by David Wong
Zoey said, “I take it he doesn’t walk around dressed as a giant question mark.”
Echo said, “I think that would cause trademark issues.”
Andre said, “He’s been playin’ up the mysterious angle since he hit the scene, wants us to think of him as something larger than life. Mystical. Keeping us in the dark about what his capabilities are, or aren’t. We’ve been working it, but he’s the most Blink-savvy player we’ve ever dealt with. Always keeping the name out there, never showing the face.”
Budd said, “Now, men like that, we’ve found they usually don’t stay in the shadows forever, they get to where they crave the spotlight. But when this guy decides to go public, I’m thinkin’ he’ll do it in a way that’s spectacular. And I mean spectacular in the bad way, like a collision between a fuel tanker and a school bus.”
Zoey swallowed pizza and said, “Well, we’ve been told the memorial service tomorrow is going to be crashed by a guy who controls an army of mentally ill people with wizard powers. That sounds pretty spectacular.”
Will said, “And do you understand why he’s going through this whole dog-and-pony show, rather than just sending a thug to threaten you with a shotgun the next time you go out to get the mail?”
“He wants an audience.”
“Now you’re getting it. There’ll be several thousand people at the memorial tomorrow, and probably a hundred times as many watching it via Blink. Now that the threat of a spectacular assassination taking place has been made—and trust me, he’ll make sure word gets out—you can multiply that number by a hundred. Big showdown, heiress versus supervillain.”
“Wait, are we talking like I’m actually going to go to this thing?”
Will, without breaking eye contact with Zoey, asked the room, “How hard would it be to get a Zoey lookalike?”
Budd said, “You’re talkin’ about an assassination double? It’ll cost us, but we could find someone who passes.”
Will, still looking at Zoey, nodded and said, “Yeah, lots of desperate people in this city. Go out to the trailer parks outside town, find a girl with the same build. You’ll surely find someone happy to take the risk, for the money.”
Zoey said, “Ugh, you are the devil. You know that? You are the literal devil. All right, I’ll go to the memorial service. I’ll act as bait for the magical sociopath who wants me dead.”
Will said, “I was suggesting no such thing. It would be extremely dangerous for you to go yourself. Besides, with the kind of wealth you have now, you shouldn’t have to take those kinds of risks. Not when there are plenty of impoverished women who would gladly—”
“Stop. Shut up. Just … pour some more scotch in your mouth, whatever it takes to make the words stop. I’m going. Better than just spending the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. Let’s just do it and end this, one way or the other.”
She turned toward Armando. “Is there any hope at all of keeping me safe during something like that?”
“As safe as anyone can be, doing what you are about to do.”
Andre said, “You’ll have help.”
Zoey said, “So … is this just the type of thing you people do?”
Will said, “You mean staging elaborate traps for psychopaths, just to see what happens? All so we can get a look at their strengths and weaknesses, at tremendous danger to everyone in the vicinity? Yes, actually. With some regularity.”
He turned and tapped the wall monitor. An overhead view of a patch of land appeared on the screen.
“Here’s the park. Echo, we’re going to start running down hardware, there’s a lot of open perimeter here—that part is going to be an all-nighter for both of us. Budd, start vetting hired guns, work with Armando on that. Andre, you’re already on party preparations. But of course, a lot of your hard work has just gone out the window, you have to completely rethink where you’re channeling the crowds. The whole shape of this situation has changed substantially in the last few minutes or so. Don’t plan on much sleep.”
Andre grabbed another slice of pizza and said, “Now there’s an understatement. I mean on top of everything else, we got to get Zoey something to wear.”
NINETEEN
That night, Zoey dreamed about Jezza.
The dreams weren’t an uncommon occurrence over the last eight years, dating back to when Zoey was in high school. She and her mother had lived in an apartment in a public housing complex, a cramped two-bedroom place with sticky linoleum floors and walls that smelled like old grease. But by far the worst thing about the place was that none of the interior doors locked—not the bathroom, not her bedroom. Zoey had never understood how fundamentally she had relied on the ability to lock out the rest of the world until Jezza Lewis had moved in with them during her freshman year.
Jezza was her mother’s boyfriend at the time, a sleazy British guy whose hobby was “accidentally” walking in on Zoey every chance he got. On the toilet, in the shower, when she was changing. He wouldn’t do it every time—she’d be safe for a week, or a month. It was just often enough that it was always lurking in the back of her mind. And then, during some vulnerable moment, he’d burst through the door, playing it off like a hilarious faux pas (because hey, we’re all just family here, right?), then he’d get a good look before he backed out. Zoey had told her mother, who had just laughed and talked about how one day they’d get a bigger place with two bathrooms and locks on the doors, and how Jezza was getting more and more DJ work all the time.
The whole thing ended when, one day, Zoey stepped into the bathroom to take a shower and immediately noticed cracks in the plastic housing of the ventilation fan in the ceiling—like somebody had messed with the fan but was too stupid to know how to get the cover off without breaking it. She figured there was a better than even chance that there was now a little wireless camera up there, because she had been expecting Jezza to do something like this and that was the only spot to hide a camera that could see down past the shower curtain. That meant that everything she was doing was likely being fed wirelessly to Jezza’s ancient laptop, the same one he used to play music at his DJ shows while he stood there and flapped his arms around as if the computer wasn’t doing all of the work.
Zoey could have waited until her mother got home and then showed her the camera, or she could have stood up on the toilet and ripped the thing out of the ceiling. She could have done a lot of things. Instead, she undressed and took her shower. She took her time, and dried herself off slowly. Then she got dressed, found the laptop to confirm her suspicions, then called the police. Zoey was fourteen, which meant the video file on Jezza’s laptop was child pornography. Jezza had two prior offenses, surprise surprise, which explained why he had such a strong reaction when he realized what Zoey had done.
She still had the scars.
When the cops dragged him away, Jezza swore he would come back and find Zoey, and finish making her pay. He described his payback in graphic detail—it was clearly something he had spent considerable time thinking about.
Six days later, someone at Zoey’s school found the shower video on the Internet—it had been a live feed, it turned out—and within twenty-four hours, every single one of her classmates had seen it. A week later would mark the first and only time Zoey tried to commit suicide. She swallowed a bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills, but vomited them back up after she passed out.
Regardless of his gruesome promises, Zoey had never seen Jezza again. Outside of her nightmares, that is. In her sleep, he visited her time and time again, magically appearing at her most helpless moments. Yanking back a shower curtain, ripping off a blanket, swapping in his body for Caleb’s halfway through a sex dream.
This particular time she dreamed she was back home, sleeping on her futon, and woke up to see him looming inches over her with his stupid, greedy eyes and hot garbage breath. And once again Zoey felt those hands clamp down. His impossible strength, just as she’d felt it that day in the kitchen when he came after her, the sounds of muf
fled sirens in the distance. Until then, she hadn’t known a human could be that strong—this scrawny little tattooed DJ, crushing her under his hands, amped up with a power that courses through every predator upon the sight of quivering prey.
He grinned a grin so wide it threatened to sever his face and said, “Come back off the ice, sweetie.”
Zoey’s eyes snapped open and she found she was alone, in the tomb-silent guest room, Stench Machine busily licking himself at the foot of the bed. She sat up and pulled on her jeans and decided she needed to get out of this room. She headed out into the hall with Stench Machine in tow, trying to decide if her situation had gotten better or worse since she had done the exact same thing about twenty-four hours ago. She thumped down the stairs and upon sight of the massive bronze doors, she thought, just go.
She would be able to, this time. The mansion’s security system listened to her now. She could stroll right out, across the grounds and through the front gate. She could walk to a Mercedes dealership and drive off with a luxury car to take her back to Colorado. Sure, it was the middle of the night, but she was rich—she could probably just take one and leave a note telling them to put it on her tab. The next day they’d send her a bouquet and a card apologizing for not being open.
But then, for the rest of her life, she would be right back where she was at fourteen, in that place without locking doors. Always waiting for some monster to come smashing in after her.
She arbitrarily decided to head right, through the arched doorway to the East Wing, the same way she’d gone the night before. Might as well get a look at the house she owned. She found that a lot of the first floor seemed to be dedicated to entertaining guests—in addition to the dining room and kitchen she’d already seen, she found a movie theater, featuring twenty leather recliners and a professional popcorn machine. The most impressive thing about that room, she thought, was that it had clearly been used. Having your own movie theater sounds like the kind of gaudy feature a rich person demands in their mansion and then never sets foot in, since it’s not like you can’t just kick back on the sofa and stream a movie to the wall, or your phone, or your glasses. But this room smelled of cooking oil and artificial butter and cigars, and the seats looked worn, several bearing stains and cigar burns. There were scuffs on the seat backs, where guests in the rear row had casually propped their feet up. She saw people relaxing, laughing, eating popcorn. Movie Night at the Livingston Place.
Next door to the theater was a room that had been turned into a massive ball pit, like they have at Chuck E. Cheese, about twenty feet by twenty feet of plastic balls that were chest-deep on Zoey when she dove in. When she climbed out a half hour later, she found that across the hall was a room with padded floors and walls full of harmless fighting gear—foam batons and overstuffed boxing gloves. The entire floor was a black mesh, and Zoey almost fell over when she tried to step on it. It was bouncy—the whole floor was a trampoline. A lot of the gear in the room was little kid–size, and Zoey immediately pictured a dozen adults all retiring to the theater to watch a movie over beer and popcorn, while everybody’s kids went and screamed their heads off in the play areas.
Farther down the hall, in a private area around a bend, there was a black-tiled room with a massive Jacuzzi in the center, surrounded by live plants to give it a jungle feel (at least half of the foliage was hemp), and a waterfall along one wall. There was a wet bar at floor level along the Jacuzzi, so you wouldn’t even have to get out to get yourself a drink. A woman’s bathing suit top was still draped over one brass rail.
An invitation to Arthur Livingston’s estate didn’t mean black ties and cocktails, Zoey realized. People had the time of their lives here.
She doubled back to the foyer and headed up the stairs, past the buffalo room. The rest of the second floor seemed to be mostly bedrooms. Some of them had personal items and toiletries lying around, stuff she assumed belonged to frequent guests who knew they’d be back. People who hadn’t known that the last time was in fact the last time, people who no doubt had been crushed by the news about Arthur. A whole constellation of friends and acquaintances that Zoey could barely comprehend. She had fifteen contacts in her phone and nine of them were friends and family of Caleb’s, people who if she tried to call them, would see her number and roll their eyes before sending it to voice mail. Arthur could summon twice as many within five minutes, any time he didn’t feel like watching a movie alone.
She was headed back toward the West Wing when she ran across a life-sized statue of Arthur Livingston, set back into the wall of the second-floor hallway. Zoey actually laughed out loud—the statue depicted Arthur with a walking stick, one leg raised onto a mound of earth, as if he was in the process of scaling a mountain. The statue had an elaborate mustache, just as she saw Arthur wearing in his hologram, and close inspection revealed that it had been added later—she could see the tiny welds where it had been attached to his upper lip, and it wasn’t as tarnished as the rest. Zoey wondered if some poor artist would have had to come cut the facial hair off the statue again if the real Arthur had lived long enough to shave his.
Etched into the base of the statue were five words: There Is Always a Way.
As she was reading it, a mechanism clicked and scraped and the statue slowly rotated away, revealing a staircase that went straight up. Zoey didn’t even realize the house had a third floor.
She cautiously climbed the stairs, half expecting to find a torture dungeon, or piles and piles of cocaine. Instead, she found a master bedroom, another space haunted by the ghosts of ancient cigars. The first thing that registered was that there was a car parked in the middle of the room. The second was that it was raining outside this room, and only this room.
The car, it turned out, was a grown-up version of the little plastic race car beds that kids have, only this one was made from an actual car, some kind of old-timey, very expensive-looking sports car that had the entire middle cut out and replaced with a king-size mattress. It had real tires and everything. As for the rain, Zoey moved over to the one giant bay window that overlooked a courtyard she also didn’t even know was there until that moment. Raindrops were drumming against the glass with a perfect soothing, sleepy rhythm. There was a brass switch near the window, and when she hit it, the rain stopped. It was some kind of sprinkler device outside, supplying an instant lazy, rainy day with the flip of a switch.
Zoey wandered around the dead man’s room, feeling like she was intruding. One wall was dominated by framed photographs—Arthur Livingston with the president, Arthur Livingston with a player from the Utah Jazz, Arthur Livingston at a casino with an old guy in a suit who Zoey didn’t know but was sure she had seen on the news. There were dozens of these pictures—Arthur and famous people, Arthur in tuxedoes, Arthur demonstrating what a big shot he was. Under the photos was the obligatory wet bar and in the corner next to it was a punching bag—well-used, with a pair of gloves hanging on a nail nearby. Next to it was a massive bookcase full of antique, leather-bound volumes, all of the classics of literature. Zoey went to pull one of them from the shelf, and found they were all glued in place.
There was a vanity topped with bottles of aftershave and a single comb with a few loose gray hairs woven through. There was a narrow door to a surprisingly small bathroom with an old-fashioned tub and sink with brass fixtures, a lone toothbrush lying on the counter. Zoey had to force herself not to wonder where exactly Arthur’s teeth were right now. On the opposite wall from the bathroom was an identical door that Zoey assumed led to a closet, but when she stepped through it she was suddenly in a Brooks Brothers store—the “closet” was an entire separate room, packed with suits. There had to have been five hundred suits on the racks covering the walls. At least. In the corner was a pedestal and mirrors for fitting—altogether, more floor space dedicated to the “closet” than the entire bedroom.
Zoey turned back to the bedroom and it registered with her that the room looked rumpled and harried—drawers partially open, some cl
othes tossed onto the floor, a box of old letters having been pulled out from under the bed and rifled through. The room had been ransacked, though gently and respectfully. Arthur’s own people had surely done this, of course, in the frantic search for the “key” immediately after his death.
Zoey heard footsteps on the stairwell and froze, actually having a ridiculous moment when she frantically looked around for a place to hide. But of course this was her master bedroom now—she could squat and pee on the floor and nobody could say a word.
Armando appeared in the door and said, “There you are. I thought you were in bed, then I heard you laughing at something. Did you know this was up here?”
“No, I just stumbled across it. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I might as well take a look at my house before it winds up getting bequeathed to somebody else after I die tomorrow.”
“So that’s how it is? You’re going to insult my bodyguard skills right to my face?”
“Sorry. If it makes you feel better I’m sure you’ll also die, trying to save me.”
Zoey went and sat on the ridiculous race car bed. On the nightstand next to it was an antique-looking bronze Buddha figurine that looked like it was in the process of blessing an ashtray full of cigar butts. There was a half-empty water glass, sitting on top of a Christmas card from somebody named Gary that had been used as a coaster. She pulled open the top drawer. Aspirin. Antacids. Chapstick. Reading glasses. A revolver.
Zoey asked, “You have any problems with the plan tomorrow? Me acting as bait?”
“Well … you know I can’t just shoot Molech on sight, right? Tabula Rasa is lawless but not that lawless. But we’re going to staff up the event, make sure that if he does make a move, we’re there.”