And it wasn’t just my family that I couldn’t bring myself to leave, it was Patriots Landing, too. Make fun of it as you will, but this strange existence of mine, built purposely insipid to act as a shield, this almost-satire of the American Dream, was not just a costume I was wearing to keep the bastards off my track. I had played at being the bland suburban dad for so long that what had started as a cover had become my core. And I loved it, every bit of it, the house that was too big, the lawn that was too green, the cars that were too expensive, Little League, Bermuda shorts, lawn mowers and surround sound, a gin and tonic on the back deck with the next-door neighbors as we listened to the crickets and complained about the neighbors on our other side.
Have your say and tell me it wasn’t the real world and all I can reply is that it was real enough to me. Was the water in Calcutta wetter than the water that rose like graceful waves of art from my lawn sprinkler? Were the granite faces of the Himalayas any harder than the granite on the island in my kitchen? Patriots Landing may not have been the leafy Main Line suburb of my youth, but it was a pretty good simulacrum of precisely that, and the emotions it pulled out of me were undeniably potent. And however you might self-righteously scoff at my suburban landscape, don’t scoff at those emotions—they were as real as anything felt by any landowner in the so-called real worlds of New Delhi or New Orleans.
I loved the wide streets of my development. I loved the smell of Scotts Turf Builder with Plus 2 Weed Control in the morning (it smells of victory over dandelion, chickweed, knotweed, and spurge). I loved the way passersby waved as they passed by, a little wave expressing perfectly that we had nothing to say to each other and we each were thrilled not to say it. I even loved the stilted chitchat during block parties, the tedious flirting with the unattractive wives in their tennis outfits, the fighting with my children, the complaining about my wife, the slicing of my tee shots, the coaching of my daughter’s soccer team. Well, maybe waxing rhapsodic over the soccer thing was going a bit too far, but the other stuff, all of it, had become the warp and the woof of my life and God help me, I loved it.
“Why wouldn’t you?” said Harry, still keeping my boat close with the grappling hook. “Of course you would. Why, to think that you’d leave everything behind was pure nonsense. A man needs his home like he needs his family.”
“What about you?”
“Alls I got left is my boat and a sister down near Kitty Hawk.”
“You need her?”
“I need her like I need a typhoon. I keep telling her being born once is more than enough to suit me. But if I had what you had, Johnny, you couldn’t pry me away. That’s why all along, all these years, I knew when push it came to shove you’d end up staying.”
“And yet you’ve been taking your retainer each year just so I could rely on you when the moment came.”
“A man needs to eat.”
“And drink.”
“I got a boat, don’t I? But tell me one thing, Johnny.”
“Okay.”
“What the hell’s a simulacrum?”
“A dream world,” I said.
“Sounds pretty damn good, simulacrum, like a coffee cake. So what now? Are you going to fight?”
“I hope not.”
“’Cause I can help you there, Johnny. I’m a fighter, you know that. I ever tell you how close I came with Robinson?”
“You told me.”
“I had him reeling, the great Sugar Ray. With a couple hard lefts I had him on his heels, and just as I was loading up for one more hook that would have sent him spinning, the son of a bitch—”
“You told me, Harry.”
“I guess I might have already. But the point being, you and me together…” He flicked his nose with his thumb.
“Maybe we won’t have to,” I said. “They’re looking for me, sure, but they don’t have my name or they would be here already. And I’ve taken precautions. Maybe they’ll give up before they find me.”
“Maybe they will.”
“Maybe I’ll just play it cool, wait and see.”
“That’s always a good plan, the old wait-and-see when trouble’s brewing. I done that a lot myself when things got tight.”
“How’d that turn out for you?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Not so good, actually.”
“Yeah, well, there’s always a first for everything. Hold on a bit.” I stepped forward on my boat, lifted up one of the seats, pulled out the rusted metal toolbox. “Do me a favor, Harry, and hold this for me. Can you keep it safe?”
“’Course I can.”
“It’s my life. And I’m trusting you with it.”
“You can count on me, Johnny.”
“The amazing thing, Harry, is that I know that I can.” I hoisted the toolbox over to his boat and watched as he weighed it in his hand for a moment before disappearing to stow it belowdecks.
“Done,” he said when he climbed back up. “Now what?”
“Now we wait and see if those sons of bitches can find me.”
We didn’t have to wait for long.
19. A Mr. Clevenger
MR. WILLING?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s Steph? Over at Jefferson Davis Mortgage?”
“Oh, Stephanie, hello. It’s nice to hear from you. What’s up? Are you guys hiring again?”
“Not yet, Mr. Willing. It’s still like a pirate ship here, everyone hunkered down waiting for the next victim to walk the plank. They let go of two more secretaries, Miss Thompson included.”
“No.”
“Yes. And she’s been here longer than anyone. They had a guard walk her out. A guard.”
“That’s not right. If you talk to her, please give her my sympathy.”
“I will. So how are you, Mr. Willing? Did you find anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I might have some good news. You know how you used to get all kinds of calls from headhunters before everything fell apart?”
“The good old days.”
“You just got another call, I think.”
“You think?”
“A Mr. Clevenger. He didn’t ask for you personally, but he said he was looking for a broker who had a background that seemed to fit you perfectly.”
“Fit me?” My ears pricked back like on a horse smelling snake. “How so?”
“He said he was looking for a broker who had been born in Pennsylvania and had gone to the University of Wisconsin. And I seemed to recall you matched up, so I checked your file, and sure enough.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him we had just the man he was looking for.”
“You didn’t give him my name or tell him where I lived, did you, Stephanie?”
“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Willing, not without getting in touch with you first. I don’t give any personal information over the phone. Especially now. Next thing you know, a client would be showing up at one of the brokers’ houses with a gun, and no one needs that.”
“No one indeed.”
“It’s just that he mentioned some Italian name and I told him that wasn’t you at all. But this Mr. Clevenger didn’t seem discouraged by that. In fact, he seemed pretty excited about getting in touch. He said he had a golden opportunity for you. Maybe it will lead to something, you never know. He left a number.” She gave it to me. “Good luck, Mr. Willing. I hope it works out.”
“I expect it won’t, but thanks,” I said before I pressed the END button.
I looked at the number I had scribbled as she talked. A 312 area code. Chicago. The land of the flat, Midwestern vowel. Stephanie was right about one thing: it was a headhunter for sure.
One winter’s day when I was in college, Augie and Ben drove up to Boston to visit me unannounced for some ribald fun. When they found out I wasn’t in the city, had never in fact registered at BC, there was a shitstorm, the whole wounded-hearts-and-no-trust-between-old-friends thing. Men do it differently than women: w
e work it out with fistfights in seedy bars, arguing over our favorite albums. But at the end of the fight, I told them the truth about my college career in Madison, minus the name change. We assured one another we were past it, and that was the night we each got the identical Still Here tattoos to prove our undying bond, but the truth was we never truly got past it. We had all gone our separate ways and this was just another wedge.
But the point is that Augie had known I attended the University of Wisconsin. So I understood how this Clevenger, undoubtedly the bastard who had placed the call to Augie’s while I was inside, might have known about it, too—the marks on Augie’s body had indicated that Augie had received the whole Dick Cheney treatment. And Ben and Augie both had also known I was a mortgage broker. So none of this was totally unexpected, but somehow Clevenger had narrowed his search to somewhere near Richmond.
Except that was as far as it went. This Clevenger was clever, and thoroughly thorough, and scarily swift, but he was still looking for a Moretti, he didn’t yet know me as a Willing. I was pretty sure I had severed any link between my two names. I had even scrupulously kept my face out of my college yearbook—Jonathon Willing was listed as “Not Pictured” on the back page of the Badger. So he could know about the job, and know about the alma mater, but as long as he still didn’t know about the name I was okay.
Which is why Clevenger was sitting lost and lonely by his phone in Chicago, waiting for me to give him a call. Fat chance of that.
“Johnny? Is that you, Johnny?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Harry. What’s up?”
“Nothing. Probably nothing.”
“Well, is it nothing, or probably nothing?”
“Probably nothing.”
“Then it might be something.”
“It might be at that.”
“All right, let’s have it.”
“I was at Schooners last night, with the Koreans. Nothing out of the ordinary there. And who comes in but a fellow named Prolly, got a commercial fishing boat, docks down in Shipps Bay now. Old Prolly and me, we got into some piles in our day. There was this one time, we was busting on this waitress up there in Ocean City—Maryland, not Jersey, I’m talking. We had gone there on a charter for these business types from Ohio, and the—”
“Harry?”
“Prolly, right? Remember how you asked me to keep my eyes open for anything that might not be on the square.”
“I remember.”
“Well, when Prolly and me was having drinks, I asked him if he seen anything out of whack and he says it just so happens a fellow came into Prolly’s usual joint, a sailors’ bar not far up the road toward Virginia Beach, and the guy was buying beers and flashing a picture, offering a hundred if anyone recognized the face.”
“A picture?”
“Yeah, a picture. Said it was a guy who owed him on a boat somewhere out of Richmond. Prolly said the picture was black and white and fuzzy. Of a guy walking through a metal detector at an airport.”
“What did the guy in the picture look like?”
“It was hard to say. But he was white, tallish, in his forties.”
“What about the guy showing around the picture?”
“Well, all Prolly said about that was there didn’t seem to be much to him but his smile, but there was something in the guy’s smile that made Prolly damn glad it wasn’t him he was looking for. And Prolly was a fighter, too, in his day, an amateur and a lightweight, but even so. Still it could have been anyone in that picture, right?”
“Right.”
“Like I said, probably nothing.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Though Prolly, he said the guy did mention something about a scar.”
Clevenger, that devious son of a bitch.
How the hell did he know about the boat? The scar I understood, and the picture, too. The bastards had combed through the photographs automatically taken at the Phoenix and Philadelphia security gates and somehow found a picture they assumed was me. Whether it was or not, who could tell, maybe they had the complete wrong guy, though I suspected they didn’t. But how had they learned about the boat? Whatever they did to Augie, however medieval they got, he couldn’t have told them about it because I made it a policy to keep anything about my escape hatch from Augie and Ben. Even though I trusted them both, the less they knew about any of it, the better. But somehow Clevenger had divined the possibility that I had a boat, and was now combing the seaside haunts up and down the coast, looking for me.
Well, let him. His thugs could stake out the docks all they wanted; I sure as hell now wasn’t going anywhere near my daysailer until all this had passed. As long as they were sticking to the water, they weren’t getting close enough to bite. As long as they didn’t have my name, they had nothing.
Nothing.
“Hey, it’s Charles. You coming down?”
“Coming down where?” I said.
“To the club. You had a game scheduled this morning, right?”
“What kind of game?”
“Jon, what’s going on? We don’t play badminton.”
“But we didn’t plan to play today, did we?”
“Not us. You and your friend.”
“My friend?” I said.
“I was in the pro shop when he called and asked if you were a member there. When Don asked why he was asking, the guy on the phone said that you two had made plans for this morning but that he couldn’t make it. And you know, I wasn’t doing anything today.”
“That’s a change.”
“So I thought if you were planning to play anyway and he wasn’t showing up, maybe I could jump in.”
“I wasn’t planning to play.”
“That’s a little weird.”
“Must be a mix-up,” I said. “Did he give his name, my friend?”
“Cleckinger or something, I think it was.”
“Clevenger?”
“That’s it. Is he any good?”
“The son of a bitch is a plus,” I said.
Even before I hung up on Charles, something cold and familiar raised the hackles on my neck. I leaned forward and looked out the window to the street in front of the house. Empty. But it wouldn’t be for long.
He had found me. It had found me. I was fearfully peeking out the windows of my house, just days after I had fearfully peeked out the windows of Augie’s house, and the terror was the same. My precautions had been for naught; my lines of obfuscation had been obliterated with an alacrity that stunned. A dagger through tissue paper, a baseball bat to the ribs.
Clevenger, that wily bastard, had gotten my name.
Maybe there was some document somewhere in the University of Wisconsin’s admission files linking Moretti and Willing. Or maybe they had compared all the names leaving Phoenix at around the time of my flight from Vegas with names arriving in Philly within the next week, the parked car coming back to haunt me. Or maybe someone had ID’d the photograph. But how he had done it didn’t matter. I had hoped to create some barrier with the name change, yet really, how could I have thought it would stay a secret for long once the bastards started looking?
And now not only did they have my name, but they also had my development. Our address was seriously unlisted, but how many seconds would that hold them up?
I needed to run, we all needed to run. But how could I get my family to flee with me? A fake vacation? A cruise, maybe? Yeah, that was the ticket. A cruise to nowhere. A cruise that would last for weeks, months. Some big heavy liner sitting all portly and grand in a Mexican harbor. All I had to do was get Caitlin and the kids to go along. And why wouldn’t they? Everyone loves a cruise: the shows, the pools, the midnight buffet. We could all run to Miami and hitch on to a boat. Maybe we would like Mexico enough to stay. And I could pay for it with cash—how convenient.
It was all so perfect, except that the exigencies of our lives made it flatly impossible. Shelby and Eric had school. And Caitlin had a couple of open houses scheduled as her portfoli
o started its slow recovery along with the economy. There was no way I could get them to go with me short of kidnapping. And even if I did, who would cut the lawn? Who would keep up the house? And how could we run from Patriots Landing while maintaining the crucial appearance of still belonging?
I discarded the cruise idea—what kind of delusional fool was I becoming?—and came up with something a lot more sane.
I would get myself a gun.
20. Trifecta
I HAD BOUGHT a gun once, years ago, shortly after we moved into Patriots Landing, a sweet Smith & Wesson nine millimeter. I didn’t take it to the range or spend hours cleaning the thing, I didn’t want to be conspicuous in my gun ownership even in a conspicuously gun-owning state, but I liked having it in my closet. With all my secrets and concerns, I felt like it was a prudent part of my precautions. Until Caitlin stepped into our room one afternoon and found Shelby on the floor with a doll and my Smith & Wesson, playing spin the pistol.
When I came home from work Caitlin was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for me. Her mouth was tight, her hands shook with anger. The gun sat before her on the granite countertop, its barrel pointed at me like an accusation. As she told me what had happened, she stared at me as if I was as incomprehensible as a piece of liver.
“I bought it for protection,” I said. “For the family.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know. It’s crazy out there.”
“It’s crazy somewhere, that’s for sure. And do you even know how to shoot it?”
“It’s a gun. It’s not rocket science. There’s a trigger. You pull it. Bam.”
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