This is it. An overcast Thursday. April 22. A high of 54 degrees with light rain showers expected. A baseball star has died. A labor leader has died. The ashes of a cult compound settle and snuff out.
Gary Wilensky is transferring items from one bag into another, filling a black duffel with the bulky essentials: night vision goggles, guns, ammo, stacks of money he’d withdrawn yesterday. A fellow pro who had spotted Gary at the bank, looking gaunt in his tennis shorts, later describes his mood as “distressed.”
Papers, papers, papers. In a briefcase and a duffel, he packs his notes, poems, questions, the lease to the cabin, and the audiotapes of the letters he’d written.
Drizzle shakes across windshields; wipers bat them away. They swing from side to side like legs sashaying between two white lines, an exercise to prepare for the match. Suicides, they’re called.
All along the New York State Thruway, broken limbs dangle from trees, snapped by the storm five weeks ago. Gary is driving a new car, a white Lincoln he’d rented from a New Jersey dealership the week before. A luxury car for the rule-abiding middle class. Not a Mercedes, but also not a clunker like his regular ride. The kind of car an old man drives through the retirement towers of South Florida. A clean white American cruiser. A new set of bleached teeth to match.
He’d made this drive the week before: almost three hours from Manhattan to Colonie in Albany County, noting the nearby Kmart where he’d pick up supplies, the three area tennis courts, and the strip of motels down Wolf Road.
All of it, a rest stop on the way to his final destination, farther north.
He arrives at the Sheraton Airport Inn around four p.m. and leaves his car packed while he checks in. At the front desk, he pulls out a roll of bills and licks his thumb as he separates hundred-dollar bills from fifties.
“Is there a tennis court here?” he asks the desk clerk, who hands him the key to room 164.
There isn’t. It’s an airport-style hotel on the outskirts of downtown Albany, not a resort. The Sheraton is located on a strip of Wolf Road alongside several other hotels and motels. It is a part of town designed to accommodate tourists visiting the capital for work or pleasure, but mostly work. A strip lit up by fluorescence in the night—clean, standard, and all business.
“There is an indoor pool straight ahead and to your right.”
The ETA-K-Swiss Junior Grand Prix Tennis Tournament is happening in town throughout the weekend—and the teenage players will soon be swarming the Sheraton’s lobby, double racket bags dangling from their shoulders, hands clutching Gatorade bottles, eyeballs darting around for competition, doing the math on other players with numerical rankings higher or lower than their own.
Back in his car, Gary drives to the courts and finds the tournament’s information desk.
“Can I get a draw?” he asks. He’s looking for the tournament pairings so he can find out who the Daughter is competing against and where.
“Sorry,” the tournament organizer says. They don’t give the pairings out early, as a rule. “Try tomorrow. Do you have a daughter playing this weekend?”
“No,” he tells the organizer, “but I wish that I had a daughter.”
Big old Gary grin. Whitened.
In the hotel he pulls out his tracking device, which provides the location of another car, not his own. He’d managed to slip the small chip on her family’s vehicle before he left New York.
On Friday, he calls the tournament organizer, again asking about pairings. They’re available now that it’s the first day of matches.
Gary keeps a low profile in the stands during the Daughter’s game and goes unnoticed.
At around 4:30 p.m., he is in the parking lot behind the Sheraton, scratching about in the trunk of his car.
A woman pulls up and parks nearby. In town for a wedding, she is returning to the hotel after a day touring downtown Albany, and she sees Gary in his oversize trench coat, gray curls poking out the sides of a knit wool cap. “I noticed him because he appeared to be homeless by the way he was dressed,” the woman will state in a police report several hours later. She’ll assist a sketch artist in drawing his likeness, recalling his “dark and gray” eyebrows, his “intense-looking eyes.”
Wolf Road is a flat ruler with home goods stores, family-style restaurants, and midrange hotels as units of measurement. Gary drives slowly, three or four units past his hotel, and pulls into the parking lot of the Lexington Grill, a family-style restaurant. Burgers, fries, Cokes in foggy yellow plastic pierced with partially undressed straws. Through the green tint of his night vision goggles, he watches from his car as the Daughter and the Mother eat dinner behind glass.
Soon he is driving his white Lincoln down the signage-lit Wolf Road, like a unicorn streaking through an electrified forest. Pulling into the Sheraton parking lot again, headlights directing him toward the rear of the hotel, he slides the car between two yellow lines. It is ten p.m. and the lot is quiet when he turns off the ignition and walks to the trunk of his car. Inside is a folded wheelchair. The one item on his master list he’d written down twice, the device he envisioned when he imagined this plan, another wheeled prop in Gary’s act. He unfolds the contraption, unlocks the wheels, reattaches the footrests, which snap into place, and then walks his toy to the passenger side of the car, preparing to load its seat with another toy he’s brought along.
Headlights. A car eases into the rear parking lot where Gary is standing. The driver is a woman, the same woman who spotted him earlier in the day.
She turns off the ignition, opens the car door, walks to the curb to the hotel’s back entrance, and disappears inside.
Gary stays in the parking lot with his wheelchair, setting up his gear, waiting for the minutes to pass.
In the rear of the Sheraton parking lot, Wolf Road is invisible. There is only the darkness, and the flash of high beams from the highway behind the brambles.
As the clock nears eleven, Gary lurks by his parked car, gripping the handles of the wheelchair. Headlights—two wide, blinding eyes—approach the rear lot and pull into a spot. He sees them.
For so long, he’s watched from a distance, observing his targets through binoculars and cameras, glass screens that separated him from the movie he was observing. Now he will soon walk into the scene. The weeks of planning, the shopping trips, the visions of a future that lived only in his mind—all are about to converge here.
Gary Wilensky, the villain, the hunter, the man in disguise, with his oversize trench coat pulled up at the collar. His hair covered by a sailor’s cap, a wool hat pulled down to his eyes, or a gray wig—accounts will differ. His face is concealed by the shadow of his collar, and a charcoal stubble—that may, in fact, be charcoal-colored makeup. He looks homeless, older, ragged, dangerous. He looks nothing like himself as he approaches the Mother and the Daughter, grinding the wheelchair’s wheels over black cement. On its seat, underneath a blanket, is a shotgun. In his hand is an electric cattle prod.
They don’t notice him, and when they do, they don’t recognize him. He is a man raising a weapon and slamming it down on a seventeen-year-old girl.
There is the sound of a hammering alarm from a human throat. Two throats. The throats of women. Words. Directions. Go. Help. Please. A question: “What do you want from us?”
The Daughter—she is on the ground, out of his reach. There is a weight on top of his back, another person. The Mother—Gary has turned his attention to her, tamping down all the sounds with his cattle prod, until there is a new sound.
“Okay, pal, the police are on their way.” Gary Wilensky peeks out from behind a parked car. Beneath him, the Mother is bleeding on the ground, trying to stand. A minute before, the Daughter had run into the lobby. “Help! My mother is being attacked!” she screamed to the desk clerk. Now the desk clerk stands above the scene and sees Gary Wilensky in a large dark coat, a scarf wrapped around his neck, walking toward an empty wheelchair and pulling a rifle out from underneath a blanket on the seat. Gary points it at the desk clerk and cocks it.
Back up, back up, back up. Gary raises and lowers the tip of the gun as if it were his own chin, approaching the clerk with his rifle pointed.
“Okay, pal, I’m moving,” says the clerk, arms above his head. “Where do you want me to go?”
Gary changes his tack. He returns to his white Lincoln, sliding in the driver-side door and turning on the ignition.
The trunk is still open when he backs out. He leaves the wheelchair in the parking lot with the desk clerk, the Mother, and the Daughter.
The gun, he keeps.