Parting Shot

Forty-two

Cory Calder felt energized. A nice way to feel, after so many missteps.

He’d met Jeremy Pilford. Face to face. Shook his hand. Looked him right in the eye! Well, almost. Jeremy seemed a little preoccupied at that moment, like maybe that guy with him had told him something he didn’t want to hear. Whatever. It didn’t matter.

This was so different than what had happened with Craig Pierce, or even Brian Gaffney, although the less said about that one the better. Cory had to admit, he felt bad about Gaffney.

Gaffney had looked, at a glance, so much like Jeremy Pilford. He was even dressed more or less the same. Cory and Dolly had watched Jeremy go into Knight’s and were waiting for him to come out. And when he did, or when someone who looked very much like him did, Dolly said, “Hey, how ya doing, can you help me out here? I dropped a contact.”

The dude stepped into the alley, Cory came up behind him, chloroformed him. They dragged him to the van, which they’d left parked at the end of the alley.

Would have been so much better if it had been the right guy.

And then, to make matters worse, someone recognized Dolly as Cory was getting Gaffney tucked away. Fucking chatted with her.

Anyway, what was done was done. Sometimes, trying to do the right thing, innocent people got hurt.

Tell me about it.

At least Gaffney had never seen them, never had a real look at them. Not even Dolly, who’d called him into the alley. It was dark, and they were confident he’d never be able to describe her for the cops. The whole time they had him in the barn at Dolly’s place, he was out of it, but they’d kept him blindfolded, just in case. So they were able to let him go. Dumped him out of the van two days later in the same place they’d found him, and took off.

Man, they sure fucked that one up. And after all the trouble Dolly had gone to steal the necessary equipment from her boss.

The Pilford kid was still out there, with no idea how close he’d come to having to pay for what he’d done.

Cory felt committed to correcting his mistake.

They’d gotten it so right with Craig Pierce. Wow, had they ever. Man, when that dog made a meal of him, boy, that was something else. Dolly threw up, but Cory was blown away by what they’d accomplished. For a moment, he thought maybe they’d gone too far, that Pierce was actually dead, because that was not what he wanted. Cory believed, at least at the time, that it was better for bad people to endure their punishments.

So he chased off the dog and went back to see if Pierce had survived. The son of a bitch was still breathing, but Jesus, what a mess. And there was even a little something left behind, that must have fallen out of the dog’s mouth. Cory had taken some pictures, but here was an actual souvenir. (He was proud of the fact that he’d never been a particularly squeamish kid.)

The real payoff had been the attention the deed garnered. Cory uploaded the pictures to Just Deserts, careful not to leave any digital trail that would lead back to him, with plenty of information about what Pierce had done. He thought very carefully about the words that would accompany the pictures, about how “revenj” had been exacted upon this disgusting pervert.

The website ran with it. Scores of other sites picked it up.

Seeing the response was without question the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Cory Calder. He sat on the website non-stop for several days, watching the fallout. First, the site tracked the number of visitors. There were thousands of them, and that didn’t even count the other sites that carried the story.

And then there were the comments. Every few minutes, more people weighed in. Some thought that whoever’d done this to Craig Pierce, an act described as everything from despicable to worthy of a Nobel prize, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Others lauded him, called him the best kind of vigilante, a hero who was stepping in to do what was right when the courts had failed to live up to their obligations.

One person went to so far as to compare him to Batman, even though Batman was not known particularly for using a dog to bite off a bad guy’s junk.

Cory even went on the site himself and left a comment, saying that whoever this guy was, he was terrific.

When he was at home, up in his bedroom, his father down the hall, he had to keep a lid on his enthusiasm during his repeated checks of the site. But when he was at Dolly’s place, he was uncontrolled in his excitement, letting out whoops of delight as he sat in front of her computer.

“Look at this!” he’d cry, calling her again and again to look at the screen. “Look what they’re saying!”

She wasn’t always as excited about it as he was, and that troubled him some. But after all, he was the mastermind of this operation. It made sense that the enthusiasm levels were somewhat lopsided.

Even though his name never appeared — and a good thing too — he reveled in the attention. He wished there were some way to tell the world with impunity that he was the one responsible.

Very quickly, the online adulation became addictive. As the comments began to wane in the weeks following the attack on Craig Pierce, Cory became agitated and restless. He needed to keep the interest alive, to maintain the debate. Praise or condemnation, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the world was talking about him.

So he started to think about his next project.

How he wanted to rub the noses of his goddamn brother and his goddamn sister in it.

How Daddy loved them. So fucking proud.

There was Caitlin over in Europe, helping those people who’d fled Syria with little more than the clothes on their back, taking perilous boat journeys, half of them drowning. That little kid on the beach. One night, Cory and his father were watching CNN when a story came on about the refugees. They were literally walking out of the water, their boat having gone down about a hundred feet offshore, carrying babies in their arms, everyone crying and screaming. There were aid workers on the beach, waiting for them. Doctors and care workers and all that shit, and suddenly Alastair pointed to the screen and shouted, “It’s Caitlin! Look, it’s Caitlin! It’s your sister!”

Yep. It was Caitlin. Running up to a man with a limp little girl in his arms. She took the child away, worked frantically on her, getting air into her lungs, bringing her back to life.

His father didn’t stop talking about it for days.

Then there was his brother, Miles, who at least didn’t make it to CNN, but he was doing great work, oh yes he was. Big-shot scientist halfway around the world, finding ways to make seawater drinkable. Your basic save-the-world kind of thing. No biggie. Quoted in Scientific American, even the New York Times once or twice. A genius, they called him. Yeah, well, Cory could remember the time he locked the keys in his Infiniti with the engine running. Didn’t seem like any great genius that day.

Well, you didn’t need a medical degree or a PhD in whatever it was his brother had to make your mark in the world. There were other paths to greatness.

In many ways, Cory considered what he had been doing more noble, because it was anonymous. He wasn’t on CNN. He wasn’t getting quoted in the New York Times. He was working behind the scenes to effect change. Didn’t that make it more genuine? More real?

Except there were times when he wondered, maybe he should just tell his father. “You think Miles and Caitlin are such hot shit? You see them putting themselves on the line the way I have? Running the kind of risks I’m running? I could go to jail. I could get sent away. You don’t see them taking those kinds of chances.”

So many times he’d wanted to say it. Not only so his father would stop thinking his so-called useless son wasn’t so useless after all, but to see the expression on his face.

In the last twenty-four hours, Cory had had a feeling that was going to happen sooner or later. When his father came to see him at the police station with a lawyer in tow.

Cory had to admit things hadn’t gone so well lately.

Not that there hadn’t been some major successes. Finding Jeremy for one. He’d tracked him down, lost him, and found him again.

He’d picked him up leaving his great-aunt’s house the night before, getting in that Honda with the old guy. It had been no trick figuring out he was at Madeline Plimpton’s house. The whole world had worked that out. Little wonder the kid was hightailing it out of there.

Cory had followed them to some Promise Falls apartment over a bookstore. But then the old guy must have seen his van, because he came running out onto the street, heading their way.

“Oh shit, here he comes,” Dolly’d said, and Cory had tromped on the accelerator.

By the time he’d come back, the Honda was gone.

Shit.

He’d lost him.

But overnight he checked the Just Deserts website, and some other similarly themed places on the Internet, and in came a reported sighting of Jeremy Pilford in Kingston, New York. Some couple had spotted him in a hotel lobby.

Once Cory had dealt with some other unexpected matters, he got in the van and drove to Kingston.

He searched the parking lot of the hotel where Pilford had been seen, but he could not find that Honda. Maybe, he thought, they’d realized they’d been spotted and gone elsewhere. He wandered the lots of other area hotels, and around five in the morning got lucky.

Now that he’d located them, what to do? Follow them, he figured, and wait for an opportunity. But he had to admit to himself he had no plan. He was, to say the least, rattled by other events that night. In addition, he no longer had an assistant. But as he sat in that hotel parking lot, trying to formulate a strategy, something happened.

Some dumbass couple rammed a car while trying to snap a photo of Pilford. Cory knew that was going to draw the cops, so he took off. But he took a spot just down the street, and before long, an ambulance went past, followed by the Honda. The car was left a block away from the hospital, and it was at this point that Cory really caught a break.

It had been left unlocked.

This time, he’d come better prepared, and he only needed thirty seconds. He opened the driver’s door, dropped down, his knees on the pavement, and reached under the front seat. Clipped the small mike and transmitter into place. Closed the door and got out of there.

All he had to do after that was listen.

Back in his car, he put on the earbuds that were attached to the phone-like device that carried the app that was linked to the bug that lay in the house that Jack built!

What an amazing world we live in!

He heard Pilford and the old guy — turned out his name was Weaver — talking about a lot of things, but the one really important thing he heard was their destination.

Cape Cod.

Big place to search, but then he heard Weaver repeat the address. North Shore Boulevard in East Sandwich.

Bingo.

He filled the tank up with gas and was on his way to Massachusetts before Pilford. That gave him time to check in with one of the local rental agencies and find himself a place to stay. A super-cheap cabin, about twenty by twenty feet, a quarter of a mile down the road from where Pilford and Weaver were staying. There was no water view — it was on the other side of the road from the beach houses. That was okay. He wasn’t here to sightsee.

It was a neat little place. One room, basically, with a bathroom notched out of the corner. An aged, hulking refrigerator with sides thicker than a steel vault, a counter with a big porcelain sink, no cabinets under it, but a wooden shelf that held a few pots and pans. In one corner, an actual old woodstove with a pipe that led up through the roof. The folks who rented it out had left a small stack of wood alongside it, plus a wrought-iron stand that held a small shovel, tongs, a poker, and tiny broom.

Quaint.

But Cory didn’t think it was cold enough to bother lighting a fire. As a backup, there was a small electric fan on the shelf he could plug in if he needed it.

Before he went to check out Cape Cod Bay, he parked his van behind the cottage. The back end was slightly visible to anyone driving by, but they’d really have to be looking for it.

Strolling along the beach, standing there with his toes in the sand, feeling the water rush in around his ankles, filling his lungs with the cool sea air was pretty damn nice.

And you met the most interesting people.

Now, back in the cabin, he had to think about how he was going to do this. There was a time when he believed that his subjects should live with their punishment, but his position on that was evolving.

He took a seat at the small table in the kitchen nook of the cabin and took out his cell phone. He’d powered it off hours ago. He didn’t want to run the risk of using it to track Pilford, in case they were on to him, which he now understood was a real possibility.

Maybe just for a few seconds.

He turned on the phone and saw that he had a message. He put it to his ear and listened.

“Cory, it’s your father. Call home immediately.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to do that,” he said aloud. He deleted the message and powered the phone off once again.

“What do to, what to do, what to do,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have any bright ideas?”

Carol Beakman, unconscious and tied to one of the two single beds in the small room, did not.