“There’s more,” Jonathan said. “After you call the school and the senator, I think you need to make plans to be somewhere else for a while. We’re confident that the threat exists, but we only suspect that the children are the targets. It could be the senator as well. And if not her, then just a target of opportunity, which would be you.”
Prince looked like he’d been beaten, a combination of exhaustion and confusion. “But why?”
Jonathan made a show of looking at his watch again. “Ticktock,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-two
Ethan explained, “After they split, I stayed with my mom for a while, but she was hitting her medicine pretty hard, so Dad took me to his place.”
“How did that work?” Wendy asked.
“I think he tried,” Ethan said. “But I also think he was as lost as I was. There was always the unspoken thing in the room. And he changed, too. After the incident, he’d let me get away with shit that he’d never have let me get away with before. It’s like I was made of glass.”
“Emotionally, you probably were.”
“Okay. So letting me get away with shit was a good thing. Fine, I can agree to that.”
“And you tested your boundaries pretty aggressively,” Wendy said.
“Yeah, I kind of became a shit.” Ethan said that with a trace of a smile.
Wendy referred to her notes. “You vandalized your school, you were picked up for underage drinking—three times. After you sold marijuana to a classmate, you were expelled from middle school. Five fights of record, and you were caught with a deadly weapon. All before you were sixteen.”
“The deadly weapon was a pocket knife,” Ethan said. “It was a tool, not a weapon. It’s not like I tried to stab anybody with it. But on the others, yeah. I did all that.”
“And other things?” Wendy asked. “Events where you didn’t get caught?”
A shrug. “Of course.”
“Tell me about them.”
Ethan had anticipated this question, and he’d been waffling on how to answer it. There were a lot of other petty infractions, from smoking more pot to illegal drinking to petty shoplifting, but he didn’t see how she needed to know any of that. It wasn’t like he was torturing cats or setting fires. He said, “No, I don’t want to get into that. It was just more of what you talked about. Same shit, different day.”
“Did you have friends during this period? People you’d hang out with?”
“Probably not in the way you’d think about them. Everybody’s got an angle, you know. I’m no different. When somebody says they want to be your friend, what they’re really telling you is that they want something. You’ve got it, they want it, and the way to get it is to be nice.”
“What did people want from you?”
“It depends. When I was selling drugs, it was the drugs. When I was filching beers, it was the beers.”
“What about other times?”
Ethan prepared himself with a giant breath, and smiled as the memory bloomed. “You know, there’s a lot of fame that comes with being a designated bad kid at school. The nerds are all afraid of you, the cool kids think they’re hot shit because they’re not you. They might be utter shitheads, and might treat other people like crap, but at least they’re not Ethan Falk. I’m sure they pointed to me a lot when their parents were talking about grounding them.
“And then there are the invisible kids, the ones who think that if they hang out with you—if they stay in the shadows of a bad kid—their street cred will somehow grow. Those are the kids who egg you on to do shit, and then either don’t show up, or they screw it up and get you caught. Then, when I didn’t rat them out I became an even bigger deal. It’s not a bad gig when you’ve got nowhere else to be.”
Wendy scowled. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What do you mean by ‘when you’ve got nowhere else to be’?”
“I’m not talking about a physical place,” Ethan clarified. “Actually, I’m not sure what I mean. It’s like we all have these roles to play. When you’re little, I guess you get to experiment, but by the time you get to high school, those roles are set. Mine was to be the bad kid. I think I was pretty good at it.”
“But you weren’t happy.”
“I thought I was. Shit, by then, I didn’t even know what happiness looked like. Even now, I’m not sure I do. This isn’t it, that’s for sure.” He made a broad gesture with his cuffed hands to indicate the entirety of the room.
“Tell me about the scars on your wrists,” Wendy said, pointing to his hands with her forehead.”
“I think you already know,” Ethan said.
“I want you to tell me.”
* * *
People who don’t understand it want suicide to be an act of insanity. They want it to be an impulsive overreaction to a single bad thing, or a series of bad things that make a person go mad. The reality for Ethan was exactly the opposite of that, or nearly so. When the day comes that every hour hurts, when every new day is an exercise in endurance, there’s that moment when you realize that ending it all is the only rational choice. Who wouldn’t choose peace over warfare? And when the war is being fought between your ears, all sides of the conflict are the same person. The winner is the loser. And vice versa.
Not to get all melodramatic, but what difference would it make? Really, what difference? As the source of pain for so many people—himself among them—he’d be doing the world a favor by not being in it anymore.
Ethan didn’t know why he did the things he did. He’d gotten a little contemplative about it all in recent years, but back then, five, six, seven years ago, when it was all very real and very raw, he’d find himself in the midst of an act of thievery or an act of violence that he didn’t even understand at the time. He’d tried to explain that to a school counselor once, but she just got angry. She thought he was sandbagging. That was her word, sandbagging. At the time, Ethan didn’t know what the term meant, but he knew it was yet one more thing to be ashamed of.
To hell with all of them. To hell with their judgments, and double to hell with the tens of thousands of things about him that people didn’t like. Every one of us has an Eject button beating beneath our breastbone, and every one of us has perfect control over how to activate it.
Once the decision was made, all that remained was the selection of method.
Ethan had witnessed a guy overdosing once, and he wanted nothing to do with that. The guy’s name was Jay, and he was one of Ethan’s earliest customers, back when they were both still in eighth grade. Jay moved on to bigger and better drugs—and became the kid that scared the hell out of Ethan—but they still partied together in ninth and tenth grades. They had a special spot near a train trestle where they figured no one would find them. But of course they were found, because Ethan was the designated bad kid, and every bad kid in training wanted to be with him.
Ethan wasn’t sure what Jay was taking the night when he OD’d, but he knew he wanted nothing to do with it. Jay started twitching all over, and he launched a column of puke that spattered for five feet. A few seconds later he pissed and shit himself, and Ethan ran. Let the bad kids in training get a taste of their own medicine. That kind of trouble brought not just cops, but ambulances and fire trucks, too.
Ethan never found out the details of what happened after he ran away, but somebody must have called someone, because Jay survived. He was thrown out of school because of the overdose, because it made sense to some dickhead administrator that the best way to help someone up from the bottom was to send him to a strange place to make a whole new bunch of friends among strangers. Ethan had been there, done that, gotten the scars, and in case anyone was interested in his thoughts, it was a stupid goddamn idea.
So, drugs were out. He considered jumping off a building or some other tall place, but that brought with it the same problems that attended hanging or crashing his car into a wall. He lived in terror of being paralyzed. And since he knew that he had no luck that wasn’t bad luck,
there was a virtual certainty that he’d snap his spine and end up a quadriplegic, like that detective in the Denzel Washington movie.
The more he thought about it, and the more he researched the topic—there’s all kinds of stuff about suicide on the Internet—he became convinced that the best way to push your own button was to slice an artery and just bleed out. The experts said in the articles that it would be like falling asleep. As your blood leaked out, your oxygen levels would dip, and you’d feel tired—and a little cold—and then you’d go to sleep. Next stop: The Other Side.
The radial artery was the vessel of choice because of its ease of access. The femoral artery would drop the blood pressure faster, but it was hard to get to. The body is pretty well designed to protect the parts that’ll kill you if you insult them. And the cuts needed to be made lengthwise, parallel to the line of the arm. Otherwise, the bleeding is too easily stopped. The longer the slit, the harder it would be to undo the damage.
He did worry about the mess, though. Arterial spray was well known to cover a wide area, but even at that, it couldn’t be more disgusting than Jay’s puke spray, could it?
* * *
“I didn’t eat anything on the day I did it,” Ethan explained. “I didn’t want to shit myself. I didn’t want that humiliation, and I made sure to take a leak so my bladder was empty. I’m telling you, Wendy, I had thought this through from the first moment to the last. After school that day, I stopped by a 7-Eleven to buy brand-new razor blades because I wanted them to be sharp. You know, that was one of the happiest, most focused days of my life? It was like I had a purpose, something important to do, and I was the only one who could do it. Do you hear that a lot?”
“It’s not uncommon, but I don’t want you to digress.” She hadn’t moved during the entire time Ethan was telling his story. She sat with her legs crossed, her hands folded across her knee. She didn’t even take notes.
“It’s funny the things you remember,” Ethan went on. “The label said that the blades were for a safety razor, but the blade had two equally sharp edges. And how stupid is this? As I prepared to kill myself—to open these huge wounds on my arm—I wrapped one edge of the blade in Kleenex so I could hold it without cutting my finger. I mean, this made sense to me.”
He shook his head as the memory passed. Then he felt tears again. It wasn’t like he was going to cry, but it would be close.
“I hung up all my clothes in the closet—or put them in the hamper, depending—and I made my bed. I knew I was going to make a mess, but I guess I didn’t want it to be a big mess. I put on a pair of swim trunks, and then I sat down on the edge of my bed. There was this reading lamp clamped to my headboard, kind of a spring-loaded articulating arm thing that I would use to read before going to sleep. It had a really bright light, and I wanted to be able to see what I was doing.
“I remember being fascinated at how tough my skin was at first, and then at how once I started, the edges of the cut separated just like you were trimming a piece of beef.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The cut over Spike’s ear took four stitches to close, and as he sat in the passenger seat of Drew’s van, he had to force himself not to mess with the scar. The rest of his team knew what had happened to him at the park, but they knew better than to talk to him about it. He’d let himself be beaten by someone who didn’t have half his skills. Spike had tried to deconstruct those final few seconds a hundred times, and he still didn’t know how he had awakened from unconsciousness without that blue-eyed bastard’s body lying next to him.
Spike wasn’t sure what it meant that Blue Eyes had taken the slip of paper with the address, but after thinking it through from every angle, he’d decided that it didn’t matter. The sheik was expecting al-Amin to do a job, and the job needed to be done. He’d already lost too much credibility as it was. His Yemeni masters were and were not many things, but one category on which they had an undeniable stranglehold was reliability. Spike had promised a cadre of exceptional operators, and by all evidence he had seen, he had delivered. Yet these outside forces that he didn’t understand threatened to undermine everything.
The kid with the knife from the coffee shop was perhaps the most perplexing of the setbacks they’d encountered. That wasn’t the kind of thing that just happened. And Spike felt an immediate need to settle that account. The failure of the second string team to snatch a kid was not his fault, and he was ready to defend that, but when all was said and done, the Yemenis were going to have a bad taste in their mouths about the events of the last week or so, and Spike and his team had enough money on the line that it was important not to let the handlers down.
The government had labeled groups like al-Amin to be “lone wolves”—unaffiliated teams of mayhem makers—and the Yemenis had jumped on it right away as the recipe for success. The unwitting architects for their impending success were a hapless pair of snipers who created real terror in the Washington, DC, suburbs in 2001 or 2002. The public had just finished enduring the 9/11 attacks with national days of mourning, combined with a general sense of invincibility. Lots of verses of “God Bless America” were sung in public places, and many a pundit stood in front of God and everybody to expound on the bravery of Americans and the strength of American spirit.
Then, after one person was shot at a gas pump, and then a second, like the flip of a switch, all that brave swagger was replaced by house moms cowering in their cars while the dial on the gas pump spun, only to dash out, remove and replace the spout, and then duck back under cover again. For those three or four weeks, in a community of three million people, couples stopped going out for dinner, and soccer practices were canceled, all because a team of two guys with a gun—at the time, everyone thought it was one guy with a gun—was shooting a person a day. The chances of getting hit were literally three million to one, yet that was enough to evoke mass cowardice among those of indomitable spirit.
The significance was not lost on the murderous minds in the Sandbox. Shutting down the wheels of the Great Satan didn’t require toppling great symbolic structures, after all. All it required was instilling a bit of discomfort in the lives of middle class families. Do that, and by God the people will overthrow the government. It was what the rest of the world hated most about the United States: While others fought for their survival, Americans came to blows over the untimely death of a whale or a lion.
Spike no longer had a card in that game. He’d sold his soul and his patriotism for money, and now he intended to earn it. He had this one last snatch to take care of, and then the Big Show, and he’d be on his way to the easy life on a Caribbean island somewhere, his bank account swollen by an extra $2.2 million. The rest on his team would have $2 million apiece, the delta explained by his planning and supervisory responsibilities. None of them fooled themselves into believing that all of them would survive long enough to collect, but likewise, none of them presumed that they would be among those who would not.
Spike figured that he had two, maybe three days before he was off to his island paradise, even though he had no idea yet where he would go. His passport was current, and he had cash. It made no sense to get an early reservation and telegraph to the world where he intended to go.
Some of his troops had done that. They’d made reservations, most for Saturday morning or afternoon, the very days that every port of exit would be crawling with feds. Spike had tried to talk them out of it, but you know how it is with yay-hoos who think they know everything. In Spike’s mind, after the Big Show was over, he’d have to go to ground for a couple of weeks—maybe a couple of months—before he could safely make his move. Even then, he planned to get out via Canada, where the borders were way softer than Mexico—unless you were coming in from Mexico, in which case the equation was reversed. Spike considered himself an atheist without a country. His loyalty lay entirely with the man in the mirror, and as far as he was concerned, there was no shame in that.
Today’s mission was a simple one, at two levels. The
first level was to not screw up. Just getting it done would be an accomplishment against the backdrop of the past few days. The second was to grab the Baker twins, sedate them, and get them to the Yemenis, who would handle the details of getting them shipped to the powers that be in ISIL. At that moment, his involvement in this would end. After that—whatever the shitheads did with them after the fact—the fallout was all on the heads of killers in the Sandbox.
At two forty-five sharp, the doors to Our Lady of Sorrows burst open, and children swarmed from every orifice. The spray of kids was omnidirectional, targeting every compass point.
“How are we going to pick out two kids from among all of these?” Drew asked.
“We don’t have to worry about all of them,” Spike explained. “The Baker girls are walkers. This is the route they have to take.” When they eyeballed the girls, they wouldn’t attempt to take them here in the driveway of the school, but rather, they would wait until they were on the road out front and take them there. Spike intended to invoke the clichéd ruse about helping him find his lost dog.
For a solid ten minutes, children of all ages from seven to eighteen poured from the building. Drew and Spike sat in their van at the base of the hill along with the dozens of parents waiting for their little darlings, invisible among the crowd of vehicles. The kids moved in flocks, swarming around and between cars in groups of two through fifteen, all of them engaged in the discussion of whatever the hell kids talked about.
One by one, the other cars in the queue swallowed their loads and pulled away from the curb, headed toward home, or the orthodontist, or soccer practice. By 2:55, the van was one of only six remaining vehicles, and as such they were no longer invisible.
“Did we miss them?” Drew thought aloud.
“Couldn’t have,” Spike said. He used an authoritative tone to mask his own doubts. Maybe they went to a friend’s house or something, driving them to use a different exit from the building. If that was the case, they could always take the kids at their residence, but that was many times more complicated and all but guaranteed a violent confrontation. Not the best way to go.
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