Mortal Lock Page 8

  The judge told the jury what the law was, and told them to go out there and come back when they were done. Everybody got up to go to lunch, but Veil didn’t move. He motioned me over.

  “This is going to be over with real quick, Hap,” he said. “One way or the other.”

  “What if it’s the other?”

  “Plan B,” he said, his face flat as a piece of slate.

  10

  The jury was out about an hour. The foreman stood up and said “Not Guilty” about two dozen times—once for every crime they had charged Leonard with.

  I was hugging Leonard when Veil tapped me on the shoulder. “Leonard,” he said, “you need to go over there and thank those jury people. One at a time. Sincere, you understand?”

  “What for?” Leonard asked.

  “Because this is going to happen again,” Veil said. “And maybe next time, one of the rats’ll get burned.”

  Knowing Leonard, I couldn’t argue with that. He walked over to the jury and I turned around to say something to Veil. But he was gone.

  DEAD RELIABLE

  I was walking through the woods behind our property when I came across a huge toadstool. It was a color I’d never seen, some kind of shimmering rose-orange, standing on a stalk so thick it looked like a miniature palm tree holding up a solid canopy.

  Remington stopped when I did. The chocolate lab is getting on in years, and he always grabs any excuse for a rest. I don’t think he even likes walking in the woods anymore, but Florence—my wife—says he has to do it. For the same reason I have to do it: to keep fit. Diet and exercise are very important to her. Keeping fit.

  Florence bought Remington because she said he was the right kind of dog for our new life. But he’s always been my dog. If I didn’t go walking, he wouldn’t either.

  The toadstool-tree stood in a thick bed of dark green moss. It looked like it had been there for centuries. Unseen, untouched. Unspoiled.

  I watched it for a long time, absently patting my pockets for the cigarettes I knew wouldn’t be there anymore. I used to smoke in the woods—I would never have considered smoking in the house—but I don’t do that anymore, not since I quit.

  That’s what I did—quit. Not stop, quit. It wasn’t worth the talk. All the talk. All the statistics. All the proof. All the rightness of Florence.

  She said she was sick of smelling it on me, every time I came back from a walk.

  I was sick, too.

  I had never seen anything like that toadstool. It was so beautiful. Timeless and perfect. God knows what it must have survived, how many years it had been on earth, to grow to that size and splendor.

  I never liked living way out here, even though I kept trying to. It was peaceful and quiet, not like the city at all. And cheaper, a lot cheaper. Instead of an apartment, we have a house, now. And land, too. The woods I walked in, they were on our own property.

  Florence said the city wasn’t a good value. Because there was no room to expand, every single unit was artificially priced. Someday, when they ran out of room in the city, the land we owned now would be worth a fortune to developers.

  Really, we hadn’t had to give up all that much. We have cable TV, and the Internet—Florence loves the Internet; she’s always researching things. And there’s a nice little town only a few miles away, where they have a library and a movie theater and … well, all kinds of things, if you’re interested.

  I’m not interested. I haven’t been interested in a long time.

  I looked down at my feet, at the special hiking boots Florence had bought for me last Christmas. Very expensive, but worth every penny, she said. Not only do they have steel toes, in case something heavy falls on me, but the insoles are removable, and I can replace them with my orthotic supports.

  I’m fragile now. Precautions must be taken.

  I sat down and tried to remember when I wasn’t fragile. When I was a person people listened to. Respected, even.

  The memory always hurt more than the reality, but, this time, I couldn’t even bring it back.

  I was numb. Everything was so painless. I stood up and kicked the toadstool. The entire head flew off the stalk. I walked over and held it in my hands. Then I sat down again, and started tearing it into tiny pieces.

  It took a long time. When I was done, there was nothing left but little colored scraps, scattered all over the dark moss.

  When I realized there was nothing more to do, I stood up and started walking again.

  I walked and walked, farther than I’d ever gone before. I walked slowly, so Remington could keep up.

  We came to a tree that had been cut down by lightning. Its roots were still alive, but the tree itself was lying flat on the ground.

  I sat down on it.

  Remington came over and sat next to me.

  All of a sudden, I started sobbing.

  It just kept on and on. I didn’t so much stop as run out of tears. That’s been happening for a long time. I know what it feels like, to run out of things, bit by bit. And I know how it feels when you’re finally empty.

  I used to be somebody. Not somebody important, but not a nothing, either. I was more than just a living thing. I had work. People depended on me. People always said, “Owen is a man you can count on.”

  Florence would say that, too. Only, when she said it, her lips would twist so that the words came out of her mouth like they had been poisoned.

  At first, I tried to do some volunteer work, but that’s not for me. It’s just not the same as real work. People thank you, but they don’t depend on you. Not for anything that matters, I mean.

  What volunteers really like to do is talk. Like at the food pantry. I went there because I’m good at organizing things, and I thought they would see that. But they didn’t care about doing things better. What they really came there for was the gossip: who donated what, who didn’t … things like that. Mostly, what they wanted to talk about was what wonderful people they were. They were always saying things like “giving back,” as if it were a holy act and they were the performing saints.

  After a few months, I couldn’t see why they even had the food pantry at all. It doesn’t change anything. The same people keep coming back. It’s not a bridge you use to cross over to something better; it’s a hole you fall into.

  I was once a solid, reliable man.

  I’m not solid anymore. Between the osteoporosis and the heart attack, I’m not solid.

  I don’t get opportunities to be reliable, so there’s no way to know. No way to prove it, is what I’m saying. My … reputation, I guess you’d call it … I wasn’t even in contact with the people I once had that with.

  There’re some things you can’t get back. Some things you can’t get back to.

  I never even got close to being as big and great and beautiful as that toadstool. If I’d been the man I used to be, a solid, reliable man, I would have just stood there and admired it. I would have paid it the respect it earned, all those years it had stayed alive. Alive and true.

  When I got back to the house, Florence wanted to know what I had been doing out there so long.

  I went into the room where she keeps all the hobby stuff she buys for me. Model-building kits, a shotgun, fishing rods, things like that.

  I loaded the shotgun. Then I came back out into the kitchen. I shot Florence in the back of her head.

  Her face blew apart like the toadstool, but I shot the other barrel into her anyway—I wanted to make sure she didn’t suffer.

  Remington didn’t move. He just sat there and watched. Remington had never been Florence’s dog. He never forgot what a reliable man I used to be.

  But he’s a very old dog, with a lot of health problems, and I knew what would happen when the police took him to the animal shelter. It’s a “no-kill” shelter, but, still, nobody would want him. The other dogs wouldn’t respect him. He would never be what he once was. He’d die. Not from what anyone did to him, but from what he’d lost.

  I sat at the kitch
en table. I thought about writing a note, but I had nothing to say.

  Just one more thing to do.

  I wasn’t even sad when I promised Remington he could go with me. I could see in his eyes that he knew I was still a reliable man. He could count on me. He never lost faith. He never would.

  I made sure of that, first.

  for Joel

  CHOICE OF WEAPONS

  1

  “Liberals are always blathering about how much they love nature,” Roger Kenworth lectured his rapt audience. “But the truth is, they’re actually opposed to the natural order of things.”

  His pronouncement was delivered with the self-assurance of a man accustomed to respect, and Roger Kenworth looked the part. He was powerfully built and deeply tanned, with light blond hair, symmetrical features, and perfect teeth too white for a man in his fifties.

  Tonight, he posed with one foot on his favorite soapbox: the extended hearth of a massive stone fireplace. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt the color of tarnished brass over a pair of tailored beige cargo pants and natural-alligator desert boots. His bright blue eyes swept the cathedral-ceilinged living room like a prison searchlight, scanning for dissent.

  Satisfied he had total control of his terrain, Roger used an orator’s pause to take a generous sip from his square-cut tumbler of Johnnie Walker Blue before returning to his favorite topic. “You want a perfect example, just look at the idiots who run the School Board. The paper said they held one of their little coffee klatches and decided they’re going to ban what they call ‘bullying’ at the high school. If they’d ever spent some time in the real world, they’d understand that what they’re all hyperventilating about is nothing but Darwinism in action. The strong are always going to assert themselves—that’s what keeps a species viable. Look at a wolf pack. If one of them’s too weak to pull his weight, it’s better the rest find out while he’s still a cub.”

  “Darwinism is all about evolution,” I said, mildly. I say everything mildly—at least that’s what my wife, Tammi, is always telling me. “And part of human evolution was getting past the rule of fang and claw, wasn’t it?”

  “Superficially, I suppose that’s true,” Mark Chilton said, holding his pipe like a college professor, the way he does when he pontificates. “But, in the final analysis, it still comes down to power, doesn’t it? Power and dominance, isn’t that the goal of each nation?”

  “Self-defense isn’t the same thing as dominance,” I protested. Mildly.

  “Maybe not,” Roger said, his resonant voice reflecting off the walls of the big room. “But, bottom line, if you can’t stand up to a bully, you’re going to be dominated. I don’t care if you’re some kid with his lunch money or an entire country. The point is, individually or collectively, we’re all going to be tested, and we can’t make that natural process disappear just by passing some stupid liberal ‘rule’ against it. Trying to legislate human nature never works. You might as well tell teenagers not to have sex.”

  Tammi giggled when he said that. You don’t have to be all that clever to make her giggle, as long as you’re a man. Unless you’re a mild one.

  She’s not much of a conversationalist, my wife, but she doesn’t have to say a lot to get people to look at her. Especially the way she dresses. It’s a little … embarrassing. To me, anyway. Tammi’s thirty-seven, not nineteen. She shouldn’t be wearing outfits like she does, even in this climate. But every time I bring it up, all she ever says is: “I’ve still got the body for it, don’t I?”

  There’s no arguing with the attention she draws. And Tammi loves attention; she always did.

  Roger’s wife never says much. She’s Asian—from Thailand, I think, but I don’t know for sure. She looks a lot younger than him, but Tammi says that’s just because she’s so small and skinny.

  I always think of Saturdays as kind of belonging to Roger. They start in the early evening, with him at the helm of a huge stainless-steel outdoor grill. He has it positioned at the far corner of the veranda-sized flagstone patio he had custom-built. After we eat, the gatherings go on until all hours of the night. There’s always music playing through his full-house sound system, but not many in our crowd are dancers. Mostly, we spend the time talking and drinking.

  Listening, actually.

  After the first time at Roger’s, Tammi couldn’t stop complaining the second we got back home. “You’d think, with all the money he’s supposed to have, there would have been some live entertainment. Or at least a sit-down dinner. It was just so … boring.” She was still carrying on when I fell asleep.

  The next time Roger invited us, I thought we’d just make up some excuse. But when I told Tammi, she suddenly decided she was all for it. And she really got into the spirit of things, too. Instead of the little black cocktail dress she had worn the first time, she put on a pair of jeans—the kind the kids wear, cut way too low—and a little T-shirt that showed her navel. And, once we got there, she had a few things to say, too. Nothing I’d call profound, but she was participating.

  Since then, it’s become kind of a regular thing. By now, so many people come that we tend to break up into groups. Some of the men play cards—nothing radical, not for big stakes—nobody ever gets upset if they lose. Roger has a beautiful billiard room, too, and that always gets some action. Some even use the swimming pool; although not too often, unless it’s the middle of summer.

  But even with a dozen things going on at once, Roger never leaves his spot in front of the fireplace. It takes up a whole wall of what he calls the “great room.” Anyone who wants to talk to Roger has to come in there to do it.

  2

  Usually, Tammi just leaves me alone after supper. So when she came into my study one evening, I knew there was going to be some kind of argument.

  “Do you have to spend so much time building those stupid models of yours?” was the first thing out of her mouth.

  “They’re not models,” I told her, patiently. “They’re miniatures.”

  “What’s the difference?” she said. I recognized the signs: her jaw was set and her voice was already edgy.

  “Models are prefabricated. All you have to do is put them together, whereas—”

  “Paul! I meant, what’s the difference what you putter around with? I was talking about all the time you spend at it.”

  “Well, you’re always on the computer and I just—”

  “You’re pathetic,” she said. She turned and walked out of my study, wiggling her bottom extra hard to make sure I knew it was meant to be taunting, not tempting.

  3

  Tammi doesn’t work, but that’s not her fault. The way we planned it, she would be staying at home with our kids. But kids never came. Every time I mentioned maybe seeing a fertility specialist, Tammi gave me one of her looks—the kind I didn’t even know she had until we had been married for over a year.

  So I went on my own, without saying anything to her. “I can’t tell you more without examining your wife and running additional tests,” the doctor told me, “but we can definitely rule out any … impediment at your end. Both motility and viability are more than adequate for.…”

  I’m not one of those men who doesn’t want his wife to work. But Tammi never found anything she really likes to do. She’s not stupid; in fact, she taught herself a wide variety of computer skills. And she’s certainly not lazy; her exercise regimen would exhaust a professional athlete. She once told me that keeping a small waist is the key to a woman’s shape. “If you’ve got it down, it makes everything else kind of stick out, see, Paul?” she said, turning so her body was in profile.

  I suggested she might want to go back to school. That’s where I met her, in college: she was a freshman and I was a grad student. But Tammi wasn’t interested in formal education, except when she got excited about some new thing. Then she would take all kinds of classes—yoga, tai chi, photography, things like that. She’s always wildly enthusiastic at first, but then it just goes flat for her, somehow. />
  Like we had.

  4

  “Do you think Roger was really a mercenary in the Congo?” Tammi said to me one night, as we were getting ready for bed.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Oh, Carla’s husband, Larry—he was in the army, himself—told her. And she told me.”

  “In the Congo? When would that have been?”

  “What difference does that make?” she said, sharply. “That’s just like you, Paul. Always nitpicking, checking every little detail. I mean, he seems like the kind of man who could have been a soldier of fortune, don’t you think?”

  “A ‘soldier of fortune’?” I said, with maybe just a trace of sarcasm.

  “What, I didn’t use the proper term?” Tammi said, hands on her hips. “Are you going to correct me, Paul?”

  “I wasn’t trying to do that,” I said.

  “No,” she said, the sneer thick in her voice. “I can’t imagine you would.”

  5

  I know Tammi cheats on me. Not in the flesh—well, maybe that’s not the right way to put it, considering what I found out. Once I installed the spyware on our computer, it was easy enough for me to reconstruct how she spends her days when I’m at work, especially since we’re on the same wireless network.

  Maybe sending nude photographs of herself over the Internet doesn’t meet the legal definition of adultery, but some of her e-mails were … well, they were considerably more than cyber-flirting. Still, no matter how diligently I checked—even after I installed the recorder on our phone lines, and the fiber-optic cameras in the house—I never uncovered any evidence that she actually met any of those men in real life.