She nodded, and that glazed look came over her eyes.
“How did you two meet? Did he commit a crime? I bet he didn’t.”
“No, we ran into each other at a fast food place. He knocked into me, and-“
“Offered to buy you another meal.” He cut her off, shaking his head a little.
“Right. And this is all sounding fishy to you?”
He stared her in the eyes. “I told you I would never lie to you, and I won’t now. This Joren is probably a man from the same group that controls your husband’s debt. I’m guessing that they would soon need the favor of a judge, perhaps as I do now, and would use your affair that way. I know you developed feelings for him, yet you know practically nothing about him.”
She lowered her eyes to the floor.
“Why did my husband die then? If they could hold the affair over my head, then why?”
“Law, Allison. They have surveillance of you with your lover, dated. Now, since you are in a position to control your husband’s money, they could expose the footage and the prenuptial agreement still holds. You forfeit your money to Steven’s immediate family.”
Her eyes widened. He nodded at her train of thought.
“And if someone in the family has been at this from the beginning, your money will fall into their hands regardless of how long they toy with you.”
“But the money would go to his mother first. And she’s already very wealthy because of the life insurance. So that doesn’t make sense.”
“Though I bet there’s a sibling or cousin that lives with his parents, or near his parents. Someone who could borrow as they please, or make arrangements after your husband’s mother.”
“But he has all sorts of cousins, and two brothers and a sister. How can we-“
He stopped her by raising a hand. “There will be one or two who have money problems, or who live with the mother, or who have children and are single, yes? We’re looking for a parasite. Probably the black sheep of the family.”
“Brenda,” she said, locking her eyes on Talbaine’s. She smiled triumphantly. “It’s got to be. She’s been through rehab twice, and she’s got a four-year-old daughter who lives with her grandparents. Steven mentioned she would always come around asking for money. Yeah, it has to be, Brenda Livingston, she’s a first cousin.”
Talbaine smiled and held up his hand. Allison giggled and gave him a high five.
“Now it’s time for us to contact Mr. Kirkenwald. Tomorrow.”
***
A phone rang. It rang again. Outside a figure watched the window from a serene park bench, dappled with shadow from the late afternoon sun. Joren Kirkenwald picked up the phone upstairs.
“Hallo?” Joren said in his accent. Allison’s voice came back to him.
“Joren? It’s Allison, Allison Goddard.”
“Allison!” he breathed into the phone. “I thought we’d talked about this! I can’t see you. I don’t even know if I should talk to you.” He never heard the door ease open, or the soft footfalls behind him, or the hulking figure of John Talbaine.
“But I can see you Joren.” Her voice came out flat over the phone. He looked out the window, and she waved. She blew him a kiss next, laughing into the phone, and Joren whirled around.
A hand whipped out of nowhere and took all his consciousness away.
***
The man who called himself Joren Kirkenwald woke up in a small, dimly lit hotel room. He struggled against the bindings and jerked in the chair, but only succeeded in moving himself a few inches.
“You’re right, he has got a perfect body. I know it’d put him out of a job if we ruined it.”
Allison giggled a little at the thought of this being so much like a movie. Joren looked around, and found two people in this hotel room: a large man with dirty blonde hair wearing a tight black t-shirt, and Allison Goddard. He heard a little, metallic sound, and a long knife came into view. Allison gulped her laughter down and stared openmouthed.
“Now, I’m going to beat the preliminary denials by telling you with complete sincerity that every false answer will be followed by a toe. You may have noticed that you’re seated on a large blue plastic tarp. I can assure you also that we’ve rented out half this hotel under different names, so it won’t matter how loud you scream.” He glanced over at Allison but kept his face devoid of all expression.
“So, I’m ready for the complete truth. Are you ready to give it to me?”
Joren nodded.
“Good answer. Great answer in fact. So, when did you get hired to do Allison’s job?”
“Ah, about, about a year ago. Someone came in to the theater and asked if I wanted to make some easy money.”
“Theater?”
“I’m an undergrad student at State, an acting major. They told me it would be two thousand a month if I could get Mrs. Goddard in bed.”
Talbaine shook his head. “An undergrad? A college student?”
“They asked me to do an accent and make up a name. So I went and got an apartment with the money and bought some art. I’ve got some art major friends, they gave me some half-finished stuff.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t fit the profiles at all.”
“I swear to god, please don’t hurt me.” Tears brimmed in his eyes and slipped down his cheeks.
“Jesus, shut up.” But the kid continued to cry and cry.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I didn’t know, I’m sorry.” He looked at Allison, saw the pain in her eyes. She looked ready to go untie her lover and cradle him in her arms. He shook his head when she started to move.
Talbaine went back behind the kid and raised the knife. With a gasp from Allison, he cut the ropes. ‘Joren’, his name was probably Eugene, slumped forward, then down to the floor, where he curled himself up into a tight ball.
“John you could’ve hurt him!” Allison said, rushing to his side.
“I didn’t. And anyway he’s done his own damage to you. Undergrad student…” he muttered, as if perplexed. “Allison, don’t touch him. He made this situation possible, remember?” She drew back, as if Joren were poison.
John hunkered down over the fetal ball of a man.
“I’m not going to kill you, because Allison won’t forgive me for that. But I can assure you that if you speak word one of any of this, you’ll never love a woman again. Have I made myself clear?”
Joren quivered, still sobbing.
“What’s your real name Joren?”
“M-Matthew.”
“Matthew look at me.” A single eye peered out from behind an arm.
“Do you understand what I’ve said? The people who hired you may try to threaten you. I’ll only say this once: my threats are far worse. I have fourteen years of practice and experience on my side.” He picked a spot on Matthew’s back and made a tiny cut, not even an inch. He took a paper towel and blotted out the blood. Next he found a toolbox and opened it, located a small bandage, and placed it over the incision. It held the wound closed while Matthew shivered and cried.
“Carry this as a reminder. Don’t get into this line of work until you understand the consequences. Okay?” Matthew jerked his assent. “Good, see, that didn’t hurt. Now go back to the University and keep quiet.”
Allison remained silent a long time after Matthew left.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked.
“People will see something as less important as time goes on unless they have a reminder.”
“I’m glad you let him go.” She offered him the tired smile of someone who’s lived through years in a single day. Talbaine rose and took her hand. Allison found herself staring into his brown eyes, flecked with a little gold on the insides.
“I don’t like killing people. I don’t know if I was clear on that. It’s not something I enjoy. It’s just the job I was trained for and nothing more.”
This was not a lie, but not exactly the truth.
The phone rang in Allison’s hand.
/>
Eighteen Years Earlier
“I feel like we found you, Jonathon. Somehow, together, we found you. Found where you were, where you needed to be, a place for you. But now you’re back in this chair.” Jennings paced back and forth in the room, somehow perplexed at the floor.
Talbaine wasn’t tied up this time, but he didn’t move from the chair.
“So why is it that I feel like you’re lost again?”
“I don’t know,” the eighteen year old murmured.
“So what happened?”
“I lost my temper.”
Jennings touched the bridge of his nose, clamping it between thumb and forefinger. He took in a deep breath and looked at Talbaine. He no longer showed any of the signs of childhood, with broad linebacker shoulders and a closely cropped growth of blonde hair. His chin was peppered with short stubble. He outweighed Jennings now, by at least fifty pounds, and towered over him by a good four inches.
“You lost your temper. Could you be more specific?”
Those huge shoulders rose, then fell. “The conversation wasn’t going where it should have, and Wally got in too close. He wasn’t staying on task.”
“Those weren’t your decisions to make, Jonathon.”
His shoulders moved into another shrug, and he pulled out a cigarette. “I haven’t lied to you, Mr. Jennings.” He lit the cigarette and popped the lighter closed on his leg, then slipped it into his cargo pants.
“Yes, and that ought to count for something. Except that because of your actions, you get to see tomorrow, and then the next day. After that, you’ll get more and more years. Wallace won’t see another day. He’s dead, Jonathon. He was a valuable asset, and now he’s dead.”
“I know.”
Jennings found his rage coming to a boil. “Then I haven’t stressed enough the need for your team members to stay alive, goddamnit. Where the fuck was your head out there? Do you think this is a numbers game, where you come out eighty percent, that’s still a passing grade? Eighty percent means one dead. And it could have been you.”
“I know that.”
“I can’t reason with you, Jonathon. I’m afraid you’re gone. And tomorrow you’re going to get your diploma, and I don’t know when I’ll see you again. Maybe if I’m lucky, that’ll be never.”
Jonathon’s eyes finally came to rest on William Jennings, before they dropped to the floor. His head fell down near his knees. When his voice came, it was a whisper.
“That wasn’t nice, Mr. Jennings.”
“Maybe we’re through with nice, Jonathon. Maybe I don’t want to care about you if you can’t care about what’s important to me. Come back to me when you can feel sorry for wasting someone’s life.” He turned on a heel and walked out of the room.
Jonathon sat still for a number of minutes, completely still. Then he stood and turned around, bent, and grabbed the chair. His muscles strained, and he was rewarded with a groan of metal. Soon the chair came loose from the bolts in the floor, with the snapping of the back two legs. Then the front legs snapped free, and he hurled the chair into the one-way mirror. He didn’t know how many people dove away, because the glass cracked but didn’t shatter. There were three.
Eighteen Years Later
Talbaine pressed a button on his device and nodded to her. Allison answered the phone. She turned a worried glance to Talbaine.
“I have no such person. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Talbaine pulled the phone from her fingers gently and put it to his ear. A mechanized voice greeted him.
“-we’re going to triple the amount that you’ll be dropping off. It’s going to be six thousand in a black duffel bag. Tomorrow at six pm. Set it down at the airport, in the bathroom at International Departures, behind the wastebasket. Make sure no one sees you. And get rid of whoever’s helping you, or else we go public with your affair.”
Talbaine held a finger up to his lips, then spoke. The words that came from his throat were stolen straight from Allison’s lips.
“It’ll take some time to come up with the money. Can’t I have some more time?” Allison stared at him, openmouthed. Then she started to giggle, and clamped a hand over her mouth. A woman’s voice came out of his massive form.
“Six pm, no excuses. You are in no position to request anything from us. And get rid of your help.”
“What do you mean we? Who are you?”
But the line went dead. Talbaine folded the phone back in half and handed it to Allison, but she burst into a furious bit of laughter.
“I can’t believe you just did that!” she giggled.
He smiled. “I think you’re having too much fun with this,” he said in her voice. “We still don’t have the evidence, and we haven’t neutralized the threat. You should go and get some rest, we have court again tomorrow.”
She mouthed something that might have been I know, and howled with laughter. One knock at the door, however, and she froze.
“Who’s that?” she demanded. Talbaine’s eyes slid to the side. “Who is that? Tell me, Jonathon, you promised you’d never lie.”
Talbaine sank into his shoulders and glared at her. The knock came again.
“Come in,” he called. A young brunette woman came into the room, shut the door, and set a bag down next to the door.
“Who the fuck is this?” Allison shot up, her good mood already vanished.
“I’m Claudette,” the woman said.
“I didn’t ask you,” Allison shot her a look and stared at Talbaine. “Jonathon, explain yourself.”
Talbaine snorted and looked away from her again. His entire body coiled into a singular point, ready to right this problem the only way he knew: by ending her life. He needed her though. Somehow she still thought of him as just another human being. He didn’t understand her lack of fear.
“I told you that I would be breaking an old promise to myself by lying. Claudette is here to punish me, since Jennings can’t be here.”
“Punishment, what sort of punishment?”
Talbaine pulled off his shirt. Underneath, his chest, shoulders, abs and back were layered with old and new welts. Some had faded into bruises, purple and angry or yellow and sickly. He looked like a twisted sort of sunset somehow.
Allison let a breath escape her. She stared in astonishment.
“I used to get twenty lashes for every lie from a belt. I’ve decided to keep that number the same. In a standard hour in court, I can tell roughly one lie per minute. I hired Claudette from an escort service.”
Allison met Claudette’s eyes, but the brunette shied away.
“She usually won’t go on past a hundred and fifty.”
“Oh my god,” Allison muttered, drawing close to Talbaine’s half-naked body. She didn’t understand about him, why? Why would she risk touching him? Her hand drifted up toward a bad patch on his left shoulder, and finally grazed his shoulder.
“Claudette, you should go,” he said. “I’ll call the office if I need you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said, and disappeared with her bag.
Her fingertips moved over the bumps where the welts were raised, but very gently. She gazed over every inch of his body, as if staring at the aftermath of a tornado. Finally she looked at his face.
“Could I, would it hurt you too much if I were to hug you?” she asked, her voice small. This raised a lump in his cybernetic throat, and he shook his head no. Her thin arms wrapped around his shoulders, and Jonathon Talbaine grunted.
“How could you do this to yourself?” she said, her soft hair tickling his neck and shoulder. It sounded as though she were crying.
“I told you why,” he said in a defenseless voice. She squeezed his body.
“Oh Jonathon,” she said. “You could take the fifth.”
“No.” Her head came off his shoulder and she stared him in the eyes.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” she whispered, moving her lips close. Very close. He stared into those eyes and memorized the look in them,
radiating their honest and naïve love. Then he felt her lips press against his, and he let his arms come around her waist.
***
“I wanted to say thank you for helping me out with this whole mess.”
“It’s no problem,” he said. “You’re helping me with mine.”
“But these last couple of months, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been spiraling out of control, flying into something. You came along, and you’ve felt like an ejection seat. I’ve wanted to get back on solid ground, I just didn’t have a parachute.” She’d been very gentle around him since yesterday, even walking with care.
He stepped off the stand earlier that day, and she’d had to remind herself not to sigh with relief. Witnesses and experts on the defense’s side were still on their way, and the court would probably continue in deciding this matter for a few weeks, but at least it would mean the end of Jonathon racking up whippings.
She looked out the window of her car. “Are you sure we’re safe in here?”
“You have tinted windows. No audio recording equipment is going to pick up anything. I checked the car for other electronics. There’s nothing untoward being seen or heard. We just have to stay careful in getting into or out of your car, that’s all.”
“I know,” she said, “But I hate the fact that you wait ten minutes before getting out.” She looked in the rearview mirror at him and smiled. He smiled back, then looked down at his watch.
“I want to help you talk to her.”
He turned to her. “Not many people are comfortable in an interrogation room.”
“I need to break my conscience a little. Besides, she stole from me.”
He nodded. They drove in silence for another ten minutes.
“You said it would be about forty five minutes to get to the airport.”
“About, yeah.”
“Good, we’re right on time.”
They pulled up to a massive house, nearly a mansion, and into a huge round driveway. On one side of the house the driveway went straight back and curved slightly into the six car garage. Allison pulled into this part of the driveway just as another car rolled out of the garage. It stopped as soon as it spotted them, with no way to get out.
Allison pulled up behind the car and got out. She mumbled, “Here goes nothing.”
Brenda was also getting out of her car.
“Hey Brenda,” Allison called. The other woman regarded her, dressed in ratty clothes and sporting bags under her eyes.