by Will Mosley
“Heather, come on. The bathroom?”
“Please, Phil.”
Phil escorted her, following close behind until she entered the unisex lavatory. He stepped inside only a second after her, which elicited a head turn and an incredulous “Huh?” She wasn't expecting him to listen to her pee, he knew. Regardless, she entered the last stall and locked the door. Phil listened as she unzipped her dress and lowered the toilet seat.
“Assholes. Why can't they just put the seat down when they finish?” She whispered.
Phil smiled. “Why can't chicks raise it up when they're finished?”
“Point taken.” Heather said, her voice echoing in the small room.
Several seconds elapsed and Heather's stall was silent; no farting, no grunts to aid in the movement of feces, not even pee splashing in the toilet.
“What are you doing in there?” Phil said and unholstered his Glock.
“I can't go when I know someone's listening.” She said, girlishly.
“Seriously? What about when you copped-a-squat around fifteen soldiers in Croatia? How 'bout Somalia? China? Afghanistan?”
“Ah! You're bringing up the good old days. It's different here, though. It's so formal and all. A girl expects a certain level of privacy, you know?”
“Privacy my ass!” Phil approached the stall and peeked through the crack between the door and the threshold. “You're not even on the pot!”
“What the hell, PK?” She yelled once she saw him and held her hands up to block his view, but it was too late.
“You gotta get out of here, now!” Phil switched his Glock to his left hand and reached for the handle on the stall door with his right. It was a rookie move; too late to take back the decision and he knew it the moment he stuck his hand out. A tiny white spark jumped from the door to his hand a second before he grabbed the handle, but his mind had not communicated the danger fast enough, and instead of yanking his hand back to safety and escorting Heather from the premises, he latched onto the metallic handle and felt the first few thousand muscle wrenching volts of electricity course through his body before he blacked out.
The door violently rattled as Heather imagined Phil's clinched teeth and tightened facial muscles try to release a scream for help against his seized muscles. She listened to the slide of the Glock clank against the tile, then his body collapse to the floor in a limp puddle. She released the trigger of her stun gun, touched the door with the back of her hand to make sure the current was gone, opened it and pushed Phil's balled up body aside. She locked the bathroom door then took Phil's boots off and tossed them aside. His fit frame made removing his pants a simple task. She heaved him onto the toilet seat in a sitting position and used the pant legs to tie his torso to the pipe behind the toilet. “Sorry, old friend.” she muttered when he was secure. Once more she activated her stun gun, hitting him with a precautionary serge of voltage. His body gyrated, his feet kicked wildly until the current stopped.
The windows were alarm activated and not an option for escape. But, as she looked to the air conditioning vent, always keeping several options open for escape as her training had taught, she knew that the most capable person in the building to stop her was now sitting in the stall behind her. Why not take the front door?
She stopped by Luke's office once more and silently watched him type an email until he noticed her.
“Holy crap, Heady!” Luke's lanky body shuttered in surprise.
“You don't have a girlfriend, Luke. Who are you emailing?”
“By God, you scared me and that's not some easy feat considering my skills in archery.” With one extended finger, he swiveled his chair towards her. “And I'll have you know, I have a girlfriend. You do not know the extent of my vast collection of sexual deviants.”
“True. But the chances of that are low.” She smiled.
“Too low.” Luke laughed. “Just emailing my buddy Brian and waiting here on your call. But since you're still here –,”
“Forget the call, Luke. Get your team together and meet me at the location we discussed.”
“At the –,”
“Luke!” She looked to the far corner of the room at the darkened, half dome concealing a video camera that jutted from the ceiling, leading Luke to follow her with his eyes.
“Oh! Right!”
“Not the right place to talk about that. Meet me there at noon. Bring the things we talked about, and leave them with something playful.”
Spring gusts tossed Heather's Ford Focus around easily, leading her to veer into other lanes. The sun was warm and cast blinding white light from a sky the color of swimming pools.
Heather Luzader put on her shades after a red Honda Accord cut her off. “Watch where you're going, bitch!” A smirking man yelled from the Accord, satisfied with himself that his epithet was directed at a woman. In a former life, she would've taken down the man's license plate number and paid him an unsuspecting visit late one night while the wife and kids were asleep. If she hadn't sensed that the cars behind her were unchanging, she would have done so.
She continued driving in the light traffic with both hands on the steering wheel as she looked in the rear view mirror and made a mental checklist of the cars surrounding hers and their colors. She approached the red traffic light, stopped and double checked her mental list of cars. Some had swapped positions, but the cars were the same. This soon? She thought, understanding that the company took many safe guards in protecting their secrets. That, or, they really did believe that the transmission was of great importance, as she believed.
As the traffic light changed to green and cars began moving, she steadied her speed five miles per hour below the rest of traffic and took note of the proximity of the cars surrounding her. Two Toyota Tundras – one red, one gun metal gray – found gaps beside her, along with a black Camry and a red Jeep Grand Cherokee. Four cars were subtracted from her mental list and five were left to choose from, though she had already found the two cars she was looking for: A Dodge Journey and a Dodge Caravan, both silver, both nestled three cars deep behind her, both not changing lanes to get around a slow moving vehicle, and both were American. The company didn't buy foreign.
Suddenly and without the aid of a blinker, she switched several lanes to a chorus of horns and made a hard right onto Newberry Avenue. Once on Newberry, she saw that the traffic light had just blinked from yellow to red and that cars were slowing. She maneuvered her Focus through the cars, carefully ran the red light, and turned into oncoming traffic. More horns blared, but even more drivers veered out of terror. Several road signs read 'One way', or 'Do Not Enter', and in the shade of its tall buildings she parked on the left side of the road, turned on her hazard lights and waited.
Though, by car, she was no more than two minutes away from her destination, it was vital that this tail didn't follow her there. She didn't want them knowing what she had cooked up to solve the transmission riddle. They had the money and the muscle to not only get the needed information, but to follow it through to its completion. She only had a few techies, a handful of field operators that she could call, and hoped they'd answer when they saw her number pop up, and a severance check for $93,855.32; a nice investment for something that would prove far more valuable.
As she waited just past the intersection, under the shade of a block long office building only separated from the street by a sidewalk, she thought about her own copy of the transmission – not nearly as crisp as the original, but the original wasn't of very good quality anyway – that she had added to Dropbox. Eventually her property would be illegally searched by the company, and if they found that file, that would guarantee her 15 years to analyze her mistake at Levenworth. After she realized that the transmission was of great importance, after telling the senior officials at the company and being laughed away, making her own copy became a priority. She bought a used Acer laptop from a garage sale, made sure the thing worked, then removed the hard drive since the company didn't allow personal computers in
the building. Along with a Parallel ATA cable, she took the 2.5 inch hard drive to work, downloaded the transmission and was able to leave the building that day without any conflict. After reinserting the hard drive to the computer, she found public Wifi access, downloaded the Dropbox software, signed in with a fake email address and uploaded the transmission. Keeping the file anywhere other than a public network, could eventually be traced back to her. She even briefly thought of giving a copy of it to her mother, Kathy, for safe keeping, but that would be child's play for the goons at the company, and they'd find a way of making sure dear old Kathy Luzader paid a penalty as well.
She removed her cell phone from the cup holder, and on the screen, touched the Dropbox application. Within seconds, the lone transmission file appeared as, 'Abigails_birthday_song.mp3', on the Graphical Interface. The first part of the three minute and forty-five second sound file actually was a recording of her niece Abigail's second birthday party. Heather had edited the file so that the birthday party clip of the sound file lasted two minutes and twenty seconds. Then, a brief pause. For one minute and ten seconds, the entirety of the transmission played. After the transmission was over, the recording of Abigail digging into her birthday cake, and parents taking turns cooing over their little girl, played for the remaining minute and thirteen seconds.
She stared at the 'play' icon because she wanted to, once more, listen to a moment of it. Maybe she'd be able to make out whose voice was whose this time, maybe even understand what they are talking about. The file had become an obsession and for a moment, she wondered if that fixation had caused her to pay less attention to the operation, leading to her dismissal. A second later, she knew that no fixation with anything could have led to that fiasco.
Her thumb hovered over the icon a moment longer making small midair circles before she pressed the lock button on the side of the device, securing the phone's content behind a black screen, and put it back into her purse. “I have self-control. I can wait.” She said.
She kept her eyes on the rear view mirror waiting for either of the two vehicles to pass behind her. But as she waited, someone knocked hard on her driver side window. Startled, she turned, sliding her hand to the Glock in the small of her back, but saw that it was only a graying, long-haired man in a tie-dyed shirt. She rolled the window down about two inches.
“I don't have any money for you.”
“What? Any money for –? Listen here,” He said, only half angry. “you're parked on the wrong side of the street, for one thing,” The man looked down and pointed, motioning with his eyes that Heather follow his finger. She didn't need his direction to know where she was. “Half your damned car is on the sidewalk, and you're blocking my store, man. What are trying to do to me?”
“Sir, I'm just –,”
“For God's sake, man, it's already hard enough to sell flowers! I have a good mind to call the cops out here.”
She waved him back from the car, then opened the door and stepped out. Her elegant neck, subtle curvature and toned legs – shimmering as if they'd been buffed and polished – softened men into lumps of dough. “Listen, sir, I can assure you that I'm not trying to reduce your clientele. My car broke down and I had to get off the road.” She said, and the lie sounded like a good way to lose the tail.
Heather watched him soak her up. “Well, uh, y-you want me to take a look at it for you? Probably just something small. I can probably fix it for you if you'd like.” She had long since been use to her effect on men and now used it as a means of manipulation.
“No. But, thank you. I've called a wrecker. They should be here shortly. I'm so sorry that this is effecting your –,”
“Oh, shoot,” He shrugged and waved the apology away. “Don't you worry about that. I'm not very busy anyway.” He giggled with the prepubescent gaiety of a ten year-old boy. “You just take your time with it. I'm going to go back in and see to this customer, but let me know if you need anything, alright?”
“Well, since I am inconveniencing you, I would like to pick up some Orchids in a vase, if you have them.” The man smiled. So astonished by her and her request, he couldn't string together any group of words that would convey his delight. He simply nodded repeatedly, gave her a thumbs up, and disappeared into his shop.
Heather opened the car door, reached inside her purse, removed her phone, then quickly moved behind a brick wall separating the flower shop and a law office. She kept her eyes on the side mirror watching the flow of traffic moving away from her and the intersection they passed, then dialed the Hertz. She told the rental agent that her car broke down and that she was leaving the car in front of the Maharishi Flowers because she had to get to work. While on hold with the agent, in the car's side mirror, she watched as the two Dodge vehicles passed behind her. Neither driver looked in her direction, probably assuming that it would be implausible for someone to drive the wrong way on a one-way street. Soon after they passed, the agent came back on the phone and said that a wrecker was in route. Heather went inside paid for her Orchids and continued her two mile walk on foot.
Mild mannered and more reserved than many other young men returning from Vietnam, Heath Walter Luzader Jr., wanted boys. Not just a singular boy, but a house full of them. And if in vitro fertilization had been inexpensive in the early 70's, or if he had had enough money to pay, he would have made sure that the doctor who performed the procedure was paid handsomely to guarantee a litter of boys; one at a time, twins, triplets, it didn't matter. There was a legacy that had to be upheld. From the American Revolution through the Vietnam conflict, in which he served, a Luzader had served his country faithfully. Only his grandfather, William Heath Luzader, held the honor of actually dying in combat, spilling his blood for the flag at the Battle of Cantigny during World War I. Heath himself had only suffered a severely twisted ankle and gun shot in his forearm, which he kept hidden for several weeks fearing that the Army would send him home on a medical discharge.
Unfortunately for Heath, Kathy and new baby – who would have been born into this world Heath Walter Luzader III – a baby boy was not in his genes. Heath cursed his mother and her five sisters for that misfortune. So bereft that his first child was not a male that once Kathy had given birth, he slept in the car and left the nurses to take care of his wife for two days. When he saw Kathy on the third day, she told him that she named the child Heather Waltna Luzader – Kathy's attempt at appeasement. It had not only angered him and seemed to be Kathy's way of assuring that the name Heath would be taken by a woman and never used again, but his word would be the last and even if he had to go through seven, or eight daughters to get a son, he would have at least one Luzader male. With his normal demeanor shattered, and frustration from anti-war sentiment and 'the daughter' issue, a new more temperamental, more violent and less tolerant man evolved. Having to contend with his blistering scorn, she didn't bother telling him – then, or ever – that there were complications during the pregnancy and that her uterus would not bear another child.
He had dealt with situations far greater than not having a male heir exactly when he wanted it. But this seemed more dire than facing hailing gunfire during Tet, or trying to cover up the injury’s that followed, because this was a situation within in his home that he had no control over. Sex was no longer an act of pleasure. It was reduced to slamming groins, grunts, emotionless pumping until seeds were delivered and swam to their destination, fruitlessly.
Though their staunch Catholicism forbade divorce, it apparently did not forbade beating wives and daughters with leather belts when in alcohol induced stupors.
Heather grew up quickly realizing that, in the Luzader household, there was no one to turn to except herself. Early in school, she excelled, though there was no reward besides pain waiting for her at home. As time passed, Kathy, once an outspoken, bra-less hippie, became a recluse, docile and weak – the definition of what Heather loathed in women.
Thinking about it now, walking through the parking lot of a shopping center, try
ing to stay away from any main street, she was almost glad that cancer had taken him the way he had taken the vibrancy from Kathy. Almost. She had the talent of seeing past his male chauvinism, his drunken binges, his beatings, to see that in the former man turned monster, was a wealth of knowledge about survival and desire to move forward. Although that hadn't been the case with her birth, every man was allowed at least one mistake – even if it killed him. Kathy, on the other hand, even if her mind and body weren't broken, there would be very little in that well of life experience from a silver spoon fed Ivy league drop-out, in which to learn. But like her father, she couldn't choose parents.
The white brick of Autumn Gardens rest home was like blocks of talc, camouflage for the dogwood petals that floated across the property in broken pearl strings.
On the lawn sprinkled like weathered Studebakers and Edsels, wheelchairs sat idle as their frozen and forgotten occupants stared deep into the past, attempting to manifest it and break free from the confinement of age. They were oblivious to Heather as she passed by them. Movement came from an old woman who jostled a walker about as she slowly crept along the walk way. Heather smiled and nodded.
“Orchids!” The lady said. Her faded blue eyes opened in surprise and she covered her mouth with a trembling hand. “Oh my, aren't they lovely.” Heather slowed her pace slightly, allowing the elderly woman to imbibe their beauty before continuing. “Oh my.” She repeated to herself. “Emerson brought me Orchids on our second date,” She spoke the words at the flowers, not glancing up at Heather at all, as if the flowers floated aimlessly past her, becoming her vehicle to another time, then continued talking to herself as Heather entered the facility.
The light in the main room was low. On the television, Maury Povich embarrassed some young man, ruining his future job prospects, and the cool air smelled so much like warm sugar cookies that Heather could taste the crunch of granulated crystals between her teeth. She stood at the entrance for several seconds, returning the stares of old men, feeling uneasy and molested by doing so, and unable to completely ignore Maury. A female attendant in purple scrubs strolled into the main room from a hallway, popping chewing gum and humming.