He seemed happier with this apparent appeasement. He misread it. “You came in all abusive. I have the right to protect myself and my customers.”
“More company policy?” I asked.
Boris answered by suddenly rushing in, swinging. I ducked under the bat and kept low. His momentum kept him going past me. We both turned and he came back for another go with a few more wild swings. He missed — I knew from his eyes and the shift in his body weight where the swings were coming from, like he was sending me e-mails on his next move. When he'd finished this flurry, I put a leg-extension machine between us. Boris's face was red with splotches of white. He was breathing heavily with effort.
I was getting tired of the game as well as concerned that he might just get lucky anyway and connect with my head. I said, “If you swing that thing at me one more time, I'll take it off you and teach you some manners.”
Boris smiled. He was enjoying himself; perhaps for the first time in a long time he was getting a little serious job satisfaction. Perhaps he was also thinking about how his boss would call him a hero for subduing this here abusive noncustomer as per company policy. He raised the bat high over his head and rushed forward. Instead of retreating and giving him room for the downward swing, like he expected, I stepped toward him. The bat was still behind his head, pointing down toward his ankles, when I grabbed it and pulled it all the way down behind his back. I wrenched it from his hands as his knees buckled and he fell backward. He lay on the floor, hands in front of his face, waiting for me to teach him those manners.
“Get up,” I demanded.
He rolled onto his side, got to his knees, and then staggered to his feet. The sneer on his face was gone, replaced by a quivering chin.
I propped the bat against a triceps machine. “Boris, it's no wonder the folks around here are choosing to shop somewhere else. Now, ask me again and this time use the magic word.”
“I–I forgot the question,” he said.
“You asked me who I was and what did I want.”
“ Who-who are you and what do you want?”
“Please.”
“P-please.”
“Now, was that so hard?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I pulled my badge and held the shield where he could see it. “Vin Cooper, special agent with the United States Air Force, and I already told you what I wanted.”
“McDonough called in sick. I'm only supposed to be on a half day and she called in sick.”
I actually felt sorry for the slob. He'd be replaying this little scene with me in his mind for the rest of his life, replaying it and no doubt playing it forward differently.
“Is that a reason to try improving your batting average on potential customers?” I asked.
“No, sir.”
“Special Agent.”
“What?”
“You don't have to call me sir. Is that who you were on the phone with?”
“Yeah. McDonough said she had to go to the doctor's.”
“I don't suppose you know who that doctor is?”
“Nah. She said she might not be back till tomorrow. But, like, fuck, you know… I've got things I need to do, too,” he said. The quivering chin had mutated into anger. His humiliation was Amy McDonough's fault, my fault, Elmer's fault, anyone's fault but his own.
“This is my card.” I took one from my wallet and held it out to him. He reached for it with a long arm like it was going to bite him. Or maybe blow up. “She calls you back, you don't tell her I came to see her.”
“No, sir.”
“You find out where she is and you call me. Please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where's Mr. Elmer?”
“Died ten years ago.”
“Who's the boss now?”
“His nephew — never comes in.”
There were still no customers in the store. The place was atrophying, heading for life support. Or maybe the nephew wanted it DNR, for tax reasons. “Don't you go losing that card, Boris.”
“No, sir.”
“Special Agent.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
I walked out into the parking lot. My cell rang. The screen told me it was a private number, which I usually don't answer. In a rare moment of cell generosity, I pressed the green button. “Special Agent Cooper,” I said as I watched three guys take their anger and frustration out on a wall with cans of orange spray paint.
“Hello. My name's Erwin Griffiths. You left a message to call.”
“Sorry, sir,” I said. “What did you say your name was?”
“Erwin Griffiths.”
“Where you from, Mr. Griffiths? I've left a few messages around town lately.”
“Sure. Ah, I'm from a company called Neural Paths.”
Neural Paths — I remembered. “Yeah, Erwin,” I said. “I'm investigating the death of a man you called at the beginning of last week — before Christmas.” I leaned against the Explorer and watched one of the graffiti artists throw a rock at the one last unshattered pane of glass. He missed.
“Oh, sorry to hear that. Dead? Can you tell me who it was that died? Don't mean to be rude here, but, like you, I call a lot of people.”
“Ruben Wright.”
“Ruben Wright, Ruben Wright, Ruben… Oh, yeah, got his file right here. Dead? Hmm… that's a shame.”
He made it sound like it was a shame Ruben's file was on his desk rather than on someone else's.
“Can you tell me what kind of company Neural Paths is, Erwin?” I asked.
“Sure. We do, like, credit card fraud.”
“Credit card fraud. You mind giving me an overview?”
“OK… Well, let me tell you something about yourself you probably aren't aware of. You're predictable. Most people don't like being told this, but it's true.”
He continued. “You… everyone, in fact, spends money in a manner that software can now predict. That's because you spend money in a pattern that's highly regular. As I said — you're predictable. If you deviate from that spending pattern, either in the type of things you buy or the amount you spend — sometimes both — the program pops your name up on screen and someone like me gives you a call to check that your erratic spending isn't the result of card fraud — that your card isn't being used by a person, or persons, unknown to you.” I heard him take a breath.
I didn't know Erwin, but I sensed he was the kind who found the word “brief” beside the word “impossible.”
“You called Ruben Wright because of his spending patterns?”
“Yep, textbook. He'd suddenly gone from being a pain-in-the-ass customer who never used his plastic to the kind of customer the credit card company wanted on its gold rewards program. Like, if it was really Mr. Wright spending all that money, which I was calling to confirm, then the credit card company would have asked him if he wanted to increase his limit.”
The Ruben I remembered kept a family of moths in his billfold. Spending bags of money? Not the Ruben I knew — and obviously not the one the credit card company was familiar with either.
“So Wright's dead?” Erwin asked, the voyeur in him coming out for a look around, hoping to catch a glimpse of something truly nasty — the way drivers slow down for a traffic accident, eager for a glimpse of blood.
I cut off his enthusiasm. “Yeah. So I doubt he'll want to take up that rewards program.”
“Oh. Well, then … thank you,” he said, miffed, sounding like I'd short changed him.
“Glad to be of service,” I said, hanging up. I was intrigued. There was something going on here — an erratic pattern that the software between my ears had picked up.
TWENTY-FOUR
I like Pensacola. Not too big that you don't know anyone, and not so small that everyone knows you. Home to the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels, and also to Amy McDonough. I drove out to her house. It was off a busy road and it was small and mean. I stood in the driveway and looked around. The house across the street was black with mildew, one corner sinking into the soft earth. An old oak with a limp beard of Spanish moss threw a pale gray shadow across the veranda. The house was a twin to the one McDonough lived in, except that the oak in her yard was reduced to a gray stump, the rest of the tree having been sawn off three feet from the ground a long time ago, its ancient dry roots breaking through the concrete drive here and there.