The Wrong Man (12 page)

Forever yours,
Michael

Ashley wanted to shriek but no sound could rise through her throat.

At first, the garage owner was not particularly eager to help.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, wiping greasy, oil-stained hands on an equally filthy rag. “You want to know something about Michael O’Connell? Tell me why.”

“I’m a writer,” I said. “He figures in a book I’m working on.”

“O’Connell? In a book?” The question was followed by a short burst of forced laughter. “Must be some sort of crime story.”

“That’s right. It’s some sort. I’d appreciate any help.”

“We get fifty bucks an hour here to fix your car. How much time do you think you’re gonna need?”

“That depends on how much you can tell me.”

He snorted. “Well, that depends then on what it is you want to know. I worked side by side with O’Connell the entire time he was employed here. Of course, that was a couple of years back, and I haven’t seen him in a long time. That’s a good thing. But, hell, I was the one that gave him his job, so I could tell you some stuff. But then, I could also be fixing the transmission on this Chevy, too, you get what I mean?”

We had circled around my question, and I thought we would find ourselves nowhere in a couple of minutes. So I reached into my back pocket, grabbed my wallet, and rapidly counted out $100. I put this down on the counter in front of where I was standing. “Just the truth,” I said. “And nothing that you don’t know firsthand.”

The man at the garage eyed the money. “About that son of a bitch, sure.” He reached out his hand, and like some hard-bitten character in a million Hollywood potboiler movies, I placed my palm down on the money, holding it on the counter. The mechanic grinned, showing white teeth with gaps.

“One question first,” the man said. “You know where O’Connell is now?”

“No. Not yet. But I’m going to find him sooner or later. Why?”

“He’s not the sort of guy I necessarily want to piss off. Come looking for me with questions of his own. Like why I talked with you in the first place. He’s not someone you would want asking you those types of questions. And unhappy about it, too.”

“I’ll keep this conversation confidential.”

“Those are big, fine words. But how do I know, Mr. Writer, that you’ll do what you say?”

“I guess that’s the chance you’re going to take.”

He shook his head, but at the same time eyed the money. “Bad odds. Especially where that guy is involved. Wouldn’t want to be trading peace of mind for a lousy hundred bucks.” He took a moment, muttered, “Screw it,” under his breath, then shrugged. “Michael O’Connell. He worked here for about a year, and after about two minutes I made damn sure that he worked the same shift that I did. I didn’t much want him stealing me blind. He was the smartest bastard that ever changed some spark plugs in here, that’s for damn certain. And very cool, too, about how he stole money. Mean and charming as hell, all at the same time, if you can imagine it. Like you would hardly know it when you got taken. Most of the guys that I hire to pump gas in this place are either college kids trying to make a little extra money, or guys that couldn’t pass one of the mechanics certification courses at the big dealerships, so they end up here, instead. Either they’re too young to know how to steal or too dumb. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t answer that question, but took a long look at the gas station owner. He was probably close to my own age, but too much time underneath a car in the summer heat and winter frost had given him creases around the eyes and at the corners of his face. Smoking, too, hadn’t helped, and he took the moment to stick a cigarette between his lips, ignoring his own
NO SMOKING
sign prominently displayed on the back wall. He had a way of speaking directly toward me, but twisting his head slightly, so that it seemed as if whatever he said came out sideways.

“So, he started working here…”

“Yeah. He worked here, but he wasn’t really working here, you get my drift?”

“No. I don’t.”

The gas station owner rolled his eyes. “O.C. put in the hours. But fixing old carbs and doing inspections wasn’t really his thing. Not exactly where he figured his future lay.”

“What was?”

“Well, replacing a perfectly good fuel pump with a rebuilt one was. Then selling the good one and pocketing the difference. Taking an extra twenty bucks in cash from whoever walked in to make sure some old clunker passed its Massachusetts State emission test was another. Whacking a front ball joint with a hammer and then telling some Boston College kid they needed a new set of brakes and an alignment was.”

“A scam artist?”

The mechanic smiled. “That was it. But you’re just scratching the surface with O’Connell.”

“Okay, what else?”

“He took computer courses at night, and he was into every damn thing you could do with a laptop. The boy was a regular fountain of knowledge. Credit-card fraud. Identity theft. Double billing. Telephone cons, you name it, he had a handle on it. And in his spare time, he used to scan every damn website, newspaper, magazine, whatever, looking for new ways of stealing. He used to keep folders filled with clippings, just to keep himself up-to-date. You know what he used to say?”

“What?”

“You don’t have to kill someone to kill them. But if you really want to, you can. And, if you really know what you’re doing, ain’t nobody going to catch up with you. Not ever.”

I wrote that down.

When the gas station owner saw my pencil scratching across the notepad, he smiled, and he reached out and took the money off the counter. I let him pocket the $100. “You know what the damn stupidest thing was?”

“Okay, what?”

“You’d think that a guy like this would be looking for some big score. Trying to find a way to get rich. But that wasn’t exactly it, with O’Connell.”

“What was it, then?”

“He wanted to be perfect. It was like he wanted to be great. But he wanted to be anonymous, too.”

“Small-time?” I asked.

“No, you’re wrong. He knew he was going to be big. Ambition. He was strung out on it, like it was some sort of drug. You know what it’s like to be around some guy who’s just like an addict, but it ain’t cocaine up the nose or heroin filling up his veins? He was drunk all the time with all sorts of plans. Always getting ready for the big deal. Like it was just waiting for him out there somewhere and he was closing in on it. Working here, whatever he did, it was just a way of passing time, filling in the blanks, all along the path. But it wasn’t exactly money or fame he was interested in. It was something else.”

“You parted ways?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to end up getting used whenever the hell he figured out what he was going to do. But someday he was going to take down something. You know what they say, ‘The end justifies the means.’ Well, that was O’Connell. Like I say, the boy had big ideas.”

“But you don’t know—”

“Don’t know nothing about what happened to him. Saw enough, though, to keep me pretty scared.”

I looked at the mechanic.
Scared
didn’t seem as if it would normally be a part of his vocabulary. “I don’t get it,” I said. “He scared you?”

The garage owner took a long drag of his cigarette and let smoke curl up around his head. “You ever meet somebody that’s always doing something different from what he’s doing? I don’t know, maybe that don’t make sense, but that was O’Connell. And when you called him on it, when you called him on anything, he would look at you with this way where he just stared right like you weren’t there, and he was taking down something about you and putting it somewhere, because someday he was going to find a way to use it against you.”

“Against you?”

“One way or the other. He was just the sort of man, you just didn’t naturally want to get in his path. Stand to the side a bit, that would be okay. But get in his way, or get in the way of what he wanted…well, that would be something you’d want to avoid.”

“He was violent?”

“He was whatever he needed to be. Maybe that was what was so scary about him.”

The man took another deep, deadly inhale of the smoke. I didn’t ask another question, but he added, “You know, Mr. Writer man, here’s a story. Once about ten years ago, I was working here real late, you know, two, three in the morning, two kids come in, next thing I know, I’ve got a big, shiny steel nine-millimeter stuck up in my face, and one kid is yelling
‘Motherfucker this’ and ‘Cocksucker that’
and a whole lot of
‘I’m gonna bust a cap in your face, old man’
type bullshit, and I thought, truly and honestly, that was going to be it, that he was going to do it, while his goddamn partner cleaned out the register, and I ain’t particularly religious, but I was muttering every Our Father and Hail Mary I could think of, ’cause this was the end, no doubt about it. Then the two kids took off, with hardly a word, left me laying on the floor behind the counter needing a change of underwear. You get the picture?”

I nodded. “Not pleasant.”

“No, sir. Not pleasant at all.” He smiled and shook his head.

“But what did O’Connell have to do with that?”

The man shook his head slowly and exhaled.

“Nothing,” he said carefully. “Not a single damn thing. Except this: Every time I ever talked to Michael O’Connell and he didn’t say nothing back, just listened and looked right at me that way he had, it reminded me of looking into that black hole of that kid’s pistol. Same feeling exactly. There weren’t no time I talked with him that I didn’t wonder if what I was saying meant I was gonna die.”

8

A Beginning of Panic

A
shley bent toward the computer screen, assessing each word that flickered up in front of her. She had been locked into position for more than an hour and her back was tightening up. She could feel the muscles in her calves quivering a little, as if she’d run farther on that day than was her usual jogger’s norm.

The e-mail messages were a dizzying array of love notes, electronically generated hearts and balloons, bad poetry that O’Connell had written, much better poetry that he’d stolen from Shakespeare or Andrew Marvell and even Rod McKuen. It all seemed impossibly trite and childish and yet chilling.

She tried writing down different combinations of words and phrases from the e-mails to deduce what the message was. There was nothing so obvious as a word italicized or placed in boldface that would have made her task simpler. As she closed in on her second hour of inspection, she finally tossed down her pencil, frustrated with her efforts. She felt stupid, as if there were something she was missing that would have been apparent to any crossword or acrostics puzzle fan. She hated games.

“What is it?” she shouted loudly at the screen. “What are you trying to say? What are you trying to tell me?”

She could hear her voice rise, stretching into unfamiliar pitches.

She scrolled back, starting at the beginning, then blistering through each message, one after the other, so they flashed up on the computer screen and then disappeared.

“What? What? What?” she yelled as each went past her eyes.

And then, in that second, she saw it.

The message from Michael O’Connell wasn’t contained in the e-mails that he’d sent.

It was that he’d been able to send them at all.

Each one had come from a different name on her address list. Each was from him. That they were grade-school-level testimonials of undying love was irrelevant. What was critical was that he had managed to insinuate himself into her own computer. And then, through a clever choice of words, managed to get her to read every message he’d sent. And, she understood, the likelihood was that by opening one, she had opened some sort of hidden electronic door. Michael O’Connell was like a virus, and now he was nearly as close to her as he would have been if he’d actually been seated next to her.

With a small gasp, Ashley leaned back hard in her chair, almost losing her balance, feeling a sense of dizziness as if the room were spinning around her head. She grabbed the arms of the chair with her hands and steadied herself quickly, took several long, deep breaths to regain control over an accelerating heart.