by David Kazzie
CLP.
Next he scrolled through the phone's list of Dialed Numbers and noted that Samantha had made the call at 6:55 p.m. Friday.
Damn, he felt like an FBI agent!
Those idiots who had kicked him out of the FBI Academy a decade ago would be sorry now. He had actually begun the Bureau's sixteen-week academy at Quantico but was expelled when he displayed certain attributes that led the FBI psychiatrists to conclude that he was unfit for duty. The FBI determined that he was so mentally unstable that it placed him on a watch list, which would have been problematic for his present line of work had he continued to use his real name. In fact, he remained a bit of a pet project of one of his FBI instructors, Alan Nichols, who had nightmares about Flagg for weeks after he was expelled from the Academy. Flagg would have been amused to know that Nichols, now the Special Agent in Charge of the New York City field office, kept Flagg's academy orientation photograph tucked into a corner of his bathroom mirror, wondering daily what had become of his former student.
Carter's voice mail picked up.
"You've reached Carter Pierce. Please leave me a message, and I will return your call within twenty-four hours. If you need immediate assistance, please dial zero for my professional assistant, Althea."
Flagg replaced the phone in its cradle while he pondered the idea of a professional assistant. He tried to conjure up a fancier turn-of-phrase for the word secretary, and he decided he couldn't. Leave it to these bigwig lawyers. After a few more minutes of searching, he concluded that he'd gotten all he was going to get out of Samantha's office, and he set his sights on Pierce's.
He slipped back out into the hallway, contemplating a lawyer's place on the evolutionary food chain. Flagg had to hand it to them. They had made themselves virtually indispensable in society. You couldn't do anything without a lawyer these days. Like latter-day viruses, they had set up shop in every cell of the modern world. They had backstage passes to the worlds of business, technology, science, crime, family, even entertainment. They could make or break companies. They could put people in prison. They could put people on death row. Impressive.
Pierce's office was three doors down from Samantha's, in the batch that Wheeler had failed to clean. The aroma of bad Chinese food hung in the air like smog. Flagg swept the room quickly for threats before getting down to the business at hand. The desktop was clear, which Flagg interpreted as a sign that this man doled out the work to the underlings but took all the credit for himself. Kind of a conundrum there. Was Carter Pierce a man who'd gotten fat and lazy, or a man who was truly king of his jungle?
There was just no way to know.
Nothing on the desk caught his eye.
He checked the notes he took in Samantha's office. The Marriott? That made sense. Julius, janitor-turned-bazillionaire, comes to the lawyers he knows best for help. They slap each other on the back with glee and stash the client in a nice hotel until he can cash in the ticket and they can take their $600 an hour for the rest of this guy's natural life. Could it really be that easy? Was Julius cooling his heels down at the Marriott? He couldn't remember exactly where it was, but he knew it was downtown somewhere. A mile or two from where he now stood. He wondered where the lawyers were right now. Probably on their leather couches in front of a fire, cozy under an afghan, sipping cognac, satisfied that their client was safe. Morons.
There was a phone book in Carter's lower right-hand drawer, its spine never creased. Flagg suspected that Carter Pierce had not looked up a phone number in many years. He found a listing for the Marriott and called the front desk.
"Good evening," said a pleasant voice, dusted with a sprinkle of an Irish accent. "Thank you for calling the Marriott on Fifth."
"Julius Wheeler, please."
Tapping of a keyboard.
"I'm sorry, sir, we don't have anyone by that name."
"Carter Pierce?"
More tapping.
"No, sir," he said. "No one by that name with us, either."
He inhaled deeply, feeling the frustration bubble up inside him.
"Samantha Khouri?"
A pause this time, virtually dripping with suspicion, and then more tapping. The sound reminded Flagg of horses clocking across pavement.
"I'm sorry, sir."
"Aw, shit, they must be at a different hotel!"
"Yes, sir," she said.
He set the phone back in its cradle and wandered over to the window. Thousands of Christmas lights shimmered against the snow on the downtown skyline. From this height, the city appeared still, but he knew that carousing of all kinds was underway in the bars and clubs below. Somewhere down there, right now, some poor girl was hours away from being raped by a nice guy she'd just met. A guy was dancing with a girl who would, later tonight, after he'd consumed a few too many Alabama slammers, infect him with HIV. Yet another would drive home drunk and kill a migrant worker riding a bicycle. It was like this every night in every city in the world. It never ceased to amaze him. Natural selection never stopped.
* * *
As he drove the deserted streets of Richmond in Ashley's car, Carter Pierce found himself thinking about Amy Cuddyer. He also found himself sexually aroused, and this just annoyed him, because he had grown to associate Amy Cuddyer with the destruction of his parents' marriage.
He wasn't sure what she was doing up there, running through his mind like it was some sort of cranial meadow. He hadn't thought about her in years. He thought again about his father, Dr. Wesley Pierce, and his mother, Mrs. Wesley Pierce. That was how she always identified herself, even today. Mrs. Wesley Pierce. Carter didn't even know her name was Janice until he was about eight years old.
Carter Pierce was twelve years old when he first observed his father being unfaithful to Dr. Mrs. Wesley Pierce. He had stolen a pack of cigarettes from his mother earlier that afternoon and was intent on torching his way through all twenty smokes by the pool while his parents were out. His mother was around the corner playing bridge with Mrs. Fletcher, because that's what doctors' wives did when their husbands were at the hospital, sticking their hands inside people's chests and saving lives. Thus, Carter thought he had the house to himself when he slinked down the stairs and onto the back deck on that warm summer evening thirty-two years earlier.
Amy Cuddyer was twenty-one years old and had just graduated from Sweetbriar College. Her parents lived across the street from the Pierces. She had a boyfriend, a chap that she had grown up with and fully intended to marry and whom she later did marry. But none of that mattered on that particular night.
For the first twelve years of his life, Carter Pierce had had virtually no relationship with his father. The man was a gifted heart surgeon, a pioneer in the field, which, unfortunately for Carter, did not leave many opportunities for father-son bonding. On the day Carter was born, Dr. Pierce had just started a seventy-two-hour shift. Despite several chances, he didn't see his son until he stumbled home, reeling with exhaustion, three days later. Janice Pierce had been the stalwart parent, Carter's rock. It was thus with much horror that Carter found his father and an extremely naked Amy Cuddyer smooching by the pool.
Things progressed far beyond smooching that night, and Carter Pierce watched the whole thing from behind the grove of boxwoods guarding the pool, too terrified to move, too fascinated by Amy Cuddyer's splendidly bare jugs to do anything but remain crouched behind the bushes. He watched them until her orgasm burst forth, loud and reckless and startling in its intensity. At first, he thought his father was hurting her, a thought quickly dismissed upon hearing her cries for "more, more!" It was under this cover of cacophony that Carter retreated from the bushes and back into the house. His mother found the cigarettes in his room the next day and gave him the beating of his life.
He never told her about what he had seen.
He drove on, the thing that needed to be done laid out before him like an old photograph.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sunday, December 23
4:35 a.m.
Sam bolted upright from the dream, afraid she had screamed aloud. Pasquale, however, remained sound asleep next to her. The room was quiet. Gently, she lowered herself back down against the sheets, which were damp with perspiration. Gross, she thought. She had woken up in an honest-to-goodness cold sweat. She thought that only happened in the movies. She peeked over at Pasquale again. He was on his back, his chest rising and falling rhythmically.
A wistful smile crossed her face as she remembered their relationship, before the dark times. There was no middle ground with him. If he fell asleep, he slept like the dead; if something was eating at him, bothering him, he didn't sleep a wink until he had resolved whatever it was chewing away at his insides. Once, he had gone four days without sleeping. She, on the other hand, was a perpetually light sleeper, her slumber punctuated with bad dreams that she rarely remembered but left her feeling uneasy all day.
This dream, while she did remember it, was already starting to fade, the fine details dissolving like the outer edges of a sandcastle. The core of it remained though. She was back in law school, in one of the large lecture halls, standing at the podium. The classroom was full, standing room only, like it was the beginning of the semester when students are trying to figure out whether to stay or drop the class. An overhead projector was on her right, beaming an image up against the wall. The image, however, was obscured because the drop-down screen was still hidden in the ceiling panels.
Samantha scanned the crowd. After a moment, she realized that they were her relatives. Every single one of them. Her parents and sisters. Twenty-seven first cousins. A dozen aunts and uncles. All four grandparents, even though three were deceased. Still other blood relatives scattered about. They were chattering quietly, the way students do just before class starts. Sam noticed a small remote device in her hand, about the size of a deck of cards. In the center was a red button, which she pushed. Immediately, a motor started whirring loudly, and the screen descended from the ceiling. As the screen completed its trip downward, its smooth, reflective surface caught the previously amorphous image spit out by the overhead projector. It was the Ticket, splashed up against the projector screen, the winning numbers highlighted as if they proved some elemental point Samantha was trying to make.
When Samantha turned back to face the audience, something had changed. They were all wearing Julius Wheeler masks. She blinked twice, hard, and the scene changed again. She was on her grandfather's porch in Lebanon, drinking warm lemonade. Her grandfather, who had been dead since 1975, was next to her, rocking back and forth in his chair. He touched her shoulder and, with a bony, frail hand, gestured down to the street. Six dusty olive-green tanks rolled by, groaning on their tracks, smoke billowing from their turrets. Something about the tanks caught her eye. She couldn't quite put her finger on it – then, it hit her. The side of each tank was stamped with a number: 5, 9, 16, 17, 24, 43.
That was when she woke up.
She touched her forehead again. It was cool to the touch, and her fever seemed to have broken. With the dream still reverberating like a mental echo, she slid out of bed and threw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. Quietly, she backed into the closet and knelt down by the safe. She slid the key home and turned it as slowly as she could. Still, the metal screeched.
She flipped up the lid. There it was.
Her career was over. Her soul was battered from years of hundred-hour weeks. An interesting government job had never been an option; there were too many people to take care of. She hadn't saved a dime for retirement. Her parents' debts were vast. Her family back in the old country lived in ramshackle homes and struggled to make ends meet, constantly wondering whether the political crisis du jour would bubble over like an unattended soup pot into yet another civil war.
With one fell swoop, she could end all their suffering and take care of her family forever. She could give every aunt, uncle and first cousin a million bucks each and have $100 million to spare. Her brain began crafting rationalizations. There was no guarantee that Jamal Wheeler was in Virginia, let alone in Richmond. Hell, Wheeler might not even be his last name. Jamal might not even be Julius' son. Jamal might be dead. There may never even have been a Jamal!
Her hand hovering over the ticket, Samantha's mind wandered into the past like a lost traveler. She drifted in and out of scenes of her parents arguing about money, of her cousin trying to borrow a little bit, of being pulled out of private school because they couldn't afford the tuition. She thought about her family trips to Lebanon as a kid, about family too poor to ever think about visiting the U.S., even if they could get entry visas, which was never a sure bet these days.
She stopped and closed the lid.
She knew it was wrong.
She found herself not really caring.
It was a tough old world out there.
She opened the lid, plucked out the ticket and shoved it into the pocket of her jeans.
"What are you doing up?" a sleepy voice asked from behind. Her back was to him, so he couldn't see what she was doing. He yawned loudly, and she heard him stretch. "Man, I was sleeping like a rock."
She wanted to hate him for sleeping well. She was afraid it meant that he didn't think about her anymore.
"Nothing," she said. "Go back to bed."
Silence enveloped the dark room.
"What time is it?"
"It's late."
"Yes, I gathered that."
"I need to go out for a bit."
"With the ticket?" he asked. "Does it need to take a piss?"
"Shut up."
"Hey, take it easy."
She popped out of her crouch and brushed past Pasquale on her way out of the room. Pasquale followed behind, but not too closely.
"I told you to go back to bed," she said.
"I'm hungry. Got any cereal?"
"Check the pantry."
She stopped at the closet and grabbed a navy blue pea coat. As she put it on, Pasquale fixed himself a bowl of Golden Grahams. They were his favorite, and for reasons that remained unclear to her, Sam always kept a box of it in her pantry. She stopped and watched him root through the refrigerator for milk. He found it and poured it over the cereal.
"Jesus, I love this stuff," he said with a mouthful of flakes.
She paused and chewed on a fingernail.
"I know."
"You're gonna keep that ticket, aren't you?"
"So what if I am?"
"Hey, you called me."
"You don't know what I've seen tonight."
"I do. You told me."
"You know what I mean."
"Still, I'm fuzzy on how that entitles you to the ticket."
"Like you're the world's preeminent expert on doing the right thing."
"What does that mean?"
"You know exactly what it means."
"No, I don't." He kept eating his cereal. As he neared the bottom of the bowl, he tipped it up to his lips and slurped down the milk.
"Charming."
"Is this because I left?"
She was silent.
"I had to get away."
"No matter what happened to me," she said.
"It wasn't about you."
"Really? The 'it wasn't you, it was me' speech? A little late for that, isn't it?"
"I never meant to hurt you."
"Well, I guess that lets you off the hook then."
"I am sorry."
"Sorry doesn't get me back those years," she said. "Not the leaving so much. The damage was done by then. What really pissed me off, what really hurt me was that you never even tried to get better. You just started downhill and that was it for you. You never gave a shit about anyone but yourself."
"What about you?" he snapped back. "When I was having a hard time, you quit on me."
"Oh, what a bunch of bullshit!"
"Listen to you," he said. "You were running around like the goddamn law student of the year while I was dying inside."
"I had to hate it because yo
u did?"
"Yeah, like law school really shows you what practicing law is like," he said. He dumped the ceramic cereal bowl into the sink with a loud clatter.
"Careful with that," she said. "I can't afford to buy any replacements."
"Jesus Christ," he went on, ignoring her. "You just got shown the door after eight miserable years!"
"They didn't show me the door," she said quietly.
"What, did they give you the 'of counsel' speech? Because that's what you put in all the ninety-hour weeks for. Of counsel. No profit sharing. No equity share. What a bunch of bullshit."
"Then maybe I should fucking steal it!"
Samantha was shouting now, her insides boiling with anger. With his independent wealth, Pasquale had had the luxury of stepping off of the hellish merry-go-round that was the practice of law, whereas the impoverished schmucks like her had to think about their futures, mortgages and student loans and families with struggling businesses.
"For you," she continued, "law was like a thing for you to try, like scuba lessons or pottery. You didn't like it, you could've checked out any time. But instead of putting us first, you chose to become one of these assholes that thought the goddamn fate of civilization depended on the outcome of some landlord-tenant dispute."
"I wasn't allowed to get into my work just because I had money?" he asked.
"That's not what I meant," she said softly.
"Sure it is."
"No-"
"Yes, it is. I never cared about the money. I didn't like who it made me. I wanted to work for a living. I didn't want to sit around all day watching Golden Girls reruns. And here's the thing. I liked the idea of being a lawyer. I liked the stuff that's in the brochure. I still like it."