A paintball to the skull from an air pistol is rarely fatal. Well placed, it’s good for a stun. I had been hoping for lights out, but no such luck. Jim never got a good look at the convincing replica before the sting. It had been one of Patrick’s favorite sporty toys, and I had snagged it while my relieved and well-tipped cabdriver waited in my driveway a lifetime ago, or less than ninety minutes ago, maybe. It’s all the same thing now.
Jim falls across the steering wheel, his hand wobbling for the back of his head, but losing its will or its way repeatedly as his senses waver.
Maybe I should wait to see if he’ll fade out entirely, but the moaning is going to be a problem. I wince a quick look over each shoulder, turn the gun butt out so that I’m gripping the barrel, then sidle up to give my batting arm some room to swing.
My first stroke is less than committed. I couldn’t look, so I’m not exactly sure where I clipped him. It has woken him up more than put him out. He yelps and that sets a match to my resolve. A confident thump delivered over the knot I’d already raised and Jim has the decency to go quiet. And limp.
In short order, he’s gagged with his own socks and bound at the wrists by his belt. I trot back to my running car, kill the engine, and lock it up. I fetch some bungee tethers from the trunk and fortify my handiwork, securing Jim’s ankles to finish the job. The shoving struggle to drag him over to the passenger side of his car leaves me trembling and sweaty, but he’s still not come all the way around by the time we pull to the back end of the deserted wasteland behind the Carlisle Inc. compound.
I slam the gearshift back into place, pry the gag from Jim’s mouth, and brace my back against the driver’s door, foot poised to kick a hole into my new friend if he wakes up cross or noisy. As it is, he wakes up slowly and sweetly groggy. When his focus comes back online, I prod him with the toe of my shoe and level the paintball pistol at his face.
“Hiya. How much was I worth?”
“Excuse me?”
I toe-poke him again. “Don’t do that. I’m not in the mood. How much was I worth?”
“Fifteen thousand.”
“Well, now you work for me. I’ll pay you fifteen thousand and twenty-five dollars.”
“What?” He actually laughed.
“I’m sorry. Did you think I’d offer double? I’m not the one who knows what my socks taste like, now am I? How about this: I’ll pay you fifteen thousand twenty-five dollars and not shoot you in the throat.” I press the maw of the barrel into his neck. “Now who do you work for?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to call Patrick and get him over here. And then”—I shrugged—“do what you do.”
“I can’t kill him here.”
“No?” I crane around to look out every window. Early on a Friday evening, the back margin of Carlisle Inc. might as well be the dark side of the moon. “It looks like a nice private place for someone to meet their end, don’t you think?” I put the gun back in his face. “I think it’s perfect, if you have the right incentive to improvise.” His eyes cross and water as they skitter over the gun. I’ve no doubt that he has a crushing headache.
I hold the phone for Jim while he talks Patrick into a detour to Carlisle Inc. on his way home from work. I encourage Jim’s cooperation with the muzzle of the paintball gun jammed firmly into his crotch.
I listen to the one-sided conversation, imagining my husband in his steel-and-glass office building on its carpet of crayon-bright sod, talking to his hired thug on the phone while he admires the fountained lake outside his office window, all blue and sparkling with reflected sky. How does he feel inside that jewel right now? Safe? Impatient? Did a cloud just pass over the sun where he was, canceling out some of the warmth from the air against his cheek? Did the room go suddenly dim in some cool warning that my hand rests right on the other side of the voice in his ear? Can he feel me as a cold spot in the place where he keeps his plan—am I already a ghost in the attic of his mind?
And how does he look to them today, the people who think they know him? Did he seem out of sorts on the day before he bought himself a $15,000 avalanche of sympathy and a wide-open vista of no-strings freedom?
When the call ends, I strangle the steering wheel to squeeze the shakes out of my hands. There is a terrible power in me, jousting with a gut-melting fear. I’m running out of time. The workday is winding down and Patrick will soon be out of his office and on his way to me. Jim is almost irrelevant, especially bound and gagged. But it wouldn’t do for him to know just yet that I will never pay him, and also that I have no intention of letting him kill Patrick either.
A shallow grave or concrete shoes for my husband wouldn’t make me feel any better, or any safer. It would simply be trading one problem for another. I want him in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. I want to catch his eye when they hand down his prison sentence. And the next step is the whole trick. Whatever it’s going to be, I don’t want this happening in our home, behind closed doors and drawn curtains the way everything else has been. But God forbid it should happen out on the front lawn in full view of everyone on our street. That’s not normal.
Everything had gone sharp in the details and clear in the colors since I’d pulled my head out and looked at what my life truly was, not what I insisted that it should be. Everything I’d attempted in the last couple of days, from the search of my house, to the folding of my husband’s mistress, to the dousing of my brother’s interference, had worked like Swiss gears. Thanks, Mama. But what now? I’ve painted myself into a corner. I’ve assaulted and kidnapped the oddly neutral and very dangerous Jim, rendering myself a felon without a shred of proof against anyone else. Then I’ve invited the one person in the world who wants me dead out here to confront me in a now-deserted construction yard. Brilliant.
My brother would swing every hammer he had to break me out of this mess, but he is as far away as he can be, and by my own doing, deep in his rum dreams.
If it goes wrong, and I don’t even have an idea of what “it” might entail yet, no one will ever know what happened to me. Patrick will probably pay Jim a hazardous-duty bonus and then cash in our Danube cruise or just reissue it in the name of some pretty, sweet woman who cries like a movie star, and I will never know how it all works out in the end.
Well, if I can’t prevent it, then I can at least lengthen my reach. Be it alive or dead, I will not be caught without a say in what happens tomorrow, or in the days after, either.
I scrabble through the scraps of paper in my purse and find the card for Hoyle’s Compounding Pharmacy & Alternative Medicine Center. I bite my lip and dial. The electronic operator asks me to enter a numeric message or wait for the tone to leave a voice recording.
Beep.
“Brian, it’s Dee Vess.” I drop Aldrich preemptively, but whether in premonition or resolve, I can’t tell. “This is the part where I trust you”—I take a big deep breath—“but it’s not going to make a lot of sense right now. I’m sorry for that. Maybe you get this kind of thing all the time. I don’t know. You probably have a weird life. I’m sort of counting on it, to be honest.
“Anyway, my husband, Patrick, is coming out to a place called Carlisle Inc. He doesn’t know I’m here. This is not a good thing. If I don’t leave another message for you in the next two hours, please find a way to lead my brother to this place, he’ll know where it is. Please help him to look into what happened.” I chew the inside of my cheek and slide a look at the regagged Jim. “There’s a guy with me named Jim who knows what’s going on. He works here. But I don’t have solid proof of anything, and I can’t exactly speak to where he’ll end up.” Jim’s eyebrows lift in interest.
I blow out the next breath and wonder if this is a time-limited recording. “I’m sorry to drag you into this. Whatever it is.” I laugh, tickled in the absurdity of it all. “I can’t imagine what the hell I’ll say to try to explain all of this if I get to call you back. How un-Spider am I?” My finger hovers over the End button. “Thank you, though, for being out there, for having that weird life so that you can even take this call. I don’t know that it’s going to do any good, but it was at least nice to have a number to dial. I get it now.”
I hit the call dead and wipe my eyes.