They reached the vacant stretch of county land where they were to work for the next week. Edward bumped over the curb onto the dirt, pulled up next to a burned palo verde, and the three of them got out. Hunt tossed the remains of his cold coffee onto the ground and threw the cup back on the floor of the truck. Unhooking the mulcher from the hitch, Edward looked over at him. “You can tell us if you want,” he said. “Whatever you say goes no further than this.”
Hunt was still not sure even his friends would believe his wild story, but he saw the expressions on Edward’s and Jorge’s faces, and he decided to take the plunge.
He told them everything. From the initial offer of a rider on a personal injury policy that would protect him from arrest, to Kate’s death and the disappearance of all of her videotaped testimony.
“It’s a little hard to believe,” Edward admitted when he was through. “Your insurance agent as guardian angel?”
“More like guardian… maybe devil’s not the right word, but he certainly isn’t an angel.”
“I believe it,” Jorge declared, his voice a little too loud, a little too forceful.
Both Hunt and Edward turned to look at him.
“He’s been after us to buy supplemental health insurance before the baby’s born. He gave Ynez a pamphlet with pictures of deformed babies on it.”
Goose bumps rushed down Hunt’s arms.
“Wait a minute.” Edward frowned. “Is this that same guy? That door-to-door salesman?”
“Yeah,” they both said at once.
Edward shook his head. “Oh man. I knew you shouldn’t’ve gotten involved with that guy.”
“Then you believe us?” Hunt asked.
“I don’t disbelieve.” He turned toward Jorge. “Did you save that pamphlet? I mean, it seems like you could turn him in for something like that. Harassment or extortion or something. You could turn it over to the attorney general. The state investigates suspicious business practices.”
“They investigate fraud,” Hunt said. “This isn’t fraud. This is real. This insurance works.”
“Well, what do you know about the company he represents?”
“The Insurance Group? Not much. It’s supposed to be a consortium of insurance carriers, all very old and well-respected. I gather they’ve won numerous awards for quality and customer service.”
“You didn’t even investigate them, find out who they are?”
“I was going to,” Hunt said dryly. “But other things came up.”
“I didn’t know their name,” Jorge admitted. “The card he gave me just said ‘Quality Insurance.’”
“I’m going to see what I can find out tonight,” Hunt promised.
“I just thought of something,” Jorge said. “Do you think this could be related to your other insurance problems? Your rental house and your car and all that? You think there could be a connection?”
Hunt hadn’t really considered it. He’d been thrust so fast into this new world that he hadn’t had time to catch his breath, let alone analyze whether there was any connection between the insurance agent’s bizarre policies and anything that had gone before. Now that he thought about it, though…
Half past a monkey’s ass, a quarter to his ba-wuls.
Yes. They definitely could be connected.
“Probably,” he said.
Edward nodded. “If Jorge’s right, maybe all those other troubles primed you for this, made you more susceptible to say yes to some insurance salesman off the street.”
He hadn’t looked at it that way, but it made a lot of sense.
The truck’s radio crackled as Steve attempted to contact them and get a status report.
No one made an effort to answer it, and they ignored the manager’s barked order to respond as usual, but Edward picked up the mulcher’s tow arm and started pushing the machine toward the weedy patch to the right of the burned tree. “We’d better get our asses in gear. We got a lot of work today. We can talk while we’re cutting.”
Jorge grabbed tools out of the back of the truck. Hunt slipped on a pair of gloves. “So what are you going to do?” he asked Jorge. “Are you going to get that extra health insurance?”
The other man sighed heavily. “What choice do I have?”
At home after work, Hunt signed on to the Internet to see what he could find out about The Insurance Group. The company had no web page—very suspicious in this day and age—but the search he conducted got over 27,000 hits for The Insurance Group. Unfortunately, as happened with Internet searches more often than not, the listings proved to be tangentially related or not related at all. He found ads for companies with the words “Insurance Group” in their title—such as The Hartford Insurance Group or The Insurance Group of Maine—and information and articles about every other insurance company under the sun—as well as a web page for The Group, which was some sort of swingers porno site.
Beth brought him dinner, which he ate at his desk, and by the time he quit after midnight, with well over 26,000 entries yet to go, he had not come across a single reference to the company that had issued their policies. How such a thing was possible, he did not know, but even though ninety-eight percent of the listings were still ahead, he had a sneaking suspicion that if The Insurance Group had avoided detection through entries that had the highest percentage of correlation with his typed parameters, they would most likely not be found in any of those ranked lower.
Still, he was a hardware guy, not a software guy, and he was tempted to call one of his old acquaintances from California, one of Boeing’s programmers, and ask him about any way to narrow the search so that only articles and information that specifically mentioned “The Insurance Group,” with no modifiers or qualifiers, would be listed. But it was too late to bother anyone. Besides, he knew that such an effort would be futile, so he didn’t even try. The Insurance Group could not be found over the Internet. Or through the phone book.
They could only be reached through the insurance agent.
He didn’t know how he knew that to be true. But he did.
And it scared him.
2
Steve arrived home from work tired and angry. The shell of his rumpus room greeted him as he pulled in to the driveway, and that made him even angrier. He’d long since cleared away the debris and had even started rebuilding again—as much as his dwindling funds would allow—but he was still a good six months behind where he’d been before the storm—
and the men in hats
—had destroyed his handiwork.
He was convinced now more than ever that that fanatic insurance agent was behind the destruction of his addition. The man had tried the old hard sell to pressure him into buying new homeowner’s insurance, and when that hadn’t worked, the psychotic fuck had hired goons to vandalize his property. Despite what he’d seen, or what he thought he’d seen, there was nothing mysterious about those trespassing thugs. They were simply agents of the agent, doing the job they were hired to do. He didn’t even hate them.
He hated the insurance agent.
And if he ever saw that asshole again, he was going to thrash him within an inch of his life. Or more, if the opportunity arose.
But the insurance salesman seemed to have disappeared. After the addition went down, there were no more entreaties to buy a homeowner’s policy, no phone calls or junk mail or surprise visits. He seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet.
Lucky for him.
Inside, Nina was in the bathroom, taking a dump. She’d left a message for him on the blackboard above the kitchen counter: “Call Insurance Agent.” He stormed down the hallway and pounded on the bathroom door. “What does this mean, ‘Call Insurance Agent’?”
“He called at lunchtime!” she shouted. “He wants you to call him back!”
“How? Did he leave a number or anything?”
“Go look at your mail! I put it on your desk!”
He strode back down the hallway to his den. On top of the desk was a pile of
cards and envelopes at least three feet high.
Some of the bluster left him, replaced by an uneasiness that was unfamiliar to him and was uncomfortably close to fear.
The insurance salesman was back. Steve walked over to the desk and started opening envelopes. They were all filled with identical brochures for homeowner’s insurance. The cards were postcards featuring the same photograph of a smiling family in front of a two-story colonial home, with a printed message on the back made to look like a personally inscribed note: Call for details! Quality Insurance 520-555-7734.
He suddenly did not want the opportunity to thrash the salesman within an inch of his life. He wanted the man to disappear and never contact him again.
But he picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hello! Mr. Nash!” The agent answered even before the first ring, and the enthusiasm in his voice seemed downright creepy. “You got my message!”
“Yeah,” Steve said.
“Then listen to me, bitch.” The voice dropped about three octaves. “I’m coming over, and I’m going to put a bunch of insurance policies in front of you, and you’re going to sign up for every one of them. Do you understand?”
Steve’s mouth went suddenly dry.
“Do you understand, bitch?”
Steve gathered his courage. “You come over and I’ll blow your fucking head off.” His voice came out squeakier than intended.
The agent chuckled. “Then I guess you don’t want insurance.”
“Not from you.” The phone in his hand was shaking.
“Good luck.”
The line went dead.
Down the hall, the bathroom door opened, and in the silence of the house Steve could hear the last whoosh of the toilet’s flush. He was still holding the phone in his hand when Nina poked her head in the doorway. “What did he want?” she asked, and the tone of her voice was so casually innocent, so unlike her usual annoying whimper, that he thought she must know already, that she was probably in on it.
He wanted to beat her head with the phone, but instead he slammed the handset down in its cradle. “Go make dinner,” he ordered. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
3
“But it worked!” Ynez paced back and forth in front of the kitchen table. “Hunt got out of jail and that whole nightmare just ended!”
“He’s not a genie,” Jorge said. “He can’t grant your every wish.”
“No, but maybe if we call him we can get some kind of insurance that, I don’t know, guarantees that our baby will be born healthy and happy.”
“I don’t want to call him,” Jorge repeated. “If he comes to us, fine. But let him take the initiative.”
“He already came to us! And you turned him down!” She knelt on the floor before him. “I don’t want anything to happen to our boy.”
“Haven’t you heard a single thing I said? This is a Faustian bargain. We’d be making a deal with the devil, and there’s nothing in it for us. It’s a lose-lose situation, as they say. If he came here and threatened us, okay, I might give in for the sake of the baby. But I’d be foolish to go looking for him.”
“He already came. The threat’s been made. We have to take it off.”
There was a knock at the door. Jorge sighed and went to answer it. Behind him, Ynez got herself a glass of water.
The man standing on the porch was not immediately recognizable. He was tall and well-built with sharp distinctive features and a full head of black hair. Jorge had already started to say, “May I help you?” when he realized who the man was.
The insurance agent.
The man nodded, smiling. “Yes you may, Mr. Marquez. And I think I will be able to help you, too. May I come in?”
Jorge did not want him in the house, not where his wife and unborn child were. But he found himself nodding and stepping aside.
The agent breezed past him, and Jorge shivered. Cold followed in the man’s wake. If it had been for anything else, anything other than his wife and son, he would have told the man to leave his home then and there.
Ynez was still drinking her water, and she emerged into the family room. “Hello,” she said.
“Nice to see you again, Mrs. Marquez. I probably said this to you last time, but it bears repeating: you have a lovely home.”
“Thank you,” Ynez said. She was smiling, but Jorge could tell from her tone of voice that she was also wary. Thank God. Seeing the agent in person seemed to have tempered some of her uncritical desire for more health insurance.
The agent sat down on their couch, loosened his tie, and opened up his briefcase.
Automatically, they sat on chairs opposite him, and Jorge realized that they’d already lost. Before they’d even started. Because no matter what sort of policy he put in front of them, no matter how much it cost, they were going to buy it. They couldn’t afford not to.
He knew this already.
“I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a package that I think will nicely meet all of the medical, dental, and life insurance needs of your soon-to-be family.” He passed them a thick sheaf of papers held together with three brads. “If you’ll look on page one…”
The agent’s attention to detail was exhausting. As far as Jorge could tell, the policy was fairly straightforward, and he paid particularly close attention to the portion of supplemental health insurance that dealt with delivery problems and extra hospitalization, grateful to learn that it seemed at once more flexible and more comprehensive than his existing county insurance.
“Now I need both of your signatures for this coverage,” the agent said, pushing the application forms across the table and handing them each a pen.
“So when does this take effect?” Jorge asked.
“Immediately upon signing.”
Jorge looked at Ynez, filled with a wariness that seemed to be mirrored in her eyes. If he were a praying man, he would have sent up an entreaty right now. He signed his name on the blank line at the bottom of pages three and six. Ynez did the same.
The agent took the forms from them. “Now there’s just one more little detail we have to take care of. The exam.”
Jorge’s heart rate shifted upward in gear.
“The exam?” Ynez said.
“Yes. It’s customary for new signees to undergo a medical exam to make sure there are no preexisting conditions for which coverage of treatment would be exempt under the terms of the policy. Ordinarily, this consists of a blood test, but we have the records of both your doctors and copies of your charts, so in this case, the blood test will not be necessary.”
“Then—” Jorge began.
“I just need to examine your wife’s crotch.”
What? Jorge blinked dumbly, unable to believe what he’d heard.
No, that wasn’t true. He believed it completely.
He turned toward Ynez, who was shaking her head from side to side.
The agent was moving around the side of the table, crouching down on the carpet. “Now if you could just pull down your pants and spread your legs so I could see your pussy.”
Jorge stood, practically knocking over his chair. “No!” he declared.
The insurance salesman straightened. His voice when he spoke was cold, hard. “Then your policy will be null and void.”
“I’ll do it,” Ynez said quickly, her hands fumbling frantically, desperately at her button and zipper. Tears were rolling down her face.
“No!” Jorge told her.
“It’s our son!” With difficulty, she lifted her buttocks off the chair and slid down her pants and panties, kicking them off. She spread her legs wide as the insurance agent crouched before her.
“That’s a beautiful beaver you’ve got there, Mrs. Marquez.” He grinned up at Jorge. “You’re a lucky man.”
Ynez held her face in her hands, sobbing.
“Let’s hope childbirth doesn’t ruin that miracle of nature, eh?”
Jorge wanted to kill him. He wanted to lash out and kick in those grinning teeth until t
he man’s mouth was nothing more than a gaping bloody hole.
The agent stood, pulled tight his tie and closed his briefcase. “Looks good,” he said. “Consider yourself insured.”
Ynez was still sobbing, legs tightly together, doubled over in an attempt to hide her bare lap. Jorge stood between her and the agent, trying to hide her, although there was not anything he hadn’t already seen.
The man smiled at Jorge. “Did I mention that additional coverage may be required at substantial extra cost?”
Jorge could barely contain his rage. “No you did not,” he said in a strained strangled voice.
“Depending on the circumstances, we may require an added commitment from you in order to ensure that you are getting the coverage that best suits your individual needs. Information regarding the codicil will be included in your policy, when you receive it, but if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.”
Ynez wailed behind him, a cry of anguish and humiliation.
“Don’t worry,” the agent said, “I’ll see myself out.”
4
By Wednesday, Beth was almost ready to quit her job.
If not for Stacy, she probably would have. Stacy now seemed to be her sole friend at Thompson and the only one to whom she could speak freely. Unfortunately, Stacy wasn’t here today, she was all alone, and even casual contact with anyone else in the office had become extremely uncomfortable. The hostility of her coworkers seemed to have increased tenfold since Hunt’s release, as though they thought he had gotten away with his crime, and their attitudes toward her had been uniformly antagonistic.
The question was: did she wish she had signed up for employment insurance? So she wouldn’t resent her job because of “extraneous factors at work”? Beth couldn’t really say. Certainly it would have been easier coming to work knowing that she had more than one guaranteed ally in the building—a lot easier than it had been two days ago when she’d gone to the bathroom only to find “Beth Blows Fat Men for Free!” written in one of the stalls. But the idea of paying another penny to that insurance agent and his company galled her.
THE POLICY Page 22