THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  Especially after what Ynez had gone through.

  The phone rang just as she was about to eat her lunch. Well, just as she was about to get her lunch out of the refrigerator and bring it back to her office so she could eat in peace without having to put up with the silent treatment or the outright animosity of her coworkers in the lunchroom. It was line three, her outside line, and she picked it up quickly, hoping that it was not Hunt, hoping that nothing bad had happened.

  “Hello,” the professional-sounding voice on the other end of the line greeted her. “May I speak to Beth Jackson?”

  She breathed an inward sight of relief. Thank God it was just a business call. “This is she,” Beth said.

  “This is Rebecca from Dr. Moy’s office. We have an opening this afternoon at two, and we can fit you in.”

  Dr. Moy? She frowned. Who was Dr. Moy? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not sure who you are.”

  “I’m Rebecca. From Dr. Moy’s office.”

  “I don’t know any Dr. Moy.”

  The woman sounded extremely apologetic. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just assumed that your insurance company had called you. Dr. Moy is your oral surgeon. He’ll be replacing your teeth.”

  “Dr. Mirza’s my oral surgeon,” Beth said.

  “You’ve been reassigned to Dr. Moy. I don’t think Dr. Mirza is part of the plan anymore.”

  There was something ominous about that statement—I don’t think Dr. Mirza is part of the plan anymore—and she hoped to God that she was reading too much into it, that it simply meant he was no longer participating in her specific insurance program.

  She had a sudden flashback to Dr. Blackburn.

  “Pussy for breakfast, pussy for lunch, pussy for dinner and a midnight snack.”

  She decided to press it. “Dr. Mirza’s not part of what plan?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I meant your new insurance plan. You recently switched insurance carriers, which is why you have been reassigned to Dr. Moy. Now, how does two o’clock sound?”

  Someone passed by her office door, and Beth looked up to see who it was. Ruben from accounting held up an angry middle finger. Beth quickly swiveled her chair so that she faced the wall. She couldn’t take much more of this. “This afternoon?” she said. “That’ll be fine, that’ll be great. Just give me directions on how to get there…”

  Dr. Moy’s office was not on a widened residential street or in a converted house. It was in a brand-new medical/dental complex just west of the university. The courtyard of the building was busy and crowded, and when she walked into the waiting room of the oral surgeon, three other patients were waiting as well, two of them holding their jaws as though they were in considerable pain. It was as far from Dr. Blackburn’s office as it was possible to be, and yet…

  And yet Beth could not relax. In her mind, this was all a facade, part of an elaborate ruse to trick her and lure her in. Like the attitudes of her coworkers—both her friends and enemies. Everything was suspect now, subject to manipulation, and she had the feeling that this was part of the plan too, part of a concerted effort to keep her off balance.

  Still, Dr. Moy’s office seemed to run more like a regular dentist’s office, like the ones she remembered from childhood. Looking back now, everything about her visit to Dr. Blackburn seemed suspicious. Hindsight was always twenty-twenty, they said, but she couldn’t help feeling that if she had been more alert, the whole nightmare of her teeth might have been avoided.

  She filled out a new-patient form and submitted her driver’s license to the receptionist, who made a copy of it. She didn’t have an insurance card, but the receptionist assured her that the insurance company had specifically called to make the appointment for her and arrange payment. She’d probably be getting her card in the mail soon.

  Dr. Moy’s office was not quite ER, but it was busy and bustling, and as Bern was led back to an exam room, she saw that all of the patient rooms in the office were occupied. Dr. Moy himself was an older Asian man with a very calm and reassuring demeanor. He patiently examined her mouth, studied the X rays that an assistant had taken only a few moments before, then explained exactly what he planned to do. It was a long and involved procedure, and there would be much less pain, he said, if he did only a quadrant at a time, but he could do the whole mouth at once if she preferred.

  She told him that she did want it all done at once, she’d lived with these silver teeth for far too long, and he explained that in that case she would have to be put under completely and would need to sign an extra consent form.

  Ten minutes later, the form was signed. Hunt had been called and told to pick her up at the dentist’s office in two hours because she would not be fit to drive, she was prepped and ready, and Dr. Moy gave her the gas. In the second before she went under, she thought she heard the oral surgeon softly say the word “pussy.”

  Then she was awake and groggy. She was aware neither of when she lost or regained consciousness, it was all part of a hazy continuum. All she knew was that she was lying in the same dentist’s chair and that it was all over. The small room was empty save for her, and the door behind her was closed. She sat up, feeling around on the tool tray for a mirror, so she could see what she looked like. All she could find was a small magnifying mirror with a long handle like a toothbrush, one that the dentist used to peer into the back of her mouth. She picked it up, held it a foot or so away and smiled.

  Her lips were swollen and bloody and her head hurt like hell.

  But all of her teeth were once again white.

  5

  “Got a visit myself last night,” Edward said. They were trimming trees along a county-maintained bridle trail that ran through unincorporated land. “Your insurance salesman. Bastard tried to sell me supplemental workman’s comp. Like there is such a thing.”

  Hunt and Jorge exchanged glances. “You know what that means,” Jorge said quietly.

  He cut them off. “Don’t give me that crap.”

  “The insurance works,” Hunt said. “I’m living proof. You ignore it at your own risk.”

  Edward waved them away, but the truth was that he felt far less confident than he let on. The visit from the insurance agent had shaken him. His friends were right. There was something seriously skewed about the man, and it wasn’t merely his Stepford salesman routine. Beneath that facade, so close it could almost be seen, was a different, darker, more elemental essence. Edward was not a religious man, didn’t bandy about words like “evil” or “demonic,” but those were the adjectives that came to him when he listened to the insurance agent, and it had taken every ounce of courage he possessed to throw that fucker out of his house.

  Even now, he wasn’t sure he had done the right thing.

  Maybe Jorge and Hunt knew what they were talking about. There could be disastrous consequences for not buying insurance.

  “Things happen when you don’t buy insurance,” Jorge reminded him.

  “Coincidence,” Edward said, though he was no longer sure that was true. He could see in his friends’ faces that they wanted to believe him, that they longed for him to be right, and he could not quash their hopes by revealing his own doubts. “We’re almost done here,” he announced. “Why don’t you two head over to the south quadrant. I’ll meet you there in ten.”

  “That’s okay,” Hunt told him. “We’ll all finish up here first.”

  “It’s a waste. I’ll do cleanup, and you take the equipment to the south quadrant and start. Maybe we’ll get out of here before noon.”

  They nodded reluctantly, knowing he was right, and he exchanged his saw for a long-handled clipper and climbed up the ladder to whack the last few danglers off two adjacent trees while Jorge and Hunt piled the rest of the tools in the back of the cart and drove down the bridle trail to the south quadrant.

  “Be careful,” Hunt said before they left, and there was a resonance to the generic warning that was echoed in the sober expression on Jorge’s face.

  “I’ll be fi
ne,” he told them. “Hit the road.”

  But the minute they were gone, he was immediately sorry that he’d suggested they split up. An uncomfortable conversation was a small price to pay for the security that two additional bodies provided.

  Security?

  He didn’t want to think about that, and he concentrated on the work at hand, lopping off three thin branches that had not been cut by the power tools before getting off the ladder, moving it to the opposite side of the path and chopping off two more branches from another tree.

  He heard a rustling noise from off to the right. The sound of shoes on dead leaves.

  He looked toward the sound, thought he saw movement behind a bush.

  A chill, like an ice cube, traced along the vertebrae of his back, moved down his body. “Jorge!” he called out experimentally. “Hunt!” But the two of them were far out of range.

  He glimpsed more movement out of the corner of his eye, a dark figure that ducked behind a sycamore off to his left.

  Edward was not a man who was easily frightened. He’d been in more bar fights than he could count, often with the odds three-to-one against him, and he’d never hesitated. He’d been on the ground in Desert Storm, and while more than a few of his fellow infantrymen had browned their shorts, he’d forged ahead fearlessly. But something about these subtle noises and furtive movements in the bushes spoke to a more primal part of his being. They bypassed his rational mind and warned him of a danger that he could not combat.

  Supplemental workman’s comp.

  Bogus or not, he realized that he would feel a lot more confident right now if he were protected by extra insurance for on-the-job injuries.

  But insurance only paid for the medical bills and other expenses incurred by an accident. It didn’t prevent that accident.

  Maybe it did, though. Wasn’t that what the insurance salesman had hinted?

  Edward looked around, listened, but he saw no other figures, heard no other sounds. He was overreacting, he told himself. The visit last night and all of his friends’ talk had spooked him and made him overly paranoid. Still, enough strange things had happened recently that he could not automatically deny them. Better safe than sorry, as his momma used to say. He started to step slowly down the ladder.

  And then he saw them.

  There was one next to each tree, for as far as he could see up the bridle trail. Heavyset men in long coats and broad-brimmed hats. It was a sunny day but they all seemed to be in shadow, and it was that more than anything else that caused him to scurry down the ladder and jump the last few feet to the ground. They remained unmoving, as though posed, and their faces were little more than darkened smudges, as though he was viewing them through dark sunglasses or one of those polarized sections of film that were used to look at eclipses of the sun.

  He had too much self-respect to just turn pussy and run—there was still a remote possibility that they were ordinary people and that there was a perfectly rational explanation for this—but he gathered up his shears and clippers much faster than he would have ordinarily, and quickly loaded them onto the truck that was still parked in the adjacent clearing. He was very glad that Hunt and Jorge had taken the cart. The truck had a much bigger engine and much faster pickup.

  He hurried back to get the ladder.

  And they surrounded him.

  He didn’t know how it happened, how they had gotten there so fast, but suddenly ten bulky men were standing in a circle around him, closing in. He still could not see their faces. They were still in shadow though there was no shadow.

  He was afraid.

  The circle grew tighter.

  Instinctively, he backed up to the ladder, and immediately, unthinkingly, he turned around and started to climb. Maybe he could scramble up a tree branch and wait there for someone to come along, for Jorge and Hunt to return. Maybe these men—

  monsters

  —couldn’t climb, or maybe he could leap over them and run to safety. His plans were not well thought out. He had no plans, really, only a vague notion that he might be able to get away by climbing upward. He moved up to the top of the ladder, grabbed a branch. He had to keep moving. He’d figure out something along the way.

  He looked down. They had circled the ladder.

  And suddenly there were only five of them.

  Where were the other—?

  He heard a noise, looked up, and saw them standing on the branches, in the trees.

  One of them laughed. A high wild giggle.

  And in the brief second before the branches came down on his head, he thought he saw, in one of the dark faces, the bright white shine of teeth.

  FIFTEEN

  1

  The mail came early on Saturday. Hunt was online again, trying to learn what he could about their various insurance policies, looking up not only the name of the company but the names of the specific policies themselves, comparing what they had to the texts of similar offerings published on the Internet by other carriers, when he heard the rattle of the mailbox lid.

  He wasn’t expecting anything important, so he waited until Beth called him for lunch before opening the front door to pick up the delivered mail.

  There were so many cards and envelopes they could not fit in the box, so the postman had placed the overflow in three neatly stacked piles next to the front door.

  What the hell was this? He picked up a postcard with a photo of a homeless man sitting on a curb next to a dead dog. On the other side was a computer-signed note advising him to call his insurance agent.

  His insurance agent.

  Hunt quickly scooped up all of the mail and brought it inside, dumping it on the coffee table. He picked up an envelope and opened it, noting before he did so that there was no return address. Sure enough, inside was a pamphlet advertising employment insurance and touting its supposed benefits. He started opening the other envelopes, expecting to see a whole array of offered policies, but to his surprise, the cards and pamphlets were all identical, a total of thirty advertisements for The Insurance Group’s employment insurance. There was nothing for any of the other forms of coverage they had not yet purchased, nothing for supplemental health or workman’s comp.

  He thought of Edward, laid up in the hospital because he had not bought an extra workman’s comp policy. Only his size and overall fitness had saved him from being more seriously injured or even killed. As it was, he would be in the hospital for several more days, in bed for at least three weeks and have to undergo a ton of physical therapy before he’d be on his feet again and back to work.

  The insurance agent, Hunt had no doubt, originally intended something far worse.

  Beth came out of the kitchen. “I said it’s time to eat—” she began. And then she saw the mountain of mail on the table and the expression on Hunt’s face.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  He nodded, handed her a pamphlet. He took another one for himself, and silently they both read through the text.

  He put his down. “We have to buy it,” he said, “or we’ll lose our jobs. We’ll end up unemployed.”

  “I don’t care if I lose my job,” Beth said stubbornly. “I’ll find another one.”

  “Maybe you won’t be able to.”

  “I’ll react to that when it happens.”

  “One of us needs to stay employed,” he told her, and the reason was the same as it was for every other couple in America. Insurance. Only in their case, they needed to be able to pay their monthly premiums because if they didn’t they would be sick and homeless and incarcerated—everything their insurance protected them from.

  She understood without him having to spell it out. “Better it be you,” she said. “At least you still like your job.” She ran a frustrated hand through her hair. “I was thinking of quitting anyway. It’s getting too stressful.”

  “You could quit,” he said unenthusiastically.

  She turned her face up toward his. “That’s what’s so insidious about this whole thing. Did you r
ead that pamphlet? Employment insurance guarantees that you won’t resent your job, that you won’t be affected by office politics or personal issues, and you’ll be happy in a job you love. That’s aimed directly at me. And I’m still not sure if it’s meant as an incentive or a threat. You know why? Because it does sound good to me. And it scares the hell out of me.”

  “I’ll just buy the insurance for myself,” Hunt told her. “We’ll see what happens. And I’ll wait until he pressures me into it. I won’t volunteer. We’re buying too much insurance, we’re becoming indebted to him.”

  But was there any way to avoid that? Del Daley had tried, and he’d been imprisoned for it. Then he had been killed.

  But was Del what he had appeared to be?

  Was anyone?

  Maybe the best idea would be to leave. To pack up and disappear under the cover of night. He had come to Tucson on a whim, and he could leave the same way. He and Beth could gather their belongings and just take off. Inform no one, give no notice, simply relocate to another state under new names. They could get jobs at a hotel in Colorado or on a farm in Nebraska or as sales clerks in Pennsylvania.

  But they would still have the same fingerprints, the same faces. They could be tracked. He remembered the first time the insurance agent had come into the house and started figuring estimates. He’d been mumbling to himself as he’d gone over the forms, but Hunt had heard what he’d muttered, and he’d known their birth dates and places, their former lovers, everything about them.