Clean

by Tom Lytes

  He said, “Anyone the program comes to know, online, they’re never free of Clean again. It keeps track of everything they do, forever.”

  Bobby had ordered another round of drinks by waving at the bartender.

  “Leonard, don’t get me wrong,” he’d said. “I’m as paranoid as the next fucking guy. Creeps with hidden cameras and these hackers, they’re a bunch of lowlifes.”

  Leonard had slammed an open hand onto the bar.

  “You’re not listening,” he’d said.

  It was loud enough to draw attention to them. The bartender had again glanced at Bobby, who waved him away.

  Bobby had given Leonard an appraising once-over, and said, “Okay boy-genius. I’m listening, now. What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Leonard remembered leaning into Bobby like he was going to speak quietly, but his alcohol consumption had him miscalculating social cues. When he finally started to speak, it was loud enough to make Bobby jump a little.

  “If the program acquires enough information to declare somebody guilty and unfit for society—” Leonard had paused and played with his hand for a second. When he looked up, Bobby was paying attention, so he continued. “That person will die. It might look like a car accident, or a suicide, or a mugging, but the result will be the same. And the Clean program will be behind it.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Leonard shook his head. “No, I’m not.” Some historic survival gene somewhere in Leonard’s make-up kicked in when Bobby adjusted in his seat. Leonard had put his empty glass down on the bar, suddenly. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Not so fast, boy-genius. Now I’m fucking intrigued and you want to play Cinderella and run outta here? Sit down and tell me the rest.”

  Bobby pushed his drink to the side and held Leonard’s elbow.

  “How do you know so much about this program, anyway?” Bobby asked.

  Leonard was too bombed to follow through with leaving, and anything but the truth had seemed too hard to concoct.

  “I built it. It was for a computer class I was taking. I set out to create the ultimate marketing tool.”

  “Huh,” Bobby had said, thinking.

  “Yeah, and now I’ve got a house perched at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, right on the coast of Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina.”

  “Sounds pretty fucking pricey. What did that set you back?”

  Leonard sighed. “Five million bucks.”

  Bobby whistled softly, his eyes looked focused, and clear enough for Leonard to try and take another stab at being quiet.

  Bobby had broken the silence first. “If you spent that much on your house, you must have plenty left over for life-shit, expenses and such.”

  Leonard had nodded weakly.

  Bobby didn’t say anything more at first, and they had both taken to observing a woman do backbends that would have been thrilling at another time.

  “As fucking hard to believe as it is, Clean is out there, isn’t it?”

  Leonard had nodded again.

  “I remember watching Star Trek as a kid. Remember their walky-talky things? Everyone said phones without wires were absurd, it would never happen. Now, my fucking smartphone tells me when my garage door opens.”

  Bobby had reorganized himself on the barstool again. Something about his posture made Leonard squeamish about how his time with Bobby would end.

  “Stuff like Wi-fi was fantasyland type shit right up until it wasn’t,” Bobby continued. “I know there’s geniuses like you all over the fucking world churning out ideas and shit that’s about to blow all our minds.”

  Leonard had nodded again, this time even smaller. He remembered feeling like he should retreat but couldn’t back out of where he’d gone.

  “I’ve made my money knowing when to take it, Leonard. Something tells me you and I are gonna be in business a while.”

  After Bobby slapped Leonard too hard on the back, the rest of the night blurred until Leonard woke up in a strange bed, alone. Bobby called him most days after that one night, looking for ways to profit from the program, proposing ideas and asking questions about how to monetize it.

  A week ago, Bobby’s tone was different.

  “Leonard, maybe we can’t make any money from Clean. Maybe I was made to know about it for another reason.”

  When Leonard didn’t say anything, Bobby continued.

  “You don’t know everything about me.”

  “Uh, okay,” Leonard said.

  “To be honest, I’ve got everything I do because I know when to pounce on people’s fucking weakness. I assume the worst in everybody I meet. I really do.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It’s best when I let my paranoia run wild. Let my savage instincts take care of business.”

  Leonard stayed silent.

  “Yeah, well,” Bobby continued, “I’m thinking I was made to know about your fucking program because it’s like releasing a billion psychos into society and putting them in charge. I’m thinking I was made to know about Clean because I’m supposed to stop it. Maybe get to it before it finds me and kills me for all the evil shit I’ve done.”

  That one call set the tone for all the rest that followed. And that was how Leonard knew what Bobby wanted to hear today.

  Bobby picked up right away when Leonard dialed him back. “Yeah, Len, whatta you got?”

  “I’m just looking over the program now,” Leonard said. “It looks like your nephew Floyd died before the program found you. You’re still safe, not on the list.”

  “Are you completely sure?” Bobby asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Leonard said. A container ship passed by his picture window and dwarfed everything on Sullivan’s Island. There was something about the continental shelf of the island that created an underwater, mile-deep cliff close to shore. The biggest boats came within a hundred yards of Leonard’s house. “You have to realize that at some point there will be too many names in the program to search through all of them. Right now, it takes over an hour. And when your name does show up, I won’t be able to stop Clean. It will be a matter of time.”

  “Yeah, you said that,” Bobby said. “And you’re gonna keep checking every day for my name. And you’re gonna spend the rest of your time working tirelessly until you find out who can put a stop to this.”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. Men on the ship were scurrying about and Leonard wanted to do what they had to do, instead of talk to Bobby.

  “And if I die,” Bobby said, “I’ve made sure you die next, a painful and horrible death. Stop this thing.”

  “Yup, you say that every day.” Leonard hung up.

  He walked out the door, down the steps of his elevated house, across his grassy patch and onto the beach. He was waving at the men on the cargo-ship like a kid waves at a parade.

  Leonard smiled, despite himself. Adopting a new persona, an entire identity, wasn’t without risk, but Bobby believed in Leonard. And because Bobby struggled to find a way to monetize Clean, he didn’t think anyone could. Leonard’s smile threatened to turn into a chuckle.

  “Oh, Bobby, if you only knew,” he said to himself. “Clean has always been about money.” He thought about its onset, when he originally thought his program would market consumer goods. He laughed out loud into the wind coming off the water. Clean was about so much more now. “And that money will give me the power I need to do what I want.”

  Then he’d drop the Leonard persona, like he’d discarded others.

  This time, he, Vortmit, would reap the benefits of his planning and deception– not a foreign government or even his own.

  His shoulders were rising and falling from chuckling, and Vortmit kept waving.

  4

  Who could have predicted there’d be a crispy dead guy hanging off the transformer on the same day Peggy kill
ed her brother? Murder being a rarity in this rural part of New York, the sensational deaths attracted everyone with a badge within a hundred-mile radius. Extending out beyond the greenhouses where Doyle lay in a pile, the crime scene hummed with a chaotic mix of lights and urgency, extending all the way up the hill and around the fenced enclosure of the electrical equipment.

  “So why did you come over here again?” Agent Finley asked her.

  He dressed like a local with the Dickies tan pants and button down short sleeve shirt, untucked. Only his crisp haircut and lack of accent gave an inkling of his roots outside New England. He scribbled in a small notebook.

  “I hadn’t seen my brother in a while, so I came to say hello, and talk to him about Floyd being dead.”

  Finley nodded, caught eye contact, “You know I was talking to him about Bobby Touro?”

  “Talking to who,” she asked, “Doyle?”

  “Yeah,” Finley said, closing the notebook.

  “I’d heard about Doyle being on the outskirts of Touro’s activity,” Peggy said. “Was he more involved than I thought? You’d think I would be able to answer that, him being my brother and all.”

  “Nope, Doyle was a far removed, bit player in Touro’s dealings. So was Floyd. The guy up there,” Finley said as he pointed up the hill at the transformer, “is a guy the FBI has been watching for a while. He’s a suspected gun for hire usually working out of the South, so it doesn’t make sense for him to be here….”

  Peggy adopted her best cop stance and adjusted her sunglasses. Technically she was in charge, with the FBI invited into the situation as a courtesy. She wondered if Finley might try to take over the case by using a remote connection to Bobby Touro.

  “Don’t get too carried away here, Finley,” she said more because it was expected of a local cop at a scene like this than because she cared. She kicked at a pebble a few times and swore under her breath.

  “Nah,” Finley said with a broad smile. “I’m not. We won’t step on your toes. Seems like this situation isn’t random, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Yeah, maybe the fellah that fried up there shot Doyle, and went up after,” Peggy said.

  “No murder weapon up there.” Finley pointed to the electrical enclosure and Floyd’s dead body.

  “Hmm, interesting,” Peggy said. “Let me make sure our photographer has the scene well documented. Then I’m going to have to babysit until they can send a medical examiner from Albany.”

  “If you’re asking if I’ll be around later,” Finley said, “I will.”

  “Good. Then, meet me at my place around seven,” she said. “After we screw, you can take me out to dinner.”

  “Sounds great, Peggy,” Finley said with a straight face in case anybody was looking. “You do have a way with words.”

  Peggy had been dating Finley for over a year, but it wasn’t public knowledge. On principal she intended to keep it that way for as long as she felt like he’d never fully commit, not that she’d want that anyway. Besides, nobody else caught her eye, so he was it, for now. She turned her back on him and continued to lead her crew through the details of documenting the crime scene.

  “I want to make sure you have clear pictures of this greenhouse,” she said to the photographer. It was her first time seeing him, and Peggy thought he was probably some art kid from the Hudson Valley Community College. Probably interning for the town to pad his resume but getting more than he bargained for today. “Take a photo of those petunias with the dead blooms on them. Give me a snap of that area where the flowers are crushed.” It was halfway down the long row of flowers in the greenhouse. “Take more pictures than you think we need and then take some more. Hey, you all right, kid?”

  “No,” the young man with the camera said. “I haven’t seen a dead body before.”

  He had an open face which, at the moment, was devoid of all color whatsoever. He didn’t look like a complicated kid by any stretch.

  “You can take a break and call your mom if you want,” Peggy said.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Peggy took a closer look at the plants in the greenhouse. They didn’t look as good as they usually did this time of year. She remembered Doyle complaining about Canadian growers benefiting from their government’s fuel subsidies. Heating greenhouses with government oil meant they could sell plants cheaper than he could grow them. Doyle usually followed up his anti-Canadian rhetoric with a blistering critique of Walmart. He kept on about how their plant section lost money so people would go there and buy other stuff. At the time, Peggy didn’t know if it was Doyle just being an inflammatory idiot or if the issues were even real. From the looks of the flower output in the greenhouse, Doyle was struggling.

  Growing beautiful plants requires labor. Peggy knew all about it. The bricks behind the wire beds of flowers had the patina of hundred-year-old masonry. The cypress wood preferred by the builder of the greenhouses, Lord and Burnham, wouldn’t rot despite the humidity and moisture of the growing environment. The window glazing would decay, and the glass would slide, however, and Peggy spent much of her youth maintaining the lines of putty that kept glass attached to the wood mullions. She’d been small and agile, and enjoyed being on the roof, going from window to window looking at the sky and dreaming about a different life. Doyle had dreams back then too. They used to share them under the broad palms of the taller trees in the exotic greenhouse where they’d rested during summer afternoons. Everything changed when she’d shown an aptitude for riding horses. She embraced it with her whole being and it was her way out, for a while.

  Then she’d made a big mistake and followed it with two dozen more. Bobby Touro got his hooks in her, and once he did, it was tough getting out without a whole lot of sacrifice. And in a quintessential Bobby Touro move, he used her own brother to deliver messages and threaten her into doing things for him. When Floyd woke up dead this morning, instead of alive as the usual ass he was every other day, Peggy saw the opportunity she needed to come over and take care of Doyle. The other dead guy up the hill seemed like a bonus, making all the deaths seem connected somehow. Nobody would think she killed Doyle.

  The medical examiner finally came from Albany, and Peggy knew autopsies would be done to confirm the cause of death, and timing, too. There’d be a toxicology report for everyone involved and that might take six to eight weeks. It was mid-afternoon when Carlson’s Fence showed up to repair the chain link around the transformer.

  Old Ben Carlson was a friend of Peggy’s father. He took his time getting to the enclosure, finding Peggy along the way. They walked together in front of the long ends of the greenhouses and could see the plants in several of them.

  Ben said to Peggy, “Somebody better get in there and start watering those flowers, girl. Otherwise they’re sure to die in the heat – already got a wilt on’em. Your Daddy sure wouldn’t have let that happen, not when he was alive.”

  “Just repair the fence.” Peggy directed.

  He shook his head and looked back at the flowers before he mumbled, “May Doyle rest in peace.”

  Peggy’s eyes softened as she looked at Old Ben Carlson, her father’s one true friend.

  Any possibility of commiserating with the man ended when he said, “Doyle always was a lazy kid.” His face was etched with downward sloping lines that suggested disappointment and judgement. “The plants don’t look good. Your father wouldn’t have been pleased.”

  Peggy breathed deeply and turned away. She hadn’t thought about what might happen to the plants with Doyle gone, but she knew she wouldn’t be watering them. And if it wouldn’t be her, or Floyd or Doyle, then there probably wasn’t anyone left. Despite what might have been her father’s wish, it wouldn’t bother her if the flowers roasted in the sun and withered, either.

  When Old Ben Carlson finished repairing the fence and making the transformer area safe, she climbed into her squad car,
pulling her long braid of hair clear of the door. It was time to unwind and she’d let Finley tire himself out, and then ride him however she pleased.

  5

  “Poll numbers are up. We stay the course.”

  “I know we should, Carson,” Rube said with his hands raised defensively. “Remember it was me that came up with the campaign message.”

  Governor-to-be (hopefully) Carson Miller rubbed his eyes and briefly supported his head with both hands as he looked down at the table in front of him and exhaled.

  “Yes,” Carson said, after taking a deep breath. “You had an idea. You wanted to remove prisoners from jails across America and put them into the Grand Canyon for closed circuit television, pay-per-view gladiator fights. You thought we could decrease the prison population, cut costs, clean up society and provide entertainment. The campaign we are running is pretty different than that idea.”

  “But I inspired it,” Miller’s righthand man and oldest friend, Rube, said with his chest puffed out. Rube dressed well but still looked like a walking mess. All the beautiful, individual pieces of clothing and accessories he bought were wonderful until Rube wore them together.

  “Yeah,” Carson said, hoping to move the conversation forward. “How do the polls break down?”

  “Like I said, steady gains, but we’re still not in front,” Rube said. “We’re behind with women, young people, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and anyone who listens to National Public Radio.”

  Carson nodded, and looked unconcerned. The data was the same week after week. His numbers went up due to the disenfranchised white male. He was their candidate.

  Carson said, “Like I’ve been saying at the campaign stops, people want something to be done. Law enforcement can’t do it, the courts can’t do it, and the military won’t do it. We need a cultural housecleaning. I’m the only one ready to act, with a plan.”

  “You are, Carson,” Rube agreed. “You’re speaking at a lunchtime meeting just south of Bennington, close to a small farm town called Hoosick. That town had some murders, and they need to be mentioned. One of the dead supported you, early.”