A Man of Lies, page 22
With one knee in my back, he sends Owen to deal with Marta cowering in the corner of the bedroom. Laia disappeared in the chaos.
“All right, you fucker,” Conrad growls. “Let’s try this again. Where’s the fucking key?” He wraps his fingers in my hair, pulling my head back, and leans down into my ear, which only puts more weight onto my spine. “And you should know Richard Sands’s body is due to turn up any day now. Where that happens and who takes the blame come down to the next words out of your mouth.”
“Richard is dead?” I ask. It’s not the right answer. He slams my face into the ground, and the world starts spinning again. I mentally add one more tick to my lifetime brain injury count.
“I’m running out of patience,” he hisses at me. “And I don’t give a fuck about your stupid fucking video. We can make that shit disappear.”
I’m not sure if I believe him, but I am pretty sure he believes himself, which is all that matters.
“Let me go. I’ll give you the key,” I gasp, straining underneath his weight.
He releases my hair and eases up with the knee in my back.
“And here my partner thought we couldn’t get along,” he muses.
I pull in a solid breath. “In my right pocket there’s a key chain with a big top hat,” I say.
He pats down my leg, finding the keys easily. Hanging from them is my top hat key chain where I glued the second of the two fake keys. He stands up and turns to Owen, who has one arm over the old woman’s shoulders, comforting her.
“Let’s get out of here,” he calls. “We got the key.”
Owen ambles over with a smile. “Fuck yeah.” He claps his partner on the back. “Let’s go get fucking rich.”
“And me?” I ask from the ground. “We had a deal.” I roll over onto my side so I can look up at the two of them.
Conrad considers the key in his hand. “Yeah,” he says. “About that—”
CHAPTER 52 Peter Van Horn, 10:02 P.M.
The overnight shift sergeant has already been briefed by Sergeant Nowicki when Peter reports for his first night in the filing room. “How’s your typing?” she asks.
“It’s fine, I guess,” Peter says.
“Fucking wonderful. Follow me.” She leads Peter to a tiny room in the back of the bullpen labeled RECORDS. The room is barely eight feet to a side and at least fifteen degrees warmer than the rest of the station. Out front are three boxes filled with paper, waiting to be processed and color-coded for urgency. Inside are three computers, one of which is currently manned.
Every interaction an officer has with the public, regardless of how banal or uninteresting, has to be logged. Most officers type their reports directly into the system. To the oldest generation, though, the computers are still not to be trusted. They manually fill out the forms, which then need to be computerized, cataloged, and cross-referenced. That’s where people like Peter and his new compatriot, a sallow-skinned officer pushing seventy and currently henpecking his way across the keyboard, come in.
For most this would be a punishment, but there is something about the work that Peter finds soothing. He is putting things in their proper place. It’s almost like being a librarian. But Peter can’t enjoy it. He needs to get through it. Get to tomorrow. Get back to figuring out what Owen is planning, and how Holzmann, Rye, and the U-Store-It fit into it all.
He does his best to make small talk with his new coworker. His name is Darren, and he joined the force in his forties, leaving a job as a mall cop to do the real thing. He’d wanted to help make the city a better place and wound up here. The department wasn’t going to train someone that old up the ranks, and now he’s too infirm to do actual patrolling. They can’t fire him, and he refuses to quit until he gets his full pension, so they’ve left him back here.
There is no ventilation in the room, and the body heat combines with the exhaust from the computers to make it unbearably warm, but they must keep the door closed. Company policy.
Between the heat and his lack of sleep, Peter can feel himself fading, so he does what he always does to fill the empty hours. He makes a game for himself. He starts with his chair set to the middle height. With each form that he enters, he counts the number of letters in the final word. If there are an even number, he raises his chair. If odd, he lowers it. The goal is to get his chair either to bottom out or reach its maximum height. He tries not to cheat and look at the last word early, allowing the tension and suspense to carry him through the night.
“You’ll drive us mad with that, son,” Darren says when Peter lets out a small cry of misery after he nearly reaches the full height, only to fall away.
“I’m sorry,” Peter says. “I was just—”
“Just fidgeting,” Darren interrupts. “I get it. I’ve been here long enough. You want to know the secret to making the night pass?” Darren puts the paper he’s currently working through aside to hold Peter’s gaze.
“Sure.” Peter nods.
Darren glances at the door, as though afraid somebody might be listening in, trying to steal his valuable knowledge. He leans in toward Peter, and when he speaks, it is a whisper, barely audible over the humming of the computers.
“Give up,” he says. “They sent you here to die. From the smell of you, you’re halfway there already.”
Darren sits back in his chair, chuckling to himself, and resumes his pecking across the keyboard, laboriously typing in the page, one miserable letter at a time.
Peter tucks his nose into his collar and sniffs. The man is right, but there’s nothing to do about it now. Darren might have been sent here to die, but Peter is being trapped. He is being pinned in place so that Owen can marshal his forces and finish destroying him.
In spite of this—maybe the heat and the exhaustion are making him loopy—Peter feels better than he has in years. He did something today. It was a desperate gambit, but it was novel and exciting and it worked. Peter didn’t wait for the right person to show up to fix his problem. He went and did it himself. He’s a new man with a new outlook. Peter Van Horn doesn’t just sit around. No. He does things. He solves problems. And right now, he stinks to the high heavens.
So he heads to the locker room. He doesn’t have a change of clothes, but there are at least showers. He’s not supposed to shower during his shift—company policy—but he’s not the sort of person who cares about that. Not anymore.
The cold water shocks him awake, and he scrubs away the stink of failure that he’s been stewing in for the last few days. He’ll shower when he needs it, and he’ll burn the overhead lights while he does it. It’s invigorating. The most thrilling moment of his life. He won’t let himself dwell on what that says about him. He’s too busy getting things done to be self-pitying.
Once he’s cleaned and dried, he pulls his stiff, putrescent clothes back on—he briefly considers returning to the records room with only the towel wrapped around his waist, but decides that might be too much, even for this new him—and strolls back to the overheated room and the piles of reports. He grabs a handful of forms from the lowest priority stack. If the department wants to railroad him, then he’s going to do the least important work he can.
CHAPTER 53 Barrett Rye, 11:56 P.M.
The holding cell is a rectangle of cement in the back of the police station that reeks of piss and vodka sweats. There’s a steel toilet in the corner and benches along the wall. Four cells are back here, all identical. I’m in the one for the sleepy drunks.
Owen tells the officer on duty that they picked me up outside a bar where I’d been getting handsy. Nobody wants to press charges, so I’ll be spending the night here before being released in the morning. I try protesting my sobriety to the officer, but my eyes, still struggling through the concussion, won’t dilate properly.
A clock on the wall above the officer’s desk tells me it is just before midnight. I promised to meet up with Cass and help her steal the safe. I promised Holzmann that I would get him back the key that Cass now has. I cut a deal with Laia to betray Holzmann and take the prize for herself. And it would appear that these two cops—who I have also now sworn the key to—struck out on their own as well. A lot of pissed off people are about to get a lot more pissed off, and every single one of them is going to point the blame at me.
I’ll be in this cell for seven more hours. By then, whatever is going to happen will have happened. There’s nothing more I can do. Whoever comes out on top will find me here, and I’ll take whatever punishment they mete out. Jonny Boy and Pickens are both on their own.
Great fucking job, me. You thought you could be someone else. You thought you could be Barrett Rye, confidence man. Instead, you’ve done the only thing you ever do: get people killed and ruin lives. Well fucking played.
CHAPTER 54 Twenty-Seven Years Ago
When I was eight years old I saw a magician doing rope tricks at a birthday party. The magician cut the rope, and he restored it. He cut it again. He restored it again. He remade the world to suit his whims. He bent existence until the errors of the universe were made smooth and whole. I swore that I would learn the secret.
The internet was still in its infancy. I couldn’t go to YouTube and watch somebody explain, so I went to a magic shop. The owner, a middle-aged man with a comb-over and an oiled beard, was excited at my enthusiasm but told me I was too young to be doing the restored rope. He said I didn’t have the dexterity to pull it off, and he tried to sell me the balls and cups instead. I had no interest in the balls and cups. That was a child’s illusion, and I had already mastered it.
He asked me to show him, and so I did. I took the three inverted cups and placed them on the counter with one little rubber ball. The ball went beneath one cup, only to disappear and reappear beneath another. I ran through the variations, producing the ball repeatedly beneath the same cup, splitting it into two, three, or four copies of itself, and causing it to pass through all three cups when stacked on top of each other.
It was trivial, but the shop owner smiled and laughed at each reveal. Once I finished, he took the illusion away and told me that I had real talent. He asked me if I really wanted to learn the secret of the rope, and I nodded yes. Absolutely. Desperately. I trembled as he took out a ball of twine and cut off a length to demonstrate. I had proved myself worthy, he said, and he would now bestow on me this great boon.
He performed it for me first, and it was just as wondrous as I remembered. He stretched the twine out and tied the two ends together, forming a loop. Scissors, produced from nowhere, cut the loop and then disappeared, leaving two pieces of string tied in the middle. His fist closed around the knot, and when he removed it, the knot was gone. The string was whole again.
I understood illusions. I knew that I wasn’t making a little ball teleport from beneath one cup to another. There were multiple balls, and I chose which one to reveal when. But this was not an illusion. This was true magic. What else could it be? The shopkeeper broke something and then, through an act of overwhelming will, caused it to be made whole. I squealed with delight and demanded he tell the method.
After he did, I went home and cried for an hour.
The rope wasn’t restored. It never was. Never could be. Once he cut it, the two pieces could never be put together again. The trick was that he didn’t cut it in half. One of the pieces was cut to only be a few inches long. When he grabbed the knot, he gathered up that little fragment and palmed it away, leaving only the one longer piece behind. An audience won’t notice that a few inches have been taken off a four-foot rope, so they think that it’s still whole. But it isn’t. It is less than it was before, and each time you perform the trick, a little bit more of the rope goes away until all you’re left with is a pocketful of scraps. Some things are simply broken, and nothing can change that.
MONDAY
CHAPTER 55 Seventeen Months Ago
I was in the hospital, and the nurse told me I had a visitor. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but I caught sight of him through the window of my room, and he had a bouquet of yellow and white flowers and that crooked smile, so I told the nurse to let him in.
“My guys really did a number on you, didn’t they?” he said once the nurse left and the door was closed.
“They did what they had to,” I said. I wanted to shrug stoically, as though it was no big deal, but it hurt too much to move. “That guy was willing to hire hitmen. Now he doesn’t think I’m part of the group that screwed him over.”
“Even so,” Mickey said. “You helped me out, and it landed you here. I owe you.”
“You shouldn’t be here. We’re not supposed to be talking to each other.”
His smile fell, but his eyes didn’t leave mine. He put the flowers down on the table and stepped back.
“Do you want me to go?” he asked.
He was nervous. I was used to people being nervous around me, but this was something else. He wasn’t scared of me. And I didn’t want him to leave.
“Were the flowers too much?” he asked. I hadn’t answered his question, and his nerves now made him fill the silence. “The flowers were too much.”
“The flowers are lovely,” I said.
The smile broke open across his face again. “Oh, good,” he said. He looked at his hands, and he blushed. “You know there used to be a whole language of flowers? People had entire conversations through nothing but bouquets.”
“What do these mean?”
The blush spread down his neck, and he muttered something about not knowing. He’d just seen them in the gift shop downstairs. I asked if he wanted to sit, and he did, and we talked about nothing in particular until I grew tired. I don’t remember him leaving, but when I woke up it was night, and visiting hours were over. He was gone, but the flowers were still there.
My phone told me the yellow ones were daisies, which could represent innocence or true love, but could also be sent as a message saying I will keep your secret. The white flowers were peonies, an emblem of bashfulness and apology.
The next day I checked myself out. I should have stayed longer, but I didn’t want to keep the bed from someone who might truly need it. As I was being discharged, the nurse told me my boyfriend was waiting downstairs to take me home. I didn’t correct her. Mickey was there with a wheelchair, and I let him push me around. It made him happy.
“Make sure he gets plenty of rest,” the nurse said. “Lots of soups and liquid foods.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mickey said with a salute and a grin, and he wheeled me out of the hospital.
“I looked up the flowers,” I said as we approached his car. I don’t know why I said it, and as soon as I did I realized I might have embarrassed him. He’d told me those things in code so he wouldn’t have to confront them, and now I’d thrown it in his face. He didn’t say anything, but he moved his fingers from the wheelchair handle to my shoulder. They were warm through the cloth of my shirt.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told him, once he’d gotten me back to my apartment. I was sitting up in bed with my back to the wall. A can of chicken soup was warming in the microwave. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Of course I do,” he said, and he sat in the bed next to me and took my hand. His fingers looked tiny and fragile. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
Blood pounded in my wrist. I wanted to ask more, but I was afraid.
“You’re not like anyone else I know,” Mickey said. He was talking quickly. The words raced to get out before his brain could catch up. “You’re not like the other guys who do this work. I’m sorry if this is forward, but I feel like if I don’t say it, it’s gonna burn inside me, and I’ll never forgive myself, so here I go. I don’t have anyone to talk to. Anyone who understands me. I’m lonely, and I’m miserable, and I have a whole host of issues, and if that’s too much for you, I get it, and I’ll leave as soon as you eat your soup and I’ll never come back. But if you’re OK with it, I’d like to stay, and I’d like to get to know you, because I think that maybe you feel a little bit the same way.”
He looked me in the eye, and his hand shook against mine. I didn’t know what to say. I had resigned myself to this life. I didn’t enjoy it, but I was good at it, and I had nearly convinced myself that being good at something was the same as enjoying it. I could tell him to leave and go back to that lie, and eventually it might become true. Or I could tell him to stay, and I would never believe it again, but maybe I wouldn’t have to.
The microwave dinged, and I still hadn’t said anything. His hand slipped away as he stood and walked to the kitchen. He found the drawer with the spoons, brought me the soup, and put it on the table beside my bed. He looked at me, giving me one last chance, and I said nothing. I wanted to be brave, to do what he had done, but I didn’t know how.
I could see the regret in his eyes. The shame. He shouldn’t have said anything. It was too much, and he’d scared me off. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t. He hadn’t. I was right here. But I didn’t say anything.
“Take care of yourself,” he said. He was standing at the door, about to leave. And then he was in the hallway. The door was closing, and I was too late.
“Wait!” I called, and it hurt my ribs to be that loud, but I didn’t care.
The door was about to latch. He caught it and pushed it open again, and he stood there looking at me. I smiled, and I asked him a question.
“Do you want to see a magic trick?”
He could have left. So many times he could have left, and he never did.
CHAPTER 56 Peter Van Horn, 12:39 A.M.
Peter is halfway through copying the report into the computer before he realizes what he’s looking at. It’s an intake form describing an interaction with a belligerent leading to a drunk-and-disorderly arrest. But that’s not the important part. What’s important are the names of the belligerent and the arresting officer. Barrett Rye and Owen Oster, respectively. Peter still doesn’t know how Barrett is connected to all this, but he is a part of it, and he seems to be out of favor with Owen.
