The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “I killed a young woman,” Mark says flatly. “A promising young woman. You didn’t have to live with that. You were lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  How can Mark even think that? It’s one of the dumbest things anybody has ever said to him.

  “Shit,” McGregor says, “we’re going the wrong way. Make a left at the next light.”

  This, from a guy who said he didn’t know where they were going.

  He and Anderson resembled each other, Mark says. Same height, complexion, and eye color, and just a year apart. Anderson had a few pounds on him, but hey, that was easy enough to fix. He just had to up his calorie intake for a few months, let himself go a bit. Actors did it all the time.

  “‘Now there’s an idea for a movie,’ I thought to myself, lying there all depressed and self-loathing in that hospital room. Guy doesn’t want to live anymore so he sells his life to someone else. Instead of selling an organ like those poor schmucks in South America, he’d sell his whole life.”

  “What was he going to do with the money once he was dead?” Richie asks.

  “I don’t know, maybe he had a relative or someone he wanted to hook up. Shit, if he’s going to kill himself, he might as well get something for his trouble.”

  “And you were just the guy who was willing to provide it.”

  “Well, that was for the movie. In real life, you can’t tell him that eventually you’re going to have to kill him. That doesn’t go over so well. And sadly, once people come into half a million dollars, they have a habit of wanting to live a little longer. Sometimes a lot longer.”

  McGregor smiles again. But this time when Richie glances over, he sees that McGregor is not only smiling, but he’s staring back at him.

  “Ah, man, I missed you, Richie,” he says, giving him a little slap on his shoulder with his left hand—the one that isn’t holding the gun. “We had a fucking good time, didn’t we? Back in the day.”

  “Ancient history, Mark. Ancient fucking history.”

  “The glory days. Before women brought us down.”

  “Women brought us down? You’re blaming women, plural? What the fuck are you talking about? You sound wasted.”

  “That’s because I am.” Then, not missing a beat: “Bear right. And follow the signs to 280.”

  Madden calls Carlyle back to ask for an update on the Hertz car-tracking situation. Apparently, he hasn’t gotten very far.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Hank. We’re getting a little bit of a runaround. I’ve got Pastorini making calls. They’ve transferred him twice, put him on hold.”

  “Is he on the phone to corporate? Who’s he calling? You need someone high-level to authorize this. Tell him to step it up.”

  Lowenstein comes over. He’s been talking to Ashley, making sure she’s all right, but he must have seen Madden talking on the phone, looking frustrated.

  “Where are we at?” Lowenstein asks.

  “We’re working on it,” Madden replies. If it were anyone else, he would leave it at that and rebuff any more intrusions. But it’s Lowenstein, and Lowenstein isn’t going to sit back and take his bullshit. So he adds, “But if you’ve got any strings you can pull with Hertz corporate, I’d encourage you to pull them.”

  Lowenstein nods, seeming to appreciate the gesture, then takes out his phone and makes a call.

  “Hi, Elizabeth, this is Marty Lowenstein,” he says. “I’m a President’s Circle member and I’m about to put your exceptional service to the ultimate test.”

  “I haven’t driven a car in over eight years,” Richie says.

  “Really? It’s not hard. You can pick it up a little.”

  McGregor talks as they drive, explaining the evolution of his plans with increasingly slurred words and jerky hand gestures. Project A, as he liked to call it, became an obsession. It invigorated him, he says. Obviously, the key to the whole thing was pulling off the body switch. He knew he’d have to disfigure Anderson, but he didn’t want to go so far as to burn him, making him totally unrecognizable. He was relying on Beth to identify the body and he wanted it to look like a crime of passion, one a wife could have committed. Those were the two underlying principles he started with, and he worked backwards from there.

  While he needed her to make a positive ID, he knew that in any suspicious death, the coroner’s office wouldn’t simply take her word. They’d start with fingerprints, move to dental, then finish with DNA. If he had the first two nailed—or three if you counted Beth’s ID—he figured he’d have more wriggle room with the DNA. Over the months, he’d acquired a couple of Anderson’s toothbrushes, a hairbrush, nail clippers, and a number of other personal effects he could exchange for his. While there was no escaping the fact that he would leave some of his own DNA around no matter how careful he was, as long as there was enough of Anderson’s around to pick from, he’d be in decent shape.

  The fingerprints and dental records were an easier fix than he thought.

  “Everything is digital now,” he says. “And everything digital is open game for manipulation.”

  For all his issues, Anderson had never been arrested. That was a big plus. Other than giving his thumbprint when he got his driver’s license, he’d never been fingerprinted.

  McGregor says the “thumbprint part” wasn’t a huge challenge. His previous company had been awarded one of the contracts to help modernize the state’s computer system and integrate a new online voter registration system. That gave him a back door into the DMV, which he’d kept in his back pocket, so to speak.

  He thought the dental records would prove much trickier, but it turned out that not only did his and Anderson’s dentists both use digital X-ray machines, but also the same software.

  “I’m not going to lie,” he says, “it was a little hairy, but it’s not like you’re hacking into the Pentagon. I just had to pick the right time to switch the files.”

  As Mark tells the story, Richie briefly forgets he has a gun pointed at him and stops caring where they’re headed. In a way, it’s fascinating, if not horrifying—the lengths to which McGregor has gone to extricate himself from his life, in the process completely infiltrating Anderson’s.

  How’d he get to Anderson? Drugs. Anderson dug painkillers and tranks: vikes, percs, oxies, benzos, z-drugs, “all that shit.” But it was more than the promise of drugs that got him to the house that day. It was money, too, he says.

  Anderson had been asking for another hundred grand. Usually, he met him at his shitty little apartment in Mountain View and later at the house in San Carlos. Anderson was a lazy fuck. That’s why he didn’t make it. His idea of a good time was sitting in his hot tub smoking a joint and then having some dude handcuff him to that bed downstairs and pound him in the ass and tell him what a fucking loser he was.

  Richie wonders who McGregor’s talking about, himself or Anderson? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. He lets it go, though. He wants him to finish the story.

  McGregor says that as a precaution, he always made sure that they both kept their cell phones off twenty minutes prior to each meeting and twenty minutes after so they couldn’t be tracked. The same rule applied this time but he told Anderson to meet him much closer to his home—on the El Camino in front of the Guild Theater in downtown Menlo Park. He said he had something special for him.

  When he got there, he opened the trunk of his car and showed him a briefcase with money in it, let him touch a stack to see that it was real. He said there was twenty thousand inside, which was a lie; it was five. He said he didn’t have any more cash but he could take the car. It was worth seventy, maybe more. Just give him a ride home and he could take it. He’d sign over the title to him right now. And that would be that. They’d be done. For good this time.

  Anderson seemed amenable to the deal. He’d always coveted that car, and was happy to take possession, though he was momentarily flummoxed over what he was going to do with his own car.

  Not my problem, McGregor said. Stick it in a garage.
Did he want the car or not?

  Like any junkie, Anderson was focused on getting a fix. Every exchange they had seemed to end with that.

  “What you got pharmaceutical-wise?” he asked.

  He told him he’d left a bottle of “oxy” in the glove compartment (which Anderson promptly fished out and opened), and had another few bottles at home he could give him.

  When they turned onto Robert S Drive, McGregor, in the passenger seat now, ducked down, pretending to look for something on the floor between his legs, then pressed the remote for the driveway gate, and Anderson pulled the car inside.

  He had everything set up, ready to go. Distracting Anderson, he told him to check under the front seat of his other car in the garage for more pills. They should be in a little cardboard box, he said as he slipped on a pair of black golf gloves.

  Anderson looked and said there was nothing there.

  McGregor told him to keep looking. They were there. But they weren’t, and when Anderson stood up and turned around, he never knew what hit him. McGregor struck him high across the neck and then several times in his chest and upper back. Wham, wham, wham. Anderson went down and McGregor slammed the backside of the tomahawk into his face. Once, twice, and then a third whack for good measure. It was over in less than thirty seconds.

  “I was breathing hard, my heart pounding like a goddamn jackhammer. But I pulled it together. I stuck to the plan. I wrote ‘Hack’ in Anderson’s blood on the floor with my left index finger.”

  Then he slipped the weapon into a garbage bag and wrapped it up tightly. Next, he removed Anderson’s wallet and everything from his pockets, including his car and house keys and phone, and replaced them with his own, dropping his own moneyless wallet on the ground near the body. Last was the watch, his prized Rolex. God, he hated giving that thing up. But he wanted to create confusion. The fake robbery would look so blatantly botched it wouldn’t make sense.

  When he was through checking and rechecking everything, he took off his shoes and stepped into a pair of nearby sandals, careful never to touch the ground with his feet. He then took the briefcase out of the trunk and walked over to his pool house, stripped down to nothing but a T-shirt and jeans and stuffed everything else—shoes, weapon, long-sleeve shirt, and the briefcase—into a duffel bag that could be worn as a backpack. The final touch was a modest disguise: a blond wig with a ponytail that he covered with a John Deere hat and a cheap Weed Wacker that he slung over his shoulder. He then walked out the back of his property, slipped through his neighbor’s yard and emerged on the adjacent street, Corinne Lane, and headed up to Valparaiso and back to the El Camino and Anderson’s car.

  Everything had gone off without a hitch. “A thing of beauty,” McGregor says, pausing reflectively. Then he says, “You wanna hear something fucked up?”

  Richie shrugs. Like he has a choice. Like what he’d just told him already wasn’t fucked up enough.

  “That program I wrote for the shell company, the code Anderson sold back to us, was the best work I’d done in a long time. It was pretty spectacular. Ended up with a patent for one piece of it. It kicked the shit out of what our engineers came up with, which wasn’t bad, mind you.”

  “If it was so good why didn’t you just keep everything legit?”

  “People are constantly doing beautiful work and no one gives a shit. Everything’s fucking ‘freemium’ these days. You gotta ramp pretty fast and you’re dealing with a lot of different variables. You either can’t get to critical mass or you get to critical mass but you don’t get the return on investment you said you would and all of sudden your optics are all off. Next thing you know you’re looking through the bottom of a Coke bottle and drinking Jack, fending off the hounds. Why deal with all that stress? It’s a hell of lot easier to raise the money than to actually make it. And shit, this way I didn’t have to give away any of it to my vampire wife.”

  He had a point, Richie admits. But there’s still some stuff that doesn’t make sense.

  “Like what?” McGregor asks.

  “Like how could you count on Beth to make an ID? I mean, she had to, you know … she had to know your body,” he says, struggling to get the remark out.

  “Dude, we hadn’t had sex in a year. And I put on some weight over the last few months. And shit, how long would you want to look at a body that had been hacked up like mine was? It was pretty gruesome, man. But here’s the kicker. Here’s the fucking brilliant part.”

  Using his left hand, he yanks up his shirt, then wedges his thumb in his waistband and pulls it down, exposing a patch of skin on his waist, just below the belt line. Richie glances over and sees that it’s a small tattoo that looks like a snake. There are some letters underneath it that spell something he can’t make out.

  “I got this tattoo. Exact same one Anderson had. I made sure she noticed it. Cops ask for identifying characteristics: here it is.”

  Wow, Richie thinks. “What are the words? What’s it say underneath?”

  “Sedition 1918.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some fucking gay rights group he was a part of in his twenties. Gay marriage and shit. I’m all for it, by the way. They thought the name was clever. He and a few of the other boys went out one night and got themselves tatted up. You know, solidarity for the movement, which must not have been much of a movement because I did a search on Google and didn’t find anything. Lots on the Sedition Act of 1918, though.”

  Sedition Act? It rings a bell from a history class but he doesn’t know exactly what it refers to.

  “Hey, slow down,” McGregor says. “There’s highway patrol all along here. I don’t want you to get a ticket.”

  That’s exactly what Richie wants. He accelerates more, pushing the speedometer to eight-five.

  “I said slow down.”

  “What are you going to do? Shoot me going ninety? We’ll both be killed.”

  “Good,” McGregor says, raising the gun a little. “I’ve got no problem with that. We can do it that way.”

  Richie looks at him, decides he’s serious, and eases off the gas.

  “Where are we going, Mark?”

  “You know where we’re going, Richie.”

  He does. He’s known ever since McGregor said to get on 280 and go south. This is the route they took the night of the accident.

  “You don’t remember this part because you were asleep,” McGregor goes on. “But you’re going to remember it this time.”

  They drive in silence for a little bit, then McGregor says:

  “I’ll tell you, man, it’s something to be able to see what happens after you die. All the flowers in front of the house like that, a lot of them from strangers. And all the nice things people had to say. It was really quite moving.”

  “You’re an arrogant asshole. You always were.”

  “Yeah, I know. But when we were friends, you used to like that. I made you laugh.”

  That was true. He did make him laugh. Just then the first sign for the Sand Hill exit appears and McGregor says:

  “Hey, get ready. Turnoff’s coming up.”

  “What are we doing here, Mark?”

  “I thought we’d pay our respects. What do you say?”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I’ll let you in on another little secret.”

  “What kind of little secret?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They drive in silence, the question and answer session seemingly over—or entering a new phase. He glances over at McGregor, who’s wearing a small, self-satisfied smile. It’s all a game to him. The same psychological bullshit. With McGregor, it had always been about gaining the upper hand. He had to have it. And now he was doing it again.

  What’s the endgame? Richie thinks, looking ahead to what the best time to jump him will be. He’s just going to have to go for it. I’m gonna live till I die, he says to himself, remembering one of Sinatra’s famous quotes, which always struck him as something Yogi Berra would say.
I’m gonna live till I fucking die.

  He pulls off at the Sand Hill exit and then struggles a bit with the steering wheel as they go around a tight loop that leads them back over the highway.

  “I was having a little trouble keeping my eyes open on the freeway,” McGregor says. “But I was fine here. I remember being glad to get off.”

  They head down Sand Hill and Richie looks at the speedometer. They’re going forty-five. He goes through the first light and passes the Rosewood Hotel on his right. Buildings with the names of venture-capital firms litter either side of the road.

  “Slow down,” McGregor says, staring straight ahead.

  He should have done it then, should have put his hands together and taken a swing at him, but he was looking, too, mesmerized by the road ahead.

  “I must have fallen asleep right here,” McGregor goes on. “I never saw the red light until the last second. I was probably only out for three or four seconds. Max. Okay, pull over. By the cross.”

  Richie turns the wheel a little to the right, then a little left and straightens out, guiding the car into the wide bike lane, positioning the left wheels of the car just inside the line. It’s not a good place to stop. A car whizzes past. Then another. They’re going really fast. Like torpedoes.

  “Turn off the engine,” McGregor orders. “Just put it in park and hit the button.”

  The gear shift is between them, with Ashley’s purse practically lying on top of it just in front of the radio and GPS screen. Reaching over with both hands, Richie takes the lever and gets set to put the car in park when something stops him. Don’t, he thinks. He pushes the lever up, and he says, “Fuck, I didn’t know that cross was still here,” causing Mark to glance over at it. In that moment he lets the stick come back down to D. He then reaches over to the ignition button and pretends to tap it, saying, “The family maintain it?”

  “I don’t know,” McGregor says. “But I’ve gotta see it every time I take fucking 280.”