by Tom Pitts
“I don’t smoke.” Taber said it slowly, like he was talking to a child. DeWildt knew he didn’t have cigarettes. He’d told him a thousand times he didn’t smoke.
DeWildt turned and reached for the door of the study. “I’m going downstairs to find some.” Before he shut the door, he added, “He’s an idiot. He’s always been an idiot.”
Stephan found his familiar red pack of Dunhills on a stack of unopened mail on the kitchen table. He pulled one out and stuck it in his mouth. Before lighting it, he moved to the den, the private place he liked to do his thinking, and his smoking. He shouldn’t have trusted Taber with putting this together, he should have trusted his gut. Taber wanted a solution that made them all look like their hands weren’t dirty. Appealing, yes, but it wasn’t going to work. Sometimes you had to get your hands dirty and just scrub them clean and hope no one saw the dirt under your nails.
He sat down behind the study’s desk and reached down to open the bottom drawer. In it, along with other papers and useless business accoutrements, sat a disposable cell phone. He kept it hidden there for a reason. There was only one number on it. He plugged the phone into a charging bank on the desk and lit the cigarette. He smoked and looked at the phone awhile, making his decision. When the cigarette was done, he picked up the phone and found the one contact it held.
He let it ring. It rang until a message came on telling him the person had not yet set up a voice mailbox.
He lit a second cigarette and waited.
After about three minutes, the phone on his desk vibrated.
“Hello? Martek?”
“Yes, sir. How are you?”
“Are you in place?”
“Of course. I’ve been in place. When?”
“Right away. San Francisco. By Ocean Beach, I think.” DeWildt tapped his finger on Ronnell’s address, scratched and circled on a legal pad in front of him.
“I’m twenty minutes out. I’ll have to drive.” Excitement percolated deep in Martek’s voice.
“I understand. Get what you need and get going. I’ll call you on this phone with more details while you’re on the road.”
Chapter Eighteen
Mommy looked different now. Jason knew there’d been some sort of seismic shift, some fault had cracked open and part of his mother had fallen in. He knew she was in there and he waited for her to come out. There were times, brief moments, when she’d blossom. Maybe it was a late afternoon yawn, or a pat on the head, but Jason would sense her presence and reach out for it, only to find her retreating back inside.
She chattered. Sometimes there were tiny words fumbling out of her mouth, sometimes they were silent, omitted from her lips. Sometimes it was only her teeth that chattered. Jason heard it, the clacking of her molars, clicking away like a distant typewriter. It sounded like she was cold, that’s why her teeth chattered, and Jason would reach up and hold her hand. Her hand was cold and dry and would never return his grip. Jason would squeeze the fingers, trying to get them to squeeze back. After a moment or two, she’d yank her hand up to her chest and chide him for hurting her. He didn’t want to hurt her. He just wanted to know that she could still feel.
One day, Jason wanted milk. Usually he poured himself a glass, but on this day, the refrigerator was empty. He tiptoed into the darkened living room where Mommy sat in silence.
“We’re out of milk,” he said.
There was the clacking, the teeth gnashing together.
“Mommy?”
He knew she’d heard him because she looked away, turning her attention to the blank wall instead.
“Mommy? Can we get some milk? Or are you too tired?”
She didn’t answer.
Then, in the dim light, Jason saw the hair. It looked like doll’s hair, but it was the same auburn as Mommy’s. Bunches of it lay on the couch beside her, fistfuls. He looked at the side of her head, expecting to see where the chunks had been cut out. But there was no evidence of jagged cuts. Instead he saw inflamed red patches on her scalp, raw spots where she’d pulled out clumps of her own hair.
It frightened Jason. He’d never seen her do this before. He reached out and wanted to touch her hand, but he stopped. Along her forearm were long bloody scratches. She’d torn into herself with her own nails. Jason didn’t know what to say, what to do. He walked backward out of the room, making sure his mother was still. He guessed whatever had happened was over and she was taking some sort of nap. A waking nap. Resting while sitting up and staring at the wall. When Jason was out of the room, he turned and ran to the kitchen. He’d get himself a nice big cold glass of water. He didn’t need the milk anyway.
Linda was belted back in the passenger seat. Jason hadn’t increased her injuries dragging her back to the car, but the hopelessness of being recaptured scarred her face.
Jason was turned all the way around in the driver’s seat, wagging the barrel of the gun in front of her nose. “You fuckin’ try that again and I’ll fuckin’ kill you. I’m not kidding. I’m not going to chase you through any goddamn fields either. I’ll put a bullet right in the back of your fuckin’ head.”
He swiveled the gun to Russell. “And you, ya pasty little fuck. How did you let her get away? You had one fucking job. One. You let a woman—a bitch in bare feet half beaten to death—get away. If you can’t pull your fuckin’ weight, then we’ll leave you in the cornfield with that other dipshit. You hear me?”
Russell nodded sheepishly, used to being admonished.
“Juliet,” he said. “Get in the back and keep an eye on her. We gotta get movin’.”
“Hang on, hang on.” Her head tilted down, her attention once again buried in her purse. She came up with a piece of cellophane, sealed within it a brown smudge of black tar heroin. “Let’s get well first.”
Jason’s voice boomed. “You’re not sick yet. Get in the fucking back before I shoot all three of you.”
She dropped the dope back into her bag, slow and languid, showing she wasn’t scared of him. “We have to call them. We have to make a deal now before we get out on the road. They need to fix this, Jason.”
Jason slumped back in his seat and gripped the steering wheel. “They can’t fix this. Besides, I don’t have the number. It was in the other phone. We can’t call them.”
“I wrote it down.” She held up a torn slip of paper between her fingers. “What would you do without me?”
Jason smiled.
She said, “So how about it. Let’s do a little before we get going.”
“No. Get in the back. Right behind me. If that cunt even breathes, smack her.”
“Look, I’m a fixer. It’s what I do. I fix people’s problems.” Calper spoke at the windshield, not looking at Gary. Traffic was light at night and they flew down Interstate 80 unimpeded. “This one seemed like a simple job. They all do, I guess. Until they get complicated.”
“Complicated? Is that what this is? This guy is kidnapping and shooting people. There’s a very good chance he’s killed my wife.”
“Don’t say that. We’ll hear from him. We’ll get her back.”
“Why? What makes you say that?”
Calper relented. “They weren’t just looking to get this kid into rehab. They got a stake in him. He’s their golden goose.”
Gary was confused. The wind howled past outside the car, but the interior was quiet and calm.
Calper continued, “I looked into it. Jason isn’t just a nephew to Abigail Perkins, he was a weapon. A final slight she used as revenge against her brothers.”
“A weapon? I don’t get it.”
“Jason is Stephan DeWildt’s son. That name ring a bell to you?”
Gary shook his head.
“Stephan DeWildt is a Hollywood powerbroker—at least that’s what he’s known for. That means he’s had a good run investing in movies, successful movies. When his name gets attached to a project, other money follows. He l
ikes the lifestyle, he likes the notoriety. But that’s not where the real money comes from. That’s not how he built his fortune. He took a huge pile of dough from his father, William DeWildt, and rolled it over into billions. The old man was a pioneer in the ol’ Texas land grab. Their family still controls huge tracts of land in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, you name it. Old Bill was basically a real estate baron. But when his kids took over, they moved into oil, mineral rights, that kind of shit. Wringing whatever they could out of land they already owned.”
“So they’re the super-rich. And Jason DeWildt is a trust fund baby with a chip on his shoulder. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yeah, right on the money, but it gets worse. You see, Papa Bill split his holding companies between the three kids, Stephan, Abigail, and William Jr. And Abby, she never wanted to have anything to do with the brothers. Thought they were assholes, which, by the way, was true. She got out, turned her back on the whole fortune. It worked too, for a while. She survived on rice, beans, and spite. Went to live like the rest of us in suburbia, where she thought she’d be left alone. But she wasn’t. The brothers kept harassing her, trying to buy her out. So what does she do? She has a trust set up for her favorite nephew, Jason. A living trust that dovetails into an inheritance. Air fucking tight. Last year, William Jr. was killed in a car accident, drunk behind the wheel, and he leaves Abby his share. So, if this trust goes through, Jason ends up with the controlling interest in the holding companies.”
“Companies? How many are there?”
“Oh Christ, like, fourteen or something. Huge deal, across the board. They got their dirty fingers into everything that makes money. Everything except the movie business, that’s the one risky venture that Stephan went into alone. That’s how he came across me.”
“You’re in the movie business too?”
“No, I’m in the business of movie people. Like I told you, I’m a fixer. My specialty is people in that particular business because they seem to need more fixing than people in the real world.”
Gary looked out the window at the hills of the American Valley. The freeway dipped and the car’s speed picked up and propelled them up a large hill. At the crest of the hill a view opened up to Vallejo and, beyond it, the delta feeding the bay. Any other time of day he’d be able to see the twisting rollercoasters of Six Flags laid out in front of him. Whenever he and Linda drove by the amusement park, he promised her they’d one day take the time and stop to ride them. They never made the time and now the time had passed.
“Jason is just a pawn in a game of spite between spoiled siblings?”
“He’s more than that. DeWildt doesn’t know how far I looked into this, of course, but I have to do a little background to protect myself, you know? But as far as I can tell, Jason DeWildt is the one standing between Stephan and the rest of his fortune. He’s a pawn that Stephan wants to take off the board.”
Gary thought about this. The ne’er-do-well scumbag that wandered into his life, the dirty addict that broke into the house across the street, was better off than he could ever hope to be. He wondered about how the person he met, the man that threatened him, the animal that abducted his wife, could be related to the kindly couple he was so fond of.
“Wait a second, what do you mean if the trust goes through? Why wouldn’t it?”
Calper turned to Gary and wrinkled his brow. “You don’t know? The Perkins ain’t been heard from since they drove off your block.”
Chapter Nineteen
“What about what’s his name?” Juliet asked.
They’d been sitting in the cornfield now for almost twenty minutes. Juliet still sat in the front and Linda and Russell were tucked beside each other in the back. Jason gave in to the hungry beast inside and said yes to Juliet’s repeated request for more heroin. The drugs hadn’t quelled the tension or calmed his nerves. He still clenched and unclenched his hands on the steering wheel, eyes darting to either side, sweat beading across his forehead. Linda watched him closely. He was agitated and clearly unsure about what to do next. He argued with Juliet about their plan, but there was no plan.
“Russell,” Juliet said, “do you want me to put a bit on some foil for you?”
Russell nodded his head.
Juliet pinched a piece of the brown goo with her fingers and wiped it on a folded piece of aluminum foil she kept tucked away with all the other items in her purse. She rolled up a scrap of paper around a broken pencil she found on the floorboards and handed them both back to Russell with a disposable lighter. He grabbed the makeshift paraphernalia and went to work, holding the lighter under the foil with the paper tube in his mouth. Although he sucked in most of the smoke, the car was filled with an acrid smell that reminded Linda of vinegar.
“See? He only smokes it,” Juliet said to Linda.
She wasn’t sure why Juliet felt the need to make this qualification, but as she watched the young man greedily inhale the smoke as it pirouetted out of the bubbling tar, she felt a pang of sadness. She didn’t understand why he was here with the other two—or three, if you included the would-be rapist they’d killed and left behind. There was a softness, an empathy in him. He didn’t belong. She knew it, and he knew it too.
“He’s out there. He ain’t going nowhere,” Jason said. The conversation in the front seat had circled back to the other man, the unlucky man they’d taken the car from. Jason kept looking out his window in the direction he’d dragged Derrick. No sign of movement. No sound.
“It’ll take him at least an hour to get his ass up and find a farmhouse,” he said. “By then we’ll be in the city. We can park the car in Ronnell’s garage and figure out what to do from there.”
“Does he even have a garage?”
“I wouldn’t say so if he didn’t. He’s in the same spot by the beach. He’s been there for years.”
After another few moments of listening to the emptiness of the cornfield, Juliet said, “You shouldn’t have shot Bomber. You already beat him up. He wasn’t going to do nothing. You shouldn’t have shot him.”
Jason started the car. “Fuck him. He was an asshole. Get in back so we can get the fuck out of here.”
As soon as Juliet had pushed into the back seat, shoving her shoulder against Linda’s and sandwiching the woman between her and Russell, Jason dropped it into reverse. They rammed down more cornstalks as he swung the CR-V around and tried to get back on the same jagged path they’d entered the field on.
As they moved through the corn, Linda glanced over at the small boy beside her. He was staring out the window at the barely visible stalks whipping by, his forehead bouncing lightly on the glass. She couldn’t help but feel he was experiencing the same helpless sensation of having his destiny pulled from him, of their fate being in the hands of a madman who had no idea what he was doing.
Calper pulled the Taurus up to the Bay Bridge toll plaza and handed four singles to the collector. Traffic was light and in moments they were high on the span with San Francisco laid out on their right. The financial district’s glow usually felt inviting to Gary. After he and Linda moved to the valley, each visit to the city was like a homecoming, but as he and Calper crossed the bridge, it felt flat and dead, like the end of the road. He wanted to feel something, some kind of intuition, that Linda was out there somewhere. But he felt nothing.
“This guy lives out by the beach,” Calper said.
“What’s the plan? Are we calling the police? Have them stake it out?”
Calper smirked. “Stake it out? No. They’re not going to do that. Besides, I don’t know the exact address, but I know where it is. We’ll go out there, take a look, and decide what to do from there.”
Gary shook his head. “Why wouldn’t we want the police there? This guy is dangerous. He’s got my wife. He’s already killed someone. There’s no way we should be doing this alone.”
Calper signaled right and moved from the 80 to the short
span called the Central Freeway. In moments they were crossing Market onto Octavia and hooking a left onto Fell Street.
“Look, we’re not sure they’re even going there. We better not start asking the cops to show up at empty houses. Otherwise, we’re going to be left high and dry if we really do need them. Let’s just go and check it out. Besides, we don’t know if they switched cars again.”
“Sounds like bullshit. Like the detective said, if we have information, we’re obligated to share it.”
“Obligated? He said that? I don’t remember you saying it that way. Listen, my obligation is first to your wife. We want to make sure she’s safe, and placing her in the middle of a police shoot-out is not the way to do it.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What’s your second?”
“To my client.” Calper said this as though it should be obvious. “I made a promise to them and I’m going to do my best to keep it.”
“What about all that shit you told me about Stephan DeWildt?”
“All true, but it doesn’t change Jason’s situation. He needs to surrender himself, get some decent representation. If the cops get pulled in, he’s going to get a bullet in the head, I guarantee you. That’s not good for anyone.”
Gary let the comment hang. He watched the overpriced Victorians fly by as they ascended Fell Street. He ran over what Calper had told him on the drive in, mulling it over, trying to read between the lines. He waited till they’d reached Divisadero and he was certain they were heading to the avenues before saying, “A bullet in his head means your client wins. It’s the arrest you don’t want. If he sits in jail, his control over the companies sits with him. An arrest would mean you lose.”