Monsters

by Matt Rogers

  He said to King, ‘Choi can sit up front. But at least turn the damn light on for me.’

  He rolled the sliding door open again and disappeared into the darkened space, his only company the corpses. When he shut the door from the inside King got in the driver’s seat and found the switch that lit the back, the one Carter had killed earlier. Two slaps on the other side of the partition wall let King know it had worked.

  King started the van, then reached over and opened the passenger door from the inside, pushing it outward. It revealed Choi frozen solid on the sidewalk, considerable bloodstains at his feet.

  King said, ‘Get in.’

  Choi said, ‘What just happened?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Get in.’

  Choi put his head down, walked forward and dumped himself in the passenger seat before he could get cold feet. He started to cry. King had to lean over him to pull the door shut. Choi didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to do it himself. King threw the van into gear and peeled away. The muffled drone of the overpass receded to nothingness.

  In the distance, a faint siren began to wail.

  Maybe someone calling in to report gunshots. They’d been fired unsuppressed, and even the worst parts of San Francisco weren’t so bad that a shootout would go ignored. This was no Chicago.

  King drove in silence for a couple of minutes. He had no particular destination, his only aim to get as far away from the scene as possible. He drove west toward Fairmont then merged onto Skyline Boulevard, the dark and straight road overshadowed by hills leading up to Mussel Rock Park. The Pacific churned beyond the park, out of sight, its vastness only implied.

  Cloaked in the anonymity of the coastal boulevard at night, Choi must’ve felt comfortable voicing his turmoil. ‘That was…oh my God…’

  King said, ‘You ever seen someone killed before?’

  ‘No,’ Choi stammered. ‘No, God, no. God…there’s still blood on your hands.’

  King wiped his hands on his jacket. He returned them to the wheel. ‘I get it. It’s not going to mean much that we just saved your life. Your brain won’t be able to put that together for a while. You’ll see us as murderers.’

  Choi’s throat spasmed like he might throw up. ‘Can you pull over? Can I get out?’

  ‘No,’ King said. ‘Not yet. We need to talk.’

  ‘That’s…that’s what the other guy said.’

  ‘He didn’t mean it. What he meant was that he wanted to beat you to death and take photos of your body.’

  Choi lapsed into a long pause, then said, ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘You know something about that?’

  ‘I was meeting him to get his comment on a story I’ve been working on. He promised to be an anonymous source. He told me he worked for a company I’m investigating and he wanted to do the right thing.’

  ‘You’re a journalist?’

  Choi nodded. ‘I’m with the Examiner. I…’ He stopped talking, had to stare out the window for a few breaths to regain his composure. King didn’t interrupt him. He deserved all the time he needed.

  ‘Sorry,’ he finally continued. ‘Hard to talk right now. I was tipped off about a situation with a start-up. Vitality+. Heard of it?’

  King nodded slowly.

  Choi said, ‘One of their employees in the chemistry department forwarded me a realistic update of where the science was at and made me promise I wouldn’t use his name.’

  ‘“His”?’

  Choi hesitated. ‘Yeah. “His.”’

  ‘It wasn’t Mary Böhm from R&D?’

  ‘No. Haven’t heard of her. You know her?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ So multiple Vitality+ employees were independently beginning to sound the alarm. King grimaced at that knowledge. Things were unravelling for Heidi Waters faster than they’d first thought.

  The weird line of questioning gave Choi time to take a step back, think of questions unasked and unanswered. ‘Wait. Who the fuck are you? You were with those guys. You and your buddy. You came out of the van…’

  ‘We’re not with them. We were faking it. We’re here to help.’

  ‘You’re undercover cops?’

  ‘No.’

  Choi shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘Best we leave that ambiguous,’ King said, then got his line of questioning back on track. ‘So Carter told you he was another employee of Vitality+? How’d you find him?’

  A pause. ‘Who’s Carter?’

  King glanced over, one hand on the wheel. ‘The blond guy.’

  ‘Oh. He said his name was Finn.’

  ‘How’d you find him?’

  ‘I put out the feelers online, but kept a low profile. He got back to me almost straight away. Said he was browsing the unofficial channels just looking for an opportunity to tell someone in the media what he knew about the inner workings of the company. Said he had the scoop of the century. Fraud of the highest magnitude.’

  ‘Did you vet him?’

  Choi bowed his head. ‘Not as well as I should have, obviously.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. He had the resources to fake almost anything he wanted. A limitless budget.’

  ‘Who is he?’ Then Choi shivered and corrected himself. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Carter? Just a thug, same as his boss. But they’re working for Heidi Waters.’

  Choi froze at the mention of the woman, then shook his head. ‘No, no. She’s a famous CEO. She’s got a reputation to uphold. This…this is underground shit. Organised crime.’

  ‘Big business, organised crime. What’s the difference? And it’s precisely because she has a reputation to uphold that she’s doing this. You’re a goddamn journalist, Choi. You should see through the cracks in reality, see through to its rotten core. You should know what desperate people are capable of.’

  ‘I guess I should.’

  They drove for another couple of minutes.

  Choi said, ‘What are you going to do with me?’

  ‘Let you out somewhere discreet. You’re going to fall off the radar for a couple of days. You’re going to make it seem like you’re dead.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we have a cover story to maintain. Not for much longer. Just until we know there’s no more stragglers, and then we can squash this.’

  ‘Squash what? What the hell is this?’

  ‘This is narcissism, Choi. This is psychopathy. This is what happens when it’s left unchecked.’

  ‘So then…you and your partner…what are you?’

  King met Choi’s eyes as asphalt disappeared under the van’s hood. ‘We’re the checks and balances for people like Heidi Waters.’

  46

  King spent the next fifteen minutes going over specifics with Choi.

  Told him exactly how to lay low, what he could and couldn’t do, which places he could and couldn’t visit. Anything that mirrored his old routine was off-limits for the next couple days. King told him to hole up in a hotel somewhere, order room service, distract himself with mindless entertainment. Then, when the coast was clear, he could resume normal life. He’d have to come up with an excuse for his mysterious absence, but he was an independent journalist. His superiors at the Examiner would understand. His girlfriend would tolerate it if he explained himself beforehand.

  It was sure better than being a brutalised corpse, photographed and wielded as a blackmail and intimidation tactic.

  King let Choi out at the tip of Sea Cliff, against the dark and churning backdrop of South Bay and, beyond it, the Golden Gate Bridge. Hot wind blew his thin hair around as he stooped in the doorframe, looking back into the van.

  He said, ‘I’m scared.’

  King said, ‘You’re alive.’

  Choi nodded and shut the door. King watched through the glass as he shoved his hands in his pockets, put his hood up, and strode away, swallowed by the darkness of the lookout. King reached over his own shoulder and smacked the heel of his hand against the partition wall, one solid thunk. Slater go
t the message and clambered out of the cargo hold, rounding to the front compartment and taking Choi’s place in the passenger seat.

  When he closed the door he said, ‘How are we going to spin this to Frankie?’

  ‘Blame Carter. Not the other guys. We’re not convincing anyone that those two meatheads masterminded anything.’

  ‘We can convince Frankie that they were pissed about having to babysit the newbies.’

  Slater understood where King was going with it, and nodded his understanding. ‘Make the call, then.’

  Overlooking the black waters of the bay, King dialled. There was no wait. Frankie answered immediately, almost before the first ring. It was only twenty minutes after they’d supposedly carried out the job.

  ‘Put Carter on,’ Frankie demanded. ‘He’s violated protocol. He was supposed to text confirmation.’

  King said, ‘You got bigger problems to worry about than a confirmation text.’

  A pause. ‘What?’

  King made himself angry, quickened the pace of his speech. ‘You’d better be paying us for this bullshit. This isn’t what we signed up for, Frankie. Your men are goddamn cowboys.’

  ‘Slow down.’

  ‘You need to fucking—’

  ‘Slow down,’ Frankie hissed. ‘What happened?’

  King pretended he was bringing his breathing under control. ‘You should’ve given them a heads-up before you let us on board. They sure didn’t like it. Spent the whole ride to El Camino trying to antagonise us, and we kept our mouths shut. That pissed them off more so on the way back after the job they stopped and forced us out at gunpoint.’

  Frankie sucked air through his teeth. ‘I gotta go.’

  ‘Wait,’ King said. ‘Before you call them, you should know they’re gonna bluff you. They spent most of the ride cussing you out for bringing us on board without knowing anything about us. They said you were amateur hour. They said you were an impulsive little bitch. I’m sure they’re not gonna mention that when you call them. I thought you should know.’

  He could sense Frankie internally combusting in the furious silence. The man didn’t make a sound, but the quiet seemed to simmer. King let it drag out.

  Frankie tried to reactivate an intimidating aura. ‘Both of you get back here as fast as you can. Get a cab. Don’t think about going anywhere else. And if your story doesn’t check out…’

  ‘Don’t try that anymore,’ King snapped. ‘You fucked up, Frankie. You put us with hotheads. We’re fucking professionals and we expect to be treated as such. So get out of here with the tough-guy act. Clean up your mess and sort your employees out.’

  It’s hard to be angry when you’re defending yourself from accusations.

  Psychology 101.

  Frankie said, ‘Just get back here,’ but his tone was deflated.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ King said. ‘We’ll be there. Focus on sorting your own mess out.’

  He hung up.

  Slater let go of the breath he’d been holding for much of the conversation. ‘Risky pushing him like that. But it sounds like it worked.’

  ‘Honestly, what isn’t risky?’

  ‘You really want to go right back there?’

  ‘Of course,’ King said. ‘We’re his best employees now. The rest of them skipped town.’

  47

  The dining table that Heidi’s smart tablet rested on had cost her five hundred thousand dollars.

  When she read the news headline on the tablet’s screen, it struck her how little any of this luxury mattered.

  TROUBLE IN PARADISE: CAFFEINE WONDER-DRUG ROLLOUT HAMPERED BY BEHIND-THE-SCENES NIGHTMARES.

  The article itself was even worse.

  It described, in detail, the supposed tyranny of Vitality+’s office politics. It wasn’t even the work of that cretin Choi, whose body was hopefully brutalised and photographed by now. She’d planned to use that priceless piece of blackmail to shut down the few papers she didn’t yet have control over. She had a short list of dissidents she’d planned to intimidate, journalists and reporters she was aware weren’t cooperating, but the guy who’d written this hit piece hadn’t even been on her radar.

  Which worried her.

  In an instant, the $12.5 million mansion surrounding her seemed more like a hollow prison than a status symbol. The high ceilings weren’t something to be proud of anymore. It was just more emptiness, more of the feeling that she was playing a part in a play she couldn’t control.

  A door opened in her mind.

  For the first time, she didn’t close it.

  Darkness spewed forth. Visions of depravity, flashes of madness — tearing apart everyone who’d ever given her a sly look in the office, rolled their eyes at her unrealistic deadlines, talked behind her back, told her “no.” Which was a long list. At least, then, prison would be enjoyable. She’d always have those memories to cherish. And considering the extent of what she’d done, the lies she’d spun, she’d be going to jail for decades anyway. Financial crimes are punished ruthlessly because you’re robbing the rich instead of the poor. You’re spinning a web of lies to venture capitalists instead of salaried workers getting ripped off by their mortgages.

  What’s the difference? she asked herself.

  Money. That’s the difference. The investors have the resources to punish you for your actions. So, if this was all ousted, which it soon would be given the article was on the front page, well…

  What’s the difference between going down for life for financial crimes and going down for life for financial crimes plus murder?

  Only one option carried the possibility of vengeance.

  She read the whole article three times in a row, beginning to end, and with each rotation her stomach twisted tighter. Beside the tablet, her phone lit up like a Christmas tree. Missed call after missed call after missed call. She didn’t even want to think about her emails.

  On each read she dwelled on the same six words.

  “Several anonymous sources from within Vitality+…”

  So that’s it, she thought. We’re playing that game.

  They were turning on her. All of them.

  She seized her phone and unlocked it, ignoring heading after heading of new message notifications.

  John Rhames: Call now.

  Fabian Romani: Have you read it? I’ve reached my limits, Heidi.

  Frank Bolton: If any part of this is true we’re fucked.

  Board member after board member.

  And that was just the beginning. PR, legal, even chemistry and engineering and R&D. They’d soon fall apart. It’s a lot easier to dissent when everyone’s doing it. People were going to start quitting in droves. The downhill spiral had begun.

  Didn’t matter anymore.

  They couldn’t freeze her accounts. Not yet. That’d take lawsuits, or intervention from the board, but nothing’s immediate. For tonight, at least, she was safe. Despite their messages of concern, she still had Fabian and Frank wrapped around her finger, just like John had told her in her office. She had Hugo, too, and especially so, considering he hadn’t texted or called yet. There’s not much that an older man won’t do for a younger, beautiful woman if she’s played her cards right, embedded herself in his psyche. All those meetings four years ago had helped with that, meetings of a different kind. John had resisted her subtle advances in the beginning, which is why he had the wiggle room to protest and test her. The others would need some effort to break free from her spell, and that wouldn’t happen all at once.

  So for a narrow window she had full control over nine figures of liquid cash, cash which angel investors had pumped into a company she knew full well had nothing close to a finished product.

  It was the first time she’d ever admitted that to herself.

  She couldn’t dwell on that, though, because someone came into the dining room.

  She looked up, and her automatic mechanisms kicked in. She smiled widely and flushed colour into her cheeks, warmth into her eyes. �
�Hi, honey.’

  Darren Waters was responsible for getting her the initial start in Silicon Valley. He was ten years her elder, a kind and respected surgeon, curly-haired and handsome with thick-rimmed glasses that framed a pleasant face. He’d somehow found that rare and elusive balance of being a socialite who was also polite. That was still the case, even though she no longer needed the high-powered connections to get her foot in the door, hadn’t for the last few years. But the optics were good, and the media wrote favourably of them, so she had yet to stop pretending she loved him, kept him around as her husband, like a show pony.

  She thought, Why complicate things now?

  Darren rounded the huge table, came to rest behind her with a hand on her shoulder. She wasn’t able to turn the tablet off in time, lost in other thoughts, but he said, ‘I already gave it a read.’

  She forced her tear ducts to life, peered up at him with wet eyes.

  He touched a pair of fingers to the underside of her chin. ‘We’ll get through this, baby. You’re the strongest woman I know.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I can make some calls. See if anyone’s willing to spin a puff piece. I’m owed a few favours.’

  She smiled. ‘It’ll be just fine. I need to make a couple calls of my own, though. As I’m sure you can imagine…’

  He leant down and kissed her. ‘Of course.’

  He took his cue and walked away, but before he left the dining room he looked over his shoulder, his voice softer now. ‘I know you. Know how gentle your soul is. But…why do you think they’re all saying…those things?’

  She fixed him with her most manipulative stare. ‘I don’t know, baby. I’ll get to the bottom of it. I promise.’

  He nodded, satisfied with her answer, and left.

  Her face fell into a mask of nothingness, and she called Frankie Booth.

  48

  Game faces on.

  Righteous indignation activated.

  Anything else was surrender, and surrender was death.

  Out the front of the warehouse gym, King and Slater parked the Peugeot hatchback they’d hot-wired and stolen. For obvious reasons they’d needed to abandon the van. They hadn’t had time to find a twenty-four hour car rental service, if those even existed, so they’d stolen a ride off the street. They planned to have it back by the morning.