First Class Killing

Chapter 42

STEWART’S DOOR WAS LOCKED WHENITRIED the knob, but I knew he was in there. I heard his stereo pounding. I thought about crashing through the window but decided to go with a knock. I didn’t need the element of surprise, not with Bo’s Glock in my waistband.

Alarmingly, Stewart wasn’t surprised at all to see me. He stepped aside without comment and let me in, then headed for the back room. “What you want is back here.”

I stood for a moment, trying to decide if the fact that he had expected me was a bad thing. Angel had obviously filled him in. Ultimately, I decided it didn’t matter. I wasn’t leaving.

Back in the bedroom, Stewart was watching Jamie’s video. He’d turned his stereo off, so the sound track was clearly audible. He froze the picture when he saw me, hit a button on his keyboard, and brought up a list of ten or twelve e-mail addresses.

“This is the distribution list Angel gave me for this little art house film.” His voice had a sharp edge of confidence, as if he had total control. It showed in his eyes, too. “Take a look.”

My e-mail address was on the list. So was Gina’s. I saw the address for Jamie’s new company and what looked like Sean’s private school. There was an address for St. Anthony’s Parish and-my stomach turned to stone-my father. I imagined Walter pulling up a copy and feeling vindicated for every nasty thing he’d ever said about Jamie.

“Where did you get these?”

“I hacked into his e-mail account. Watch this.” Stewart used his mouse to move the cursor over the send box…and clicked it. Heclicked it.He sent the messages.

“Did you…what did you do? What did you justdo?”

“Relax. They’re not quite gone yet. They’re locked away in a safe place on the server for now.” Which meant there was nothing I could do from his computer. “I can stop them any time in the next ten minutes. But after that, they’re gone, and nothing can stop them, and no one can get them back. Think of it as a ticking time bomb, and only you can defuse it.”

I felt Bo’s gun against my back. I heard Tristan’s words floating in my head. “Don’t bring a gun unless you intend to use it.” I had to leave it as my last resort.

“What do you want?”

“You still owe me a fuck, you cockteasing bitch.”

I took a step back-recoiled was more like it. “If you were the last asshole on earth, I would not let you lay a finger on me.”

“Is that your final answer?” He reached for the mouse. “I can always send them early.”

“Stop. Wait.”

“The clock is ticking.” He clicked on something else, and the horrid video began again, with all the attendant noise, and I could hear Jamie moaning, and I could hear Angel, gasping and wailing like the porn queen she was.

“Turn that off.” He killed the volume but left the image playing. “I said to turn it off, you…” I couldn’t even think of what to call him. My vocabulary was a little light for this situation. “Child.”

He clicked it off and looked at me. He kept wiping his hands on his pants.

“Ask me for something else,” I said. “Money. I’ll buy it from you.”

“No. All I want is you naked. For an hour.”

“An hour? What would we do for the fifty-eight minutes after you were done?”Ass hole. “I’ll get what I need some other way.”

“You won’t, and besides”-he tapped the monitor-“I thought what you wanted was to stop this mailing. It’s your brother, right? Is that what you said?”

“I didn’t say.”

“She must have told me. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s someone you’re trying to protect. That’s what I know.” He reached for his mouse and clicked around the screen quickly. “Have you seen the whole thing? This one is triple-X-rated. Whoo-hoo.”

“I saw it.”

“I know what you saw. I’m the one who clipped it out for her. There’s more. There is so much more. Believe me, the stuff they did, you don’t want this thing getting out. You sure don’t want his wife looking at it.”

It was hard to keep from imploding, from simply caving in under the weight of a problem that just grew heavier and heavier with each passing second. I looked at his clock. Five minutes, thirty seconds…twenty-nine…twenty-eight. Had we been debating for five minutes? I had to do something. I should walk out is what I should do. I should either pull the gun or walk out. Information. I needed to know more.

“What about Angel’s copy?”

“She doesn’t have one.”

“You’re lying.”

“Okay, I am. But all you need to know right now is that this thing is going out in”-he checked the count-down clock-“five minutes if you don’t get your clothes off right now.”

That was it. I reached around, pulled the gun, and pointed it at his head. It felt kind of good…until he started laughing. “You can shoot me if you want, but this thing will still go out. Or you can give me the gun and let me ball you and make it stop. What’s it going to be?”

He was so repulsive, and he wasn’t as cool as he was pretending to be. There was a thin line of sweat on his upper lip under his downy patch of light red facial hair. I put the gun right against his forehead. “Do you want to die, Stewart? Would it be worth it to die for Angel?”

“No, but I also want to get laid, and I don’t think you have the guts to shoot me.”

He couldn’t turn his head, but his eyes slipped sideways to the screen. I was trying to think fast. An idea was trying to pull itself together in my brain. It must have been somewhere in my subconscious, because the conscious side was pretty panicked at the moment.

“I’ll do it.” I pointed the gun down and stepped back. “Turn it off.”

“Give me the gun.”

I hit the release, popped out the clip, and handed it to him. “I keep the gun, and you keep the clip. That’s the only way it works.”

He took the clip, put it in a desk drawer, pulled a key from somewhere, and locked it. When he turned and found the barrel of the gun up in his eyes again, his head snapped back.

“There’s one round chambered,” I said. “I’ll put it right through your head if you don’t turn that off right now.”

He held perfectly still. He was no longer smiling. “It won’t fire without the clip. It has a disconnector.”

I opened my mouth to answer and closed it again. How the hell did he know about disconnectors?

“This is a Glock, Stewart. It doesn’t have a disconnector.” Thank God for Tristan and his firearms lessons.

“It does,” he said, “if it was purchased in Massachusetts after the regulation went into effect.” Without moving his head, he rolled his eyes up to look at me. “Do you know how old that gun is?”

A geek who knew his firearms. Besides the obvious and immediate drawback, it made me wonder if he had some of his own stashed around. I didn’t know how old the gun was, which meant I didn’t know if I was bluffing or not. Not exactly a strong position to be in.

“Do you want to find out, Stewart?”

He took a deep breath and swallowed hard and reached his hand out. For one precious moment, I thought it was to stop the clock, but it found my thigh instead. “Let’s find out together. Fire off a test round, and we’ll see.” He gave me a squeeze through my blue jeans. When I pulled away, he smiled. I didn’t much like being the canary that had gotten caught, especially given the consequences.

“Two-minute warning.”

I watched him get up and walk toward the bed. With a quick flourish, he pulled off both his buttoned shirt and his T-shirt and dropped them on the floor. He had breasts. He unbuttoned the top button on his pants, then sat down to remove his ratty running shoes and socks.

“What’s it going to be?”

“Shut up.”

Under his showy bravado, I could see the sweaty little social outcast he must have always been, lumbering down the soccer field with his bright red frizzy locks and his hairless, pillowy body under an extra-large jersey made for boys twice his age. A rejection magnet is what he was, and he was so afraid I would walk out the door and leave him there with his hard-on I could almost smell the desperation coming off him. I hated him. How could I let him touch me?

“One minute and counting.”

I reached up to push a strand of hair out of my face and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over his dresser. I still couldn’t get used to my blond hair. It made me feel like a stranger to myself. I remembered how my mother used to push the hair out of my eyes so she could “see my pretty face.” What would she think of me now? I hadn’t done anything yet, and I could already feel the abscess forming on my soul.

It wasn’t worth it. I knew that. It was dangerous. It could change me. It could change the way I thought about sex or how I could be with a man I wanted to be with or how I thought about myself. It could launch a chain of events that couldn’t be stopped and could never be reversed. It could…it was…it wasn’t worth it.

But it was time.

I looked at Stewart looking at me. “Do you have condoms?”

He took in a quiet breath and licked his lips as he reached over to show me the box. He had not come into this unprepared.

“Pop out that round,” he said, nodding at the gun I forgot I even had, “and I’ll turn it off.”

I dropped my hands and pointed the gun at the floor. “Turn it off.”

“Clear the chamber first, and you’d better hurry up.”

I did. The round dropped to the carpet at my feet.

He reached out for the gun. “Let me have it.”

“Fuck you, Stewart. You keep the clip, and I keep the gun, and that’s the only way this works.”

He thought about that. Then he reached over and picked up a remote control next to his bed. I turned around to look at the screen. He’d stopped the clock with twelve seconds remaining.

I went over to my backpack and dropped the Glock in. When I walked back and stood in front of him, I thought he would faint. He couldn’t get his pants off fast enough. I pulled my sweater over my head and started to unbutton my jeans.

He stopped me. “I get an hour. Not a minute less.” I watched him put his hands on me. The sweat glistened around the edges of his palms. I watched him move them over me. I let him touch me wherever he wanted.

“No kissing,” I said. “Don’t touch my face.”

“Your face,” he said, moving me closer, “is not what I’m interested in.”

The large muscles of my back and shoulders, the muscles of resistance, had twisted into a massive knot of dull, aching pain. When I tried to swivel the tension out of my neck, it cracked and popped. But where it hurt most was in my gut. All the terrible thoughts in my head and all the memories of what Stewart had done-of what I had let him do-had slipped down into the boiling, spitting, churning pit of my stomach and hurt so much I was doubled over with my forehead on the steering wheel.

I was still in the parking lot of Stewart’s building. I had dressed as quickly as I could, pulled each article of clothing on with the clear conviction that I would burn it before wearing it again. They all smelled of him, and of me with him, and I wanted nothing more than to find a shower somewhere and wash myself clean. But what I understood, what was making my stomach hurt so much, was knowing that I couldn’t get clean with soap and water.

Jamie’s CD was on the seat next to me. I’d watched Stewart burn the loathsome file onto it. I’d watched as he’d gone through and deleted the same file from several directories. There was no guarantee that he didn’t have copies stashed somewhere, but I had done everything I could think of to erase at least his copies of Jamie’s bad deed. I had done more than I thought I ever could, and I still hadn’t gotten to Angel’s copy.

A wave of dead air came over me, then a disorienting pressure in my face. I closed my eyes, and all I could see was Stewart’s face floating over me and my own looking back at me in his mirror. I saw Robin Sevitch’s battered head and Harvey ’s eyes when he’d said, “Shame on you.” I saw Jamie shattered, and I saw Tristan betrayed, and I started to think there wasn’t anything I had done so far that was right. Then I saw Angel. I heard her laughing at me. I squeezed my eyes shut and ground my teeth until my ears rang. I waited for the pressure to ease. When it did, I reached into my glove box and pulled out the extra clip Bo had pressed on me. I took the gun from my bag and popped it in. I knew exactly what I had to do. Seldom in my life had I been as clear about anything.