by Jim Heskett
“Do you want me to come check on you later? Maybe tomorrow?”
The thought of him showing up at my house unannounced nearly sent me into a panic. “No, please don’t do that. I’ll be okay. I just need to get a good night’s sleep.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he took a step away from me anyway. “Alright, buddy. If that’s what you want. Maybe you’ll feel better after you get some rest.”
I lingered, hoping that he would demand the truth out of me, but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t put his life in danger, if coming here hadn’t already.
He backed his car out into the street. Without a goodbye, I got in my car and drove home, slamming my fist against the steering wheel until it went numb. I was defeated, and I knew it. The situation was not going to get better. Might as well give up.
***
I sat on the living room couch, my phone in one hand and Shelton’s business card in the other. I was out of options and didn’t want any more blood spilled because of me. Going to Roderick’s house had been a terrible idea. It was a last-resort, desperation effort that hadn’t gained me anything.
All I wanted was for my wife to come home, and if calling Shelton and doing whatever he told me to do meant that could happen, I didn’t figure that I had any other choice.
I took out my phone, and as I was looking at my reflection in the darkened screen, all of the coincidences converged at a single point. The timing of all the events of the last few days suddenly made sense.
The darkness in Wyatt’s eyes when I refused the job offer yet again in his office. Shelton telling me that he was originally from Austin. Hearing Thomason’s southern accent at the top of Eldorado Canyon.
I knew who was responsible for all this.
I typed a different number in my phone and waited as it rang.
“How may I direct your call?”
“Wyatt Green, please.”
“One moment.”
A few seconds later, I heard the connection. “Candle, my boy, how the hell are you?”
The words caught in my throat, then I forced everything out in a grunt. “I’m ready, Wyatt.”
He chuckled. “You don’t sound so good. Ready for what?”
“I give up. Whatever it takes to end this, I’ll do it. You want me to move to Dallas and accept this job offer? Fine. I’ll do it. I can’t take this anymore. I know it was you who did this, and I can’t fight it because you and your people have beaten every inch of hope out of me. I just want my wife back.”
“Oh well, you see, now we got ourselves a problem.”
I knew it. I knew that all of this was just to toy with me, to drive me to the edge of insanity. “What do you mean?”
“It’s the corporate trainer job, Candle. I’m afraid we’ve already filled that role. You were our first choice, obviously, but you weren’t our only choice. We had to work on a contingency plan since you were playing so hard to get this whole time. We’ve offered that position to a trainer out of the Philly office. He’s moving here early next year.”
The cut on my back pulsed and tension in my shoulders pulled my head against my neck. Little dots of white blinked in front of my eyes as the room started to spin. “Wyatt, please. I have to get her back.”
“Now, now, don’t go all soft on me. Maybe your future with IntelliCraft ain’t gonna be what we all planned on, but you can still do something useful for us.”
He had me on the verge of tears. I felt utterly powerless and ready to agree to anything. Everything in my life hung on his words, and I resented and feared him because of it. “What have you got planned for my future? Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I can’t keep on like this.”
“We’d hoped that you’d organically lead us to him, but that didn’t work out. He’s as slippery a bastard as I ever saw, that’s for sure.”
“Lead you to who?”
“If you’d just taken the job when we first offered it to you, this would have been so much easier. But now, we got all these other plans in motion, all these moving parts… it’s an unbelievable amount of work just to keep it all above water. And expensive as hell, too.”
I felt a drop of sweat bead above my eyebrow. “Who am I supposed to lead you to?”
“Kareem Haddadi, you dumbass. Or Muhammed Qureshi, if you like, although he usually goes by Kareem in this country.”
Why did everything always keep coming back to Kareem? I couldn’t fathom how he fit into this equation.
Wyatt cleared his throat. “I always liked you, Candle, but I got to tell you I couldn’t give two shits about your wife. She’s nothing to me. Same goes for Paul and Keisha and anybody else working in design or sales or tech support. I got people chomping at the bit to come work for me, so one’s as good as any other. Am I making sense to you?”
Kitty jumped onto the couch, sat back on her haunches, and stared at me. “Yes, I think I understand the size of the situation.”
“I don’t even really care about you other than what you can do for me. I mean, it’s clear you got some smarts, but you’re not any more special than any of my execs, or your bitchy boss, or anyone out there slaving away in the cubicles. We’re all just pieces of a machine.”
My teeth ground together, sending a jolt of pain into my jaw. Maybe he was right, and he had enough power over me that I couldn’t argue with his opinion, but I still wanted to put him in a choke hold and snap his neck. “What do you want me to do, Wyatt? What is this service my un-special self can do for you?”
“Now, I can hear you getting testy, so I’ll cut the chit chat. I want you to find Haddadi. Find out where he’s holed up and kill him. You do that little job for me, and then all of this goes away.”
My heart stopped. Kill Kareem? It’s not as if I was some Special Forces operative trained to infiltrate government buildings to assassinate targets. I was a software trainer, for God’s sake.
“You there?” Wyatt said.
“Are you serious?”
“Hell yes, I’m serious. Maybe you haven’t appreciated the messages we’ve sent you. Actions speaking louder than words, you know?”
My mind raced. To get my wife back and stop people around me from dying, I had to agree to kill a man I barely knew. A man who may even be magical, although I now seriously doubted the water-into-wine thing. I’d had a few drinks, after all.
Regardless, I couldn’t kill an innocent man. That was ridiculous.
“I can’t do it.”
He sighed, a long breath drenched in disappointment. “I’m sorry to hear you say that. Your type, y’all have so much potential. I know I said all that about being a cog in the machine, but you could be a lot more than that if you tried. You have parts of yourself you don’t even understand what’s in there, know what I mean? But you just don’t seem to be able to apply yourself and leverage your strengths. We picked you personally out of about a hundred applicants to join this company, son. Been grooming you from afar for the last three or four years.”
There was something about the mix of patriarchal disappointment and corporate-speak use of the word leverage that flipped a switch inside me. I felt an overpowering urge that I didn’t have to sit here and take this abuse. Whatever sway Wyatt held over me, I wasn’t going to let him berate me into nothingness.
Maybe I didn’t have to do everything Wyatt told me to do. Maybe there were options open to me. I could call the real cops, report all of this. Tell them everything that had happened, warn them about the possible danger to Martin, and get everything above board.
I felt a twinge of hope resurface.
“I don’t give a shit what you think about my potential, Wyatt. I’m not going to be a pawn in your game.”
He chuckled. “Oh, you decided to stop crying and be a man, huh? I suppose your head-strong nature was one of the qualities that made us hire you for the job in the first place. Fine, but you remember this choice when your life falls all the way apart. Goodbye, Candle.”
The connection severed. Panic raced
through my veins. What had I done?
It was simply a stupid moment of impulsiveness. Of wanting to lash out and feel the victory of anger for just a second. And it had cost me. I had probably just destroyed the only chance I had at seeing my wife and unborn child ever again.
I’d doomed myself, that’s what I’d done.
But I had to change whatever things were still within my power. I glanced into the kitchen at the clock above the stove. There was still time to get a police station and spill my guts.
I snatched my keys from the bowl by the door and sprinted to my car. Started it up, threw it into reverse, then backed out into the cul de sac. I raced out into the street, flying down the road. No idea how fast, but at least forty miles an hour. The neighbors with their slow, children playing signs would not be pleased, but I couldn’t be bothered with that.
My hastiness is why I didn’t see the big truck approaching me from the side street. I didn’t see him hit the gas and point the nose of his car at my driver’s side door. I didn’t feel my senses shutting down as our cars collided, metal and plastic filling the space around my contorting body.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Eyes closed. Trouble breathing. Thudding sensation in my head.
Something was pressing into my chest. My breath came in snatches, and I fluttered my eyelids because I couldn’t seem to get them to open all the way. Darkness was all I could take in, open or closed. The smell around me was like metal, but not the same as the smell of Paul’s or Keisha’s blood when I first encountered that stench.
A gnawing screech filled my ears, which brought me closer to being awake. Something around me was moving, but I was still.
Then a rush of cold air. My car door was opening, but it didn’t sound the way it normally had.
“Can you hear me?” said a disconnected voice, far away down a tunnel.
My eyes opened all the way. I was looking over an airbag at the windshield, cracked and splintered like a spider web. Through that windshield, I saw the front lawn of the neighbor who obsessively watered his lawn. Not that he’d water it at this time of year, that would be silly. Winter grass doesn’t need water. I wanted to smile, but my face wouldn’t cooperate.
I turned my head, which sent needles down the back of my neck. The voice belonged to my neighbor down the street. What was his name? I couldn’t remember. I don’t think I actually knew it, but he lived at the house on the end, the one that I suspected was a meth house.
The seat belt holding me in clicked and then retreated. A pair of arms surrounded me, laced together around my back. I was being pulled, and I heard glass shift and move. The glass was on me, falling from my lap as I was leaving my car. My body weighed a thousand pounds at that moment, and I couldn’t put any of my own weight on my feet. I was like a rag doll.
The neighbor lowered me to the ground next to the car. Cold, wet road pressed against my butt.
“You don’t seem like a meth dealer,” I said, and the sound of my own voice drifted off as the tinkling of a music box. Opening my jaw was like trying to set a bear trap. How did I know that? I’d never even seen a bear trap in real life.
“You’re going to be okay, dude. You’re going to be okay.”
No idea why he kept saying that, or why he had pulled me out of a car, or why I had been covered in glass. Nothing made sense. I knew I was injured, but I couldn’t remember why or how.
He came close to my face, his eyes peering into my own. I smelled meatloaf on his breath. Grace made meatloaf, but she always put too many onions in it.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“They call me Candle.”
“Do you know how many fingers I’m holding up, Candle?”
I glanced at his hand. It was blurry, but I was pretty sure I saw three fingers. “Is it three? I’m going to say three, and that’s my final answer.”
“Are you hurt? Do you feel anything broken?”
The world was spinning, my neck ached, and there was a pulse in my chest that felt like a rotating light. I could barely breathe because each movement of my chest made my ribs feel like something was squeezing them.
“What happened to me?”
“You were in a car crash. I didn’t see it, but I damn sure heard it.”
A siren sounded, growing louder. A dog in a nearby back yard howled. “Did you call an ambulance?”
He nodded, and the world slowed a little.
In a flash, they were on me. The neighbor faded away into the abyss. An ambulance, and a minute later, a cop car. More uniforms poking me, prodding me, shining a light into my eyes as I started to understand what was going on. I had been going somewhere but couldn’t remember why or where.
They sat me in the back of the ambulance and lifted my shirt. I had a semicircular bruise across my chest. That would explain the ridiculous pain. Also, it matched the shape and curvature of the cut on my back, so they were like twinsies. This time, I did laugh, even though it hurt my face and my chest.
“You might have a concussion,” the pretty blonde paramedic said, “but it’s difficult to tell. We need to put you through the full protocol to be sure.”
I hadn’t even noticed she was talking to me before I heard that.
“Are my ribs broken?”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t look like it. That’s a pretty deep bruise, though. You might have some moderate internal bleeding, so I think we’re going to take you to the hospital. We need to get you checked out. Is there anyone you need to call?”
“No hospital.”
“Are you refusing a trip to the emergency room?”
I nodded.
“I need you to answer the question, sir. Are you refusing an ambulance ride at this time?”
“Yes, I do not want to go to the hospital.”
She stood back and frowned at me. “Sir, I think you should come with us. You might be seriously injured.”
“I’m fine, really. Just a little dizzy, so I’d like to go home and lay down.”
She turned away and waved a cop over. She mumbled something in his ear, then walked away.
The cop put a hand on my shoulder. A flash came back, and I remembered where I had been going, why I was so upset and racing down the street. Wyatt, Kareem, Detective Shelton… all of it came storming back into my head.
The cop in front of me wasn’t Shelton, fortunately, and I could have kissed him for that. He was a regular cop, pudgy, nearly bald, with a graying goatee that didn’t properly connect between the mustache and chinstrap.
“Did you see the man in the other car, sir?”
I hadn’t, and I didn’t bother to ask if they’d caught him. I knew who it was—or at least who had sent him—so I only shook my head. No point in even trying.
“We’re going to talk to your neighbors and figure out what happened here. Don’t worry, Mr. Candle.”
“How do you know my name?”
“We were out here the other day, remember? I can’t imagine the week you’re having. Trouble seems to be following you around lately.”
I swallowed, and the sensation was like trying to force a rock down a garden hose. I could see straight now, but my head felt full of boulders and my ears were ringing.
“Can you tell us what you remember? Any information at all you can provide will help us. The make and model of the car, maybe?”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I dug it out, saw a text message on the home screen from an unknown number. I swiped to open it.
The text read:
Don’t tell him anything.
***
Eventually, after they’d towed my totaled car away, taken statements, and insisted someone else check out my injuries, they let me go home. Made me promise I’d go see my primary care physician first thing tomorrow morning.
I refused a ride, even though I was half a block from my house. I wanted to walk because it was the only thing I could still control.
The text message had put me into something like a walking c
atatonic state. They knew everything. I couldn’t go to the police, or ask for help from anyone. Anything that I might do, they would either kill that person or send another car to run me down. Every pathway I tried was like some kind of unbeatable maze. Why did I keep finding little glimmers of possibility, when I knew they wouldn’t work?
I was out of options. Time to surrender completely. I’d have to kill Kareem, just like they wanted. How had this company—my employer of the last five years—been able to so suddenly become something completely different? Had I been blind to it before?
My head felt cloudy, my back and chest hurt, and I developed a little bit of a limp as my right knee started to swell. The impact had turned my car into a twisted origami of metal and glass.
My mother had died in a car accident. I’d just survived one.
As I limped home, I couldn’t have expressed the defeat and hopelessness that dominated my thoughts. But that was nothing compared to what came over me when I opened my front door.
In my living room, holding my steak knife, bushy-eyebrowed Darren stood behind trainee Martin. Martin was strapped into one of my dinner table chairs, his hands duct-taped together and his feet duct-taped to the legs of the chair. A final piece of tape covered his mouth.
But his eyes were clearly visible. They were broad and full of desperation, boring into me, begging for help.
“Hello, Candle,” Darren said as he pressed the knife against Martin’s throat.
I leaped forward. “No! Don’t do it. I’ll help you find and kill Kareem. I’ll do anything you want if you please stop hurting people.”
He removed the knife and pressed the tip of the blade underneath Martin’s eye, just above the duct tape. He pressed until a drop of blood spilled over the tape and ran down Martin’s chin. The poor kid whimpered.
My eyes darted all over the living room. There had to be something I could grab and hurl at Darren. He was more than ten feet from me so I couldn’t cross that space in enough time. But something heavy, like a vase, or maybe a potted plant might do the trick.