Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  Graham was a man of many talents. He was always rebuilding engines, working on his 1971 VW Beetle in the backyard of his apartment building. He worked in a record store that sold only vinyl. He was also a “Trekker,” a fan of the original Star Trek TV series, which to him was the height of culture. Only the original series—Classic Trek, as they called it; everything else was an abomination, he thought. He knew all the plot lines by heart and all the character names, even the minor, nonrecurring characters. He once told me that his first big crush had been on Lieutenant Uhura. He went to a lot of Star Trek conventions, and he’d turned a scale model of the Starship Enterprise into a bong.

  Graham had also done jail time, not unlike some of my other buddies from the old neighborhood. In his early twenties he went through a rough patch and broke into a couple of houses and apartments, trying to pay back a marijuana deal, and he got caught.

  Basically, Graham had ended up where I might have ended up if my parents hadn’t been so insistent I go to college. His parents considered college a waste of money and refused to pay for it. He got pissed off and dropped out of high school at the beginning of senior year.

  “Sorry, man,” I said. “It’s been real crazy at work.”

  “Haven’t heard from you in weeks, man. Weeks. Come on over to the Den of Iniquity—we’ll do a spliff, get baked, and I’ll show you what I’ve done to the Love Bug. El Huevito.”

  “I’m awful sorry, Graham,” I said. “Another time, okay?”

  Around noon, Festino appeared in my office door. “You hear about Teflon Trevor?” There was a look of unmistakable glee on his face.

  “What?”

  He snickered. “He had an appointment with the CEO of the Pavilion Group in Natick to do a meet-and-greet, a handshake kind of thing, and ink the deal. CEO’s the kind of guy you don’t keep waiting five seconds, you know? Real control freak. So what happens? One of the tires on Trevor’s Porsche blows out on the Pike. He missed the meeting, and the CEO was totally pissed.”

  “So? We’ve all had car trouble. So he calls Pavilion on his cell and tells them, and they reschedule. Big deal. It happens.”

  “That’s the beauty part, Tigger. His cell phone died too. Couldn’t make a call. So basically the CEO and everyone else is sitting around waiting for Trevor and he never shows up.” He squeezed out a dab of hand cleaner and looked up at me with a smile.

  “Hate when that happens,” I said. I told him about how I’d just turned the Lockwood deal around, about playing the Aruba card. You could see Festino looking at me in a whole new way.

  “You did that, Tigger?” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No, I just mean—wow, I’m impressed, that’s all. Never thought you had it in you.”

  “There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” I said mysteriously.

  After Festino left, I called Kurt.

  “Good work,” he said.

  “Thanks, man,” I said.

  “No worries.”

  I clicked on my Entronics e-mail in-box. “Listen,” I said. “A job just opened up here. Corporate Security officer. It says they prefer recent military experience. Experience with handguns. You’ve got experience with handguns, right?”

  “Too much,” he said.

  “You interested? Pay’s not bad. Better than driving a tow truck, I’ll bet.”

  “What does it say about background check?”

  I looked at the screen. “It says, ‘Must be able to pass full criminal, drug, and employment background check.’”

  “There you go,” he said. “They see the DD and they stop reading the application.”

  “Not if you explain the circumstances.”

  “You don’t get that chance,” Kurt said. “But I appreciate the thought, man.”

  “I know the Director of Corporate Security,” I said. “Dennis Scanlon. Good guy. He likes me. I could tell him about you.”

  “Not that easy, buddy.”

  “Worth a try, don’t you think? Wait till I tell him about the softball game. We need to make you a legal Entronics employee. He’ll get it.”

  “He’s looking for a Corporate Security officer, not a pitcher.”

  “You saying you’re not qualified?”

  “Qualified isn’t the point, bud.”

  “Let me make a call for you,” I said. “I’ll do it right now.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Hey,” I said, “it’s the least I can do.”

  I picked up the phone and called Dennis Scanlon, the Director of Corporate Security, and told him briefly about Kurt. How he was in Special Forces, was a nice guy, seemed smart. Got a dishonorable discharge, but not for any bad reason.

  Scanlon was immediately interested. He said he loved military types.

  11

  I had nothing against my smarmy brother-in-law, Craig Glazer, and his social-climbing wife, Susie; but my heart really squeezed for their poor, brilliant, maladjusted eight-year-old son, Ethan.

  Let’s start with the kid’s name. Ethan is what you name a kid who you fully expect, even before he’s born, to get beat up on the playground, his lunch money stolen, his glasses snapped in two, and his face pushed into the dirt. Then there’s the fact that Susie and Craig were at once overprotective of their son, in their high-strung way, and totally uninterested in him. They seemed to spend as little time with him as possible. When Ethan wasn’t being beat up in his fancy private school, or whatever they did to nerds in private schools, he was being raised at home, in isolation from other kids who might have helped drag him into the world of normalcy, by his nanny, a Filipino woman named Corazon. As a result, they were raising a smart and creative and messed-up little boy, and I felt for him. I always hated it when kids like that got picked on.

  They say life is high school with money, right? You’ve probably known people like me in school. I was never the jerk who beat you up and took your lunch money. I wasn’t the quarterback of the football team who stole your girl. I wasn’t jock enough to make it on any varsity team. I wasn’t the brain who did your homework for you, and I sure wasn’t one of the rich kids. But there was another guy, remember?

  If you were the nerd with the wrong sneakers and the too-tight jeans in the Dungeons & Dragons Club, odds were I didn’t hang with you; but unlike most of your classmates, I didn’t mock you either. I just said hi and smiled at you when you walked down the hallway. If the bullies started picking on you, I was the one who tried to defuse the situation by pointing out that we’d better start being nice to you, because in ten years, after you founded a behemoth software company, we’d all be working for you.

  So despite my feelings for Craig Glazer, his son and I bonded. I much preferred conversing with Ethan, visiting his weird little world of medieval torture chambers—his current obsession—than listening to Craig tell me about how his new pilot blew everyone away at the “up-fronts” in New York.

  On the way home I stopped at a Borders Books superstore located in a mall that also had a Kmart and a Sports Authority. I wanted to pick up a present for poor little Ethan. I parked the car and tried once again to call Kate. The last three times I’d gotten our voice mail. I knew she’d left work early today so she could be home when her sister and Craig showed up. I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t answering the phone, but maybe she was out shopping or something.

  This time, though, she answered. “Hey, babe,” she said in a boisterous voice. “Are you on your way back? Craig and Susie just got here.”

  “Oh, great,” I said, heavy on the sarcasm. “I can’t wait.”

  She got it but she was having none of it. “They can’t wait to see you too,” she said. I could hear laughter in the background and the tinkling of glasses. “We’re making dinner.”

  “We?”

  “Don’t sound so worried!” she said. A loud guffaw that sounded like Craig. “Susie just got certified in CPR.”

  More laughter in the background.

 
; “I got some really great Porterhouse steaks from John Dewar’s,” she said. “Inch and a half thick.”

  “Nice,” I said. “So, listen. I had my talk with Gordy.”

  “No, I’m just going to crack the peppercorns a little,” she said to someone. “Au poivre.” And to me: “Go well?”

  “He reamed me out,” I said.

  “Oh, God.”

  “It was a nightmare, Kate. But then I found out something about that guy at Lockwood—?”

  “Can’t talk now, babe, I’m sorry. Come on home. We’re all famished. We’ll talk at home.”

  Annoyed, I clicked off and went in to the bookstore. I browsed quickly around the children’s section, moved on to teens, and found two possibilities. Ethan, like most boys, had gone through a dinosaur phase and a planets phase, but then he’d taken a sharp left turn into an obsession with the Middle Ages. And I don’t mean King Arthur and Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table and the Sword in the Stone. It was instruments of medieval torture that floated his boat. You had to wonder about his parents’ marriage.

  So here I was, Uncle Jason, the enabler. I went back and forth between a book on the Tower of London and one on the Aztecs, and the Aztecs won out. Better illustrations and more gruesome.

  On the way to the cash register I passed by the Business Self-Help section, and a book caught my eye. It was called Business Is War! The book jacket had a greenish camouflage look to it.

  I remembered Gordy mocking Mark Simkins: Candy-ass crapola.

  This wasn’t candy-ass. This book promised to teach the businessman “proven, effective secrets of military leadership.” It looked promising.

  I thought of Kurt and the way he’d helped me turn around the Lockwood account with one hardball phone call.

  Then I found another book, face out on the shelf, called Victory Secrets of Attila the Hun, and then another one, called Patton on Leadership, and The Green Beret Manager, and pretty soon I was holding a tower of hardcover books and CDs.

  I gulped at the cash register—hardcover books cost a lot, and CDs cost even more, but I justified it as an investment in my future—and asked them to gift-wrap the Aztec book for Ethan.

  The adults were gathered in our cramped kitchen, and young Ethan was nowhere to be found. They were laughing loudly and drinking from grotesquely large martini glasses, and having such a good time that they didn’t notice me enter. Even though Susie was four years older, she and Katie looked exactly like each other. Susie’s eyelids were a bit heavier, and her mouth tilted down just a bit. Also, the passage of time as well as life in the lap of luxury seemed to have changed her a bit too. Susie had more fine lines around her eyes and forehead than Katie, no doubt from all that time on the beaches of St. Barths. Her hair also looked like it was cut and highlighted once a week at some eight-hundred-dollar-a-visit Beverly Hills salon.

  My brother-in-law, Craig, was gesturing with his free hand. “Concrete,” he was saying. “Forget granite. Granite is so eighties.”

  “Concrete?” I said as I walked into the kitchen and kissed my wife. “My boss keeps trying to fit me for concrete boots. I can’t figure it out.”

  Polite chuckles. Craig was once a Jeopardy! contestant, so officially he knows everything. He doesn’t like to talk about the fact that he wiped out on the easiest question in Jeopardy! history—the answer was “potato”—and his entire winnings were a year’s supply of Turtle Wax.

  “Hey, Jason,” Susie said, giving me a sisterly peck on the cheek and a half hug. “Ethan’s so excited to see you I think he’s going to jump out of his skin.”

  “Jason!” exclaimed Craig like we were old buddies. He threw his bony arms around me. He seemed to get skinnier every time I saw him. He was wearing a pair of brand-new-looking blue jeans and an un-tucked Hawaiian print shirt and white Converse All Stars. I also noticed he’d shaved his head. Obviously the minoxidil wasn’t working. He used to have a big mop of curly hair that was thinning on top and made him look like Bozo the Clown. Also, he had new eyeglasses. For years, when he was writing experimental short stories for literary magazines, he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. When he hit it rich, he went through a contact-lens phase until he discovered he had dry eyes. Then he started wearing whatever glasses were cutting-edge. For a couple of years in a row he wore different versions of nineteen-fifties geek frames. Now he was back to horn-rimmed specs.

  “New glasses,” I said. “Or old?”

  “New. Johnny picked them out for me.” I happened to know he and Susie had recently vacationed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines with Johnny Depp. Kate had clipped out the article from People magazine and showed it to me.

  “Johnny?” I said, just to make him say it. “Carson? Isn’t he dead?”

  “Depp,” Craig said, with a fake-bashful shrug. “Hey, a little too much of the good life, huh?” He patted my stomach, and I almost lost it. “A week at the Ashram, you’ll drop that weight easy. Hiking, Bikram yoga, twelve hundred calories a day—it’s a boot camp for celebs. You’ll love it.”

  Kate saw me revving up to say something I might regret, so she quickly interrupted me. “Let me get you a martini.” She hoisted a silver martini shaker and poured into one of the giant glasses.

  “I didn’t even know we had martini glasses,” I said. “From Grammy Spencer?”

  “From Craig and Susie,” Kate said. “Aren’t they special?”

  “Special,” I agreed.

  “They’re Austrian,” said Craig. “The same glassworks that make those amazing Bordeaux glasses.”

  “Careful,” Kate said, handing me a glass. “Hundred dollars a stem.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty more where they came from,” said Craig.

  “Did you notice Susie’s brooch?” Kate said.

  I had noticed a big ugly gaudy misshapen thing on Susie’s blouse but I thought the polite thing to do was not to embarrass her by pointing it out. “Is it a starfish?” I asked.

  “You like it?” Susie said.

  Yep, it was a gold starfish covered in sapphires and rubies and must have cost a fortune. I’ve never understood why women like pins and brooches so much anyway. But this was a doozy.

  “Oh, Suze, it’s fabulous,” Kate said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Craig got it for me,” Susie said. “Was it Harry Winston or Tiffany’s?”

  “Tiffany’s,” Craig said. “I saw it and thought it was so Susie that I had to get it.”

  “Jean Schlumberger,” Susie said. “I would never have spent that kind of money on a piece of jewelry. And it wasn’t even my birthday or our anniversary or any special occasion.”

  “Every day I’m married to you is a special occasion,” Craig said, and he put his arm around her, and she gave him a kiss, and I wanted to puke.

  I also had to change the subject as quickly as possible, because I couldn’t take any more, so I said, “Why were you guys talking about concrete?”

  “They want us to put in new countertops,” said Kate. She gave me a quick, conspiratorial look.

  “We just got rid of our granite countertops in our Marin County place after Steven had us over,” said Craig.

  This time I didn’t ask whether he meant Steven Spielberg or Steven Segal. “Yeah, I’ve always wanted my kitchen to look like some socialist worker’s communal flat in East Berlin,” I said.

  Craig flashed his Lumineer smile. He looked at me with kindly condescension, as if I were some Fresh Air Fund kid. “How’s the corporate world?”

  “It’s okay,” I said, nodding. “Gets crazy sometimes, but it’s okay.”

  “Hey, your boss, Dick Hardy, invited me to the Entronics Invitational last year at Pebble Beach. Nice guy. Man, I got to golf with Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh—that was a blast.”

  I got his point. He was a buddy of the CEO of my company, whom I’d never even met, and he got to hang with all the celebs because, well, he was a celeb. I couldn’t imagine Craig golfing. “Neat” was all I said.

  “I could p
ut in a word for you with Dick,” Craig said.

  “Don’t waste your time. He doesn’t even know who I am.”

  “It’s cool. I’ll just tell him to make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks, Craig. I appreciate the thought, though.”

  “You work hard, man. I really admire that. I get paid all this insane money for basically playing, but you really work your ass off. Doesn’t he, Katie?”

  “Oh, he does,” said Kate.

  “I don’t think I could do what you do,” Craig went on. “The crap you’ve got to put up with, huh?”

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  I couldn’t take it anymore, so I told them I wanted to change out of my work clothes. Instead, I looked for Ethan and found him in the tiny guest room upstairs, which was supposed to be the future baby’s room. He was lying on his stomach on the blue wall-to-wall carpet reading a book, and he looked up when I entered.

  “Hey, Uncle Jason,” he said. Ethan had a lisp—something else for his classmates to make fun of him about, like he needed anything more—and glasses.

  “Heya, buddy,” I said, sitting down next to him. I handed him the gift-wrapped book. “You probably don’t need another book, right?”

  “Thanks,” he said, sitting up and tearing right into it. “Oh, this is an excellent one,” he said.

  “You have it already.”

  He nodded solemnly. “I think it’s the finest in the series.”

  “I was debating between this one and one on the Tower of London.”

  “This was a good choice. I needed another copy anyway, for the Marin house.”