The Protocol: A Prescription to Die, page 16
With the touch of a button, he could instantly see live video from every square inch of the interior along with panoramic views of the building’s exterior. He could turn off any computer in the office, lock or unlock any door, and turn on the light in the bathroom while at the same time turn one off in the kitchen. The fire suppression technology consisted of an aragonite system that simply suffocated the fire by depriving it of oxygen. With a three digit code entered on his phone followed by a zone number, he could quickly and easily remove every atom of oxygen in a particular area, a group of rooms, or an entire floor in seconds. The key was to protect the technology at all costs. Computers did not need oxygen to work, and they especially didn’t react well to the water used in regular fire systems. Eat just had to make sure there were no humans in the area when the system turned on and there were several failsafe systems in place to prevent that from happening.
Eat passed by the entrance to his office, and continued up the stairs to the building’s third floor. This was the his primary living space: living room, kitchen, home theater, three bathrooms, a wet sauna, a dry sauna, a small lap pool, and a hot tub outside on a four-season deck accessed from the living room. His second floor, the building’s fourth, consisted of his library, three full baths, four bedrooms, and another four-season deck outside of the master bedroom. Before he reached the entrance, Eat turned on his kitchen lights, put on some of his favorite music, and tilted the window blinds open at a 30.546 degree angle. All of this was accomplished by pressing a few buttons on his phone. And all was done before he even opened the front door.
When he first moved in, Eat’s home wasn’t even remotely close to being the type profiled in Architectural Digest. Now that Andy had been living here for awhile, it would probably make grade. He didn’t like the homes profiled in the magazine where it seemed as if no one lived there. Things were too neat. Too organized. Too much like a museum instead of someone’s home. Homes with bookshelf-lined walls, but having only a handful of books.
Eat liked his stuff to be out and about. Not cluttered, just easily accessible. Along with his pen, his stuff was his security blanket, and God help anyone who tried to change or relocate it.
Andy had tried.
Once.
She had tried to organize his books. To take some off of the shelves and put them in boxes so the shelves weren’t so full.
But as she pulled books off, Eat put them back on. To an outsider looking in, they would have thought it was a comedy routine.
It was simple.
Eat liked his books.
Eat walked into his kitchen, and placed the four bags of groceries that he had strung on his arm onto the countertop. Tonight was going to be special. Or at least he wanted it to be. He would never consider himself a great cook, but with Andy’s help, he had learned to become adequate. It had only taken 5.436 months from the time Andy started to teach him the basics until he could make a full-blown dinner with a vegetable, starch, and some sort of meat.
Best of all, tonight’s plan didn’t involve heating anything in the microwave.
Tonight was the second anniversary of the first time he built up enough courage to give her a kiss. And that, in Eat’s opinion, deserved a nice dinner, despite the current events. Over the past few weeks, he had scoured the Internet for recipe sites, and created a menu: roasted brussel sprouts and cauliflower, au gratin potatoes, and broiled chicken breasts with rosemary and fennel. He had even stopped at the liquor store and picked up her favorite bottle of Chianti. He prayed that he wouldn’t hurt himself before she got home.
The task looked daunting. Where most may need liquid encouragement to begin a big project, Eat preferred something crunchy. He pulled a box of Cookie Crisp cereal from the pantry, poured himself a bowl, stuffed a handful in his mouth, and started studying the recipes he’d printed out.
The first task was slicing the brussel sprouts into quarters and soaking them in salt water, supposedly to remove the bitterness.
Eat took another handful of cereal cookies.
This was not going to be easy.
*
Things were progressing nicely, and there hadn’t been any fires or explosions when he was interrupted. Eat’s phone rang while grating the cheese for the potatoes. He had a pot of potatoes boiling “until they were almost fork tender” as the recipe told him, a cookie sheet with a layer of parchment ready for the vegetables, a handful of cereal, and a cold soda. He licked the cheese off of his fingers the best he could, and answered the phone. Although he really didn’t want to talk to anyone in the middle of his project, he decided against ignoring the call after looking at the caller id.
It was Ben Williamson, his financial advisor.
Eat pressed the speakerphone icon, and transferred the call to the surround sound system. He needed all of his hands to work the kitchen gadgets, and he wasn’t comfortable enough to hold the phone to his ear, and use a knife at the same time. Ben was now on seven speakers.
“Hi Ben. What’s up?”
“Hey Eat. Who have you been pissing off?”
Eat stopped stirring the potatoes. His curiosity was piqued.
“Not sure what you’re talking about, Ben.”
“Well, all of your accounts have been frozen.”
“Frozen?”
“Frozen. As in the money cannot be accessed for any reason. It says the IRS, DHS, and HHS have all placed holds on all of your liquid assets. This is a first for me. I’ve never seen a consecutive freeze ordered by three federal agencies. The IRS? Definitely. Maybe Homeland Security if you’re a terrorist. Never seen Health and Human Services doing this before though. Like I asked. Who’d ya piss off?”
Eat was already thinking beyond what Ben was telling him.
“What about the off shore accounts?”
“Those are safe. They don’t have jurisdiction there.”
“Mom’s?”
“Same. Frozen solid.”
“What do we do?”
“I think you’d better come down to the office.”
Eat looked at the clock on cable receiver. It was 3:40 in the afternoon.
“Give me twenty minutes. I’ll be right there,” said Eat as he ended the call.
“What else can go wrong?” he said to his reflection in the refrigerator’s stainless steel door. Something like this affected his and Andy’s future, and had to be dealt with. He hoped his meeting with Ben wouldn’t take too long and that he’d be able to get home before Andy did, and still have a surprise waiting for her.
*
The warehouse had an underground parking garage that he and Andy used for their cars, and also storage for excess furniture resulting from their combined households. It was the graveyard to his old furniture that Andy wouldn’t allow in her vicinity.
She called it vintage 1970’s Winnebago.
It was his intention to donate it to charity but he just had to find the time to get it over to the drop-off. Andy didn’t believe anyone would take it, free or not.
Whereas Andy liked shoes and rock concert souvenir t-shirts, Eat liked cars. When it came to them, his will power was non-existent. So far, Eat had a collection of four: a BMW 650xi, a Mini Cooper Roadster, a Ford F-150 Raptor, and a Jeep Wrangler Arctic. Before his father died, he had test driven a silver Audi R8. He loved it. Eat had no clue about the type of engine under its hood, but the car had some of the sexiest headlights he’d ever seen on a car. When Andy saw the price tag, she did the math and said she’d need more closet space for her one thousand pairs of new shoes if he ever bought it.
“I have sexy headlights too and they don’t cost the same as a house,” she said.
Eat decided to wait.
For now.
Andy had a point.
Her headlights were pretty fascinating, and he rather enjoyed putting on the brights.
All of the keys were in a bowl next to the microwave. He reached in and pulled out the first set that his fingers came in contact with, the Coop’s.
Eat shook his head.
The Cooper wasn’t quite right. He put them back in the bowl and began spelunking for the Wrangler’s keys. He didn’t really feel in a whimsical, cherry red Cooper mood. Eat was in a brown, run-over-whatever-was-in-his-way, Wrangler mood. Not only was someone interrupting his surprise for Andy, but their finances, and his mother’s, were being screwed with.
He didn’t appreciate that.
The Wrangler was big, beefy, and had a testosterone-filled rumble.
The Cooper?
Not so much.
It buzzed more than grumbled.
With its clearance and extra wide tires, the Wrangler could run over anything in his way and leave a nice tread pattern to boot. That’s the way he felt right now. He wanted to run something over and that wasn’t possible in the Cooper, at least nothing of substance more than four inches high.
CHAPTER 48
Butch’s booming heart kept tempo with his growing anxiety. Sweat rained down his face and dripped off of his chin onto the black tar roof and his boots despite temperatures barely in the forties. He wasn’t sure if it was his thumping heart he heard, or the steady rhythm of sweat droplets landing on his leather boots. He shivered and clenched his arms around his bearish chest to keep warm. It didn’t help, as the cold wasn’t causing the chills, but the thought of the task that lie in front of him.
Butch was perched on the roof of an old warehouse at the intersection of I-94 and Broadway, directly across the street from 314159 Enterprises. From his vantage point, he could see the front entrance and the building’s very large silver roll-up garage door. He looked at his watch. It was 3:45 and he had to leave by 4:30 as his shift at the club started at 5:00. He hoped to be finished long before then as Barbara would surely be pissed if this wasn’t resolved today. He opened his backpack and took out the picture that Barbara had handed him last night, and studied it for yet another time. It was his afternoon’s assignment and the reason he was camped on the roof of an abandoned warehouse on the edge of Minneapolis’ ‘hood. The man in the picture wasn’t bad looking. Kinda plain. Warm smile. Cute-ish. He looked like one of his old college professors and was even dressed in a turtleneck sweater and tweed jacket. He was just missing the black glasses. Butch wondered what he’d done to make Barbara so mad that she’d want him dead.
Butch heard a distinct squeak echo between the buildings; then a slight movement caught his attention.
It was opening.
The garage door across the street was rolling up. From where he sat, Butch could see inside of the garage. A large Jeep Wrangler, with a winch on the front bumper, was slowly making its way out of the garage. Whoever was at the wheel had decided to withstand the weather and go topless. The jeep might have been naked but the driver was fully clothed and in full view to Butch. There was just a windshield and a four-point roll-bar to contend with. This was Butch’s lucky day.
Since leaving the army, Butch hadn’t looked at his gun. As the security guard at the nightclub, he had a baton and a can of pepper spray at his side, nothing with bullets. He’d been forced to palm his baton once and that was enough to quiet the commotion outside of the club. Even drunks became reasonable when face to face with Butch’s towering presence. Today was different though, and he was going to have to do more than just threaten someone with a stream of capsaicin. He pulled his holster out of his backpack, unsnapped the safety strap, and slid the gun out.
The 38-caliber pistol was heavier than he ever remembered it being. He double-checked everything. It was loaded and ready with a bullet chambered.
Butch looked at the driver then glanced at the picture. It was him all right. Barbara said his name was Evan Teague. And she wanted him out of her way.
He sighted his gun on his target. The afternoon sun was bright, but not so bad as to affect his aim. The traffic on the opposite side of the street was another story. The sun glinted off their windshields and focused it into his eyes. It caused him to wince with each passing car.
Butch looked down at the picture of his target again. He wondered if Evan had a wife and kids. He wondered if Evan’s parents loved him, and if Evan loved them in return. Butch wished Barbara had never told him the name of the man in the picture. He was better off knowing him simply as his “assignment.” Now, guilt began to envelop Butch’s entire being.
Finally, both the traffic and view of the man cleared; the Wrangler started to move into the street.
Butch pulled in a deep breath and held it.
He steadied his hands, just as the army taught him.
Butch squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER 49
Merging onto Broadway from his garage always proved interesting. Especially when he had to make a left and cross a lane of traffic as he was trying to do now.
Eat’s problem was patience, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Eat hated waiting for anything, and sitting in traffic was almost as bad as waiting in line at an ATM.
Both were excruciatingly painful.
Andy had tried to teach him deep breathing. She claimed it would help calm him when his lack of patience began to rear its ugly head. While he sat waiting for traffic to clear, Eat replayed her lesson in his head.
“Exhale completely. Close your mouth though.”
Four more cars turned onto Broadway.
“Inhale for four seconds. No, not that fast.”
Traffic wasn’t getting any better. Cars were not disappearing the way he wanted them to. The way they were supposed to after having breathed so deep he felt his toes invert.
“Now hold for seven.”
Two trucks approached that could turn the Wrangler to scrap metal and Eat into meatloaf with plenty of red sauce if he pulled out now. The seven seconds were beginning to feel like an eternity, and Eat was positive that his eyeballs would pop out of his head and roll into traffic before he did.
“Exhale for eight. Through your nose. Keep your mouth closed, Eat.”
Three more cars approached, all driven by old women who could barely see over the steering wheel going two miles per hour in a thirty mile per hour zone. They were definitely not deep breathing.
Repeat until you feel better or pass out.
Right now, Eat desperately wanted to pass out. Not from deep breathing and holding his breath, but from shear lack of forward motion.
Eat let the clutch out a bit, pressed the gas, inched further into the street, and craned his neck to scan further down both sides of Broadway. He looked again in both directions. Things were definitely improving. The trucks were gone. The old ladies were gone. Finally, there was a break and he was good to go.
At last. The potential of forward momentum presented itself.
He finished exhaling.
When the Wrangler crossed the dashed yellow line and Eat began to turn left into the traffic lane, the world released its bowels, and everything landed smack-dab on Eat’s lap.
The windshield exploded spraying chunks of safety glass into Eat’s face. Panicked, Eat raised his arm in front of his face, further blinding him while at the same time leaving the Wrangler without a sighted driver. Eat’s foot came off of the clutch which fully engaged the transmission and put the behemoth Jeep into unfettered forward motion. To make matters worse, instead of stomping on the brake, Eat’s right foot pressed on the gas. When Eat chose the Wrangler, he had wanted to run something over.
Now he had his wish.
Within seconds after the windshield shattered onto his lap, the Wrangler was traveling at fifteen miles per hour and, since Eat’s foot remained on the gas pedal, it continued its acceleration. Things were quickly moving out of control. When they finally came in contact with the seventeen foot cast aluminum light pole, Eat and the Wrangler were traveling at almost twenty-five miles per hour. When contact was made with the unforgiving aluminum pole, all forward momentum instantly stopped. Eat’s body, however, not understanding physics, but nonetheless bound by its laws, tried to continue its forward movement but was jerked back into the position by the seat belt. At this point Eat was no longer feeling any pain, his body was in shock. The light that was supposed to be hanging seventeen feet above him came careening down onto the hood, spraying glass slivers in every direction. Some embedded themselves in the upholstery; most took residence within Eat. The Wrangler’s air bags deployed with canon-like precision, and prevented Eat from smashing his face against the steering wheel and the torn metal being thrust into the driver’s seat. It also injected the glass shards from the shattered light fixture further into his face, chest, and arms. Eat flopped in the driver’s seat, then slumped onto the passenger’s seat. His right arm was twisted unnaturally behind and above him. Not at the elbow, but at an unnatural halfway point between his shoulder and elbow, as if Eat had grown another joint. The gearshift pressed into his abdomen and roamed around his interior. The engine rumbled and misfired then died; steam and smoke billowed from under the hood.
Eat blinked twice and tried for a third.
Black, inky darkness enveloped him.
CHAPTER 50
“A box of rocks.”
“What?”
“A box of rocks. You are about as dumb as a fucking box of rocks.”
It hadn’t taken Barbara long to find out. The minute she’d heard that Teague wasn’t in a dirt bed turning to mulch, she had gone ballistic and ordered Butch to her office the following morning. Now Butch sat in the brown chair strategically placed in front of Barbara’s desk, and endured the unrelenting verbal beating spewing from her mouth.
Butch was sure that she’d had the chair custom made to be the most uncomfortable one known to mankind. No chair could have been purposely made this confining and low to the ground. Even though he was more than a foot taller than the bitch currently spewing multiple four-letter adjectives at him, he found himself forced to look upwards and into her unflattering, flaring nostrils, and watch her nose hairs squirm with each exhale of her fetid breath.
