You're Next

Chapter 11

Mike’s oversize, pixelated face greeted him and his family one step into the Braemar Country Club. Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times article, blown up to the size of a door and mounted on foam, leaned against the entrance to the main dining room. Lined beside it like enormous dominoes were similar clippings from the state’s other major papers, giving the effect of tabloid wainscoting. Itching in his eight-hundred-dollar suit, Mike paused, uncomfortable.

Despite the newspaper photo’s clearly showing Mike’s heterochromia, the journalist had referred to his ‘blazing brown eyes,’ ignoring the fact that one of them was technically ‘blazing amber.’ But the oversight was nothing next to the fraud at the core of the politicized hype – Mike’s receiving an environmental award for houses that shouldn’t have passed the green code. Scanning the puff piece, which praised his work to the ozone-depleted heavens, Mike felt a rush of guilt and – feeling his daughter’s tiny hand in his – shame.

Annabel finally tugged at his arm, breaking him from his thoughts. Reluctantly, he entered, nodding at various well-dressed folks, many of whom beamed at him with recognition. Kat kept pace, clutching her backpack full of books, which she’d brought in case she got bored. Waiters circled with glasses of champagne and hors d’oeuvres he couldn’t recognize. He popped a pastrylike item into his mouth just to have something to do and scanned the crowd for a familiar face.

Kat had already engaged Andrés’s kids in a game of tag. Annabel looked stunning in a red dress with a cutout back. He watched her drift effortlessly into a circle of heavily made-up women, moving with the grace bestowed by a proper upbringing and natural confidence. The woman was a marvel; each situation brought out a new facet of her. But even as he watched with pride, her ease seemed only to underscore how out of place he felt. It seemed the one place he fit in effortlessly was with his family.

He started toward his wife, but an older woman with a clipboard appeared between them, facing Annabel. ‘Michael Wingate’s wife, right?’ she asked. ‘I need to borrow you for a picture.’ She clasped Annabel’s hand in hers, leading her away. Annabel shrugged in mock helplessness and went with a smile.

Mike made his way across the room and caught the bartender’s attention. ‘Can I get a Budweiser?’

The bartender, a handsome aspiring-actor type, gestured at the bottles in the ice bucket behind him. ‘Only Heineken. You’re at the wrong party.’

Mike took the cold bottle. The bitter beer felt great going down. The last two days had dragged out, made slower by how much he’d been dreading tonight.

Gazing across the swirls of people, Mike spotted Andrés at one of the elegantly set tables by the dais. Carrying his wife’s purse and looking bored senseless, Andrés rolled his eyes, and Mike had to look away to hide his smile.

The sight of the governor’s chief of staff holding court one table over made the half grin go brittle on Mike’s face. Catching Mike’s eye, Bill Garner offered him a head tilt that he couldn’t help but interpret as conspiratorial. Were other people looking at him that way, too? He couldn’t get a handle on his uneasiness. For a week now, he’d been jumping at shadows.

At the far end of the room, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out across a sloping golf course, now dark. Mike angled his way through the crush, offering greetings to passing faces. Getting to the fringe of the gathering and having a view of the horizon calmed him a bit.

Just as he’d started to unknot his concerns, someone collided into him from the side. Stumbling to regain his footing, he spilled beer down the leg of his trousers.

A voice floated over his shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry.’ A wiry man with a patchy beard leaned in at him, gripping his arm. ‘I have CP.’

The man had breath like a birdcage, his lips spotted with black flecks. Sunflower seeds? He reached into a ratty brown sport coat and withdrew a handkerchief. Mike took it and swiped at the wet mark on his thigh, but the liquid had already seeped through the fabric.

‘Cerebral palsy,’ the man said. ‘Bad balance, you know? Again, I’m real sorry for that.’

‘That’s okay. I hate this suit anyway.’

The man’s sport coat looked like Salvation Army – corduroy, worn elbow patches, frayed sleeves. Mike offered back the handkerchief, and the man hooked it in a hand curled like a monkey’s paw. His eyes, set in a jaundiced face, twitched from side to side.

A hulking man stood idly several feet away, not uncomfortable but not at ease – not anything at all, in fact. He was so detached that it took Mike a moment to register that the two were together.

‘I’ve had my Achilles tendon lengthened eight times, my hamstring five,’ the man in the sport coat continued. ‘Eleven tendon releases in my right foot alone. Forty-four surgeries in all. That don’t even count Botox injections into spastic muscles. Then there’s the seizure meds, then the meds for med side effects, and… well, hell, you get the picture.’

Mike loosened his tie, wondering what the guy wanted. The big man remained immobile, looking at the draped walls, at nothing. Was he even listening?

‘And still the muscles tighten. I walk a little worse each year. Need a few more snips and cuts. Expensive as hell. Keeps me working, that’s for sure.’ He brought a wineglass up to his chin and spit sunflower seeds into it. A soggy wad had collected in the bottom of the glass, steeping in a quarter inch of leftover red wine. ‘All this ’cuz I didn’t get enough oxygen when I was riding down that birth canal. No fault o’ my own. But I gotta pay anyways, day after day.’ He snickered. ‘Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, Mike? Catches up to us all.’

Mike studied the guy’s face. ‘How do you know my name?’

The man nodded at the newspaper blowups. ‘Man o’ the hour.’

‘And you are…?’

‘William.’

‘William…?’

William smiled, showing off yellowed teeth. ‘My kid cousin had scars like that.’ He nodded at Mike’s knuckles. ‘Old-fashioned fighting.’

Mike slid his hands into his pockets. ‘Had?’

‘People with knuckles like that don’t generally make it to happy middle age.’

Kat ran by, chasing Andrés’s son, shrieking laugher.

William gestured at them with his chin. ‘Look at the little ones. I could watch ’em play all day.’

The way William was looking at the kids made Mike squirm.

‘Cute girl,’ William said. ‘Must be yours – strong resemblance, those cat eyes. You can tell she ain’t adopted.’

A creepy remark, creepier still since Mike didn’t think he and Kat looked all that much alike. Why would the guy give a damn if Kat was adopted? Had Mike heard wrong, or had William actually placed extra emphasis on the ‘she’? A veiled reference to Mike’s foster-home past? Meaning what? And how could William know? Mike felt a pulse beating in the side of his neck.

‘So who do you know here?’ Mike asked.

‘Well, Mike, now I know you, don’t I?’

‘Sure,’ Mike said evenly. ‘But who invited you?’

Someone made an announcement, and they all began settling into their chairs. The woman with the clipboard waved Mike toward his seat by the podium, her gesture emphatic: We need you here now.

‘Better get going,’ William said. ‘Looks like they want you onstage.’

There was no denying it; this second evasion was intentional. Something had shifted in the air, gone sour.

And Mike’s patience had worn thin. He swallowed, tried to rein in his irritation. ‘You didn’t answer my question. How are you hooked into this?’

‘I’m just a guy who likes a party.’ William kept his eyes on Mike and spit out another sunflower shell, this time over the lip of the cup onto the carpet. ‘Plus, there’s a whole mess of finelookin’ women around.’ He gestured, again with his scraggly chin. ‘Look at that slice o’ pie there.’ Annabel was sitting at the edge of the banquet table up on the dais. Her chair was pulled sideways as she spoke with one of the waiters. Though her legs were closed, her dress was hitched on a knee, and from their lower vantage they could see a little triangle of white silk between her legs.

Mike felt his face go hot. He stiffened, and the big man, never shifting his blank gaze from the far wall, sidled a half step toward them.

Mike felt a surge of old instinct rising in him, gathering heat. His face was close enough to William’s that he could smell the stink leaking through his teeth.

The woman with the clipboard called Mike’s name. He untensed his muscles and stepped calmly away. Walking up onto the dais, he whispered in Annabel’s ear, and she straightened her dress, smoothing it over her knees. The lights dimmed, save those beating down on the banquet table, illuminating Mike and the other award recipients. Squinting out at the room, he could discern little more than shadowy figures around the far tables.

The governor made a grand entrance, his frame dwarfing the podium. He threw out a few opening cracks, a broad grin showing off the trademark gap in his front teeth. Mike registered the crowd’s titters but little else; his eyes were picking over the crowd. Annabel, misreading his tension, squeezed his hand supportively. Kat waved from Andrés’s table down in the front.

The other honorees got up and made brief speeches, but Mike couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. He thought he spied William’s form moving across the back, but then there was an awful silence and he realized everyone was staring at him. The familiar woman, sans clipboard, said Mike’s name again into the microphone. Annabel urged him to his feet, and, walking on wooden legs, he took the podium.

‘I, um-’ A feedback squawk; his mouth was too close to the mike. The wet fabric from the spill felt cold against his thigh. He did his best to put the bizarre confrontation out of mind. ‘I don’t really deserve to be here,’ he said.

At the VIP table, Bill Garner looked up at him, head cocked, lips wearing a tense little smile.

‘I mean, to give me an award when I already feel so lucky for what I have and what I get to do. I wake up every day thinking I’ve won the lottery.’ Finally relaxing a bit, Mike glanced at his wife. She was looking back at him with adoration. ‘Because I have. I mean, my wife, my daughter, steady work that I love.’

Mike glanced down at the podium. ‘And it’s not like building Green Valley was all selfless. It was a paying job.’ Eager to break the tension, a few people laughed, thinking he was joking. ‘I’m no great environmentalist,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want my daughter and grandkids to look back at me decades from now and be angry that I didn’t do the right thing.’

Annabel’s new diamond ring glinted, the big rock seeming to sum up how full of shit he was. As if reading his thoughts, she slid her hands into her lap and looked away, trying to keep her composure. Seeing her upset completely threw him, and for a moment he lost track of where he was. The silence stretched out uncomfortably as he grasped for words. He almost just came clean, admitted the lie, and walked off to start shoveling his way out of the hole he’d dug for himself and forty families, but instead he heard himself say, ‘Thank you for this recognition. I’m honored.’ Annabel closed her eyes, and he saw her heartbeat fluttering the thin skin of her temple. To applause, he stepped out of the spotlight, touched her gently on her shoulder, and murmured, ‘Let’s go.’

The lights were up now in the dining room, the ceremony over. Mike scanned the space, but there was no sign of William or the big guy anywhere. He felt ill, his mind racing, his stomach churning from the altercation earlier, from the phony award, from the way Annabel had averted her gaze when he was up there, as if she couldn’t meet his eye. He wanted to get home, burn off the night with a scalding shower, and put all this behind them.

A photographer approached: ‘We need you for one more set of pictures-’

‘Sorry,’ Mike said. ‘We really have to be going.’

Nodding curtly at well-wishers, he grabbed Kat’s hand and led her and Annabel to the door, Andrés calling after him, ‘What the big hurry?’

Kat was beaming. ‘Dad said he built Green Valley for me.’

Annabel forced a smile. Mike rushed on, trying to leave Kat’s remark behind. A few guests had trickled outside, but for the most part the parking lot was empty of people. Gleaming foreign cars and a good number of hybrids. Mike hurried Kat and Annabel up and down the aisles, searching for that black Mercury Grand Marquis that he’d thought had followed him earlier in the week.

‘Mike’ – Annabel shifted the award plaque in her arms, nearly dropping it – ‘what’s going on?’

‘Just give me a minute.’

At the far edge of the lot, slant-parked across two spaces, a dingy white van stood out distinctly among the sleek vehicles. Wedged between windshield and dash was a torn-open bag of David’s sunflower seeds. Mike halted twenty or so feet from the van. The driver’s and passenger’s seats were empty, but beyond them the cabin was dark.

No front license plate.

Mike turned to his wife. ‘Take her, get into the truck, and lock the doors.’

Annabel’s forehead crinkled with concern, but she took Kat and hurried back toward the truck. Though a few more people were making their way to their cars, here in the farthest row it was dark and still.

Tentatively, Mike circled the van. An old Ford, late-seventies model. Checked drapes covered a high-set rear window, slid open to a dusty screen. With relief he saw there was a back plate, an old-fashioned California model with a blue background, the yellow numbers and letters so faded he had to crouch to read their raised outlines – 771 FJK.

The voice came at him, unnervingly close. ‘You let your wife go out dressed like that?’

Mike whipped upright. William’s face, leering out the van’s rear window, wore the checked drapes like falls of hair. The back door came ajar with a creak, Mike peddaling back, heart jerking in his chest. William unfolded painfully from the dark interior, the big man sliding out to loom behind him.

Mike’s breath fired hot in his lungs. ‘I don’t let her do anything.’

A car alarm chirped nearby, and Mike noted with relief more people heading to their cars, spreading out through the lot. Had the men been hiding in the van, waiting to follow him home?

With a little smirk, William lurched toward Mike in an odd, toein gait. ‘Why you harassing us?’ He swirled the wineglass, packed with half-chewed sunflower shells, for emphasis. ‘Following us out here, spying on our van.’ William spit a sunflower shell on the asphalt near Mike’s feet. He jerked his chin, a gesture he seemed to overuse. ‘Better get back to your family.’

Mike’s gaze moved uneasily from William to the big man, who stood silently, log arms crossed, his unreadable features half lost to shadow. ‘The hell does that mean?’

‘It means a family man like you’s got better things to do than stand out here jawing with a buncha lowlifes.’ He peered around Mike, and Mike turned.

From the passenger seat, Annabel peered anxiously through the windshield. The truck was two rows away, but Kat was visible in the rear, standing up, fussing with her backpack. Both of them right there in plain view, exposed. The night air, crisp in Mike’s lungs, tasted of mowed grass from the distant golf course. The faintest trace of cigar smoke laced the breeze. Annabel’s eyes implored him.

Mike wheeled back. ‘Is this about Green Valley?’

‘Green Valley?’ William looked genuinely confused.

‘You’ve been following me,’ Mike said.

William’s eyes jittered from side to side rapidly, an almost mechanical tic. ‘Sounds like you got people after you, Mr Wingate. Don’t take it out on me and Dodge here.’

Neither broke off his stare. Mike took a few backward steps, then turned and headed swiftly to the truck, Annabel watching him tensely. A few passersby offered their congratulations, and he nodded, his face still burning with anger. As he neared, Annabel threw open her door. Kat was facing away from the scene, pointing out the side window and laughing. ‘That lady has a cra-zy hat!’

Mike heard a pop behind him.

He turned. Pitifully, William clutched his trembling wrist, apologizing to the small cluster of folks who had gathered around, concerned. ‘I’m sorry. It just slipped.’ A man in a suit used a rolled magazine to sweep the broken glass away from his tires. Dodge crouched to help, his lips still sealed. Was he mute?

Annabel was out of the truck now. ‘Mike, what the hell is going on?’

He grasped her biceps, reversing her protectively into the passenger seat. ‘We’re going. I’ll explain in a second.’

‘That’s hurting my arm,’ she told him quietly.

He let go. His grip had turned her skin red. She climbed in, and he started around the hood to the driver’s seat.

But William and Dodge were on top of him already. He turned and caught Annabel’s eye. She read his expression, her face draining of color. She moved her arm, and he heard the click of the automatic locks. In the rear Kat reorganized her books in her backpack, distracted.

William stepped up on Mike, moving swiftly. His hips dipped a bit when he walked, but it was nothing like the pronounced gait he’d put on display earlier. Mike wondered how much he used the illness to his advantage, the way Shep had his bad hearing.

Mike squared off as William sidled into reach and said, ‘I see your CP cleared up some.’

William bared his yellow teeth. ‘Thank the Lord Jesus.’

Dodge stood with one massive arm curled behind his back. Hiding a knife? A gun?

Adrenaline pounded through Mike, the rush leaving him light-headed. He could drop William in a heartbeat, but Dodge was a wild card. From the looks of him, he could snap Mike’s neck with a twist of his hand. But Mike’s only concern right now was Annabel and Kat. His daughter remained focused on her book bag, but she’d look up at any minute and take in whatever was going to happen here. He tried to will Annabel to scoot across the console and drive away, but he knew she’d never leave him here.

William spit a scattering of shells across Mike’s shoes.

Mike said, ‘Don’t spit on me.’

William’s tongue dug around his mouth and then poked into view, a black crescent riding the tip. He blew it into Mike’s chest.

Mike said, ‘One more time and we’re gonna have a problem.’

William bunched his lips, the scruff of his chin bristling, his stare narrowing appraisingly. ‘Aah. There it is.’

Oblivious, a woman in a fur coat, begging Mike’s pardon, slid past him and climbed into a Jaguar. Her presence returned him to his senses. He exhaled, dissipating his rage. Then he took a step away, ceding ground, his eyes on the bulge of Dodge’s shoulder, that arm curling out of view.

Mike glanced quickly over his shoulder. Kat’s face pointed back at him, her sober expression a match of Annabel’s. He grabbed for a line of reasoning. ‘Look at all these people. This is an upscale gig. We don’t want to fight here.’

‘Fight? Fight?’ William grinned, and even Dodge’s face seemed to rearrange itself into an expression of amusement, a couple of spaced teeth peeking into view. ‘There are generally a few more steps of escalation in there. Shouting, chest bumping, shoving. We don’t want to skip all the foreplay, now, do we?’

‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘We do. Whatever game you’re playing, it ends here.’

‘No,’ Dodge said, the low voice, almost a vibration, surprising Mike.

Dodge moved his massive hand from behind his back and let fall a white stuffed polar bear.