Simple Simon

Chapter Nineteen The Stranger

How could a number not exist?

Art punished himself with that question as he and Simon walked up the stairs to 3B.

If you call a number and someone answers, it exists.

Then a converse thought muddied his reasoning.

Just like bank accounts with Anne’s name. Those exist, but they don’t.

Reality didn’t matter, apparently, Art was beginning to believe. At least the kind he knew and understood didn’t.

At the door he almost knocked, then remembered that Pooks was gone. Would not be back. Not after doing what Art wished he could be doing himself. Eyes might be on him now. Eyes that might follow.

Art opened the three locks with the keys Pooks had left him, and, following Pooks’ habit and his own skittishness, reset them as soon as they were in.

He only got to number two before Simon said, “There’s a stranger.”

Art looked over his shoulder and saw a man through the open door to the bedroom, sitting on the bed, eyes cast upon Simon’s creation on the dresser.

“Shit,” Art said as he drew his weapon and pushed Simon to the couch, bringing the Smith to bear at the stranger, advancing in cautious sliding steps toward the bedroom. “Who are you?”

“My name is Mr. Pritchard.” An awesome creation, Pritchard thought as he looked upon the replica of the tower, comparing it with the coal black rectangle reaching for the clouds to the north.

“What do you want?” Art demanded. He was in the bedroom now, and eased around the bed, checking the bathroom and the closet, both of which were clear. Behind Pritchard now, he said again, “I asked you a question: what do you want?”

Tearing his eyes from the sculpture of dominoes, Pritchard stood and faced Art. “You can put that away. You’ll no more shoot me than you would have shot Agent Van Horn Saturday evening.”

The pistol came down a degree, Art’s head cocking curiously to one side.

“That wasn’t the smartest thing to do,” Pritchard said. He came around the foot of the bed and looked into the front room, smiling briefly at the back of Simon’s head, then continued, “You were doing things right until then. And sending Mr. Underhill—”

“Just who the hell are you?” Art asked again, wanting more than a name now.

Pritchard look at the gun. “Do you think I would be sitting in here alone if I were here to arrest you?”

“I’m not worried only about the people who want to lock me up.”

Pritchard smiled. “If I were here to take him, would you have made it more than a step inside the front door?”

The stranger was not a good guy, and he was not a bad guy. That lack of definition did not soothe Art’s concern, but he could not deny the truth of Pritchard’s analysis. He lowered his weapon but kept it in hand at his side.

“I don’t have a weapon,” Pritchard said.

“I feel better that I do,” Art replied.

“Very well.” Again Pritchard glanced toward Simon. “How is he?”

“He’s fine,” Art answered suspiciously. “And why do you care?”

“My entire reason for being here now is that I care. As do a number of other people.”

“Other people.”

Pritchard nodded. “You seem surprised.”

“Pardon me for doubting any implied benevolence, but my life is not exactly on track at the moment, and his is worse.”

“People care,” Pritchard said.

“Right.”

Another tack was needed, Pritchard saw. “Tell me, Agent Jefferson, who do you believe is doing this to you?”

Art stared warily at Pritchard.

“The bank accounts, et cetera, et cetera. We know about it all. Who do you believe is doing this to you?”

Art sighed, not sure what to make of this Pritchard fellow, but feeling less than threatened by him. “Someone in the National Security Agency.”

“I see. Your government is doing this to you?”

“No, I said someone,” Art corrected. “Or ones. I don’t know.”

“Someone with considerable resources?”

“I’d say so,” Art agreed.

Pritchard brought a finger to his lips. “So let me get this straight. A person or persons of some authority inside a massive government agency are conspiring to destroy you to get at him. At Simon. Is that it?”

“Pretty close.”

“Hmm.” Pritchard folded his arms, the pose of the guilty or the confident. “You believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then is it not possible that the exact opposite might be true?” Pritchard offered.

“What do you mean?”

“Could not some people in positions of power conspire for the greater good?”

Art considered Pritchard with a doubtful, sideways gaze.

“You believe the converse,” Pritchard reminded him. “Are you so cynical that what I suggest is only fantasy?”

“The government itself is supposed to function for the greater good,” Art said.

Pritchard chuckled. “Oh come on. You’re a cynic and not a realist? Please…” He narrowed the distance to Art. “Have you ever seen a guilty person go free?”

“Plenty.”

“Or an innocent person go to jail?”

His position worked against Art admitting that, but, especially now, he could relate to that point. “Of course.”

“Fraud, waste, corruption,” Pritchard said. “All parts of this government that works for the greater good. Agent Jefferson, the government, despite the founders’ greatest hopes, is a machine that hums along regardless of good or evil. It doesn’t care. It can’t. The government has no feelings. That is what the masses who complain about the ills of government, and those who tout what good it can achieve, that is what none of them understand. The government is nothing more than a concept drawn from the thoughts of men who died a long time ago.

“And,” Pritchard continued, “it is populated by people who do things for their own reasons. Some good, some bad, some indifferent. There is no Department of Evil Doings, no Agency for Righteous Undertakings. People, Agent Jefferson. People function in those roles.”

“All right,” Art said. “On whose authority do you operate?”

Again Pritchard chuckled, softly this time, dipping his head until it subsided. “We have no charter, Agent Jefferson. We operate when the need arises.”

Art holstered his weapon finally, and walked past Pritchard. He stood in the doorway where he could see Simon. “And what is the need?”

“You won’t be surprised when I say it is the young man in there.”

Now Art’s arms folded over his chest. “Why? What makes him so important to you? The same thing that this so-called evil side wants him for?”

“If we wanted him for that reason, remember…” Pritchard made a gun out of his hand, pointed it at his temple, and said, “Boom. Boom. When you walked in that door.”

“Then why?”

“To save him.”

“That’s what I am trying to do,” Art said insistently.

“You’ll fail,” Pritchard said sullenly, with surety.

Art shook his head. “Once this is all cleared up—”

“He will be even more vulnerable,” Pritchard interjected. “Where will he be? With you and your wife? In a foster home? A care facility? All places where he will likely receive wonderful, loving care. And places he can be found.”

Art looked into the front room. Simon had gotten up from the couch and was standing in the empty corner of the room near the door, in his fretting stance Art could see. Was he wondering where the red rocker was? Would he always?

Worry over the chair in which his father sat in to sing to him, and the secrets to breaking the unbreakable code, all in that mind. The mind so disabled? The mind of a genius?

Gray matter worth more than its weight in gold.

“This doesn’t end if and when your life is back in order,” Pritchard said. “The people I represent do not choose to intervene in every case where an innocent is involved. Only those where our efforts can bring a resolution to a threat.”

“So stop these people,” Art said. “Whoever’s doing this, shut them down.”

Pritchard shook his head. “Active measures of that scope would expose us. Exposure would render us useless, Agent Jefferson. We often operate outside the bounds of the law, as our opposites do. We, however, do so benignly. But in the harsh light of judgment that would matter little.”

“So what the hell can you do?” Art asked.

Pritchard came to the doorway and added his eyes to those already playing over Simon’s back. “Allow us to take him.”

Art shook his head.

“To arrange for a new life for him,” Pritchard tried to explain, to convince. “We have made similar arrangements before for other innocents.”

“I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, mister,” Art declined firmly. “You come in here and tell me you’re with some kind of group that sounds like a bunch of wannabe superheroes, and tell me to give Simon to you. He’s not mine to give.”

“Then before long he won’t be yours at all,” Pritchard said.

Simon turned from the corner and approached Art, stopping when he saw the stranger’s feet very close to his friends’. His hand felt at the cards beneath his shirt.

Pritchard crouched down. “That’s a nice building you made.”

Simon twisted and said, “I was up on the chair.”

Pritchard stood again and looked to Art. “Will you walk me to the stairs?”

“Why?”

“He remembers what he hears, I presume. There is something I don’t think he should hear.”

Art thought it over, then walked Simon into the cramped kitchenette. “Simon, I have to walk with this man to the stairs. I’ll lock the door. You stay in here and don’t open it. Okay? Only I can open it. Got it?”

“Art can open the door,” Simon confirmed, in his own way.

Art patted him on the shoulder and led Pritchard into the hall, twisting the keys in the three locks.

“Which stairs?” Art asked.

“I’m parked in the alley,” Pritchard answered.

They walked down the hallway and turned where it ended at the rear of the building.

From the front of the building, Keiko Kimura turned onto the hallway and made her way toward 3B.

At the door she stopped and listened, both to the footsteps descending the far stairwell, and to scraping footsteps from inside the room. She wondered who the man was with Jefferson, but his relevance was minor, if consequential at all. They were gone, possibly for a minute, possibly for an hour. All she needed was a minute.

From her pocket she removed a small ring of three keys, which the building manager had willingly surrendered from his neatly arranged pegboard after Keiko cut his throat. No time for anything beyond that, and no desire. She inserted each key, undoing each lock, and opened the door to a shabby room. An empty room.

She closed the door and stepped further in, eyes searching the corners, ears picking up the shuffling feet to her left. There was an open door. Through it she saw what she had come for.

Her tongue slid past her lips and wet them with a slow stroke.

“Hey,” Keiko said, passing from the front room to the bedroom. The young American stood there, his feet nervously moving against the old wood floor, one finger touching a dresser where a building made of dominoes rose in tribute to its inspiration out the window. She closed on Simon and swung her hand at the miniature tower, scattering it into hundreds of pieces that clicked off the walls and the floor.

“You’re a stranger,” Simon said as he retreated to the window in the corner.

“No, I’m your friend,” Keiko said, reaching a hand with blue nails toward Simon. “And you’re coming with me.”

Pritchard stopped before exiting the stairwell on the ground floor and faced Art. “I want to give you a number you can call.”

“Why couldn’t you do this upstairs?”

“Our young friend having a phone number he should never have seen is how this all began.” Pritchard removed a card from his wallet and held it out so Art could see it. “Remember this number. Call it from any area code in the country. On the third ring press the number five.”

Art studied the number, committing it to memory, but he was not sure why.

Pritchard was more certain. “You will call it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because they’ll never stop looking.”

That statement clicked a switch in Art’s head. “Will they if you have him?”

Pritchard had no answer to that. At least they would not know where to look. But that was not a denial of Jefferson’s point. “Please don’t believe that you alone can save him.”

“I’m not that good,” Art said.

Pritchard wasn’t so sure that Jefferson didn’t believe it.

The nails dug into the shirtsleeves, and into his arm, and Simon’s head flopped back as another hand came over his mouth to staunch a scream.

“Shut up!” Keiko commanded, and grabbed for the window shade with the hand that covered Simon’s mouth, pulling it down. “Let’s go! Now!”

Simon resisted. This was a stranger. He was not supposed to leave. Only Art could open the door. Only Art could tell him to leave.

“Come on!” Keiko said harshly, tugging at the arm.

“You’re a stranger,” Simon repeated loudly, and pulled his arm free of the stranger’s grip. Her nails scratched him, and it hurt, and she reached with the other hand for his face.

“You’re coming, you little—”

Never go with a stranger. Simon knew that, and as her fingers touched his cheeks he tried to push them away. But they came back. He pushed them again. They came back.

“You’re a stranger!” Simon said very loud, and swung at the hands reaching for him, swung hard, swung and swung until his arms were flailing, and his fists clenching. “You’re a stranger!”

Keiko tried to snag one of the fists pecking at her like some annoying barnyard fowl, but when she did the other slipped through and crunched against her chin.

“You damn little—”

Simon felt the pain in his hand just before a sharper pain stung his face just like the time the man with the red hair had—

“Dumb little Joe!” Keiko swore as her hand pummeled Simon’s cheek a second time and knocked him to the floor.

In a building a hundred feet west, a woman pulled her face back from a spotting scope. “Did you catch that?”

Her partner, a man who might have passed for Pooks Underhill minus twenty years, nodded and kept his eyes on a small video screen, the image of the drawn shades yellow in the waning light. “Something is wrong.”

“Call him,” the woman suggested.

Pritchard was about to offer his hand to Art when his cell phone rang. He slid it open and listened, saying nothing, his eyes locking on Art’s after a moment. “Someone’s up there with Simon.”

“Who?” It could be Pooks, Art told himself. It could.

“A woman.”

“Dammit!” Art said, turning and bounding up the steps.

Pritchard closed his phone with an angry snap and resisted the urge to follow. He was out the door and to his car before Art reached the third floor.

“Come on!” Keiko prodded, urged, ordered, pleaded, as she pulled Simon into the front room by his arms, dragging the body that had become a defiant human tornado of arms and legs toward the front door.

She reached it and pulled it open and was knocked over as Art bolted into the room.

He tumbled over her, rolling toward the kitchenette, and she released her grip on Simon as she was smashed against the hard floor.

Art bashed against the low island of cabinets that set the kitchenette off from the front room, his eyes searching back over his path, one hand bringing the sweatshirt up as the other reached for his Smith. Simon was crawling toward the bedroom.

And on the floor two yards away a woman with black hair was coming up from all fours to her knees, a boxy black gun in one hand.

Shit!

Art rolled right as she fired, bullets coming not in singles or in double taps, but in steady burps that peppered the cabinets and followed the wall behind Art across the front room. He gave Simon a shove, sending him sliding across the floor into the bedroom, and fired back twice, blindly.

One round impacted the edge of the door just left of Keiko’s head, sending a spray of wood splinters over her. She rolled backward and fired a last burst at the couch, through the couch, as she tumbled into the hallway and scrambled to her feet.

The sound of feet beating a retreat brought Art up slowly from where he lay atop Simon. The last volley of fire had shredded the couch and had punched a half dozen holes in the wall between the front room and the bedroom.

“Simon? Are you all right?”

Simon came to a curled sort of sit, something Art had not seen before, an almost fetal position.

“Are you all right?”

“She was a stranger,” Simon said.

Art stood and checked the front room, and, thinking as fast as he’d ever had to, grabbed the items Pooks had gotten for him and lifted Simon to his feet. “We’ve got to go, Simon.”

“To the basement. The loud noise, and Mommy and Daddy aren’t…” The recital ended in several short breaths.

“Dammit,” Art swore, and took Simon’s hand in a firm grip and led him out of the apartment, checking the hall in both directions, and then to the back stairwell.

As they exited into the alley, sirens were approaching from all directions.