Wrecked

by Joe Ide

  “I was attacked.”

  “Ya mussa dun sumpin’ mon. Most dog smatta dan ya tink.”

  Walczak hated being here. He could hardly stand up so this oaf had actually held on to his arm while he took a piss. FUCK he hated that.

  Walczak had enjoyed working for the CIA. He liked that it was select and special, which made him select and special, and he liked that it was secretive and even Patty couldn’t know what he did. He liked that he could find out anything about anybody and, if he was careful, use it however he wanted. Frame the guy, get him fired, get his family and friends to turn on him, ruin him financially. Put his whole life in jeopardy. It wasn’t so much that he enjoyed being above the law. What gave him pleasure was that he was the law. The CIA had great volumes of rules and regulations governing its operatives, but once you were out in the field, you fulfilled your mission in whatever way seemed pragmatic. Owens could do an amazing impression of a good ol’ boy comedian who wore a Cornhuskers cap and a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off. The guy had a catchphrase. Get ’er done! Walczak adopted it as his slogan.

  After Bob Marley’s bodyguard left, a doctor came in. “How are you feeling, Mr. Walczak?” he said. For fuck’s sake, the guy was a goddamn Pakistani, maybe even an Iraqi. Walczak watched him closely. Maybe this guy knew who he was and would accidentally give him a shot of cholera or hepatitis C.

  “I will give you a tetanus shot and some medication to reduce the pain,” the doctor said. “The nurse will give you instructions on how to keep your wounds clean.”

  In two days, Walczak was supposed to hand Sarah a million dollars and he was trying to get used to the idea that he might have to pay it. She’d never live to enjoy it, he thought. She had no idea of the assets he had at his command. A moth wouldn’t be able to get in or out of the drop area without being tracked, netted, and stripped of its wings. His revenge would be molecular. He would torture her protons.

  Following the revelations about prisoner abuse, Walczak was relieved of duty and sent home to Langley. He was declared nonoperational and sent to see the Company shrink. He thought therapists were supposed to be neutral, but it was clear from the start what she thought of him. She said he lacked empathy and that he was unable to put himself in someone else’s shoes. That he couldn’t feel for other people.

  “Of course I can feel for other people,” he replied. “I have as much empathy as anybody else.”

  “Then how could you act with such cruelty at Abu Ghraib?” she said.

  “You can call it cruelty, I call it a necessity. We gathered important intelligence. Intelligence that saved American lives.” He knew that was iffy, but he wasn’t going to give this smug cunt with her pearls and degree from Harvard one fucking thing.

  “That’s debatable,” she said, “but let me ask you this. Many of the detainees were noncombatants, and the reports say you tortured them anyway. Why?”

  “How do you know they’re noncombatants until you torture them?”

  She shook her head. “So it’s all about expediency.”

  “Yes,” he said as if it was obvious. “Getting the job done.”

  “In a civilized society, we have to make moral choices. Not just expedient ones.”

  “Society isn’t civilized.”

  “What if the things you did to the detainees were done to your wife and son? How would you feel about that?”

  Walczak shrugged. “I’d feel the need to kill the people who did it, if that’s your point.”

  “When you were beating a detainee or hanging him in a stress position, didn’t you feel bad about it?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t.”

  “And yet you say you have empathy.” She leaned back and tipped her head sideways.

  “I do have empathy,” Walczak said.

  “For who?”

  He shrugged. “Ordinary people.”

  “Do you realize your behavior was universally condemned by ordinary people all over the world?”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that.”

  “And?”

  “And—I don’t care.”

  His answer was part bluster and part stubbornness. He cared. You’d have to be a complete sociopath not to care and he was sure he wasn’t one of those. But whatever compassion he had left was buried beneath layer upon layer of sedimentary mayhem that made up his past. Every new cruelty pushed the one beneath it deeper, every beating suffocated another, every scream drowned out the one that came before it. He had come to feel that each act was a thing unto itself. A one-off, an anomaly, and therefore forgivable.

  During his years at the Company, he made a lot of connections in government, the military, the intelligence community, and private industry. When he started to build his business, he thought Abu Ghraib would mark him as a pariah, but he wasn’t looking to do business with Bristol-Myers or Walmart. In his world, they appreciated a nonempathic, expedient SOB who didn’t feel the suffering of others and would do anything to get ’er done.

  WSSI protected corrupt dictators and suppressed democratic movements. It assassinated rebel leaders and stole high-tech know-how for the Chinese. It guarded Russian gangsters, shipments of illegal arms, and entire military installations. It carried out black ops and secured black sites. The company worked so closely with the US government it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The two entities made policy together. They shared databases and technology. They shared secrets. Edward Snowden? What a joke. His revelations hadn’t done anything to protect privacy. Your personal data was no safer than a lawn ornament. WSSI could tell you what porn you watched, the amount of your last overdraft, and the results of your colonoscopy. It could print out your passwords, start your car, watch you take a shower, and listen to you fart. It could map the ruins of a lost city, sniff out chemical weapons, and locate underground missile sites.

  It had made Walczak a rich man. There were a Bentley and several Porsches in the garage. He had a private helicopter and a new Gulfstream. He owned houses in LA, London, and Abu Dhabi. His closets held half a million dollars’ worth of clothes. He was a member of seven country clubs, he owned racehorses and had a multicultural legion of beautiful women who wanted him in their beds. So fuck you, Langley. Did you hear me? Fuck you. But none of it was helping him find Grace and Sarah.

  They were the worst kinds of targets. No sightings, paper trail, or phones that could be traced, family and friends who either didn’t know anything or wouldn’t tell. No patterns or predilections that would lead to a location. He was desperate. Sarah could exhume the whole putrid mess and the thought of it terrified him, all that savage debauchery erupting out of the grave like bloody fingers in a slasher movie, its grip around his throat, throttling him with shame.

  He envisioned the photos appearing in the New York Times and on CNN. He could see the media outrage metastasizing to every country in the world, his name synonymous with cruelty, depravity, and perversion. The most excruciating part. His family. The business was earth and he was Atlas. His family was his only true source of happiness, and the only people he knew who still saw him as a patriot, a hero, and a great human being. He loved family outings, soccer games, holidays, barbecues in the backyard. He even wore a chef’s hat and cooked the hamburgers to perfection. He enjoyed the screaming kids, flying Frisbees, the big game on, everybody sitting around, talking and laughing, enjoying themselves, enjoying him. He was everyone’s pride and joy. The one who’d made it big. A star on the world stage. That goddamn Sarah. There was no jungle, mountain range, coral reef, sand dune, hidey-hole, or unknown corner of the planet where she could not be found. He had to get those photos back and destroy every copy in existence or they’d be hanging over him like a guillotine for the rest of his life. Suppose Sarah was hacked or she showed them to somebody who showed them to someone else or she released them anyway? The thought of his darling wife Patty seeing him rape a helpless woman made him sick
. The thought of his precious son Noah knowing his father was a monster made him want to die. He’d never been so afraid. Not when the desert night was lit with tracer rounds and the mortar shells exploded so close you thought you were finished and you could hear your fellow soldiers screaming and dying in the rubble. None of it frightened him more than the revelation of his beastly heart.

  He called Patty just to hear her voice. They small-talked. She put Noah on the phone and he went on about a new video game and how Grampa was deaf and Grandma made cookies that were so bad he fed them to the dog and the dog threw up.

  “I love you, Noah,” Walczak said.

  “I love you too, Dad. See you soon.”

  In the morning, Walczak caught a cab home from the hospital. He took more Demerol and lay on the bed trying to find a position that didn’t hurt. Failing that, he went cringing and limping to his study. Might as well do something useful. He got out his laptop and scanned his emails. There was one from Sarah.

  If you go anywhere near Grace again I’ll release the pictures IMMEDIATELY and you will all GO TO JAIL!

  He thought a moment and grinned. He couldn’t suppress his elation. He punched the air and shouted “YES!” Sarah had made a huge mistake. He immediately called Jimenez.

  “What’s up, Balzac?” Jimenez said.

  “It’s Walcz—get everybody together. I think I have something.” He hung up and laughed. He couldn’t wait to spring it on Richter, shut him down for once, and that fucking Mexican too. Walczak was bleeding through his bandages. He thought about Sarah and Grace and what he’d do to them. He’d invent new atrocities that would take a long time. He’d lynch that dog and make them watch.

  Isaiah stumbled through his front door wearing only his pants. He fell down, more blood and bruises than human. Grace put her hand over her mouth to stifle her scream. She ran to him and put her arms around him.

  “I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

  “No. That’s where they’ll look first.”

  “Where then?”

  Mrs. Marquez was a neighbor. She was also a nurse and a good friend. She took him to her sister Elena’s house in Lakewood. Elena worked in an old folks’ home and the two women looked after him better than any hospital. They propped him up with pillows, iced down his bruises, applied first aid to abrasions, put his arms in slings so he wouldn’t have to carry them, and loaded him up with Vicodin. Mrs. Marquez hooked him up to a fancy electrostimulation machine she borrowed from work to help him heal faster. Grace was there the whole time, watching intently, like she wanted to help but didn’t know how. He liked that a lot. The pain was still bad and at Mrs. Marquez’s insistence, Isaiah called Raphael, who delivered a half ounce of something called Trainwreck. A hybrid, Raphael explained. Mexican and Thai sativas bred with Afghani indicas.

  “Go easy,” Raphael said. “This shit’ll make you high as the fucking sky.” Isaiah was reluctant to smoke something called Trainwreck, but Mrs. Marquez said the doctors she worked for used it, sometimes on themselves.

  Elena said, “No ser un debilucho.” Which, judging from the look on her face, meant something like Don’t be a pussy. Isaiah didn’t want to be a pussy in front of Grace so he nodded. Elena expertly rolled a joint, and for the first time in his life, he smoked weed. He didn’t feel anything for a while, the women watching him like he was about to give birth. Ten minutes later, or maybe it was an hour, he started to feel a calmness he’d never felt before—but also isolated and removed, like he was looking down on himself from the ceiling. His vision went from 720p to 1080, but the colors were off and too bright. The sound of the TV was clearer, but nobody had turned it up. The pain was there but distant and muddy.

  “How are you?” Mrs. Marquez said. The women were smiling at him, and suddenly, that seemed incredibly funny. He burst out laughing and so did they, their glee making him laugh even harder. Eventually, everyone calmed down, but they were still looking at him.

  “You know what?” he said. “I’m hungry.” They broke into hysterics again, laughing and laughing until his stomach hurt and his injuries throbbed and he couldn’t laugh anymore. Grace was smiling at him almost affectionately. The weed made him loose and brave. He wanted to kiss her.

  Dodson and Deronda came over. “I’m sorry I’ve gotta do this now,” Dodson said, “but I fucked up, or should I say somebody fucked up, and we in a situation we don’t know how to get out of.” He told Isaiah about Chester, Junior, and the blackmail.

  Deronda looked at Grace suspiciously. “Who are you? You’re not his girlfriend, are you?”

  “No, I’m not,” Grace said, like she didn’t want Isaiah to hear her.

  “Tell me about Junior’s place,” Isaiah said quickly.

  “His crib is over on Minden, behind the Shop ’n Save,” Dodson said. “I took some pictures.” He gave Isaiah his phone. The photos showed a small nondescript house, well maintained with the usual chain link fence and burglar bars. No alarm box because nobody in the hood paid attention to them. The doors were formidable. Solid-core from the look of them and overlaid with a grid of cast iron security bars. The dead bolt was a high-quality Medeco that couldn’t be picked, bump-keyed, or drilled. The two old friends exchanged a look.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Isaiah said.

  “Yeah, I believe I am.”

  “What?” Deronda said. “What are you thinking?”

  “You don’t remember?” Dodson said, smiling. “I’m surprised at you.”

  It took a moment before it came to her. She smiled back. “Y’all was crazy then and you crazy now.” They talked and came up with a plan.

  “You two will have to do the heavy lifting,” Isaiah said.

  “Who two?” Deronda said, alarmed. “You mean me and Dodson?”

  “I can be there but that’s about it.”

  “Lord have mercy,” Dodson said.

  “We gonna need more than mercy,” Deronda added.

  When they were gone, Grace sat in silence for a long moment. She looked at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “You were the Battering Ram Bandits?”

  Isaiah knew that the investigation, if that was what you could call it, was getting more random and directionless. People thought he was infallible, but in situations where there were no leads and scant information he’d get stuck just like the police. He was frustrated and pissed off about his other agenda too. Knowing Grace. His probing had revealed little about her. It was like unearthing a million-year-old fossil. A slight mistake and the whole thing would crumble into dust.

  Even though he was asking the questions, he felt like she was the one getting the answers, patting him down with her artist’s eyes. Was she getting angry about the lack of progress? Was she suspicious, thinking maybe he was drawing this out? Was he drawing it out? No. He wanted to find her mom, please her and see what happened. She did seem a little more comfortable with him, or maybe not and he was just hoping that was true. The only time he’d been relaxed with her was when he was high. Being high all the time had occurred to him and he wished he could make her laugh when he was sober. He wanted to tell her that she was safe with him, that he’d rather get hung in a stress position than hurt her. He felt her sadness. He wanted to erase it, smooth it over, heal it, even though he knew that was impossible. Her father had been murdered and her mother had abandoned her.

  When Marcus was killed, Isaiah didn’t think he’d feel anything but sadness ever again. He worried that he meant nothing to Grace, that he was just a way of finding her mother. A tool, like a hammer or a saw, and the more he thought about it, the more likely that seemed. He couldn’t think of a reason why she would be attracted to him over and above the case. When the case came to an end, he’d probably never see her again. He tried to imagine a way of convincing her to stay but nothing, absolutely nothing, came to mind.

  He was lying on his side, dozing. He woke up but didn’t open his eyes. He could hear the TV murmuring from the living room. He
could smell onions and cilantro and the remains of the weed. He smelled Dove soap. He felt the air move and a warmth beside the bed. Grace was there. Doing what? he wondered. If she was working on her laptop he’d hear it. Was she reading? Sleeping? She took a slow breath and exhaled the same way. No, she was awake. Just sitting beside the bed. It felt eerie, even threatening, someone there when you were at your most vulnerable. He opened his eyes a hair’s breadth, his vision blurred by his lashes. He could make out her waist, the top of her jeans, and her knees. She was turned toward him. She’s watching me. Don’t move. Don’t even twitch. He felt an urgent need to swallow, but it would give him away. His nose itched, his legs were in an uncomfortable position, his breathing was shallow and he couldn’t get enough air. He was about to feign wakefulness when she stirred and stood up. She paused. Was she still looking at him? And then he felt the back of her hand brush his face so lightly he thought he might have imagined it. A trill of high notes shivered through him. He wanted more than anything to look at her and smile and say he wanted her and everything would be okay. He opened his eyes, but she was already leaving, her back to him as she turned into the hall. Could he have done it? He wondered. Told her how he felt? Yes, he could have, should have, he decided.

  Or maybe not.

  He was up, dressed, and reading the paper when she returned with a cup of coffee and her laptop. Had she really touched him? Why? Was it affection? Did she want him to wake up and say something? Did she want him to kiss her? Did she want him to—Shut up, you idiot. You’re dreaming. She was probably brushing lint or crumbs off his face.

  “I was just thinking about something,” she said, handing him the coffee. “In that picture, my mom and Stephanie were wearing bikinis, right? Obviously, they were going to the beach. And remember those water cans on the roof of the van? If they had to bring their own water, it had to be someplace isolated.”

  “Okay,” he said.