Seventy-Seven

It was midnight. I turned off the disposable cell phone I’d bought at Walmart and waited. This was all going to end in the next hour.

I sat at my father’s desk, holding the revolver in my lap with one hand, flipping through the incriminating notebook with the other. The book contained all the evidence Bobby Miller and Lieutenant Lee would ever need. I probably should have called them, but I hadn’t. I’d called my mother’s killer instead.

My father had started a new notebook every six months. There were two per year, each a bound collection of green pages with a faint blue grid superimposed on them. These notebooks would have been useful if my father were getting a patent. Instead, they outlined the pressures that turned him into a spy and gave him an aneurysm.

My father had recorded his life in meticulous detail using tiny printed handwriting, always in pen, never in pencil. I flipped back through time, past meeting notes, past drawings, past phone numbers and org charts, circuits and flow diagrams, through phone call logs and maps and sketches.

My father made little distinction between work and home. A meeting with another engineer (whose name, like all names, had been highlighted with a yellow marker) was logged beside a shopping list that contained Twinkies, a snack that had never sullied my mother’s kitchen.

My father had scored the ’86 Red Sox playoff games in his notebook. I remember him doing it. It was a Saturday, and he was always home on Saturdays. I watched the game, scrunched up against him, my Red Sox cap crushed in my hands as I prepared to leap into the air. Afterward I cried. Dad told me not to be a baby.

Game 7 had been scheduled for Sunday, but it rained, and Dad traveled back to Pittsfield on Monday. I had watched Game 7 alone, my mother having long since gone to sleep.

I flipped further back in time to the note I had found before, the one that confirmed what I already knew because of what Talevi had told me:

Meeting with Mr. Talevi

I scanned down the page and found a number:

$500K for me

There it was. The price of my father’s honor. Five hundred thousand dollars was enough to convince him to sell our country’s secrets so he could support the babysitter he’d fucked and the son who resulted. Five hundred thousand dollars that paid for a house in Pittsfield, a diploma from UMass, and a few years of homemaking for Cathy. Five hundred thousand dollars that burned a hole in his conscience and blew out a blood vessel in his brain.

The note continued:

$500K for Walt.

“I see you found the notebooks,” said Uncle Walt. He had padded through the doorway of the storage unit and stood in front of the desk.

I had called Walt an hour ago and told him I had the evidence. Told him to meet me here, in this deserted place, at this deserted time, or that I’d share the evidence with Bobby Miller in the morning.

I raised the revolver, finger along the side. “Throw away the gun, Walt.”

Walt’s eyes widened and he stepped back, raising his hands. He hadn’t expected me to be armed. “Whoa. I don’t have a gun. Watch where you point that.”

“Don’t fuck with me. Throw away the gun.”

“I told you. I don’t have a gun,” he said.

“Let’s try this, then. I shoot you in the chest, and then I look for the gun.” I slid my finger under the trigger guard, reached up with my thumb, and cocked the hammer.

“Okay. Okay,” said Walt. He reached behind his back and produced a black pistol, holding it between thumb and forefinger.

“Toss it behind the filing cabinet.”

Walt hefted the gun toward the filing cabinet in an arc. It hit the top and rattled off onto the floor next to the wall. “You happy?”

“Is that the gun you used to kill JT?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” said Walt, “it is.”

“Why?”

“Why did I use that gun?”

“No, you son of a bitch. Why did you kill JT?”

“He was going to tell you about our deal with Talevi. Patterson had quit, we didn’t have the password, and JT said that you would be able to break in. Turns out he was right about that part.”

“I wouldn’t have helped him,” I said.

“I knew that, but JT wouldn’t listen. That asshole thought you were some sort of bent Mafioso hacker, that you would jump at the chance at a million dollars.”

“What million dollars?”

“My million dollars. Talevi was paying two million. JT was going to give you my million. Said I was useless now that he knew Talevi.”

“So you killed him.” Walt started to lower his hands. “Keep them up.”

Walt raised his hands again. “Yeah. So I killed him.”

“It was stupid to do it right in front of my house.”

“I didn’t know it was your house.”

“And then Cathy Byrd, and then my mother.”

“Just covering my tracks, Tucker. I was sorry about your mother. I just needed to destroy those notebooks.”

Images flashed before me. I saw my mother, stumbling in the smoke, fighting her way down a flaming goat path.

“I’m going to kill you now, Walt. Just like I promised at her funeral.”

Walt moved toward the desk, keeping his hands up. He stopped with the gun a foot from his heart. Then he dropped his hands and leaned on the desk, closing the gap.

Walt said, “You’re not going to kill me.”

I said, “I am.”

“If you were going to kill me, you would have done it already.”

“Wha—”

A spiking clang of pain speared my skull and tore at my balance. Walt had bashed me with my father’s ashtray. The gun fired, but Walt wasn’t standing in front of it anymore. I turned to shoot, but Walt brought the ashtray down again. Its torn edges exploded across my forehead.

I heard Walt say, “You always were a disappointment.” Then I slipped into darkness.