by Mark Leslie
Amazing how he could “work a room” like that – seem to almost instinctively determine what a room needed best – either solitude and quiet reflection, which he seemed to do well (and something that likely lent to his ability to sit for hours in a boat on a lake while fishing, just floating there quietly in the calm tranquility of the natural surroundings, absorbing the world around him and patiently waiting for that tug on his fishing line), or forging relationships with strangers and helping to put others at ease.
It was a skill that neither Scotty nor his mother seemed to possess. And, though he occasionally found himself offering the world a bit of his father’s bizarre brand of humor, Scotty didn’t seem to possess that natural ability to blend and mix with people, to forge friendships and quickly attained relationships.
He was more analytical, introspective, and good with inanimate objects, data and puzzles. Which was likely one of the reasons he adapted so easily to computer programming. He could easily consume himself with a programming challenge for days without tiring of it. But engaging in the small talk associated with colleagues and friendships was taxing to him.
He would do it out of necessity, of course, but would much rather spend his time focused on code, on exploring the intricacies of the manner by which a string of characters in a particular format could command the control of a computer-controlled environment.
It was likely the reason he didn’t have many friends.
No, he could count, on a single hand, the number of people besides his parents that he had forged any lasting relationship with – something that lasted longer than the time associated with a particular chapter of his life.
There were no high school friends that he maintained contact with; except for Pierre, his childhood neighbor, someone he saw and spoke to only when he returned home to visit his parents, and Mr. Prescott, the computer science teacher whom he had maintained regular email contact with since that first day he began to take Scotty under his wing.
Even his relationships through university didn’t seem to last longer than the term by which he shared a classroom with someone, or the year he was dorm room-mates with another person.
And the colleagues he had worked with remained just that – colleagues.
So no, there were no long term relationships, no natural inclination, like his father, to bridge those personal connections, to reach out to those around him, to inject a sense of belonging and empathetic understanding into a room.
Even while nervously waiting for his kidney surgery, more than two hours delayed and still not having had a bite to eat nor a single sip of water beyond dinner the evening before, his father sat in the waiting room calmly observing those around him and occasionally offering a friendly nod or quick quip meant to inspire a smile.
Lionel Desmond was indeed a unique character.
Scotty didn’t properly “get that” the morning he had spent waiting with his parents in the operating room, dividing his time between trying to read Cuckoo’s Egg and thinking anxiously about the meeting he had planned in order to take on what seemed like some intriguing freelance hacking work.
No, it wasn’t until much later that Scotty understood there was more to his father than he had ever paid attention to.
It wasn’t, perhaps, until the day Scotty had seen his father, eighteen months after he had supposedly died on an operating recovery room table, that he figured there was much more to the man than anybody in his life had ever properly suspected.
But that morning, Scotty was frustrated and anxious, and eager to do nothing more than see his father get into the operating room so that he could get to his meeting and explore the possibility of a new hacking assignment, a new computer challenge.
Chapter Three
Today
Scott stood and watched as the guard slowly walked toward him, his right hand coming up with a Taser.
Then he turned to look over his shoulder and saw Herb walking toward him from the other side, his gun drawn.
“You cannot evade us!” the two said in perfectly matching tones.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Scott said, spotting the empty meeting room to his immediate right. He immediately ducked into the room and slammed the door behind him. Then he locked it and dragged one of the three meeting room tables over to it, flipped it over on its side and pushed it up against the door.
Someone slammed against the door from the other side.
Scott knew it wouldn’t hold. Besides, the guard likely had a key to the room.
There wasn’t a phone in this twelve by eighteen foot meeting room, just a few more tables, a half dozen chairs, a whiteboard and a single window. But even if there had been a phone who could he call? Building security? They were obviously in on it with Herb, whatever it was.
And what the hell was it with the monotone robot-like voice, the matching glazed look on their faces?
There wasn’t time to think about that, to try to understand it. They weren’t just trying to capture him. Herb had made the intent quite clear. The goal was to kill him.
Scott needed to find a way out by any means possible.
He rushed to the window as someone again slammed against the door.
There were no latches to open the window, just a thick sheet of glass. Scott looked out, knowing that there was a drop down to the 3rd floor roof-top turret below.
Scott set down his backpack. He lifted one of the wheeled archback office chairs, then threw it against the window. The chair bounced off.
“Dammit!” he yelled as someone again slammed against the door from outside.
He picked up the chair again, and once more threw it against the window.
This time a spider-web of cracks splintered out.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
The third time he launched the chair against the window, the spider-web cracks shot out farther across the surface of the window.
Scott heard a key being inserted into the door’s lock.
He hefted the chair again, this time shattering the glass completely.
Scott grabbed his bag, looped it over his shoulder, and stepped up into the window. The broken edge of the glass sliced into his left hand as he pulled himself into the window’s opening.
The door behind him opened and slammed against the table he had tossed in front of it.
“You cannot evade us!” a robotic voice stated.
Scott jumped out the window to the rooftop alleyway one floor below. When his feet hit, he folded his legs beneath him and rolled out of the fall, losing his backpack in the process.
Rolling several times, Scotty moved up into a crouched position about a foot away from the chair he had thrown through the window. He then rushed to the edge of the roof that overlooked the building’s parking lot. There was no fire escape stairway or any other means of climbing down or up. And there was no way that he was going to be able to survive a leap down three stories onto the pavement.
He raced back to the chair, picked it up and launched it against one of the third story windows into another vacant meeting room.
This time, the window cracked upon first impact.
Scott picked the chair up again, this time feeling a sharp pain in his left hand. A line of blood leaked down from his palm and over his wrist. He threw the chair again. The crack became bigger.
He glanced back up at the window he had just jumped out of. Neither Herb nor the security guard was visible. They were obviously still trying to get into the room.
He picked up the chair again. Threw it. The window spider-webbed into a road map havoc of cracks.
Another throw. Deeper and more intense cracks.
“Come on!” Scott yelled, hefting the chair again with all of his might.
The fourth throw did the trick and the glass imploded inward along with the chair.
Scott picked up his backpack, threw it over his shoulder and ducked into the window just as he heard, again in unison, the two men say in that eerie robotic tone. “You won’t get
away! You cannot evade us!”
Chapter Four
Thirty-Five Years Earlier
“You certainly haven’t been fishing,” Janelle Desmond’s voice cut through the quiet morning, waking Scotty from a deep, restful sleep. “So where in the hell have you been?”
Scotty’s eyes snapped open and he flipped over onto his back, rubbing his eyes. The sheets and blanket were warm and snug and cocoon-like around him. His parents rarely ever fought or argued, so hearing his mother’s voice in such a loud pitch was particularly startling. The child looked over at the square bright red numerals on the bedside clock radio. It was 9:43 AM. Sunday morning.
Scotty’s father had left Friday after work on a solo fishing trip up north. He usually returned from his weekend fishing ventures early on Sunday. And he was usually home just about an hour after the sun got up. He would normally stick his head into Scotty’s room and say something like: “Up and at ‘em, Chip!” (his fond fatherly nickname for Scotty) and “Time to take on the day” or “The day isn’t getting any younger!”
But this morning, he must have arrived a bit later, and there was none of the regular “annoying” fatherly intrusion into his pre-teen desire to sleep most of the morning away. Sundays had always been for sleeping in because Saturday was all about getting up early – yes, even earlier than during the school week – in order to absorb the plethora of cartoons that played.
Scotty often relished in getting up before the channel even came live.
On Saturdays he would wake without benefit of any alarm, toss the sheets aside and race to the living room in order to turn the television on, to see the rainbow strips of the test pattern surrounded by a frame of black and with the quiet, persistent single note pitch whining in the background.
He would sit there, transfixed by the screen, proud of the fact that here he was, pre-station go live time, waiting for the magical “world” of Saturday morning television to begin.
The ritual of being there, each Saturday morning to see the test-pattern revert from the static sound and colored screen to the slide-show of Canadian landscapes and cityscapes accompanied by the National Anthem was a special moment in Scotty’s weekend.
It was like he was there for the dawn of time, the beginning of everything, and he felt a special part of the universe to go from the “nothing-ness” of the overnight test pattern screen to the beginning of the day.
It wasn’t until a decade or so later that he would wonder if that was part of the special feeling his father embraced when he sat out on a lake while fishing and watched the Sunday sun come up over the trees.
But that was Scotty’s Saturday morning – it was all about being awake to see the day’s world begin, through the National Anthem and then the stream of cartoons; from The Flintstones and The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Looney Tunes, Captain Kangaroo, Scooby-Doo, enjoying having the morning to himself before his mother stirred.
Saturday was a special ritual where, for a certain time, he was the only person in the universe, just waiting for everything to turn on and begin. It was – and this was something he wouldn’t consider for at least a decade, not until he was fully entrenched in computer programming – his weekly “reboot.”
But Sunday – now that was his day to sleep in, to catch up on the rest missed from the morning before. Sunday was usually when he would try to suck as much rest and sleep from the morning as he could before his father woke him – in the same way that, on Saturdays, he would suck as much of the joy of animated television programs that seemed to only play on Saturday morning (with the exception, of course, of The Flintstones and Spider-Man which did play during the week at noon for half an hour and also just around the time he was having his after school snack).
Except, not this Sunday.
This Sunday was something new. Something he’d never experienced before.
It was strange hearing his mother’s high pitched voice cutting through the morning.
Decidedly more disturbing than his father’s typical cheesy morning ritual of waking him.
“Fishing!” Lionel Desmond stated in response in a loud, firm, and deep-toned voice, quite remarkably different than the high-toned shriek.
“No, you weren’t fishing!” she said.
“Of course I was. Where the hell else would I be?”
“You tell me, Lionel Edward Desmond. You tell me.” There was a pause for at least a couple of beats. “Sure, you have your tackle box, you have your rod, you have your overnight bad and you’re wearing your fishing gear. But you don’t smell like fish...”
“I don’t smell like fish because I didn’t have any luck! I didn’t catch anything.”
“Bullshit!” Scotty heard the front door open and then slam shut. “Look at your truck!” She yelled. “It rained most of the weekend. But look at your truck; look at the wheel wells, look at the tires. There’s not even the faintest trace of mud anywhere on the truck.”
“You’re serious?” Lionel replied. “There’s no mud?”
“And I said it before, Lionel.” There was another pause, as Scotty imagined his mother leaning in, pursuing her lips together and performing a series of sniffs – the same gesture she would often do when trying to determine if Scotty had brushed his teeth. “But you don’t smell like fish.”
“I told you…”
“No! You don’t smell like fish! But you do smell like cologne. Why do you smell like cologne, Desmond? Tell me that, huh. Why do you smell like cologne?”
“Seriously?” Lionel said. “There’s cologne on my collar because this is the shirt I originally put on Friday after work.
“Tell me, Lionel!”
“Tell you what?”
“Where have you been?”
“Fishing!”
“No, you haven’t. You don’t smell like fish. Your truck has no mud on it. I want to know where you’ve been, Lionel!”
“Fishing!” he repeated. A second later the door slammed so hard that there was the sound of glass breaking. Then, half a minute later, the truck door slammed and Lionel heard the truck starting up then pull out of the driveway.
He laid in bed wishing he could just fall asleep and make it go away as he listened to his mother’s quiet sobs.
After a minute, the bathroom door closed and locked and his mother’s muffled crying seemed louder.
Sighing, Scotty got out of bed and figured he could be useful by going and cleaning up the broken glass.
Chapter Five
Today
It was stepping onto the broken glass on the floor as he stepped inside the third floor of the office that sent Scotty’s mind back to that morning when he was a child and his parents had been fighting, that his father slammed the door so hard that it broke the small nested door window.
There was something about the distinct crunch of the glass under his shoes that reminded him of the feel and sound of the glass crunching under his slippers as he moved across the kitchen floor in his pajamas to gather up the dustpan from the kitchen counter which was immediately beside the door.
He hadn’t thought about that fight in years. But it was the glass that brought his mind there, reminded him of what they had been fighting about.
He hadn’t been fishing, Scotty thought. But had he been having an affair? What if he was doing something else?
He had to put those thoughts off as he slipped out of the meeting room he had just smashed his way into and made his way down the abandoned and quiet third floor hallway. He had to get out of there before Herb and the security guard made it downstairs.
As he had stepped through the window, he’d heard another shot fire from the fourth floor, and the sound of what Scott figured was the bullet ricocheting off the brick less than a foot from his head. So they were still upstairs at the window, or at least Herb was. But they had to be following him once they saw he had successfully smashed his way inside.
So he didn’t have much time.
The only way for them to get down, he knew, wa
s via the front hallway elevator, which was shared between Digi-Life’s office and two other building clienteles, and the rustic wooden stairway access, also shared, but a much quicker way to descend a single floor.
Scott raced down the hall and headed past the main stairway access doors, through the kitchen area and over to the metal circular staircase that graced the “front” of the building. Thank goodness for another way up and down, at least between the third, second, and first floors. The fourth floor didn’t have that additional access. Except for the make-shift window exit Scott had just devised, there was previously only the two ways down.
The echoes of his footsteps rang loudly on the metal stairs as he quickly descended down and around. He was worried that the sound would carry and they would know where he was, but, given that he was on the third floor and there were only two ways to get out of the building (apart from breaking a window, he supposed), would be heading down at least one more flight. From the third to the second floors there were only two options – the circular metal staircase he was now on or the shared rustic wooden stairs on the opposite side of the front of the building.
There was a fifty-fifty chance of them knowing which way he had taken. Not that they’d have descended so quickly. Not unless they, like he had done, decided to jump down from the fourth to the third floor. Without someone threatening them with a gun, would they really take that risk? Scott couldn’t even believe he had done it; not to mention that he hadn’t broken something in the act.
As he made it around the final curve of the metal staircase and onto the second floor, Scott could clearly see down to the 1st floor entrance from the open balcony area of the second floor.