The End of Marking Time (22 page)

I felt a little guilty heading for the donut shop after Joel’s grocery shopping lecture, but it was easier to buy my coffee than to make it myself. My coffee wasn’t terrible. I needed the caffeine in the morning and I wasn’t looking for much more than that, but the donuts were much better fresh even if they did cost double.

I didn’t even give the black box a second look on my way out the door. The gray pads seemed harmless at first, but I knew why Charlotte looked so grim when she saw them. They were the beginning of the end. No one could satisfy Blake’s ridiculous demands for problem solving speed, and the push-ups made it impossible to work very long. If things didn’t change, I would never complete another lesson.

On the sidewalk I had a whim to go buy paper and pencils so I could make up my own problems. Practice might help me get better, but beating the machine was hopeless. I plodded along with my eyes on the concrete until a black blur in the street came even with me and stopped short. I was thinking about pencils and how I’d sharpen them when I turned and saw a long Lincoln blocking traffic. The window buzzed down and the wide black mouth of a twelve gauge poked out. I immediately dropped to the concrete behind a neon blue fender and a new-looking tire.

The gun blared.

Glass shattered and a few pellets ricocheted back and smacked against the car not far from my head.

The pump worked back and forward to chamber another round.

The gun blared again. This time the pellets hit the car I was hiding behind, deflected over my head, and crashed into the lower part of the window. The car took the worst of the second blast. Stray pellets cracked the glass in a dozen places but it didn’t shatter.

The car door creaked. The shooter came out after me.

I jumped up and ran past the donut shop, against the flow of traffic. The Lincoln couldn’t back up through the cars stopped behind it. I crossed into the street and the gun boomed again. I couldn’t tell what they hit. I heard glass and metal banging all around me, but none of the pellets hit home.

I kept going full out for three blocks. When I couldn’t run anymore I caught a taxi and headed north toward the city. I’d never heard three shotgun blasts since I moved to town, never mind during the morning rush on a crowded street. The gunman didn’t care about witnesses. There must have been forty people in cars or on the sidewalk. He could have killed any one of them with a ricochet.

I was in more trouble than I imagined.

The cab dropped me at a grocery store. I went in and stayed near the back where I couldn’t be seen from the street. I hadn’t gotten a good look at the guy with the twelve gauge or the driver. My first suspect was Nick, but Blake could have hired someone just as easily.

There was only one person who didn’t pop up on my list of suspects. He was the only one I could trust and right then I decided how I was going to save myself. I did a little shopping, ducked into an Internet cafe nearby, and hurried home.

I dumped the packets of popcorn all over the counter and found the camera at the bottom of the box where I’d left it. I slipped it into my pocket, grabbed the shopping bag from the table, and rushed out the door before anyone could stop me. Instead of going right to my destination, I made a quick stop in the park near my old place on Dent Street. The basketball game had grown considerably in the five years I’d been gone. It seemed lots of people had free time on their hands during the week. Men in shorts lined both sides of the court waiting for the next game to start.

The man with the gym bag was in the same place by half court. “Got any percs?” I asked.

“I could use a new iPod. A red one,” he answered and pointed to a store across the street. I went over and paid for it by scanning my thumb. They had dozens of them in the glass case and I was pretty sure this was another currency that had replaced cash.

Back across the street, I traded the iPod for my purchase and hopped back in the cab. I wasn’t sure I needed the pills, but the man I wanted to visit discouraged unexpected company. I stopped the cab two blocks from the house and when I saw the place I knew I had made the right choice.

An eight-foot concrete wall rose up from just off the sidewalk to surround the entire property. It was still early, so climbing the wall anywhere along the front was out. I walked past a few times, then crossed the street and checked out the house from there. Someone with huge money had built this place a hundred years ago. It was six thousand square feet. Three floors with a slate roof. I didn’t see any people, but I did see three Rottweilers roaming inside the wall. I’d done this hundreds of times. I never would have picked this house because of the dogs, but I didn’t have a choice. I needed to see Wendell. I could have gone to the front gate and pressed the buzzer, but he would have sent me away and things would have been even worse. I decided not to ask permission.

I walked around the block, cut through a yard that looked like no one was home, and climbed a tree that leaned near the wall. My sore arms struggled to lift me and the three pounds of hot dogs stuffed down my shirt, but I pulled myself up and crossed from a heavy branch to the top of the wall. When I ripped open the first package and started breaking the hot dogs into chunks, the dogs came running. I poked a Percocet into the center of each chunk and tossed them on the ground. I kept breaking, poking, and tossing and the dogs gobbled down the pieces greedily. When they had eaten five pieces each, I stopped adding the pills and used the meat to entertain them, hoping they would pass out. I threw the pieces left and right, letting the dogs chase after them and fight over each morsel. I broke smaller and smaller chunks as I ran low, but the dogs showed no sign of tiring. When I finally ran out, the dogs looked up at me cockeyed. There were enough trees to hide me from the house, but that wouldn’t matter if the dogs started barking.

I waited and waited, expecting them to tip over, but they didn’t. They looked woozy, but stood firm. Finally, I got impatient, reached out for a branch, and climbed down a tree inside the wall. The dogs watched like toddlers entranced by a television program. Their limbs were too uncoordinated to move aggressively. I stepped away from the tree nervously, but the dogs didn’t follow. They tilted their heads and took a few longing steps then laid down in the grass.

It probably wasn’t smart to walk past the dogs smelling so strongly of meat. If there was another dog inside, it would have torn me apart, but I wasn’t thinking of that as I trotted across the lawn toward the back corner of the house. I didn’t stop until I was inside the overgrown rhododendrons. From there I was sure I was safe from the cameras, and I took my time inspecting the lower windows that led down into the basement.

I was just about to start working on a window when I clearly heard a grandfather clock chime inside the house. The window directly over my head was wide open. It was one of those old windows, double the size of the ones they put in new houses, and it sat low on the wall. All I needed was a short boost to get inside. I found a garbage barrel someone had been using to collect leaves. I tipped it over, popped the screen, and in seconds I was inside the largest dining room I’d ever seen. The table could seat fifteen or twenty. That one room was bigger than my entire apartment.

I stepped into the shadow of a large cabinet filled with dishes and stood motionless against the wall to get in tune with the sounds of the house. Nothing moved. I was glad not to hear the padding of another guard dog, but it was strange not to hear anything moving in a place so big. Across from me was a huge portrait of Wendell with a woman as wide as my mother. It was made to look like a painting, but it was definitely a photograph.

I spotted two motion sensors and moved slowly to the staircase without setting them off. I turned a corner and heard the click of a sensor activating. It had me, but the alarm didn’t sound. Lucky it was off. In front of me, a matching staircase led up to the second and third floors. I placed my sneakers quickly and quietly so I could get out of the huge open space before someone wandered in. From the second floor landing, I moved down a long hall of closed doors, pausing at each to listen for activity on the other side.

If I had called out at that point, everything might have been fine. I was unarmed. Yes, I came in uninvited, but someone left the window wide open. I should have said something to let Wendell know I was there, but I stalked the entire second floor without a sound and continued up to the third. At the far end of the hall, I heard shuffling behind the door. I’d opened a few and found mostly empty rooms, but this one had been waiting for me since I scaled the wall.

I closed the door behind me and the four computer screens at the far end of the room went blank. There was a metallic thunk at my back, like a dozen deadbolts ramming home at once. I grabbed the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Trapped, I spun around. The front half of the room was completely empty. The wooden floorboards and bare walls led to the U-shaped desk where Wendell sat facing the windows with his back to me. My arrival hadn’t surprised him at all.

“What did you give my dogs?”

“They’ll be ok.”

Wendell turned around. “How do you know? Did you ask them if they were allergic to narcotics? Did you weigh them to get the proper dose?”

What was his problem? I hadn’t hurt the dogs and I really needed to see him. Why couldn’t he understand that my message was more important than his dogs taking a nap?

“What if an assassin climbs the fence? Can my dogs protect me now?”

The dogs would be out for hours, but was he serious? Was he really scared of assassins?

“What gives you the right to climb through my window and come traipsing through my house? Do you know how expensive that carpeting in the dining room is?”

“No, sir.”

“Well? What gives you the right?”

“I needed to see you.” I felt like an eight year old being scolded for tracking dirt into the house.

“Maybe I didn’t want to see you. Did that cross your mind?”

“I have something important to show you.”

“Important?” he scoffed.

“I had to come. I needed to see you and you’re seeing me. I did what I had to do.”

“And who’s choice is that? That I’m seeing you, I mean.”

“Mine,” I barked. I was angry and I was tired of being manipulated. He was going to listen to me and there was nothing he could do about it. I took two quick steps forward. I would have marched to the desk and grabbed him by the neck, but a floor board six feet away popped open and a glass partition shot up to the ceiling. In a blink, the room was divided into two. My side was considerably smaller than Wendell’s.

“Would you like to rethink that Mr. O’Connor?”

Why was he nitpicking? Couldn’t he see how important my message was? I wouldn’t have broken in otherwise.

“In a polite society when we need to see someone, we ask permission.”

“What does that have to do with anything? I found something important and I need to show it to you.”

“Ah. Exactly my point. You need. You need. You need. That’s why you’re here, Michael. You only think about what you need. You’re willing to sacrifice what someone else has or wants to satisfy whatever whim has your attention. In a civil society we don’t take from others without asking. That applies to dogs, and houses, and even time.”

I lost my cool. His flat tones were so irritating, I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran to the glass and started pounding.

He was completely unfazed by my rage. So was the glass. Wendell frowned as if I were failing another test on his black box. He casually clicked a button and six ceiling vents started pouring blue smoke. With nothing to stand on, there was no way to prevent the smoke from blanketing me. Wendell’s side of the room remained clear. He snickered through the haze as I tried to wave away the smoke.

“What I’m about to give you is as harmless as what you gave my dogs.”

“I’m not a dog.”

“Clearly not. But those dogs provide a valuable service. They earn a living by protecting me. Just how have you earned your living these twenty-five years, Mr. O’Connor? You’re a career criminal who has never done anything worthy of the food you eat or the air you breathe. Some might say the dogs are more valuable than you. What do you say to them?”

At first I couldn’t believe he really wanted an answer. Was he insane? Of course I was more valuable than those dogs. I went back to the glass so I could see his face. He looked right back, waiting for me to explain myself.

“I’m a human being, for God’s sake.”

“You’re smarter than the dogs. I’ll give you that. But what service have you ever provided, Michael? Tell me. It’s an easy question. What have you done to help support your fellow man? Why should we keep feeding you?”

The question had never been put to me that way. I needed to eat. I deserved to eat. That’s all there was. Was he serious? Why wouldn’t he feed me? I was human. It was my right to live and be healthy. He couldn’t take that away from me.

Locked inside the glass or even on the street I was completely under Wendell’s control. I started to think how unfair that was when a realization hit me heavily in the chest. Wendell created the black box and assembled the counselors to teach me something, however misguided that effort was. He made something that hadn’t existed before. Even with me here in his house, he was at work, or at least interrupted by his work.