Killer Instinct (43 page)

More static. A long silence. “I don’t know about this. I’d be putting you in serious danger. It’s extremely irregular.”

“Serious danger? You want to talk serious danger? A friend of mine is slowly suffocating in a trunk somewhere. I’m going to meet with Kurt. If I have to use my own crappy tape recorder and tape a microphone to my chest, I’ll do it.”

“No,” Kenyon interrupted. “I’ll see what I can scrape together.”

“Good.”

“But are you certain you can get him to talk?”

“I’m a salesman,” I said. “This is what I do.”

61

I stopped at a Starbucks and did some quick Internet research just as they were closing. Then I met Kenyon about a half-hour later at an all-night Dunkin’ Donuts near the Entronics building. It was shortly after eleven. There were a couple of drunk young guys in Red Sox caps and low-hanging shorts with their boxer shorts showing. A tense-looking couple having a quiet fight at a table. A bum who’d surrounded his table with shopping bags full of junk. Nothing like a Dunks late at night.

Kenyon was wearing a navy sweatshirt and chinos and looked tired. We both got large coffees, and then he took me out back to a new-looking white van. He opened the rear doors and we climbed inside. He put on the dome light.

“This is the best I can do on short notice,” he said, handing me a coil of wire.

“Kurt knows how to search for concealed microphones and transmitters,” I said.

“Sure he does,” Kenyon said. “So don’t get too close.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Then we should be squared away.” He looked at my T-shirt. “You got something long-sleeved?”

“Not with me.”

He removed his sweatshirt. “Wear this. Just get it back to me sometime, okay?”

If I’m alive, I’ll be more than happy to.
I nodded.

“Take off your shirt.”

I did. He taped the transmitter to the small of my back with a wide adhesive tape he wound around my chest. It was so sticky it was sure to rip out my chest hair when I removed it.

“Is he going to spot your backup team? Don’t forget, he’s a pro.”

“So are they.”

I took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. “Is this going to work?”

“The transmitter’s going to work fine. Everything else—well, that depends on you. Whether you can pull it off. And that’s what scares the shit out of me.”

“I can do it,” I said. “Is there, like, a panic button built into this?”

“We’ll be monitoring the transmission. If you need us, just say something. Some phrase we agree on. And we’ll come running.”

“A phrase. How about, ‘I’m not getting a good feeling about this’?”

“Works for me,” he said. “Okay, then. We’re good to go.”

It took me another forty-five minutes to get ready for my meeting with Kurt. I parked in back of a 7-Eleven that was closed and worked out of the trunk of my car.

The Entronics building was mostly dark, with a scattering of lights in the windows. Cleaning people, maybe. A few office workers who kept very late hours the way Phil Rifkin once did.

I saw that the lights were on in my corner office on the twentieth floor. I’d turned them off when I left for the day. The cleaning staff usually came through around nine or ten, so it wasn’t them. Not at one in the morning.

It had to be Kurt. Waiting for me.

62

Fifteen minutes before one in the morning.

I arrived at my office a quarter hour before the time we’d agreed to meet. I set down my gym bag and my briefcase as I entered. The lights were already on. So was my computer.

Kurt had been using it, I assumed, but for what?

I went behind the desk to look at the monitor, and I heard Kurt’s voice. “You have something for me.”

I looked up. Nodded.

“Let’s make this fast.”

I stood still, looked in his eyes. “What’s my guarantee Graham’s going to be where you say he is?”

“There’s no guarantees in life,” Kurt said. “I guess you’ll just have to take me at my word.”

“What good is this thing to you anyway?” I asked. “It’s just a piece of scrap metal.”

“It’s worth nothing to me.”

“So why are you willing to deal?”

Last-minute hesitation. Happened all the time in my business. How many prospects had suddenly developed a case of jitters just before signing on the dotted line? Usually when I saw it coming I’d head them off by throwing in some unexpected bonus, some pleasant surprise. It almost always worked. But you had to anticipate it.

“Why? Because I’d rather keep it out of the cops’ hands. Not that I couldn’t handle it if I had to. Not that my buddies on the force might not happen to ‘lose’ a piece of evidence against me. But I’m a thorough guy.”

“Who says the cops are even going to know what this is?”

He shrugged. “They might not. You’re right.”

“They might not even know it’s from a Porsche.”

“That kind of shit they can figure out. All it takes is one smart forensic guy to find traces of mercury or whatever’s on there. Or the pattern of breakage—I really don’t know. I don’t care. But why take the chance? When you and I can come to terms. And both of us live happily ever after.”

I nodded.

Got it.

That was enough. That was as much as I was going to get, and it was enough to incriminate him.

“I’m taking a huge chance,” I said.

“Life’s a risk. Hand it over.”

I was silent for a long time.

True sales champions,
Mark Simkins said,
can sit there quietly all day if they have to. It’s not easy. You want to say something. But don’t! Keep your mouth shut.

When enough time had passed, I picked up the gym bag, unzipped it. Pulled out the piece, which I’d wrapped in plastic and duct-taped up.

Handed it over to him.

“Good,” he said. He picked at the duct tape, unraveled the layers of plastic from the steering shaft. He threw the plastic onto the floor, held up the twisted thick steel rod with a U-shaped joint at one end. Weighed it in his hand, admiring it. It was heavy.

“All right,” I said. “Where’s Graham?”

“You know where the old General Motors assembly plant is.”

“On Western Ave., a mile from here or so?”

“Right. That vacant lot there.” He handed me a small key. To the trunk, I guessed. “Funny how your life can depend on a little piece of metal,” he said. He walked slowly to the big glass window.

“Like a round of ammunition. It can save your life.” Now he was looking out the window. He swiveled around. “Or it can kill you.”

With that, he swung the steering shaft at the window.

The glass exploded with a loud pop, a million shards showering all over the carpet. “Cheap-ass tempered glass,” he said. “Contractors should have at least sprung for laminated, building this nice.”

“I’m not getting a good feeling about this,” I said to the hidden microphone.

Get the hell up here now,
I wanted to shout.

“Jesus!” I shouted. “What the
hell
are you doing?”

Cold wind whipped into the office, a smattering of raindrops.

“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Sudden rise to the top. All sorts of pressures on you, trying to save the division—you didn’t know the whole thing was a trick. High-level games. You found out the truth, and it was too much.”

I didn’t like the way he was talking, but I knew what he was up to.

“Now a hundred fifty people are going to hit the unemployment lines because of you. Yeah, lot of stress on you. You’re going to lose your job too, and your wife’s pregnant. So you do the only thing that makes sense. In your desperate condition. You’re going to jump. It’s a good day to die, don’t you think?”

The wind was sluicing through the office, blowing papers around, knocking picture frames off my desk, off the credenza. I could feel the spray of cold rain.

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

I reached into the gym bag, pulled out Kurt’s Colt pistol. An army-issue semiautomatic .45.

Kurt saw it, smiled. Went on talking as if I were pointing a finger at him. “You’ve left a suicide note,” he said calmly. “On your computer. Happens more and more often these days.”

The gun felt heavy in my right hand, awkward. The cold blue-black steel, the rough grip. My heart was knocking so hard my hand was twitching.

“The cops can hear every word we’re saying,” I said. “I’m wired, my friend. Your suicide ruse isn’t going to work. Sorry.”

Kurt seemed to be ignoring me. “One-handed grip?” Kurt said, surprised. “That’s not easy.”

I brought my other hand up so I was holding the gun with both hands. I shifted my hands around, moved my fingers, tried to find a two-handed grip that felt natural.

“You’ve apologized to your wife and your unborn daughter. That’s what the amnio results said, by the way. A girl. Congratulations.”

For a second he almost stopped me. I froze for an instant. But then I went on.

“Like Phil Rifkin’s bogus ‘suicide,’” I said. “He didn’t hang himself. You garroted him, then made it look like a hanging.”

Kurt blinked. His smile diminished, but only a little.

“Because he caught you coming into the Plasma Lab. To do something to the plasma screen Trevor was demo’ing at Fidelity. You didn’t expect him to be in on a Sunday. You didn’t know the strange hours he kept.”

“Please tell me you didn’t just figure that out,” Kurt said.

“I think I’ve known it for a while. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.”

My left hand braced my right at the wrist. I had no idea if this was the right form. Probably it wasn’t: What the hell did I know? Point and shoot. Pull the trigger. If I’m off by a few feet, it’s trial and error, aim again, squeeze the trigger. Eventually I’m going to hit him. A lucky shot, an unlucky shot, I should get him in the chest, maybe even the head. My hands were trembling.

“Did you load it, Jason? Do you even know how?”

Kurt grinned. There was something almost paternal in his expression now, proud and amused, watching the antics of an endearing toddler.

“Man, if you load the rounds in the magazine wrong, or even jam the magazine in there the wrong way, you’re screwed. Gun could explode in your hands. Backfire. Kill you instead of me.”

I knew he was lying. That much I knew. But where was Kenyon? Couldn’t he hear me? How long would it take them to get up here?

“Good choice of firearms, Jason,” he said. He took a few steps toward me. “Model 1911 A1 Series 70. Outstanding weapon. I like it better than the Glock, even.”

He came closer.

“Freeze, Kurt.”

“Great safety features. Way better than the Beretta M9 the army hands out, which is a piece of shit. Superb stopping power.”

He came even closer. Maybe ten feet away. Very close. Not a problem now.

“Stop right there or I’ll blow you away!”
I shouted.

I curled my forefinger around the trigger. It felt surprisingly insubstantial.

“You should have taken me up on my offer to give you shooting lessons, Jason. Like I said, you never know when you’ll need it.”

“I mean it,” I said. “You take another goddamned step and I’ll pull the trigger.”

Where the hell were they?

“Boy, the way you’re holding that weapon, the slide’s going to fly back at you and take off your thumb, man. You’ve got to be careful.”

I hesitated, but only for an instant.

“You’re not going to kill me, Jason. You’ve never killed a man before, and you’re not going to start now. A guy like you’s never going to take a human life.” He spoke quietly, steadily. Almost lulling. “That’s a nightmare you don’t want to live with. Close range like this, you get sprayed with blood and brain tissue, fragments of bone. It’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“Watch me,” I said, and I squeezed the trigger.

He didn’t move. That was the strange thing. He stood there, arms at his side.

And nothing happened.

The gun didn’t fire.

I squeezed again, pulled the trigger all the way back, and nothing clicked.

Suddenly his right hand shot out, pushed the gun to the side as he grabbed it, wrenched it out of my hands in one smooth motion.

“Friggin’ amateur,” he said. He turned the gun around, pointed it at me. “You loaded it, but you didn’t squeeze the grip safety.”

I spun around, ran.

A burst of speed. As fast as I could. Like racing up the steps of Harvard Stadium, like doing wind sprints along the Charles, but with every twitching fiber of my being engaged in a desperate attempt to save my life.

From behind I heard him say, “Colt’s not easy to use, for an amateur. You gotta push against the back strap while you’re squeezing the trigger.”

Out of the office, through the maze of cubicles.

He shouted:
“Should have let me teach you.”

The elevators just ahead. I leapt toward the wall panel, pressed all the buttons, lit them up orange.

“Nowhere to run,” came Kurt’s voice, sounding closer. Why wasn’t he firing at me?

The bing of an elevator arriving. Thank God. Elevator doors slid open and I jumped inside, heard Kurt’s footsteps, punched the
LOBBY
button, punched and punched at it until the doors, so agonizingly slow, finally closed.

A hesitation. The elevator wasn’t moving.

No, please.

Then, a little jolt and it began to descend.

So damned slowly. Floor buttons began to light up one after another, slowly. Nineteen…seventeen. The flat-panel screen was dark, and the lights in the elevator cabin seemed dim. I stared at the numbers, willing them to move faster.

Where the hell was Kenyon?

The elevator shuddered to a stop. The orange 9 button frozen.

I punched L again, but nothing moved.

Then everything went dark. I could see nothing. Pitch-black.

Somehow he’d shut the elevator off. Turned off the power. I reached out in the darkness, flailing at the buttons, found them with my fingers. Ran my fingers over them, punched each one. Nothing.