Just Watch Me

by Jeff Lindsay

  SPLAT.

  * * *

  —

  And now it’s 3:32 and I’m still awake.

  And just like every other time that memory comes back at me, I sit up in bed in a room I don’t recognize. I’m in a midtown hotel, being somebody I have to be. Because I am on another job. A truly epic lift this time. Maybe the best and the greatest ever, and I should be excited about doing it. I should be high on adrenaline, giddy with the thought that Riley Wolfe is about to do something nobody else in the world could hope to do. And I am going to do it in the Riley Wolfe way, a way nobody else could ever even imagine. Doing it, even thinking about it, has been filling me with excitement for the last few weeks, and it should be filling me now.

  It’s not.

  All I can think about is that goddamn sound.

  SPLAT.

  I get out of bed and walk into the bathroom. I see my face in the mirror—except, of course, it’s not my face. I stare at it. For a minute I can’t remember my real face. It doesn’t help that I’m wearing somebody else’s right now. Especially somebody who doesn’t even really exist. So I stare into the mirror. I try to see Me in there somewhere. I can’t see it. I can’t remember it. I’m somebody else, and for a long minute it feels to me like I was always somebody else and I don’t know who Me is and maybe I never really existed at all except as a whole series of Somebody Else’s Faces.

  It’s that stupid fucking memory.

  It knocks me on the head every time.

  I pull my eyes away from the mirror, splash water on my face—on his face. Because it still isn’t Me.

  I straighten up from the sink and look in the mirror again. But this time I pull away and leave the bathroom. Dangerous things, mirrors. You have to watch out for them. If you’re not careful, you can get stuck in there. They hypnotize you, pull you in, take you away to a place where nothing is real, especially you. It’s hard to pull out again.

  But I manage. I sit on the edge of the bed and think for a while. The clock said it was 3:35. In a few hours, things would start happening and I needed to be alert, ready for anything. But I was pretty sure I still couldn’t go to sleep.

  I looked out the window. New York wasn’t asleep, either. It never sleeps. Just like the song says. Isn’t it nice when something lives up to its reputation?

  I thought about going out, maybe heading across town on an aimless parkour jag. That usually cleared my head, washed out whatever ailed me. But this time? It felt too much like running from something.

  So I sat on the edge of the bed. Just sat.

  After a while I stretched out with my hands behind my head. I lay there and thought about what I had to do in the morning. I lay like that for a long time, just thinking about doing it, telling myself I’d be fine, I could do it, nothing to worry about. I kept telling myself all that, over and over, until I saw morning light out the window.

  Then I got up and went out to do it.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Please don’t be impressed,” Katrina told Randall as she led him up the rose-lined path and into the house. “Really, it’s just a house.”

  “No, a house is someplace where people live,” Randall said, looking up at the glass-and-metal facade.

  “Well, for goodness’ sake,” she said. “I mean, I live here.”

  “Mm, no,” he said. “This is a castle. A place like this, I think you have to dwell.”

  Katrina opened her mouth to protest that really, she wasn’t a princess—but just in time, she caught the expression on his face. It was the look of a man trying very hard to look serious while delivering the punch line to a joke he wasn’t sure his audience would get. “In that case,” she said somewhat primly, playing along, “I shall have to demand that you enter on your knees.”

  “Ouch,” Randall said. “Very well, Your Grace.”

  And as if they were wired to the same switch, they snorted with amusement in unison.

  That was when Katrina knew they would get along very well. And over the next few hours nothing changed her mind about that. She took Randall through the whole cavernous house, and he took it all in, making notes on a small tablet, which he also used to take photos. And all along the way, they made small jokes together, discovering that they shared a slightly off-kilter, very whimsical sense of humor.

  Katrina found that Randall was everything she had hoped when she first met him. Although he was thoroughly professional and very knowledgeable, he was also warm, human—and yes, damn it, he was charming. In the few hours they spent walking through the house and making preliminary plans, Katrina realized she had smiled more than she had in the previous six months.

  And at the end of the day, Katrina watched him walk away down the path, thinking, I really like this guy. But a small nagging voice in the back of her head told her it had noticed the way she watched Randall climb into his car, her gaze lingering on his butt, and the little voice whispered, Just be careful you don’t like him a little too much.

  Throughout the next few weeks, the feeling grew. Katrina told herself it was just a friendship, two souls who had a lot in common and liked each other. But when Michael came home on one of his rare visits between business trips, she couldn’t help comparing him with Randall. Her husband did not do well by comparison. Randall was so much more . . . well, nice. Pleasant. Fun to be with, charming, funny, attentive. And if she was honest with herself, he was a great deal more attractive, too.

  Not that she would ever actually do anything about that. Even though she thought he might be having the same kind of feelings about her. She wasn’t an adolescent. She was full-grown and totally married, and as her grandfather had often said, she had made her bed and could bloody well lie down in it.

  But every now and then, she would look at Randall and feel that small warm feeling in the pit of her stomach that seemed like something more than friendship. And even though she pushed it away, it always seemed to come back.

  Nothing will ever happen with him, she told herself. It’s wrong, it’s adultery, and it just won’t happen.

  But that didn’t stop her from thinking about it.

  * * *

  —

  Michael Hobson was the problem.

  The obstacle. The stumbling block, the hurdle, the hitch, the hindrance. The bastard was in the way.

  Was “bastard” just my opinion? Because he was in my way?

  Maybe. Everybody else said Michael Hobson was a good man. He gave a lot of money to charities—especially kid’s charities. Make-A-Wish, Children’s Defense Fund, March of Dimes, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital—they all had Michael on speed dial. It didn’t stop there; he gave his time, too. He worked with the courts as an advocate for children in trouble with the law. He always said kids were important, that helping them was just something he had to do.

  But Michael’s epic goodness didn’t stop there, with helping kids. He was way too Good for that. Just to round things out, he did a lot of pro bono work for the Innocence Project, too. So anybody who looked at his record would totally have to say he did everything a truly good man could do, and a lot more. A freaking saint. And all that free work meant lost billing hours, too. At the rate Michael charged, that was a lot of money lost.

  Not that money is important, right? I mean, not when you’re doing something you love, helping kids. And anyway, Michael could afford it. Because as one of the top corporate attorneys in New York City, he made at least eight digits every year. And there was more—a lot more. In one of his early cases he’d defended the head of a big hedge fund. The guy was a true scumbag, and he got caught fair and square. But Michael Hobson went in against big odds and a federal prosecutor who wanted to run for governor, and somehow Michael won the case. Scumbag or not, the CEO was grateful enough to let Michael in on some very lucrative deals. Over the years that had grown, like only a shady hedge fund can grow, to a
total that might make a Saudi prince blink.

  So in spite of the pro bono charity work, Michael still had plenty of money, and he wasn’t bashful about spending it. There’s an old saying that Beverly Hills showed what God would do if he had money. Michael could have shown God a few tricks. He built an enormous modern house on the shore in Connecticut, on thirty acres of wooded land that sloped down to the water and looked straight across at Long Island. Lots of glass and steel and angles, and twenty-four thousand square feet of space inside. A rose-lined walkway led down to the water, where just to one side, so it wouldn’t interfere with the view, a beautiful fifty-foot Marquis sport yacht bobbed at the dock.

  There was a barn and paddock for the horses, a large attached garage with room for eight cars, and a huge infinity pool, complete with a hot tub and a cabana that was bigger and better furnished than most middle-class houses.

  Inside, the main house was totally smart-wired to a computer so you could make it do anything just by calling out the password and a command. It would even bake you a quiche and then wash your dishes, as long as you stuck them in the dishwasher. So Michael didn’t really need a domestic staff hanging around and getting all up in his privacy. Michael liked privacy. You might say he needed it.

  And the house had a high-tech, temperature-controlled wine cellar, a gigantic kitchen that any gourmet chef would envy, and a full gym. There was also a room you could call a “home theater” only because it was in a home. Aside from that, it was more luxurious and better equipped than any movie mogul’s screening room. It held both the most modern electronic equipment and a row of old-fashioned projectors, since there was a large library of classic 16- and 35-millimeter movies in an adjacent temperature-controlled vault.

  Like I said. Totally awesome house. Furnished by an incredibly rich person who didn’t mind spending it. And Michael had shown true good taste by installing a wife in the house who was a genuine trophy, the real deal. She wasn’t a bimbo with implants who’d been a stripper until she got chosen runner-up in the 2015 Miss Mango pageant. Instead, Michael had married the daughter of one of America’s great old-money families. Michael’s wife was a woman of good breeding, exquisite taste—and an enormous trust fund of her own.

  So when you looked him over, Michael Hobson was a guy who had it all. You couldn’t even hate him for it because he gave so much back, to kids and so on. He really looked like some kind of modern urban legend, and he really seemed to be what everybody said he was—a truly good man. The kind of guy who made having money look Good. A living saint.

  I killed him anyway.

  Some guys like to kill. I’m not one of them. I mean, if it has to happen, if you have to go or the job flops, okay, I’m sorry, better luck next life. But I don’t really like it. And I know it should bother me. It doesn’t. Right before, it’s like I stop being me. The Darkness comes over me, like mental armor. I go into it, and it’s not me doing stuff. It’s like I’m watching a movie in a small dark theater. Not that it’s ever fun. I usually try to find some other way first.

  I didn’t try too hard this time. Not with Michael Hobson. There wasn’t any other way. More important than that, the miserable shit deserved to die. And I didn’t mind making that happen.

  He made it pretty easy. Not just because he had it coming. But it was the middle of the night, and he had just flown in from Abu Dhabi—some kind of conference. And when he came home, he didn’t go upstairs to see his wife. No “Hi, honey, I’m home,” not for Michael Hobson. He went right to his soundproofed office, like he always did. And then he sat down and went to work.

  He had to be tired. So tired he sat with his back to the door and counted on the security system. I would have to say that’s almost always a mistake. It sure was for Michael. He turned on the system and thought that was the end of it.

  For him, it was.

  He was sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen. He was concentrating hard, and he was dead tired, and he wouldn’t have heard me if I’d come in with a brass band. Like I said, a little too easy, and that always makes me nervous. So I stopped for a few seconds, right in the doorway, and I looked around.

  The security system was a good one. I mean, it wasn’t so good I couldn’t hack it. I did. It was high-tech but pretty standard equipment—surprising how much useless crap they sell to people who could afford something better. Anyway, there were no surprises, and I was sure I’d disabled all the sensors, cameras, the whole system. But I took time to look around the office anyway, just to be sure.

  Michael had done one hell of a job on his man cave. It was a beautiful room, decorated in a very definite taste—classical masculine leather and dark wood—and absolutely no care about what it cost. Two walls were set with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves full of law books and other reference volumes. One wall was all glass and looked down a sloping wooded lawn to Long Island Sound. On the wall opposite the window, there was a painting I knew right away. It was one of Edouard-Henri Avril’s erotic pictures. Some of them can bring a pretty good price. This one showed an older man with a much younger one. It looked like the original. But I didn’t see any sign of overlooked security measures or anything else that might give me trouble. I eased the door shut behind me and took a breath. And then—

  The Darkness came. I stepped into it.

  I watched my feet move quietly across the room. I got closer . . . And Michael Hobson just kept staring at his computer screen like his life depended on it. It didn’t. But it sure helped me end it.

  He had no idea I was there. He yawned and stretched once, and I froze. But then he went right back to his computer screen. I saw myself slip across the floor to a spot behind him, and he still didn’t notice a thing. But he sure as hell noticed it when my gloved hand clamped over his mouth. He noticed even more when I jammed the razor-sharp blade into his neck. In fact, he noticed that for a full fifteen seconds, as the blade went in and out several more times.

  That wasn’t really necessary. My first stab had been perfect. It slid in just right and severed his spinal cord. The stabs after that were just for show. Michael tried to struggle, wriggle away from the pain and the gloved hand. He tried—but for some reason his limbs didn’t listen to him. Maybe the cut spinal cord.

  So he just sat there, trying to move, trying to moan, not making any progress with either one. He just sat until his sight went dim and his body started to relax. And then Michael Hobson stopped struggling and just let go, sliding down the long dark slope into nothing at all.

  I was sure he was dead. That first stab had been placed perfectly. But I waited anyway. Not for any creepy ghoulish reason. I’ve watched the terrible and beautiful trip down the Dark Hall into death before. I don’t get off on it. But I watched and waited a full minute anyway, just to be sure. And after a minute, I was. Michael Hobson was dead.

  And just like that, the Darkness blew away. I blinked. I looked at the dead body, but it didn’t matter. It was just an empty suit, and I had real work to do.

  I had a picture to paint. Still Life with Dead Asshat. And I had to get every brushstroke just exactly right. I started with the lifeless body. When I let it go, Michael’s head flopped forward and thumped onto the computer’s keyboard. I took one step back, looked him over. Something was a little off; it looked like I had dropped him. I mean, I had—but I didn’t want it to look like that. I readjusted one arm so it looked like he had raised the arm to defend himself and then dropped it when he died. Much better picture. Next, I took a small Ziploc bag from my jacket pocket. Inside was a short piece of what looked like ordinary Scotch tape. It wasn’t. It was a specialty item, well-known to forensics geeks, designed to lift fingerprints. I took the tape out of the bag carefully. Then laid it onto the handle of the blade sticking out of Michael Hobson’s back. Gently, steadily, I rubbed the back of the tape. Then, just as carefully, I peeled up the tape and took a look.

  A clear set of finger
prints in a light brown powder now stood out on the handle of the blade. Right where they should be. I put the tape back in the bag and the bag back in my pocket.

  From a different pocket, I took out a second plastic bag. I opened it and took out a few thin fibers, too small and light to be wire—hairs. Human hairs, belonging to somebody very specific. I put one beside the knife’s handle, one on the floor beside the desk, and a couple more on the dead guy’s hand and shirtfront.

  I stepped back again and looked; so far, it was perfect. Now for the kill shot.

  I pulled out a file drawer from the left side of the desk. Taped to the back of the drawer was a flash drive. I held it up and looked to be sure. Yup. This was the Money. In block letters, the flash drive was labeled “TRUE MENTOR.” This was something Michael hid, in a place where nobody would find it but where he could get at it quick and easy when he wanted a peek. Which he did a lot. This was the real Michael Hobson.

  “Bastard,” I said softly. Just holding it in my hand made me want to kill him all over again. But there was still work to do. So before I could puke and ruin the picture, I pushed the flash drive into a USB port on Michael’s computer. Using the keyboard was a little awkward. I had to work around the lifeless head lying there. But I managed. In a few seconds, images came up on the screen. I didn’t want to look, but I had to be sure.

  They were the right pictures, all right. “Fucking bastard,” I whispered again. Couldn’t help it. And anyway, Michael Hobson wasn’t going to hear me. I turned away from the pictures. If I looked any longer, I really would puke. I didn’t want to see them, even by accident. But Michael Hobson did. Or he had.

  Almost done. I stepped back and looked the scene over. It was close to perfect—but “close” is never enough. It needed one more dramatic touch. My eyes fell on Michael’s briefcase. Yup, that was it. I knocked it onto the floor and scattered a few pages from inside it onto the carpet. Now the scene told it all: dramatic struggle ending in tragic death. The body sprawled across the desk, obviously murdered. A very small drip of blood had made a stain on the carpet—a true fucking tragedy, because it was beautiful Persian, probably seventeenth-century and therefore worth a great deal of money. Unfortunately the bloodstain would lower the price. A shame, but unavoidable—and worth it in any case.