Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  “Kurt knows how to search for concealed microphones and transmitters,” I said.

  “Sure he does,” Kenyon said. “So don’t get too close.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Then we should be squared away.” He looked at my T-shirt. “You got something long-sleeved?”

  “Not with me.”

  He removed his sweatshirt. “Wear this. Just get it back to me sometime, okay?”

  If I’m alive, I’ll be more than happy to. I nodded.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  I did. He taped the transmitter to the small of my back with a wide adhesive tape he wound around my chest. It was so sticky it was sure to rip out my chest hair when I removed it.

  “Is he going to spot your backup team? Don’t forget, he’s a pro.”

  “So are they.”

  I took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. “Is this going to work?”

  “The transmitter’s going to work fine. Everything else—well, that depends on you. Whether you can pull it off. And that’s what scares the shit out of me.”

  “I can do it,” I said. “Is there, like, a panic button built into this?”

  “We’ll be monitoring the transmission. If you need us, just say something. Some phrase we agree on. And we’ll come running.”

  “A phrase. How about, ‘I’m not getting a good feeling about this’?”

  “Works for me,” he said. “Okay, then. We’re good to go.”

  It took me another forty-five minutes to get ready for my meeting with Kurt. I parked in back of a 7-Eleven that was closed and worked out of the trunk of my car.

  The Entronics building was mostly dark, with a scattering of lights in the windows. Cleaning people, maybe. A few office workers who kept very late hours the way Phil Rifkin once did.

  I saw that the lights were on in my corner office on the twentieth floor. I’d turned them off when I left for the day. The cleaning staff usually came through around nine or ten, so it wasn’t them. Not at one in the morning.

  It had to be Kurt. Waiting for me.

  62

  Fifteen minutes before one in the morning.

  I arrived at my office a quarter hour before the time we’d agreed to meet. I set down my gym bag and my briefcase as I entered. The lights were already on. So was my computer.

  Kurt had been using it, I assumed, but for what?

  I went behind the desk to look at the monitor, and I heard Kurt’s voice. “You have something for me.”

  I looked up. Nodded.

  “Let’s make this fast.”

  I stood still, looked in his eyes. “What’s my guarantee Graham’s going to be where you say he is?”

  “There’s no guarantees in life,” Kurt said. “I guess you’ll just have to take me at my word.”

  “What good is this thing to you anyway?” I asked. “It’s just a piece of scrap metal.”

  “It’s worth nothing to me.”

  “So why are you willing to deal?”

  Last-minute hesitation. Happened all the time in my business. How many prospects had suddenly developed a case of jitters just before signing on the dotted line? Usually when I saw it coming I’d head them off by throwing in some unexpected bonus, some pleasant surprise. It almost always worked. But you had to anticipate it.

  “Why? Because I’d rather keep it out of the cops’ hands. Not that I couldn’t handle it if I had to. Not that my buddies on the force might not happen to ‘lose’ a piece of evidence against me. But I’m a thorough guy.”

  “Who says the cops are even going to know what this is?”

  He shrugged. “They might not. You’re right.”

  “They might not even know it’s from a Porsche.”

  “That kind of shit they can figure out. All it takes is one smart forensic guy to find traces of mercury or whatever’s on there. Or the pattern of breakage—I really don’t know. I don’t care. But why take the chance? When you and I can come to terms. And both of us live happily ever after.”

  I nodded.

  Got it.

  That was enough. That was as much as I was going to get, and it was enough to incriminate him.

  “I’m taking a huge chance,” I said.

  “Life’s a risk. Hand it over.”

  I was silent for a long time.

  True sales champions, Mark Simkins said, can sit there quietly all day if they have to. It’s not easy. You want to say something. But don’t! Keep your mouth shut.

  When enough time had passed, I picked up the gym bag, unzipped it. Pulled out the piece, which I’d wrapped in plastic and duct-taped up.

  Handed it over to him.

  “Good,” he said. He picked at the duct tape, unraveled the layers of plastic from the steering shaft. He threw the plastic onto the floor, held up the twisted thick steel rod with a U-shaped joint at one end. Weighed it in his hand, admiring it. It was heavy.

  “All right,” I said. “Where’s Graham?”

  “You know where the old General Motors assembly plant is.”

  “On Western Ave., a mile from here or so?”

  “Right. That vacant lot there.” He handed me a small key. To the trunk, I guessed. “Funny how your life can depend on a little piece of metal,” he said. He walked slowly to the big glass window.

  “Like a round of ammunition. It can save your life.” Now he was looking out the window. He swiveled around. “Or it can kill you.”

  With that, he swung the steering shaft at the window.

  The glass exploded with a loud pop, a million shards showering all over the carpet. “Cheap-ass tempered glass,” he said. “Contractors should have at least sprung for laminated, building this nice.”

  “I’m not getting a good feeling about this,” I said to the hidden microphone.

  Get the hell up here now, I wanted to shout.

  “Jesus!” I shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Cold wind whipped into the office, a smattering of raindrops.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Sudden rise to the top. All sorts of pressures on you, trying to save the division—you didn’t know the whole thing was a trick. High-level games. You found out the truth, and it was too much.”

  I didn’t like the way he was talking, but I knew what he was up to.

  “Now a hundred fifty people are going to hit the unemployment lines because of you. Yeah, lot of stress on you. You’re going to lose your job too, and your wife’s pregnant. So you do the only thing that makes sense. In your desperate condition. You’re going to jump. It’s a good day to die, don’t you think?”

  The wind was sluicing through the office, blowing papers around, knocking picture frames off my desk, off the credenza. I could feel the spray of cold rain.

  “Speak for yourself,” I said.

  I reached into the gym bag, pulled out Kurt’s Colt pistol. An army-issue semiautomatic .45.

  Kurt saw it, smiled. Went on talking as if I were pointing a finger at him. “You’ve left a suicide note,” he said calmly. “On your computer. Happens more and more often these days.”

  The gun felt heavy in my right hand, awkward. The cold blue-black steel, the rough grip. My heart was knocking so hard my hand was twitching.

  “The cops can hear every word we’re saying,” I said. “I’m wired, my friend. Your suicide ruse isn’t going to work. Sorry.”

  Kurt seemed to be ignoring me. “One-handed grip?” Kurt said, surprised. “That’s not easy.”

  I brought my other hand up so I was holding the gun with both hands. I shifted my hands around, moved my fingers, tried to find a two-handed grip that felt natural.

  “You’ve apologized to your wife and your unborn daughter. That’s what the amnio results said, by the way. A girl. Congratulations.”

  For a second he almost stopped me. I froze for an instant. But then I went on.

  “Like Phil Rifkin’s bogus ‘suicide,’” I said. “He didn’t hang himself.
You garroted him, then made it look like a hanging.”

  Kurt blinked. His smile diminished, but only a little.

  “Because he caught you coming into the Plasma Lab. To do something to the plasma screen Trevor was demo’ing at Fidelity. You didn’t expect him to be in on a Sunday. You didn’t know the strange hours he kept.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t just figure that out,” Kurt said.

  “I think I’ve known it for a while. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.”

  My left hand braced my right at the wrist. I had no idea if this was the right form. Probably it wasn’t: What the hell did I know? Point and shoot. Pull the trigger. If I’m off by a few feet, it’s trial and error, aim again, squeeze the trigger. Eventually I’m going to hit him. A lucky shot, an unlucky shot, I should get him in the chest, maybe even the head. My hands were trembling.

  “Did you load it, Jason? Do you even know how?”

  Kurt grinned. There was something almost paternal in his expression now, proud and amused, watching the antics of an endearing toddler.

  “Man, if you load the rounds in the magazine wrong, or even jam the magazine in there the wrong way, you’re screwed. Gun could explode in your hands. Backfire. Kill you instead of me.”

  I knew he was lying. That much I knew. But where was Kenyon? Couldn’t he hear me? How long would it take them to get up here?

  “Good choice of firearms, Jason,” he said. He took a few steps toward me. “Model 1911 A1 Series 70. Outstanding weapon. I like it better than the Glock, even.”

  He came closer.

  “Freeze, Kurt.”

  “Great safety features. Way better than the Beretta M9 the army hands out, which is a piece of shit. Superb stopping power.”

  He came even closer. Maybe ten feet away. Very close. Not a problem now.

  “Stop right there or I’ll blow you away!” I shouted.

  I curled my forefinger around the trigger. It felt surprisingly insubstantial.

  “You should have taken me up on my offer to give you shooting lessons, Jason. Like I said, you never know when you’ll need it.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “You take another goddamned step and I’ll pull the trigger.”

  Where the hell were they?

  “Boy, the way you’re holding that weapon, the slide’s going to fly back at you and take off your thumb, man. You’ve got to be careful.”

  I hesitated, but only for an instant.

  “You’re not going to kill me, Jason. You’ve never killed a man before, and you’re not going to start now. A guy like you’s never going to take a human life.” He spoke quietly, steadily. Almost lulling. “That’s a nightmare you don’t want to live with. Close range like this, you get sprayed with blood and brain tissue, fragments of bone. It’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  “Watch me,” I said, and I squeezed the trigger.

  He didn’t move. That was the strange thing. He stood there, arms at his side.

  And nothing happened.

  The gun didn’t fire.

  I squeezed again, pulled the trigger all the way back, and nothing clicked.

  Suddenly his right hand shot out, pushed the gun to the side as he grabbed it, wrenched it out of my hands in one smooth motion.

  “Friggin’ amateur,” he said. He turned the gun around, pointed it at me. “You loaded it, but you didn’t squeeze the grip safety.”

  I spun around, ran.

  A burst of speed. As fast as I could. Like racing up the steps of Harvard Stadium, like doing wind sprints along the Charles, but with every twitching fiber of my being engaged in a desperate attempt to save my life.

  From behind I heard him say, “Colt’s not easy to use, for an amateur. You gotta push against the back strap while you’re squeezing the trigger.”

  Out of the office, through the maze of cubicles.

  He shouted: “Should have let me teach you.”

  The elevators just ahead. I leapt toward the wall panel, pressed all the buttons, lit them up orange.

  “Nowhere to run,” came Kurt’s voice, sounding closer. Why wasn’t he firing at me?

  The bing of an elevator arriving. Thank God. Elevator doors slid open and I jumped inside, heard Kurt’s footsteps, punched the LOBBY button, punched and punched at it until the doors, so agonizingly slow, finally closed.

  A hesitation. The elevator wasn’t moving.

  No, please.

  Then, a little jolt and it began to descend.

  So damned slowly. Floor buttons began to light up one after another, slowly. Nineteen…seventeen. The flat-panel screen was dark, and the lights in the elevator cabin seemed dim. I stared at the numbers, willing them to move faster.

  Where the hell was Kenyon?

  The elevator shuddered to a stop. The orange 9 button frozen.

  I punched L again, but nothing moved.

  Then everything went dark. I could see nothing. Pitch-black.

  Somehow he’d shut the elevator off. Turned off the power. I reached out in the darkness, flailing at the buttons, found them with my fingers. Ran my fingers over them, punched each one. Nothing.

  The emergency switch was at the bottom of the control panel. I couldn’t see it, but I remembered its position. Was it a button or a switch? I felt along the panel, completely blind, sliding my hands down the two rows of buttons until I felt the bottom edge of the steel panel. What felt like a toggle switch. I grabbed it, flipped it up.

  Nothing. No alarm, no sound, nothing.

  Other buttons down there. Was it a button, then? I jabbed at the bottom row of buttons, but nothing. Silence.

  A wave of panic hit me. I was stuck in total darkness in an elevator cabin. I felt the cold smooth steel doors, the palms of both my hands sliding along the metal until I found the crack where the two doors met.

  A tiny gap, not enough to get my fingertips into. Sweat prickled at my forehead, the back of my neck.

  In frustration, I pounded at the door. Kicked at it. The steel was cold and hard and unmoving.

  Found my cell phone, opened it so the screen illuminated. Punched 911.

  That little chirp tone that told me the call had failed.

  No reception in here.

  My heart racing. The sweat was beginning to trickle down my cheeks, into my ears, down my neck. Tiny dots of light danced in front of my eyes, but I knew this wasn’t real light. It was some random firing of neurons in my brain. I backed up, swung my arms around, felt for the walls of the elevator.

  Closing in on me.

  I flung my hands upward, felt for the ceiling, had to jump to reach it. What was up there? Little screws or something? Could you loosen them? Were there panels up there, a trapdoor, an emergency escape hatch?

  I felt the brushed stainless-steel handrail that wrapped around three sides of the cabin, stuck out a few inches. Maybe four inches.

  I jumped again, swept the ceiling. Felt something round, a hole. Remembered that the ceiling in here had little recessed downlights in it. No protruding screws. A smooth, flat, brushed-steel ceiling with halogen lights in a regular pattern. Which were now dark.

  But there had to be an emergency escape. Right? Wasn’t that required by code?

  And if there was some emergency hatch, and I managed to get it open—then what? What was I supposed to do? Climb up into the elevator shaft like James Bond or something?

  The sweat was pouring now. I had to get out of here. I tried to swing my foot up onto the handrail, to boost myself up, but it was too high.

  I was trapped.

  The ceiling lights suddenly came on.

  Then the panel lit up blue, then white, then…

  Kurt’s face appeared.

  A close-up of his face, slightly out of focus. A big smile. His face took up the entire panel.

  “The word of the day is ‘retribution,’” Kurt said. “Good word, huh?”

  I stared at his face on the monitor. How the hell was he doing this?

  “B
oy, you are drenched,” he said. “Hot in there, huh?”

  I looked up, saw the silvery black dome in one corner of the ceiling. The big black eyeball of the CCTV camera lens.

  “Yep, that’s right,” Kurt said. “That’s me. And you look like a drowned rat. No need to hit the emergency call button. I disabled it, and besides, there’s no one in the control room. I sent Eduardo home. Said I’m taking over, running some diagnostic tests.”

  “What are you going to do, Kurt? Leave me in here overnight?”

  “No, I thought I’d entertain you with a little live video feed. Watch.”

  The image of his face stuttered, blinked, and the screen went dark. Then another image came up, fuzzy and indistinct, but it took me only a few seconds to recognize my bedroom. The image slowly zoomed in on the bed. Kate lying there. Her head on the pillow.

  Strange blue light flickering over her face.

  “There’s the wifey,” Kurt said. “Couple of nights ago. Guess she fell asleep watching TV while you were out somewhere. Desperate Housewives, maybe? She’s a desperate housewife herself.”

  My heart was going ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk.

  “Lots of opportunities to install that camera. Hell, she was always inviting me in. Like maybe she was attracted to me. A real man. Not a pathetic fake like you. A wannabe. You were always the armchair athlete, and the armchair warrior.”

  Another scene appeared. Kate and me in bed. She watching TV, me reading a magazine.

  “Oh, wait,” he said. “Here’s an oldie. From before she went to the hospital.”

  Kate and me in bed. Making love.

  The image had a greenish, night-vision cast.

  “No comment on your sexual technique, bro,” Kurt said. “Let’s just say I’ve been seeing a lot of you two.”

  “I guess you don’t want the other half then,” I said.

  “The other half?” The image of Kate switched to Kurt’s face. Big, looming close-up. A curious look.

  “The steering shaft in the Porsche Carrera is eighteen inches long,” I said. “The piece I gave you was, what—maybe ten inches? You figure it out.”

  “Ah,” he said, chuckling. “Very nice. Maybe you did learn something after all.”

  “I learned from the master,” I said. “Taught me to play hardball. You want it, you bring me back up to the twentieth floor. To my office. I get it from the hiding place, hand it to you. And then you let me go. I retrieve Graham. And it’s over.”