“He might not see the statements for a month.”
“No. We’ll put enough charges on them so that he’ll be over his limit all the way around. Then, when he keeps getting declined, he’ll call the credit card companies, screaming. When he denies that he’s made the purchases or that he’s lost his wallet, they’ll cancel all his cards. What a migraine.”
“Good. I get it. Make it happen.” Pratt hung up, slid the drawer closed, and took out his calculator to perform his daily ritual. He looked at a computer screen that displayed yesterday’s New York Stock Exchange closing price of Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc.’s common stock. Two hundred and fourteen dollars per share, up 7/8 of a point. He multiplied the share price by 825,000—the number of shares he owned.
“One hundred and seventy-six million and change,” he said out loud in the empty suite. “That’ll keep me in Biltmore Forest at least until payday. Not too shabby for the skinny kid from St. Raymond’s orphanage. Not too shabby at all.”
Pratt took a deep breath and went back to the proposed ads. He decided to reject them. They weren’t bad, but the subliminal message they were supposed to convey, you’re eighteen now, you can smoke if you want to, didn’t come across quite loudly and clearly enough.
3
Monday, October 2, 10:26 a.m.
Bay View Mall, Boston
Raising two small children by herself made Millie Jenkins’s job at Tunn’s Tobacco Shop in the mall seem like a leave of absence. She enjoyed every moment of it. At 9:30 each morning, she arrived at the shop. At 9:59 she unlocked the glass doors, plucked the occasional dead fly or moth out of the display in the store window and opened for business.
A little before 10:30 on Monday morning, the FedEx delivery man stepped into the shop and rapped his knuckles on the glass case that displayed a variety of imported pipes and lighters.
“Millie.”
She looked up. “Hey, Greg.” She liked Greg. He had that blue-collar-model look of so many FedEx drivers, and she had been flirting with him for a year.
“Something for you today.” She wrinkled her brow. He handed her the FedEx envelope and a clipboard.
Then she smiled. “Wow, for me?”
“Sign right here.”
Millie signed, taking care to make certain her name was legible.
“Alrighty then,” Greg said. “See you.” He retrieved the clipboard and returned to his dolly stacked with other packages.
“Can’t wait,” she said, wanting to sound interested but not desperate.
Millie carried the envelope back into the stockroom, poured the tepid coffee out of her mug and refilled it with fresh. She tore open the envelope and shook the contents out onto a desk.
Out tumbled a pack of Easy Lights rubber-banded to a disposable lighter, a regular envelope marked “Survey Enclosed,” a cheap pen and a letter addressed to her on the stationery of Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. Millie knew the company’s regional sales manager. That was probably why the package was sent to her. She pulled the personalized letter from under the cigarettes and lighter and smoothed it out on the desk.
September 29, 1995
Ms. Millie Jenkins,
Assistant Mgr.
TUNN’S TOBACCO SHOP
Bay View Mall
Boston MA 02109
Dear Ms. Jenkins:
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. We are conducting a consumer survey because we’ve changed the taste of Easy Lights and want to know what consumers think about the difference.
Complete the enclosed survey form now, and you’ll be $100 wealthier in just a few minutes! Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. will mail you a check within five business days.
We need your feedback right now, so our offer of $100 applies only to the first 250 respondents. We have sent surveys to 500 tobacco retailers via overnight mail, and so by midday Monday, all participants will have received them. May I suggest you complete the form right now? It’s simple. Here’s all you need to do:
Open the enclosed pack of Easy Lights and enjoy one cigarette as you would any other.
Complete the survey. We’ve even enclosed a pen for your convenience!
Immediately dial the 800 number listed below. One of our opinion researchers will ask you to read your responses.
Provide our researcher with your name and address—work or home, whichever you prefer—and we’ll process your $100 payment today.
Thanks and please keep enjoying Easy Lights, Primos, and other fine Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. products!
Matthew Doran
Vice President, Product Development
P.S. If you are not over 18, if you are not employed by a tobacco retailer, or if you do not regularly smoke cigarettes, please discard this survey.
Millie checked her watch.
10:26. I’m getting me that hundred bucks, honey. The good Lord knows I can use it.
An occasional smoker who had never tried Easys before, Millie knew her survey responses would be of little value to Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc., but she didn’t plan to mention that when she called in so she could get the one hundred dollars.
She removed the cellophane from the pack, took out a cigarette, and put it to her mouth. She flicked the lighter and brought a bead of flame to the cigarette.
Millie inhaled deeply. A vicious cough burst out of her throat.
The smoke had blistered her mouth, throat and lungs. Her eyes opened wide and the burning cigarette dropped into her lap. The room spun so fast she saw nothing but a whirl of muted color. She coughed again and a choking sound came from deep within her chest. Still on the chair, she doubled over, gasping. Her diaphragm convulsed, forcing air into her lungs. The current burned the back of her throat like a blowtorch.
She panicked, as if submerged in water without warning. She tried to scream, but couldn’t. What’s happening to me? Her respiration became a staccato series of violent grunts and snorts. Furious coughing hammered her chest. She swallowed air spasmodically. Millie, no longer able to breathe, could only choke. Eight or ten seconds after lighting the cigarette, the poisoned smoke had annihilated her respiratory system. Her lungs had been rendered incapable of harvesting oxygen from air.
Millie’s jaw locked open, and she fell thrashing, wild-eyed, onto the floor. Her body jackknifed, every muscle contracting then relaxing, contracting then relaxing, in pantomime of the gasping mouth of a caught fish fighting for air. Her fingers spread wide and went rigid. Her hands jerked up in front of her as if to stop an oncoming truck. Her bladder and bowels convulsed and emptied. At the moment of death, an agonizing spasm wrenched Millie Jenkins’s back into a shape it had never known in life.
For another half-minute, her body continued to jerk, writhing sideways on the unswept stockroom floor, crashing into steel filing cabinets, smashing into boxes, the overturned chair, and finally, a cinder-block wall.
4
Monday morning, October 2
Tom “T.R.” Rhoads’s apartment
Asheville, North Carolina
At forty-two, on a good day, preferably one slightly overcast, Tommy Rhoads could be mistaken for a handsome man.
He was tall and wiry, his hair curly and brown, his gait agile.
Rhoads’s face was angular and awkward. He had the habit of leaving his mouth slightly unhinged. And his nose was a bit hooked in that jagged Anglo-Saxon way and too long. Bright light didn’t flatter it and it cast a giant shadow. Beneath the skin of his face was an ensemble of expressions coiled and ready to spring. At any moment, Rhoads’s face could contort itself into a firestorm of rage or become the source of an inappropriate laugh.
On a bad day, like this day, after the bout with food poisoning and his search for relief in a bottle of rum, Rhoads could look like hell. The ensemble wouldn’t show up, and his face would recede into dark gloomy pockets under his eyes, and that was all you c
ould see.
This morning, he was too hungover to go to work, too embarrassed to go in and pretend not to see his employees avert their eyes while thinking, Look what Rhoads did to himself again. The three employees at his private security and investigations firm were loyal and devoted to him, he knew, and that’s why he called in, saying that he was working in the field all day. He knew they were worried about him, and he couldn’t bear to face their concerned looks. It had been this way since his wife died, months of sobriety alternating with weeks of showing up late, bleary-eyed and exhausted. His clients were always happy with the work the firm did, but in times like these, he leaned heavily on his people to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks.
Instead of showering and dressing, Rhoads paced slowly back and forth through the rooms of his small apartment in a high-rise in the heart of Asheville. Rhoads had hardly furnished the place. When he had moved to Asheville from Philadelphia years earlier, he installed expensive off-white wall-to-wall carpeting and bought a dozen large indoor trees. Ficus and avocado and Norfolk Island pine. When the flora didn’t produce the dense woodsy effect he was after, he went out and bought six more. That had done it. He used a water bottle with a spray nozzle and misted the trees three or four times a week. Large windows flooded the apartment with sun for most of the day.
Eventually, Rhoads replaced his futon with a real bed and bought bar stools for the breakfast counter in his kitchen, along with a big television, VCR, and audio system. He didn’t own much more than his clothing and what he had in the apartment. He drove a Taurus—reliable and not flashy, the impression he wanted to give of the firm itself.
Rhoads sat down at the breakfast counter and dialed his secretary’s voice-mail number, letting her know he was working on the latest case—a corporate security analysis—from home.
After leaving the message, he called his younger brother Teddy who lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The two Rhoads brothers had always been prone to drink—a family trait—but Tommy hadn’t given in to it until his wife of three years died. She insisted he call her Janet, but he preferred to call her Jan. Now that she was gone, it was Jan. She had died too early—complications from a congenital heart defect that kept her side-lined from sports and exertion her entire life. Her heart simply gave out, and now Rhoads’s only family was Teddy’s.
Teddy hadn’t done as well as Rhoads when it came to pushing back from alcohol. Rhoads loved his brother, and since he and Jan hadn’t had kids, he loved Teddy’s like his own. Teddy’s life had been falling apart for years.
His descent was accelerating. When Rhoads couldn’t get to his office, he had employees who worried about him. When Teddy didn’t make it in to work, all he had was a belligerent manager who was no doubt building a file for Human Resources detailing his erratic performance. Tommy knew it wouldn’t be long until Teddy and Kodak were history.
The phone rang in Teddy’s den. He answered Rhoads’s call, and as soon as the “how’s the family” talk was over, Teddy asked, “You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“Plan B, big brother. I found us our boat.”
Rhoads and Teddy, years before, had come up with a plan to strike out on their own. They would buy a fishing boat and run charters together off the coast of southern New Jersey. For Teddy, it was a way to escape the disapproval of his bosses and take control of his life. Rhoads was ready to leave the P.I. business, which was mostly a seedy and depressing world where he could make a living but never get rich.
But mostly he had always thought of the charter business as a way to keep an eye on Teddy. They would work together every day and, though Rhoads knew he had little hope of keeping Teddy off the bottle, at least he could keep him from going too far. They had talked over their Plan B for years, but Teddy could never come up with the money for his half of the boat. Teddy’s sudden declaration that it was time made Rhoads immediately suspicious.
“What happened?” said Rhoads.
“Nothing happened, man. It’s just time. I’m done with working for corporate America.”
Rhoads smiled. Their father had been a mid-level manager for an auto parts manufacturer and a union rep. He was the picture of middle-class American success and compromise—a responsible employee who had dreamed of earning a living as a jazz saxophonist. Somehow he had adopted the resistance vocabulary of the sixties counterculture and regularly made ironic commentary on his life, a life serving “the man” that was bearable only because of his union work, which he considered “fighting the man.”
“How’s work?” Rhoads asked Teddy.
“How’s work? Work blows. The man is after me, you know that. But I’ve got twenty-five grand to put down on the boat, so who cares how work is?”
“You win the lottery or something? You haven’t been gambling again.”
“No,” Tommy insisted. “I cashed out my IRA, okay? We’ve been talking about this for how long? Years and years. I just realized we have to put our money where our mouths are.”
“You cashed out?” Rhoads said. “Are you still employed?”
“It’s not looking good for me at Kodak, okay? Maybe my boss is after me more than usual. It’s time to do it. You want to go for it or not? Are you ready to bail out of your business?”
Rhoads suspected that Teddy had been fired, but it didn’t matter much. If that was the case, Rhoads would have to find some way to support his brother’s family, something he was happy to do if he had to. But if Teddy didn’t have a job—about his last reason to stay sober—then, within months, he’d inevitably go into a fatal alcoholic spiral. Plan B was Rhoads’s best hope of keeping his brother alive and intact. Rhoads understood the irony in all of this. He was barely holding it together himself.
“Let’s make it happen, brother. I’m in. Tell me about the boat.”
“There’s a big-ass fifty-two-foot steel Can Grande trawler they’re going to auction off tomorrow. It’s already rigged for charter fishing and probably within our price range. It’ll be perfect.”
“Well, let’s have a look at it together,” Rhoads said.
“Outstanding,” said Teddy. “We’re going to name it Plan B.”
“I like Second Chance better, but we can figure that out later.”
Rhoads felt relieved. It’d take him a couple months to wind down the P.I. business, but the charters would mostly be on the weekends anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem. He and Teddy had talked about their Plan B for a long time. That it was finally happening made him happy. A drink to celebrate would taste good right about now. He thought about it for a long minute. A thousand excuses to take a drink, but not one good reason.
He leaned back in his chair and thought about blue water and standing behind the wheel of his own boat, his brother at his side.
5
Monday, October 2
Philadelphia
Surrounded by ceiling-high bookcases in his living room, Martin Muntor sat quietly in a worn, green leather recliner and faced a blank, large-screen television. A sleek cat jumped up out of nowhere into his lap, formed itself into a ball, and closed its eyes. Muntor put his hand on the cat’s back and felt the heat under the fur. Without warning, he began coughing—deep rasping coughs that startled the cat that jumped off his lap. Muntor felt the absence of its warmth.
So, that’s how it’s going to be, he said to himself as he watched a tail disappear into the kitchen. He sipped some water and the coughing subsided.
Twenty years earlier, Muntor had made the living-room bookcases himself. He had used boards of redwood and fastened shelves into the frames with brass screws. He owned more than fifteen hundred books on almost every imaginable subject and organized them by subject. Physics and chemistry, classic literature and cheap thrillers, political philosophy, biographies, music, the media, westerns, popular psychology, and different versions of the Bible and books about God and spirituality. E
ach volume was cataloged in a spiral notebook he kept in the basement in a fireproof safe. In the event of a fire, he could replace the books with the insurance money.
He had read every one of them. No book got onto the shelves unless he had read it entirely. That was one of his rules. Newly acquired books he hadn’t yet read remained stacked in a small pile on the Oriental rug next to his recliner.
Muntor’s cat, Bozzie, a rare-breed Bengal male, jumped up onto one of the shelves and rubbed its black-spotted, reddish fur against the clock that Muntor used to separate his collection of Thomas Berger novels from his autographed set of Mark Twain’s works. When Bozzie finished and moved away, Muntor looked carefully at the clock.
10:40.
It’s happening now.
Wherever it was Eastern Time, overnight deliveries had arrived, and the shipments to other time zones wouldn’t be far behind. People were already beginning to die.
He thought, It’s happening. Smokers getting what they deserve. And the cigarette companies are next. He regretted that his targets wouldn’t experience the daily pain of lung cancer, emphysema or the other diseases smoking caused, but the thought of their folly being paid in kind gave him fierce satisfaction. He had done everything right. He kept himself in good shape, ate right, took care of his family, went to church, worked hard. And yet there he was, unemployed, dying and alone.
Some days he was convinced that it was the sheer number of people who didn’t treat their bodies like temples that had made him sick. The smokers, the druggies, the ones too fat to see their feet. They were everywhere, like a poison in the air that had infected him. The American dream was a lie—people didn’t necessarily succeed just because they did the right things, worked hard and persevered. Sometimes, maybe usually, the deck was stacked.
He had seen them every day of his life, starting with his father, the people who threw their lives away, wasted years chasing excesses. He had lived like a monk—the accusation his wife had thrown at him when she left with his children—and others who had wasted their lives had done better and would live long after he was dead.
Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge) Page 2