by Gregory Ashe
And that was, at the bottom of it all, the real problem, because what did Somers really feel anyway? If it was just sexual attraction, Somers knew he could find ways to reason it away: his adolescence—early, middle, and late—had been tied up with a mixture of longing and fear, and all of it had centered on Emery Hazard. They had come so close, once in adolescence and now twice as adults, to consummating that longing. And for the hundredth time, Somers told himself that if it was just sex, well, he could move past it. It would go away with time.
At that moment, the wind picked up again, shrieking into Somers’s face. It chilled him until his skin felt brittle, likely to flake or shatter if even so much as a muscle twitched. And inside that shrieking wind, Somers could hear his own mocking laughter, because who was he trying to kid? If it was just sex, if it would go away with time, then why hadn’t it gone away in twenty years?
Ahead, the outline of the shooting range came into view. Then another gale whipped up the snow, whiting out the structure. Grains of snow pelted Somers’s face, stinging his cheeks and lips and eyes as he pressed forward. Why the hell hadn’t it gone away, he asked himself again. Why in twenty years of fooling around—with men and women—had he never forgot that moment in the locker room, trembling at the desire he could see in Emery’s face, his hand shaking as he reached out to touch the other boy, and then Emery’s lips like dry, papery fire against his own? Why hadn’t marriage and a child made a difference? And why—this was a dark, furious murmur at the bottom of Somers’s soul—why had Emery Hazard come back?
The wind pulled back, as though someone had sucked in an enormous breath, and the snow settled. Ahead, the shooting range came into view. Unlike the conservatory’s turn-of-the-century glass and steel grandeur, and unlike the stable’s slow but inevitable surrender to time and the elements, the shooting range just looked shitty. That was the only word for it. Or maybe, Somers thought as they walked closer, shitty in the special way that so many parts of Dore County were shitty.
That Dore County style of shitty revolved around a couple of basic principles: do it cheap, do it fast, and do it once. Windsor’s shooting range, unlike the rest of the estate, lived up to those principles admirably. The walls pitched at what might have been a forty-five-degree angle, and the wood—from the looks of it, never painted—had decomposed to a shiny gray film that made Somers think of long, mildewy summers. The shooting lanes themselves, which ran north away from the building, were overgrown with kudzu, winter-brown tendrils clutching at support posts and target holders. In two of the lanes, paper targets flapped frantically—leftover, Somers assumed, from the shooting activities the day before.
Like the rest of Windsor, the shooting range was unlocked, and Somers pushed the door open. Here, too, the lights were on, although the air was just as cold as the outside. Somers took a steadying breath and drew his Glock. His hands found the weight familiar and comforting as he spoke over his shoulder to Hazard.
“Somebody’s been here, too.”
From behind Somers came the snap of Hazard’s shoulder holster, and then Hazard’s low, smooth voice, like black honey. “Go.”
They moved into the range with the perfect precision that marked all the tensest moments of their work. Somers saw no one. Overhead, a string of lightbulbs wobbled in the sudden bursts of arctic air. Their glow intensified and then faded, intensified and then faded, making it difficult for Somers to get an accurate sense of the range. The lanes, which opened up to his right, were so overgrown that any number of people could have been hiding there. Somers thought of the two shadows he had seen moving in the snow, and he realized that, framed by the range’s lights, he and Hazard would make perfect targets.
No shots came, though, and Somers eased forward. He kept his gun low, ready to bring it up in an instant as he moved from lane to lane, clearing the inside of the range. Hazard covered his back; the big man was silent as a shadow, but Somers knew he was there.
Ahead, a door led off of the main structure into what Somers assumed was the storeroom, where the firearms and ammunition would be kept. This door, too, was open. Somers held up a hand, and Hazard fell into place beside him. From inside the room came a soft squeak, like a wet sneaker on cement. Then the sound came again. Frustrating, huffing breaths began to reach Somers, and then a shadow crossed the doorway.
Somers sprang forward. He latched onto a heavy down coat—he had just enough time for his senses to gather basic data: a man, tall, rangy—and then he swung the man into the wall. Hard. The down coat made a puffing noise, like air pressed out of a pillow, and the man let out a surprised squeal.
“Ran?” Somers asked, lowering the Glock and staring. The scrawny programmer stared at Somers from behind his hands, shielding his face. He was still squealing, and the noise trailed off gradually.
“Guess you scared him,” Hazard said, his head cocked in irritation at the sound of Ran’s dwindling squeaks.
“Ran,” Somers said, “what are you doing out here?”
Ran’s noises had shrunk to faint, mewling protest. Somers was suddenly aware of the scent of urine, and when he glanced at Ran’s face, he saw shame mixed with terror.
“Calm down,” Somers said. “It’s all right. It’s just us.”
Ran continued to mewl, shivering and shrinking into his jacket, arms shielding his face.
“For Christ’s sake,” Hazard roared, slamming one huge mitt against the wall. “Shut up.”
Ran’s noises stopped.
“Guess you scared him,” Somers muttered, and he didn’t miss the self-satisfied look on Hazard’s face. “Ran, put your arms down. Ran. Are you listening to me?”
Slowly, Ran lowered his arms. Red marked his cheeks in blotches, and tears filled his eyes. Without seeming to realize it, Ran cupped his hands over his crotch, an embarrassed toddler pose as he realized he had wet himself. “Jesus, fuck,” Ran said, wiping at his eyes. “What are you—why are you—”
“No,” Somers said. “This isn’t about us. Why are you here?”
Ran didn’t answer, but his eyes betrayed him, flicking towards the storage room.
“Keep him here,” Hazard said, pushing past Somers and into the storage room.
“I will,” Somers said, “but not because you told me to.”
Hazard gave him the finger without looking back. A moment later, Hazard emerged holding what looked like a dish towel in one hand. Enormous tabby cats covered the dish towel; they were swollen to Godzilla-like proportions on the cotton, and they were in various positions of repose and contentment.
“That,” Somers said, “is yours, isn’t it, Ran?”
He sniffled and ran his wrist under his nose. “No. Yeah.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Le—” He broke off. “Kitchen.”
“Leza gave it to you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“My guess,” Hazard said, balling up the towel, “is that he was planning on wiping prints off the guns.” He pitched the balled-up towel at Ran and got him right on the nose. Ran squawked and fumbled the towel, barely catching it.
“He was planning on wiping them down?” Somers said.
“That’s right. Except the guns are gone.”
Somers swore. “What?”
“All of them.” Hazard took a step towards Ran, and the thin-chested man scrambled backward, tripped over his heel, and landed on his butt. Behind him, he left a yellow stain on the cement. “So where are they, Ran?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t,” Ran was crying again, trying to pull himself backward, but together Somers and Hazard pincered the man. “Oh, God, honest, I don’t know, I swear.”
“Lot of bad stuff could happen out here, Ran,” Hazard said. Somers was struck by the forcefulness of Hazard’s words, and he felt like he was seeing his partner for the first time. Gone was Hazard’s normally pristine appearance: his perfectly combed long hair, his pressed shirts and trouser
s, his shined shoes. This man, with his wildly wavy locks spilling over his forehead, with his rumpled clothes, with the dark shadow on his jaw, this man looked brutal. Savage. Ready to do just about anything. “This far from the house, you’d never be able to crawl back. After the storm ended, they’d find you. Not for a while, of course. I’d make sure of that. But they’d find you. And they’d think it was a really nasty fall. Lots of ice out there, Ran. You could fall, and nobody would ever think twice about it. You ever heard a bone snap? It’s a popping sound, just like ice cracking under your feet—”
“Christ,” Ran babbled. “Jesus Christ, help me.” He squirmed towards Somers, and his thin-boned hands clutched at Somers’s leg. “Please, I’ll—I’ll talk to you. Just don’t let him—”
Hazard tightened his fists until the knuckles cracked, and then he smiled. It was a bright, happy smile—one that Somers had never seen on his partner’s face before. “Sounds kind of like that.”
Ran stiffened, making a choking noise in his throat as he clawed at Somers.
“Detective Hazard, give me a minute with him.”
Hazard frowned. “I don’t think so. I don’t like the way he talked to me at the house. This whole time, I haven’t liked him. I’ll do the talking, Detective Somerset. I’ll do it real fast, I promise.”
“Please,” Ran wailed.
“That’s enough, Detective Hazard. Clear out.” Somers put as much steel as he dared into his voice. “Now.”
Hazard, glowering, stalked to the end of the range, kicked open the door, and vanished into the swirling white.
As soon as Hazard had left, Ran slumped to the ground. The terror in his face was very real, and his nails still dug furrows in Somers’s calf, but he seemed genuinely exhausted, as though pushed past his limits. That much, Somers could tell, was only partly due to Hazard’s behavior. Something else had been taking its toll on Ran McCain, and Somers wanted to know what.
“You need to sit up,” Somers said, prying Ran’s fingers from his leg. “And you need to start talking.”
Working his jaw, Ran made smacking noises as he pulled himself upright. He drew himself into a ball, arms around his knees, chin on his arms, and looked like he might be broken—pushed too far, too fast. Somers waited, letting his own heartbeat settle. There had been something . . . real about Hazard’s behavior. Something terrifying, and his own body was still reacting to it.
“I—I promised not to tell,” Ran finally said in a whisper.
“It’s past time for promises. Someone is dead, Ran.”
“Oh, Christ.” He squeezed his eyes shut, but tears leaked through anyway. “I never wanted any of this.”
“Let’s start with something simple. The towel.”
“Leza gave it to me. She said one of us had to be smart. She said even if we were innocent, our prints were all over those guns. She said it’d be easy for the police to frame someone if they couldn’t find the real killer.”
Somers didn’t respond, but he knew any defense lawyer would have had a field day with those ballistics. And no cop—or prosecutor—would have tried such a ridiculous, not to mention illegal, approach.
“Columbia told me that you and Leza were preparing things all day. You weren’t part of the fun.”
“Yeah,” Ran said, indignant anger tinging his voice. “They said it was luck, but it wasn’t luck. They never treat me and Leza like the rest of them. They’re the executives. We’re the—you know what they call us? The spare parts.” The words were full of bitterness. “So of course when we come play this game, who gets the fun roles of maid and butler? Ran and Leza, of course.”
“You came to the shooting range.”
“We did all of it. I knew where the games were—they had trust-building stuff, ropes courses, like that—because I had set them up. And Leza and I weren’t going to be slaves all weekend. So in the afternoon, we came to the range. Benny and Meryl were here for a while with Colonel Fitzgibbon. I don’t know his real name, so don’t ask me. Then they left because they had to get ready for the murder, and Leza and I came in. And you know what makes the whole thing a big joke? We didn’t even shoot anything! We just took some of the guns out, played with them. We knew if we fired them, someone would hear and come looking. It was more of a way to—to tell the others to get bent, you know.” A harsh laugh broke from Ran’s chest. “I don’t even like guns.”
“But Leza was worried about the fingerprints.”
“Well, no. I was the one who thought of it. And I told Leza, and she told me someone had to get over here and wipe them down before you got here. I left while you were still talking to Columbia and Adaline, but I got lost in the snow.” Ran’s lower lip trembled. “I could have died out there.”
Somers barely heard the man’s whining. He was trying to calculate their movements. Had Ran been one of the figures they had seen in the snow? Somers wanted to believe it; it would make things easier. But the timing felt off.
“Anyway,” Ran continued, “the guns were gone when I got here. I had a panic attack. It’s not my fault, you know. It’s this medication. But I couldn’t breathe, and then you grabbed me, and I—” His hands drifted towards his wet crotch. “And you scared the shit out of me.” The anger in the final words, though, was pale and waxy.
The guns were gone. That, more than anything else, put a flicker of fear in Somers. He wasn’t sure why, not exactly. Hazard would be able to verbalize it better—Hazard was more analytical, more procedural. But Somers felt it in his gut, and he knew it meant that something had changed. Something was spiraling out of control. Like the storm, he thought. It’s like this goddamn storm, and it’s just going to come down harder and harder until we’re pissing icicles.
“What’s the rest of it?” Somers asked.
“What do you mean?” Ran asked, his eyes small and rat-like, his voice wary.
Somers sighed. “Hazard,” he called.
“No.” Ran clutched at Somers’s jacket. “God, no, please.”
Hazard poked his head in the door, and Somers raised an eyebrow at Ran.
“I’ll tell you,” Ran hissed.
With a wave, Somers dismissed Hazard, and he retreated into the tempest.
“I—” Ran paused. He was shaking now, and something about his pallor and the tremors running through him made Somers think of old-time illness, the palsy, something that took a man over and took him whole. “Oh, I’m so fucked. I’m so goddamn fucked.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“The beginning?” Ran barked that hoarse laugh again. “The beginning is don’t get into business with Thomas Strong, that’s the beginning, that’s lesson one, that’s the whole shebang right there.”
“Why?”
“Because he stole it from me,” Ran screamed, spittle flecking Somers’s face. “Mine. It was my algorithms, my work, my nights, my days, my goddamn divorce, all of it. You know what he had when I got there? He had an aggregator. A multi-million dollar aggregator that a freshman at Caltech could have done a better job programming. And Benny, well, he knows how to push people and he knows how to talk the talk, but you know why he jumps from Google to Amazon to Qualtrics to Home Depot, for the ever-loving-Christ? Because he can’t code a damn line. Not to save his life. And the two of them took it from me, all that work, and they were the ones who were getting rich off it, the ones who were going to get rich off it.”
“You’re talking about this program,” Somers said. “The one that is proprietary to Strong, Matley, Gross. That’s part of what makes the firm so valuable.”
“Part? It’s the only thing that makes those losers worth more than the clothes on their backs. My program is Strong, Matley, Gross. And you know what I got for it? A hundred and sixty thousand a year, great benefits, and a pat on the back. Thomas and Benny, meanwhile, are looking at millions. Hundreds of millions. I . . . I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t stand it. It was making me crazy. I had to start taking these—I had to have some way to come down, and then
the panic attacks started. Then one day Leza shows up, smiling like she’s won the jackpot, and she tells me we’re going to get bought out, and everybody’s going to get rich. I snapped. That minute, right there, I went crazy.” Ran swallowed; his breath sounded thick and liquid, and he was pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek as though it were too big for his mouth. “I didn’t kill Thomas. I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
“I wanted him to see how much he needed me. That’s all. I was going to fix it.”
Hazard would have seen it earlier. Hazard would have figured it out halfway through the conversation. Somers drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “You’re the reason the program stopped working.”
Ran’s cheeks colored, and he nodded. “I didn’t know Thomas was going to go crazy. I didn’t think it would go this far. I thought I was just teaching him a lesson, you know? He’d make a few bad investments, he’d come talk to me, and I’d fix it. I mean, I wasn’t going to tell him that I was the one who’d broken it in the first place, but once I fixed it, I knew he’d see how valuable I was. Only Thomas did go crazy. I don’t know what he was doing in his office all that time. I don’t know if he was peeing in jars or pretending he was a cat or if he was trying to find the problem in the code. I honestly don’t know. He was supposed to come straight to me, and we’d work it out. I’d get a raise, maybe some more stock.”
“Who found out?”
Shock widened Ran’s eyes, but then he just gave a glum shrug. “Benny.”