The Six: Complete Series (28 page)

Two weeks after she moved in Benjamin received a frantic call from his daughter’s cell phone, only it wasn’t his little girl. It was her roommate and she screamed like she was being murdered into the receiver. He couldn’t make out most of what she said but he heard enough.
hanged herself...paramedics...dead
.

The phone slipped from his fingers and thudded on the floor.

She had written a note that said if she couldn’t have her babies, there was nothing else to live for. Ultimately, it was more than that and he knew it. She felt abandoned by everyone she thought loved her and it was more than she could bear.

But she didn’t know it was a lie. He did what he did because he loved her enough to care. And as the cars raced feet away from him, the desire to join her grew less desirous.

Still. What was the choice? Stephanie had a home and a family. He had the basement and the prospect of killing a man in his future. There was no happiness there for him.

Then the strangest thing happened. He heard a baby cry. It wasn’t in the road or from a radio. It was baby Frankie after she was born. It was clear as day. Her gurgling cries as she shivered in the cold hospital room. His daughter laughed in relief as her own child wailed to life.

Dennis had a baby out there. He had something to go back to and there was love still in his future. If he stepped over that line he’d be just as selfish as his daughter, ending his life and cutting short years of love and family.

A strong arm wrapped around his neck and pushed him away from the road. The pair of them teetered and fell to the ground.

“What the f*ck?” the driver said as he lay on the ground with his bicep still pressed squarely against Benjamin’s body.

“I’m sorry, I...” Benjamin started to say.

The arm loosened but quickly grabbed onto the back of Benjamin’s collar as he was being dragged back towards the car like a naughty puppy. “Get in there.”

He had to do this for Dennis. Without a hint of a struggle, Benjamin rose and walked towards the car with his head drooped.

***

Hannah found the kid from the news report quickly through Facebook. As any other fame hungry youngster, he was more than happy to cooperate. They met at a pizza place down the road from his dorm room.

After gobbling down half a slice of pizza, he was ready to talk and she was ready to make a break in the case.

“He took my girlfriend’s phone. I mean he took and broke it into like a thousand pieces. She was pissed ‘cause she’d just bought it.”

The kid was the standard frat guy she’d met over and over in college. It was the smarmy confident time that strolled up in a toga or a pair of ridiculous shorts at 2 in the morning and tried to woo a room of girls with half a bottle of vodka. She wasn’t proud to have been taken in more than once with a shot or four of store-brand alcohol.

“But did she take any pictures?”

He nodded and reached into his pocket. “That guy must have forgot that the pictures are automatically sent to the cloud or some shit. So he broke it but the pictures she took were on her computer when we got back home.”

“So you have them?” she said.

He pulled out his phone and scrolled through the windows. After a few clicks, he spun it towards her. “So they weren’t really clear but you can make out some stuff. So check this out...” There was the image of a black SUV with a burly man standing next to it. The picture was blurry and the flash had obscured large sections but she was able to make out the man’s face and the back of the car.

“Zoom in on the plate,” she said.

The kid tapped on the picture and Hannah wrote down the digits that she could read. 9JHD382. “Could you send me that picture of the guy by the car?”

The boy nodded and took the phone away. “You think he really did it?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” she said.

“Okay it’s sent,” he said. “You know I really don’t think he did. I mean I bumped into him way before he got all crazy and he seemed fine. Like a nice guy, not a big creep. Even when we were out there he looked real freaked out.”

Her phone buzzed with the photo of the man by the car. The kid had sent another one of the man a little closer as well. The last one he sent was of Simon in front of the girl. It was taken before he’d smashed her phone. There was terror in his eyes. It wasn’t the glare of a madman. It was a little boy being played by something much bigger than him.

“Did Simon say anything before he left?”

The kid shook his head. “I mean he said a bunch of tough guy stuff, like from a movie or something. It wasn’t too convincing but my girlfriend isn’t the bravest person out there, ya’ know. It was stuff like he didn’t want the pictures on the internet or he’d hurt her. It was a lot of pacing around and waiting for that car to come, I bet. He was a little beat up already ‘cause my buddy punched him so I don’t know if he really even knew what he was talkin’ about.”

She pointed towards the photos pulled up on her phone. “Have you shown these...”

“To the cops?” he interrupted. “Not yet. They really haven’t gotten around to questioning us yet. We’re supposed to go in tomorrow but you asked so I thought the more people who know the better, right?”

“Definitely,” she said. As she looked at the man against the car, a spark of recognition burst through her body. It was the man from the coffee shop. It was the same burly man in the long black jacket who had taken Lila away. “Shit,” she muttered.

“What?”

“This guy,” she said. “I’ve seen him before. Oh my god. I was right.” She looked up at the confused boy seated across from her in the hopes that he’d share her excitement.

“About what? What were you right about?”

She sent the photo to Kyle. He needed to be as in the loop, too.

This is the guy I saw with Lila.

She took a long sip of her cooled down cup of coffee. “This is all connected. My friend I was telling you about and Simon. This guy. He was at both places.”

The kid yanked off a chunk of his muffin and popped it in his mouth. “Shit.”

“Definitely,” she said as her phone buzzed on the table.

Thanks for the picture. Will do some digging on it @ home. Off to convention center. Can’t keep the VP waiting :)

She completely forgotten about the speech. Kyle had been planning the night for weeks. It had taken letters and favors to get the man anywhere near the little college he worked at. If the night went as well as he’d planned, he would be next in line to run the Student Life department.

Good luck,
she wrote back.
And knock ‘em dead.

Benjamin stood against the side of the building for ten minutes before he had the nerve to walk inside. The driver had given him a gun which he’d stuck in his jacket pocket. It rattled against his side.

Martine College was compact and crowded. A dozen people walked past him with a side-eye on their way to a night class or to grab a plate of nachos from the cafeteria. The guard showed him where they were holding the speech. It was at the only large sprawling building on campus.

People were already heading in to hear the vice-president talk. It was mostly older folks in modest overcoats accompanied by glimmering black canes and scratching walkers against the concrete.

But there he stood twenty feet from the entrance. He had everything he needed to get to that man. There was a ticket, fake press credentials and the name of the organizer of the whole event, Kyle Malik. That was more than enough to get backstage. He had everything but the strength to walk through those doors.

He felt fingers wrap around his bicep and yank him from his spot.

The driver looked exhausted and he couldn’t blame him. The spot where the scissors had dug in was still beaded with new drops of blood. He looked like would rip Benjamin’s arm in half if this didn’t end soon. “Are you going to do this or not?”

A middle-aged couple walked by them. The wife talked animatedly towards her husband as they moved and the husband, perhaps looking for sympathy, looked over with the “wives, eh?” look. Benjamin smiled back before being forced back to the driver’s glare.

“Do I need to drag you in there?”

Benjamin simply dipped his head and turned from Eduardo. He walked away from the people walking in and towards the backstage door that had been shown to him ten minutes prior. With the press credentials in hand and a phony story in his back pocket, he reached for the knob. It swung open with ease and he stepped inside with Eduardo on his tail.

There was a small set of stairs that lead up to a bustling backstage area. There were a pair of college students racing from side to side with their arms filled with walkie talkies and bottles of water. It was dark in the small inlet that Benjamin stood in. Above him were the coiled wires of the spotlights that sputtered and shot to life as he stepped inside. No one noticed him at first. The college kids were distracted by their gopher tasks and the adults were too busy mingling with fame to be alerted to a middle-aged man appearing in their midsts.

The only person not busy was a brunette man by the curtain. He looked at his phone with rapt attention. There was twenty feet between them but it might as well have been a mile. With each step he felt like someone would see through the rouse. He didn’t look like a journalist and he’d already forgotten what newspaper he was supposed to be working for. “Your name is Peter Topper,” Benjamin whispered to himself. Peter Topper was etched across every phony credential Eduardo had thrown at him before he pushed him out of the car. Peter Topper, not Benjamin Lanston, would do this. Benjamin Lanston died long ago. Peter would do this for Dennis and no one else.

The brunette man stuffed his phone in his back pocket and hardly got a chance to turn an inch before Benjamin was at his side.

“Hi,” he said. “I, um, I’m here with the press section...I mean. I’m sorry. I’m writing an article about this...” The words spilled from his mouth and landed on the floor with a thud.

The man looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Press? We have seats in front for you. Did they not show you to them?”

Benjamin looked out towards the audience and saw a roped off section with large print-outs saying
RESERVED-PRESS
. “Oh,” he said. “I must have missed that.”

The man smiled condescendingly, with the distinct intention of expressing he didn’t have time for Benjamin’s problems. “Is that it?” he said.

He couldn’t possible shoot the vice-president from the audience. Not only would there most likely not actually be a seat available for him, the conspicuousness of the activity would mean instant apprehension. There would be security and Joe Q. Public on him before he got the shot out. He had never held a gun, much less shot it from fifty feet away. Even if he had a clear shot, there was no way he’d hit anything close to a small man hiding behind a podium.

Eduardo emerged from the shadows of the curtain area and stood by Benjamin’s side. “What my colleague means,” he said, “is that we were promised a quick interview before the speech.”

“Who did you talk to?” the man asked.

“The person arranging it. The boss did it.”

The man patted his chest. “Yeah, I arranged it. Kyle...that’s who they talked to, right?”

Benjamin gulped but Eduardo didn’t miss a step. “Well Kyle,” he said, “I believe we came here to talk to him and that’s what we’re going to do. So step aside.”

Kyle looked at Eduardo with a glimmering sense of recognition, like he was trying to place him but also simultaneously make sense of what the man demanded. “It’s too late,” he said. “The talk starts in eight minutes. There’s no time.”

“Plenty of time,” Eduardo said. “This’ll just take a second.”

Eduardo pushed past Kyle and strolled towards the back of the stage. Benjamin dutifully followed behind the leader and trusted he knew where he was going. He quickly peered back at Kyle who stood transfixed where they’d left him. Just as the pair of them turned a corner did the man snap to reality. His eyes opened wide and went to his phone. Then they looked out to where the two of them walked. The last thing Benjamin saw was him power walking towards them.

There wasn’t much time. “We’ve got to hurry,” Benjamin said. “I think that guy figured us out.”

“Bullshit,” Eduardo said. “He looked like a moron in a cheap suit. Just follow my lead so we can get the f*ck out of here.”

They walked effortlessly past college students and political groupies all waiting for the chance to listen to the vice-president speak. It wasn’t hard to find the victim. He was at the center of a small mob that had encircled him. He’d been engulfed by grad students who’d dressed up their usual look with a Goodwill jacket and a splash of aftershave.

Eduardo pushed right through them and straight to the man. The scowl that seemed tattooed on his face disappeared and was replaced by a charming smile. He pulled back his shoulders and put out his hand for a firm hearty handshake.

Benjamin stood thirty feet away like a sitting duck waiting to get snipped. He looked all around for traces of that Kyle guy but there was none to be found. He felt himself slipping in and out of focus as the entourage around Victor Trayhorn slowly stepped back. The burly intimidating man just needed to glare at the passive students and they reluctantly turned and went about their way.

Eduardo gestured back towards Benjamin and escorted him into their trio. The gun thumped against his chest as he walked closer to the guest of the hour. As he got close to the vice-president, he felt a surge of energy run through his bones. He was not going to escape this conversation with a handshake and a smile. The theoreticals were about to become a reality.

“Hello,” Victor said as he stuck out his hand for a shake.

Benjamin’s only hand trembled as he gripped the vice-president. “Hello,” he mumbled. “Honor to meet you.”

Victor smiled a big hearty politician's grin. “Well thank you,” he said. “So, I heard you have a few questions to ask. Better make it quick. I’m supposed to go on real shortly.”