Termination Man: a novel (61 page)

Even though I had been alarmed by the sight of Adam Seitz in the street that night, a part of me had believed that a man like Kurt Myers would stop short of actually resorting to physical violence. The vice president of strategic operations simply had too much to lose.

Nick King was another matter. He had done time behind bars;
my research had told me that.
And if he was now in cahoots with Shawn, he might also know the full story behind his firing from UP&S. He wouldn’t hesitate to bring a gun to a meeting like this; and he wouldn’t hesitate to draw it on me.

This prospect made me aware of my own limitations. I was a tough guy, in my own way. I had played football in high school and college. I’d been in my share of scuffles during my adolescent and teenage years. Nothing serious, mind you—just the sort of thing that is bound to occur when you mix testosterone-filled young males with silly reasons for conflict. Most of my fisticuffs had been over sports or girls.

This was a conflict of another magnitude. I had never faced a man with a gun; and I had never contemplated the use of a gun to solve my problems before.

Let me rephrase that: I suppose that I
had
contemplated the purchase of a gun for purely defensive purposes. My undercover identities were reasonably airtight; but I had always been vaguely fearful that someday my double life would catch up with me. The Termination Man had created a lot of disgruntled ex-employees over the years.

Most of them would never guess that I had been the source of their firing or forced resignation. However, there was always a chance that one of them would somehow connect the dots. A person who could do that would likely have the ingenuity to learn my real identity and track me down.

This anxiety had prompted me to browse through handguns in online catalogues. I wouldn’t need something outlandish. No semi-automatics with huge ammo clips, nothing like that. All I would need would be a basic revolver. Based on my research, I had concluded that a .38 special would probably be the gun that would fulfill my needs. Coincidentally, this was the gun that Claire carried in her purse.

But I had a minor problem: I had no experience with firearms. My father had never been a gun enthusiast. Nor did my boyhood years include a grandfather or favorite uncle who was a hunter or recreational shooter. Guns had never entered my life.

I would therefore need to learn how to safely handle a firearm, probably by taking a course. This should not have been an exceedingly difficult undertaking for a man who had a Wharton MBA and his own management consulting company.

Many times I had made note of available firearms training companies online and in the phone book. But I had never actually signed up for a certification class. At the end of the day, the real reason for my delay was not procrastination but pure vanity: Craig Walker was the Termination Man, the slick consultant who was always one step ahead of the game. I did not want to admit to myself that my life might someday depend on my ability to gun down another person. A person who had been a line item on one of my consulting jobs.  

Here was the result of all that vanity: I was in a situation where a handgun would have been a reassuring backup; and I didn't have one. I would therefore need to use my wits—such as they were—to resolve the situation at Donna’s house. But I knew that my wits might not be enough. As I slipped my coat on,
I noticed the dollar sign paperweight sitting on the hotel room bureau: It was the one that Lucy had given me the night of the holiday party,
when she had opened up that dark window into her soul. The paperweight wasn’t a gun, of course. Nevertheless, it might serve as a makeshift weapon. I could certainly throw it at Nick King if it came to that.

What a plan
, I reflected sourly. I had now reached the level where I might be reduced to the hurling of blunt objects. But right now I had to improvise, if necessary, and focus on warding off the immediate threat to Donna and Alyssa. I opened the front door of my room, thinking about guns and paperweights, and suddenly I was staring down the muzzle of a real gun.

“There you are, you bastard!”

I had not seen Alan Ferguson since the day he was fired from UP&S—since the meeting in which he had suggested that I was not what I appeared to be. I had not expected to ever see him again. But here he was.

In that final meeting at UP&S, Alan had been the helpless one. Now he was standing before me with a pistol leveled in my direction.

He lowered the gun to waist level. The hotel parking lot appeared to be empty. Had anyone seen him raise the pistol? Probably not.

I glanced down at the weapon. This one was not a revolver, like the .38 special that I had considered buying. This one was a semiautomatic. Alan was standing only a few feet from me. Even if he was a poor shot, he would not miss at this distance. 

“How long have you been standing out there waiting for me?” I asked him. Although this detail really wasn’t important, it was the only intelligible comment I could manage.

“Get inside,” Alan said. “Don’t make a sound, Craig. Not another word out of you.”

I did as he said.
What choice did I have, after all?
If he shot me here in the doorway of my hotel room, there would be no escape for him. But perhaps Alan Ferguson did not have escape in mind. Perhaps his plan was to take his own life here and now—only minutes or seconds after taking mine.

Get him talking,
I thought.
Get him talking and keep him talking.

“What the hell are you doing here, Alan?” I asked, ignoring his injunction against speaking.

“I should be asking you that,” Alan said, with a self-righteousness that struck me as insane, given the circumstances. “Sit down,” he commanded, gesturing to one of the hotel room beds.

I did as he instructed, and he sat on the bed opposite me. There was something oddly intimate about this. It reminded me of our numerous chats in the UP&S cafeteria, the ones in which Alan’s attempts to speak at length
—to expound on his pet ideas and theories—w
ere usually overwhelmed by Lucy’s gabbiness.

Things were almost the same as they had been—except that now Lucy was dead, and Alan was aiming a gun at me. He held the gun in his lap. Had he pulled the trigger now, the resulting discharge would have blown a hole in the middle of my chest.

“I’ve been in communication with an old friend of yours,” Alan said. “A guy named Kevin Lang.”

Under different circumstances, I might have had the wherewithal to attempt a denial or a diversion. There is something about the dark, empty bore of a gun that takes away your internal resources, stripping you down to only what is essential. I was also acutely aware that while I was sitting there, Shawn or Nick might be pointing a similar weapon at Donna and Alyssa.

“So now you know,” I said, those four words constituting an admission of everything.

“That’s right, Craig. I know everything. But I can’t take the full credit. Kevin Lang was the one who figured it out: He got to thinking about that guy in the bar, the one who just happened to show up on the barstool beside him and strike up a conversation about smoking marijuana. Then he considered how the very next day he was called in to be fired, and how one of the people in that meeting looked oddly familiar.

“How did you and Kevin find each other?” I asked.

Alan laughed.

“You people,” Alan shook his head. “You think you’re so much smarter than the average working stiff. You think that you can manipulate working men and women like we’re puppets.
How did we find each other?
Have you ever heard of the Internet, Craig? There is an entire message board dedicated to TP Automotive and its many shenanigans. Do you think that you have to be a six-figure consultant in order to carry out online research?”

Common sense would suggest that it is never a good idea to argue with a man who is holding a gun. However, Alan had a self-righteous streak that had always annoyed me. It had annoyed me on occasion during my undercover weeks at UP&S. And it annoyed me now.

“Don’t pull that class warfare crap on me, Alan. I’ve seen your resume. You’re not some blue-collar working class hero. You don’t run a lathe or unload crates from a truck for a living. You’ve got an accounting degree from Ohio State. You’ve got about half of an MBA, too.”

Alan paused for a moment, seeming to seriously consider this. “I never said I was a blue-collar man,” he said. “In the big scheme of things, I’m comparatively privileged. I’ll admit that. But I’m not a liar. I don't cheat the system. I don't screw over people who are trapped.”

“What are you talking about, Alan? TP Automotive wasn't holding you at your job. If you didn't like it, you could have voted with your feet at any time. But instead of taking responsibility for your own destiny, you stayed put and played the role of the professional malcontent. And now you’re holding a gun on me because the company wanted to get rid of you.”

“Easy for you to say,” he said. “Mister hotshot consultant. What about Lucy?”

“You think I didn’t care about Lucy?” I asked.

Alan snorted. “You’re the son-of-a-bitch who killed her.”

“Whoa. Hold on a minute, Alan. Lucy killed herself.” There were limits to what I was willing to endure in the way of Alan’s hyperbolic accusations—even in moments like this.

“She was weak,” Alan said. “She couldn’t take the impact of being fired.”

“From a job that she hated? And what about you, Alan? Why did you remain at UP&S, considering how much you despised the new management? Tell me: Were you even looking for another job? Why didn’t you take your destiny into your own hands?”

It suddenly occurred to me that I sounded more than a little like Kurt Myers. And in this one regard, I might have agreed with him—just a little. But we were back to that old debate again—the one that I had been having with myself for weeks now:
Why was a task that was easy for some people so difficult for others? And what obligations do people like Claire and I bear toward the Lucies and the Alans out there?
What do the people who can adapt to a coldly Darwinian system owe to those who can’t?

These were all questions that I could think about later. While I was sitting there with Alan, engaged in this quasi-philosophical debate, Nick King and Shawn Myers threatened Donna and Alyssa. And I still had to cope with the very real and immediate threat of Alan’s gun.

“Alan,” I said. “I don't think you came here with the intention of hurting either one of us with that thing. And you’re making me nervous—pointing it at me like that.”

I knew that this was a desperate gamble. My remark probably would have provoked a truly homicidal and suicidal individual into a shooting spree. But I believed that I knew Alan by this point; and I was willing to bet that he wasn't going to end our lives with a murder-suicide. It was a bet that I had no choice but to make. 

Alan lowered the gun. “You’re right. I’m not going to shoot you. I only wanted to scare the hell out of you.”

And this being Alan—his explanation somehow seemed perfectly reasonable.

“Well, suffice it to say that you did, Alan. And I’d like to stay and talk with you about this some more. But I have to get going. Right now I have reason to believe that Shawn Myers—or someone hired by Shawn Myers—is about to harm an innocent woman and her daughter. You remember Donna Chalmers—the woman who used to clean the office at UP&S at night?”

“Sure,” Alan nodded. Suddenly it was as if he had never waved the gun in my face. “What does she have to do with Shawn Myers? Why would Shawn want to harm her?”

“It's a long story. And I don’t have the time to tell you now. But I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Okay,” Alan said. “And what would that be?”

“I need to borrow that gun.”

Alan raised his eyebrows. He was back to being the know-it-all.

“You want to borrow this gun, Craig? Do you even know how to use it?” He held up the weapon. This time, thankfully, he was not aiming it in my direction. “This is a 9mm Luger. It’s got a hammer fired trigger system and adjustable 3-dot sights. You familiar with a gun like this?”

I admitted that my knowledge of firearms was nearly nonexistent.

“Well, in that case, Craig,” Alan said. “I’m not going to give you this gun. Instead, I’m going to give you more than you bargained for. I was a junior target shooting champ in my teens.”

I raced toward New Hastings on I-70, hoping that no police car would attempt to pull me over.

I called Donna again on my cell phone, steering the Lexus with one hand. I swerved around a long-haul eighteen-wheeler that was obnoxiously lumbering along at 55 mph in the travel lane.

“Craig,” Donna answered.

“I’m on my way,” I told her. “Are you and Alyssa locked in a bedroom?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But we will be in a minute. I’d like to go out there and give that guy a piece of my mind, though.”

“Don’t do that!” I said “‘That guy’ has done time in prison. And he’s maybe done a lot worse things, if my guess is correct.”

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense: Nick must be Shawn’s hit man. Shawn Myers might have killed those two young women in Columbus with his own hands back in ’96. He would have been little more than a testosterone-filled teenager then. Now he would be more methodical. He wouldn’t want to get his hands dirty. So he would use Nick. It was easy to imagine Nick King killing Tina Shields for the right amount of money; and Shawn certainly had plenty of cash to spend.