That night, Fielder dreamed he was playing checkers with Andie at a folding card table in an unfamiliar room. They were laughing and having fun together.
He was about to say, King me! when a door opened, and a team of Burkholder’s lawyers jogged in. Fielder looked up, wondering how in the world they’d found him; the lawyers, all with matching briefcases, filed into a row.
Just as he was about to demand an explanation for this interruption of his personal time with his daughter, another door opened. Happy Joe King appeared with Shorty in tow.
They saw the lawyers. The lawyers saw them. Shorty snarled.
And all at once, a third door burst off its hinges; Agents Corrigan and Klein rushed into the room, sidearms drawn. Detectives Reese and Carvajal hustled in after them.
Fielder tried to stand out of his chair, but he couldn’t move.
FBI! shouted Corrigan, leveling his gun at Shorty across the checkers table.
Still snarling, Shorty reached inside his jacket and drew a gun of his own. Back off, asshole, he said. The math man’s ours.
Fielder felt a hot salty lump in the back of his throat. He tried to speak. He tried again to stand. Andie looked at him, shaking her head. She said, You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve.
At that moment, the row of lawyers simultaneously dropped to their knees, popped latches, and dove into their briefcases. They stood up armed with guns of all shapes and sizes.
Sorry, said one of the lawyers, suddenly crisscrossed over his suit with ammo belts. But we’ll be taking the professor with us.
I’m not a professor anymore! Fielder wanted to shout. But his mouth was stuffed full by some unidentifiable wad. Looking down, he saw an empty Bronco Burger wrapper in his hands.
But before he could expel the foul obstruction, everybody opened fire.
Pinned down with Andie in the center of the triangle, Stephen noticed that the guns fired mathematics instead of bullets; numbers left muzzles in a flash of flame and floated slowly, as if weightless, across the room.
One of the lawyers riddled Agent Corrigan with a salvo of spinning sevens. Shorty capitalized on the vulnerability and shot the attorney in the neck with a nine. Klein hit the floor and rolled; Detective Carvajal covered him, snapping fraction after fraction over the lawyers’ heads.
Andie watched the crossfire with an awe-dazed grin. Dad! Look at this! She reached up with an index finger and touched a passing greater-than/equal-to symbol, sending it spinning off course. They’re so beautiful!
She never noticed the lawyer over her left shoulder, drawing down on Detective Reese. By the time she turned to see the discharge floating her way, it was too late for her to react.
Able to move at last, Fielder sprang up, lurching forward to shield his daughter.
Just as he reached her, arms outstretched, he took one in the shoulder. The force of the impact spun him around toward Happy Joe King.
Out of the corner of his eye, Fielder saw Shorty’s gun buck, and he raised his hand defensively. But in the dream, somebody had turned off the slow motion, and he got a speeding pi in the face before he went down.
In the end, Fielder lasted almost two months before Shorty caught him wearing the wire.
It was a fluke. The collector had come to Bronco Burger to get Fielder for their weekly staff meeting in the back of Happy Joe’s limo. On the customary walk to the parking lot of the used furniture store, Shorty made some joke and followed up with a quick play jab to Fielder’s midsection. Stephen hadn’t been paying attention, and he failed to juke away in time. Shorty’s play fist brushed the transmitter device taped to Fielder’s ribcage.
He reached again to check.
Then his face darkened, and the fist exploded into Stephen’s belly for real...
... and when he could finally breathe again, Fielder found himself in the back of the limo — Bronco Burger shirt torn open, welts raising on the skin of his chest where the adhesive tape had been ripped away — facing Joseph “Happy Joe” King for what he knew would be the last time.
The old crook sat looking at the FBI-issue paraphernalia in his hand as though pondering some high-tech rune. Fielder could feel Shorty beside him, brewing like an electrical storm.
But Happy Joe just sat in silence for what seemed like ages.
At last, King spoke only two words: “How long?”
“A couple of months,” Stephen admitted, for there was no use playing games at this stage. “Six, seven weeks maybe.”
Joe King nodded. And Fielder couldn’t be sure, but he thought he recognized the expression on the man’s face. It was the look of a man who suspects he’s in the process of losing something. Something he’s always had.
Or maybe it was the look of a man on the verge of admitting to himself what he already knows he lost some time ago.
At last, Shorty could no longer contain himself. He erupted with a primal bellow of rage, and when the big gun in his hand connected with the middle of Fielder’s face, Stephen felt his nose give way.
Cheek against the opposite window, pressed there by the muzzle of Shorty’s gun at the hard bone above his opposite temple, Fielder gargled blood as the collector screamed at him, close enough to spray saliva in Stephen’s ear.
“We trusted you!” Shorty shouted. “We trusted you, you miserable fuckin’ fuck!”
Before he blacked out, Fielder saw Happy Joe King call off his collector with a slight shake of the head. Shorty roared again and gifted Stephen with one final, thunderous kidney punch.
Then chaos ruled.
Light flooded the world; doors came open, other doors slammed. Hard voices shouted commands. People appeared and scurried about; somebody had a megaphone.
Later, sitting in the open back end of the paramedic’s rig, holding a bloody ice pack to his split lips and broken nose, Fielder saw Andie break free from a uniformed cop, cross the yellow tape, and sprint his way.
She’d told him she might stop in and see him tonight. Until that moment, their unofficial date had completely slipped his mind.
For some reason, the sight of his daughter brought the memory of a movie they’d rented together a year or two ago. Stephen didn’t remember the name of the film. But it was all about how life as everybody knew it was really just a great elaborate computer program. And if you knew the program’s secrets, you could bend its rules: jump higher, run faster, float in the air, that kind of thing. If you were truly special, you could figure out how to transcend the program altogether.
For some reason, Fielder thought about the pivotal moment in the movie where the hero finally reaches enlightenment. From that point on, the hero saw everything around him in terms of the endless datastreams that created the illusion.
And it occurred to Fielder that if he were the main character in that movie, this would be the point where he’d observe the bustling chaos of this scene before him and begin to see the underlying patterns, and all would be revealed.
He thought about Happy Joe King. Wondered if the patterns were any clearer to him.
He wondered if he was the only one who seemed to be missing the point.
And then he felt his daughter throw her arms around him, asking him in breathless tones if he was okay.
Fielder stroked her hair, grinned in spite of the pain, and told her he was fine.
Michael Downs
Man Kills Wife, Two Dogs
From Willow Springs
Three hard raps on the door made Dudek drop his beer. Only the landlord ever knocked, and no way would he knock again. Not after that morning.