiest way to pull it off was through Con Trac."
"She did come home?" he says.
"Of course."
"When?"
"Let's just say she didn't spend the night," I say. "I told you she was bad, but not that. Not what you think."
"What do I think?" he asks.
"I see your look."
"Is it possible you're projecting?"
"She told me what he said about sweetening the deal," I say. "Why would she tell me that if she did anything? That wouldn't make sense. What are you looking like that for?"
