Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  When he finally slept last night, the old man came to him, and he knew everything was all right. He appreciated the reassurance.

  Now, though, the demons are starting to creep in again.

  At 2:30, the phone rings. It’s Gina, wanting to add a couple of items to the grocery list. She asks if the mortgage company has called or written. He tells her no.

  “And Gerald?”

  “Not yet.”

  There is a long pause on the other end, as if Gina’s working up enough energy to pretend she still believes, still cares.

  “He’ll call,” she tells him finally. “You know he’ll call. He said he would.”

  But she knows he might not. So, at last, does Jack.

  Just let this be over, he says, and it feels almost like a prayer. But to whom? The only times they ever go to church are Christmas and Easter. He hadn’t felt anything in years that hinted of something beyond the here and now until he picked up the old man.

  At 2:45, he breaks down and calls. David tells him that, actually, Mr. Prince is in a very important meeting now. He takes Jack’s message.

  Half an hour of silence later, Jack thinks of something.

  Gerald does have his e-mail address, has even used it once (albeit tersely) after Jack sent him a note confirming that today was the day Gerald would get back to him about the book.

  Maybe Gerald has already responded.

  Jack goes to his computer and logs on. It takes him a long five minutes to gain access to the Internet. When he gets there, the little mailbox in the upper-left corner of his screen is open.

  “You’ve got mail,” a mildly enthusiastic masculine voice informs him.

  The first two messages are junk advertising from a site that once lured him in by promising to put him in touch with old high school classmates, as if he didn’t know where most of them were anyhow, but he thought he might relocate Puffer Sensibaugh or some other rare missing person from the Class of ’70.

  The third message on his screen reads:

  1/30/01 gdprince@princebook.com G’Day.

  Jack sits back and takes 10 very slow, very deliberate breaths.

  He clicks, and the message opens.

  He tries to read it slowly, but he’s like a beagle with a slice of cheese in front of him:

  Hey, Babe.

  Got your message. What a day. Just met with that prick Schachter, and now I’ve got a phone message from freakin’ Jack Stone.

  Godalmighty, if there’s anything worse than old so-called friends, it’s old friends with no talent.

  He’s just so damn pathetic. And the book! Second-rate Thomas Harris. Make that third-rate.

  This guy, he’s like that Tasmanian Devil cartoon character Caleb used to love so much. A regular whirling dervish. This whole thing has brought back memories of high school (and you know how I do love those so!).

  This one is going to be hard to shake. Still can’t believe he rewrote the whole thing in first person just because I suggested it. As if that made it any better. Maybe I should tell him I was wrong, that it really ought to be third person after all. Hah!

  I can tell in 30 pages whether a book’s any good. Hell, I could tell about this one in 10.

  Sorry if I sound like a shit.

  Just three more days ’til Virgin Gorda. Home by 7, I promise.

  Jack reads it again, or as much as he can bear.

  He’s something of a novice on the computer. He only got it because everyone told him it made writing, or more specifically rewriting, much easier. He never would have bothered to get Internet access, but Gina and Shannon both wanted it. He never gets much farther than his e-mail. The things Milo bastard! tells him about the porno sites, where you can see things they can’t even put in Hustler, don’t really interest him.

  He tries for some minutes to put a positive spin on what he sees in front of him. His last hope, that he’s dreaming, fades when he pulls one of his arm hairs out. He is wide and painfully awake.

  He supposes that Gerald Prince must have gotten a little confused. He did it once himself, he remembers, emailing Mike when he meant to e-mail Sandy about Mike. It was a little embarrassing, and he supposes Gerald Prince will be a bit chagrined to discover his stupid little mistake.

  “How can this be?” He’s thinking it, and he realizes that he is saying it, rather loudly. He repeats it a few times.

  He looks out the kitchen window and sees that the lone oak leaf has finally torn itself away or been torn away from the tree. He supposes it is skittering aimlessly across their front yard by now, maybe in their next-door neighbor’s driveway already. He thinks he might go out and try to find it. The last leaf of the season.

  He goes to the file cabinet where he keeps the two extra copies of Lovelady he’s printed out. He removes one of them, holding the manuscript carefully in his hands, as if it might break.

  Only one thing to do, he thinks. He doesn’t think he’s saying this out loud, but he isn’t sure.

  Just then, the clock in the hallway, one of the few items they took with them when they moved from his mother’s house, chimes 4 o’clock.

  Well, he corrects himself, setting the manuscript back down, maybe two things.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hurry up, Jack says, and he’s sure he’s talking out loud now. I don’t have all day.

  What if Susan was wrong? People have gotten such things wrong before. Lives have been ruined because somebody said something that wasn’t true and somebody else believed it and acted on it.

  Sure, the other voice says. He was probably talking about some other idiot named Jack Stone, some other book.

  Jack has had points in his life at which he has had to deal with what Mack McLamb calls WPO: Worst Possible Outcome. Sometimes, Mack says, it just happens that way. Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s just a matter of the odds evening out. Sometimes you get the best possible outcome, sometimes you get the other. What really matters, Mack has always said, is how you deal with the WPO.

  Jack has been proud, until the last couple of days, and especially the last couple of hours, of how he’s handled the crises of his life. He has had the requisite amount of grace under pressure, he’s always believed.

  His responsibility for the accident that killed Bobby and Posey. The untimely death of his father. Carly’s desertion. He’s done what had to be done.

  He’s dealt with carelessness and tragedy and selfishness and bad luck. He’s paid for his mistakes and even other people’s, whatever showed up on his tab. Since shortly after the wreck that first diverted him from what he once was sure life had planned for Jack Stone, he has assumed that life would throw WPOs at him from time to time, even before he knew what they were. After he worked through the initial denial, and he did it fairly quickly, he always had managed to survive them.

  Now, sitting in a car squinting into the late-afternoon sun, a block and a half off Main Street, a hundred yards from the alleyway connecting Speakeasy Medical Center and Wainwright and Son Insurance Agency, he sees he was wrong.

  There is, he sees now, a WPO in anyone’s life capable of sucking all the grace out of your being.

  He can’t help but blame the old man a little. He supposes this is what happens when you start losing control. You find somebody to blame.

  But, damnit, the old man made him believe. He made him think that an old dream, about the last one Jack Stone had left, could come true. No, not could. Would by God come true. The old man made him careless, made him put everything on one play, the way he did once in Atlantic City, on one of the excursions they used to take every year or so. Jack had won almost $500, a lot for a man who enjoyed the bus trip up and the companionship more than the risk. At Milo’s urging, he put it all on black at the roulette table, the rest of their party and some others all whooping and hollering as if he were betting a million dollars. But even that wasn’t the same as this. Jack had known it might come up red (which of course it did). The old man made Jack know that the wheel would stop on b
lack.

  Except it didn’t. And this time, Jack has bet a million.

  What, he wonders, do you do with that kind of information?

  It’s almost 4:30, and he’s seen no sign of life around the back of Milo’s building. He wonders if she’s already gone inside. He’d feel like a fool barging in this time of the afternoon and then finding that she wasn’t there. Maybe he should just go in anyhow and tell Milo he was coming to ask him to step over to the diner for a game of pool. Maybe the front door would be locked, with a Closed sign on it.

  While he’s hesitating, he sees a figure cross Maplewood, between his car and Milo’s building. The figure is moving north, and it stops in the middle of the street and looks right at him. Jack can’t see anything except an outline as he stares into the sun. He starts to duck down, sure he’s been found out, the detective detected. Then, he realizes who it is.

  The figure holds up its right hand and gives what looks like a thumbs-up gesture, then moves on, arms swinging high as if he were some aerobic walker.

  Well, Jack thinks, we’ve gone this far together. Might as well take it to the limit. Nothing to lose.

  Just as he’s thinking this, with the figure’s dust barely settled, she appears.

  He almost misses her. He sees a flash of color, red, and looks just in time to see her walk quickly across the asphalt behind Milo’s office and then slip, smooth as a lie, inside the door. He can identify Regina Royal Stone just by the way she walks. He could have sworn it was her just by the way she held her hand up to push her hair back. She always does that when she is about to make any kind of entrance. He’s seen her do it a thousand times without really realizing it until now. It is one of the little things he’ll miss.

  He gets out of the car slowly and closes the door as softly as he can. He walks on the pavement because it’s quieter than the gravel shoulder. He wishes there were some way to turn back now, but there isn’t. He has to do this, and he doesn’t really give a damn if it looks like his WPO is handling him.

  The old man’s guiding him now. He said it was all right.

  He stands by the same back door his wife has just entered, wondering whether to enter loud and fast or slow and silent.

  He’s given them five minutes. Plenty of time, he thinks, grinding his teeth. He puts his hand over his mouth in case he’s saying it out loud.

  He turns the silver doorknob carefully and feels it continue to give. Before he opens it, he puts his ear to the wood. All he can hear is the deep, low roar of the heating system.

  Then he’s inside, in a small room, apparently used for storage, with a half-bath across from him, next to another door.

  Jack opens that door, too, stopping again to listen first. He’s in the outer office, where the secretary sits from 9 until 3. On the opposite side are the fancier double doors that are the Main Street entrance. They seem to be locked. He sees Milo’s Toyota parked facing the window, whose blinds are closed against the sun’s dying warmth.

  To his right is yet another door, the one leading into Milo’s office.

  He can hear a rhythmic thumping behind that door. Moans come from irregular intervals, from two voices. He wants to leave, but he can’t.

  He supposes they would have heard him by now if they were not so distracted. The floor creaks slightly as he takes the last few steps.

  This door, though, is locked. Jack takes a short step backward and then lunges, leading with his right shoulder.

  When he hits the cheap wood, it caves in, its fall broken by the table and lamp in its path. Back from the carnage, untouched by it, is Milo’s desk. The whole room can’t be more than 12 by 15 feet, done up in claustrophobic brown paneling, not a window in sight. One of the agency’s own calendars is on the wall, just like the one Gina brought home, given to her by Milo before Christmas.

  That first second will be frozen in Jack’s mind like a framed photograph. He’ll close his eyes later and see it there like the spot that remains after looking at the sun. Except it doesn’t go away.

  Leaning length-wise and face-down in front of him, across Milo’s sad little pine desk, is Gina. Her head hangs over the desk’s other end, no more than six inches from the back wall. Her eyes appear to be squeezed tight. The red skirt and her panties have been thrown into the far corner, as if in great haste. She still has her blouse on, although it seems to be unbuttoned, her bra unsnapped and loose. Her torso is flat against the desk, and her ass is raised a good foot above it, elevated by a piece of material beneath her that Jack will later realize is Milo’s pants. Gina’s arms are stretched out, gripping the far corners of desk. She’s on tiptoes, barely touching the floor.

  Standing behind her, in that second, is Milo. He is naked from the waist down but still has on his dress shirt and tie. He is sliding his cock in and out of Gina while he simultaneously works her anus with his middle finger. Fat, bald and slack, he appears to be every bit of his 48 years, and Jack wonders if they aren’t doing it doggie style so Gina doesn’t have to look at him. She is still, he realizes while his second marriage passes before him, a very attractive woman.

  With the bright overhead light making it all as open as a gynecological or proctological exam, Jack thinks he might have never had such a clear and unobstructed view of his wife’s most private parts.

  Milo reacts first, and it might have been amusing, under other circumstances, to see how even the sight of his office door being kicked in by his lover’s husband does not make him stop cold. He jerks forward with a couple of increasingly disheartened thrusts before he leaps back, wet and interrupted, and starts trying to get his pants from underneath Gina, who is left to push backward into the air one last time before she lifts her head up and around, screams and rolls off the far side of the desk.

  “I’m wondering if I should kill you or just cut your dick off,” Jack says quietly to his old friend.

  Milo holds his pants in front of him, afraid to leave himself vulnerable long enough to step into them.

  “Please. Please. I’m sorry, Jack.” Milo starts to cry. Jack wonders if he isn’t a short leap from blaming it all on Gina, in which case he might just go ahead and kill him, maybe after the castration.

  Gina, lying on the floor, has apparently slipped into her panties and the red skirt. She starts to get up.

  “Stay down,” Jack tells her. “Just stay down. Don’t let me see you.”

  She makes a small sound and then is silent behind the desk, hiding in the corner’s relative darkness. Jack can see her eyes peering at him wetly from the gloom.

  “Jesus Christ,” he says. “Jesus Christ.”

  He slams his fist into the wallboard and splinters it. Milo has moved to the other back corner, across from Gina. He finally gets the nerve to put one leg, then the other, in his pants. He can’t look directly at Jack, but he never lets him out of his sight, either.

  Jack asks Milo the obvious question: How long? Milo says only a couple of times, it just happened, it won’t happen again, swear to God.

  “Couple of times,” Jack says. “What bad luck, then, for me to just happen to catch you on—what?—the second time. Just bad luck. Bad fucking luck.

  “Or could it be that you all have been at it so long you’ve just about worn out that damn desk? Could it be that every damn body in Speakeasy, Virginia knows about it except the village idiot here?”

  “Nobody knows,” comes a weak voice from Gina’s corner.

  “Shut up. Everybody knows.”

  Jack asks Milo if he’s been waiting all this time to get even with him for stealing his date.

  “Why didn’t you just say so, Milo? Why didn’t you just have the guts to come out and tell me you still wanted her? I’d have backed off.”

  Gina, risking it, steps up from her corner.

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she says, staying well out of Jack’s reach. “I wanted you. You all can’t just sit there and bargain for me, like you’re a couple of kids trading baseball cards.”
r />   “Well,” Jack says, not looking at her, “maybe we could just take turns. I’ll get you Wednesdays, Fridays and weekends and Milo can have you, what, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

  “That’d be four more days than now,” Gina says after a long silence. “I’d settle for you one day, or night, a week, and Milo could go whistle. I’m sorry, Milo.”

  Milo doesn’t say anything, hasn’t said anything for a while. There are tears trickling down his face. It is not beyond reason, Jack thinks, that the dumb bastard is going to be hurting worse than I am, even if I never lay a hand on him.

  Still, Jack feels he has to make at least the symbolic gesture.

  When he grabs Milo, his old friend doesn’t even resist much. He has his eyes closed as Jack hauls him by his shirt collar into the outer office, warning Gina to stay where she is.

  When they are in the middle of the room, Jack takes out the gun. He’s had the snubnose .38 special for years, Gina only marginally aware it’s still in the house, locked away in a drawer, useless to anyone except an irate husband.

  “Oh, my God,” Milo says, and starts crying again.

  “Take off your pants.”

  Milo resists at first, until Jack fires the gun into the floor. Gina screams and shuts the door, then opens it again when she realizes how trapped she is.

  “Please, Jack,” she begs him.

  Jack says nothing, and Milo removes his pants.

  “Now, you know that song you like so much, about giving me three steps toward the door?”

  Milo nods his head.

  “Well, I’m going to give you three steps, Milo. Maybe four, if I feel charitable.”

  Jack reaches over and opens the front door. A gust of late-January air chills the room immediately. The sun has disappeared behind the western tree line.

  Milo is holding his hands in front of himself. He looks as if he’s considering his options.