Termination Man: a novel (50 page)

Nick nodded, but there was one name mentioned in Shawn’s jeremiad that he did not recognize.

“Who is Craig Walker?”

“He’s the asshole who got you fired.”

“What are you talking about?”

What followed was another explanation—not as sensational as the stories of Shawn’s misdeeds, but one that carried a personal impact. Nick couldn’t grasp every last detail: Somehow this Craig Walker was an employee of UP&S—but he really wasn’t. He was some sort of a consultant. Nick had heard of consultants. Since TP Automotive had purchased the company, the factory had been crawling with them. Most consultants, however, were easily recognizable: They wore expensive three-piece suits, were mostly young, and seemed to spend most of their time wandering around the plant, annoying people with stopwatches and clipboards. He had never heard of a consultant who operated undercover, like this Craig Walker apparently did.

Nick felt his anger rising: They had set him up—Shawn’s old man, the corporate lawyer, Beth Fisk, and the consultant. True, he had been stealing from the company; but there was something dishonest about the way they had caught him. They had spied on him. It was dirty pool.

But now he had something on them—
didn’t he
? The pilfering scheme that he and O’Rourke had orchestrated was small potatoes compared to what Shawn had done.  

They watched the women onstage in silence for a while after that, and Nick brooded, sifting through the unexpected mother lode of secrets that Shawn had laid in his lap.

Shawn leaned against his shoulder, clearly drunk out of his gourd.

“I’ve had enough,” Shawn said. “Let’s get outa here.” He began to fumble around in his pocket for his car keys.

Nick laughed. “Buddy, you are about as shitfaced as I’ve ever seen a dude. Don’t you remember—we came in my truck?”

This much was true, and Nick was thankful for it. If Shawn had been driving his high-end Audi, their life expectancy on the highway home would have been about ten minutes.

Nick drove Shawn home, and followed him into his living quarters without being explicitly invited. He was always anxious to see how the other half lived. Shawn resided in a nice condo. The place was filled with leather-upholstered furniture and artwork that screamed out its expensiveness. Nick doubted that Shawn had much of an eye for such things. It wouldn’t have mattered, though: With the bucks that this guy must be hauling in, he could easily afford to hire an interior decorator.

He helped Shawn onto the couch. The younger Myers was practically incapacitated now; and Nick thought for a moment how easy it would be to snatch his wallet on the way out, or maybe an expensive souvenir from the condo. That would be silly, though. He had finally found the goose that was going to lay golden eggs for him. No sense in killing it now, before it had even started to lay.

“You know, Shawn, old buddy, old pal, I’ve really enjoyed this little get-together tonight. But you see—I still have a problem. Your old man’s company fired my ass, and here I am out of a job.”

“It’s not my old man’s company,” Shawn said. “My dad is the vice president of—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Nick cut him off.

Shawn looked up at him from the couch, nonplussed. Nick could see that he was unaccustomed to being interrupted. It was time for a shift in the balance of power in this relationship, Nick decided.

“Did I ever tell you about my prison time, Shawn?” he asked.

Shawn shook his head slowly. No—of course he would have no idea about that. Nick had arranged for the erasure of the six months he had spent in the Ohio penal system. This had cost him a pretty penny, of course, via the services of a lawyer who was a little more than a lawyer. A lawyer who boasted of connections in the state office that housed such records.
“Nicky, my boy, for the right amount of money a criminal conviction record can sometimes be made to disappear from the state’s database,”
the lawyer had told him.

The general concept of records erasure, at least, was a subject that Shawn Myers would know about—based on what he had revealed over the course of the evening. Enough of that, though. The two of them had more important things to discuss.

“You see, Shawn, buddy, its like this: You’ve given me some information tonight. And I’m kind of in a tough spot. And here you are—a big shot who’s hauling down big bucks at the company that just fired me. That gives me no choice but to use this information you gave me to my advantage.”

A frown crossed Shawn’s face, and a little ripple of fear along with it. Nick savored the latter.
I wonder if he still thinks it was a good idea to befriend the guy working on the loading dock
, Nick wondered.

For a split second Shawn looked ready to put up a fight, and then the moment passed. Could Shawn overpower him if it came to that?
No—not in his present state, at least.
So far as Nick could ascertain from tonight’s stories, Shawn Myers had never successfully overpowered anyone who wasn’t female and considerably smaller.

“Are you saying that you’re going to fucking blackmail me?” Shawn asked.

Nick thought for a moment. What Shawn had just suggested was tempting—but ultimately self-defeating. If he outright blackmailed Shawn, then he would become Shawn’s enemy in that instant. And that would make him forever vulnerable, unless he was willing to preemptively kill this silver-spoon rich kid.

He didn't want to kill Shawn; there was no money in that. He wanted to milk him, to string him along. And he had to accomplish this without provoking feelings of open enmity. The managers of Nick’s erstwhile employer all assumed that he was stupid, no doubt; but he had more brains than they gave him credit for. His experience of being busted for the embezzling scheme had taught him that this particular group of silver-spooners was more than willing to play by jailhouse rules. They would fight dirty if pushed too hard. That meant that he had to instill fear in Shawn, but also a sense that they were fundamentally on the same side. Better to make Shawn beholden to him. Otherwise, this son of Mr. Kurt Myers—vice president of such-and-such and chief executive asshole of this-and-that—would only find a way to get him.

“No,” Nick said simply. “I’m not going to blackmail you. Because I’m your friend, Shawn. I’m your buddy. And buddies don’t blackmail each other.”

“It sure sounded like blackmail to me,” Shawn said.

“No, no, no. Get that outa your mind. What I’m proposing is more of a—what’s that word you management types always say—a ‘strategic partnership.’ Yeah, that’s it. The way I see it, you’ve got a couple of problems. First, you’ve got this Tina Shields bitch, who has all this dirt on you from a long time ago.
Who does she think she is
—bringing up all that old shit after all these years? That ain’t fair.”

“Ain’t fair at all,” Shawn agreed, he was leaning his head against the wall now. He squinted hard, trying to speak coherently despite the many beers and mixed drinks that he had consumed over the evening.
“And then there’s that little Chalmers bitch! Who the hell does
she
think
she
is?”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you, buddy,” Nick said. “I hear you. But from what you said, your biggest and most immediate problem is that Tina Shields bitch. The fifteen year-old girl is saying that you groped her. The other woman is saying that you went all the way—raped her, and then beat her up besides. Then there’s your problem regarding those other two women, the ones you—”

“There’s no way Tina Shields could know the truth about that! That was months before I—set her straight.”

“Dude, the fact of the matter is that you don’t know what this Tina Shields knows and what she don’t know. You weren’t expecting her to show up here all of a sudden like that, and start making trouble for you,
were you
? So how do you really know what she knows? How do you
know
what she saw fifteen years ago? It doesn’t sound like you were exactly paying great attention back then. Maybe Tina’s been watching you, targeting you somehow.”

Shawn paused contemplatively for a moment, and then nodded vigorously, this line of logic apparently quite appealing to him. “You’re right. She’s obviously got it out for me—because I’ve got money, and because I’m a
man
. But still, I don’t think she would be able to know the truth about those two girls in that apartment. I was very careful, you see.”

“She doesn’t have to
know
anything, Shawn, old buddy. All she has to do is look through some old newspaper stories—anyone can find old shit like that on the Internet—and then start stringing together accusations of things that you
might
have done,
could
have done.”

Now Shawn, despite his heavily inebriated state, appeared to be suffering from genuine alarm. The puzzle pieces were coming together in his mind; and he didn’t like the picture that they formed.

“So Tina,” Nick went on. “She starts making these wild accusations. Things that
could
be true—even if she doesn’t know for sure that they’re
really
true. Then someone else—say some nosy detective in Columbus—starts digging around. Then he finds evidence that you maybe overlooked back then. You said you were careful, Shawn, but you were—what—maybe nineteen or twenty years old?”

“Something like that.”

“And you might have made a mistake. If you made a mistake, you can be sure that the police will find it. They might have already found it—some stray hair fiber or fingerprint. The evidence needed to send you to death row might already be on a shelf in a Columbus police station. All the police need is your name, so they can link it to you. There ain’t no statute of limitations for murder, Shawn, old buddy; and they keep those cold case files alive for years. When I was in stir, I met some old convict who’d recently been sent away for a murder he’d committed thirty years earlier. It took the cops that long to finally link him to the crime.”

Nick could tell that his words had exerted a galvanizing effect on Shawn.

“I’m screwed, then,” Shawn said.

“No, you ain’t. Don’t be such a loser...a—
what do you call it
—defeatist. There’s a way out of this.”

“How?” Shawn asked. Nick had the feeling that Shawn was safely regarding him as an ally once again.

“That’s where I come in, buddy. It’ll cost you a little something, but trust me—it’ll be well worth the money.”

I never learned exactly what sort of work Tina Shields did. I guessed that the irregular nature of her personal life was mirrored by an equally irregular work life. She likely cobbled together a living from various patchwork sources; and her police record indicated that some of those were—or had been, at least—illegal. 

Tina had told me that she would be spending some time in Columbus. Maybe she really had come here from Akron for the sole purpose of counseling abused women in the area—women who had entrusted themselves to the agency she claimed to represent. Perhaps she was actually in Columbus for a job interview or a boyfriend—maybe a married one—or another scam like the ones that had landed her in trouble with the Columbus police years before.

There were many possibilities where Tina Shields was concerned. Not much would have surprised me. However, I did not expect to learn that Tina Shields had died in Columbus. That was what I discovered in the online edition of
The Columbus Dispatch
, on the Tuesday morning after Lucy Browning had shot herself. Sitting at Craig Parker’s desk at UP&S, I read the article in bits and pieces, my mind reeling from the tragedy and shock of this new development.

“This morning a body was found on the banks of the Olentangy River, w
h
ich flows through Columbus…. Police have identified the body as that of Tina Shields, aged 34
, of Akron, Ohio
…A spokesperson from the Franklin County Coroner’s Office issued a statement that Ms. Shields died of strangulation….The Franklin County Sheriff’s Department and the Columbus Division of Police are presently interviewing several persons of interest.”  

Just then, Shawn Myers walked by. If anything, he looked more relaxed than usual. And why shouldn’t he? Any formal charges concerning his assault on Alyssa Chalmers appeared to be dead in the water. And with Tina Shields dead, no one could connect him to crimes that had taken place in Columbus all those years ago.

Did he even know about Tina Shields’s death?
Of course he knew. I didn’t believe in coincidences of that magnitude. Shawn had either killed Tina himself, or he had arranged for her killing.

Unless Kurt had handled the task—a prospect that chilled me even more.

As Shawn walked by, I mentally queried him:

Where were you, Shawn? Where were you when Tina Shields was being strangled to death?

He did not notice me staring at him. And needless to say, he did not answer my questions.

I considered the possibility of approaching Dave Bruner once again. But the man had already rebuffed me twice. I would find no assistance there.