Killer Instinct (7 page)

When I was done, he said, “Not easy to have unit cohesion when you’re all battling each other.”

“Unit cohesion?”

“See, in Special Forces, we’d work in twelve-man teams. Operational detachments, they call ’em. A-Teams. Everyone’s got his job—mine was eighteen charlie, engineer sergeant. The demolitions expert. And we all had to work together, respect each other, or we’d never be battle-ready.”

“Battle-ready, huh?” I smiled, thinking of the corporation as a battlefield.

“You know the real reason soldiers are willing to die in war? You think it’s about patriotism? Family? Country? No way, bro. It’s all about your team. No one wants to be the first to run. So we all stand together.”

“I guess we’re more like scorpions in a bottle.”

He nodded. “Look. So we were on this armed reconnaissance mission outside Musa Qalay, in Afghanistan, right? Going after one of the anticoalition militias. A split team, so I was in charge. We had a couple of GMVs. Nontactical vehicles, I’m talking.”

“GMV?” Military guys speak a foreign language. You need a simultaneous translator to talk to them sometimes.

“Modified Humvee. Ground Mobility Vehicle.”

“Okay.”

“Suddenly my GMV’s struck head-on by machine gun fire and RPGs.” He made a slight grimace. “Rocket-propelled grenades, okay? Shoulder-launched antitank weapon. It was an ambush. My vehicle was hit. We were trapped in a kill box. So I ordered the driver—my good buddy, Jimmy Donadio—to floor it. Not away from the ambush, but right
toward
the machine-gun emplacement. Told the guy on top to start firing off the .50 cal, just unload it on them. You could see the bad guys slumped over the machine gun. Then my GMV got hit with another RPG. Disabled it. The vehicle was in flames, okay? We were screwed. So I jumped out with my M16 and just started firing away at them until I was out of ammo. Killed them all. Must have been six of them.”

I just stared at Kurt, rapt. The scariest thing I ever faced in my line of work was a performance review.

“So let me ask you something,” Kurt said. “Would you do that for Trevor?”

“Fire at him with a machine gun?” I said. “I fantasize about that sometimes.”

“You get my point, though?”

I wasn’t sure I did. I poked at the Bloomin’ Onion but didn’t eat any. I already felt queasy from all the grease.

He looked like he was getting ready to leave. “Mind if I ask
you
something?”

“Go for it.”

“So when we were in country, our most important weapon by far was always our intel. The intelligence we had on the enemy, right? Strength of their units, location of their encampments, all that. So what kind of intel do you guys collect on your potential customers?”

This guy was smart. Really smart. “They’re not the enemy,” I said, amused.

“Okay.” A bashful smile. “But you know what I mean.”

“I guess. We gather the basic stuff…” I paused for a few seconds. “To be honest, not much. We sort of fly by the seat of the pants, I sometimes think.”

He nodded. “Wouldn’t it help if you drilled down? Like the way you’re getting dicked around by Lockwood Hotels—like, what’s really going on there?”

“Would it help? Sure. But we don’t have any way of knowing. That’s the thing. It’s not pretty, but that’s how it is.”

Kurt kept nodding, staring straight ahead. “I know a guy used to work in security for the Lockwood chain. He might still be there.”

“A security guard?”

Kurt smiled. “Pretty high up in corporate security, at their headquarters—New York or New Jersey, whatever.”

“White Plains, New York.”

“Lot of Special Forces guys go into corporate security. So why don’t you give me some names, some background. Tell me who you’re working with. I’ll see if I can find anything out for you. A little intel, right?”

Kurt Semko had already surprised me a couple of times, so maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched, I figured, that this tow truck driver who’d been kicked out of the Special Forces might be able to get the lowdown on Brian Borque, the Vice President for Property Management at Lockwood Hotels. It made sense that there’d be a network of ex–Special Forces officers who now worked in the private sector. Why the hell not? I gave him a bit of background and scribbled Brian Borque’s name on a napkin. Kurt had an e-mail address, too—I guess everyone does these days—and I wrote it down.

“All right, man,” Kurt said, getting up and putting a big hand on my shoulder. “No worries. I’ll give you a call if I find anything out.”

It was pretty late by the time I got home, driving the Geo Metro that Enterprise Rent-A-Car had brought over that morning. Kate was asleep.

I sat down at the computer in the little home office we shared to check my office e-mail, as I always did before I went to bed. Internet Explorer was open, which meant that Kate had been using the computer, and out of pointless curiosity I clicked on “Go” to see where she’d been browsing. I wondered whether Kate ever looked at porn, though that seemed awfully unlikely.

No. The last place she’d been was a website called Realtor.com, where she’d been looking at houses in Cambridge. Not cheap ones, either. Million-dollar, two-million-dollar houses in the Brattle Street area.

Real estate porn.

She was looking at houses we could never afford, not on my income. I felt bad, for her and for me.

When I signed on to my office e-mail, I found the workup I’d done on Lockwood, and forwarded it to Kurt. Then I scrolled quickly through the junk—health-plan notices, job listings, endless personnel notices—and found an e-mail from Gordy that he’d sent after hours.

He wanted me to “drop by” his office at 8:00 tomorrow morning.

8

The alarm went off at 5:00
A.M
., two hours earlier than usual. Kate groaned and rolled over, put a pillow over her head. I got up as quietly as I could, went downstairs, and made the coffee, and while it was brewing I took a quick shower. I wanted to get into the office a good hour before my interview with Gordy so I could go over my accounts and get all the numbers in order.

When I got out of the shower, I saw the light in the bedroom was on. Kate was downstairs at the kitchen table in her pink bathrobe, drinking coffee.

“You’re up early,” she said.

I gave her a kiss. “You too. Sorry if I woke you.”

“You were out late.”

“The softball game, remember?”

“You went out for drinks afterward?”

“Yeah.”

“Drown your sorrows?”

“We won, believe it or not.”

“Hey, that’s a first.”

“Yeah, well, that guy Kurt played for us. He blew everyone away.”

“Kurt?”

“The tow truck driver.”

“Huh?”

“Remember, I told you about this guy who gave me a ride home after the Acura wiped out?” It wiped out by itself. I had nothing to do with it, see.

“Navy SEALs.”

“Special Forces, but yeah. That guy. He’s, like, the real thing. He’s everything Gordy and all these other phony tough guys
pretend
to be. Sitting in their Aeron chairs and talking about ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘killing the competition.’ Only he’s for real. He’s actually killed people.”

I realized I was telling her everything except the one thing I was most anxious about: my interview with Gordy in a couple of hours. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her. She’d probably just make me more nervous.

“Don’t forget, Craig and Susie are going to be here in time for supper tonight.”

“It’s tonight?”

“I’ve only told you a thousand times.”

I let out a half groan, half sigh. “How long are they staying?”

“Just two nights.”

“Why?”

“Why what? Why just two nights?”

“Why are they coming to Boston? I thought L.A. was God’s country. That’s what Craig’s always saying.”

“He was just elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, and his first meeting is tomorrow.”

“How could he be on the Harvard Board of Overseers? He’s a Hollywood guy now. He probably doesn’t even own a tie anymore.”

“He’s not only a prominent alum but also a major contributor. People care about things like that.”

When Susie met Craig, he was just a poor starving writer. He’d had a couple of stories published in magazines with names like
TriQuarterly
and
Ploughshares
, and he taught expository writing at Harvard. He was kind of snooty, and Susie probably liked that, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to live in genteel poverty, and I think he figured out pretty quickly that he was never going to make it in the literature business. So they moved out to L.A., where Craig’s Harvard roommate introduced him around, and he started writing sitcoms. Eventually he got a gig writing for
Everybody Loves Raymond
and began making serious money. Then, somehow, he created this hit show and overnight became unbelievably rich.

Now he and Susie vacationed on St. Barths with Brad and Angelina, and Susie regularly fed Katie gossip about which movie stars were secretly gay and which ones were in rehab. They had a big house in Holmby Hills and were always out to dinner with all the celebrities. And he never let me forget it.

She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. “Susie’s going to take Ethan around Boston—the Freedom Trail, all that.”

“She doesn’t get it, does she? Ethan’s not into Paul Revere. Maybe the Salem Witch Museum, but I don’t think they show the real sicko stuff there that he’s into.”

“All I ask is for you to be nice to them. You and Ethan have some sort of great chemistry, which I don’t quite understand. But I appreciate it.”

“How come they’re staying here anyway?” I said.

“Because she’s my sister.”

“You know they’re just going to complain the whole time about the bathroom and the shower curtain and how the water from the shower spills out on the floor, and how we have the wrong coffeemaker and how come we don’t have any Peet’s Sumatra coffee beans—”

“You can’t hold it against them, Jason. They’re just accustomed to a higher standard of living.”

“Then maybe they should stay at the Four Seasons.”

“They want to stay with us,” she said firmly.

“I guess Craig needs to stay in touch with the little people every once in a while.”

“Very funny.”

I went to the cereal cabinet and surveyed its depressing, low-cal, high-fiber contents. Fiber One and Kashi Go Lean and several other grim-looking boxes of twigs and burlap strips. “Hey, honey?” I said, my back turned. “You’ve been looking at real estate?”

“What are you talking about?”

“On the computer. I noticed you were looking at some real estate website.”

No answer. I selected the least-disgusting-looking box, a tough choice, and reluctantly brought it to the table. In the refrigerator all we had now was skim milk. Not even one percent. I hate skim milk. Milk shouldn’t be blue. I brought the carton to the table, too.

Kate was examining her coffee cup, stirring the coffee with a spoon, though she hadn’t added anything to it. “A girl can dream, can’t she?” she finally said in her sultry Veronica Lake voice.

I felt bad for her, but I didn’t pursue the subject. I mean, what’s to say? She must have expected more from me when she married me.

We met at a mutual friend’s wedding when both of us were pretty drunk. A guy I knew from DKE, my college frat, was marrying a girl who went to Exeter with Kate. Kate had been forced to leave Exeter in her junior year when her family went broke. She went to Harvard, but on financial aid. Her family tried to keep everything a secret, as WASPs do, but everyone figured out the truth eventually. There are buildings in Boston with her family name on it, and she had to suffer the humiliation of going to public school in Wellesley her last two years. (Whereas I, a boy from Worcester who was the first in his family to go to college, whose dad was a sheet-metal worker, had no idea what a private school even was until college.)

At the wedding, we were seated next to each other, and I immediately glommed on to this hot babe. She seemed a little pretentious: a comp lit major at Harvard, read all the French feminists—in French, of course. She also definitely seemed out of my league. Maybe if we hadn’t both been drunk she wouldn’t have paid me any attention, though later she told me she thought I was the best-looking guy there, and funny, and charming, too. And who could blame her? She seemed amused by all my stories about my job—I’d just started as a sales rep at Entronics, and I wasn’t yet burned-out. She liked the fact that I was so into my work. She said that I was such a breath of fresh air, that it really set me apart from all her clove-cigarette-smoking, cynical male friends. I probably went on too much about my master plan, how much money I’d be pulling down in five years, in ten years. But she was taken by it. She said she found me more “real” than the guys she normally hung with.

She didn’t seem to mind my dorky mistakes, the way I mistakenly drank from her water glass. She explained to me the dry-to-wet rule of table setting, with the water and wine to the right of your plate and the bread and dry things to the left. Neither did she mind that I was a lousy dancer—she found it cute, she said. On our third date, when I invited her over to my apartment, I put on Ravel’s “Bolero,” and she laughed, thought I was being ironic. What did I know? I thought “Bolero” was classic make-out music, along with Barry White.

So I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Obviously Kate didn’t marry me for my money—she knew plenty of rich guys in her social circles—but I think she expected me to take care of her. She was on the rebound from an affair she’d had with one of her college professors right after she graduated, a pompous but handsome and distinguished scholar of French literature at Harvard, whom she discovered was simultaneously sleeping with two other women. She told me later that she considered me “down-to-earth” and unpretentious, the polar opposite of her three-timing, beret-wearing, silver-haired father-figure French professor. I was a charismatic business guy who was crazy about her and would make her feel safe, at least, give her the financial security she wanted. She could raise a family and do something vaguely artistic like landscape gardening or teaching literature at Emerson College. That was the deal. We’d have three kids and a big house in Newton or Brookline or Cambridge.