by Zaslow Crane
I opened my eyes…
I I opened my eyes…
I couldn’t see much. The room was very dark. At first, my eyes wouldn’t even focus and nearly all I could see, dimly, was a chair. It was right in front of me and was a dark-colored, unoccupied easy-chair; my chair in my living room.
I heard soft music playing somewhere nearby and then… the sounds of someone making a cocktail. For some odd reason, my mind clung onto the sounds of ice clinking in that glass. I discovered that my mouth was very dry. I was thirsty.
In another few moments, a figure moving in close, breezing past me and settled gently but with a sort of finality into the chair before me. I recognized him. What happened?
“Mars?…What’s going on?” It was difficult to talk. My voice sounded like a frog.
He was fairly new. I’d met him at the office about six months ago. He graduated a few years back from Wharton in Philly, I’d heard that from the HR people. So I allowed him to work under me on a couple of projects.
He was pretty good, but when I needed him later, he was usually working with another group.
He seemed pretty ambitious and affable enough without going all “sales-type” on you.
I’d always felt that Mars was an odd first name, but 25 years ago, or so, was an odd time… I chalked it up to that, on the odd occasion I gave him any thought at all.
“Hi, Darren. Just hold all your questions for a moment or two. I’ll explain everything, and I’ll do it quickly.”
He took a sip from his glass, savoring the amber liquid.
He regarded it and then me.
“I’d offer you one, but… that comes later.”
He set the drink down carefully. I noticed that he used a coaster. I don’t know why that detail stuck in my head, but it did.
He leaned forward to look at me closely, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely together.
“I’ve been studying your career here at B.B.Y.& W. Impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“More like a meteoric rise. You’re a shooting star, there Darren.”
“Again. Thank you. How about untying me and I’ll forget that you did all this in the first place.”
“Not just yet…but …soon. Anyway, as I studied more closely, and subsequently dug a bit deeper, I found out some things; some things that I’ll bet you’d rather not come to light…”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mars…”
“Sure you do. You’ve been at B.B.Y.&W. for just shy of four years, right?”
“Yeah…” I wanted to scratch an itch on my nose, but for some reason, I couldn’t raise my hand. It simply wouldn’t obey…
Meanwhile, Mars started talking again.
“So your first direct supervisor, was an Abel Mulalley, right?”
“Mulcahee… Yes…”
“OH, yes, I jotted it down incorrectly the first time, and it’s stuck in my mind the wrong way, now. Do you ever do that?”
“Yeah…Sometimes…”
“Anyway, after his death; his suicide, it was discovered that he had a very serious leather fetish. He had a hidden room and everything in his apartment was leather. The secret room had floggers and whips and chains. Can you imagine when the Real Estate agent was readying the place for sale, when she found that…that weirdness?”
“I don’t know what you…Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, sure. I guess it was awkward.”
“Awkward? Shooting himself on his 15th floor balcony? Awkward? Yes, if you’re into understatement, “awkward” might be a word you could employ. I was thinking more…“horrific”.”
He sipped at the liquid in his glass…
“I was also thinking private investigator. You hired one to tail him and learn his secrets, didn’t you?”
“So?” I said, waiting for the shoe to drop.
“So? Well, while digging, I found regular payments from him to a blind account right here in New York. Every week…But then, the payments got bigger and bigger…until…”
He put two fingers next to his head, pistol style.
“Then…BANG! Right?”
“If you say so…”
“Well, I was hired originally because of my internet skills. I’m very good at following a scent, as it were…even if it’s a cyberscent. Guess I’m like some sort of bloodhound when it comes to that.”
I tensed, knowing finally where this was going.
“Do you know who I found at the end of that winding, convoluted trail?”
I swallowed hard. I was very thirsty.
“Me,” I croaked.
“Excellent! I’m glad you decided not to play innocent and force me to drag this out forever… well, since you were working directly under good old Abel, guess who knew the current and future projects best? Guess who was moved into his old slot mere days later…forty-eight hours of mourning, and then, get back to work, eh?”
“Ummmhmmm.”
“Your next superior, who happened to be the junior VP for the Eastern Seaboard and all of Canada, a very important job… That was Warner Luke, right.?”
“Yesss.”
“He had a wife and three kids; was on the board at his church, and ran a charity in his spare time. What a great guy, huh? A credit to his community…What was it that happened to him?”
“He died in a car accident.”
“That’s right. Hit and run, too. Terrible tragedy. He and his wife killed, one kid in the hospital for weeks…hoping to survive. She did, you know. She won’t be walking anywhere in this lifetime, though. Did you know that?”
“Yes. I sent flowers…”
“Flowers? Oh well, that makes up for it all, doesn’t it?”
“You can’t blame me for that!”
Mars gave me a look that clearly said that he could. Then he took a long, appreciative sip of his drink. He looked at the drink, and then at me.
“We haven’t time just now, but I’ll get you a nice drink soon, so sit tight. I have more I want to tell you.”
He set the drink back down on the coaster. Just before it touched down I noticed a droplet of water; a condensation splash there.
He scratched his head, looking affable again.
“I can’t blame you…That’s what you’re telling me, right? Well, they were hit by an old, old Chrysler. Musta weighed 4000 pounds. Stolen car, though. It was called in to the cops and everything. Why would you call in a piece of crap that someone hot-wired. It was lucky to be running properly judging by the extreme age…They don’t make two ton cars anymore. The driver barreled right through a stop sign going almost fifty in a residential area. Creamed the little Toyota that good old Warner drove! I believe they call it: “t-boning”…Almost bent it completely in two!” “So?” I coughed out. “That’s too bad, but none of my doing.”
He made a face as if to say that he wasn’t buying.
“Rocco Camessi? Name ring a bell? No? Well, how about Ronde’ Camessi? I found them both in Ryker’s. One is doing a long stretch – twenty plus; the other will be out in around fifteen months. They got caught bein’ part of some slam and scam insurance scheme, where someone died. Sound like any accident you can think of?”
“Obviously, I’m supposed to say Warner Luke…
“Bingo! Very good! You put the pieces together! Excellent! Only, I did it weeks ago. Remember that day I called in sick? I heard that you were all upset that I wasn’t there pulling my weight? Well, I was visiting Ryker’s, having a chat with the Camessi brothers.”
“You couldn’t have gotten anything actionable from either Camessi. You can’t take me to a court over Abel’s death either. The D.A. will throw it out before we start walking up the courthouse steps!”
“Actionable? Oh no! No no no… But I’m getting ahead of myself. Bear with me. A good story has a beginning, a middle and we’re coming to the end….”
After Luke’s death, you were promoted again, and again into your boss’s position; Who else, right? It was, again because you knew the details of the upcoming operations intimately. Junior V.P. in only two years! Amazing!”
“I’ve got twenty-four years experience in this business….” My voice sounded like sandpaper itself.
“Yes, but even you have to admit that that was a meteoric rise. It placed you just under the Senior V.P., Al Winter. Now we’re talkin’ some real power. And, you’re just heartbeats away from having that power, right?”
I wanted out of here. This was too weird; too frightening. I couldn’t feel or see any restraints, but as I tried to get up, but my muscles wouldn’t obey me.
Mars must have noticed my discomfort.
“Oh, don’t bother. I gave you a pretty serious dose of muscle relaxants; very specific chemicals. I want you to hear what I’m saying, but I didn’t want the potential problems of actually tying you up…rope fibers, ligature marks, and such… Besides, I was never very good at knots. They asked me to leave Boy Scouts after the third time I failed going for my knot-tying badge. Long time ago. Water over the bridge, as they say…”
Nobody says that!
Mars paused and regarded me with distant interest.
“I’m going to get a refill. Excuse me for just a second. He got up and turned on the nearby lamp, dispelling the gloom a bit. Impotently, I looked around my apartment!
I’ve got a pistol hidden in the back of both of these chairs, if I could just move to get it…
Mars returned in a bit. I’d made no discernible progress.
“You were out for quite a while, Darren. It gave me time to search your place. I found eight semi automatic pistols hidden, here and there… Do you know, I think you have a gun fetish, Darren…”
He smiled.
“The one hidden in the clown mask from Honduras was inspired, by the way. Great choice of hiding place. Are you afraid? Do you have…enemies?”
Eight? I thought feverishly. I’d hidden eleven!
He set the drink down on my coaster again.
“I really liked the Smith & Wesson model 41 that was hidden inside the seam on the right side of your dark red velvet chair. That was inspired, you know? A small, light but effective weapon right where you might need it in a hurry…and there was the ugly old revolver I found in the kitchen. What’s up with that, Darren? I figured you for a semiauto sort of guy…”
I felt like a captured bug: helpless and hopeless. And unlike a bug, while I knew that I couldn’t escape, I know that nothing good was going to happen to me in the next few minutes.
“So…a month ago, weird things start happening to Alexander Winter…your boss. He comes in flustered and late telling peculiar stories of intruders who just come in and break an item and leave… almost like clockwork. And it only happens when everyone is out. Weird. The cops don’t really respond because there’s no proof of breaking and entering and the items broken weren’t valuable enough to raise to their attention.
He’s just in process of upgrading to a high end security camera system, when, his eight year old is snatched off the street in broad daylight.
Can you imagine? Right off the street! Again a stolen vehicle…a van, this time. Nobody saw anything, it happened so fast. She’s returned a couple of hours later, left crying at a bus stop in Queens. A call came in from a prepaid cell telling her parents where to find her.
They take her home and discover a note pinned on the back of her underwear. I never got to see the note. It hasn’t been entered into evidence as a computer file yet, so I can’t hack in and get it.”
He looked right at me pointedly. “You know what it said, though. Don’t you? I lied to get into Ryker’s, but getting into the cop-shop’s evidence lockup? That’ll be a toughie. Suffice it to say that the Winters were informed that even worse would happen to them, and their family if Alexander didn’t exercise his stock options immediately and resign. He lost millions in those trades, but resign he did! And… who benefited most from Winter’s departure? You did, my friend. You did.”
“There were lots of others who benefitted…”
“OH, sure. They made a few bucks buying up what he had to sell and a huge discount, but you…you were the main beneficiary by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. The rung on the later above you had just become empty!”
He looked around the living room.
“Very nice place, by the way. You have excellent taste. Hopefully, once I start making some serious coin, I can cultivate the same sorts of perks of business…”
I tried and tried to put my hand behind me; to dig down and come up with the pistol in my hand. I pictured myself shooting him, calling the cops and explaining that this coworker had cajoled his way in to my house only to begin making very credible threats.
I was forced to shoot him! I could hear myself saying.
My hands twitched. Was the stuff he injected me with…was it wearing off? I kept trying to get my hand down the back of the chair. Maybe he hadn’t found the gun I hid there…
“So…now you’re the VP. Almost three weeks on the job. I’d be impressed if I hadn’t already been investigating. There’s no way to cover all traces of a crime you know… That’s why I’m being so careful.
“Oh, I get it,” I croaked. You want me to bring you along. Okay. No problem. As of now, you’re my protégé’. I’ll groom you to follow me. You’ll get all my perks and I can get you a terrific bump in salary. My word…as VP, you know… We probably ought to wait five or six months so it doesn’t look weird.”
“Interesting thought, Darren, but I wonder if I could trust you. Especially under these…”
He gestured to me, sitting immobile in my chair.
“Circumstances… And given your past…Hmmm. No, I think I need to go a different way on this… Ahem… You could easily drink six or eight ounces of scotch, normally – this is excellent scotch, by the way.”
He picked up the drink. The ice clinked again in the glass… The sound was something that made my ears perk up every time it happened. I continued to try to force my muscles to move; to seek the weapon that was almost within my grasp.
“You could drink six or eight ounces of scotch and be slightly buzzed… You wouldn’t really be drunk. But what if we were to bypass your liver? What then? Well… then eight ounces of scotch becomes a shitload of booze for your body to deal with. I’ve done my research.
The compound I used should be mostly gone in eight hours and what might be left should be masked by the alcohol… the drinks, the many, many drinks it’s going to look as though you’ve had tonight.”
He smiled but there was no warmth in it.
“Oh…Did you hear? Bonnie Sikorski, your replacement after you moved up the ladder… She made me her second. She loves my work ethic and attention to detail. I’m working under the junior VP, just like you…”
He held up a syringe. It was big. It looked as though it might hold three ounces of liquid. It was full of an amber liquid.
My scotch!
“I’ve got three of these… If I were to inject you with all of them in the middle of the back of your neck, I’d have four injection sites to worry about. The one that I used to knock you out and then, these others to make you drunk…dead drunk. The inquest might find them, unless something were to happen to the back of your head… Maybe you were drunk, as I suggested, and decided to take a shower…? The bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house. I’ve looked at your shower… Very, very nice, but it has lots of hard surfaces and hard right angles in it, too. And the floor in the shower can be very slippery. Potentially, very dangerous. You don’t have any of those stick-on things for traction, Darren. That’s pretty careless…You might slip and have a bad fall.”
“You’re going to get me drunk? This is your big plan?” I croaked. My throat was working a bit better by now.
He frowned and made it clear that I wasn’t following carefully enough.
“No…No…you misunderstand completely. You’re going to die today. Tonight. But I need it to look like a drunken accident, not a murder.”
In all this time, part of me knew. However, to hear it spelled out so succinctly, chilled my soul. I tried harder to move my hand; to find the gun. I could feel sweat breaking out on my brow. I hoped he wouldn’t notice!
“So, I’m going to inject you with a few syringes and you’re going to get very drunk, very fast. You might die just from the alcohol, but what would we say about the injection marks?
Hmmm? That’s why I brought along this aluminum baseball bat! See? It screws together! And you know the part of this plan I like the best? After I turn the back of your neck and head to hamburger, the shower will run and run…You were taking a shower as you fell and hit your head, you know. And…the water will run for an hour or more before anyone notices that something’s wrong! The entire site will be washed clean!”
He finished the drink and the ice clinked yet again.
That sound!
“This, of course along with the syringes and everything else I’ve touched, like this glass, will go into a small, discrete duffle bag. I will have never visited this apartment! “I” will be home doing prep work for my new boss, Bonnie S.; and our upcoming project. I think, under the recent series of sad circumstances at B.B.Y.&W., that I ought to wait for Bonnie to …ummm…leave… for at least a year. What do you think?”
I was hyperventilating. I couldn’t help it. I fought to find a way to stay alive!
“Wait!” I croaked.
He didn’t even pause.
He was on a roll now!
“I really am impressed. Nothing was too outrageous for your avarice; your ambition.
You hired a detective for the first guy…Thugs and killers for the second…And while I haven’t found them yet, I’m guessing a different set of thugs and killers and break-in artists for the third. I’ve learned a lot! You really know how to get ahead in business. People say that this is a cutthroat business, but I’ve never seen anyone take that thought to heart like you did! Thank you for showing me the way! Working with you has been quite an education. They don’t teach this at Wharton. This is Real World Info. You’ve given me a Masters Class, my friend. Thank you!”
He stood with a syringe in his hand. He grasped my hair and forced my head forward. I tried to resist, but I still couldn’t fight him; I still couldn’t move!
He leaned down and whispered into my ear as I felt the pinprick of the first needle pierce my skin.
“By the way, I found the guns in the chairs. One poked me as I sat down waiting for you to wake up…”
I felt an odd sensation. I assumed that it was the liquor going into my body…The wrong way.
Suddenly I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I suppose I sounded more like I was coughing, but part of me found this entire thing perversely funny!
Eventually Mars paused, partway through my first injection.
I felt woozy already but I kept on laughing.
He was intrigued. Even though I was close to death, I found this hilarious.
“What’s so funny, there Darren?”
I slurred badly.
“That’s for me to know, and for you to find out, old buddy…old…Mars. Stupid name by the way. Oh shoot. I guess I’d better tell you.”
My tongue fought me; it wouldn’t cooperate.
I knew what I wanted to say: I wanted to tell him that he’d never get away with it. That we could then go back to my idea: Plan B. I could make him my protégé’. More importantly, I could keep on living.
“You better stop there, Mars…. It’s funny…You don’t wanna kill me.”
I looked him right in the eye. Mars made a face and pushed the plunger down on the first syringe. It caused another ounce or so of my lovely smoky scotch to flow directly into my body, bypassing my liver.
That’s it, then.
Then, he hefted the second syringe with an evil look in his eyes. If only he’d been a little bit slower. If only I could have spoken up sooner, we both might have lived.
Anyone so paranoid to have multiple guns hidden throughout his home, surely would have CCTV security system as well. And someone really paranoid, might have a failsafe on it; a failsafe by which, if I don’t input a series of numbers on a certain keypad, once per day, the vid file goes directly to my lawyer and from there to the cops.
As of last year, the death penalty is again legal in New York.
See you soon, Mars.
Stupid name.
Copyright Zaslow Crane | ZaslowCrane.com
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