The Bad Beat

by Tod Goldberg

  To cause a horrible, tragic and ultimately doomed catastrophe, follow the steps found in most “how-to” books produced by those concerned citizens who think every helicopter is black and every government worker is secretly a member of the Trilateral Commission. Getting advice on how to kill from the paranoid and delusional is never a wise decision, a point I didn’t try to elucidate to Henry after we’d convinced him we were the good guys, since I wasn’t sure just yet where he fell along the continuum between paranoid and delusional. It was hard enough to convince him that no one was going to touch his dolls—which he preferred to call his “men.”

  I carefully explained to Henry that the setup he’d rigged with his plasma televisions hooked to the house’s gas line was likely to trigger an underground explosion that would crater around his home. He seemed oddly elated, which I found disturbing.

  I couldn’t exactly pinpoint the level of his loss of sanity—at some points he seemed fine, and at others he seemed . . . lost. It was evident that he’d had some kind of break from reality. Nevertheless, I wanted him to know that he could have taken out a lot of innocent people.

  “Really?” he said. “That big?”

  “That’s why I had to hit you,” Sam said.

  “I’m a pacifist,” Henry said, just like his son.

  “Do you hate your neighbors, Henry?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, no, they’re all very nice.”

  “Then why would you want them dead?”

  “Oh, oh, I wouldn’t,” he said, serious now. “I just think it’s very interesting how these sorts of chain reactions occur. One person with a desire to keep his house protected could, with a push of a button, take out a city block. It’s chaotic, isn’t it?”

  Henry and Sam and I were sitting in his bedroom, the only room in the house that didn’t have a window easily accessible to the outside world, as it looked out to the side yard, and even then the window was largely blocked by an armoire that Henry had moved almost directly in front of it. Not exactly design 101. But then Henry was probably more concerned about the black helicopters than the editorial staff of Architectural Design.

  “No,” I said, “it’s not chaotic, actually. It’s dangerous, Henry. Can you appreciate that?”

  “You can’t appreciate the synchronicity?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s a theoretical synchronicity that I find fascinating,” he said. “Now, where’s my son? Have you told me where my son is? You did, didn’t you? You said he’s working for a Russian syndicate?”

  I had, in brushstrokes, explained the situation to Henry, but this time I went into a bit more detail, including that Brent had tried to pay off Henry’s debts, that he’d duped Yuri Drubich and that Henry’s notary office had been destroyed. The problem was that everything I said essentially fed directly into Henry’s current delusions. I needed to see how he handled the information in order to gauge a bit more accurately where he fell on the scale of things.

  “You see,” Henry said, “this is the upside of everything that has happened with my son. Look at how industrious he’s become in my absence. I couldn’t be more proud of him. He could very well have fallen into the clutches of the fluoride people, but he didn’t. Did you know that we’ve all been poisoned for almost fifty years? It’s true. It’s a systematic poisoning of the American people so that we are dulled to our wit’s end when the New World Order takes over.”

  I decided to change the subject before I was unable to stop myself from shaking him. I’ve never been particularly good at dealing with crazy people. Henry was relatively harmless—once you took the explosives out of his hands—but that didn’t mean I had any real idea how to deal with him.

  “How do you get in and out of the house?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s very simple,” he said. “I only leave in the middle of the night. The satellites can’t track me. I’m invisible at night.”

  “Literally invisible?” Sam said.

  “Is there any other kind of invisible?” Henry asked.

  “No,” Sam said, “I guess there isn’t.”

  The nice thing about the people looking for Henry was that they weren’t professionals, which meant their dedication was likely far from monastic. They were bookies, so they tended to keep daylight hours and they weren’t very sophisticated. They survived on intimidation, but they didn’t like to actually work. It’s why they didn’t have real jobs. They probably didn’t have night-vision goggles, either, so he probably was, literally, invisible.

  “Henry,” I said, “why don’t you lie down in your own bed for once? Sam and I will keep the house guarded while you nap.”

  Henry looked around his room as if he hadn’t seen it before. “This is my room?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you’ll be just outside the door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should we cover the windows with tinfoil?”

  “I don’t think we need to do that,” I said.

  “I brought an extra force field with me today,” Sam said.

  “Oh, okay,” Henry said. “I guess I could take a nap. I haven’t been sleeping very much. I’d feel more comfortable if you both stayed with me until I fell asleep. It’s usually right before REM when the transmissions begin.”

  “No problem,” Sam said. “We’ll be right here to intercept them.”

  Within five minutes of getting underneath his covers, Henry Grayson was snoring, so Sam and I crept back into the living room.

  “I’ve decided Henry Grayson is crazy,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, he might be,” I said.

  “He did build himself his own secret hideaway,” Sam said. “Can’t say the man isn’t industrious. What are we going to do with him?”

  “He needs to be hospitalized,” I said. “Possibly forever.”

  “Not even loan sharks are going to try to take a pound of flesh from a crazy guy, right?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I have a feeling Big Lumpy might be sensitive to it, if we can get Drubich to pay him.”

  “But that doesn’t get rid of Drubich,” Sam said.

  “I know,” I said. “And Fiona snapping his wrist probably didn’t put him in a charitable mood.”

  “She was a little cranky today,” Sam said.

  “Forced captivity does that to her.”

  “And then there’s Sugar,” Sam said.

  “I want to thank you for that,” I said.

  “Boy Scout oath forced me into this situation, Mikey. Mentally awake and all that.”

  “I don’t think you’re living up to the spirit of the oath in agreeing to help Sugar with anything.”

  “Maybe not,” Sam said.

  “We need to get Henry out of this house,” I said.

  “And into a safe facility. And I’m not talking about my mother’s garage.”

  “I’ve got a buddy does a little work with unstable types for the VA,” Sam said.

  “What kind of work?”

  “Well, it’s not really the VA as it’s legally constituted,” Sam said. “More like she helps with secret prisons and that sort of thing. But her business card says VA on it.”

  “She owe you any favors?”

  “Mikey, everyone owes me a favor.”

  “Henry needs help,” I said. “Not confinement.”

  “You mind if the help is mobile?”

  “Mobile?” I said.

  “Let me talk to my buddy,” Sam said.

  A thought occurred to me. “Your friend,” I said. “She be willing to sign an official death certificate?”

  “Mikey,” Sam said, “that’s a federal crime.”

  “I know,” I said. “But so is being a Russian national with a rocket launcher on American soil. They call that terrorism now. We have a witness who had a psychotic break after a horrific terrorist attack on his business and now fears for his very life.”

  “Henry’s not exactly a viable witness, Mikey.”

  “When has that ever mattered
in matters of national security?”

  Sam pondered this for a moment. “That’s asking my buddy to extend herself pretty far.”

  “You’re a persuasive guy,” I said.

  “I do have my charms,” Sam said.

  “First thing,” I said, “is we need to get Henry out of this house and into some kind of care. And maybe keep him away from anything explosive. He had this place wired pretty well.”

  “What do we tell Brent?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Not until we know he’s safe from all of this. He gets compromised and he’ll spill everything.”

  Sam agreed. He took out his cell phone and made a call. “Marci? Marci, this Sam Axe. Sweetheart, I have a small favor I need to ask. . . . No, no, not that again. Unless you want to do that again. I’m not opposed to that, just let me adjust my insurance coverage again.... Now that—that’s not even legal on a Sunday in Florida, sweetheart. . . .”

  A high-pitched squeal erupted from Sam’s phone—loud enough that Sam had to pull the phone away from his ear—which was my cue to move to another part of the house while he convinced his buddy to acquiesce to his demands. I didn’t want to ruin my dinner.

  Two hours later, a yellow Econoline van pulled up in front of Henry’s house. According to the sign on the side of it, the van belonged to ALL-AMERICAN INSULATION & AIR-CONDITIONING REPAIR. According to the bulletproof tires, I had a sneaking suspicion that the van actually belonged to Sam’s friend Marci and her cohorts. It’s not every air-conditioning service that can afford Teflon-honeycombed antigun, antiexplosion, extreme-terrain experimental tires that I’d only previously seen in Iraq.

  From the living room window I could see the van’s passenger door open and a woman of no less than six full feet of height step out. She wore a tan jumpsuit with a utility belt and held a clipboard, the universal uniform of anyone who wants to look nonthreatening. Though I had a slight twinge of fear that Henry might think it was also the universal uniform of the New World Order. Fortunately, I could still hear Henry snoring away. Well, snoring and intermittently shouting in his sleep.

  Sam came up behind me and looked out the living room window. “That’s my girl,” Sam said.

  “That’s a woman,” I said.

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” Sam said.

  “She’s a doctor?”

  “Among other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “Geneva Convention prevents me from saying,” Sam said. He stepped away to open the front door and in walked Marci. She greeted Sam with a hug that practically lifted him off his feet and then she gave him a firm slap on his backside. It was . . . awkward. But Sam seemed to like it.

  “What do we have here?” she asked. She walked into the living room, regarded me with nary a mention, and then sat down in the recliner and stared directly at her clipboard, as if she didn’t want to take in too much information other than what she was asking for. That or plausible deniability was big in her world.

  “Big favor, Marci,” Sam said. “We’ve got a subject in the bedroom that we need to get off the grid.”

  “Enemy?”

  “No,” Sam said.

  Marci wrote something on her clipboard. “Client?”

  “Not in the traditional sense,” Sam said. He looked over my way. “Maybe you noticed another person in the room?”

  “I don’t see anyone,” she said.

  “Well, the person you don’t see, he’s a friend of mine named Michael,” Sam said. “We sort of—how should I say this—help people occasionally.”

  “I’ve never heard of Michael Westen,” she said, which was interesting since Sam hadn’t said my full name.

  “Right, great,” Sam said. “At any rate, the subject in the bedroom is, uh, emotionally unstable. We’re helping his son with some business regarding, uh, well, a gentleman named Big Lumpy and another gentleman named Yuri Drubich and, uh, we need our emotionally unstable client to get the help he needs in a secure facility and, uh, well, here we are.”

  Marci looked up. “Did you say Big Lumpy?”

  “I did,” Sam said.

  “This house,” Marci said. “I expect that it will be cleaned after I leave?”

  “Of course,” Sam said.

  “No fingerprints, no hair, nothing?”

  “Pro job all the way,” Sam said. “I’ll burn it down if you want me to.”

  “And Yuri Drubich, correct?”

  “Correct,” Sam said.

  “I’ll get back to you on the burning. Where’s the asset?”

  “Back bedroom,” Sam said.

  “You mind if I drug him? We’re going to pile him in an insulation roll and people, especially crazy people, tend to get claustrophobic when wrapped in insulation.”

  “Be my guest,” Sam said.

  Marci finally turned my way. “Like your work,” she said.

  “I haven’t done any in a while,” I said.

  “Belgrade in 2001,” she said.

  “Ah, yeah, that was fun,” I said.

  “You single?”

  “Uh,” I said. “Not really. Yes, in a way. It’s complicated.”

  “Always is.”

  “My ex-girlfriend is violent.”

  “She get mean and beat you up?”

  “It’s happened,” I said.

  “I knew you looked like a good time.” She stood up, walked toward me and then stopped a few feet away so she could look me up and down. I actually misjudged Marci’s height when she got out of the van, because now that she was standing directly in front of me and the distance between us seemed to be closing incrementally with every breath, I thought she was probably closer to six foot three. Tall enough to cast a shadow on me, at any rate.

  “Maybe some other time,” I said.

  “You’ll be in a military prison some other time,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. I tried to catch Sam’s eye, but he was busy staring at the floor. I couldn’t tell if he was jealous or, like Marci, wanted plausible deniability should Fiona learn about any of this. “Listen. I might need another small favor down the line with the asset.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Any way we might be able to get him declared dead?”

  “Why?”

  “Insurance,” I said, “against getting killed.”

  “We can make him go away for a long time, but I thought he had a kid.”

  “He does,” I said. “It’s insurance against him dying, too.”

  Marci finally looked around the living room. She picked up a photo of Henry and Brent from the fireplace mantel. “Cute kid.”

  “He’s older now,” I said.

  “He know his father is crazy?”

  “That’s why we’re working for him, Marci.”

  “I like the way you say my name,” she said. “You like Italian food?”

  “I’m more a Persian food guy,” I said.

  “I like Persian food,” she said.

  “I know a great little place in Fort Lauderdale,” I said. “Outdoor seating. Breeze from the ocean in your hair. Palm trees swaying in the wind. It’s like being on the Mediterranean.”

  Marci licked her lips, which made me feel like I was watching a nature documentary. She might have been six foot four.

  “Did you just ask me out on a date?” she said.

  “I think you just made me ask you out on a date,” I said.

  This got Marci to smile. Thank God. And then she made that same high-pitched squeal I’d heard earlier through Sam’s phone. “You live through this,” she said, “I’ll consider all of your propositions.” She pulled a walkie-talkie from her utility belt. “Come on in,” she said into it. “Bring the barbital and the insulation roll.”

  10

  Getting ambushed isn’t any fun. One moment you’re happily going about your normal life, worrying about taxes and cancer and what to eat next. The next moment someone has shot you in the face and you’re dead. That’s the second-best-case scenari
o, really. What you don’t want is to be ambushed, captured and then tortured to death. All things being equal, a bullet to the brain is a far more humane way to die.

  There exists, of course, a third possible result of an ambush, the first-best-case scenario, as it were: You’re taken by surprise but not injured beyond repair—physically or emotionally. The problem with this angle is that if someone didn’t want to hurt you physically or emotionally they wouldn’t ambush you in the first place.

  Which is why I was somewhat surprised when Big Lumpy appeared at my loft later that evening. There was a knock on the door and when I looked out the window I saw Big Lumpy’s Escalade idling across the street, the glow from the nightclub on the street turning the bright white paint yellow, then pink, then blue.

  I didn’t bother to look through the peephole to see if Big Lumpy was alone. If he had guts enough to show up at my door unannounced, he probably wasn’t here to kill me.

  Plus, if you want to kill someone without ever touching them, the best way is to wait for them to stare at you through a peephole. A peephole is structurally the weakest portion of a door. It’s just a hole, bored through wood, with glass on either end. So if you want to stab someone in the brain, wait until you see light being interrupted on the other end of the hole and then shove a long-bladed—preferably serrated—knife through the hole with as much force as possible. A serrated knife will do far more damage, so it really is the weapon of choice.

  Or just shoot a single bullet through the hole. That will also do the trick. If you’re any good, you won’t even leave a fingerprint.

  Even still, you can’t be too careful these days, so I got my shotgun from under the sink, racked it and opened the door.

  “Can I help you with something?” I said.

  “Is this a bad time?” Big Lumpy said. He was still wearing that absurd white outfit, but now had a portable oxygen tank with him, too, as well as a slim laptop.

  “I’m a formal guy,” I said. “You should have called first. I would have taken out the nice linens and china.”