Parting Shot

by Linwood Barclay

“We just got here,” I told him.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you.” He extended a hand and I took it. “What’s your name?”

  “Cal,” I said.

  He put out his hand to Jeremy and asked the same thing. I felt an instant sense of panic.

  Don’t tell him your name. Don’t tell him your name.

  Jeremy, almost robotically, held out his hand.

  “And you are?” the man said.

  I tried to catch Jeremy’s eye, but he still wasn’t tracking very well.

  He said, “Uh, I’m Alan.”

  I breathed an inward sigh of relief. Even in a stunned state, he had enough good sense to give a fake name.

  “Well,” the man said, “nice to meet you both. Might see you again. I’m Cory, by the way.”

  FORTY-ONE

  ALASTAIR Calder led Duckworth up to the second floor of the house and opened the first door on the right.

  “This is Cory’s room,” he said.

  Maybe Duckworth expected all young men’s rooms to look as though a bomb had just gone off in them, but Cory’s world was meticulous. The bed was made, the desk uncluttered. A shelving unit was packed tightly with CDs and DVDs and books, but there was a sorting system for all of them. The disks were arranged alphabetically, the books into subcategories. Science-fiction novels were grouped, then alphabetized by author, and the same was true for non-fiction titles. Graphic novels were collected according to character, so stories featuring Batman, regardless of who wrote them, were stacked alongside each other.

  “He’s neat,” Duckworth said.

  “I’ll give him that,” Cory Calder’s father said.

  The bed, which was about a foot lower than a typical one, seemed to float in the room. Duckworth noted that the mattress sat directly on a platform, without a box spring, and the supporting legs were set back just far enough to be invisible.

  He checked out the desk. There was desktop computer with an oversized monitor not much thicker than a finger. Wireless mouse, wireless keyboard. He gave the mouse a shake and the monitor came to life, but it was password-protected.

  “You know your son’s password?”

  Alastair shook his head. “No.”

  “Could you guess at it?”

  “No.”

  Duckworth nodded. Nothing about the room was jumping out at him. He scanned the items on the shelves. The DVDs were mostly science fiction or fantasy. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit. As he scanned the spines of the books, he was hoping for titles along the lines of Do-It-Yourself Tattoos or Kidnapping 101.

  What he had not really expected to find was one called Sedation: A Patient Handbook.

  He pulled it from the shelf and showed it to Alastair. “What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” Alastair said.

  There were also, on the same bottom shelf, a number of textbooks that Cory must have hung onto from his high-school or college days, most of them chemistry-related. It was looking to Duckworth as though Cory might have the smarts to keep someone unconscious for a couple of days.

  And if the books didn’t supply enough information, there was always the Internet. All you had to do was google it. Which was why Duckworth was sorry he wasn’t going to be able to immediately get into Cory’s computer, if at all.

  He went to the closet and opened it.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  Instead of clothes on hangers, the entire closet had been turned into shelving, but not for socks or shirts or underwear. The compartments were neatly stuffed with boxes—some empty, some not—ranging from the very small to briefcase-sized. The packaging labels indicated that most of this stuff was electronic equipment.

  Alastair, standing behind Duckworth, said, “He saves the packaging for everything he gets. And all the instructions and the manuals.”

  Duckworth read the labels. Modems, chargers, cables. But more interesting things, too. Surveillance-type equipment. Listening devices. Microphones.

  “Why would Cory have stuff like this?” he asked.

  Alastair looked. “I don’t know.” His face grew dark.

  Duckworth closed the door to the closet. He got down on his knees and lifted the bed skirt, preparing to peer beneath it. But kneeling in the closet, standing, and now getting down again had made him momentarily light-headed. He rested his elbows on the bed and took a moment to ask Cory’s father another question.

  “Where does he get the money?”

  “Money for what?”

  Duckworth tipped his head toward the closet. “All the electronic goodies.”

  Alastair swallowed and said, quietly, “I give it to him. I give him what you’d call an allowance, I suppose.” He looked ashamed. “It’s just easier sometimes to let him have what he wants.”

  “Sure,” Duckworth said.

  His head feeling back to normal, he went down on his hands and knees and peered under the bed. There was almost nothing there, not even dust. But there was something up near the head of the bed, tucked against the wall by the baseboard. Whatever it was, it seemed to reflect the tiny amount of light that was getting under there.

  Duckworth shimmied his body along the floor to get closer, and reached his hand under. His arm wasn’t long enough, but he was able to get a better look at the item. It was a jar. About six or seven inches tall, with a metal cap on top. It carried no label, but it appeared to be something spaghetti sauce might have come in.

  “Do you have a stick or a ruler or something?” he asked Alastair Calder.

  “What is it?”

  “Something under here I can’t quite reach.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “A jar.”

  Duckworth heard Alastair opening drawers. Finally he came around the bed and handed the detective a pair of scissors.

  “I couldn’t find anything else,” he said.

  Duckworth held the scissors by the pointed end, reached under the bed, and was able to connect with the jar. He moved it slightly in his direction, noticed a shimmering, and realized it contained some kind of liquid, in addition to something else. Very carefully, so as not to knock it over, he edged it even closer with the scissors until he was able to reach it with his hand.

  He passed the scissors back to Alastair, then stuck his arm back under the bed and drew the jar out. Then he got to his knees and, still holding it in his hand, rested it atop the bed.

  “Sweet Jesus, what the hell is that?” Alastair asked.

  Duckworth checked the lid to see that it was on tight. The liquid in the jar had a yellowish tinge. Sitting on the bottom was a wrinkled, fleshy mass about the size of two small chicken gizzards. But they did not look like gizzards to Duckworth.

  “What do they look like to you?” he asked Alastair.

  “They look like . . . My God, they appear to be testicles.”

  “That’s what they look like to me,” Duckworth said. “And I think I know who these just might belong to.”

  So maybe the dog hadn’t swallowed everything after all.

  FORTY-TWO

  CORY Calder felt energized. A nice way to feel, after so many missteps.

  He’d met Jeremy Pilford. Face to face. Shook his hand. Looked him right in the eye! Well, almost. Jeremy seemed a little preoccupied at that moment, like maybe that guy with him had told him something he didn’t want to hear. Whatever. It didn’t matter.

  This was so different than what had happened with Craig Pierce, or even Brian Gaffney, although the less said about that one the better. Cory had to admit, he felt bad about Gaffney.

  Gaffney had looked, at a glance, so much like Jeremy Pilford. He was even dressed more or less the same. Cory and Dolly had watched Jeremy go into Knight’s and were waiting for him to come out. And when he did, or when someone who looked very much like him did, Dolly said, “Hey, how ya doing, can you help me out here? I dropped a contact.”

  The dude stepped into the alley, Cory came up behind him, chloroformed him.
They dragged him to the van, which they’d left parked at the end of the alley.

  Would have been so much better if it had been the right guy.

  And then, to make matters worse, someone recognized Dolly as Cory was getting Gaffney tucked away. Fucking chatted with her.

  Anyway, what was done was done. Sometimes, trying to do the right thing, innocent people got hurt.

  Tell me about it.

  At least Gaffney had never seen them, never had a real look at them. Not even Dolly, who’d called him into the alley. It was dark, and they were confident he’d never be able to describe her for the cops. The whole time they had him in the barn at Dolly’s place, he was out of it, but they’d kept him blindfolded, just in case. So they were able to let him go. Dumped him out of the van two days later in the same place they’d found him, and took off.

  Man, they sure fucked that one up. And after all the trouble Dolly had gone to steal the necessary equipment from her boss.

  The Pilford kid was still out there, with no idea how close he’d come to having to pay for what he’d done.

  Cory felt committed to correcting his mistake.

  They’d gotten it so right with Craig Pierce. Wow, had they ever. Man, when that dog made a meal of him, boy, that was something else. Dolly threw up, but Cory was blown away by what they’d accomplished. For a moment, he thought maybe they’d gone too far, that Pierce was actually dead, because that was not what he wanted. Cory believed, at least at the time, that it was better for bad people to endure their punishments.

  So he chased off the dog and went back to see if Pierce had survived. The son of a bitch was still breathing, but Jesus, what a mess. And there was even a little something left behind, that must have fallen out of the dog’s mouth. Cory had taken some pictures, but here was an actual souvenir. (He was proud of the fact that he’d never been a particularly squeamish kid.)

  The real payoff had been the attention the deed garnered. Cory uploaded the pictures to Just Deserts, careful not to leave any digital trail that would lead back to him, with plenty of information about what Pierce had done. He thought very carefully about the words that would accompany the pictures, about how “revenj” had been exacted upon this disgusting pervert.

  The website ran with it. Scores of other sites picked it up.

  Seeing the response was without question the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Cory Calder. He sat on the website non-stop for several days, watching the fallout. First, the site tracked the number of visitors. There were thousands of them, and that didn’t even count the other sites that carried the story.

  And then there were the comments. Every few minutes, more people weighed in. Some thought that whoever’d done this to Craig Pierce, an act described as everything from despicable to worthy of a Nobel prize, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Others lauded him, called him the best kind of vigilante, a hero who was stepping in to do what was right when the courts had failed to live up to their obligations.

  One person went to so far as to compare him to Batman, even though Batman was not known particularly for using a dog to bite off a bad guy’s junk.

  Cory even went on the site himself and left a comment, saying that whoever this guy was, he was terrific.

  When he was at home, up in his bedroom, his father down the hall, he had to keep a lid on his enthusiasm during his repeated checks of the site. But when he was at Dolly’s place, he was uncontrolled in his excitement, letting out whoops of delight as he sat in front of her computer.

  “Look at this!” he’d cry, calling her again and again to look at the screen. “Look what they’re saying!”

  She wasn’t always as excited about it as he was, and that troubled him some. But after all, he was the mastermind of this operation. It made sense that the enthusiasm levels were somewhat lopsided.

  Even though his name never appeared—and a good thing too—he reveled in the attention. He wished there were some way to tell the world with impunity that he was the one responsible.

  Very quickly, the online adulation became addictive. As the comments began to wane in the weeks following the attack on Craig Pierce, Cory became agitated and restless. He needed to keep the interest alive, to maintain the debate. Praise or condemnation, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the world was talking about him.

  So he started to think about his next project.

  How he wanted to rub the noses of his goddamn brother and his goddamn sister in it.

  How Daddy loved them. So fucking proud.

  There was Caitlin over in Europe, helping those people who’d fled Syria with little more than the clothes on their back, taking perilous boat journeys, half of them drowning. That little kid on the beach. One night, Cory and his father were watching CNN when a story came on about the refugees. They were literally walking out of the water, their boat having gone down about a hundred feet offshore, carrying babies in their arms, everyone crying and screaming. There were aid workers on the beach, waiting for them. Doctors and care workers and all that shit, and suddenly Alastair pointed to the screen and shouted, “It’s Caitlin! Look, it’s Caitlin! It’s your sister!”

  Yep. It was Caitlin. Running up to a man with a limp little girl in his arms. She took the child away, worked frantically on her, getting air into her lungs, bringing her back to life.

  His father didn’t stop talking about it for days.

  Then there was his brother, Miles, who at least didn’t make it to CNN, but he was doing great work, oh yes he was. Big-shot scientist halfway around the world, finding ways to make seawater drinkable. Your basic save-the-world kind of thing. No biggie. Quoted in Scientific American, even the New York Times once or twice. A genius, they called him. Yeah, well, Cory could remember the time he locked the keys in his Infiniti with the engine running. Didn’t seem like any great genius that day.

  Well, you didn’t need a medical degree or a PhD in whatever it was his brother had to make your mark in the world. There were other paths to greatness.

  In many ways, Cory considered what he had been doing more noble, because it was anonymous. He wasn’t on CNN. He wasn’t getting quoted in the New York Times. He was working behind the scenes to effect change. Didn’t that make it more genuine? More real?

  Except there were times when he wondered, maybe he should just tell his father. “You think Miles and Caitlin are such hot shit? You see them putting themselves on the line the way I have? Running the kind of risks I’m running? I could go to jail. I could get sent away. You don’t see them taking those kinds of chances.”

  So many times he’d wanted to say it. Not only so his father would stop thinking his so-called useless son wasn’t so useless after all, but to see the expression on his face.

  In the last twenty-four hours, Cory had had a feeling that was going to happen sooner or later. When his father came to see him at the police station with a lawyer in tow.

  Cory had to admit things hadn’t gone so well lately.

  Not that there hadn’t been some major successes. Finding Jeremy for one. He’d tracked him down, lost him, and found him again.

  He’d picked him up leaving his great-aunt’s house the night before, getting in that Honda with the old guy. It had been no trick figuring out he was at Madeline Plimpton’s house. The whole world had worked that out. Little wonder the kid was hightailing it out of there.

  Cory had followed them to some Promise Falls apartment over a bookstore. But then the old guy must have seen his van, because he came running out onto the street, heading their way.

  “Oh shit, here he comes,” Dolly’d said, and Cory had tromped on the accelerator.

  By the time he’d come back, the Honda was gone.

  Shit.

  He’d lost him.

  But overnight he checked the Just Deserts website, and some other similarly themed places on the Internet, and in came a reported sighting of Jeremy Pilford in Kingston, New York. Some couple had spotted him in a hotel lobby.<
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  Once Cory had dealt with some other unexpected matters, he got in the van and drove to Kingston.

  He searched the parking lot of the hotel where Pilford had been seen, but he could not find that Honda. Maybe, he thought, they’d realized they’d been spotted and gone elsewhere. He wandered the lots of other area hotels, and around five in the morning got lucky.

  Now that he’d located them, what to do? Follow them, he figured, and wait for an opportunity. But he had to admit to himself he had no plan. He was, to say the least, rattled by other events that night. In addition, he no longer had an assistant. But as he sat in that hotel parking lot, trying to formulate a strategy, something happened.

  Some dumbass couple rammed a car while trying to snap a photo of Pilford. Cory knew that was going to draw the cops, so he took off. But he took a spot just down the street, and before long, an ambulance went past, followed by the Honda. The car was left a block away from the hospital, and it was at this point that Cory really caught a break.

  It had been left unlocked.

  This time, he’d come better prepared, and he only needed thirty seconds. He opened the driver’s door, dropped down, his knees on the pavement, and reached under the front seat. Clipped the small mike and transmitter into place. Closed the door and got out of there.

  All he had to do after that was listen.

  Back in his car, he put on the earbuds that were attached to the phone-like device that carried the app that was linked to the bug that lay in the house that Jack built!

  What an amazing world we live in!

  He heard Pilford and the old guy—turned out his name was Weaver—talking about a lot of things, but the one really important thing he heard was their destination.

  Cape Cod.

  Big place to search, but then he heard Weaver repeat the address. North Shore Boulevard in East Sandwich.

  Bingo.

  He filled the tank up with gas and was on his way to Massachusetts before Pilford. That gave him time to check in with one of the local rental agencies and find himself a place to stay. A super-cheap cabin, about twenty by twenty feet, a quarter of a mile down the road from where Pilford and Weaver were staying. There was no water view—it was on the other side of the road from the beach houses. That was okay. He wasn’t here to sightsee.