Hollow Man (8 page)

Gus painted trails in the condensation on his beer glass. He looked up at me. “You really serious about doing this?”

“I guess you can say that I'm serious about exploring it. You?”

“Seems crazy, but…yeah.”

“Cool,” I said. “Although I would have one condition.”

“What's that?”

“Our new lady friend is kept out of it.”

Gus thought for a moment, then asked, “Are you being sweet and protecting her, or…?”

“The other. I don't trust her.”

“That so?” He smirked. “I thought you wanted to—”

“We both want to do that. And I'm happy to, I just can't tell what she's up to, and I don't like that. Have you talked to her since last weekend?”

He shifted in his seat. “No.”

“But you've tried.”

“Once. I called and left a message.”

“Do me a favor and leave it alone, will you? Just for a while.”

“Sure.” Gus cleared his throat, then looked me in the eye. “Are we really going to do this?”

We were, because the elements of my true nature had already collided, a rolling snowball of sociopathy gathering momentum.
Impulsiveness picking up on my need for risk, rolling onto my lack of fear and the deceptiveness and sense of self-worth that convinced me I could get away with it. And on top of it all, I got to manipulate another human being into playing soldier under my command. Not to mention all that cold, hard cash.

“Let me plan it out, check out the end of his route. I'll take lead and let you know, okay? We're just stealing a car, not even really stealing it for long.
Borrowing
, like you said.”

“Right,” he said. “And I have a condition, too.”

“Oh?”

“No guns. I know how you like to carry everywhere you go, but on this, no guns.”

“Yeah, okay. No guns is fine with me. You said before that he carries, though.”

“I think so….” He snapped his fingers. “Come to think of it, he might not. He picked up a DWI a year ago, which means he has to wait another four years to get a concealed carry license. He's not allowed to carry a gun.”

“Which means he
shouldn't
, not that he doesn't.”

“True. But if he's trying to fly under the radar, he'd be stupid to take the risk.”

“On the other hand, he'd be stupid
not
to carry. He's more likely to get jacked by a civilian than by the police. Anyway, just do your thing and I'll let you know if it's feasible.”

He left me there in the bar, to go home to his wife and work on those kids. Truth be told, I didn't trust him much, either. For a decent, conscientious, loving man to commit a serious crime and jeopardize his future and his family…well, there was a lot about empaths I didn't get, and this went on the list.

I thought about going home and beginning the feasibility analysis, but I wanted to start then, that very second. I also didn't want the distraction of my new roommate, Tristan Bell.

I'd recently rented a room in a condo that Tristan owned, to
save money. He was the IT guy in the main DA's office downtown and had posted a note saying he wanted a roommate. I asked around about him, and people told me he was quiet and would be easy to live with. So far that had been true, excessively true almost. The name “Tristan” reminded me of the dorky vet of the same name in the English show from when I was a kid, called
All Creatures Great and Small
, and this Tristan fit the mold. A modern version, he was a classic computer nerd, complete with glasses and reclusive streak. He spent almost all his time in his bedroom, and when he wasn't there he kept his bedroom locked. It seemed odd at first, paranoid even, but I figured that we didn't know each other that well and, if he had expensive gadgets or porn in there, I could see why he wouldn't risk a stranger nosing around in his room.

The best thing was that he didn't bug me, ask me questions, or want to be my friend. He left me alone the same way he liked to be left alone. I'd worried about my guitar playing, but he told me he liked the muffled strum coming from my room. “And I do have headphones,” he said, “if I don't like the song you're playing.”

So I probably could have gone home and thought about this little caper, but I wanted some immediate answers. Or if not answers, some decent lines of inquiry and maybe a list of supplies. I borrowed a pen from the waitress, reached for a paper napkin, and opened it up.

Let the planning begin.

Three weeks later, I walked into my office to find Tristan sitting at my desk, his nose in my laptop. I stood in the doorway until he noticed me, eyes blinking in surprise.

“Something wrong with my computer?”

“Doing some updates. Security stuff and new software that allows downloads straight from the APD servers to your computer. You'll be able to watch in-car videos minutes after they're shot. Assuming the officer downloads them properly.”

“You couldn't do that remotely?” I wasn't tech savvy by any means but, in the past, the folks in IT had been able to help me with problems from where they sat, taking over my computer somehow and doing what they needed to do.

“Almost done.” He typed for a second, then stood up. “Sorry, but you should be good to go. If you have any problems just let me know.”

“Thanks.”

He ducked out and nodded to Brian McNulty, who was on his way in from court. McNulty dumped his briefcase on his desk and sank into his chair with a groan. “Be thankful you don't have my judge for your dockets. He's an asshole.” McNulty suddenly leaned forward and looked both ways through the door. “And speaking of assholes, you just met a prize one.”

“Oh? Being a computer nerd makes you an asshole?”

“He's a nosy fucker, is what he is. And not above a little blackmail. Threatened to report me for using my work computer for my music.”

“You mean your illegal downloading of music.”

“I don't illegally download, I sample songs and create my own mixes. Just because I don't pluck at a guitar and croon to the ladies, doesn't mean I don't make music.”

I didn't have the energy to argue. “Whatever. You were saying Bell threatened to report you?”

“Yeah, like I said, he's nosy. I'm pretty sure he peruses our Internet history, looking for dirt to use against people. He made me write him a letter of recommendation for a job application.”

“He's leaving?”

“The county's letting a few people go in that department. I guess he might be one of them. This was only two weeks ago, so I don't really know.”

“Huh, I had no idea,” I said. “Which is weird, when you think about it.”

“Why?”

“The chap's my roommate. He's never mentioned anything about that.”

“Wait, he's your roommate?”

“That's what I said.”

“Seriously? How did that happen?”

“Long story. Anyway, he's fine, keeps to himself.”

McNulty snickered. “That's what they say about serial killers.”

He might have been right about Tristan but I doubted it, even though my roommate and I still barely spoke. Not through any animosity but because of our schedules. I was either at work, playing music, or chasing women. Even when I was at the apartment, I barely saw him. He was an odd duck, still locking himself in his room most hours of the day and subsisting on Cheerios in the morning, delivered pizza the rest of the time. Once, I brought him back a salad plate from Whole Foods. Not because I cared about his diet but because I wanted to see what he'd do. Like feeding a monkey couscous instead of bananas. And he did what I'd expect a monkey to
do: eye it warily for a moment, eye me warily for another moment, then disappear into his room with it. Only difference was, Tristan grunted a thank you. He was odd enough that I'd gotten interested in him, wanted to understand him.

When McNulty turned away, I sat down and looked over my computer, noting a new icon on the desktop but nothing else to worry me. I double-clicked it, and APD's Versadex system opened on the screen, asking me for log-in information. It seemed to be exactly what Tristan had said it was. And truthfully, I didn't care whether Tristan was a nosy bastard as I hadn't been doing my private research on my work computer. I knew enough about technology to avoid that trap. Every morning at work we logged in using individual usernames and passwords, so I figured our online activity could be tracked. As a prosecutor, I probably could have explained away most of it as job-related, but I went in the opposite direction. Call it paranoia, but I'd bought a cheap laptop that I used solely for researching the theft. And once it was done, the computer would find itself at the bottom of a lake or…somewhere that wasn't my apartment. And I'd double-deleted the early searches I'd done on my work computer weeks ago.

Gus had been right, of course, the Internet was invaluable. Within days, I knew how to break into a car in seconds, using a small ball-peen hammer to punch out the lock. I also knew how to start it with just a screwdriver, jamming it into the ignition the way twelve-year-olds apparently knew how to do. As a backup plan, and in case we had time, I also knew the theory behind hot-wiring a car. Just for fun, I studied the art of lock picking, researching the theory online and ordering a pick and tension wrench.

Gus and I had swapped a couple of e-mails before he read that a politician cheating on his wife had devised a safer communication method: sharing an e-mail account and leaving messages in the “drafts” folder. Apparently, or so he said, if e-mails never actually got sent, they left no trail. So we both cleared our earlier e-mail
exchanges as best we could, and we did that, instead. Safe for work, even, Gus said, and he knew more about those things than I did.

Toward the end of the month, I spent a couple of hours on a Thursday evening following our intended victim, Ambrosio Silva. Gus had given me a list of parks where several of his mobile homes were located, as well as his address. I figured he'd either start nearest his home and work his way out, or start farthest away and pick up his rents on the route home. I exercised my love of surveillance cameras and researched battery-powered ones, finding a nice line in camouflaged cameras.

The day before Silva made his rounds, I put one at the entrance of the park nearest his home and one at the park farthest away, testing my theory. I forced myself out of bed at dawn and spent a boring two hours in front of my computer, but eventually I spotted him at the park closest to his home. I knew he'd be there for thirty minutes at least, which gave me time to drive out there. I did what I told Gus I wouldn't: I followed Silva. I'd realized that knowing his route was vital. Not every minute, not every twist and turn, but to know basically which trailer parks he went to in rough order. So I followed him, at a distance, for two hours, making sure my supposition about his route was correct, and by the time I turned back toward central Austin, I was sure it was. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when he turned into what I'd assumed to be his final destination at ten o'clock that evening. As I'd suspected, it was the rundown heap of a place that sat right next to the deserted field where I'd last set my eyes on a stolen Transit van. Which is precisely where I figured the getaway car would wait.

I had a date in mind and a plan well formed in my head. Like a video game, I was able to put the players in position and watch the clock ticking down, execute an escape from the grimy and appropriately named Crooked Creek Mobile Home Park with another man's car and another man's cash.

That plan, however, went to shit on a Thursday morning when I opened our communication system and saw a message from Gus.

A light rain fell as I left my parents' farmhouse, both of them watching from the back door. My father had given me one brief shooting lesson in the back meadow, standing beside me and throwing a plastic bucket high and away from us, gentle encouragement when I hit it, muttered never-minds when I missed. After twenty minutes, the barrels started to get hot, so we quit and sat at the large table in his study as he showed me how to clean my new Holland & Holland .410 shotgun. I was thirteen.

At that point, they'd lost a degree of contact with me. I'd spent three years at boarding school, and I think they watched me a little warily that morning, hoping that school and a measure of maturity had wiped away the dark edges they'd glimpsed during my childhood. The gun was another rite of passage, like boarding school, only one I'd been looking forward to since I was seven.

In an English drizzle that morning, I walked down the gravel track and away from the farmhouse, my coat pockets bulging with Eley cartridges and a wool scarf itching my neck. My father had bought me a flat cap to go with the gun, and it, as much as the weapon itself, was a marker of adulthood. The little peak kept the rain from my eyes, but I wouldn't have minded a downpour as I set out on my first hunt, rabbits and pigeons my quarry. The prospect of my first pheasant shoot was still a month away, the time when I'd stand side to side with my father's friends, the noblest of the Hertfordshire gentry, as a long thin line of farm workers pressed slowly toward us
through the undergrowth to flush wave after wave of pheasants over our heads, our waiting guns. It wasn't a slaughter, though, not like the animal-rights people claim. In fact, it was deemed too easy and unsporting to shoot the low-flying pheasants, and the guns either side of you would take a dim view if you did. No, the challenge was to shoot the high, fast ones and, even better, to “wipe the eye” of your neighbor, take out the bird that he just missed.

But that chilly October morning I was by myself. I had to get used to the feel of the gun, my father said, the weight and the sound of it when I fired. Get used to killing something by myself, so I knew that I could. And that's what I wanted, too.

I carried the gun under my arm the way I'd been taught, with the barrels pointing safely at the ground. A half mile from the house, I cut left along the edge of a field and headed toward the narrow end of a wood we called Arrow Wood, for its triangular shape. When I got there, I started slowly down the right-hand side, in between the edge of the trees and the strip of mustard that our gamekeeper had put down as game cover. That thin belt of mud and patchy grass was where I thought I'd find rabbits.

And maybe my first kill.

Up to then it'd been a few insects and fish. Same as any other boy, though perhaps my curiosity levels were a little higher. Once I'd done it, though, and seen and felt nothing, there was no great desire to harm other creatures. Not the way you read about when it comes to people like me. The question in my mind that morning was whether killing warm-blooded creatures would feel any different. I suspected not, if only because the killing itself would be more remote—the fish had been hauled in from the farm's three ponds, wriggling on the end of a line and dispatched in various ways that included a rock, a knife, and ten minutes of me staring at it flapping on the ground. Drowning, I suppose you'd call it.

But out there by the woods, death would come at a distance. A rabbit bowled over at fifteen or twenty yards, a pigeon knocked from
the sky and thumping onto the ground even farther away. I wasn't expecting much from the killing. And it wasn't just the killing that drew me there, brimming with suppressed excitement and anticipation. No, to suggest that would be a sore misrepresentation of my motivations. A huge part was the power, not just of the gun but of the trust my parents placed in me, the freedom to look like a child but act like a grown-up. I didn't want to disappoint them, either, by missing or not finding anything.

Nor did I want to lie about what I'd shot just to impress my father. The rule was: All dead animals were brought back to the bothy, the out-building where we hung the pheasants after a shoot. Even rabbits and pigeons were supposed to hang for a day or two, to loosen the meat and improve the flavor, and my father would no doubt be waiting for my return to see how I'd done. I could lie and claim to have shot a few things, but one other rule of his was: no animal was to be left out there, either dead or wounded. If you killed it, you brought it home; and if you just wounded it, then you stayed out there until you found and killed it. He didn't miss often, my father, but when he clipped a bird, he made sure it was tracked down and its neck was wrung before he moved on. I'd seen him beating through brambles to get to a wounded pheasant, hands and legs torn up by thorns just to make sure the bird didn't suffer a slow, lingering death. I didn't care about that, but I knew enough to follow my dad's rules to the letter if I wanted to keep my new shotgun. It was a beauty, too. Double-barreled with two triggers, a forward one for the right barrel, and the back trigger firing the left barrel, which was itself choked a hair's breadth tighter to keep the shot pattern more compact for an extra yard or two.

I walked as quietly as I could beside Arrow Wood, cursing silently as a pair of sharp-eyed pigeons popped out of the trees sixty yards in front of me. They flitted and dipped as they flew away, as if expecting a blast of pellets from behind. I looked back toward the track, and my eye caught a sudden movement ahead and to the
right, on the verges of the mustard growth. I stopped to stare and listen. The mustard grass rustled, but it could have been the wind. I lifted the gun and tucked the stock into my shoulder, watching the ground where I'd seen movement. I could hear myself breathing and feel tiny drops of rain tickling the top of my nose.

The grass rustled again, closer to the edge this time, and I shifted my feet to get a better stance, sure the rabbit would bolt for the woods. I stood like that until my shoulders ached, but I didn't want to blink first, to lower my gun and give the creature a free pass. Be outwitted by a rabbit. I sidled forward, still aiming. Ten yards away, nine, eight…then a flash of movement farther out, twenty yards at least, a ball of fur leaping out of the mustard grass onto the track of green and closing the gap to the trees in a heartbeat. I didn't aim—didn't have time to—I just jerked the gun up and swung it in the direction of the rabbit, pulling the forward trigger as its head came level with the first line of trees, letting the second barrel go a split second later, lead shot spattering into the woods with a blast of frustration and hope.

The moment I fired, a dozen or more pigeons took off from the trees, the flap of their wings startling as they swirled over and around me before spotting the source of the noise and spiraling away, some scything the ground as others soared upward toward the low, gray, clouds. In seconds a silence fell over the woods, leaving me with just the gentle patter of a slightly harder rain, a soft
thunk
when I dropped two new cartridges into the gun, and the sound of my feet on the ground as I walked toward the rabbit's point of entry.

A thin path led into the woods where the rabbit had disappeared, just in inch or two wide, and I wondered if animals had habits like us, stuck to routines and routes the way we did. Useful information for a hunter, I thought, and filed it away as something to ask my father about when I got home.

I stood there, peering into the trees, letting my eyes adjust. I could smell moss and wet bark, and the trees reached over me to
keep the rain away as I looked for signs of movement, of life. Barely six feet away, I saw the rabbit, crouching under a fallen log. At first I thought there might be two under there, but I realized why it was hiding, not running: the back leg poking out beside the blinking eyes and twitching nose belonged to the same creature. My shot had disabled it, broken it. I moved slowly into the woods, and the rabbit tried to shrink further, its small body rippling against the dark and crumbling bark of the log. But it had nowhere to go.

I crouched down barely three feet from it and saw the blood on its hind leg. My father hadn't told me what to do if I injured a rabbit or hare. How to kill one off. Pheasants and pigeons, you just wrung their necks, I'd seen the shooters on a pheasant hunt do that with a quick flick and jolt of the wrist. But I didn't know if you could do that to a rabbit, and I didn't want to get bitten finding out. I stayed there looking at it for a moment, watching its tiny, black eyeballs swiveling back and forth, as if by not seeing me it would be safe. Then I pointed the end of my gun at its little head and pulled the trigger.

I stepped into the woods just after three in the morning. A full moon cast an odd silvery light onto the path ahead of me, making me feel like I was in a photo from the 1800s. This wasn't the woods of my childhood, green and lush, with rabbits hopping into muddy burrows and the outraged calls of disturbed pheasants rising from the undergrowth. No, this was a monochrome spinney of leafless, sunbaked trees and browned grass, where dust and cicadas rose up around me as I walked. This was a place to be careful, where snakes lived and the poor Mexicans from the Crooked Creek Mobile Home Park came to have illicit sex with their neighbors or sell their drugs to children. I'd had to wait in my car while several groups wandered out of the trees, wait for them to get clear, and make sure others weren't in their wake.

The flashlight in my backpack jostled against the camera, secure in its bubble wrap, and I was about to pull the light out when I found the perfect spot about forty yards into the woods. The tree was U-shaped, off the trail to my right, at the edge of a ditch and with its lowest branch too high for kids to climb but within reach for me. I scrambled up with a little difficulty and sat, fifteen feet above the ground in the
U
, catching my breath and scanning the trees for movement.

All seemed quiet, so I pulled the camera from my backpack and got to work. It was a beautiful little device, half the size of a shoe box and could take pictures or record video. Best of all, most important of all, I could operate it remotely from my laptop, download or watch images from the comfort of my bedroom. Two hundred bucks was a small price to pay for such a beautiful little device.

Secured in the
V
of two smaller branches, I lay my head beside it, making sure it had a clear view of where Silva would park his van. The final touch was to wipe the camera down with gentle strokes of my handkerchief, just in case things went sideways. If there was one thing juries loved and defendants hated, it was fingerprints. Hard to explain away innocently, and in my case, impossible.

Happy all was safe and secure, I dangled from the branch for a few seconds, enjoying the stretch in my shoulders, feeling the pain gather after a minute, and dropping myself to the ground before it seared me, feet landing as gently as possible in the crackle of brown leaves. I looked up and had to squint to make out the camera, not even sure I was seeing it then. I took one more look around me, then made my way toward the car. On three trees I put inch-long strips of white tape, markers to my camera but haphazard enough that it wasn't obvious which tree they led to. Then, as the night lifted slowly around me, I drove away from the mobile-home park, content that my prized piece of equipment was in place, that no one had seen me, and that my plan was as close to perfect as it could be.