Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  I arrived at the office late, and among my many voice-mail messages was one from Kurt inviting me to lunch. I called him back and said, “Thanks, man, but I’m just going to grab a sandwich and work at my desk. You know, the old crumbs-in-the-keyboard—”

  “I’ve made reservations at a really nice Japanese restaurant in Boston,” Kurt interrupted. “One o’clock.”

  I didn’t even know Kurt liked Japanese food, and I didn’t quite get his insistence. “Another time would be great.”

  “This is not optional,” Kurt said. “We’ve had a lucky break. Meet me at Kansai at one.”

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “That’s okay. I’m in the city already. Took the morning off work.”

  I’d worked for a Japanese-owned company for years, but I’d never really gotten into Japanese food. Too healthy, maybe. Too minimalist.

  “So what’s this about?” I said.

  “You’ll see. Are you hungry?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Me either. No worries.”

  We were shown to a low black-lacquered table where we had to remove our shoes and sit on tatami mats on the floor. There was a hot plate on the table with a big bowl on it boiling away, a big hunk of kelp floating in some murky water.

  “Need to use the bathroom?” he said.

  “No, thanks, Dad.”

  “Why don’t you anyway?”

  “This going to be a long lunch?”

  “Men’s room is down the hall on the left. But you might want to keep going down the row to the last booth on your right.”

  “And?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I shrugged and went down the hall to the last booth on the right. A rice-paper screen provided privacy, but by shifting over a few inches I was able to see in at an angle.

  What I saw in there almost took the top of my head off.

  Lorna Evers, the Deputy Procurement Officer for the City of Atlanta, was enjoying a romantic luncheon with a man with silver anchorman hair and deep-set eyes. Steve Bingham, the CFO of AirView Systems.

  The company that had just won the Atlanta airport contract that we should have gotten.

  They were sitting next to each other on one side of the table, sucking face, and Lorna’s hand was expertly kneading the man’s crotch. On the table in front of them, untouched, was a platter of paper-thin, blood-red slices of raw beef.

  It took a lot of willpower to keep from knocking over the shoji screen and telling Lorna Evers what I thought of her procurement process. I went back to our table.

  Kurt watched me approach, eyebrows raised.

  “How’d you know?” I asked, stony.

  “Told you, I know a guy in Marietta. Who knows a P.I. in Atlanta. Who deals a lot with the City of Atlanta. So I did a little prep work in Lorna’s hotel room.”

  “Goddammit. She’s the goddamned deputy procurement officer. The city’s got to have all kinds of laws against this.”

  “Code of ethics, sections 2-812 and 2-813,” Kurt said. “Thought you’d want to know some specifics. Miss Lorna can not only lose her job but also get locked up for six months. I also don’t think her husband would be too happy about it.”

  “She’s married.”

  “So is Steve Bingham. Steve has five kids too.”

  I stood up. “Excuse me. I want to say hi to Lorna.”

  I made my way back to her booth and barged right in to the gap between the rice-paper screens. The two were going at it hot and heavy, and they looked up, embarrassed.

  “Oh, hey, Lorna,” I said. “Great place, huh?”

  “J-Jason?”

  “I hear the hand roll’s excellent.”

  “You—what are you—?”

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” I said. “Steve, right? Steve Bingham, from AirView? I think we met at TechComm.”

  Steve Bingham’s deep crimson blush contrasted interestingly with his silver hair. He crossed his legs to conceal the obvious bulge in his trousers. “We’ve met?” he said, and cleared his throat.

  “TechComm can be a zoo,” I said. “You meet so many people. But you two are obviously well acquainted.”

  “Jason—” Lorna said in a pleading tone.

  “Awful sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I’ll call you on your cell later on.” And I gave her a little wink.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to call Lorna. She called me an hour or so later. She’d found some “discrepancies” in AirView’s bid, she said, and had decided to award the contract to me.

  I should have been elated, but instead I felt sullied. This was not how I’d hoped to win the biggest deal in my career.

  The Hardygram came a few minutes after I e-mailed him the good news, sent from his BlackBerry. In all caps, he wrote:

  YOU DID IT!

  He called shortly thereafter, almost giddy with excitement, to tell me that he was almost certain I’d saved our division from the chopping block.

  “Great,” I said. “I’m glad.”

  “Boy, are you low-key about this,” Hardy said, his voice booming. “You’re a modest fellow, aren’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Well, the press release is going out over the Internet any minute now. Hedge fund managers are starting to look at Entronics stock differently now. They know what a big deal this is. Even if you don’t.”

  I stopped home to change and check on Kate. She was lying on her side in bed, tapping away on her laptop. She was researching placenta previa, too, but apparently she’d only found the scary websites. I told her about the less scary ones, and how the nurse had said that if she took it easy everything would probably be okay.

  She nodded, considering. “I’m not worried,” she said. “You’re right. If you go by the odds, I’ll be fine.” She placed a hand on her belly. “And baby’ll be fine too.”

  “Right,” I said. I tried to sound upbeat and authoritative.

  “So I’m not going to worry about it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Worrying won’t do me any good.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.” She took a breath. “This morning I e-mailed some JPEGs of Marie Bastien’s work to the director of the Franz Koerner Gallery in New York.”

  It took me a minute to remember who Marie Bastien was. “The quilts,” I said.

  “The director’s a friend of Claudia’s.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Yeah, well, if you’ve got the connections, use them, I figure. I’m not going to say a word to Marie, of course. But if they’re interested, this could be just the breakthrough she needs. You look bored.”

  “I’m not bored.”

  “I didn’t ask you about your day. I’m sorry. How was your day?”

  I told her that I’d just probably saved the division by winning the Atlanta airport contract, but I didn’t tell her how. She responded with a pretty convincing imitation of enthusiasm. Then she said, “The cable’s not working.”

  “That’s a bummer. Did you call the cable company?”

  “Obviously,” she said, peevishly. “They said we have a signal. Which is not true. They said if we want the box replaced, they can get someone out here in a couple of days. I really don’t want to wait. I’m under house arrest here.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got the Internet.” We had high-speed DSL through the phone company.

  “I know. But I want to watch TV. Is that so much to ask? Can you please take a look at the cable?”

  “Kate, I have no idea how to fix a cable box.”

  “It might just be the wiring.”

  “I’m not a cable guy. It all looks like a bowl of spaghetti back there to me.” I paused a second and couldn’t resist adding, “Why don’t you call Kurt? He can fix anything.”

  “Good idea,” she said, not getting my little dig. Or maybe she did and she didn’t want to “dignify it,” as she liked to say. Not that my digs ever needed dignifying. She turned back t
o her laptop. “You know that actress who was in the movie we saw last night?” She now had two accounts with an Internet movie-rental company so she could rent twelve DVDs at a time. She’d been renting a lot of indie films. I believe they all starred Parker Posey. “Did you know she was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High?”

  “News to me.”

  “And did you know the director grew up in Malden? He used to write for Major Dad.”

  “I think maybe you’ve been spending too much time on the Internet,” I said. I noticed that her bookmark in The Brothers Karamazov was still only about a millimeter of the way into the book. “How’s the Brothers K? A real page-turner, I see. Can’t put it down if you don’t pick it up.”

  “That’s the thing about bed rest,” she said. “You have all the time in the world, but you lose the ability to concentrate. So I just go on the Internet and look something up, and that leads to something else and something else, and I just click and click and click and pretty soon I’m lost in cyberspace. I thought you have a game tonight.”

  “I do, but I’m staying here with you.”

  “For what? Don’t be silly. If I need to reach you, I know how. Just keep your cell on this time.”

  Kurt was really pitching lights-out that night, as the radio announcers say. But what was really amazing was how many long balls Trevor hit. He was good, and he usually hit a home run in each game. This evening, though, every time he stepped up to the plate, the balls just exploded off his bat, each flying easily three hundred feet. Trevor himself seemed amazed at how well he was playing. I figured his confidence was stoked by the possibility of bringing me down. He was playing better than Kurt.

  The Metadyne guys weren’t great, weren’t terrible. This was a company that made testing equipment for semiconductor chips, which is as exciting as it sounds, so softball was the high point of their week, but they weren’t enjoying this game.

  In the fourth inning, Trevor slugged another one, and his bat went flying out of his hands, slamming against the dirt with a loud metallic ping, and then something bizarre happened.

  The end of his bat had popped off. The end cap had separated from the barrel and rolled a good distance away into the infield. A bunch of the players laughed, even Trevor. The ball was gone. One of the out-fielders gamely gave chase. Another one of the Metadyne players picked up the end cap as Trevor ran the bases.

  He looked at it curiously, weighed it in his hand. “Man,” he said. “Heavy. Look at this!”

  He took it over to another one of the Metadyne players, who I remembered was an electrical engineer. The engineer weighed it in his palm just like the other guy had done. “Oh, man, someone put, like, lead fishing weights and hot melt inside this cap. Unbelievable.” Then he walked over to the decapitated metal bat and picked it up. He looked inside, then waved some of his teammates over.

  “Hey,” one of them shouted. “This bat is juiced!”

  Trevor, running triumphantly home, nowhere near out of breath, looked to see what the commotion was.

  “You doctored the bat,” another one of the Metadyne guys shouted.

  “What?” Trevor said, loping over to where they were all inspecting his bat.

  Our own team had left the benches to see what the fuss was about.

  “The inside of this bat’s been machined, or lathed, or something,” the engineer was saying. “Like maybe with one of those Dremel tools. You can even see the shavings—graphite or resin, I think. And check out this lead tape inside the end of it.”

  “Hey, I didn’t do that!” Trevor protested. “I wouldn’t even know how.”

  “Nah,” said another Metadyne guy with an adenoidal, buzz-saw voice, “he sent it to one of those bat doctors.”

  “No way!” Trevor shouted.

  “It’s a forfeit,” the engineer said. “The game gets forfeited. That’s the rules.”

  “No wonder these Entronics guys are suddenly on a winning streak,” said the buzz-saw-voiced guy. “They’re cheating.”

  The Metadyne team insisted on doing a visual inspection of all the rest of our bats, and all they found were the usual scratches and dings. Only Trevor’s bat had been doctored. Apparently thinning the walls with a lathe to make it springier, and weighting the end, increased what the Metadyne engineer called the trampoline effect, making the bat really hot.

  But Trevor was not going down without a fight. He stood there in his cargo shorts and his LIFE IS GOOD T-shirt and his pukka shells and his brand-new white Adidas and his backwards faded Red Sox cap, and he protested that he’d never in his life cheated at sports, that he’d never do such a thing, that he wouldn’t even know how to begin.

  It was hard to tell how many of the guys believed him. I overheard Festino say to Letasky, “For a company softball game? Now that’s competitive.” Letasky, ever the diplomat, pretended he hadn’t heard. He was playing basketball with Trevor and Gleason on Thursday, he’d told me. He was being very careful not to take sides, as he’d put it.

  “Either the thing came that way,” Trevor said, “or…”

  He looked at Kurt. “This bastard did it.” His voice rose. “He set me up again.” Now he pointed to me, then to Kurt. “Both of these guys. It’s like a goddamned reign of terror around here, have you guys noticed?”

  Kurt gave him a puzzled look, shrugged, then headed off toward the parking lot. I followed him.

  “How come?” I said when we were out of earshot of our teammates.

  “You don’t think I did that, do you?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  But Trevor had caught up with us, walking alongside us, speaking quickly, in clipped tones. “You’re an interesting guy,” he said, addressing Kurt. “A man of many secrets.”

  “That right?” Kurt said blandly, not letting up his pace. It was twilight, and the sodium lamps in the parking lot were sickly yellow. The cars cast long shadows.

  “I did a little research on you,” Trevor said. “I found this Special Forces website, and I posted a notice. I asked if anyone knew a Kurt Semko.”

  Kurt gave Trevor a sidelong glance. “You discovered that I don’t exist, right? I’m a mirage. I’m in the Witness Protection program.”

  I was looking back and forth between the two of them, watching this verbal tennis match, bewildered.

  “And someone posted an answer the next day. I didn’t know you had a dishonorable discharge from the army, Kurt. Did you know that, Jason? You vouched for him. You recommended him.”

  “Trevor, that’s enough,” I said.

  “But did you know why, Jason?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “How much do you know about the—what’s the term they used?—‘sick shit’ Kurt got into in Iraq, Jason?”

  I shook my head.

  “Now I see why your friend is so willing to do your dirty work,” Trevor said. “Why he’s so willing to be your instrument in your little reign of terror. Because you got him a job he never would have gotten if anyone did a little digging.” He looked at Kurt. “You can threaten me all you want. You can try to sabotage me. But in the end, both of you are going down.”

  Kurt stopped, came close to Trevor. He grabbed Trevor by the T-shirt and pulled him close.

  Trevor drew breath. “Go ahead, hit me. I’ll see to it you don’t have a job to go to tomorrow morning.”

  “Kurt,” I said.

  Kurt lowered his head, moved right in so their faces were almost touching. He was just about the same height but much broader and much more powerful-looking. “I have another secret I want to share with you,” he said in a low, guttural voice.

  Trevor watched him, wincing, waiting for the blow. “Go ahead.”

  “I killed Kennedy,” Kurt said, letting go of Trevor’s T-shirt abruptly. Trevor’s shoulders slumped. The fabric of his LIFE IS GOOD T-shirt remained bunched.

  “Trevor,” Kurt said, “are you sure?”

  “Am I sure of what?”

  “Your shirt, I mean.” He pointed at Trevor’s
T-shirt. His index finger circled the LIFE IS GOOD logo. “Are you sure life is good, Trevor? Because I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.”

  44

  When I got home, Kate was still awake. She was clicking away on her laptop, surfing a tsunami of trivia on the Internet, digging deep into movie adaptations of Jane Austen novels.

  “Aren’t you the one who said that watching movie versions of Jane Austen’s novels was like hearing a Beethoven symphony played on a harmonica?” I said.

  “Did we ever rent Clueless? You might be into that one. It’s Jane Austen’s Emma, but it’s set in a Beverly Hills high school and it stars Alicia Silverstone.”

  “You know they’re remaking Pride and Prejudice with Vin Diesel as that guy?”

  “Mister Darcy? No way!” She was appalled.

  “Way. In the first scene, Vin drives his Hummer through the plate-glass window of this English manor house.”

  She glared at me. “I asked Kurt to take a look at the cable,” she said. “As you suggested.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “He’s coming over tomorrow after work. I also invited him to stay for dinner.”

  “For dinner?”

  “Yeah, is that a big deal? You’re always saying I exploit him—I thought it was only right to invite him to break bread with us. Or papadams, at least. Maybe you can pick up some Indian, or Thai, or something.”