Corrupted Memory

by Ray Daniel

  “Whatever,” said Sal.

  I said to Jael, “Please do me a favor and take Lucy to Mass General to get her toe fixed up.”

  Lucy said, “You’re not coming?”

  I looked at the ground. “No. There is something I have to do. I’m sorry.”

  “You seem to be apologizing a lot today,” said Lucy. She turned and limped toward Jael’s MDX. They climbed in and drove down the street. I waved at Lucy. She ignored me.

  I said to Sal, “I need one more favor.”

  “You want me to tuck you in?”

  “No, I need a gun.”

  “Why?”

  I knew who had burned my mother’s house down and why. I told Sal.

  Sal said, “You don’t want a gun.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you aren’t a fucking killer, that’s why.”

  I relived the moment when my heel connected with Sami’s nose. I felt the crack in my foot as the thin bones of his nose were driven into his brain. I watched again as his eyes rolled back in his head and blood spurted down my shoe. I remembered the feeling when I saw his shuddering last breath and realized what it meant. I had killed the man who was about to kill Lucy and me.

  It felt good.

  It shouldn’t have felt good. It should have filled me with remorse. I should have spent time imagining the wife who wouldn’t see him again, the kids who wouldn’t have a dad, the mom who would bury her son.

  Screw them all. He had felt Lucy up, bound our wrists with zip ties, covered our mouths with tape, and was going to shoot us and leave us for the tide. It shouldn’t have felt good to kill him. It did.

  “You’re wrong,” I said, “I am a killer.”

  “That was a fucking accident,” said Sal. “This won’t be like that. You’re gonna have to look him in the eye and say goodbye. You’re not gonna be able to do it, and he’ll kill you.”

  I said, “Believe me, I’ll be able to do it.”

  “Are you sure it’s him? Are you abso-fucking-lutely sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got evidence that nails him. I’m going to show it to him and then kill him.”

  “Just show it to your FBI buddy. Let him do the work.”

  “No.”

  “Show it to me and I’ll get Lyla to do it. This guy killed my aunt; Lyla would do it for free.”

  “No. I swore to God.”

  “You didn’t even make Confirmation, now you’re swearing to God?”

  “Are you going to give me a gun?”

  Sal reached into the car and fumbled around in the glove box. He produced a gun.

  “Here. It’s a fucking revolver; it’s loaded. Just pull the trigger hard. You didn’t get it from me.”

  “I know. Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re gonna get fucking killed,” said Sal.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Sal. He turned to climb into the car.

  I ran around the car. “Hey, Sal.”

  He stood next to the driver’s door, waiting.

  I said, “Are we good?”

  Sal grabbed me and pulled me into a bear hug. “Yeah, little cousin, we’re good.”

  Seventy-Six

  My apartment door hung open. Crowbar bites ran down the doorframe, showing where someone had worked my door open. I stood at the door, revolver in hand, listening for someone in the apartment. My finger rested on the trigger. I moved it out along the side of the revolver. Never too late to implement gun safety.

  Silence. Nobody was moving in my apartment. I considered calling Jael, but my cell phone was lying in a street somewhere, probably shattered. I placed my finger back on the trigger and pushed the door open with my foot. No sound. No movement.

  I peeked through the doorway, looking down the hallway to my living room. My big black leather sofa was splashed across the living room, its cushions gutted. My flat panel TV lay on top of it. It had been ripped from the wall over the fireplace.

  “That was unnecessary,” I muttered.

  I stepped into the condo, peering around the door. The mess got worse. Pans, spices, dishes, paper towels, bottles of Scotch, and the contents of the refrigerator were thrown across the floor. Bags of my mother’s mail had been ripped open and spread everywhere. The countertop was covered with cereal boxes.

  My thoughts turned to Click and Clack. I dug through the crap on the counter and found them under a torn plastic bag. They were unaffected by the maelstrom around them.

  “Did you guys do this?”

  They rested on their log.

  “Because I told you no parties. I told you the tough kids would show up and ruin everything.”

  Their sponge was dry. I took it out of the terrarium, stepped across the former contents of my cabinets, turned on the water with my revolver hand, and wet the sponge. Tucked it back into the terrarium, sprinkled food on it, and replaced the lid.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be seeing you guys,” I said. “I’ll make sure someone checks in on you.”

  The search had destroyed my office. All the drawers were pulled out, their contents dumped. The books had been ripped off the shelves and chucked onto the floor. My computer monitor had been smashed. That was just mean. You can’t hide notebooks in an LCD computer monitor.

  My bedroom had gotten the same treatment: shredded mattress, strewn clothes, posters torn off the walls. Clearly Talevi killing me would not have saved the person who trashed my apartment looking for notebooks full of damning evidence, evidence that should have been destroyed in my mother’s house fire.

  I had lied about having the notebooks. Jael had been right: you can’t tell what will happen when you improvise. You can’t even know whom to trust.

  Seventy-Seven

  It was midnight. I turned off the disposable cell phone I’d bought at Walmart and waited. This was all going to end in the next hour.

  I sat at my father’s desk, holding the revolver in my lap with one hand, flipping through the incriminating notebook with the other. The book contained all the evidence Bobby Miller and Lieutenant Lee would ever need. I probably should have called them, but I hadn’t. I’d called my mother’s killer instead.

  My father had started a new notebook every six months. There were two per year, each a bound collection of green pages with a faint blue grid superimposed on them. These notebooks would have been useful if my father were getting a patent. Instead, they outlined the pressures that turned him into a spy and gave him an aneurysm.

  My father had recorded his life in meticulous detail using tiny printed handwriting, always in pen, never in pencil. I flipped back through time, past meeting notes, past drawings, past phone numbers and org charts, circuits and flow diagrams, through phone call logs and maps and sketches.

  My father made little distinction between work and home. A meeting with another engineer (whose name, like all names, had been highlighted with a yellow marker) was logged beside a shopping list that contained Twinkies, a snack that had never sullied my mother’s kitchen.

  My father had scored the ’86 Red Sox playoff games in his notebook. I remember him doing it. It was a Saturday, and he was always home on Saturdays. I watched the game, scrunched up against him, my Red Sox cap crushed in my hands as I prepared to leap into the air. Afterward I cried. Dad told me not to be a baby.

  Game 7 had been scheduled for Sunday, but it rained, and Dad traveled back to Pittsfield on Monday. I had watched Game 7 alone, my mother having long since gone to sleep.

  I flipped further back in time to the note I had found before, the one that confirmed what I already knew because of what Talevi had told me:

  Meeting with Mr. Talevi

  I scanned down the page and found a number:

  $500K for me

  There it was. The price of my father’s honor.
Five hundred thousand dollars was enough to convince him to sell our country’s secrets so he could support the babysitter he’d fucked and the son who resulted. Five hundred thousand dollars that paid for a house in Pittsfield, a diploma from UMass, and a few years of homemaking for Cathy. Five hundred thousand dollars that burned a hole in his conscience and blew out a blood vessel in his brain.

  The note continued:

  $500K for Walt.

  “I see you found the notebooks,” said Uncle Walt. He had padded through the doorway of the storage unit and stood in front of the desk.

  I had called Walt an hour ago and told him I had the evidence. Told him to meet me here, in this deserted place, at this deserted time, or that I’d share the evidence with Bobby Miller in the morning.

  I raised the revolver, finger along the side. “Throw away the gun, Walt.”

  Walt’s eyes widened and he stepped back, raising his hands. He hadn’t expected me to be armed. “Whoa. I don’t have a gun. Watch where you point that.”

  “Don’t fuck with me. Throw away the gun.”

  “I told you. I don’t have a gun,” he said.

  “Let’s try this, then. I shoot you in the chest, and then I look for the gun.” I slid my finger under the trigger guard, reached up with my thumb, and cocked the hammer.

  “Okay. Okay,” said Walt. He reached behind his back and produced a black pistol, holding it between thumb and forefinger.

  “Toss it behind the filing cabinet.”

  Walt hefted the gun toward the filing cabinet in an arc. It hit the top and rattled off onto the floor next to the wall. “You happy?”

  “Is that the gun you used to kill JT?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” said Walt, “it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I use that gun?”

  “No, you son of a bitch. Why did you kill JT?”

  “He was going to tell you about our deal with Talevi. Patterson had quit, we didn’t have the password, and JT said that you would be able to break in. Turns out he was right about that part.”

  “I wouldn’t have helped him,” I said.

  “I knew that, but JT wouldn’t listen. That asshole thought you were some sort of bent Mafioso hacker, that you would jump at the chance at a million dollars.”

  “What million dollars?”

  “My million dollars. Talevi was paying two million. JT was going to give you my million. Said I was useless now that he knew Talevi.”

  “So you killed him.” Walt started to lower his hands. “Keep them up.”

  Walt raised his hands again. “Yeah. So I killed him.”

  “It was stupid to do it right in front of my house.”

  “I didn’t know it was your house.”

  “And then Cathy Byrd, and then my mother.”

  “Just covering my tracks, Tucker. I was sorry about your mother. I just needed to destroy those notebooks.”

  Images flashed before me. I saw my mother, stumbling in the smoke, fighting her way down a flaming goat path.

  “I’m going to kill you now, Walt. Just like I promised at her funeral.”

  Walt moved toward the desk, keeping his hands up. He stopped with the gun a foot from his heart. Then he dropped his hands and leaned on the desk, closing the gap.

  Walt said, “You’re not going to kill me.”

  I said, “I am.”

  “If you were going to kill me, you would have done it already.”

  “Wha—”

  A spiking clang of pain speared my skull and tore at my balance. Walt had bashed me with my father’s ashtray. The gun fired, but Walt wasn’t standing in front of it anymore. I turned to shoot, but Walt brought the ashtray down again. Its torn edges exploded across my forehead.

  I heard Walt say, “You always were a disappointment.” Then I slipped into darkness.

  Seventy-Eight

  I awoke to the smell of lighter fluid. Flat on my back. My hands tied over my head. I pulled, but a length of rope ran from them to the leg of Dad’s desk. Walt sat in the Barcalounger, watching me.

  “Well, you finally woke up. I thought I was going to have to torch you without saying goodbye.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I suppose I got that coming. Truth be told, I don’t care about saying goodbye. I need to ask you a question. If you answer it, I’ll shoot you and then burn your body. If you don’t, I’ll just burn you alive.”

  My head spun. I tugged at the rope, pushed myself toward the desk with my heels, and tried to lift the desk to slip the rope from under it.

  Walt said, “That desk is a heavy fucker with all those notebooks on it. Your dad was almost as bad as your mother when it came to hoarding paper.” Uncle Walt gestured to a pile of engineering notebooks on the desk. The pile stunk of lighter fluid. So did the desk.

  Walt continued, “Did Talevi ever get the plans from you? He said that you called him.”

  I said nothing.

  Walt rose and pulled out the filing cabinet drawers. He dumped all the papers on the floor into a pile.

  Walt said, “I guess you figured out by now that I helped Talevi take Lucy. She didn’t even see me shove her into the car.”

  He covered the pile of paper with lighter fluid and kept talking.

  “I got to tell you, Tucker, there is nothing more exhilarating than the long con. JT was going to pay you a million dollars to break into Patterson’s machine, and I got you to beg me to let you do it.”

  I tried again to lift the desk. But flat on my back I couldn’t get leverage.

  Walt said, “You didn’t need to get Hugh to give me a beating, though. I was going to give in if you just crawled to me one more time. Then you even offered to pay off my gambling debts. You’re so cute.”

  “You’re gonna fry, Walt. You think I didn’t tell people about the notebooks? Bobby’s on his way here now.”

  “You know, Tucker, you are a shitty liar. I think you really believed you were going to murder me. You didn’t tell anyone about the notebooks.”

  I spit on one hand and rubbed it onto my bound wrist. Tried to fold my hand and fit it through. The skin tore, but the rope held.

  Walt said, “So anyway, to my question. Did you give the plans to Talevi? Did he get what he wanted?”

  I said nothing. Let Walt find out about Talevi on his own.

  “Last chance, Tucker. I’d like to get some money out of Talevi. Did you give him the plans?”

  “You know what, Walt?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not my fucking uncle.”

  Walt pursed his lips and sighed. “Ah, well, it figures. It’s easy to see why JT was your father’s favorite.”

  “You knew about JT?”

  “Of course I knew about JT. I was his godfather, for Christ’s sake. That’s why I gave him a chance at the second deal with Talevi. Figured, like father like son, and I was right.”

  “Why not me?”

  “You were always your mother’s son, Tucker. A momma’s boy and a straight arrow. JT was your father’s son. Looked just like him; acted just like him. God, your father loved that kid.” Walt moved toward the fluid-drenched pile of paper. “Time for me to torch this place and get rid of the Tuckers. Frankly, you’ve all been nothing but a pain in my ass.”

  Even with the blood, I couldn’t slip free of the ropes. I glared at Walt. “Why?”

  “Why what? Why am I going to burn all this? Isn’t it obvious? It’s the link from your dad back to me.”

  Walt lit a match.

  I yelled, “Don’t do this!”

  “Bye-bye, Tucker.” Walt threw the match onto the pile and the lighter fluid started to burn. The flames climbed the pile. Smoke wafted against the ceiling. Walt stepped out of the storage bin, turned, and watched.

  A
column of smoke and flame hid me from Walt. I tugged at the rope, trying to break it with brute force. The flames followed a line of lighter fluid along the floor and up the desk’s other leg. Walt had not put the lighter fluid near me or the rope.

  The notebooks on the top of the desk ignited with a whoomp. Smoke boiled toward the ceiling. The flames merged with the flames from the paper pile. Panic set in. I got to my knees, got my feet under me, and lifted the desk, flames dancing in front of my face. It rose an inch, but there was no way to slip the rope off. I coughed, dropped the desk, and fell back as the pile of notebooks slid off the desk and onto the floor.

  The notebooks fanned open, burning brightly. I saw my chance. I pushed my wrists over the flame, fighting the reflexes that tried to pull my arms to safety. The rope tethering me to the desk caught fire. I gritted my teeth and kept my wrists in place to make sure the rope was burning, then I kicked back with both legs. The burning rope snapped and I fell toward the burning pile of paper.

  I twisted my hips, planted a foot on the floor, and rushed through the flames, holding my seared and bound wrists in front of me. Black smoke enveloped my head as I coughed, ducked, and charged into the night.

  Smoke had filled my eyes. Walt was on me before I could clear them. His shoulder rammed my gut and forced me back toward the flames. Panic worked for me now. I fell, caught myself with my bound hands, got to my feet, and bolted away from the heat.

  I stopped running and turned, wiping my eyes clear. Walt was fumbling to get my revolver out of his jacket. I launched myself at him. He fired. Pain creased my side, but I had momentum. I plowed into Walt and he fell. I grabbed the gun barrel and its heat burned my scorched skin, but I held on and twisted. Walt grunted as his wrist bent. I took the gun, staggered away, and heaved it into the fire with both hands. I fell to one knee and coughed up black mucus.

  Walt kicked me in the side. The pain from my burns screamed through me, blocking out the pain from the kick. I stood. Walt grabbed me and pushed. We both fell toward the flame. The heat tore into my body, making the cut in my side howl.

  I couldn’t fight anymore. I dropped, becoming dead weight and grabbing Walt as I fell. He fought to keep from going down. I kicked up, catching him in the midsection and slingshotting him over me into the inferno. He landed on the pile of engineering books. His flannel shirt blazed into flame. He screamed, rolled, stood, and ran blindly into the filing cabinet, ricocheted to the desk, and fell back onto the burning pile of engineering books. Walt scrambled to his feet, staggered toward the door, flames sheeting over his body. His skin blistered as he fell to his knees, pitched forward, and was still.