A Perfect Life

by Mike Stewart

  When Scott had retreated three paces, he stopped and waited.

  Canon was breathing hard and rubbing his wrist. “I'm too old to run. So”—he pulled in a deep breath—“do what you're gonna do.”

  Scott looked down at the gun. “How do you take the bullets out of this thing?”

  “Huh?”

  “How do you . . .”

  “Little button there on the left side. Push it up, and the cylinder swings out.”

  Holding the grip in his palm, Scott discovered that his thumb came to rest naturally on an indented lever. He pushed and the cylinder moved slightly to the left. Walker said, “Flop it to the left,” and he did. The cylinder swung full out. Scott pointed the muzzle at the ceiling and four bullets hit the floor. Canon was ready to be helpful now. “See that steel rod sticking up on the front end? Push down on it. It'll pop out the other two bullets.”

  The last two cartridges hit the floor. One of them was spent. He looked up into Walker's eyes. “You're a crazy old bastard. You know that?” His eyes dropped. “Did I hurt your wrist?”

  “Shit, yeah, you hurt it. What'd you think?”

  Scott grinned. “I thought a crazy old man was getting ready to kill me. Here”—he held out the gun—“take this before I hurt myself.”

  Canon glanced at the pistol but didn't reach for it. He said, “You move pretty good for somebody with a messed-up, no-sleep frontal lobe.” The old bluesman massaged his wrist. “Where'd you learn to do that? What was that, some kind of special forces move or somethin'?”

  Scott grinned more broadly. “I don't think a special forces move would've had bullets bouncing around the room. I just grabbed your wrist with one hand and twisted the gun loose with the other.”

  “Fastest thing I've ever seen.”

  Scott walked over and dropped into the easy chair vacated by Canon. “I was a wrestler in college.”

  Canon still didn't move. “That wasn't no wrastlin' move I ever saw.”

  Scott could see the old man was scared. He tried to explain. “Everybody . . . almost everybody has some kind of gift.” He looked around the room and sighed. “Look, I'm not quick because I was a wrestler. I started wrestling because I could just naturally move a little faster than most people. The coach . . . the wrestling coach at my prep school . . . saw a bunch of us boxing on the green one Sunday afternoon. He talked me into trying out for the wrestling team, and I was a state champion the first year.” Scott stopped and screwed his eyes shut. “I'm kind of rambling here. Bottom line is, I never did anything like that before in my life. I'm just quick, that's all. Always have been. Nothing sinister, okay? The hell with it. You going to sit down or what?”

  Next to the easy chair, someone had placed a sofa that looked like something you'd find next to a dumpster in a trailer park. Scott tossed the empty pistol onto the sofa. Canon sat down and picked up the gun. “I don't like being in this sick place.” He dropped the pistol into the side pocket of his overcoat.

  Scott looked around the room. “How do you think I feel?”

  “That's the problem, ain't it? I don't know how you feel about it. Don't know if it turns your stomach. Don't know if you think this sick-ass room is the happiest place on earth.”

  “So.” Scott leaned back against stained polyester cushions. “Now what?”

  Darryl Simmons had been online now for seventeen hours. The apartment lights were off. Outside, the ice storm had stopped and the sounds of city traffic grew steadily as more cars ventured back out onto frozen streets.

  Here, alone in his small apartment, Simmons wore black-rimmed glasses as he peered into the glow of a huge flat-panel computer screen. He had been hacking credit card numbers. It was his bread and butter.

  A phone rang. Simmons muted the classical music blasting from his computer speakers and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Click?”

  “Never can tell. Who wants to know?”

  A few seconds passed, then the voice said, “Jimmy Lee down to the 7-Eleven. Jimmy Lee said call this number and ask for Click.”

  “Guess you can follow instructions.”

  “Uh, yeah. Well, look, Jimmy Lee says you hookin' folks up with online pussy. Uh, cut-rate porn site access numbers. You know?”

  “Say the magic words.”

  “Oh.” The caller hesitated. “Oh, yeah. Jimmy Lee said to say ‘Gandalf lives.'”

  Simmons, a.k.a. Click, leaned back and pulled off his glasses. “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many IDs you need? I don't be selling retail, jack. Ten's the minimum. You need ten ID numbers, it'll be ten bucks each. A hundred flat. You need fifty numbers, I can go five bucks a pop. The access numbers are guaranteed good for two months.”

  “How many for a thousand?”

  Click grinned. “I'll shoot you, say, two hundred-forty private memberships in the nookie site of your choice for a grand. That's”—Click barely missed a beat—“four bucks sixty-six cents a pop. And this is the good stuff. I can do Playboy Members Only, Penthouse Players Club, or we can get nasty with some online sex-show stuff. So, what you waitin' on? We got a deal or what?”

  “Let's do it.”

  Click stood and walked to the window. “Go back to Jimmy. Show him the money, then have him call me with an e-mail address where you want the stuff delivered. When Jimmy puts the cash in my palm, the access numbers hit your computer.”

  “And I'm just supposed to trust Jimmy and you with a thousand bucks? Just say okay and walk out and hope you'll send the numbers?”

  “Only way it's gonna happen, jack. You don't see me. I don't see you. You get the porno access numbers by e-mail routed through a dummy address.” Click scanned the street beneath his window. “You found Jimmy and me, so you know who you're dealing with. And you and me both know you can hit any high school in the city and turn your one grand into three or four in a day or two. You don't wanna do it . . . fuck it. Up to you.”

  Seconds passed. Click had already walked to the desk to hang up when the caller said, “I'm taking the money now. Send me the sex-show access numbers. Like you said, the nasty stuff.”

  “You got it. I'm waitin' on Jimmy's call.”

  The caller said, “Like you said, I guess I know who I'm dealing with. I know Jimmy Lee, anyhow.” He paused. “Don't you wanna know who you're talking to?”

  “No,” Click said, “that's kind of the friggin' point.”

  “Listen up, smartass. You may not wanna know who I am, but I promise you I'm not somebody you wanna screw over. You hear me? You don't do what you say you're gonna do, I'll be coming to see you with a nine.”

  “Right.” Click hung up the phone.

  He glanced out at the street again before settling back in front of the keyboard. He never printed anything. He never made notes, never kept passwords or addresses. It was all in his head. He'd learned that much, and not much else, from his old man. Leroy Simmons had been a numbers runner for the Irish mafia from way back. Old-timers in the neighborhood swore that Click's old man, Leroy, could keep a week's worth of football, baseball, and horse-racing odds and wagers between his ears. Smart as hell, they said, until the whisky finally ate his brain.

  Click heard the sound of his own voice now in the dark apartment. It sounded eerily like his father's. “Can't go to jail for what's in your head.” It was the Simmons family motto.

  The computer screen held a day's worth of coded credit card orders to an online electronics retailer. He would unscramble the numbers later. For now, he uploaded everything he had to an online server and deleted all local files. Then, using administrative access and a sweeper program, he erased all evidence of his footprints across the Internet by expunging all incriminating entries in the server logs of the computers he had just accessed. Years ago he would have simply deleted the logs themselves, but that could raise alerts. Leaving the logs intact while erasing only his own entries was much more sophisticated. It was, he thought, more elegant.<
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  When he was done, Click pushed away from the keyboard and stumbled into the next room where he collapsed onto a king-size bed. It was time to sleep. He'd gotten a request for something new on the shrink over at the hospital. Nothing complicated. Just keyboard time. But now he needed to sleep. Scott Thomas would have to wait.

  CHAPTER 13

  When Canon said he was going to the car for a bottle, Scott was sure the old man was cranking his Caddy, retreating down those ruts of heavy slush, and leaving him alone in that horrible house. So he was surprised when Canon stepped back into the foyer holding a fifth of Jack Daniel's.

  He motioned to Scott. “Other room. That's turning my stomach in there.”

  Scott stood and followed Canon into the little makeshift study. The older man plopped down in the only chair, unscrewed the cap on his bottle, and took a swallow. Then he extended the bottle to Scott.

  Scott shook his head. “I'm having enough trouble without that. Probably put me in a coma.”

  Canon asked, “What's upstairs?”

  “I told you. I've never been inside this house in my life.”

  The old man bobbed his head and took another swallow.

  Scott pushed his rump up onto the particle-board desk and let his feet dangle. “You reload your gun?”

  Canon snorted a kind of brief chuckle. “Bet your ass.”

  “Try not to shoot me.”

  “Can't promise anything.” The old man took another pull from the bottle, then looked around the room. All he said was “Convince me.”

  “That I've never been here before?”

  Canon Walker nodded his head, reared back in the chair, and propped a pointy-toed shoe on the edge of the desk.

  “Okay.” Scott rubbed his eyes and reached out. “Give me a sip of that.” The bottle was cold. The whisky felt cool on his tongue, warm inside his throat and stomach. “I guess . . . I guess you've got two choices. One, I'm innocent of any of this—the murder or putting up that filth in there. Or two, I'm not only crazy as hell, but I'm going to extraordinary measures to announce that fact to the world.” He paused. “That sound about right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So let's take the last one. Why would I bring you out here to see this? Why would I make up a burglary, smash up all my own stuff, and tell a lie about some unseen burglar admitting to murdering one of my patients?”

  “Like you said. Crazy.”

  “Okay, why would I faint . . . sorry, pass out when I saw that awful room?”

  “Actin'.”

  “You really think I was acting, Canon?”

  The old man screwed the top on his bottle and set it on the desk. “No. Not makin' much of an argument for your innocence, either, though.” He stood. “Fire up that computer. I wanna see what's on it.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Yeah. I'm goin' upstairs and look around. See what I can find. And, Doc?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you're tellin' the truth, I'd keep a eye and ear peeled for anybody comin' around. We don't wanna get caught flatfooted by whoever put together that picture show in the next room.”

  Scott hopped off the desk and walked to the window. Nothing out there but moonlit pastures and charcoal clumps of trees. When he turned back, Canon had disappeared.

  He turned his attention to the computer. The front panel showed a DVD player, a CD writer, a floppy drive, two USB ports, and a firewire. He punched the ON button and watched the nineteen-inch screen come to life. Windows XP. Scott zoned out as the operating system loaded. When the hourglass disappeared from beside the cursor, he clicked on START, opened the Control Panel, and clicked SYSTEM.

  “Oh, shit.”

  The screen read:

  Registered to: Scott Thomas

  Gateway, Inc.

  Intel (R)

  Pentium (R) 4 CPU 1.90 Ghz

  1.90 GHz

  256 MB of RAM

  “Shit, shit, shit!”

  “What is it?” Canon had quietly returned downstairs and was standing behind him.

  “Guess I'm not only a pervert, I'm a stupid pervert to boot.” Scott pointed to his name on the screen.

  Walker straightened up. “Already got your picture all over that mess in the living room. Don't see where your name on the computer makes much difference.”

  “Depends on what kind of cookies they've been accepting. What kind of security. If they downloaded those pictures off the Internet . . .” His eyes scanned the desktop. Nothing there but Office Suite programs and Internet access. He clicked on START again and opened the Programs menu. “Look.”

  Canon leaned over the screen. “What the hell am I looking at?”

  “A cheap version of Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro. Three or four other graphics programs.”

  “What's that . . .”

  “Hang on.” Scott opened Photoshop and hit OPEN. The My Pictures window opened. “Oh, shit.”

  “What!”

  “There are a couple of hundred files here.” He chose one at random and double clicked. The screen filled with a closeup of a gynecologist's work area.

  Canon said, “That what I think it is?”

  “Can't you tell?”

  “Kinda hard to place things with no point of reference like that.”

  Scott chose another numbered file at random from the menu. The next screen had a barnyard theme.

  “Burn it,” the old man said abruptly. “Burn the whole house down.”

  “We can't do that.”

  Canon took his hand off the loaded pistol in his pocket and motioned at the house with an empty palm. “What if somebody finds this? You can't explain this shit. You haven't even been able to explain it to me. What you gonna tell the po-lice? Damn. I'm tellin' you, Doc, you gonna give that de-tective in your apartment this afternoon, you gonna give the man a month of wet dreams handin' over sick-ass evidence like this. This ain't no fuckin' movie. You give the cops this kinda evidence, hell, they gonna lock your ass up and throw away the key. Nobody . . . no-damn-body on earth gonna look any farther for who snuffed that poor woman in the hospital if they see this.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You've seen all this. And I guess you believe me. Otherwise, I don't think you'd be telling me to set fire to some stranger's house.”

  “Two things.” Canon walked to the window and scanned the pasture outside. “First”—he turned back and tried to smile—“you're forgettin' I can see evil on people.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “And, boy—you got about as much evil on you as a new puppy stumblin' around trying to find its momma's tit.”

  Scott turned off the computer. “What's second?”

  “Second is that it don't benefit me to think you killed that woman. The cops wanna solve this crime. You said . . . What's the woman's name?”

  “Patricia Hunter.”

  “You said this Hunter woman is rich. Got a big-dog husband. Well, big dog don't matter to me, but you can bet your ass it matters to the po-lice. They'll slap a set of cuffs on you and parade your ass in front of every reporter in town.” He looked out again at the frozen fields. “It ain't my job to talk you into savin' yourself. You wanna call the cops and get 'em out here to look at this, knock yourself out. I'm just sayin', if it was me, I'd set a match to the place.”

  “I have a history with fire.”

  “Oh.” Canon didn't know what else to say.

  “The pictures are here.” Scott waved his hand at the desk. “Inside this computer. Now my fingerprints are all over the place, too.” He paused. “What'd you find upstairs?”

  “Nothin'.”

  “Nothing important or . . .”

  “I mean nothin'. Not a bed. Not a chair or a table.” Canon moved away from the window to stand over Scott. “I'm tellin' you, this whole place doesn't feel right. It's more like a stage that's half ready for a show than a place where somebody lives or works. And I'll tell you somethin' else. I don't
think you'd be burnin' down somebody else's house, the way you said.”

  “What do you mean? It has to belong to somebody.”

  “Got your name on the computer. All those nasty pictures in the other room. We might as well assume there's a lease or a bill of sale somewhere has your name on it. All the rest don't make sense otherwise. The cops discover this place, they got to check on who pays the rent. All the rest don't work if that person ain't you.”

  “So you say put a match to the whole house.”

  “Nothin' else you can do. You strip out those pictures, bust up this computer, they're just gonna fill it up again. Or set you up somewhere else.”

  “But either way—burn it or empty it—and they can still set me up again in another house or apartment.” Canon started to speak, but Scott held up a palm to stop him. “Just a minute. You think it looks like whoever did this isn't through.”

  “No way to know for sure. But, yeah, looks that way to me.”

  “So that means they're coming back.”

  The old man grinned. “Yeah. It does. Doesn't it?”

  Scott could feel the haze clearing inside his head. “If you'll take that pistol and stand watch out by the road, I'm going to build a hell of a fire in the fireplace.” He leaned down to pick the CPU up off the floor. Placing it on the desktop, he asked, “You got a knife on you?”

  Canon reached into his hip pocket. “Yeah, sure. What you gonna do?”

  “Well, after I put a match to those pictures in the living room”—he rested his hand on the computer—“I'm going to come back in here and cut this thing's heart out.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Kate Billings had turned on the answering machine in case Charles Hunter returned her call. She waited for his voice after the sixth ring, but heard Scott Thomas instead.

  “Kate? If you're there, please pick up. I really need to talk to you. Please, pick—”

  She grabbed the receiver. “What's wrong?”