The Wrong Man

2

The tattoo artist’s needle buzzed with an urgency that reminded him of a hornet flying around his head. The man with the needle hovering over him was a thickset, heavily muscled man, with multihued, entwined decorations creeping like vines up both arms, past his shoulders, and swirling around his neck, ending in a serpent’s bared fangs beneath his left ear. He bent down, like a man considering a prayer, the needle in hand. He stooped to the task, then hesitated, looking up and asking, “You sure about this, man?”

“I’m sure,” Michael O’Connell replied.

“I never put a tat like this on anybody.”

“Time for a first, then,” O’Connell said stiffly.

“Man, I hope you know what you’re doing. Gonna hurt for a couple of days.”

“I always know what I’m doing,” O’Connell answered. He gritted his teeth a little against the pain and leaned back in the tattoo parlor chair. He stared down and watched as the burly man began to work over the design. Michael O’Connell had chosen a scarlet heart with a black arrow driven through it, dripping blood tears. In the center of the pierced heart, the tattoo would have the initials AF. What was unusual about the tattoo was the location. He watched the artist struggle a little. It was more awkward for him to put the heart and initials on the ball of the sole of O’Connell’s right foot than it was for O’Connell to keep his leg lifted and steady. As the needle pierced the skin, O’Connell waited. It is a sensitive location. Where one might tickle a child or caress a lover. Or step on a bug. It was the location best suited for the multiplicity of his feelings, he thought.

Michael O’Connell was a man with few outward connections, but thick ropes, razor wires, and dead-bolt locks constricted him within. He was a half inch under six feet in height and had a thick, curly head of dark hair. He was broad through the shoulders, the result of many hours lifting weights as a high school wrestler, and trim through the waist. He knew that he was good-looking, had a magnetism in the lift of his eyebrows and the way he sauntered into any situation. He affected a kind of carelessness about his clothing that made him seem familiar and friendly; he favored fleece over leather so that he would fit in with the student population better and avoided wearing anything reminiscent of where he had grown up, such as too tight jeans or T-shirts with tightly rolled sleeves. He walked down Boylston Street toward Fenway, letting the midmorning breeze wrap itself around him. It had a suggestion of November in its breath, swirling some fallen leaves and debris off the street into a small whirlwind of trash. He could taste a little of New Hampshire in the air, a crispness that reminded him of his youth.

His foot hurt him, but it was a pleasant pain.

The tattoo artist had given him a couple of Tylenol and placed a sterile pad over the design, but he had warned O’Connell that the pressure of walking on the tattoo might be hard. That was all right, regardless how crippled he might be for a few days.

He wasn’t far from the Boston University campus, and he knew a bar that opened early. He limped along, making his way down a side street, hunched over a little, trying with each step to measure the shafts of electric hurt that radiated upward from his foot. It was a little like playing a game, he thought to himself. This step, I’ll feel pain all the way to my ankle. This step, all the way to my calf. Will I feel it all the way to my knee, or beyond? He pushed open the door to the bar and stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, smoky interior.

A couple of older men were at the bar, seated with bent shoulders as they nursed their liquor. Regulars, he thought. Men with needs defined by a dollar and a shot glass.

O’Connell moved to the bar, slapped a couple of bucks down on the counter, and motioned to the bartender.

“Beer and a shot,” O’Connell said.

The bartender grunted, expertly drew a small glass of beer with a quarter inch of foam at the top, and poured off a shot glass with amber Scotch. O’Connell tossed back the shot, which burned his throat harshly, and followed it with a gulp from the beer. He gestured at the glass.

“Again,” he said.

“Let’s see the money,” the bartender replied.

O’Connell pointed. “Again.”

The bartender didn’t reply. He’d already made his statement.

O’Connell considered a half dozen things he might say, all of which might lead to a fight. He could feel adrenaline starting to pump in his ears. It was one of those moments where it didn’t really matter if he won or if he lost, it was just the relief he would feel in throwing punches. Something in the sensation of his fist and another man’s flesh was far more intoxicating than even the liquor; he knew it would erase the throbbing in his foot and energize him for hours to come. He stared at the bartender. He was significantly older than O’Connell, pale, with a pronounced gut around his waist. It wouldn’t be much of a fight, O’Connell thought, feeling his own taut muscles contracting with energy, begging to be released. The bartender watched him warily; years spent on that side of the bar had given him an understanding of the way a man’s face suggested what he was about to do.

“You don’t think I’ve got the money?” O’Connell asked.

“Need to see it,” the bartender replied. He had stepped back, and O’Connell noticed that the other men at the bar had shrunk away, their eyes lifted up to the dark ceiling. They, too, were veterans of this particular conflict.

He looked at the bartender again. The man was too old and too experienced in the world defined by the gloomy corners of the decrepit bar to be taken unawares. And, in that second, O’Connell realized that the bartender would have some ready source of man-made equality. An aluminum baseball bat, or maybe a short-handled wooden fish billy. Maybe something more substantial, like a chrome-plated nine millimeter or a twelve gauge. No, he thought, not the nine millimeter. Too hard to chamber a round. Something older, more antique, like a.38 police special, safety disengaged, loaded with wadcutters, so to maximize the damage to flesh, minimize the damage to the property. It would be located out of sight, in easy reach. He did not think he could jackknife across the bar fast enough to reach the bartender before the man grabbed the weapon.

So, he shrugged. He spun and stared at the man at the bar a few feet away.

“What’re you looking at, you old fuck?” he asked angrily.

The man refused to make eye contact.

“You want another drink?” the bartender demanded.

O’Connell could no longer see the man’s hands.

He laughed. “Not in a shit hole like this.” He rose and exited the bar, leaving the men behind in silence as he passed through the door. He made a mental note to come back sometime, and felt a surge of satisfaction. There was nothing, he thought, nearly as pleasurable in life as moving to an edge of something, and teetering back and forth. Rage was like a drug; in moderation, it made him high. But every so often it was necessary to truly indulge; to get wasted with it. He looked down at his watch. A little after lunchtime. Sometimes Ashley liked to take a sandwich out onto the Common and eat beneath a tree with some of her art class friends. It was an easy place to keep an eye on her without being seen. He thought he might just wander over and check.

Michael O’Connell first met Ashley Freeman by happenstance, some six months earlier. He was working as a part-time auto mechanic at a gas station just off the Massachusetts Turnpike extension, taking computer technology courses in his free hours, making ends meet by tending bar on weekends in a student hangout near BU. She had been coming back from a weekend ski trip with her roommates when the right rear tire had shredded after hitting one of Boston’s ubiquitous potholes, a common enough winter-season occurrence. The roommate had nursed the car into the station, and O’Connell had replaced the flat. When the roommate’s Visa card, maxed out by the weekend’s excesses, had been rejected, O’Connell had used his own credit card to pay for the tire, an act of generosity and seemingly Good Samaritanism that hadn’t been lost on the four girls in the vehicle. They were unaware that the card he used was stolen and had readily handed over their addresses and phone numbers, promising to collect the cash for him by midweek if he would just swing by and pick it up. The new tire, and the labor to install it, had come to $221. None of the girls in the car had understood for an instant how ironically small a sum that truly was, to allow Michael O’Connell into their lives.

In addition to his good looks, O’Connell had been born with exceptionally sharp eyesight. It wasn’t hard for him to pick out Ashley’s outline from beyond a block’s distance, and he sidled up against an oak tree, maintaining a loose surveillance. He knew that no one would notice him; he was too far away, there were too many people walking by, too many cars passing, too much bright October sunlight. And he knew as well that he had been lucky to develop a chameleon-like ability to blend into his surroundings. He thought that he should really have become a movie star, because of his capacity to always seem to be someone else.

In a run-down dive of a bar, catering to alcoholics and fringe criminals, he could be a tough guy. Then, just as easily, in Boston’s massive student population, he could appear to be just another college kid. The backpack, filled to bursting with computer texts, helped form that impression. Michael O’Connell thought he maneuvered expertly from world to world, relying at all times on the inability of people to take more than a second to size him up.

Had they, he thought, they would have been scared.

He watched, easily picking out Ashley’s reddish blond hair from the group. A half dozen young people were sitting in a loose circle, eating lunch, laughing, telling stories. Had he been the seventh member of that group, he would have turned quiet. He was good at lying and making up believable fictions about who he was, where he’d come from, and what he’d done, but in a group, he always worried that he would go too far, say something loose and unlikely, and lose the credibility that was important to him. One-on-one, with someone like Ashley, he had no trouble being seductive, creating a need for sympathy.

Michael O’Connell watched, letting rage grow within him.

It was a familiar sensation, one that he both welcomed and hated. It was different from the anger he felt when he was readying for a fight, or when he got into an argument with a boss at any number of the occasional jobs he held, or with his landlord, or the old lady who lived next door to his tiny apartment and who bothered him with her cats and leery-eyed stares. He could have words with any number of people, even come to blows, and it was to him next to nothing. But his feelings about Ashley were far different.

He knew he loved her.

Watching her from a safe distance, unrecognized and unobserved, he stewed. He tried to relax, but could not. He turned away because watching was too painful, but then, just as quickly, he twisted back, because the pain of not looking was far worse. Every laugh she emitted, tossing her head back, her hair shaking seductively around her shoulders, every time she leaned forward, listening to someone else, was agony. Every time she reached out and, even in the most inadvertent of motions, let her hand brush up against another’s-all of these things were like ice picks driven deep into his chest.

Michael O’Connell watched and for nearly a minute believed he could not breathe.

She constricted his every thought.

He reached down into his pants pocket, where he kept a knife. It wasn’t the Swiss Army multiuse-type knife that could be found in hundreds of backpacks throughout Boston’s student universe. This was a four-inch folding knife, stolen from a camping goods store in Somerset. It had heft. He wrapped his hand around the knife and squeezed it tightly so that, although the blade was concealed within the handle, it still bit into his hand. A little bit of extra pain, he thought, helps to clear the head.

Michael O’Connell liked carrying the blade because it made him feel dangerous.

Sometimes he believed that he traveled in a world of about-to-bes. The students, like Ashley, were all in the process of turning themselves into something other than what they were. Law school for the soon-to-be-minted lawyers. Medical school for the ones who wanted to be doctors. Art school. Philosophy courses. Language studies. Film classes. Everyone was part of becoming something. On the verge of joining.

He wished, sometimes, that he’d enlisted in the army. He liked to think that his talents would have translated well into the military, if they could have seen past his difficulty taking orders. Perhaps he should have tried the CIA. He would have made an excellent spy. Or contract killer. He would have liked that. A James Bond type. He would have been a natural.

Instead, he realized, he was destined to be a criminal. What he liked to study was danger.

From a block away, he saw the group begin to stir. Almost in unison, they rose, brushing themselves off, unaware of anything other than their immediate halo of laughter and happy talk.

He moved forward, following slowly, not closing the distance, mingling with other people on the sidewalk, watching until Ashley and the others walked up some steps and into a building.

Her last class ended at four thirty, he knew. Then it would be over to the museum for two hours of part-time work. He wondered if she had plans for that night.

He did. He always did.

“But there’s something I don’t exactly get.”

“What’s that?” Her reply was patient, like that of a teacher with a slow child.

“If this fellow…”

“Michael. Michael O’Connell. Nice Irish name. Boston name. Must be a thousand of them from Brockton to Somerville and beyond. Makes one think of altar boys carrying incense, and choir practice, and firemen in kilts playing bagpipes on a brisk and cold Saint Paddy’s Day.”

“That’s not really his name, is it? This is a part of the puzzle, correct? If I were to follow up, I wouldn’t find a Michael O’Connell, would I?”

“You might. You might not.”

“You’re making this a little more difficult than it has to be.”

“Am I? Isn’t that for me to judge? I might be presuming that there will come a point when you’re going to stop asking me questions and head out on your own, because you’re going to want to know the truth. Already you know enough, at least to get started. You’ll start comparing what I’ve said against what you can find out. That’s the point of telling this. And making it a little difficult. You called it a puzzle. That would be apt.”

Her voice was direct. If she meant to be coy, it didn’t register in her words.

“All right,” I said, “let’s move forward. If this fellow Michael was really heading towards some sort of fringe life, working his way up the petty-crime ladder, where did Ashley fit in? I mean, she would have had a pretty good read on this guy in two seconds, right? She’d been well educated. She must have attended classes or gone to lectures about stalkers and that sort of man. Hell, there’s even a segment on them in the state’s high school health textbook. It’s alphabetical, so it comes right before STDs. So she would have picked him out rapidly. And then done whatever she could to extricate herself. You’re suggesting a sort of obsessive love. But this guy O’Connell, he sounds like a psychopath, and-”

“A psychopath in training. A nascent psychopath. A psychopath wannabe.”

“Yes, well, I can see that, but where did the obsession come from?”

“Good question,” she answered. “And one that should be answered. But you would be unwise to think that Ashley, despite her many strong qualities, was properly equipped to deal with the sorts of problems that Michael O’Connell presented.”

“True enough. But what did she think she was involved in?”

“Theater,” she replied. “But she just did not know what sort of production it might be.”