by Peter May
“It was fun shooting myself to put you off the scent, and letting Dark do the dirty work. But I knew the hero in you would think I was in danger and come charging in like a knight in shining armour. It took you a while, though. I was waiting almost two hours for you to show. Almost began to doubt you.”
She took several steps back.
“Get up now, Michael. It’s time.”
“I can’t.”
“Get up!” Her voice became shrill.
Michael rolled over on to his knees and grabbed the edge of her writing bureau, trying to get himself to his feet. But his legs wouldn’t hold him. He was too far gone now to feel fear any more. But he knew he was going to die, and something in him was resigned to it.
In the distance he heard the sound of the police siren and knew that it was his death knell. She would have to do the deed before they arrived. And he speculated, as he had many times during the past months, on whether there really was an afterlife. And if there was, if he might meet Mora there again. There was comfort in the thought, even although deep down he couldn’t really bring himself to believe it.
He looked up as she raised her arm to point the gun directly at him, and he closed his eyes to brace himself for the impact of the bullets.
He heard the shots. Three of them. But felt nothing, and he wondered if death really came that quickly. He opened his eyes in time to see Angela stagger backwards, blood pulsing from three closely grouped wounds in the centre of her chest. She sat down abruptly in the armchair where he had sat so many times in the dark talking about Mora. Her arm fell away to the side, the handgun slipping from her fingers to hit the floor with a thump. Her eyes were wide, startled, staring off into some unseen distance. And Michael knew that she was dead.
He slid down to the floor and rolled over, propping himself on one elbow, and saw Angela’s killer standing in the doorway, the gun that shot her still raised.
He frowned, confused, and thought that maybe he really was dead after all. Angela’s killer was the elderly, silver-haired lady from the Starbucks coffee shop on Balboa Island. Her hand was trembling as she lowered the gun. “When I bought this, I took a course in care and maintenance,” she said. “It included eight lessons in loading, targeting, and firing. I never ever thought I would actually shoot someone with it.”
“Who are you?” Michael’s voice was barely a whisper.
The sound of it seemed to awaken her, as if she was just emerging from some daydream, or maybe a nightmare. She hurried over to kneel down beside him.
“Oh, my dear, that looks bad.”
He looked up into her pale blue eyes and saw her concern.
“Who are you?” he asked again.
For a moment she avoided his gaze, before turning her eyes directly to meet his. “I’m Doobie,” she said. “I thought maybe you might need some help.”
CHAPTER FORTY
The Orange County Superior court in Santa Ana stood back from the road in Civic Center Drive, behind a screen of trees and bushes. A modern building of concrete and glass. Reflecting that, the courtroom itself seemed to lack the gravitas of many older courts—buildings which owed more in architecture and design to the influence of the Europeans.
But the hearing itself had been grave enough. The subjects under discussion—fraud, theft, and murder. Being decided here was what culpability, if any, could be placed at the door of Michael Kapinsky for the murder of Janey Amat, and the subsequent shooting of Angela Monachino. As well as whether there were sufficient grounds to charge him in connection with the theft of more than three million dollars.
Michael had been dreading it. After five weeks of recuperation from his stabbing, he had finally been deemed fit enough to go before a judge, and the stress of it seemed to make his shoulder ache all the more.
Now, as his legal team walked him from the courtroom, he could barely believe that, finally, it was over. He was still shaking. His legs felt weak. His attorney, Jack Sandler, slipped a triumphant arm through his and leaned in to whisper, “It’s finished, Michael. Relax. You’re home free.”
But not entirely. The judge had ordered that as soon as the sale of Michael’s property in Dolphin Terrace was completed, $3,183,637 of the proceeds were to be sequestered pending an inquiry into where the money had come from and into Arnold Smitts’ connections to the mob. The good news was that no one, either officially or unofficially, believed that Michael had stolen it. So he was off the mob hook as well.
The only thing, it seemed, that everyone agreed upon was how foolish he had been. And the judge had not been slow to pass comment on the subject.
Gillian MacCormack sat in the hall outside the courtroom, a sixty-seven-year-old lady in a grey tweed suit, sandwiched between a young lady lawyer sharply dressed in black and an older, male assistant. She stood up, filled with trepidation, as Michael emerged, pale and relieved. And for a moment their eyes met.
She had told police that when she and Michael exchanged RL names in SL, she had taken the first available flight from Sacramento to John Wayne airport, Orange County, a mere fifteen-minute taxi ride away from Newport Beach. Her instinct had been that he was in imminent danger and might need her help. Which had turned out to be extremely prescient. Of more concern now, it seemed, than even the shooting of Angela Monachino was how she had managed to smuggle a gun on board her airplane. To the consternation of the federal aviation authorities and Homeland Security, she had told them quite simply that she had wrapped it in a pair of camisole knickers and packed it in her check-in bag. Her lawyer made the point, quite validly, that she was unlikely to have been able to access the hold and retrieve the gun during the flight.
An enquiry had, however, been launched and was likely to take several months to complete.
She held Michael’s gaze for a few brief moments. She was very petite, with a remarkably smooth and unlined, elfin face, and the bluest of blue eyes that seemed to penetrate his very soul. Her luxuriant silver hair was tied back in a ponytail. They had barely spoken in the weeks since the shooting. And although he owed her his life, his overwhelming emotion on each occasion they had met, was embarrassment. And humiliation at the recollection of the confidences they had exchanged, the intimacies they had shared. He was not sure he could ever forgive her the deception. She was, after all, thirty-five years his senior.
He didn’t linger, or meet her eyes for more than a few seconds, acknowledging her only with the merest of nods, before allowing his legal team to steer him away toward the door and the Californian sunshine that split the sidewalks outside.
But even as he felt the warmth of it on his skin and turned his face toward the sky, he felt an ache of regret deep within. For the fundamental truth was that he missed Doobie Littlething.
Gillian MacCormack’s attorney took her by the elbow and led her toward the courtroom. In a sense her situation was the graver of the two. It was she who had pulled the trigger, she who had taken a life. And the court would decide today whether or not she was to face charges of manslaughter.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
All the doors in the house were open. A warm breeze blew through it from the ocean. Michael sat on the terrace staring at the chess board on which he had so often done battle with Mora. Every piece stood in its starting square, ebony facing ivory in an eternal stand-off. And he knew that he would never move these chessmen again.
He looked up as a squat, square man in blue overalls appeared at the open door. “You want me to pack that now, sir?”
Michael nodded and got up to let the removal man wrap and box the chessmen and board and free up the table and chairs to be taken out front to the truck. Virtually everything was gone now. The boxes packed all those weeks ago. The furniture. He had donated a lot of it to charity. After all, it would take much less to furnish the small apartment he had taken for rent further along the coast. He would still have his beloved sea-view and a small balcony where he could sit out and read, but a single man required less space and less baggage.
He wandered now through the empty house that he and Mora had once animated, and knew that finally he had reached a place in his life where he felt able to move on. He had quit his job, and had no idea what the future might bring. But there would be no more looking back.
“You want us to pack up your computer stuff?”
Michael turned to find another removal man regarding him quizzically. “No, that’s alright. I’ll be packing it in the trunk to take to the apartment myself.”
“Okay, sir. Well, that’s us finished for now. Have a good day.”
“Sure. You, too.”
When they had gone, he went through to his office. There was no chair. So he lifted his computer and monitor carefully down to the floor and squatted in front of it with the keyboard in his lap. He would check his email one last time before dismantling it all. There were a couple of mails from his lawyer, another from the bank, one from Sherri, who was holding him to his promise of fifteen percent. In the end she had sold the property for just under four million, so she had earned her fee.
He dealt with them all, and was about to shut down, when his eye fell upon the Second Life icon on his desktop. It sent a tiny shard of regret deep into his heart.
He had said goodbye to his lawyers outside the courthouse in Santa Ana, and then stood for several minutes before deciding to go back in. The public benches were almost empty when he slipped into the back of the courtroom to listen to the proceedings. Gillian MacCormack had been sitting with her back to him, unaware of his presence. Legal arguments on both sides were presented to a judge who knew she was just going through the motions. No one had wanted to charge this genteel sixty-seven-year-old with anything, never mind manslaughter. After all, her timely intervention had saved a man’s life. And so, in the end, the judge had found that there was no case to answer, and she was free to go.
Michael had hurried out again, even before Gillian had got to her feet. She had never known he was there.
Now, on an impulse, he opened up his browser and went to the Second Life website. There he created a new account, able once more to choose the name of Chas Chesnokov, since there was no record that it had ever existed.
He opened up the Second Life software and logged in with his old user name and password, and rezzed into Orientation Island as the basic AV he had been on his first sojourn into the virtual world. He looked around at the familiar landmarks, the volcano, the learning islands interlinked by bridges. And watched the newbies wandering around bumping into each other, waving their arms in the air, falling into the water. He clicked on his blank Lindens total at the top of his screen and bought himself twenty dollars’ worth. Then went on a spending spree.
Body Doubles, and Naughty Island. A Brad Pitt body shape; Gabriel skin, Golden Tan with Facial Hair 4; Paris Blue Eyes; a shock of blond hair, Untamed in Golden Bay Multitonal III. And then a clothes mall. Rusted green cargos, white shirt and cream sweater, black grunge boots. Within twenty minutes he had remade Chas in his original image. There would have been no way to tell the difference. And in some strange way that he could never have quantified, Michael felt whole again. Chas had pulled him back from the brink once. Perhaps he would do it again.
***
Chas rezzed into Twist’s office. For a moment he was almost overcome with melancholy. This was the place Janey had made. This was the persona she had wanted to be. And now she was gone. When the tiers expired, so would her office, and everything in it. But it occurred to Chas that he could keep the name, set up his own agency in her memory, maybe even live out the fantasy for her. But, then, he knew that he was unlikely to stay here. Like other parts of his life, it was time to leave it behind and move on. This was just a last stroll down memory lane.
He went into the Search window and found Midsomer Isle. A final visit.
***
The sun was setting, just as it always had been. Trees and ferns and bushes swayed in the sea breezes, and roses rezzed all around the entry columns. Chas looked at the empty chairs and the chessmen awaiting some avatar to come along and move them, and felt a pang of regret. Without Doobie he would never have survived, in either SL or RL. He remembered the confidences they had exchanged right here on this circular terrace overlooking the sea, the meal they had shared, and their first dance among the hidden columns somewhere further up the mountain.
He wandered across the terrace to the sweep of the retaining wall and looked out at the dying sunlight coruscating across the water, light reflecting all the way to the horizon and the setting sun.
Doobie: Hello, Chas.
Chas swivelled around.
Chas: Doobie!
She was wearing a black evening gown with a deep-cut neckline, her hair piled up on her head and hanging down in ringlets at the sides. She wore opal bangles on her wrists, and an opal pendant on a silver chain that fell between her breasts. And he thought she looked quite beautiful.
Doobie: I was down at Puck’s Hideaway and saw you appear on my radar.
Chas: I heard they decided not to bring any charges.
Doobie: No.
There was a long, awkward silence.
Chas: I guess…I never did say thank you.
Doobie: What for?
Chas: Saving my life.
Doobie Littlething smiles.
Chas: There was something I’ve been meaning to ask you.
He hesitated.
Doobie: Yes?
Chas: That stuff about your husband being killed. And the baby…
Doobie: It wasn’t a lie, if that’s what you’re thinking. It just happened a very long time ago. In the sixties. They were fighting in Vietnam then. Who knows why.
Chas: And you never married?
Doobie: No. I never wanted to. It was like I was dead for a long time. Just like you after Mora. And then Second Life, for me, was like being born again. A chance to go back and do the things I’d never done, be the person I’d never been. In a way, it gave me back my life, gave me a second chance.
Now they stood looking at each other. Neither certain of what to say next. And the silence hung. And hung. For what seemed like an eternity. Until finally it was Doobie who found words.
Doobie: I missed you, Chas.
Chas: I missed you, too.
Another silence, then,
Doobie: We were good together.
Chas: We were.
Doobie: We could be again.
She took a step toward him, then seemed to think better of it. She stopped.
Doobie: Does it matter how many years there are between us? We are who we are.
They heard the sound of the wind in the trees. SL ambience swelled and faded. Somewhere a bell sounded. Or it might have been windchimes.
Chas: Would you like a game of chess?
Doobie: I’d love a game.
Chas right-clicked on the nearest seat and sat at the table. Doobie sat opposite him. He looked up.
Chas Chesnokov smiles.
Chas: Your move, Doobs.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
<
br /> Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
More from this Author
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