The space on the bed next to him was empty and cold. Beth was already up. It was unusual for her not to wake him, and he wondered why she had let him sleep. Even more odd was the fact that the house was silent: no radio, no TV, no stereo, not even the ordinary sounds of movement that would accompany her morning breakfast ritual in the kitchen.
His sense of dread increased.
Hunt quickly got out of bed, put on some pants, and walked out to the kitchen, where Beth was sitting at the table, staring at the front page of the newspaper. She had not made coffee, had not made breakfast, and she looked up at him when he entered, her face blanched. With trembling hands, she held up the paper.
FORTY-FIVE KILLED IN MOST VIOLENT NIGHT IN TUCSON HISTORY, the banner headline screamed.
He knew exactly why she hadn’t awakened him, and he knew now that his oppressive feeling of dread was entirely justified. Feeling numb, he took the paper from her hands. Forty-five killed? On a Sunday night?
Got a life insurance quota to meet.
He had no doubt in his mind that these deaths were a direct result of the insurance agent’s marathon visit to those fifty or sixty families. He was stunned, though, by the strength of the insurance company’s power. Killing forty-five people in one night was not just an impressive feat or an amazing bit of logistics, it was an impossibility, and he understood for the first time how strong and almost omniscient was the entity they were up against.
Impressive feat? Amazing bit of logistics?
He was ashamed of himself for being so cold and clinical, but the scale of what had happened was so enormous that he was only able to think in such dispassionate terms. He could not focus on a single individual who would provide the intimacy necessary to generate real sympathy and real sadness. When tragedy was this large it was rendered impersonal, it became numbers and statistics rather than faces and names.
He sat down at the table next to Beth and read the article:
In what police are calling the most violent night in Tucson history, thirty-five men and ten women were killed last night in unrelated homicides.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” stated Tucson Police Chief Brad Neth, who added that the city’s manpower was strained to capacity by the extraordinarily high number of violent deaths within the eight-hour period.
Murder-suicides and domestic violence were responsible for the bulk of the killings, with fifteen women and three men stabbed, shot or strangled by their domestic partners and another four the result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
Eighteen of the killings were the result of gang violence. Six drive-by shootings in the Old Pueblo district resulted in eleven deaths, and one direct confrontation between rival gangs on the west side, in which an estimated fifty to sixty gang members took part, left seven dead and three seriously injured.
Five deaths were attributed to random acts of violence.
Although figures were unavailable for comparison, the combined murders were greater than any single one-night tally in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, according to Sergeant Buck Wilson. Tucson hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed by the—
The article continued inside, and Hunt turned to page twenty-eight to finish it, but his eye was caught by another small story on the same page: WOMAN DIES AFTER HIT-AND-RUN. He didn’t know why he stopped to read such an innocuous and commonplace article, but his attention was grabbed by the generic headline, and he quickly scanned the two paragraphs to discover that shortly after dusk last evening a woman racing across Congress Avenue, half a block from a lighted crosswalk, was struck by an unidentified black van that immediately fled the scene. She was apparently killed on impact.
Hunt’s mouth suddenly went dry.
It was Eileen.
He read the article again, carefully this time, then read it once more, not trusting himself to stop for feelings, wanting only an injection of the bare facts.
She was listed as “Eileen Marx,” which meant that she’d gone back to using her maiden name. She’d died alone, he thought, and to his mind there was nothing more tragic. As bitchy as she’d been at the last, as terrible as their marriage had ended up being, he still remembered when it had been good, still saw in his mind and felt in his heart that innocent high school girl who had asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance and who had shyly asked him if he thought they were going to be “just friends or more than friends.”
Beth must have seen the look on his face. “What is it?”
“Eileen,” he told her. “My ex-wife.” And even the words had a sad ring to them, a forlorn description of a lonely woman he had last seen getting on a bus. He felt empty inside, much sadder than he would have thought. Part of it was for her, but part of it was for himself. Her death had closed the door on his youth, had nailed shut once and for all the door that led backward to younger, carefree, more optimistic days.
Beth didn’t know how to respond. “I’m sorry,” she said finally in a voice that betrayed her ambivalence, and he reached across the table for her hand, held it and squeezed reassuringly.
He read once again that stock headline: WOMAN DIES AFTER HIT-AND-RUN. Had it been a coincidence? he wondered. Or had Eileen been visited by the insurance agent, offered a policy that she should not have refused?
It made him sick even to think about it.
The phone rang, and Hunt stood up to get it, half-fearing that it was the agent, calling to offer them additional coverage. But it was Joel, who did not even bother with a greeting. “Did you see the paper?” he asked soberly.
“Yeah,” Hunt said.
“Do you think—?”
“Yeah.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“He’s going to offer me personal injury or physical protection insurance,” Joel said softly.
“Take it,” Hunt told him. “You have a child.”
“How did this happen? How did we get involved in this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh my God!” Beth cried. Her eyes widened.
“Hold on,” he told Joel. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “What is it?”
She pointed to the front of the newspaper, to a photo of the location where the worst of the gang-related incidents had occurred. He had not bothered to look closely at the picture, but he looked now, turning the paper to face him, and felt his blood run cold. Bodies were lying on a section of street cordoned off by police tape. Patrol cars with lights on and an ambulance were at either side of the shot. In the foreground was a gathered crowd.
To the right of the crowd, standing by himself, was their ghost.
The one they’d seen in the guest room mirror.
The man with the hat.
Hunt’s mind was racing. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost. Maybe what they had seen in the guest room was something else entirely. Edward said several men in hats had accosted him by the bridle trail, had surrounded his ladder and knocked down the branches of the tree. “Thugs,” he insisted on calling them, although they all knew they were much more than that. Until this, he had not put Edward’s description together with the spectral figure they had seen in the guest room, but now it was all starting to make a weird kind of sense.
He looked again at the newspaper photo. These… beings seemed to show up wherever insurance problems escalated into destruction and death, whenever a point needed to be made about not buying insurance or the terms of a policy needed to be enforced. He had no doubt that when the Bretts’ house had burned down, one of them had been lurking on the periphery of the property, that when Kate Gifford had been killed, the driver of the vehicle had been wearing a hat.
There’d been one in their guest room when he was arrested for child molestation.
They were agents of the insurance company. Not insurance agents but provocateurs. Men—or creatures—who were sent out to do the company’s bidding.
“Are you still there?” Joel asked. “Hello?”
Hunt took his hand away from the phone. “Look at the p
icture on the front page,” he said. “Bottom right.”
“Holy shit,” Joel breathed.
“When Edward had his so-called accident, he saw men who looked like that.” He paused, inhaled deeply. “Beth and I saw one of them, too. In our guest room. We thought it was a ghost.”
He expected questions. Not jokes and ridicule, as he would under normal circumstances, but an honest query.
Joel wasn’t even fazed. “I saw one at school,” he said. “Talking to that girl who hit my car. And that’s what Lilly said the man who she saw with Kate looked like.”
“She saw a man with Kate? You never told me that.”
Beth pricked up her ears.
“You got released and Kate… Well, I guess I was just overtaken by events. But, yeah, Lilly might’ve seen the molester.”
“Holy shit is right.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Hunt admitted.
“We’ve got to do something. Should we go to the police?”
“With what?” Hunt watched Beth as she examined the newspaper photo once more. “Talk to Stacy,” he said. “I’ll call you back later. We’ll figure out a plan.”
The phone rang again the instant he hung up.
Jorge.
“Get a copy of today’s Ledger?” he said without preamble. “There’s a picture on the front page of one of the orderlies who drugged me.”
Jorge sounded clear and lucid, anger having pushed aside the despair that had been his sole emotion since the birth. Hunt heard resolve in his friend’s voice, a committed determination to see this thing through to the end.
He was back.
Hunt explained about Edward, Joel’s school, Lilly, their ghost. “They work for the insurance company,” he said.
“I’m going to get those bastards. I’ll kill them for what they did. And if I see that insurance salesman…”
“Do you have any ideas?” Hunt asked.
“No. You?”
“No,” he admitted. “But Joel’s on it, too.”
“Have you talked to Edward yet?”
“No.”
“I’ll do it right now. I’ll call you back later.” The line went dead, and Hunt hung up the phone.
“This can’t go on,” Beth said. “We have to do something about it. We have to stop them.”
Hunt nodded his agreement. They had waited too long already, had stood on the sidelines and done nothing while lives were ruined, people were injured, people were killed.
But what could they do? How could they fight something that arranged for accidents and arrests at will, that had no compunction about killing, that was able to knock off forty-five—
forty-six
—people in one night?
“I’ll go to the bathroom and then get dressed,” Beth said. “You take a shower, and we’ll head over to Joel and Stacy’s and brainstorm.”
“Okay.” Hunt followed her out of the kitchen. She went into the small bathroom, and he was about to grab some clothes from the bedroom when he noticed that the guest room door was half open.
It had been shut.
A wave of cold passed through him.
There was a loud knock, and the guest room door swung inward, pulled all the way open by someone inside.
The insurance agent stepped into the hall, carrying his briefcase.
Hunt experienced the same visceral reaction he had the first time the insurance agent had arrived—an abhorrence, a loathing, disgust abetted by fear.
He was wearing a black suit, the type one would wear to a funeral, and he was now at least two inches taller than Hunt and much broader in the shoulders. His teeth looked too white, as though they’d been recently capped. And too big. As though the caps were two sizes too large.
He recalled how the insurance agent had made them invite him into their house initially, the way, according to legend, a vampire was able to gain entrance into a home.
They should not have done that. If they had not allowed him entrance, he might not have been able to gain a foothold, he might simply have moved on. Now the demon was able to show up at or in their house any time he pleased.
Vampires. Demons.
Exactly what the insurance agent was still eluded him, but it was somewhere in that ballpark. It was a mystery that might never be solved, though. In novels, in movies, when individuals became embroiled in horrific events beyond their ken, explanations were eventually in the offing. Through diligent sleuthing or the loquaciousness of evildoers, the protagonists eventually learned not only the how but the why, discovering what was going on, the reason for it and the way to defeat it.
Real life, however, offered no such ready answers. It was an ambiguous world, where actions sometimes had no meaning, where chaos reigned and no one was allowed to see the big picture, only their small portion of it.
“Good morning!” the agent announced with false cheer. He held out a hand to shake. The palms had no lines on them, Hunt noticed. And the knuckles bulged strangely. He had seen hands like that before somewhere—in a painting or a movie—but he could not remember when.
He kept his own hands stiffly at his sides, but the agent seemed to take no offense. “What a gorgeous day,” he said, breathing deeply as if to savor the air. “What a glorious day to be alive.”
From inside the small bathroom came Bern’s short, shocked cry.
“Taking a piss, huh?” The agent grinned. “I bet she sprays up a storm.”
“Get out,” Hunt said flatly.
The bathroom door flew open, and Beth raged into the hallway. She’d put on pants and a T-shirt, and her face was filled with stone-cold fury. “Get out of our house!” she screamed. “We don’t want you here!” She tried to push him, but he caught her hands and pumped them in some type of bizarre greeting. She recoiled instantly, as though her fingers had just squished their way through excrement.
“I’m only here as a courtesy to you,” he explained calmly. “As I was telling your husband while you were so indelicately disposed, it’s a glorious day to be alive. And that’s why I’m here today, to make sure that you do stay alive, to protect you from the vicissitudes of this modern world and all of the horrible realities that we have to deal with on a daily basis.” He motioned to the hallway before him. “Shall we retire to the kitchen, have a nice cup of coffee and discuss the very generous life insurance coverage we’re offering?”
Life insurance.
Hunt looked at Beth. Neither of them were brave enough to kick him out of the house now, not with that hanging over their heads—
forty-six
—and, cowed but reluctant, they led the way back into the kitchen. They took up positions against the sink counter rather than sitting down at the breakfast table.
The agent placed his briefcase on the table and stood there, waiting. Hunt was determined not to ask about the insurance, determined to make the agent do all of the talking. A small achievement but one that he felt was important. He thought of lyrics from a Darden Smith song: All these little victories.
But the truth was that these little victories meant nothing. They were comfort food, feel-good panaceas in the midst of a losing battle.
Still, he remained silent. Beth did, too.
“Very well. I’ll get the ball rolling.” The agent’s voice sounded clipped, annoyed. “I’m offering you life insurance. I won’t go into the details since you don’t seem to be particularly interested in what I have to say. Besides, I think the concept of life insurance is pretty self-explanatory.” He opened his briefcase. There were no brochures or pamphlets this time, no concessions to the niceties of the ordinary world. He simply withdrew a long legal-sized form printed on card-stock paper and placed it on the kitchen table.
Hunt didn’t want to look, but he did. He saw words and sentences so fine that he doubted they could be read without the assistance of a magnifying glass.
“This time,” the agent said, “I’m afraid I must insist upon an immediate
answer.”
“We need to talk it over.”
“An immediate answer!” He slammed his hand down on the breakfast table.
Hunt looked at Beth, who nodded unhappily.
Life insurance, he thought. It was pretty self-explanatory.
“Okay.”
“Excellent, excellent.” All trace of pique was gone from the insurance agent’s voice. Once more, he spoke in the plastic tones of the professional salesman. “I congratulate you on making the right decision.”
In a ritual that was becoming all too common but none the less heinous for that, he provided them with pens and they signed the insurance application.
The agent placed the application in his briefcase, shut it and then put it down on the floor. They expected him to bid them a cheery or ironic good-bye, but instead he stood there for a moment, looking out the window. “Come here, Mr. Jackson,” he said finally. “Tell me what you see.”
Reluctantly, Hunt stood next to him and looked through the window at the ruins of the Brett house.
“What do you see?”
He shrugged. “A burned house.”
“That’s what your home would look like if a terrorist decided to ram a plane into your roof or if…” He trailed off.
“It’s a shame they didn’t have insurance,” he said softly, almost to himself.
It was the second time he’d said something like that about the Bretts’ home, and Hunt thought that it must be some sort of obsession on his part. Had he offered Ed Brett insurance only to be turned down? Or was it the mere fact that they hadn’t had insurance—any insurance from any company—that got under his skin, that preyed upon his mind?
He turned back toward Hunt, smiling brightly. “But you see, that’s what you two will be able to avoid. You have ample coverage, and with this new addition to your insurance portfolio, you’ll be protected against far more than the average policyholder.” He patted Hunt’s shoulder, and Hunt fought an instinctive urge to pull away in disgust. “I’m very proud of you.”
THE POLICY Page 28