The Switch

29

Tanner felt the first droplets of rain, a faint drizzle, as he was getting into his car on Comm. Ave. in front of Carl’s house. The asphalt pavement gleamed under the yellowish sodium light, speckling with water. His stomach clenched at the thought of Tanner Roast being ravaged, maybe destroyed. He wondered if the rain might help slow down or extinguish the fire, and he hoped the rain increased.

His car, a six-year-old Lexus GS 350, a silver four-door sedan, was a mess. Empty plastic bottles of spring water cluttered the floor on the passenger’s side. He rarely had a passenger, so he felt little need to keep the car clean, until it got to be too much to tolerate. Tonight he paid no attention; he drove almost mindlessly. He flicked on the windshield wipers when the rain started smearing the windscreen.

Centre Street at three thirty in the morning was empty except for a few cars, people going to work or returning home from a late shift, maybe a guy returning home after a late-night assignation.

And he thought: Could the cause of the fire possibly be entirely accidental? Could one of the roasters — say, the older one, the Probat — have had some sort of electrical malfunction? Could someone have left the heat on? It could get up to a thousand degrees, easy enough to start a fire. The chaff, the skins that slough off the coffee beans as they roast, was light and dry and combustible. A single stray spark would be enough to ignite it.

But none of these was the cause of the fire, he knew. The cause would be arson. He’d been targeted, and with him went everyone whose livelihoods depended on him. Now his own creation had been targeted, the company he had built over the last eight years ruined. The equipment costs alone would be in the seven figures. His insurance policy was way insufficient. If he lost the Probat roaster, he was screwed.

And maybe he had gotten lucky. He was alive.

Lanny Roth had made phone calls, set off some kind of alarm deep inside the secret government, and was killed because of what he had found out.

Maybe this was a warning? Was that too twisted a possibility? Here’s what we’re capable of doing, now give us what we want?

So Lanny was right: that laptop was his life insurance.

They — the faceless, unnamed “they” who had killed Lanny — had somehow found out where Lanny had gotten the documents he was asking about. Whom he’d gotten them from. Then they’d placed a call to Tanner, who’d refused to cooperate. So they’d broken into his house. Breaking into his place of business was harder because of the security system...

Suddenly he wondered. Was it possible they’d set off a fire in order to provide cover for a break-in at the warehouse? Or was that just paranoid thinking?

The rain had stopped; the windshield wipers slowed and then stopped. He accelerated onto the ramp that led to the Mass. Turnpike, then slowed at the E-ZPass gate. The only vehicles on the Mass. Pike were long-haul trucks and a VW convertible weaving erratically in the fast lane, no doubt someone coming home from a party.

He found himself driving faster and faster, and when he realized he was going over eighty, he took his foot off the accelerator. The last thing he needed was to be pulled over for a speeding ticket while his entire business, his investment, and yes, his nest egg, went up in flames and smoke and ash.

He reached the exit and then went through the complicated series of turns and switchbacks that led him to Brighton. Then he spotted the Tastee Doughnuts, the beacon that told him he was in Brighton. (Great doughnuts, not-bad cheap coffee.) He turned left, then made two rights and then a left onto the long one-way that was Mayfield Street.

On the right was a chain-link fence and then the tracks of the T, the Boston subway system, which ran aboveground in some places. On the left was the block-long redbrick building that housed the offices of an old-time safe and lock company. The redbrick warehouse buildings continued, one after another, all of them the size of the entire block, for a couple of blocks, and then came 50 Mayfield Street, where Tanner Roast was located.

And just up ahead, maybe half a block away, some guy was waving him down. A big man in a soiled sleeveless T-shirt, a so-called wifebeater. Bald, but shiny bald, and a goatee dyed black. On his neck and every exposed inch of his arms were tats, like he was a walking ad for a tattoo shop. He wasn’t old; he wasn’t young; he just looked powerful and all business.

He continued to wave with his left hand, wave him over to the side of the street, and then his right hand came up. In it was an immense black weapon, a veritable hand cannon. Tanner knew nothing about guns or calibers, but he knew it was a semiautomatic pistol, and it was huge.

The man locked eyes with Tanner.

They were the basilisk eyes of someone used to getting his way. It was the look of an apex predator ready to pounce.

The man was going to kill him.

And in a sudden cascade of knowledge, all became clear to Tanner.

There’s no fire.

No fire trucks racing through the streets, no smoke, no flashing lights, no traffic blockades.

Just this one guy with a gun.

Someone had called his cell, pretending to be with building security. Middle of the night, when the illogical can seem logical. When you’re disoriented and gullible.

Knew he’d have to drive out to the scene.

Flushing him out from wherever he was staying, which wasn’t home.

To kill him. On a street where there were no eyes, no witnesses.

The man-mountain was walking closer, his gun pointed. He shook his head, stepped right into the path of the Lexus, his left hand up, palm open, pointing the pistol in his other hand.

This was an ambush. He’d walked — driven — right into it.

And he did not want to be taken.

His right foot hovered over the two pedals: gas and brake. Do I pull over, submit to his request like a lamb to the slaughter?

The man with all the tats waved again, repeating the gesture as if Tanner was a slow child who hadn’t heard his instructions.

He expected Tanner to obey, to pull over because he was told to.

Tanner had read somewhere about a scientific study in which neuroscientists using an MRI discovered activity in the human brain indicating that we make decisions whole seconds before we’re consciously aware of making them.

The man is trying to kill me. I can’t let him.

His lizard brain then made a decision his conscious mind would never have made.

He floored the accelerator.

The car leapt forward mightily and struck the bald man with a sickening thud. He slammed his foot on the brake. The car screeched to a halt. He glanced in the rearview. Behind him, the man lay crumpled on the asphalt, his head canted at a strange angle to the rest of the body. He wasn’t moving.

He’d probably killed the man.

The rain was coming down in sheets, the wind picking up.

Tanner floored the Lexus and sped down the block and the next one, past the Tanner Roast building, which was dark, no fire trucks in view, then turned left and pulled over to the side of the road. He opened his car door and stumbled out onto the deserted street, into the hard, driving rain, the torrential downpour.

He doubled over and vomited onto the road, gagging and retching.

He had killed a man. He had killed a man.

The rain immediately sluiced away the vomit along with the road grime, as if everything could be washed away, washed clean.

As if anything could.