Formerly Fingerman (28 page)

Brad gathered himself and started to run out when he realized that Stump had the keys to their car in his pocket. He forced himself to rummage through the pockets of his dead former bodyguard until he found them.

On his way out he stopped to grab Sal's gun. He had yelled, “Take his gun!” at too many bad cop movies to not pick it up. He probably wouldn't shoot it, but he might point it in the general direction of anyone threatening him. Suddenly selling diapers didn't seem that important. Or advertising in general, for that matter. What seemed really, really important was figuring out how to stay alive for the foreseeable future.

Brad jumped into his rental car and started driving without even thinking.

Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into his subdivision and was making the turns to get to his street when he had a painfully obvious realization.

If that guy with the gun found his office, wouldn't he also know where Brad lived? What if that's where the imagined team of henchmen were waiting for him? Should he really be going back to the house? On the other hand, everything he owned that he wasn't wearing at the time was back there.

He made the turn onto his street and quickly found out that it was a moot point. His house was surrounded by fire trucks, ambulances, and neighbors who would no doubt later refer to Brad as a quiet man who kept to himself and was probably gay with the big guy he lived with. The model home was burnt to the ground. Firefighters had kept the surrounding houses safe, but Brad and Stump's temporary housing was gone, gone, gone. He pulled into a driveway a few houses before his own and turned around before anyone noticed who he was.

Dr. Yo's room was rented from a lovely eighty-six-year-old woman who lived about seven minutes from Brad's subdivision. It was another layer of secrecy in Yo's effort to stay off the grid. He had given the old lady a little help filling out the lease and, in the process, put her name in the lessee's name space. The lease he signed had effectively leased Gertrude Abernathy's apartment to herself. Gertrude's eyes were failing and Yo had paid a year up front in cash, so she didn't look too closely anyway. Considering even telemarketers couldn't track Yo down, Brad thought it might be the one safe place to hide from the platoon of Mafia killers scouring Tucson for him.

He parked behind the house, scurried past the detached garage and up the stairs to Yo's back entrance. The windows were dark and there was no answer when he knocked. Where the hell could Yo be?

Brad used the key Yo had made for him and let himself in, figuring he would hide until Yo showed. He sat down on the couch and soaked in the quiet stillness of the empty room.

Holy crap. He had just witnessed a double murder. And this time he really did see everything. And then Alan ran off to who knows where. Which meant Brad was the only witness. Again. No way he was testifying this time. He had seen how well that worked out.

Brad took a moment to ask the universe to hold on just a goddamn minute.

How was this fair?

Losing his promising career, his magnificent New York City life, and the mirage of a loving wife was supposed to have been his rock bottom. That would be anyone's rock bottom, no?

The whole point of starting your life over was to make it better. This was not better. It was decidedly worse. He was now on the lam from being on the lam. This was not the picture Brittany and Stump had painted for him only a few weeks ago. Who approved this new extended rock bottom with the dead partner and the blown cover and the rapidly dimming hope for a future that involved breathing? Not Brad.

Brad wanted the afterschool special version of rock bottom. The one where a tough but likable authority figure stops you from throwing that rock through the window of the abandoned factory and then bonds with you over a story about when he was a kid growing up in the hardscrabble black-and-white-film days. Not the rock bottom where someone chases you forever and ever and very much wants to cast you as the lead in a low-budget snuff film.

How is it possible that he was missing his unemployed, cuckolded, guy-in-a-chicken-suit days? This was the worst vine ever.

And where was Yo? If anyone could give him advice on disappearing, Yo could. Maybe they would go together. Ride off into the sunset, never to be heard from again. Like Butch and Sundance. Or Thelma and Louise. Or that robot from
Iron Giant
and the Great Pumpkin. Brad's analogies became more and more disjointed as he drifted off to sleep, overwhelmed by the day.

A bit about Malcolm's history with women: He had never had sex with any of them. Never with a date. Not with a one night stand. No vacation tryst. Nothing.

There had been no wild nights out with the boys. No one had ever set him up with their loose cousin. Even during the post-birth-control-pill/pre-AIDS period of his high school and college days, he couldn't get the job done thanks to eight years of crippling shyness.

His romantic backstory included a total of seventy-four first dates. This evidence is presented only to validate the effort he had put forth. It wasn't that he didn't like women. He did. In fact, he had had the nerve to ask well over a hundred women to join him for a drink after work or perhaps a night of dinner and dancing. Seventy-four had accepted.

None of the encounters had amounted to anything of value and certainly none had ever begged for an encore presentation, although there had been a few sympathy second dates. There had been girls he had liked. And presumably some who had liked him. But Malcolm had simply not run into the right girl at the right time in his forty-one dating years. Yes, he had ridiculously high standards. No, he had not compromised those criteria as time had marched cruelly forward.

But he kept trying. Naturally, it took a tremendous amount of time before he would broach the subject of dinner or even coffee with a woman. He had to think things over first, consider the smartest plan of attack. Occasionally he would run a background check. He was the opposite of spontaneous and that had worked out to about one point eight dates a year. For a man as secretly passionate as he was, it was maddening. But for a man as patient, disciplined, and scrupulous as Malcolm, it was necessary.

Of course he had never bothered with prostitutes, believing that was the sport of a lower class and wouldn't put him in the best light once he did settle down with the woman he was sure to fall in love with. Besides, most whores didn't have the kind of time it would have taken Malcolm to answer the question, “What are you looking for tonight?”

And that was why Malcolm Middleton was still a virgin.

He knew the mechanics of sex and presumed himself to be a natural at the act of intercourse. He had seen a few racy French movies and had accidentally-on-purpose clicked onto a couple of off-color websites when his mother went to bed early. But that was the extent of his experience with seeing a naked woman in the same room.

He had high hopes for Lola. She was an entirely different venture for him. She had asked Malcolm out. He was positive there was a meaningful connection. They had already successfully completed a second date that he was sure had gone swimmingly, and he was planning on asking for a third. A third!

He had let a little time pass since they last met so as to not look too virgin-y, but he felt in his heart that finally the time was right. He picked up the phone, called Lola, and asked for the very first third date of his life.

She said yes before he finished the question.

Brad woke up on Gertrude Abernathy's couch four hours after he sat down on it. It was almost eleven and Yo still hadn't shown up. Brad did not have a good feeling about this. Or maybe he was super hungry from not eating all day. He wondered if Yo kept any food in his fridge.

He did. Brad whipped up a sandwich and popped open a beer to help with stress management. He sat back down on the couch and turned on the television.

As he flipped through the channels, the reality of the situation started to sink in. Brad was in big trouble. His bodyguard had been killed. Very bad people still wanted him dead. Someone in the government he had trusted with his life had leaked enough information that he had been found. And it was all nowhere near over.

He had almost no money. His car was rented on a card that would no doubt be either canceled in the next few days or used to track his whereabouts and, either way, someone was probably scouring the streets for his license plate number right now. He was a fugitive, and he wasn't guilty of anything besides straying from a poorly written creative brief.

The local news came on and cleared a few details up. A very concerned reporter described a bloody shootout at an office park Brad was familiar with. A promising young copywriter had been killed along with an unidentified man. Police didn't have any suspects, but they were looking to question one Alan Silver. In other news, a fire burned down a house in a neighborhood Brad had recently visited. The house was a total loss and there was one fatality. A man about Brad's age had been killed in the blaze. Firefighters were assuming the dead man was one of the residents, and were still trying to determine the cause. A neighbor commented that the dead man had always been the silent type and she hoped his boyfriend was all right. Up next, the newscasters promised some super-helpful diet tips for eating healthy in Chinese restaurants.

Yo was dead.

Brad realized Sal's first stop wasn't the office. It was his house. He had found Yo there, probably playing video games, and killed him. Yo probably thought Sal was a member of some elite hit squad commissioned by a shadow government his conspiracy theories were so fond of. Chances were, his last words were “I fucking knew it.” Brad took some comfort in the fact that Yo died basking in the warm glow of self-validation.

Brad was alone.

This would have been an awesome time to get some advice from someone who knew something about situations like this, but anyone who could advise him had recently passed away or was part of the organization that revealed his location. So he would have to figure something else out. On his own.

At least when he lost his job at Overthink, he still had Gracie. And when he lost her, he had the program. And when he lost Stump, he still had Yo. But now?

No vines. Nothing.

Brad was all by his lonesome. And not in the fun, Wander-the-Earth-Like-in-
Kung Fu
kind of way. Not in the Boy-It's-Lonely-Being-the-World's-Most-Handsome-Man way. Alone in a The-Hounds-of-Zaroff way. Yes, Brad was going to have to earn his Save Your Own Ass merit badge tonight.

Compounding the issue was that, aside from a goldfish and some cherished sitcoms, Brad had never before faced the death of a loved one. Seeing a human friend killed in front of his very eyes had shocked him to his core. But as the reality of the situation settled in on him, what struck him like a Bob Sapp nutpunch was how close he had become to both Stump and Yo without even realizing it. As different as the two friendships were, they were both based on the most honest interactions Brad had ever had. Stump and Yo really knew him. And they liked him. They had inadvertently become his best friends and now they were gone.

When he really thought about it, it wasn't the living alone part that scared him. It was the dying alone part. There was the distinct possibility that Brad would end up as an anonymous pile of ashes whose only eulogy would be his butchers' debate over which fast food drive-through they would stop by once Brad's remains had been consumed by an industrial furnace.

Was this it? Would his only real contributions to the world be a few minutes of commercials, a bit of brief hope for an ambitious FBI agent, and some hardly needed inspiration for frat boys to binge drink? Probably.

Brad stopped himself. This momentary sigh of self-awareness was as philosophical as he would allow himself to become. Self-improvement had a time and a place. Currently, there was the matter of self-preservation to be considered. Regardless of how well attended his funeral would be, he needed to do something immediately to forestall that event. If he could just get out of the city and settle down into a simple blind panic, he would consider that a good start.

Brad took inventory of his current assets. Half a sandwich. Sal's gun. Sixty-three dollars in cash. His shoes were in pretty good shape. He looked around Yo's tiny room for anything that might be useful. He dug around under the mattress just in case Yo's reference to his retirement fund wasn't a figure of speech. There was nothing, of course. Yo was too smart for that. Brad assumed that cash was quietly hidden in the Caymans and not terribly accessible to him at this hour. Okay, what else? Books? Nope. Yo's stash of Purple Haze marijuana and petty cash to buy more. Yes. Pornographic DVDs. Maybe. Car keys. Ah-ha.

On a hook by the door hung a set of car keys. Could these be an extra set of tow truck keys? The key ring was emblazoned with a vintage Buick logo. Does Buick even make a tow truck? Even Yo's keys were in disguise.

Yo's truck. Cops never stopped him, and he made good cash by shaking down innocent drivers. Perfect for Brad's new life on the run. Or not.

Yo would have driven his truck to Brad's house. It should still be there sitting in front of the charred remains of Brad's fake life. Could Brad sneak back to his house on foot and make off with Yo's truck? Who would look for a runaway art director in a tow truck?

Brad pulled the window treatments back a millimeter or two. The alley behind the Abernathy estate was fairly well lit, thanks to its proximity to the side street. As far as Brad could tell, there was no Mafia hit squad lurking outside.

He slipped the keys off the hook, cracked the door open quietly, and slipped out. As he quickly tiptoed down the stairs, he noticed something very important. No gunshots. So far, so good. Just another forty years of this and he was set.

He hid in the shadows of the house and took a good look around at the terrain he was about to head out over. Late-night suburbia. He figured the distance to his french-fried house was about three miles as the crow flies, or four and a half as the marked-for-death witness runs. Was this his best plan? Should he instead stick with his rental car until he hit the Mexican border, walk into Nogales, and hope he picked up the language? That was only supposed to take two weeks if you really immersed yourself, right? And his sixty-three dollars would go much further there. Or he could grab the tow truck, head for Canada, and grow a mustache. How hard could passing for Canadian be? He just had to act unambitious and gullible. Boom, Canadian. It was nice to have options.