A Perfect Life (8 page)

“And, somethin' else. . . .”

“What is it? What were you going to say?”

The bluesman cleared his throat. “Probably nothin'. Just . . . well, there was this man watchin' us—me and Kate, I mean—watchin' us through the restaurant window. May've had nothin' to do with her. I don't know. But when Kate walked out, I turned around and this boy had disappeared.”

“He was a boy?”

“He was . . . a little younger than you, I guess. Strange lookin'. Boy's face was shiny. Kind of like—”

“Like melted plastic?” Scott interrupted.

Walker looked over. “You know him?”

“No, I don't. But I've seen him outside a coffee shop window on Harvard Square.”

“What was he doin'?”

Scott thought back. He shrugged. “Watching. Almost staring me down.”

Walker focused on the ribbon of highway stretched out in front of his headlights.

Scott studied his face. “So you think Kate's up to something?”

“Your guess is good as mine. This boy—this watcher—may have nothin' to do with her. Lady may be a do-gooder, some kinda sweet angel. Or she's a lost soul with somethin' to prove. Could be she just thinks you got a nice ass on you. Wants you to slip her the high hard one.”

Scott tried to think. Disjointed ideas and blurred images rolled around the mush inside his skull. Two days ago, he'd been smart. Now he felt slow and stupid, unable to make sense of the puzzle pieces sloshing around in his head. He asked, “You got any ideas?”

The old man nodded. “Just one. Goin' out to the road where I picked you up the other night. Figure we'll drive up that dirt road and see what's there. Far as I can tell, that's when this mess started.”

“What are we supposed to be looking for?”

Walker flexed his hands on the steering wheel but didn't answer.

Scott looked up at the fabric underside of the car top. “‘Plain old evil.' Is that what you called it?”

Canon Walker shot a tired glance at his passenger. “Woman killed in her sick bed. Buncha punks fuckin' with your head, tryin' to ruin your life.” He reached for the dashboard to turn the heat back up. “What would you call it?”

CHAPTER 11

The windows behind Charles Hunter's desk overlooked Boston Harbor. What was usually an extraordinary view had now been reduced to an abstract of wind, sleet, and snow. The swirling, late-afternoon storm wasn't much to look at, but he had been looking at it for most of an hour. He'd been sitting there watching the storm turn nasty.
Nasty.
It was, he thought, a word that described too much of his life. It was a word he'd never really used, never thought much about, until Jennie died. But it was a word that had come to describe the whole world after his son drowned. Drowned in the modern paradise Charles was creating.

Trey's death had sullied the project, dirtied the place in Charles's mind, until he decided the whole thing—the town, the architecture, even the gardens—would all be monuments to Trey. His own genius would be a monument to his son's.

Charles swiveled the black Aeron chair to face the glass walls of his office. Now he could see rows of drafting tables, each with a too-stylish twenty-something architect bent studiously over its angled top—each of them infinitely inferior, in Charles's mind, to the architect his son would have become.

A scattering of corkboards clung to the see-through walls on suction-cup feet, cutting a series of rectangles out of his view of the bullpen. Detailed drawings of floor plans and building elevations were hung from the corkboards and propped upright on half a dozen easels. In the center of the space—with architects it's always a space, never just a room—a seaside village had been built in miniature on a glass conference table that rested on stone trapezoids. The tiny, oddly traditional village was an oasis of warmth in Hunter's coldly modern office. At that moment, it was the only thing the architect had ever designed that he could bear to look at or think about.

His glass walls—with suction-cup coat hooks and display boards, with soft linen shades that could be lowered for temporary and minimal privacy—were now
too
open. The whole place was outdated. The see-through offices that he, along with everyone else, had promised would bring open communications and democratize the workplace had instead placed everyone under a microscope. Managers watched workers and workers watched each other. No one ever felt free to daydream, to look out the window at that million-dollar view and imagine something wonderful. They were all too busy looking busy, too busy earning bonuses to dream and create.

But he had begun to change all that. He was building a town of the future on the Carolina coast, a town that would embrace the town squares, front porches, and wide sidewalks of the past while bringing modern design principles to traditional forms. Charles stood and walked around his desk to examine the model village, and the tensions he'd been battling began to float away.

She
was gone. Maybe with this, he thought as his eyes danced over the tiny village, life will be good again.

“Ready?”

Charles glanced up at Carol Petring, his junior partner in the seaside development. He looked back down at the model and traced fingertips along a wavering line of cardboard seacoast before he replied. “Ready to get out of this mess?” Charles motioned at the storm outside his window.

“God, yes.” Carol was twenty-five, tall and slender with auburn hair and a way of holding herself that was at once feminine and athletic. She was also the most gifted architect he'd ever known—except, of course, for himself.

Charles asked, “Can we take off in this?”

Carol nodded. “The pilot says yes. But if you'd rather wait till it clears . . .”

Charles walked to his desk and picked up a brushed aluminum briefcase. “No. I won't ask you to go, not if you're uncomfortable with the weather. But I'm ready to get the hell out of this city.”

She turned to leave. “Just let me get my bag from the office.” Over her shoulder, she added, “Meet you by the elevators.”

Charles watched the young architect leave, then glanced down at his desktop. A pink message slip lay next to the phone. It was the message that had made him turn toward the window, that had made him spend most of an hour watching ice fall out of the sky.

He read the pink slip of paper for the ninth or tenth time that afternoon.

It was a Boston number. The
URGENT
box was checked. The message simply read
Call me
. The name of the caller was Kate Billings.

Winter evenings come early, and night had settled over the Massachusetts countryside by the time Scott Thomas and Canon Walker located the galvanized mailbox where they'd first met. Canon wheeled the old Caddy onto thick layers of slush and slid to a stop, jolting Scott awake.

The ice storm had ended, and the sky had cleared into a deep black blanket scattered with hard points of light. The heater purred; the engine was running too quiet to hear. The old man didn't speak.

Scott broke the silence. “What is it?”

“What I told you.” The old man peered into the darkness. “You feel it?”

Scott tried to feel something. Nothing came.

“I'm too tired to feel anything. I just want to go have a look at whatever's at the end of the road.” He reached up to rub at his eyes; exhaustion was rolling across him in waves. When he brought his hands down, the dark landscape rippled as if reflected in a pool of water. “After that . . . after we look here, Canon, I need sleep. I appreciate what you're doing. But, if I'm going to deal with this . . . with what's happening to me, I've got to sleep.”

The older man put the car in gear and crunched over icy ruts. A couple of hundred yards in, something shimmered in the headlights, and they rolled to a stop before a thicket of ice-covered limbs.

A pine had split from stump to crown under the weight of clinging ice. Half the tree stood upright. Limbs and needles lined one side as if unaware that they now grew from a dead thing; on the other side, an open gash of yellow wood ran from jagged treetop to frozen ground. The butchered tree's spindlier half was down across the roadway.

Canon put the transmission in park. “You feel like walkin' in this mess?”

Scott shook his head as he popped open the door. “I didn't even feel like riding.” But he stepped out into the slush and slammed the door shut. He heard Canon do the same, but he never looked back. Something was pushing him now. Too many events had conspired to keep him away from this place—first his own illogical fears bolstered by Canon Walker's warnings, then the weather, the lack of sleep, even the downed tree blocking the roadway. He could either give up or push ahead. Without thought, he had chosen the latter.

Outside the reach of the headlights, the frozen roadway cut through crystallized tangles of trees and brush that showed in silver and black. As Scott cleared the stand of pines, a weathered vacation home emerged from the smudged line of dark woods behind it—its white-trimmed doors and windows floating against gray-weathered siding, like stage props in a production of
Our Town.

Scott could hear the older man's footsteps. “Canon?”

“Yeah?” The answer was whispered.

“This seems like a pretty good way to get shot. Walking up on a country house in the middle of the night like this.”

“I was thinkin' the same thing.” Scott turned back to speak, but Canon added, “We here now. Might as well bow up and do it.”

Scott tried to read the old man's face, but his dark skin showed nothing in the night.

The gated yard held an old oak with splattered, ice-coated limbs, and each footstep sent splinters of ice cascading down in tinkling bursts. Long needles of ice hung from a satellite dish at the corner of the roof.

Scott stopped in the yard and called out. “Hello?” He glanced at Canon, who said nothing, then turned back to the house and called out louder this time. “Hello!”

Canon spoke. “No cars.”

“Yeah, I know.” Scott walked up wide steps to the front porch. He rapped at the door frame, and each knock sent a jolt of pain running through the bones in his hand and forearm. The cold made him feel breakable.

Again, he knocked on the door frame and called out.

“No one's here. What now?”

The old man shrugged.

Scott reached up and ran numb fingers along the top of the door frame.

Walker said, “Check under the mat there.”

Scott did as instructed, but found nothing. “See any flower pots or anything?”

“Here.” Canon leaned over and picked up a red clay pot that made a popping noise as it came loose from the edge of the porch. Dirt now formed a neat circle around a brass key that had been secreted beneath the pot.

The key was covered in grit, and Scott wiped it on the leg of his jeans before fitting it into the dead bolt. Behind him, he heard Canon whisper. “Call out again when you get it open.”

The dead bolt turned, the door swung open without a hint of sound, and Scott called out to the darkness. It did not answer. Swiping the wall next to the door, he managed to find a light switch and flip it. The house seemed to burst alive, but it was only by way of contrast with the dark. The switch worked only a small overhead fixture in the foyer.

“Step in.”

Scott's mind was still swimming in exhaustion. “What?”

Canon placed a hand on Scott's back and pushed gently. “We here now. Can't look around standin' out on the porch.” He shoved harder at the small of the young man's back. “Go, boy.”

Both men stepped inside. Canon called out now—not just hello, but that his name was Walker, that his car broke down, that he needed help, that he needed to use a phone, that he was just an old man. Pretty much anything and everything he could think of not to get shot.

Finally, he seemed satisfied. “Okay. You want upstairs or down here?”

Scott ran his hand through his hair. “Neither.”

“Too late.” Canon pointed to a dark room on the left. “You go that way. Meet you at the back of the house, then we can head upstairs.” The older man moved quietly away, leaving Scott standing alone beneath the foyer light.

The room Scott entered was some kind of office or study. He located a small desk lamp and clicked it on; a forty-watt bulb bathed the room in stained yellow light. The furnishings were bare but serviceable. Nothing but a particle-board door on sawhorses for a desk, but the computer was a new desktop with high-speed Internet access that—this far out in the country—was probably hooked up to the icicle-covered satellite dish outside. The desktop also held typing paper and a dark red Harvard mug full of ballpoint pens. A cheap task chair sat neatly beneath the desk; a printer squatted on the floor.

Nothing else. Nothing personal. Nothing to reflect the life or personality of the owner.

This, it seemed, was a house with no history—a place where someone was only preparing to live. Scott was thinking that he had committed breaking and entering for no more viable reason than lack of sleep when he heard movement in the foyer behind him. Turning, Scott came face to face with the man who had driven him to this place.

“What is it?”

Walker's voice came dry and hoarse. “I need you to come this way.”

“What? It looks in here like somebody's just moving in. What'd you find?”

The old man's eyes narrowed. All he said was “Now,” but he gestured awkwardly with his hand and arm when he said it. Scott glanced down. Cannonball Walker gripped a small black revolver in his bony fist, and the muzzle was pointed at Scott's chest.

CHAPTER 12

“What the hell?” Scott couldn't move his eyes from the gun.

“Now.” Canon motioned again. “You don't wanna be fuckin' with me right now.”

“You're going to just shoot me?” Scott's mind felt weighed down with the sludge of exhaustion. He felt the room tipping. “Is that why you brought me out here, Canon? Get me out in the country away from everybody and put a bullet in me?”

“Startin' to think maybe you brought
me
.”

“How . . .”

“Sent the girl, Kate, to my hotel. And then you all hang-dog when I found you with the po-lice. I'm thinkin' you worked me, Doc.” Canon blinked hard as if he didn't believe it himself. “Don't matter. Get in here now, or I'm gonna pull this trigger.” He shrugged. “Nothin' else I can do.”

Scott moved unsteadily across the room. The old bluesman backed through the foyer into a large, brightly lit living room. The whole time he kept the barrel pointed at Scott's abdomen, as if pulling him along by an invisible line.

A thrift-store easy chair was visible through the doorway. Canon backed to it and sat down. His eyes drooped. His blue-black skin looked ashen. For the first time since Scott had met the man, Canon Walker looked old and tired and ready to quit life.

“Keep comin', Doc.”

Scott stepped into the living room and froze.

All four walls were plastered with pornographic images of women being mounted by tall, short, skinny, fat men—pale-skinned women on all fours mounted from behind, spread-eagle women mounted from above, contorted women mounted from the side and from below in ugly tangles of legs and arms. Scattered among the copulating nudes were black-and-white photos of naked women roped to chairs and handcuffed to bedposts, pictures of women chained wrists-to-ankles with long black nightsticks shoved into them. At the far end of the room, a horrible life-size nude poster of a bruised and lacerated female homicide victim stretched from ceiling to floor.

And on each of these pictures, over every female head, someone had glued a photograph of Patricia Hunter's smiling face. And worse. Over the faces of every hairy, slack-butted, dog-collared man, someone had pasted a blow-up of Scott's own picture from the Harvard yearbook.

It was too much. The room spun and slipped. Scott looked at Canon, the old man swung from side-to-side as if in a sideways rocking chair, and Scott Thomas's body hit the hardwood floor in a slack and unconscious heap.

Canon Walker didn't move. The fainting had looked real, but he was too old to tangle with some young stud playing possum. So he sat and watched. Minutes passed. If the boy was dead, well, he was dead. But if he had just passed out, he'd come around. Folks always rush around grabbing smelling salts and slapping faces whenever somebody faints, but he'd never heard of anyone he knew dying from it.

Canon leaned forward to get a better look. “Wake up or don't.” But he felt bad as soon as he'd said it. He did wish for the first time in his life, though, that he had a cell phone. He let his eyes move over the images taped to the white Sheetrock walls. “Sick bastard.”

The old man stood to stretch his legs, and Scott moaned. Canon waited. The younger man reached up to rub at his face, then pushed up on one hand and got his butt under him. “What happened?”

“Passed out.”

“Fainted?”

“Women faint. Men pass out.” The old man shook his head. “From the look of this, though”—he waved an open hand at the walls—“callin' you a man is an insult to every other human being with a set of balls.”

“I didn't do this.”

“Uh-huh.”

Scott got slowly to his feet. “Why would I do something like this?” He walked toward Canon.

Canon brought the gun up. “Stop your ass right there.” He glanced at the wall. “I don't know why anybody'd do somethin' like this. Sick sonofabitch, I guess. Ain't no explaining it. Some people are just . . .”

“Evil?”

Canon nodded.

“What can I do to convince you?”

“Nothin'.”

“What about that gun? That's evil, isn't it? I didn't come out here packing a gun.”

“Shit.” The old man chuckled, but there was no mirth in it. “A gun is a tool. It can do evil, and it can stop evil. An old bluesman like me, hell, I wouldn't be alive after some of the juke joints I played if it wasn't for this little thirty-eight.”

Scott tried to think. “What now?”

“Back to town.” He motioned with the gun. “You gonna get a ride in the trunk. Sorry. Don't see no other way.”

“Can I at least get some water before we go? My head's swimming.”

Canon shrugged. “Where's the kitchen?”

“I don't fucking know!” Scott felt his face flush and realized he'd been screaming. “I've never been here before.”

“You want water. Calm the hell down.” Canon pointed at a door at the back of the inside wall. “Try through there. Slow. I don't want to, but I will shoot your ass if I have to.”

Scott started to walk past the old man, but then hesitated. Canon reacted by impatiently jerking the muzzle of his revolver at the door. That was all the opening Scott needed. He grabbed the older man's wrist, shoved it hard away from him, and at the same time clamped down on the small bones in Canon's wrist.

A sound like a cherry bomb exploded from the older man's hand. Before Canon could pull the trigger a second time, Scott had grabbed the cylinder with his left hand and twisted the gun loose. The young ex-wrestler swept the gun away from Canon's reach while quickly stepping back and ducking under a surprisingly swift elbow the older man had aimed at his ear.

When Scott had retreated three paces, he stopped and waited.

Canon was breathing hard and rubbing his wrist. “I'm too old to run. So”—he pulled in a deep breath—“do what you're gonna do.”

Scott looked down at the gun. “How do you take the bullets out of this thing?”

“Huh?”

“How do you . . .”

“Little button there on the left side. Push it up, and the cylinder swings out.”

Holding the grip in his palm, Scott discovered that his thumb came to rest naturally on an indented lever. He pushed and the cylinder moved slightly to the left. Walker said, “Flop it to the left,” and he did. The cylinder swung full out. Scott pointed the muzzle at the ceiling and four bullets hit the floor. Canon was ready to be helpful now. “See that steel rod sticking up on the front end? Push down on it. It'll pop out the other two bullets.”

The last two cartridges hit the floor. One of them was spent. He looked up into Walker's eyes. “You're a crazy old bastard. You know that?” His eyes dropped. “Did I hurt your wrist?”

“Shit, yeah, you hurt it. What'd you think?”

Scott grinned. “I thought a crazy old man was getting ready to kill me. Here”—he held out the gun—“take this before I hurt myself.”

Canon glanced at the pistol but didn't reach for it. He said, “You move pretty good for somebody with a messed-up, no-sleep frontal lobe.” The old bluesman massaged his wrist. “Where'd you learn to do that? What was that, some kind of special forces move or somethin'?”

Scott grinned more broadly. “I don't think a special forces move would've had bullets bouncing around the room. I just grabbed your wrist with one hand and twisted the gun loose with the other.”

“Fastest thing I've ever seen.”

Scott walked over and dropped into the easy chair vacated by Canon. “I was a wrestler in college.”

Canon still didn't move. “That wasn't no wrastlin' move I ever saw.”

Scott could see the old man was scared. He tried to explain. “Everybody . . . almost everybody has some kind of gift.” He looked around the room and sighed. “Look, I'm not quick
because
I was a wrestler. I started wrestling because I could just naturally move a little faster than most people. The coach . . . the wrestling coach at my prep school . . . saw a bunch of us boxing on the green one Sunday afternoon. He talked me into trying out for the wrestling team, and I was a state champion the first year.” Scott stopped and screwed his eyes shut. “I'm kind of rambling here. Bottom line is, I never did anything like that before in my life. I'm just quick, that's all. Always have been. Nothing sinister, okay? The hell with it. You going to sit down or what?”

Next to the easy chair, someone had placed a sofa that looked like something you'd find next to a dumpster in a trailer park. Scott tossed the empty pistol onto the sofa. Canon sat down and picked up the gun. “I don't like being in this sick place.” He dropped the pistol into the side pocket of his overcoat.

Scott looked around the room. “How do you think I feel?”

“That's the problem, ain't it? I don't know how you feel about it. Don't know if it turns your stomach. Don't know if you think this sick-ass room is the happiest place on earth.”

“So.” Scott leaned back against stained polyester cushions. “Now what?”

Darryl Simmons had been online now for seventeen hours. The apartment lights were off. Outside, the ice storm had stopped and the sounds of city traffic grew steadily as more cars ventured back out onto frozen streets.

Here, alone in his small apartment, Simmons wore black-rimmed glasses as he peered into the glow of a huge flat-panel computer screen. He had been hacking credit card numbers. It was his bread and butter.

A phone rang. Simmons muted the classical music blasting from his computer speakers and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Is this Click?”

“Never can tell. Who wants to know?”

A few seconds passed, then the voice said, “Jimmy Lee down to the 7-Eleven. Jimmy Lee said call this number and ask for Click.”

“Guess you can follow instructions.”

“Uh, yeah. Well, look, Jimmy Lee says you hookin' folks up with online pussy. Uh, cut-rate porn site access numbers. You know?”

“Say the magic words.”

“Oh.” The caller hesitated. “Oh, yeah. Jimmy Lee said to say ‘Gandalf lives.'”

Simmons, a.k.a. Click, leaned back and pulled off his glasses. “How many?”

“How many what?”

“How many IDs you need? I don't be selling retail, jack. Ten's the minimum. You need ten ID numbers, it'll be ten bucks each. A hundred flat. You need fifty numbers, I can go five bucks a pop. The access numbers are guaranteed good for two months.”

“How many for a thousand?”

Click grinned. “I'll shoot you, say, two hundred-forty private memberships in the nookie site of your choice for a grand. That's”—Click barely missed a beat—“four bucks sixty-six cents a pop. And this is the good stuff. I can do Playboy Members Only, Penthouse Players Club, or we can get nasty with some online sex-show stuff. So, what you waitin' on? We got a deal or what?”

“Let's do it.”

Click stood and walked to the window. “Go back to Jimmy. Show him the money, then have him call me with an e-mail address where you want the stuff delivered. When Jimmy puts the cash in my palm, the access numbers hit your computer.”

“And I'm just supposed to trust Jimmy and you with a thousand bucks? Just say okay and walk out and hope you'll send the numbers?”

“Only way it's gonna happen, jack. You don't see me. I don't see you. You get the porno access numbers by e-mail routed through a dummy address.” Click scanned the street beneath his window. “You found Jimmy and me, so you know who you're dealing with. And you and me both know you can hit any high school in the city and turn your one grand into three or four in a day or two. You don't wanna do it . . . fuck it. Up to you.”

Seconds passed. Click had already walked to the desk to hang up when the caller said, “I'm taking the money now. Send me the sex-show access numbers. Like you said, the nasty stuff.”

“You got it. I'm waitin' on Jimmy's call.”

The caller said, “Like you said, I guess I know who I'm dealing with. I know Jimmy Lee, anyhow.” He paused. “Don't you wanna know who you're talking to?”

“No,” Click said, “that's kind of the friggin' point.”

“Listen up, smartass. You may not wanna know who I am, but I promise you I'm not somebody you wanna screw over. You hear me? You don't do what you say you're gonna do, I'll be coming to see you with a nine.”

“Right.” Click hung up the phone.

He glanced out at the street again before settling back in front of the keyboard. He never printed anything. He never made notes, never kept passwords or addresses. It was all in his head. He'd learned that much, and not much else, from his old man. Leroy Simmons had been a numbers runner for the Irish mafia from way back. Old-timers in the neighborhood swore that Click's old man, Leroy, could keep a week's worth of football, baseball, and horse-racing odds
and
wagers between his ears. Smart as hell, they said, until the whisky finally ate his brain.

Click heard the sound of his own voice now in the dark apartment. It sounded eerily like his father's. “Can't go to jail for what's in your head.” It was the Simmons family motto.

The computer screen held a day's worth of coded credit card orders to an online electronics retailer. He would unscramble the numbers later. For now, he uploaded everything he had to an online server and deleted all local files. Then, using administrative access and a sweeper program, he erased all evidence of his footprints across the Internet by expunging all incriminating entries in the server logs of the computers he had just accessed. Years ago he would have simply deleted the logs themselves, but that could raise alerts. Leaving the logs intact while erasing only his own entries was much more sophisticated. It was, he thought, more elegant.

When he was done, Click pushed away from the keyboard and stumbled into the next room where he collapsed onto a king-size bed. It was time to sleep. He'd gotten a request for something new on the shrink over at the hospital. Nothing complicated. Just keyboard time. But now he needed to sleep. Scott Thomas would have to wait.