by Matt Rogers
Tomorrow they’d still be all the rage, but not for the right reasons.
The article was already out but it was late, and most would wake up to it tomorrow. Then it’d spread like wildfire.
Ernie let himself in and locked the door, more out of habit than actual fear. Rachel was curled up on the sofa watching a rerun of the Bachelor, cradling a mug of her favourite lemon and ginger tea. She looked up as he came in, gave him a smile of encouragement. ‘It’s out.’
He sighed, put his laptop bag on the hall table. ‘Yeah.’
This condo was his haven. He and Rachel had styled it, designed the interior from scratch. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him. She’d taken him from a depressed CFO who spent all his life at work and lived in a one-bedroom apartment with four pieces of furniture to the man he was now, who prided himself on rugs and throws and pot plants and the little things in life that most people in San Francisco ignore in favour of a higher salary and less sleep.
She’d taught him to stop and smell the roses.
To do what mattered, not just what made the most money.
She’d also been the first to encourage him to speak up about what he was seeing.
He loosened his tie as he crossed the living room, weaved around a peace lily and a rhapis palm and a monstera deliciosa, all of which he’d selected. He sat down on the couch beside her and looped his arm around her, held her tight. She was slender and small, with hair so blonde it was almost white, and bright blue eyes.
She rested her cheek on his shoulder, turned the TV volume down. ‘Are you questioning whether you did the right thing?’
‘I know I did the right thing. I just don’t know how this is going to go. Heidi’s…mercurial. She might make it ugly, tie up my bonuses somehow.’
She shrugged. ‘We’ll get by. It’s not like we’re barely making ends meet.’
‘You’re right.’ He closed his eyes, let some stress out. ‘You’re so right. I know what I saw, and what my values are.’
What he’d seen was proof of Heidi faking the results of Vitality+’s patented brain scan.
It was highly complicated and very expensive, being able to detect neurotransmitter imbalances in the brain with a single-scan dynamic molecular imaging technique. The technology already existed, but the hardest part was producing it cheap enough to make any financial sense to provide for each customer. Ernie was the chief financial officer, and therefore wasn’t exactly hands-on in the chemistry and engineering departments, so he didn’t have a deeper understanding of the technology itself. Most of his day-to-day work consisted of working on optimistic revenue forecasts that Heidi wanted to show to investors. The projected income relied on consumer hype, which relied on the scans actually working properly — hence why he’d been so nosy about their accuracy, especially at the price point Heidi demanded they work at.
Somewhere in the midst of that giant puzzle, he’d figured out that the successful scans Heidi had shown investors were fake. She’d demonstrated a brain scan using their patented machine, then had the computer spit out a formula that she wanted it to show. Ernie found out later that the machine didn’t even work yet.
After that meeting, she’d secured two hundred million dollars in funding.
He’d revealed all of this to an independent journalist, and it formed the bulk of the article that had just been published, the article everyone would wake up to tomorrow morning.
Rachel said, ‘Baby, what’s wrong?’
He realised he hadn’t responded to her for several minutes. He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Just…the specifics I gave to the media…’
She knew him almost better than he knew himself, so she didn’t need elaboration. ‘It’s anonymous but Heidi will know one of the sources was you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s okay, Ernie. She’s going down on a sinking ship. What’s the worst she can do, refuse to give you your bonuses? She’d only be digging her grave deeper.’
‘Yeah.’
Something told him that wasn’t the worst she could do.
Someone knocked on the front door.
Loud pounding, urgent. A fist against the wood, three times. Serious weight behind it.
Rachel jolted in his arms. ‘Who’d that be?’
He felt sick in his core. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Expecting anyone?’
He shook his head.
She shrugged, reached out and picked up her wine and sipped it. ‘Let’s just leave it. Probably some junkie.’
He nodded, drew her closer.
Listened to the deep quiet.
Someone kicked the front door in.
Two bashes of boot heel to the flimsy wood and the lock smashed, the door swinging inward on its hinges and bouncing off the opposite wall, taking a gouge out of the plaster. The noise was horrendous. Rachel leapt off the couch with a scream, but before she or Ernie could even start running, three men had come into the small living area. Ernie was a small man, five-eight on a good day, and physical fitness wasn’t high on his current priorities. These men weren’t particularly tall either but they were broad, all three pale and hard-edged and built like linebackers.
One of them was high on something. ‘Sorry about that.’ An Eastern European accent, the volume amplified. His pupils were dilated. ‘It’s rude not to answer your door, Ernie.’
He exaggerated the wrong words, the flow garbled.
Ernie and Rachel stood gawking, speechless. Ernie’s heart crashed against his chest wall.
This was a dream.
Had to be.
He couldn’t explain the violation he felt. He had no illusions as to what these men were here to do, and it made him more furious than it was possible to convey. This wasn’t just his home, it was a sanctuary, an escape from the oft-brutal corporate world, and the way Heidi conducted herself was the most sickening and vapid extension of that world. She’d brought her hyper-materialist soullessness here, to his sanctuary.
He went to shout at them, but the guy who’d done all the talking ignored him and turned to look at Rachel. ‘Huh. You’re not on the roster.’
Her face was white. ‘What?’
The guy went quiet.
His buddy said, ‘Petr?’
Petr looked over his shoulder, those large pupils flaring. ‘She’s not part of the package. So she’s just a witness.’
The buddy nodded an understanding. ‘Yes. Right.’
He pulled out a sleek Steyr M9-A1 pistol and shot Rachel through the forehead.
Something inside Ernie broke, never to be repaired. He saw her fall back, saw the blood spray out the back of her head, saw it coat the sofa that she collapsed upon. But that piece of his mind didn’t let him put it together. She was his whole world, and she was gone.
Then it got worse.
Petr jabbed a finger at Ernie. ‘You are part of the package. So it’s got to hurt and we’ve got to prove it hurt.’
He walked right up to Ernie and thundered a fist into his gut.
52
Alexis tore into San Mateo in the dead of night.
Houses and condos and small apartment buildings flashed past on either side, and the SUV she’d stolen from the Russians roared. She slowed down three streets from Ernie’s address and pulled in front of a café that lay dormant, shut down until the early a.m. rush.
She leapt out and ran as fast as she could manage while maintaining tactical awareness.
Something Slater had drilled into her, time and time again, until it was muscle memory. At first it’d seemed banal, the repetition mind-numbingly boring, but now she understood its purpose. She didn’t even have to be cognisant of it. She automatically went through the motions of sweeping shadows, keeping her back to walls.
She made it to his ground floor condo with her heart in her throat. She saw the door hanging wide open and her heart leapt somehow higher.
Then the noise of the gunshot whipped out onto the empty street.
Mu
ffled by a suppressor, so it wouldn’t cause pandemonium, but there’s still that unmistakable punch even when silenced.
Alexis didn’t even take the time to breathe or compose herself. She just ran quietly in through the open doorway, her own priorities falling away, replaced by an irrepressible urge to help.
In that moment she didn’t recognise how alike Slater she had become.
Later she would.
If there was a later.
She moved at top speed without making a noise, feet turning over at a high cadence. Ten or twelve short, sharp footfalls as she flew down the front hallway and then she tensed her quads and hamstrings and glutes to use as stabilisers as she slowed herself down.
There was a dead woman sprawled on the sofa.
And, beside the body, a curly-haired man in his forties getting punched in the stomach by a pale squat guy. The Russian had one hand around the back of Ernie’s neck and was using the other fist to throw uppercuts into his gut. Ernie was crying and shaking and yelping with each blow.
Two other men stood looming in front of Alexis, facing Ernie and the Russian. From the way they watched proceedings from a distance, she assumed the Russian was Petr, the head honcho. Just from the positioning, she could tell he was the one with full control of the situation.
She stepped quietly up to the two hulking bodyguards and pumped the trigger once each, putting the rounds through the backs of their heads.
Unsuppressed.
The gunshots roared like explosions and Petr spun instinctively toward the noise instead of away from it, a crucial reaction for a man of his vocation. If he’d left it at that she would have nailed him right between the eyes, but as he spun he pulled Ernie in front of him. The CFO stumbled blindly, eyes red and wet with tears, mouth agape in some mixture of pain and grief. He had zero spatial awareness, and she already knew he wouldn’t respond to commands. He’d just seen his significant other shot in the head. His life, he must figure, was over.
Except it wasn’t yet.
Petr hunched behind the human shield and stared around the side of Ernie’s neck, only a sliver of his face visible. She locked her aim onto his only visible eye, its pupil dilated, but it wasn’t worth the risk. A millimetre off-centre and she’d shoot Ernie through the throat.
Petr was animated despite the stink of blood and death in the air. Coupled with the pupil, she figured he was high on something.
He stared across the room at her. ‘Oh. You.’
Which meant, You’re the one who killed all my men.
She didn’t know if he had a gun. He hadn’t been holding one, but she hadn’t managed a good look at his belt.
She tried to keep her voice level. ‘You can walk away if you let him go. All I care about is innocents getting left alone. I think we can reach a deal.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Petr said, eyebrows raised. ‘You’re just gonna forget about her, are you?’
Alexis noticed the woman’s body in her peripheral vision, uncomfortably present. The woman had fallen over the sofa’s armrest onto her back, arms out at her sides, blood now soaked all the way through the cushions.
Ernie moaned.
Petr said, ‘That’s right. You’re not forgetting her. So I don’t think I’ll take your offer. Sorry.’
As he apologised he shoved Ernie double-handed. The tech worker offered no resistance and Petr was strong as an ox, so the result wasn’t pretty. Ernie didn’t so much stumble as fly, careening across the room, running the short distance between Petr and Alexis with his gangly arms flailing.
She had to lower her gun so he didn’t run straight into it and depress her trigger finger accidentally.
Ernie barely managed to slow himself down before he crashed into her, but she’d braced for it and she shouldered him aside. The impact still rattled her and she was frustratingly slow to bring the Grach back up to aim. If Petr had a gun like she suspected, he would’ve successfully got the jump on her.
But Petr was gone.
She wasn’t going to blindly rush down the hallway in case he was lying in wait, so she tactically swept the entire condo — room by room, corner by corner, shadow by shadow. She took her time, which shattered her nerves, not knowing what lay behind each hiding spot. She couldn’t fathom how King and Slater did this regularly. By the time she was finished, the condo was eerily quiet, and sirens wailed in the distance, a response to the two shots she’d fired. There’d no doubt already been frantic calls placed by neighbours. As she finished up her search she heard a car tear away at the end of the street, its engine roaring.
Petr, successfully completing his getaway.
Ernie stood motionless in the living room, staring at the dead woman.
Alexis knew a broken man when she saw one.
She walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Police will be here in minutes. Tell them everything.’
‘Huh?’ He wasn’t lucid. His eyes were glazed over, his world destroyed. He turned to finally look at her. Took a few seconds to compute what he saw. ‘You look like someone I work with.’
‘If you could be vague with your description of me I’d appreciate it, but I understand if none of this is getting through to you. You’ve been through something horrific. I don’t have words. There aren’t words.’ She squeezed his shoulder tight. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She stripped the two dead Russians of their phones and weapons and hustled out, leaving him standing there, feet glued to the ground.
At the door she heard him call out, and she took a couple of steps back so he was in her line of sight.
He watched her, shaking. ‘Did you just save my life?’
She glanced at the woman’s body on the sofa. ‘I don’t know. I hope so.’ Then, again, ‘I’m so sorry.’
She ran out.
53
King, Slater and Frankie rendezvoused with the reinforcements in the gym’s front lot.
Danny pulled in first in a beat-up old Peugeot that King couldn’t believe was still functional. The old hatchback seemed to defy physics as it choked and spluttered into the lot, but it was more surprising that Danny even had a car, given what little King knew about his financial situation.
Frankie answered King’s silent question. ‘It’s one of my old rides. Keep it up the back of the garage. I let Danny use it when he needs to.’
So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours that King almost forgot Danny was living with Frankie.
The young man got out, hunched and subdued, and he slouched more when he spotted King. He shuffled over to them, his gait meek. He didn’t look up when he reached them.
Frankie said, ‘Stop cowering.’
Danny straightened a little. Not much.
Frankie said, ‘Look at me, kid.’
Danny complied.
Frankie said, ‘Now look at Jason.’
Danny didn’t.
Frankie said, ‘Now.’
Danny glanced at King, then immediately lowered his gaze.
Frankie stepped forward, grabbed him by the shoulders, forcefully corrected his posture. Then grabbed his chin in a clenched hand, squashing the young man’s cheeks. ‘Stop being pathetic. Yeah, you weren’t wanted earlier. But now you’re needed and that’s that. No hard feelings from anyone.’ He glanced at King. ‘Right?’
King said, ‘Right.’
Frankie let Danny go and shoved him away, hard.
King could see Danny trying desperately to bring himself out of his shell, but the shame lingered. No matter what, it would. Even when this was all done.
He thought about shooting Frankie right now, and he could see Slater thinking the same. But before either of them could act on the impulse, another car pulled into the lot, and two new guys got out. They had to be brothers, maybe even twins. Both were blonde like Carter and heavily built. They looked like they trained and competed professionally. Sizing them up, King figured they’d be light heavyweights. Their walk-around weights seemed similar, maybe two-twenty or two-thirty, and t
hey’d cut to two hundred and five pounds for competition.
They both stepped out of their Ford sedan holding compact pistols.
HKs. Top shelf stuff. Frankie must’ve provided them with the weaponry.
The fact they were openly wielding sidearms made Frankie do a double take. He addressed them together. ‘What the hell are you two doing?’
One of them shot a mean side-eye at King, then Slater. ‘Just precautionary. We heard some shit.’
Frankie seemed irate. ‘Where’d you hear shit? What shit?’
‘Carter texted us.’
‘Recently?’
King thought, Doubt it.
‘Nah. Couple hours ago. He was on the way to a job. Said there were two new guys in the crew. Said he didn’t like them. Didn’t trust them.’
Frankie shook his head. ‘I don’t want to hear a fucking word about Carter. Him and Vic and Marcus skipped town.’
This was news, apparently.
The blondes stiffened.
One of them said, ‘Did they?’
The other said, ‘All three of them?’
The first guy didn’t hide his suspicions anymore. He locked his gaze onto King. ‘How convenient.’
King said, ‘You got something to say?’
‘Big talk from the new guy.’ The man turned to Frankie. ‘You got some nerve letting him run his mouth, call the shots.’
Frankie said, ‘He doesn’t call the shots.’
‘Don’t seem that way. Could kill ’em right now, Frankie. Shoot ’em dead right here. I got a suspicion it’d be an eye for an eye.’
King didn’t move a muscle. Sized up angles, trajectories, felt the weight of Carter’s Glock in his belt. He imperceptibly inched his hand back, freeing himself up for a quick draw, if it came to that. But all the reflexes in the world don’t mean anything when you’re standing directly across from two hostiles with their guns already drawn. No matter how fast or accurate King was, they’d see what he was doing and get an instinctive shot or two off. Wasn’t worth dying here in a gym parking lot for the sake of his own ego, and out of the corner of his eye he could see Slater going through the same mental calculations.