Wild Thing: A Novel (37 page)

“You’re saying he went on the White Lake trip on his own?”

“As far as I know. If he’d been working for me, why wouldn’t I have told you about it?”

“Why wouldn’t you have told me you’d interviewed him after I sent you an e-mail saying he was there? Why wouldn’t you have told Violet? For that matter, why wouldn’t you have had Violet pick him up at the airport?”

“I have a lot employees. And a lot of things on my mind.”

“With Violet falling into both of those categories.”

Rec Bill’s mouth tightens. “Finish your insinuating and get out.”

“Okay. You tried to hire Marvell when he was here in this office, but it didn’t work out. Either he said no or he asked for too much money and
you
said no. So you hired Michael Bennett of Desert Eagle Investigations to do the job you had asked Marvell to do—which was in fact
not
the job of checking out the lake monster. And when Violet and I busted Mr. Bennett trying to take pictures of us in what he thought was the same bed, you went crawling back to Marvell and paid him whatever he wanted. You even paid Sarah Palin to give Marvell a ride and a cover story—something that must have cost a fortune, and implies that you already knew that Palin was going to be the ref but had chosen not to share that information with me or Violet. Because if you had, we’d have known you didn’t give a shit who the ref was, and therefore that you didn’t give a shit whether there was a monster in White Lake or not. You were afraid of your two million dollars going to Reggie Trager, but other than that the hoax meant nothing to you. You just wanted someone to spy on Violet Hurst. While you sent her into the woods with someone so completely different from you that if she fucked me it would prove to you that she couldn’t possibly be in love with you.”

Rec Bill’s poker face isn’t bad. It’s not great, though, either.

“That’s insane,” he says.

“It’s not exactly mature, in any case. In fact it’s more like the behavior of a twelve-year-old.”

“Get the hell out of my office. Then get the hell off my campus.”

“Stop calling it a campus. It’s a fucking office park. Are you teaching French lit here somewhere?”

“Get out. And another thing. If you say a word of any of this to Violet, I will destroy you.”

“Violet’s my friend. I’ll tell her the truth.”

“So you’re
blackmailing
me?”

“No. I said I’ll tell her the truth. Which I will, no matter what you do or say.”

He looks at me with cold eyes that gradually soften and fill with tears. If it’s a performance, it’s passable.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he finally says. “How hard it is for me to trust people.”

“I’d cry you a river, but it’s probably faster for you to just buy one.”

“I need you to help me with her.”

“No thanks. I won’t try to turn her against you, but I sure as hell won’t help you win her over.”

“That’s… fair enough.” He starts to say something, then stops.

“What?”

“Did you and she…? When you went back to White Lake?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I say. “
Ask
her! Ask her whatever you want. She might not answer, but at least you’ll be behaving like a grown-up.”

“You’re right. I know. I’m sorry.”

He slumps, staring down at his desk. Or at his feet. With all that glass it’s hard to tell.

“Do you… want more money?” he finally says.

“No. What you owe me should be enough. What I want is help spending it.”

Gelin, North Dakota

Eight Months Later

I’m in the armchair by the window, trying to figure out the Image Challenge in the
New England Journal
, when the first bullet hits the glass. The image is of two hands with actual horns growing out of them.
^*
Thanks to the pressure switch under the chair, the lights are off by the time I reach the floor.

The second shot sprays a small amount of glass into the room, which means the sniper’s using something heavier than I expected—a Steyr .50, maybe, like Austria sells to Iran. Since by
“glass,” obviously, I mean sixty-six-millimeter Kevenex laminate mounted on shock absorbers.

The window’s doomed. Fine with me. I’m already crawling fast along the line of luminescent iron oxide tape that runs across the floor from the chair to the trapdoor. And the bullets can only come in straight-on, since what look like venetian blinds are actually steel slats anchored into the floor and the ceiling. They’re meant to force snipers to use the cover spots I set up for them on the bluffs facing the house. They appear to be doing that.

I slide down through the trap and close the door, which is from a safe by Nationwide that’s rated for light-aircraft impact and ten hours of chemical-fueled fire. Then I get on the sled.

The cement tunnel that Rec Bill’s allegedly untraceable construction company backhoed for me is two hundred yards long: about thirty seconds of sled time. The bunker at the far end is so cramped that my poster of Geronimo stretches from the ceiling to the floor.

I close the second hatch and turn on the strip to the monitors.

Both snipers are where they should be. Six other paramilitary geeks are coming toward the house from the “shoulder” directions, to stay out of the line of their own sniper fire as long as possible. There may be more, but the companies that train these losers favor groups of eight, because that’s the size of a typical Navy SEAL “boat team” and because any more than that tend to get in each other’s way. And to get into fights with each other. People become hitmen for a variety of reasons—true sociopathy, military training paired with a willingness to do anything for money, a pathological need to feel like James Bond—but social skills aren’t high on the list.

On the broad-spectrum monitor I can see they’re wearing infrared chemlights on lariats to differentiate themselves from the target.
^*
That’s okay. I’ve got a bucket of chemlights next to the can of UV-reflecting spray paint I thought they might use to mark themselves instead. Since they didn’t, I go ahead and put on my assault vest.

The best news, by far, is the helicopter. It’s moving into place right over the house, clear on the monitor, positioned to have a shot at me if I go out any of the doors. Helicopters, and people who can fly them, are expensive. And the house is packed with easily enough TATP to take it down.

It’s still too early for that, though. Or even for blowing the sniper positions. The paramilitary geeks haven’t tripped any of the anti-personnel mines yet. Once they do, I’ll flip the rest of the switches with one hand, then go outside and hunt down the stragglers. After, naturally, frying out their night-vision goggles with the various exotic-spectrum lamps I’ve put in the trees.

It’s likely to be a massacre, which is unfortunate. Then again, I didn’t ask anybody to come here. All I did was apply for a notary public license under a false name but with my real thumbprint and this address, something felons sometimes do to get gun licenses. At the time, I worried it might be too subtle.

Are the things I’m about to do justified? Who knows? If you count Teng, McQuillen’s scheme killed five people. My own trip to Minnesota left Dylan Arntz, four of Debbie Schneke’s Boys, and the eight guys sent by Locano dead—and almost killed Violet Hurst, Sheriff Albin, Debbie Schneke herself, and Albin’s deputy. My fault, yes, for getting involved, but the only way to keep something like that from happening again is to either keep
running—meaning never work as a doctor under any name, stay out of public view, don’t associate with anyone, and hope I get a lot luckier than last time—or fight back. Hurt the mob so badly they realize David Locano’s vendetta isn’t worth pursuing. Should I wait until I’m in a corner? Maybe I already am. Corners tend to be where you imagine them.

What argues
against
my doing this, I know—besides the fact that I’ve just spent eleven years trying
not
to kill people, mostly successfully, and to make up for having done so in the past—is how enjoyable it’s likely to be. How enjoyable it already is.

The skills I’m about to unleash are things to be ashamed of, and I
am
ashamed of them. They’re also fun as fuck to use, and pretending otherwise won’t change what’s about to happen.

I put my hand on the switches.

I mean, why lie?

by Violet Hurst

November 2010. Americans who believe that their most pressing problem is that rich people and corporations aren’t free enough to fuck them elect a Republican majority to the House of Representatives
.
^*

In December, a month before John Boehner becomes Speaker of the House, a spokesman for him says “The Select Committee on Global
Warming was created by Democrats simply to provide political cover to pass their job-killing national energy tax. It is unnecessary, and taxpayers will not have to fund it in the 112th Congress.” In February, Republicans introduce legislation prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from trying to limit greenhouse gases. Representative Darrell Issa of California, suspected car thief and arsonist and now incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, having already called funding for climate science “a tsunami
^*
of opacity, waste, fraud, and abuse,” promises yet another investigation of “Climategate,” the fake scandal that has already been discredited by five previous investigations.
^*
This while ocean acidity approaches the level past which shellfish won’t be able to make shells.

This date is important, and it raises the perennial question of which of these assholes know full well that climate change is real and are selling out to secure whatever advantage they can get for themselves and their families before everything goes to hell, and which ones are sufficiently stupid or blinded by fear to actually not see what’s going on.

But it’s way too late to be a contender for the point of no return.

January 2010. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that corporations, despite never dying or doing jail time, have the same First Amendment rights as humans—including the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising
.
^*

This decision destroys any balance that may have existed between people and corporations in the United States, and cripples U.S. democracy in general, but again is way too late for serious consideration.

April 2009. Failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference
, an event notable for intransigence on the part of the United States and China and for public indifference following the disclosure that professional golfer Tiger Woods had sex with women he wasn’t married to.
^*

Not even close, though it’s nice to see golf and the people who love it
^*
doing even more to fuck up the environment.

December 2000. After the United States elects Al Gore, the Supreme Court prohibits an accurate counting of votes from Florida, making George W. Bush president
.

Republican scumbag and secretary of state of Florida Katherine Harris,
^*
who despite being co-chair of George W. Bush’s campaign in
Florida is also in charge of certifying Florida’s vote, provokes the case by stopping the count in the first place.

This is such a classic that people forget that prior to it there was still an operating fiction that Supreme Court justices aren’t political. For example, in 1987, Republican senator Orrin Hatch said “If the [Supreme Court] judges themselves begin to base their decisions on political criteria, we will have lost the reasoning processes of the law which have served us so well to check political excesses and fervor over the last 200 years.”
^*

It’s also a strong contender. Al Gore’s wealth, like that of George W. Bush, comes from selling political favors to oil companies,
^*
and Gore’s running mate later showed himself to be entirely aligned with corporate interests. But in reality there is very little chance Gore could have done a worse job than Bush on the environment.
^*

Still, choosing this option ignores things like the role of “Green”
Party spoiler candidate and narcissist Ralph Nader, and ignores the fact that enough people willingly voted for Bush and Nader to make the election stealable. Write it on your tombstones, dipshits.

July 1997. Unanimous passage by the U.S. Senate (including Al Gore) of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which voiced opposition to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that China hadn’t ratified
.

This is a nice
“fuck y’all—including us!,”
and ratifying Kyoto would have set a precedent for international cooperation on the environment. But on its own the Kyoto Protocol was too weak to significantly slow down climate change anyway.