Delusion Road (16 page)

Evan clicked off the phone, laid it on the counter.

“Look, I know I shouldn’t have—”

“Say it,” interrupted his father.

Keegan looked away.

“
Say
it!”

His fingers still tingling, Keegan thought of the groceries he’d bought so his father wouldn’t have to. It didn’t matter what he did, how hard he tried. It was never enough.

“
SAY IT!
”

Keegan could hear Isaac whimpering in the hallway, and he swallowed the pulse in his throat. “Don’t attract attention,” he said, the words like shards of glass.

“Simple enough, right?” his father asked. “And how many times did Forbes try to hammer
that
into your head? How many times did I tell you
myself
?” Jabbing a finger toward the phone, he scowled, “Apparently, you just don’t
give
a damn, do you? Or maybe you
want
us to get caught. You
want
them to find us.”

“Seriously?” snarled Keegan. “You’re ready to talk about what
I
want?” He waved a hand around the room. “It sure as hell isn’t
this
! But that didn’t matter to
you
, did it?
No
! The only thing
you
cared about was—”

“
Enough
!” his father roared, and Keegan could hear the whimpers in the hallway become sobs. “The life we have is the life we have. Period. Neither of us can change that. But we can
lose
it. And in a
heartbeat
if you let yourself forget the prime directive. Don’t—attract—attention,” he said slowly, each word like the thud of a mallet against bone. “
Christ
, Keegan!”

Keegan glanced again at the bags on the counter. He could feel himself reaching back, could feel the muscles in his arm tense, could feel them winding up for the swing that would send all those bags hurtling to the floor. Eggs and fucking all.

But the sobs came again.

Keegan shoved through the back door and was gone.

“M
r. Barnett,” said the super as he peered around the door he held partially ajar. “What can I do for you?”

His face bore an odd expression that Griff couldn’t read. He knew it wasn’t fear—he’d seen enough of it on the faces of the people he’d offed to recognize that when he saw it. But, he thought, the fact that the super
wasn’t
afraid was a good thing. The prick didn’t know who he was dealing with. Yet.

“Mind if I come in for a minute?” asked Griff.

The super’s face instantly flushed, and Griff could guess what the guy had been up to. Choking the chicken. Griff expected him to excuse himself for a minute to turn off whatever porn he’d been watching, but he surprised Griff by opening the door all the way. “By all means,” he said.

Griff glanced left and right to make sure the hallway was empty. It was late, and the super’s apartment was in the basement, sandwiched between the mechanical room and the delivery bay, so he doubted other tenants came down here. There was, of course, the matter of the surveillance cameras in the elevator and at the end of the hallway, but Griff would deal with them later. He stepped inside.

The super’s apartment was nothing like Griff had expected. He’d imagined something seedy, and not just because its below-grade location offered slit-like windows near the ceiling. It was the guy’s rat-like manner that had made Griff picture him living in something dark and disgusting, but the opposite was true. The living room was bright and cheerful, and instead of tattered furniture found curbside or at a Salvation Army depot, a plush leather sofa and matching loveseat and wingback made a cozy grouping around a gleaming coffee table. Go figure.

“Can I offer you something?” said the super as he followed Griff into the room. “A soda maybe?”

“I’m good,” Griff replied, shaking his head. “But would you mind if I used your washroom? I’m not feelin’ too well all of a sudden.”

The super raised his eyebrows. “Uh, sure. It’s this way.” He led Griff down a hallway and pointed to a door on the left.

“Thanks,” said Griff as he entered a bathroom that, although small and windowless, was brightly lit and had a good-sized tub. Closing the door behind him, he pulled a large plastic bag and a pair of rubber gloves from his pockets. He slipped on the gloves, spread the bag on the floor, took a towel from the vanity, and waited.

After several minutes, he heard the super’s footsteps approach the bathroom. “Mr. Barnett? Are you all right in there?”

Griff didn’t respond, and a moment later the super tapped on the door. “Is anything wrong?”

Griff made a sound that resembled a moan, faint but loud enough to be heard from the hall.

“Mr. Barnett?”

Griff watched the doorknob begin to turn, and he stepped back. Although there was little space for him to move, the opening door shielded him from view momentarily, and a moment was all he needed. The second the super appeared, Griff reached out and grabbed him by the neck, forcing him diagonally floorward in a single motion and ramming his face against the inside edge of the tub, a broken tooth clattering against the porcelain. Griff wrapped the towel around the now unconscious man’s head and lowered him to the tile floor.

He worked methodically, turning on the tap in the tub and plugging the drain before stripping the man of his clothes and dropping them into a hamper beside the vanity. A bar of Irish Spring lay in a soap dish, and he placed it under the tap, the flow of warm water forcing a swath of suds outward across the rising surface. When the tub was more than half filled, Griff turned off the tap, put his arms under the super, and hoisted him up. Trying not to look at his genitals flopping uselessly between his legs, he focused instead on the dark stain seeping across the towel as he lowered the man into the tub. Griff was surprised to hear a muffled groan, and he knew the shock of the water was bringing him around. He would have to move quickly.

The towel had served its purpose, ensuring no blood had dripped onto the floor or Griff’s clothes. Cradling the man’s upper body in one arm, Griff used his other hand to unwrap the cloth from the super’s head and dropped it into the plastic bag at his feet before forcing the guy’s head under the water. As his bloodied face submerged, his eyes fluttered open, and in them at last was the fear Griff was used to seeing. Careful not to bruise the super’s skin beneath his fingers, he held the man’s face and
torso under, counting in his head. For a little guy, he was wiry and strong, and he continued to flail until Griff got to nineteen and the weakening body finally went limp. Fortunately, the water had muffled his gargled cries, but Griff was still grateful for the apartment’s basement location.

When it was over, Griff rearranged the man’s position, turning him this way and that until he was satisfied with what he saw. There being no sign of forced entry into the apartment and no other marks on the super’s body, police would assume he’d slipped in the tub and knocked himself unconscious. Hadn’t all those studies identified falls as the number one cause of accidental deaths in the home? And most of those happened in the bathroom.

Griff grabbed another towel, using it to mop up the water that had splashed onto the floor, then shoved it into the plastic bag along with the bloodied one before tying the bag to his belt. Pulling a cloth from his pocket, he wiped off the doorknob, the only surface he’d touched without wearing the gloves, then went looking for a bathrobe and a clean pair of pyjamas, both of which he hung from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. Perfect.

Having disposed of the super, Griff was now free to look for whatever the guy had on him, and he found the bedroom that functioned as an office. A leather chair sat in front of a large desk holding a computer and an enormous monitor. Three smaller screens connected to the same computer sat on a separate table to the left.

Easing himself into the chair, Griff began by searching the desk’s two drawers, carefully removing everything inside each and then replacing the contents one by one. He found nothing
out of the ordinary: one drawer contained maintenance schedules, requisitions for cleaning supplies, shit like that, and the other held only blank notepads and a handful of thank-you cards from grateful tenants. A place for everything and everything in its place, but nothing of any significance, so he turned to the computer and was relieved to see it didn’t require a password to bring it out of sleep mode. Not that he couldn’t have gotten around that, but it would have taken a while and he didn’t want to hang around there any longer than he had to.

Even in death, the super continued to surprise him—as the screens powered up, none of them showed any evidence of porn. The large monitor displayed a desktop photo of Chicago’s skyline at sunset, while each of the three smaller screens was subdivided into multiple windows showing feeds from the various surveillance cameras on each floor and elevator. Griff located the cameras for the basement hallway and the elevator that had brought him down and, with a few simple keystrokes, tapped into their feeds and erased those segments. Before leaving the apartment, he would reset the timing sequence and copy and paste video loops of an empty hallway and elevator so he could leave undetected.

Confident he’d eliminated any record of his presence, Griff turned his attention to learning how much the super knew about him. The moment he’d seen the guy had tailed him that afternoon, Griff’s imagination had leaped toward a couple of scenarios, one of them involving the police. Nothing about the super had activated Griff’s podar but, nonetheless, he set about looking for anything that might suggest a law enforcement connection. Inserting a flash drive, he initialized a sifter that analyzed the hard drive
for telltale signs of police activity but, as he’d suspected, the scan revealed nothing.

Griff slumped back in the chair. While he was glad to rule out the police, the alternative was no less disturbing: Pavel Morozov. It would be just like that pale-faced freak to put the super on his payroll to keep tabs on him and make sure he didn’t try to run. And Morozov hadn’t earned the nickname Architect of Accidents for nothing—he would know that Griff had offed the guy, so who knew what his next move would be? Griff could feel the noose around his neck tightening.

Reaching for the keyboard again, he was about to begin reconfiguring the sifter with a new set of search parameters when his fingers hesitated. He thought about the super lying submerged in the tub down the hall, thought about how tidy the man had been, not just in his apartment but throughout the building. A place for everything and everything in its place. On a hunch, Griff opened up a drive search, typed in seven letters, and hit Enter.

Despite the scenarios he’d anticipated, Griff wasn’t prepared for what appeared on the screen.

S
itting in homeroom, Willa sighed. Monday morning already, and she had nothing to show for the weekend except all the schoolwork she’d finished because Wynn was still in a pissy mood—Keegan Fraser hadn’t shown up at the final tryouts on Thursday, and Wynn had missed his chance to run the guy’s ass into the ground. She’d wondered if Keegan had heard Wynn was gunning for him, because he hadn’t shown up at school on Friday, either.

It wasn’t as if she and Wynn had argued, but she’d only seen him Saturday evening because Wynn had gotten Todd and Jay and a few other buddies to scrimmage with him until late on Friday and then most of the next day. And their evening together hadn’t exactly been best-school-year-ever memorable. They’d watched a movie at Wynn’s place, her body curled against his on his king-sized bed, but she could tell he was distracted, his thoughts clearly on what had happened in phys ed. She’d tried to distract him herself but, as usual, her efforts only got so far. The minute their necking grew intense, he’d pulled away from her and said it was getting late, he’d better take her home.

Like all the times before, she’d struggled to hide how hurt she felt, wondering what was wrong with her. A couple of months
after they’d begun going steady, she’d mustered the courage to ask why he was reluctant to take their relationship to the next level, and he’d said he respected her too much to take advantage of her that way. It was an answer that should have pleased her, but for some reason it sounded like he was repeating something he’d heard in a movie or read in a pamphlet. She knew Wynn wasn’t gay—hadn’t she felt physical evidence of his arousal every time they’d made out?—but each time she believed they might actually take that next step, he seemed to recoil as if something about her flipped a switch, shut him down. She’d wanted to talk to Celia and Britney about it but had never been able to work up the nerve—it would have been humiliating to admit how undesirable she was. So, instead, she continued to look for answers on relationship websites, poring over articles like “Ten Top Tips for Pleasing Your Guy.” Invariably, though, they only made her feel worse.

She hadn’t seen Wynn on Sunday at all—something he had to do for his father, he had told her. That afternoon, as she’d disposed of the roses he’d given her (she was surprised at how unpleasant week-old roses could begin to smell), she wondered if maybe what he was really doing was kicking that damn soccer ball around some more. Willa understood that Wynn’s competitiveness was the very thing that made him so valuable on each of the teams he played for but, for the first time, she’d found herself wishing he would just get over himself.

Off to her right, she heard the hum of a vibrating phone and saw Bailey Holloway pull hers out of her bag, glance at the display, and then stab Ignore. Willa wondered who could be on the other end generating that response. Judging from the way Greg Phillips had hung on Bailey’s every word during
their group discussion last week, Willa figured it might be him, though the guy didn’t seem like the type who’d make a girl punch Ignore. But she really didn’t know him, did she?

The door opened and Keegan Fraser walked in, handing Mr. Richardson a slip of paper before moving to his seat and sitting down. Missing school on Friday and now arriving moments before first class made it look more and more like he was keeping out of Wynn’s way, which surprised Willa. Despite his obvious talent for jerkness, he really didn’t seem like someone who’d slink around avoiding a confrontation. But he’d surprised her before, hadn’t he? Like on Thursday at the SaveEasy, the way he was so attentive to his little brother. Wynn had a younger brother, too, but the boy still lived with their mom in Halifax, so Wynn didn’t see him much. And he hardly ever talked about him.