Harmless (27 page)

“What?”

“Can I take it home
with me when I’m done?”

“We’ll see.”

***

As I walked up the
street wearing the black shoes, gray shorts, a light blue shirt, and a dark
blue hat with that most wonderful emblem ever, the soaring eagle of the United
States Postal Service, I hefted the empty mailman’s satchel up higher onto my
shoulder and felt completely like I belonged in the outfit.

I won’t ever get a
job there, but holy shit, did I wear that thing with pride.  I felt like a
decorated Marine in his dress blues. 
Sir, yes, sir. 
Entertainment
Weekly
delivered to 1848 Winton Blount Avenue, as ordered, sir
.

The feeling was
almost enough to temper my fear.

Almost.

“Mailman walking,” I
said, signaling to Ackerman that I was on the move.  Poor choice of words, I
realized, because it was way too close to the phrase, “dead man walking.”

In my earpiece,
disguised as an iPod earbud, I heard, “
Roger that.  Nice and slow.
”

It was a bluebird
kind of day.  No clouds, pristine sky.  Sprinklers watered lawns.  A breeze
tossed around some leaves.  An elderly woman, wearing a pink muumuu, smiled and
waved.  I wished that she lived across from me, instead of that old hag Mrs.
Epstein. 

“You’re early.  Any
mail today?” she called out as I strolled past her house.  “I’m looking for my
check.”

“Howdy, neighbor. 
None this time.  Maybe tomorrow.” 

Howdy, neighbor?  Sue
me.  I was playing the part.  I was undercover.  But I’ll admit, I enjoyed it.

“But you ain’t
stopped at nobody’s house.”

Maybe she
was
just as nosy as Mrs. Epstein.  I took back my wish.

“Light mail day.  Freak
of nature.  Never seen anything like it.”

She kept talking.  I
kept walking.

Ackerman said, “
Good
job, Pendragon.  We’ll make an agent out of you yet
.”

“I did okay?” I
asked, talking to the air, wondering if anyone noticed.  It reminded me of
sitting in an airport the first time I’d seen a man talking to himself,
carrying on a conversation.  I felt sorry for him, looking around for his
guardian until I realized he was on his phone.  An earpiece stuck in his ear.

Here’s another little
tip from your Uncle Steve: I don’t care how important you think you are, or how
important you think your phone conversation is, when you’re yammering into one
of those things, you look like you’re talking to yourself—you look like someone
forgot to up your meds.

“
You did fine. 
Remember, all you have to do is knock on the front door
.”

“Where’s Berger? 
Have you spotted him yet?”

“
He’s
—”  There
was a subtle snag in his pause, the kind where you know somebody is really
thinking about what they’re going to say.  “
Don’t worry.  We’ve got eyes
everywhere.  You’ll be fine
.”

“Easy for you to say,
sitting down there in your car.  What am I supposed to say?  ‘Here I am,
handcuff me?’”

“
No, we have to go
a little further than that, dig around inside his head a bit
.”

And just like in
Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom
, in that scene with those unfortunate monkeys,
I pictured sitting down at a table, peeling away Berger’s skull, and scooping his
brain out with a spoon. 

You can’t stop
thoughts like those.  You just can’t.  It was the last thing I needed to be
thinking about.

“How?”

“
Slow down a bit,
don’t get too close yet.
”

I eased up, tried to
walk slower.  It fought against my natural gait, and I’m sure I looked like a
guy struggling to hold a quarter between his butt cheeks.

“
Remember how I
said I had a hunch?
”

“Yeah.”

“
When you make
contact, ask him if his wife’s hired anybody to do some dirty work lately.
”

“Dirty work?  What
kind of dirty work?”

“
Just trust me. 
It’s the right move.
”

“What if he says no? 
What if he doesn’t know what I’m talking about?”

“
You’ll be able to
tell, and so will I.  If not, we move forward.  Just keep him occupied, let him
arrest you.  We’ll be there in thirty seconds.  Good luck, Pendragon.
”

“I hope I don’t need
it.”

“
Go dark.  Take
your earpiece out so he doesn’t suspect you.  We can hear everything.  You’ll
be fine.  Ackerman out.
”

I’ll spare you the
details about walking up the path to Shayna’s house.  Biological details, I
mean.  The things that happen when you’re more nervous than you’ve ever been in
your life.  I hadn’t been the picture-perfect example of the Pendragon elite,
but I was beyond caring at that point.

With my head on a
swivel, looking for Berger and seeing nothing, I slogged along, dreading every
step, trying to guess where he might be coming from.

Her car was in the
driveway—the same 2004 Honda Accord I’d seen on countless visits.  I’ll admit
that part of me—well, all of me—had been hoping she wouldn’t be home and we
could approach this another way.

I knocked and
waited.  I’d lost the ability to swallow, but it didn’t matter, because my
tongue was as dry as a sponge that’d been left in the sun for too long.

I knocked again and
croaked, “Mail delivery.  Package for you.”

A rather dumb move,
in retrospect, because she could’ve recognized my voice and taken the time to
actually
load
the gun.

When the door opened,
I prayed that it might be Smoke or Shade—a buffer, something to keep Shayna
calm.  Not in the human shield way.  I’m not that awful.

Instead, the tall,
brown-haired Detective Berger stood in front of me wearing jeans, a maroon
t-shirt, and flip-flops.

Flashing a gun. 
Flashing a smile.

The fact that he was inside
Shayna’s house and woefully underdressed for a detective registered
simultaneously, right before he said, “You’re as stupid as I thought,
Pendragon.  Get in here, dickhead.”

CHAPTER
30

I’d like to tell you
that things went smoothly from that point on.  I’d like to tell you that
Ackerman and his gaggle of fellow agents came rushing in like a band of shiny
armored knights, rescued the Steve Damsel in Distress and it was over before it
ever got started.  I’d like to tell you that I walked out unscathed and
everything was all hippy-dippy, hunky dory, puppies and ice cream and puppies
eating ice cream, but nope. 

It didn’t happen that
way.  Far from it. 

I’m not sure if
you’ll even believe me.  It’s
that
far out there.  It’s
that
impossible.  I still have trouble believing it.  Truth, fiction—is there really
a line between the two?  Reality?  Perception?  Is there a line there, either? 
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I stepped through the
open door, angling to face him, eyes never leaving the gun barrel.

Berger pushed my
shoulder, hard enough for me to fall forward and trip over a pair of orange
Crocs lying on the floor.  Shayna’s.  I’d seen her wearing them.

“On the couch,” he
said.  “What’s in the bag?”

I sat and pulled it
close to my chest like a cloth shield.  “It’s not a bag.  It’s a satchel. 
Didn’t you see
The Hangover
?”

“I don’t care if it’s
a potato.  What’s in it?”

He was a nail biter. 
I already didn’t like him, but that earned him an extra checkmark.

“Nothing,” I said,
opening the flap, showing him the inside.  “It’s part of the disguise.”

He moved over in
front of the wide screen television hanging on the wall.  The inside of
Shayna’s house looked different than I remembered.  Apparently she’d done some
redecorating.  Walls I remembered as cornflower blue were now the same beige as
Clarence’s litter box Volvo. 

There was a
bookshelf, lined with rows and rows of novels and knickknacks.  A piggybank for
the kids, sitting on top of a stereo speaker.  And the plants—man, I didn’t
remember so many plants sitting on windowsills and shelves and the coffee
table.  There were at least a dozen of them, maybe more.

White carpet now instead
of hardwood floors.  Who would commit such an atrocity?

There were new
pictures on the walls: an ocean vista, a sunset over a range of snowy
mountains, a winding river carving its path through a ravine, and then a family
portrait of a smiling Smoke, Shade, Shayna, and—

Berger took another
step to his right and blocked my view.  “Mailman, huh?  You come up with that
all by yourself?”

I nodded once.  I
could smell the alcohol on him from ten feet away.  The stench was brutal.

“And you thought
what, that you could just show up here and she’d take care of you?”

“Some-something like
that, yeah.”

I leaned, trying to
peek over his shoulder, trying to get a better look at the portrait. 

Don’t fault me for
this, because history has a way of burrowing into your heart, but all I wanted
was a glimpse.  I wanted to see that through all of the hard times, all of my
mistakes, Shayna had allowed a photo of our union remain.

Berger jammed his
foot against the coffee table and shoved it at me.  The potted plant flew, bounced
off a cushion, and spilled dirt all over my legs and the white cloth.  “It
never ends with you, does it?”

With his eyeballs
bulging and wrath growing, I knew I needed to hurry, to press him with
Ackerman’s question, before I found out whether or not a bulletproof vest
really worked.  It didn’t come out as smug and confident as I intended.  In
fact, I had stuttered less the first time I worked up the courage to ask a girl
to prom. 

I said, “S-so, your
wife, uh, has she done any dirty stuff recently?  No, not that kind.  I mean
has she hired anybody to do some dirty work lately?”

“What’d you say?”

I had more control of
my voice the second time.  I repeated, “Has your wife hired anybody to do some
dirty work lately?”

He lunged forward,
grabbed a leg of the coffee table, slung it out of the way, and then buried the
gun barrel into my cheek.  “Where’d you hear that, huh?  Where?”  He shoved
harder.

Panic rose along with
my voice.  “I, uh, I don’t know how to answer that!”  It was true, but in a way
I was pleading to Ackerman through the wire; he’d left me severely unprepared.

“Who told you?  Who? 
Was it Ackerman?  He thinks I don’t know, but I
know
.  I’ve been onto
him for months and you wanna know
why
?  Because I’m smarter than him. 
He thinks he’s so—
agh
, bastard.”  He covered my face with his hand and
shoved me back into the depths of the couch.  “Tell me something, loverboy, did
Ackerman get to you first?  Did he?”

“Jeff, what’s all
that noise—oh my God, what’re you doing?”

Berger looked over
his shoulder.

Shayna stood in the
doorway.  Blue jean shorts, a red bikini top, sunglasses holding her hair back,
arms up, hands behind her head.  “What’s he doing here again?”

“He knows, Shayna.”

“Knows what?”

“He knows you fucked
up, okay?  If you would’ve let me handle it—”

“Oh, like you were
handling his neighbor?”

“Goddamn it, Shayna,
can we not do that right now?  Don’t be a bitch.  I’m a little busy here.”

I made a fist, but I
didn’t do anything with it.  Fortune favors the bold (or the stupid), however,
so instead of swinging at Berger, I yelled, “Hey, you can’t talk to my wife
like that.”

When Berger flung his
head around to face me, I can’t really describe what I saw.  Pure rage beyond
rage, disbelief, and that look you get on your face when you’re so frustrated,
you have to laugh because that’s the only thing left.  His face twisted and
contorted into so many different shapes and emotions, I was sure his skin would
swirl and meld and morph him into some unidentifiable creature from a different
planet.

He slapped my cheek. 
He roared.  “
Your
wife? 
Your wife
, Pendragon?”

He slapped me again. 
My eyes watered.

“Who is that?” he
asked, grabbing my face, digging those nasty chewed-up fingernails into my
cheeks, and forcing me to look at her.  “What’s her name?”

“Shayna.”  (With my
cheeks so egregiously pinched together, it came out something like, “Shughnah.”)

“Shayna what?”

“Shayna Pendragon.” 
(“Shughnah Pennagun.”)

“
Wrong
. 
Wrong, wrong, wrong.  That is
my
wife, Pendragon.  Shayna
Berger
. 
Shayna goddamn Berger. 
Ber
…
ger
.  Look—look damn you—look at that
picture on the wall.  See it?  Jeff, Shayna, Mark, and Lily. 
My
family. 
My
kids.”

“What?”  (“Whuh?”) 
“No, mine.”  (“Nuh, mihn.”)

“No, Pendragon. 
No
. 
We let it go for too long—
too long
.  You’ve got problems, up here,” he
said, jamming a finger into my forehead, “and at first, we felt sorry for you. 
We tried to tell you, and it was kinda cute, you know?  ‘Oh, look at the poor
little guy with the messed up head, he thinks he’s married to my wife.’  So, so
cute.  Newsflash, it got old real fast.  You pushed it too far, you crazy son
of a bitch.  And you wanna know the worst part?  You’re not insane enough to
commit.  You keep coming around, you keep coming around.  Day after day after
day, ‘Shayna, Shayna.’”

“But she’s—”  (“Buh
sheese—”)

Shayna moved closer
to us, one hesitant step at a time.  “Call the cops, Jeff.”

“I’m talking here.”

“It won’t work, you
know it won’t—call the police, Jeff, now.”

“What the hell,
Shayna?  I
am
the police.”

“Then arrest him. 
Get him out of here, do something.  No, wait—you should shoot him!  Just shoot
him and get it over with.  We’ll say it was self-defense.  We’ll say you shot
the guy who murdered your little slut and it’ll be over with.”

“
For the last time
,
I wasn’t doing anything with her.  How many times do I have to tell you?  It’s
all your fault. 
Yours
.  Not mine.  You hired that drunk, not me.”

Almost frantic,
Shayna pulled her hair.  “Shoot him, shoot him, shoot him!”

“No!  Please!”  (“Nuh! 
Plis!”)

“You should’ve
listened, Pendragon.  You should’ve listened when we told you to get help, and
now it’s too late.  Somebody’s gotta end this.”  Berger let go of my cheeks,
stood up straight, cocked the gun, and then the front door exploded inward.

Gunfire.  A sledgehammer
in the center of my chest.  Ears ringing over muted screaming.

And it wasn’t mine,
because I couldn’t breathe.  It was theirs.

Shayna.  Not-my-wife
Shayna.  Ackerman and Berger.

I saw Thomas above
me, heard his muffled voice asking if I was okay.  I tried to say no, but the
room went black.

***

When I awoke—could’ve
been seconds, could’ve been minutes; it was hard to tell as my vision went from
foggy to not-so-foggy—Ackerman was leading Shayna and Jeff Berger out the front
door in handcuffs.  I was still sitting upright on the couch, and as much as it
pains me to admit it, I’d pissed myself.  But only a little. 

Pendragons are not
inclined to temporary moments of incontinence, but…don’t tell my dad.

I felt a hand patting
my cheek and heard Thomas’s voice, “Hey, bro, hey—you good?”

“Ouch, stop, that’s
still tender.”

“You scared me for a
sec.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pass out after getting shot with a
vest on.  I was worried it’d stopped your heart or something.”

“What happened?”

“We got ‘em, man.”

“Good, but what if
he’d shot me in the head?”

“You did great, don’t
worry about it.  You’re alive and that’s all that counts, right?”

I sat up and ripped
my shirt open.  The slug had flattened into a metallic starburst just over my
heart.  “I could’ve died.”

“You could’ve died
walking across the street this morning.  We all go sometime, but not you, not
today.”

The not knowing?  The
second before I almost died?  Would you like to hear what I was thinking about?

Don’t ruin the
uniform.

That’s it.  That’s
all there was.  And it’s probably the same for everyone else that gets launched
into the afterlife way too soon.  Something simple, something innocuous,
something mundane.

But now that I’d
learned that we don’t have time to process everything important we
should
be thinking about, like children and wives and parents, I was okay with the
knowing.

I picked at the slug
and watched it fall into my hand.  It could’ve been my imagination, but I swear
the thing was still warm.  “Can I keep this?”

“Sorry, bro. 
Evidence,” he said, plucking it from my palm.  “If you want, we can go out to
the shooting range one day and make another one.”

“You
are
kidding, aren’t you?  Jesus, my chest hurts.”

“It will for a
while.”

“Thomas?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did Berger say
he’s married to my wife?”

“I’m not touching
this one.  That’s all Ackerman.”  Thomas lifted my arm and wrapped it around
his shoulders.  “Up we go.  Up.  Use your legs, deep breath.  ‘Atta boy.”

Outside the home that
had never been my home, Ackerman gave instructions to a couple of mustachioed
agents—who had nothing on Rockin’ Roger—wearing sunglasses and dime store
suits.  Even Clarence dressed better than they did. 

We waited our turn,
and once they’d trotted off like a couple of overeager androids, Ackerman
turned to me and said, “Like a boss, Pendragon.  Bravo.”

He clapped.

He
actually
clapped
.

Thomas removed my
arm, made sure I had my balance, and stepped to the side.

Ackerman shook my
hand.  “I bet you have some questions, huh?”

“Where do I start?”

***

Back at the
beginning, I said, “Here’s how it happened, and
most
of this is true.”

I wasn’t lying about
everything you’ve read here.  Not intentionally.

A few of the details
were smudged, you know, because of this thing with my head, but we’ll get to
that in a second.

Here’s what happened,
and I know this much to be true.

The day I met Thomas
and Ackerman in the boathouse, a couple of patrolmen picked up a guy walking
down Main Street so drunk he was falling into traffic.  Drunk Guy starts going
on and on about how he’d been hired to murder this woman and when they pressed
him for details, the only thing that managed to work its way through the
alcohol fog was that she’d threatened him with the fact that she was a cop’s
wife.