Hollow Man (7 page)

I knew how he felt. I was at a crime scene that I wasn't going to report, standing next to a juvenile delinquent who'd stolen a car and broken curfew to do it. I was, legally speaking, at the sharp end of a conspiracy to commit a felony, which I also was not planning to report. I looked over my shoulder and found myself the hub of this little prank, two pairs of eyes on me as if the next move were mine, and mine alone. Normally I would want to take the lead so I could manipulate the situation to make sure my own ends were met. As it was, I just stood there staring back at them. And wondering.

Could it really be that easy?

My job had taught me many things, but that night the two that came to mind were the facts that criminals got away scot-free a lot more than they got caught, and that as a general rule, even the ones who got away were pretty stupid. I'd also been wayward enough as a youth to know that it wasn't necessarily the criminal act itself that determined whether or not you got caught, it was the planning. That was my bypass mechanism, the route I took to avoid my own nature.
Because if I planned carefully enough, I could follow the rails of my own logic like a train and not be sidetracked by impulse.

I watched as she climbed into the minivan with her brother, and it struck me that I didn't even know her name. I couldn't imagine what it would be, either, because ever since we'd met I'd thought about her as one would a dream. Or maybe a ghost in a nightmare—real enough to make me react, to entice and intrigue me, but in the end not a real person, and not with a real name.

She drove without turning on the headlights, the van's tires spitting out dust and pebbles as it rocked and bounced along the dark track away from us.

“So who lied about the gun to the head, you or her?” I asked.

“Her,” he said, still staring down the track. “I wouldn't make that up.”

“Figures.” We were silent for a moment, then I looked at him. “So what's her name?”

“I have no idea,” he whispered.

Sixteen days after my gig was canceled, that was also how long it took Marley to call. He phoned midmorning, as I was scribbling some lyrics on a notepad, and I wanted to ignore him. The words were flowing, soft and manipulative verses that girls would swoon over. Words that my sweet little sadist would fucking hate. And yet I wanted to sing them in a crowded bar with her right there in front of me, so I could watch the irritation on her face, watch her roll her eyes at the sap I was singing, and have her see all the other girls lap it up.

I answered, though, as the name on my phone's screen told me who it was, and I listened as he hedged and stammered, the quiver in his voice giving me advance notice of what he was going to say. He apologized for taking so long and got halfway through firing me permanently before his spine kicked in and he switched to mild outrage that I'd try to deceive him and my audience.

“I'd like to think this was accidental, Dom, but that's not possible. Parts of it are a carbon copy—chords, rhythm, even some of the damn lyrics are the same.”

“Who says I stole their music?”

“You did steal it, man, but if you don't know who complained then maybe you did it more than once. Maybe several people have complained to me about it, and I ain't telling. Come on, get real, Dom, you can't do that shit.” He started up again, talking about ethics and trust, as if he didn't screw every musician who came into
his shitty little bar, making them play for tips and be grateful for the chance. As he rambled on, I tuned him out and thought about what to say in reply. I could go with the apologetic,
So sorry, it won't happen again, please forgive me
, or maybe try,
I must have absorbed it without knowing, I'm just so embarrassed
, both attempts to save my musical career in Austin. Manipulation is my strong point, especially making myself the victim, but in the end I chose door number three. I waited until he was midflow to interrupt. “Hey, Marley. Fuck you.” I hung up.

At moments like that, when events conspired and turned against me, I could always set them straight by tweaking someone else. Usually, I'd find a girl to sleep with, make some impressionable, dumpy chick do something she didn't want to do in bed by feeding her hope for the future. I'd lie about a pending record deal and ask if she'd want to go on the road with me, did she like hotels and breakfast in bed? Then I'd not call her, or call her and ask for another girl and act like I couldn't really remember her. It sounds cruel and maybe it is. Cruelty is pretty abstract to me, a concept I get on an intellectual level but don't experience. After all, cruelty requires empathy, and that bucket is empty.

And remember what I'm saying, the
reason
I toyed with these girls. It wasn't to be cruel—it wasn't about them at all. It was to build myself up, and their hurt feelings were a mere by-product. Something more, too, these excursions acted as scientific endeavors because incisions into a person's soul gave me a chance to see emotions I didn't have, to experience things vicariously that most other people experienced all the time. And I benefited from that vicarious experience by studying it in a detached way, learning a little more about my fellow man. Or woman. If I saw an emotion, heard it, then I could mimic it.

The drunk girls in Austin were safe, though, that night at least. I just wanted my music. My lovely guitar, the gentle hum of words in my throat, perfect accompaniments to an idea floating like a song
in my mind. It was a song about the unthinkable, and yet I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I took two more weeks to decide, but in the way a starving man sits before a meal and decides to eat it. Some things become inevitable. I'd surrounded myself with a force field of reasons to keep on the straight and narrow, to stay invisible behind my one-way mirror: personal safety, financial security, avoiding the stigma of my condition. Those reasons were still there, but the force field had weakened thanks to a pay cut, an unwanted transfer, and accusations of musical fraud. And on the other side of the mirror, out in the real world, a beautiful woman beckoned like a proverbial siren. I wasn't planning on shipwrecking my life, of course, but given the circumstances, a careful tack in her direction seemed, at the time, reasonable enough. And, of course, there was the money.

Money meant freedom. And pleasure. It meant that to everyone, of course, but to me it meant I could live more like myself, not worry so much about the people around me finding out who, or what, I was. And as question nine on the Hare PCL-R indicates, living off other people was just another part of me, one of the internal cogs that worked in synchronicity with the other elements of sociopathy. Which is to say that money wasn't just alluring, getting my hands on it was a biological imperative.

After a morning docket at the JJC, I took off my tie and drove across town to buy a disposable cell phone, what the bad guys call a “burner.” Gus didn't answer when I called, perhaps he didn't recognize the number, so I left a message for him. Deciding which number to leave gave me pause, because my regular cell phone was issued by the county. We were allowed to make personal calls—they didn't expect us to lug two phones everywhere—but using them to foment criminal conspiracies would no doubt be frowned upon.

He called my burner two hours later. “Get a new phone?”

“Borrowed one. You have plans tonight?”

“I'm guessing I do now.”

I looked at him over my grapefruit and tonic. We'd not talked about the van in the field, other than that night when we'd watched our co-conspirators drive away. Gus had said, “What the fuck are we doing?”

I'd just patted him on the back, and said, “Nothing. Yet.”

I took a sip and asked him the same question, kind of. “Why did you go out there that night?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. It seems so stupid now.”

“Daylight can do that,” I said. “I'm wondering if you really think stealing your client's car is a good idea.”

“This might surprise you, Dom, but I do. I mean, look how easy it was, a frigging twelve-year-old managed it.”

“A twelve-year-old with plenty of practice.”

“That's what the Internet is for,” he said. “You can figure out anything nowadays.”

“True. You need the money that badly?”

“Things aren't good. Seems like every kid out of law school is jumping on the immigration bandwagon, and they're using daddy's start-up money to undercut my prices. In business, or even criminal law, clients care if you're experienced, if you're actually good. In my line of work, not so much. The clients are all poor as hell, and frankly I don't do much more than fill out the paperwork for them. If they can get some recent grad to do that for half the price, why wouldn't they?”

“And if you get caught?”

“I've thought about that, yeah. But like you've said a million times, idiots get away with crime every day. We're not idiots, so…” He drank some of his beer. “Plus, he's my client. I could say I was out
there looking for him. I'll have some paperwork in the car for him, something like that.”

“Sneaky.”

“And you also said that no one ever goes to prison for a first-time offense, right?”

I nodded. “Unless it's murder or something like that, true. If you just steal a car, you'd get probation for that, absolutely. But you'd also lose your law license.”

Gus waved a dismissive hand. “And not be allowed to fill in forms for the rest of my life? Poor me. Maybe I could play music full-time. How cool would that be? And I'd have a bad-boy reputation, too. That'd help with the crowds. Or just move to Costa Rica and play my guitar on the beach.”

He was good enough to play full-time, for sure, but we both knew the romance of doing so wasn't the same as the reality, though he seemed to be ignoring that fact. With no job to fall back on, with a wife to support and kids to plan for…

“And Michelle, how does she feel about all this felonious activity?”

“You think I haven't told her?”

“Yes, I do.”

Gus smiled. “I did kind of bring it up last week. No specifics, just how she'd feel about me being a secret master-criminal and showing up with wads of cash.”

“And?”

“Made her horny.”

Fucking Gus, and his perfect wife.

“Okay, Mr. Master-criminal, how would it work? Seriously, if you think it can be done, tell me the details.”

Gus chewed his lip for a moment. “We watch him. Follow him on a day he's collecting rent, see how he does it and when he leaves his car.”

“Stupid plan,” I said.

“Why?”

“Still speaking hypothetically, of course, there's no point stealing the car before he's collected any money, it only makes sense to do it at the end of the evening. So I don't see any point in following him all day and risking being seen.”

“Ah, right. Didn't think about it that way.”

“Plus, it's summer and we should probably do this in the dark, later at night.” I smiled. “Maybe you can leave the master-criminal thing to me.”

“Fine, how would
you
do it?”

“It'd be like preparing a case for trial, except in reverse. When I get ready for trial, I go through the police report and pick out the witnesses and evidence I can use, make a list of both. And I make a note, too, of the evidence that likely won't be admissible, and a list of flaws in the case. The trick in planning a crime, I think, would be to make sure that second list is nice and full, and that there's as little as possible on the first.”

“The perfect crime?”

“No such thing.”

“I disagree. I talked about that with Michelle, actually. She thinks the perfect crime is one where no one even knows a crime's been committed. That way, the perpetrator gets away with it, keeps the money or whatever, and never has to worry about looking over his shoulder. Makes sense to me.”

It didn't to me. I couldn't fathom doing that much work and planning, putting my neck on the line and taking potentially deadly risks, only for no one to know about any of it. My narcissistic streak, perhaps, but it would be like that tree in the woods, falling without anyone hearing. I would want my crime to make a noise, a crash, I would want people to know that it had been committed and then have to suffer the torture of not knowing who did it. But Gus was right about one thing, I certainly wouldn't want to live my life looking over my shoulder, not any more than I already did.

As I sat there nursing my drink, I had an idea how to address that particular issue. Then I tucked it away for future use and went back to the subject at hand. “Michelle's perfect crime makes me wonder,” I said, “if maybe your client might be a little hesitant to call the cops and report all that money missing.”

Gus's eyes lit up. “That's a great point. If he reports it, all of it, there's a good chance the IRS would come poking around. The immigration people too.”

“Precisely. It's possible that he's better off losing a month's takings than losing his business altogether. So maybe the perfect crime is one that the victim doesn't dare report.”