Aphrodite

by Russell Andrews

  “I’m glad you think so. I like her.”

  “You never wanted any?”

  “Children, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes,” Justin said. “I wanted children.”

  His words left a heavy silence in the air and she wasn’t exactly sure why. When she glanced at him again, his face looked drawn and his eyes were sad. He looked as if a pain was hammering away at him inside his head. Or, she thought, inside his soul.

  Before she could say anything else, they heard a stirring from the backseat. “How much longer?” Kendall yawned.

  “Another hour or so,” Justin said. “Not too much farther.”

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom?” Deena asked.

  “No,” Justin said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you have to go, sweetie?” she asked her daughter.

  “No,” Kendall said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “If he can wait, I can wait,” the little girl said. And, looking straight at the rearview mirror, she nodded firmly and decisively.

  Justin, eyes peering into the mirror, nodded back.

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, just past 6:30 p.m., Justin pulled the Buick into the parking lot of the Leger Retirement Home. They were in upstate New York, about half an hour southeast of Albany, in a small blue-collar town called Woodlawn.

  “You guys want to come in?”

  “Yeah. Kenny can use the rest room.”

  “No,” the little girl insisted. “I don’t have to go and I’m not going to.”

  “Maybe we’ll come in anyway,” Deena said. “I’d like to use the rest room.”

  They went up the steps to the Home, a modern one-story building. The lobby, which also served as the reception room, was comfortable but devoid of charm. Several elderly people were scattered around the room watching a large-screen television or playing cards. An attendant wheeled a white-haired woman past in a wheelchair. Kendall looked around curiously; she had never before seen so many old people in one room.

  “Is one of these people Grampy-gramps?” Kendall asked quietly.

  “That’s what I’m about to find out,” Justin told her. He went up to the reception desk—it had the feel of an airline check-in counter—and he said to the woman holding down the fort, “I’m here to see Lewis Granger.”

  The woman at the desk paled and her eyes widened nervously. She gave Justin a pitying once-over, then quickly turned away, unable to look him in the eye. She said, “I’ll have to call the manager,” picked up the phone, and dialed. After a brief pause, she spoke into the receiver. “There’s someone to see Mr. Granger,” she said quietly. Another pause, then she hung up, turned to Justin, and said, “Mr. Depford will be right with you.”

  “Is there a problem?” Justin asked.

  “Mr. Depford will be right here,” she said, sat back down, and busied herself with what looked to be unnecessary paperwork.

  In a few moments, a small, fortyish-looking man in a gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie came striding into the lobby. He walked directly up to Justin and stuck out his right hand. As they shook, the man in the suit used his left hand to grasp Justin above his wrist. Justin realized that this was meant to be a comforting gesture. Justin introduced Deena and Kendall as his wife and daughter; then he waited to find out why he needed to be comforted.

  “Are you a relative?” Depford intoned.

  “Yup,” Kendall piped up. Deena instantly grabbed the back of her shirt and pulled the girl backward.

  “I’m his son,” Justin said, trying to match the manager’s solemnity. “I’m very sorry to tell you this,” the suited Depford said directly to Justin, “but I’m afraid your father has passed away.”

  “He’s dead?” Justin said incredulously.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I just spoke to him yesterday. He sounded—”

  “I know. He seemed fine up until the very end. That’s often the way here. Which we’re thankful for.”

  “What happened?”

  “It seemed to be very peaceful. He died in his bed,” Depford said.

  “When?”

  “Sometime this afternoon. He didn’t come down for supper. Eventually, one of the nurses went to check on him and found him in bed, not breathing. He didn’t look as if he suffered, if that’s any consolation.”

  “Yeah, that’s a big consolation,” Justin said. “Is he still here?”

  “Why …yes, we—”

  “Has he been moved?”

  “No. We’ve called the hospital and they’re going to come pick him up. I told them there was no extraordinary rush since he’s already … well …I called his nephew.”

  “Ed Marion.”

  “Yes.” Depford’s eyes narrowed and he stared at Kendall. “You called yesterday, didn’t you? I thought you said Ed Marion was your father.”

  “This is my dad,” the little girl said, with a sweet smile on her face. “Right, Daddy?”

  “Ed’s my cousin,” Justin said. “You must have misunderstood.”

  “Yes, well …he’s the only person we had on file. We were unaware there were any other—”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Mr. Marion? Well, no. He hasn’t even responded to our call.”

  “No,” Justin said. “Granger. I want to see …my father.”

  “You mean you want to view the body?”

  “That’s exactly what I want to do,” Justin said.

  The four of them strode down the sterile hallway of the Leger Retirement Home until they reached a cheap wooden door that had the number 27, in even cheaper balsa wood, attached to it.

  Depford stopped in front of the door, turned, and, in his most sorrowful tones, said, “Would you all like to go in?”

  “Yes,” Kendall said immediately and a bit too enthusiastically. When all three grown-ups looked down at her, she said, with a little less enthusiasm, “I’ve never seen a dead guy before.”

  Justin nodded and said, “Okay, we’ll all go in.”

  Depford opened the door and started to step inside with them. Justin put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “We’d like a few private moments, please.”

  “Of course,” Depford murmured. He waited until they were all inside, then he shut the door and said he’d wait for them in the hallway.

  As soon as the door was closed, Justin moved to the bedside and began examining the body.

  “What are you looking for?” Deena asked.

  “Give me a minute and I’ll tell you.”

  “Can I see?” Kendall wanted to know.

  “In a minute.”

  Justin picked up the dead man’s right hand, lifted it up toward the light. He twisted Granger’s head, fingering his neck and under his eyes, then he turned the body over on its side, doing some poking and probing.

  “This is pretty yucky,” Kendall said. “I don’t think I want to see, after all.”

  “I’m with you, baby,” Deena muttered.

  Justin let Granger fall back onto the bed. When he turned around, he saw both mother and daughter staring at him expectantly.

  “Look,” he said, turning back to the corpse. He picked up Granger’s left hand and ran his fingers down the wrist and arm of the corpse. “Red marks here. It looks like someone was holding him down, restraining him.” Justin turned the corpse over and showed Deena the back of the dead man’s right heel. “It’s bruised. The night table over here’s kind of skewed. My guess is he struggled and kicked it, that’s how he hurt himself.”

  “Why was he struggling?” Deena asked.

  “Because somebody smothered him to death,” Justin said. “And I’d have to say he probably didn’t like it too much.”

  “What’s happening?” Deena whispered. He realized that she was speaking quietly not because she didn’t want to be overheard; fear was not allowing her to speak any louder. “Why are they killing people?”

>   Justin wished he had an answer for her, but all he could do was shake his head. He didn’t tell her what he was thinking. It was not a very comforting thought, and he knew that it would occur to her soon enough. He was thinking: Somebody beat us to Granger. Which means somebody knew we’d be here.

  When he glanced back at Deena, he knew she’d just made the connection. She grabbed Kendall, drew her close, and hugged the girl to her body. As he watched Deena’s eyes flicker, he knew she’d also taken the thought to the next logical step.

  Which means somebody knows we’re here now.

  Mr. Depford was waiting for them in the hallway when they stepped out of Lewis Granger’s room.

  “If there’s anything I can do,” he said, still using his most somber and funereal tone.

  “Actually, there is,” Justin told him. “I’d like to look at any records you might have.”

  “What kind of records do you wish to see?”

  “My father always kept something a bit of a mystery. None of us ever knew how old he really was. I’d like to find out.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have that on file.”

  “Isn’t that standard information?”

  “Normally, yes. And, of course, we had it. But a few years ago, three to be exact—”

  “You had a burglary.”

  Depford looked surprised. “Why, yes.”

  “Right before you started the job.”

  The manager looked even more surprised. “That’s right. How did you—”

  “Were any other files taken, other than my father’s?”

  “A few. That’s what I was told. But no one who’s still with us, I’m afraid.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Depford. You’ve been very helpful.” Justin took Kendall by the hand and started walking down the hallway toward the stairs that led to the lobby. Depford did a little hop, step, and a jump to keep up with them.

  “What about a funeral?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What would you like me to do with the body? Now that you’re here …”

  “Nothing but the best,” Justin said. “Spare no expense.”

  “Um …yes …of course,” Depford said. They were downstairs and almost at the front door. The prim little man looked uncomfortable now. “But as far as payment …”

  “The usual,” Justin said. “Send the bill to the Ellis Institute. Just be sure to tell them I okayed it.”

  Depford didn’t follow them out to the parking lot. They headed quickly toward the car, until Deena pulled up short.

  “I think you should use the rest room,” she said to Kendall.

  “Mom,” the girl said. “I told you. I’m a big girl.”

  “I know you are, sweetie, but sometimes even big girls—”

  “I know when to go!”

  “But we don’t know when we’ll find another stop,” Deena said. “I really think—”

  “Mommmmm …”

  “Okay,” Deena said. “Okay. But I don’t want any whining when we’re in the car. Just remember I told you that, because we’re not going to be able to stop in the middle of nowhere.”

  The little girl tossed her head as if to say “I do not whine,” then skipped ahead of them toward the car.

  “Tell me again how I’m doing something right,” she said to Justin.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” he told her.

  “Where do we go from here?” Deena asked.

  “I was afraid you were going to ask that.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve got a couple of ideas,” he said. And then, when she looked at him incredulously, he added, “What, you thought I was kidding about that ‘nobody’s perfect’ thing?”

  He got in the driver’s seat, reached over Deena’s lap into the glove compartment, and pulled out an old Dire Straits CD. The only thing he’d bothered to transfer from his old car to this one were his CDs. This one had a song on it, “The Bug,” that was one of his favorites. Justin skipped ahead to that song, heard Mark Knopfler twang out the line Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.

  Yeah, Justin thought. And as he drove away, he realized that he’d spent the last six years of his life being the bug. But he never felt it quite so much as he did this very minute.

  20

  The first thing Wendell Touay ever blew up was a rat. He was thirteen years old and caught the rodent as it was scampering over a rusty drain-pipe in a construction site that had been emptied out for the July Fourth weekend. The rat, struggling to escape the boy’s grip, bit Wendell on his thumb, which not only pissed him off, but hurt like hell. Wendell had simply been going to strangle the animal but now that he was angry he decided it deserved a more elaborate send-off. He was carrying several cherry bombs—M-80s and M-100s—was planning on setting them off at the site, his own private celebration. He decided to ratchet up the celebration a notch. He shoved one M-100 as far into the rat’s rectum as he could manage, watched in delight as the ugly, furry thing twisted and clawed and snapped, furiously trying to escape, then he lit the fuse, tossed the thing high in the air, and toasted America’s birthday under a rain of sparks and flesh and fur and blood.

  Ever since then, he had been addicted to explosions. Gordon liked to touch the things he killed. Wendell much preferred watching them get blown to pieces. He read books on explosives, had late-night Internet chats with fellow devotees, spent hours upon hours on the dozens of international Web sites devoted to all things that explode, and studied everything he could about homemade bombs. He’d had to buy several copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook and The Poor Man’s James Bond because he’d read them both so often that the spines had broken and the pages had fallen out. He considered himself an expert and took quite a bit of pride in the scope of his knowledge. He could tell you the difference in the rate of detonation between tetrytol and TNT and, for any primary or secondary explosive, he could rattle off its color, its detonation rate, and any quirks that one had to watch out for when handling it—sensitivity to static electricity, degree of water resistance, any danger that might arise from as little as a three-degree drop in temperature.

  So when he and Gordon worked out their plan, he was not only pleased to have the opportunity to indulge his passion, he was confident that his skills were up to the task. Gordon’s plan had failed on the back roads of Long Island. This plan would not fail. Wendell had created explosives before for them to use in their exclusive line of work, and the success rate had been one hundred percent. A small piece of Wendell was excited at the chance to surpass his seven-minutes-older brother. But what excited him even more was the anticipation. When Wendell first began to picture exactly what was going to happen to Justin Westwood and his two charges, a tiny drop of anticipatory spittle formed on his lower lip and he had to lick it away. The thought of seeing the three people blown to bits actually made him drool.

  While the cop, the woman, and her kid were inside the old-age home—just about now, Wendell thought—discovering that Lewis Granger was not going to be very much help to them, Wendell was crouched down behind the piece-of-shit Buick, busily attaching four surprise packages underneath the frame.

  Each package was identical. And he was proud of them. They were not only clever, they would be devastating.

  Everything had been assembled in a highway rest-stop parking lot midway between the airport and the Leger Retirement Home. They had picked up their rental car and gone straight to a hardware store. There Wendell had purchased a kitchen timer—he picked one in the shape of a rooster that crowed when the timer went off—two packages of double-A batteries, duct tape, five industrial-power magnets, electrical wire, industrial-strength fast-drying glue, a plastic bucket, a two-gallon plastic jug, and a large ball of string. After that, they stopped off at a liquor store and bought five bottles of a good Bordeaux. Before paying for them, Wendell checked to make sure that the bottoms of the bottles were all dimpled in the center. He had brought his own electric blasting caps
, which had required some ingenuity since they were flying and security was supposedly tighter than in years past. Still, it was no problem. He’d taken apart the DVD case in his laptop computer, removed the mechanism, and inserted the caps—which were similar in size and resembled the tubes of ink that fit inside fountain pens—in its stead. He then replaced the casing for the device and slipped it back into the computer, attaching it in its proper place. He was able to carry it right on the plane in his overnight bag. The caps set off no alarms and caused no special search.

  After buying the supplies at the hardware store, they’d driven toward the Leger Retirement Home. Wendell directed Gordon to the rest-stop parking lot, which was fairly empty. He could do everything he needed to do there, and he assured his brother that the assembly wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. While Gordon kept an eye out for any overly curious travelers, Wendell built his bombs. He had decided to make shape charges. For one thing, they were subtle, much subtler than something that would just total a car and blow everything around it to smithereens. For another, they required a very small amount of plastic explosives. He had decided to use C-4, a military explosive that looked like a bar of soap and was easily malleable. He could carry it, undetected, in a soap case, lumping it together with his toothbrush, toothpaste, and small bottle of mouthwash. A shape charge, he knew from his Gulf War days, was capable of piercing the armor of a tank, incinerating everything inside that tank, and leaving the shell practically unscathed. Its appeal was that it focused nearly all of an explosive’s energy into a very narrow, extraordinarily hot jet. And it was easy as pie to make.

  The first thing he did was go into the rest-stop complex and fill the plastic bucket with cold water. He also bought a five-pound bag of ice and a corkscrew. He then walked to the gas station right outside and put two dollars’ worth of gasoline into the jug. Before he got in the car, Wendell opened and emptied four of the wine bottles into the bushes that partially hid the rest area from the highway. Inside the car, working in the backseat, he soaked several pieces of string in the gasoline, then tied pieces of the soaked string around the four empty wine bottles, approximately three inches from the dimpled bottoms. He lit a match, set the strings on fire one by one, and watched to make sure that the bottles heated evenly all around where the string had been tied. When the string was burned down, he instantly immersed each bottle into the bucket that was filled with cold water and ice. Within seconds, each bottle broke perfectly at the point where the string had been tied and the bottles burned. Wendell now had four pieces of glass the size of small juice glasses, each with an inverted cone at the bottom.