by Rachel Kane
“I’m not a man who likes to waste time,” growled Grumman. “Yet here I am, miles from my office, dealing with an issue my lawyers should have been able to take care of easily. How do you suppose that makes me feel, Trent Sinclair?”
Trent assumed the question was rhetorical, so did not answer. Or maybe he was just too scared to speak.
Grumman removed a cigar from his inner coat pocket. He rolled it in his fingers before bringing it to his lips. “You’re inconsistent,” he said to Trent. “Weak. One minute you’re testifying. The next you’re not. Now I get word that the trial is on, and you’re back in the spotlight. It’s one thing to make your opponents play guessing games. I could respect that. But what you’ve done here is simply vacillation.”
Trent found his voice. “What are you going to do with me?”
“Nah,” said Grumman. “That’s not the conversation we’re having.” He shook his head, then lit his cigar. His lighter’s long yellow flame outshone the oil lanterns lit around the cabin. It seemed unnatural, dangerous.
“Then why am I here? So you can threaten me more? So you can kill me? Do you think you’re going to get away with it that easily? What’s Harlan Marlowe going to do when his star witness doesn’t show up?”
Grumman shrugged. “Why is that my problem? I’ll tell you what’ll happen. People will point fingers. People will tut-tut. And Springer will remind everyone what a flake you are, and then people will assume you’ve run off to Mexico. That doesn’t concern me; the problem takes care of itself. No, I am here to have a conversation with you.”
“We could have talked in the city.”
“What, you don’t like the little cabin here? From what I heard, you liked it just fine when your boyfriend was here.”
Trent took a deep breath. He realized Grumman was playing with him. The man might have something he wanted to say to Trent, but what he enjoyed most was dragging this out. Making Trent sweat.
The only way to fight it was to stand there and be as stoic as he could. Don’t show fear. Don’t react. Trent crossed his arms.
Grumman puffed on his cigar; the room filled with its sweet scent. “Fine. To business. You need to know that I never meant to hurt those kids.”
“You dumped toxic waste near a school. What did you expect to happen?”
“I expected the fucking contractor to contain the waste, like I paid for. Not to bury unsealed barrels and pocket the cash. But don’t you worry. I took care of him. Justice has been done.”
“It’s still your chemicals. Some of those kids got really sick.”
“You think I haven’t paid a price? When the state came after me, it cost me. You don’t want to know how much money I had to spread around to get off. And now my name is tainted. Funny how new contracts stop coming in when people think you poisoned a bunch of schoolchildren.”
He spoke so openly about it. Like he believed Trent would never be able to tell anyone what he heard in this room.
“You haven’t paid the right price,” said Trent. “What about the hospital bills? What about the cleanup?”
“Nah. The state will handle the cleanup. Eventually. As for the hospital bills, I ask you, what would it look like if I went around paying those? I might as well sign all the checks Guilty Grumman.”
“Like the bribes weren’t proof enough of your guilt.”
“What do you want me to say?” asked Grumman. “I employ three thousand people in this city. I’ve got distributors driving all over the country. If I go under, where are those people going to work? What’s going to happen to their families, their children, if the jobs go away and there’s no food on the table?”
“Should I be glad that you’re concerned about someone? Does that make it better that you’re going to kill me?”
“All you had to do was back down. What did you think was going to happen to you, Trent? What made you think, after you heard that talk in the bathroom, that you should go rushing to lawyers?”
It was strange to think that this might be the last conversation he would ever have. After this, maybe they would take him to the woods, and get it over with, and there would never be any other topic of conversation ever again.
He couldn’t understand how he felt about that. It was an emotion he had never experienced before. Something beyond fear, beyond anger. It felt like electricity inside him, tingling and popping.
He didn’t want to spend the last conversation of his life circling around things. Hadn’t he done that all his life? Never getting to the point, always afraid to say what was really on his mind?
“Tell me something,” he said to Grumman, “because this whole time, I have not been able to figure it out. Why come after me like this? Why my safety, my job, my life? Why didn’t you just offer to cut me a fat check to buy my silence, the way you did with so many other people?”
Grumman removed his cigar from his mouth. He turned it in his fingers, staring at the ember, with its frosting of ash. “You don’t get to be in my position without knowing people. Knowing them pretty damn well. You learn to size up an opponent in a second. Find their weak spots, their strengths; it’s all written in the face. You walked in on my conversation, and I looked at you. You knew exactly what I was talking about. And you weren’t afraid. Not like you are now. Not like you almost always are; I’ve seen all the pictures my investigators took of you. Most of the time you run around all hunched over like you’re terrified. But I saw the look you gave me that night. I had hurt your school, the kids you worked with every day. There was nothing in that look about fear. There was nothing but hate, and anger, and revenge. I knew then that you were going to be an opponent, and that there was no way I could get you onto my side.”
Trent sank onto the stool on the other side of the room.
“Here,” said Grumman, “I’ll prove it to you. I’m going to offer you ten thousand dollars. How about that? That’s enough for a new start. Go move somewhere else. Get a nice job, nice clothes, nice boyfriend. Yeah? In return, I never see you again. You don’t testify. You don’t even know who Harlan and Dodi Marlowe are anymore. You don’t answer their calls.”
“You’re going to give me ten thousand dollars?”
“Listen to the acid in your voice! Do you hear it?” Grumman smacked one of the hitmen’s arms and laughed. “That’s what I’m talking about! Before I finished writing the check, you’d have already thought of a plot to come after me. Yeah, see, it’s you coming after me. What choice do I have?”
And Trent realized that was true. What else did he have to lose? His life? What was a life worth, if he didn’t have integrity and honesty? How could he be happy living as a coward, knowing he had failed the kids who got sick?
It was then that he understood he would not beg for his life. There wasn’t going to be any pleading, any promising not to talk.
And from the look Grumman gave him, he knew they understood each other.
There really was no hope. He was going to die up here.
32
“I’ve tried to call him five times,” said Jace, the jeep hurtling towards Harlan’s office.
The wind made it hard to hear Harlan’s voice on the phone. “He’s probably screening your calls. You’re broken up, remember?”
“I’m telling you, he’s in danger.”
“Based on what, Jace? You keep insisting Trent is in trouble. But Grumman has already punished him. What else do you expect to happen?”
“You know exactly what else I expect to happen.” He’d described his conversation with David’s mother to Harlan earlier.
“He’s probably fine. But okay. Hold on, while I’ve got you on the line, I’m texting Dodi. She’ll call his mom’s house. It’s going to be okay, Jace.”
His tires screeched as he slammed to a stop at a red light. Car horns blared behind him. Breathless, he pressed the phone harder against his ear, as though it would make him hear the words more quickly.
“Problem,” said Harlan. “Dodi’s on the phone with T
rent’s mom. He’s not there. He got a call from a lawyer and left. His mom thought it was a call from us, so she didn’t worry.”
“Oh shit,” said Jace. He rubbed his hand across his forehead, then pounded the steering wheel. “How do I find him, man? Grumman owns half the buildings in this city. He could be anywhere.”
To his credit, Harlan didn’t suggest calling the police. They both knew that would not get results. “Okay, I have an idea. Maybe we can track his phone.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I know a guy. Don’t ask. How quickly can you get to the office?”
Jace looked up at the street signs, and moved forward as the light turned green. “Be there in a sec.”
Harlan and Dodi were studying the screen of a laptop. They were with a man Jace didn’t recognize. Jace had taken up three parking spaces downstairs and pounded his way up to Harlan’s office.
Dodi gave him a concerned look. “How are you holding up?” she asked him. “It has been a crazy day.”
“I’ll be better once we find him,” said Jace.
She reached up and squeezed his shoulder. “Ronald here knows his stuff. Don’t worry.”
The man at the laptop was busily tapping his way through screens. Without looking at Jace, he said, “You’re the bodyguard?”
“That’s me. How are you tracking him?”
“I’m not, yet. First I have to find him. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV; we’re not going to get a nice map with a big red arrow pointing to him.” More tapping. “You don’t know if he had an anti-theft app on his phone, do you? Bonus question if you know his username and password for that app.”
Jace shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t.”
“Okay. That would’ve been the easiest option. We’ll need to do it the hard way.”
Ronald glanced behind him at the three siblings. “Like I said, this isn’t like TV. You may as well sit down for a while.”
“What’s that?” asked Harlan, pointing at the envelope in Jace’s hands.
“Nothing,” said Jace. He hadn’t even realized he’d brought it in, he’d been so mindless about getting here quickly and finding out about Trent. “Some old pictures and things.”
Harlan shook his head. “Old pictures? You’re becoming the sentimental type.”
Jace opened the envelope and looked inside. Photographs. Their mere presence brought a strange smile to his face. That was David. The whole world moves to keep their pictures on their phones, but David wanted real things, things he could hold.
Dodi looked over his shoulder, as he pulled the pictures out. “You look so young. So angry.”
“It wasn’t that long ago,” said Jace.
He studied the pictures. They were mostly of Jace himself. These weren’t couple pictures to share with the world. They were private, intimate without being explicit in any way. Jace staring into his coffee, his hands wrapped around the mug. Jace at the window, looking out at trees as though they might be hiding a threat. Jace asleep.
It wasn’t just that Jace kept pushing away the people he loved. It was that he pushed away the people that loved him. That was the hardest part, being loved. Being observed, the way David observed him with the camera.
The way Trent had observed him at the spring.
To be the watched, rather than the watcher, was such a vulnerable position. When he got Trent back (when, not if), Jace was going to have to work on being less controlling. Less of a bodyguard, checking every action and thought, and more of a boyfriend. An equal partner.
He wasn’t going to cry in front of everybody. He was too angry, too upset, too afraid, to let his guard down right now. But he felt the tears prick his eyes, as he thought of Trent being held somewhere, afraid and in danger. It made him want to get up and move right now. But there was nowhere to go, not yet.
Dodi took one of the stacks of photos, and looked idly through them. “Such a handsome little brother,” she said. “I like this one of you asleep.” She flipped it over. “What’s this?”
“What’s what?”
She pointed to writing on the back of the picture. “It looks like a web address.”
“I don’t recognize it,” he said. “Maybe some place David ordered photo prints from?”
She looked at the back of the other pictures. Each one had a different address. “Handwritten? I don’t think so,” she said.
Harlan leaned over to look. “Oh, hell,” he said.
They all looked down at the back of one photo. There was a long, complicated web address written there, in David’s spidery handwriting. And the final word in the address was: grumman.html.
While Ronald worked feverishly on his own laptop, they turned to the computer on Harlan’s desk. Harlan peered from picture to keyboard, slowly typing in the address.
“Damn, type faster!” said Jace.
“I don’t do my own typing! I have a secretary for that!”
Finally, after several agonizing moments watching Harlan tap in letters, erase them, and tap them in again, the web page loaded.
There was simply a video window. Harlan clicked play.
David’s face filled the screen. “Hi, whoever is watching this. I’m David Mathis. Which you already know, if you’re Mom. Or maybe it’s Jace out there? That would be funny. Not ha-ha funny.”
His face fell. “If you are watching this, I’m probably dead now. That’s a weird thing to say. It’s tough to recognize when you’ve crossed that line, when you’ve done something you know is so dangerous it’s going to be the death of you.”
Jace almost reached out to touch the screen.
“So this video, and the websites associated with it, are my revenge. For the past six months I’ve been on the trail of Wallace Grumman, the dirtiest businessman this city has ever seen. I’ve found evidence of illegal business practices in every corner of his company, from waste disposal, to bribes for sweet state contracts, but it goes further than that. There is also evidence that he has planned several assaults, kidnappings, and murders. This guy is a monster. And now he’s after me. Since you’re watching this, I assume that I was killed before I could finish my story. So what’s in here isn’t a clear narrative. It’s pieces, and someone else is going to have to pull them together. But it’s insurance. Because if I have to go down for this, I want Grumman to pay.”
Ronald said, “We’ve got something.”
They paused David and turned to Ronald’s computer. He pointed to several lines of numbers. “These are the GPS coordinates for his phone.”
“Is that where he is? Where is that?” asked Jace.
“No. There’s no current location on him. He’s out of range, apparently. No phone towers near him.”
“Then…then…”
“This is where he was last, before the signal was lost.” Ronald copied the numbers over into a map program, and hit return.
“Oh my god,” said Dodi.
“They took him to the cabin?” said Harlan.
Jace was already up and headed for the door.
“You’ll be on the road too long!” said Dodi.
“I don’t have time to talk about it,” said Jace. “I’ve got to get to him.”
That sinking fear. It was such a long drive. So much time for the unthinkable to happen.
“Wait,” said Harlan. “Wait.” An angry smile broke out across his face. “I know a faster way.”
33
As the borrowed helicopter hurtled through the night, Jace learned something new about himself: He was not good with flight. Jets were okay; you could pull the shade down, or get an aisle seat, and pretend you weren’t moving that much. But the motion of the helicopter, and the unavoidably loud throb of its engine, and the visibility straight down, were combining to make him feel weak and sick. Or maybe it was just the stress, the effect of adrenaline coursing through him for hours and hours. He thought about closing his eyes and taking deep breaths, but he felt like he had to watch the ground zipping past them bel
ow, as the city was left behind, and they crossed over forests and fields on the way to the mountains.
They had lucked out; Harlan had a rich client who used this helicopter to get back and forth to his weekend retreat at the shore. Midweek, it sat unused but ready to go. A few phone calls, and what felt like an interminably long preflight checklist, and Jace was in the air. Dodi and Harlan had insisted on coming, but he had been just as firm that they must not. They had things to do here.
He wanted to be set down right in the clearing near the cabin, but the pilot had vetoed that idea. Too many trees, too dark, too unfamiliar. So they made arrangements over the radio to set down at the small hospital in town.
A short jog from the hospital to the downtown strip got him to his truck. All the stores were closed this time of night, and the parking spots were empty, except for the truck, which he slid into and slammed the door.
It took some coaxing to get the motor started after its days off. With each turn of the key and press of the gas, he felt valuable seconds slipping away. But finally the engine caught. He slammed into reverse, pulling out and then racing out of the tiny town, towards the cabin.
What if I’m too late? The thought plagued him as he got closer. What if another tire blows?
But the tires held, and the truck didn’t die, and soon he was near the road to the cabin.
The truck was loud, and he didn’t want to announce he was coming, so he slid to a halt just off the road, and began a silent run further up the hill, circling so he could see the whole scene.
There were three cars parked near the cabin. One man stood guard outside. Lights flickered inside. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief; if they were still there, then Trent must still be okay. Right?
The guard was being lazy. He sat on the hood of the car, facing opposite of Jace. When Jace punched him in the side of the head, the guard slid off the car to the ground. Jace picked up the guard’s gun and went to the cabin door.
One breath, then hold and listen. Voices inside. Did he hear Trent? Yes. Second breath, then hold. His body stilled. His focus contracted around a single point. No room in his mind for any extraneous thoughts. Save Trent was the only thing there was room for anymore.