House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “No.” Her face was a mask. “I’m afraid not.”

  He rocked back in his chair. For a minute he couldn’t speak. She was talking about real jail time. Kip didn’t speak either. He looked like he’d been clobbered with a two-by-four.

  “Let me remind you,” she said. “If he’s convicted, the judge can impose a sentence of up to ten years.”

  Pete wasn’t sure how much worse that would be. Two years or ten, the boy’s life was ruined. Even if he came out unscathed, Duke would be off the table forever, and so would any elected position or government job. Or doctor, lawyer, banker, newspaperman, any kind of profession. He’d be an ex-con for the rest of his life. He’d have to work for Pete when he got out. The kid who couldn’t hammer a nail in straight.

  “You don’t have to decide now. There’s no expiration date on the offer. We can think about it. Let’s begin now by reviewing all of the witness statements.”

  “What witnesses?” Kip was blinking wildly. “They’re weren’t any.”

  Pete shot him a look. “Except for the priest, you mean.”

  “Right.” The boy flushed. His hair was dry now but loose and unstyled. It made him look about twelve. “Except for him.”

  “Trial witnesses,” Shelby said. “Not eyewitnesses.” She opened a folder on the table in front of her. “All their statements and reports are in now, so we know exactly what the evidence will be. First up is Stanley Fisher.” She looked at Kip. “The gentleman whose tree you hit.”

  “The dude who called nine-one-one?”

  She nodded. “He says he heard the crash shortly after midnight, got up, looked out the window, and dialed nine-one-one. He’s also going to testify there was no other vehicle on the road, and you were the one behind the wheel of the truck. And before you ask—” She held up a hand. “His vision is twenty-twenty.”

  “By then I was behind the wheel,” he said. “And the priest was already gone.”

  She went on. “Next is the arresting officer, Diane Mateo. She responded to the nine-one-one dispatch, found the truck in the ditch and you spinning your tires trying to back up. She detected the smell of alcohol on your person and noted that your speech was slurred—”

  “That’s a lie—”

  “—and had you exit the vehicle to administer a standardized field sobriety test.” Shelby looked up from the page. “She reports that you fell.”

  “It was raining! I slipped in the mud!”

  “Then we have a statement from the ER physician that you told him Chrissy banged her head in the accident and one from the neurosurgeon that her injuries were consistent with a trauma of that nature.”

  “Consistent with,” Pete said. “Not caused by.”

  “That’s right. They’ll have the right to call their own expert rebuttal witness after we put on our medical testimony, in which case it turns into a battle of the experts.”

  “So who wins?”

  “Too soon to say. Let’s move on. The next two statements are from Kip’s friends at the party that night. Ryan Atwood, your host, who admits there was beer, vodka, and tequila at the party, and Ava diFlorio, who says you drank at least two beers—”

  “Like I said—”

  “And you also had a shot of tequila and smoked marijuana.”

  A beat of silence passed before Pete spoke. “What?”

  Kip was suddenly fascinated by the whorls of wood grain on the conference table.

  “Hey.” Pete snapped his fingers at him. “Answer me.”

  “I don’t remember drinking any tequila.”

  Bad answer. “And the marijuana?”

  “Somebody brought some,” Kip said, shrugging. “I had a couple hits.”

  Pete closed his eyes with a grimace. He and Leigh liked to congratulate themselves on how they got the boys through high school without any drug trouble. Looks like they jumped the gun with this one. “Jesus, Kip.”

  “Hey, it’s not like I’m a stoner. It’s just a party thing, you know? It’s no big deal.”

  “No big deal? Considering it’s gonna be used against you in a homicide trial, I’d say it’s a pretty big deal. It’s a goddam huge deal!”

  Kip reddened and went back to studying the whorls on the table.

  “The tequila would explain how your BAC came in at point-oh-five-five,” Shelby said. “The marijuana would explain why you failed the field sobriety test.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “And I’m afraid it all paints a certain picture for the jury.”

  Pete knew that picture. The dissolute frat boy wannabe. The privileged white kid wallowing in his privilege. Devil may care and get out of my way. And lie about it when you get caught. That was what hit him next. “You lied.”

  “Nobody ever asked me about marijuana.”

  “God,” he muttered.

  Shelby closed the file and folded her hands on top of it. “There are three witnesses we won’t be hearing from. The accident reconstructionist couldn’t help. Our work with the ergonomics expert was inconclusive. There’s no way based on the location of Chrissy’s injuries to prove she was the one driving. And finally, despite aggressive efforts, we’ve been unable to locate the priest.”

  “You tried again to subpoena the people next door?”

  “We did. No one answers at the gate, and our letters to Resident come back Undeliverable.”

  Pete massaged his beard. He should have grabbed that woman in the Uber car and demanded that she let him in. He could have turned the place upside down until he found the video files. But there was little point if the security footage didn’t show the road. Even less point if there was never any priest on the road to begin with.

  “So,” Shelby said. “As things now stand, our defense consists only of your testimony, Kip, if we decide to put you on the stand, and the testimony of Dr. Rabin on medical causation.”

  “What d’you mean—if you decide to put Kip on?”

  “If he testifies, it opens the door to credibility attacks. The prosecution would have the right to elicit evidence of every other occasion when Kip is known to have lied. So we’ll have to consider that very carefully.”

  Pete put his head in his hands. Two years. Two versus ten.

  “As I said, there’s no time limit on the plea offer. Not yet.” She rose to her feet. “Think about it.”

  “Wait,” Kip said before she reached the door. “Can I take another look at those priest mug shots Frank put together?”

  She frowned. “Didn’t he send you the computer file?”

  “Yeah, but I want to go through it again. Here, on your computer, if it’s okay.”

  “All right,” she said, shrugging. “I’ll get Britta to set you up at a work station.”

  Pete waited in the coffee shop downstairs and tried to think about it. Two years. It seemed barely that long ago that the boy was born. He remembered it like it was last week, and what he remembered most was how scared Karen was. She was scared of labor, and scared she’d embarrass herself by being scared of labor, and even scared to hold the baby when it was all over. He was too tiny, she might break him. Pete pretended to find it all funny, but secretly he worried there was something wrong with her. No one should be that afraid of parenthood. Now he knew she was right to be so scared. It was terrifying, being responsible for the life of another human being. He didn’t know why anyone would ever volunteer for it. He couldn’t remember why he did.

  His coffee was cold in the cup by the time Kip appeared at the door. Pete sent him the question with a look across the crowded shop, and when Kip shook his head, Pete got up and dumped the cup in the trash.

  It was a little after noon. There was enough day left for both of them to get back to work. Kip plugged in his earbuds in the truck and Pete turned on the radio, and they rode out of the city without speaking. Pete thought about the plea off
er the whole way. He had no idea what Kip was thinking about.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Kip said.

  Yana shrugged and didn’t ask again. She was already naked on the chaise and racking up lines on a mirror. He peeled off his clothes as he walked to the edge of the pool, and he dove in and swam two lengths underwater without coming up for air. She was waiting poolside when he surfaced. “Hev leetle heet.” She held the mirror out to him. “Mek you feel bitter.”

  He already felt bitter, but he hauled up out of the water and took a quick snort before he flipped over and swam away again. The pool was painted black and it made the water look black, too, and soon he was rocketing through galaxies of shooting stars as the coke raced through light-years of capillaries and veins and arteries and burst into supernovas inside his brain. Here and now. Pure sensation. Live for the moment. Carpe diem. Live. Feel. Just don’t think.

  The water felt like silk against his chest and shoulders as he torpedoed through it. It felt like silk against his dick, too, and it wasn’t long before he was ready. She was ready, too, splayed out on her back in the black-and-white-striped cabana, long and lean and built like no human girl he’d ever known. An alien from some alien world. Her skin so pale it glowed with its own white light against the black canvas of the chaise.

  He fell dripping on top of her. He didn’t have to think about it, because she did all the thinking for him. She always did, from the first day of this make-believe job when she led him back here and stripped off her clothes. He didn’t have to think about how to undress because she reached for his zipper and undressed him herself. He didn’t have to think about being safe, because she had the condom ready to roll on. He didn’t have to think about timing or positions, because she stage-directed the whole thing. All he had to do was fuck, and he did, with his mind as empty and free as it ever was. He didn’t have to worry about what she’d say to her friends afterward or what he’d say to his, or whether this meant they were dating and he’d have to take her to the prom. He didn’t have to think about anything except not blowing his wad too soon, and she managed to control even that and kept him hard until she came. And then it was whiteout time as he rippled into an explosion of pure thoughtless pleasure.

  This was week three of pure thoughtless pleasure. Day after day fucking the hottest girl in the world and swimming in her black-water pool. Doing a bump of coke in the morning and a toke of weed in the afternoon and slurping vodka out of her navel any time in between. Anybody with a pair of balls would jump aboard and enjoy this ride, whether he was headed to prison or not. He wasn’t going to second-guess why she picked him out of everybody in the world or wonder if she was a cokehead or worry that her husband would walk in or his father would find out. He was living for the moment, here and now. He wasn’t going to think about anything but the slapping rhythm of his hips against hers.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he said as he flopped off her.

  She snickered, just as she did every other time he said it.

  His cargo shorts lay crumpled on the pool deck. He staggered up and stepped into them as Yana yawned and stretched and rolled over to sleep.

  Inside the house was cool, black marble and white upholstery, and so still and quiet all he could hear was the hum of the refrigerator and the clink of newly hatched ice cubes dropping into the dispenser. He lay flat on his back on the zebra-hide rug in the living room and tried to empty his mind until it was as blank as the pure white ceiling above. But it was like holding his fingers in a dike, all ten, and new leaks kept on springing and he didn’t have any fingers left to plug them, and all the thoughts flooded into his brain until he was swamped.

  He flopped over on his belly. Don’t dwell on the past. There was nothing he could do to bring Chrissy back. There was nothing he could do to make Leigh and the twins stop hating him. Live in the present. Yeah, that’s the game plan, but exactly how’s that working out for you, dude? Don’t worry about the future. Fair enough, don’t worry about it, but how about trying to fucking change it?

  He got up and went to the kitchen for a Red Bull and took it to Midas’s office at the far end of the house. The desk was a slab of petrified wood with nothing on it but a double-monitored computer and a framed black-and-white head shot of Yana peeking through the wet strands of her hair. Kip tapped a key and both monitors lit up. He located the program he installed last week and found it still well hidden among the spreadsheets and porn that comprised most of Miller’s downloads. He clicked to the IP address he’d already sussed out with the scanning app, and the program started up, belching out a random barrage of letters and numbers and symbols and combinations of all three at the log-in screen. It ran at hyperspeed, but as always, failure was almost instantaneous. Kip didn’t even have thirty seconds to scroll through Miller’s porn collection before the server timed him out.

  He dropped his head into his hands as a busty blonde writhed on one screen and the circle-backslash symbol lit up on the other. Prohibited. He’d been trying every day, from this computer, his own, his dad’s, even Shelby’s, but he struck out every time. He might as well give up, on this and everything else.

  Yana was still asleep when he went back outside. He stripped again and plunged headfirst in the pool and swam lap after lap through the bottomless black water. Here and now, he reminded himself. He recited it rhythmically in his mind, like a mantra; he swam until his arms burned and his lungs heaved for breath; but it was like everything else he did these days. A total failure.

  He dried off and got dressed. In the pocket of his cargo shorts was a thick roll of twenties. It was every dollar of the money Yana had paid him for this pretend job, and he placed it gently on the taut white skin of her abdomen. He looked around for a pen and paper, and when he couldn’t find any, he sent a text to her phone. I can’t do this anymore. Then he booked an Uber ride to Hollow Road and went out front to wait for it.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The phone jangled on the bedside table, and Leigh bolted upright, her heart stuttering. Somebody died. Don’t let it be somebody died. She lurched across Peter’s side of the bed and grabbed up the phone and gasped a breathless “Hello?” A boating accident, a heart attack on the golf course, a nail gun shooting wild.

  There was no answer. A prank call at what?—she squinted at the luminous digits on the alarm clock—3:00 a.m. She started to hang up as a faint sound perforated the speaker. White noise in the background. It sounded like the distant roar of a waterfall. Or the blast of a shower.

  “Devra?”

  Another noise, this one red hot. It was the rupture of a sob.

  “Devra, what is it?” She groped for the lamp switch. “What happened?”

  “I—I did as you advised. I refused him—”

  “Did he hurt you?” The background noise was no longer faint. She could hear shouts, the hammer of fists, men’s voices, guttural snarls in another language. “Are you someplace safe?”

  “Leigh, my friend, please! I want to leave. Help me—please!”

  She heard the crash of splintering wood, a bellow and a long, piercing shriek before the line went dead.

  In fifteen minutes she was racing for the city. She tried calling as she drove, cycling between Devra’s burner phone and the embassy switchboard. No one answered on the burner, and the switchboard answered with a recording in Arabic, followed by one in English advising that business hours were Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Her next call to the burner was answered by a recording, too. We’re sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed.

  Her next call was to the police.

  “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

  “A woman’s been attacked. She’d being held prisoner—”

  The operator cut her off. She wanted her name—Leigh Huyett, she shouted—and location—at that moment, speeding across the Key Bridge int
o the District. “She’s being held against her will at this address: 2355 Belmont Road Northwest. Her name is Devra bin Jabar. I’m her attorney. She locked herself in the bathroom and called me for help, then two or more men crashed through the door and her phone went dead. I haven’t been able to reach her since.”

  “A patrol car has been dispatched. Are these men are armed?”

  She felt certain they must be. “Yes!”

  “Pull over. Do not approach the scene.”

  She drove on, east on O Street, north on Massachusetts. The embassy was in the Kalorama section of the city, one of Washington’s most elite residential neighborhoods, and Belmont was a tree-lined street of century-­old architecture. She looked for the flashing red-and-blue lights on a Metro police car, but the only spots of light on the dark street came from the mercury-vapor bulbs glowing through the decorative streetlamps.

  She cruised slowly down the block in search of number 2355 until she found it mounted in brass numerals on a pair of steel gates. She cut in close to the curb and parked in a NO PARKING zone. A guardhouse stood just inside the gate, and beyond it a circle drive looped around to a gray stone mansion. Spotlights shone on a fountain in the middle of the circle spurting a geyser of sparkling water toward the sky. On a brick pillar beside the gate was a modest plaque identifying the complex as the Embassy of the State of Qatar. Below that was a buzzer. Above it, a security camera.

  She pressed the buzzer, and a man emerged from the guardhouse. He wore a long dishdasha, a white ghutra and a long jewel-encrusted dagger at his waist. Ceremonial, she hoped. He said something to her in Arabic. “My name is Leigh Huyett,” she said. “I’m the attorney for Devra bin Jabar, and I demand to see her at once.”

  He turned with a flap of his robes and picked up a phone in the guardhouse. He watched her closely as he listened, then returned to the gate. “Business hours are nine a.m. to five p.m.,” he said in careful English.

  “I’m not here on embassy business. I’m here on Devra’s personal business. She called me an hour ago and asked me to come get her. I demand to see her.”