Formerly Fingerman (12 page)

First came the power nap. As soon as Brad passed out for the night, Stump lay flat on his back in his bed and hauled ass to sleep. Because of his unorthodox sleeping pattern, it never took more than thirty seconds to start the sleep process, followed soon after by REM sleep. As long as he followed his polyphasic routine, he didn't need more than two hours of sleep a day. That was the way da Vinci did it. That was the way Thomas Jefferson did it. That was the way he did it. Which gave him an extra six hours to accomplish all the things normal people complain they don't have time for. He had been at it for three weeks now and so far it was serving him well.

When he woke up twenty minutes later, it was time for yoga. Stretching. Sweating. A little grunting. It usually lasted about a half hour. Then there was another half an hour of jumping rope followed by another hour of pushups, pull-ups, and crunches mixed with a collection of martial arts katas to keep his fighting skills razor sharp. He cooled down with some deep transcendental meditation, showered, shaved, and spent the rest of his free time catching up on his reading, cleaning the house, returning e-mails, and finishing his night/morning with a second twenty-minute power nap well before the rest of America, or in this case, Brad, rubbed the sleep out of their eyes.

Brad finally got up and shuffled to the kitchen to see if coffee was one of the perks of the program. It was. He poured himself a cup and turned to find the door to the room filled with Stump, standing guard in the same position he had been in when Brad retired the night before. New suit, same position.

“Special Agent Marinakos will be here in half an hour.”

Brittany sat with Brad to fill out some paperwork to submit to the department that fabricated identities. She started with his name.

“Fingerman. What is that, Irish?”

Brad's mother was vaguely Italian and his father was a strain of German, with Fingerman being an Ellis Island clerk's bastardization of a family name a century before. His parents had never thought to ask and all four grandparents were dead, so finding out the original name or its origins was no longer an option.

But, it didn't really matter. If the truth were to be told, the Fingerman line of ancestry could have been classified as Ikea-American. A pressboard background of empty lineage stretching back several generations, his heritage had been rendered meaningless as his family had long ago assimilated into the prefab lifestyle of the United States. His parents weren't Italian-American or German-American. They were American-Americans. No accents. No leftover traditions from the old country. No treasured heritage carefully preserved in rituals and holidays. They forged their life out of materials conceived in conference rooms and refined with target demo research, test results, and focus groups. Certainly they considered themselves individuals, but in fact their lives had been compilations of items selected from a finite pool of products offered to the American public by calculating conglomerates that had determined the lowest common denominator to the fifteenth degree. The Fingermans were generic. Arguably tasteful, but nothing special. Ikea-Americans. And Brad was their son.

“It's German, Italian, English, French. You know, American.”

Brittany made a note on a form.

“All right. That gives us plenty of wiggle room. We like to give witnesses names that have some thread of reality to them. Like we're not going to call an Asian guy Chang Baumgartner, that kind of thing.”

Jackpot. Maybe with a little quick thinking he could convince Brittany that somewhere along the line in his ancestry there was a Sven Ahssccikerr or an Andre Riflemann. Something that would make sense with a guy like him.

“Smart. You know, I was thinking about names last night and—”

“Brad, don't even think about giving yourself your own butch new handle. It doesn't work that way. We'll assign one to you. And you're going to keep your first name. If we change that it becomes too risky. You might not answer to the new one and people will start to wonder. It's safer to stick with Brad.”

Brad's brain rolled its eyes.

“Your last name will be generated randomly by Witness Protection Program software from a database of the most common American names.”

“Like Bronson or Damon?”

“Like Jones or Smith. The program will use an algorithm to determine, based on where we locate you, your ethnic background, and the local population, what the least obtrusive name is. It's easier to do it this way so that all legal documents—birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, credit report, et cetera can be generated at one time. Poof! Instant new identity.”

Poof! Goodbye Brock Granite. Hello Brad Yawnberg.

They moved on to employment. In most cases, witnesses were kept in holding patterns during the trial and then released into the wild of their new lives once the trial was over. But Brad's was not most cases. It was a humongous case in which many millions of dollars would be spent on lawyers by the defendant to, at the very least, tie the prosecution up with motions and tests and whatever else Frank Fortunato's money could buy. Brittany explained Brad's new situation.

“All right, here's the deal. The trial could take months, if not years, and you probably don't want to be sitting around waiting. So in the meantime we need to get you set up in your new life. What do you do for work right now?”

“I'm in advertising.”

Rather than go into the finer points of his current job, Brad walked her through his job history (minus the Chicken Shack and tequila shots) with very little embellishment.

Brittany took copious notes and slid them into Brad's file for Stump to look over.

“Okay. Stump has a lot of friendly relationships with various companies around the country. He'll see what he can dig up for you, take you wherever you need to go, and get you set up. I'll check on you as the trial preparation proceeds.”

“Great.”

“Now, let's go over exactly what you saw yesterday.”

Not great. Brad had been too busy figuring out his new marquee-worthy name to think up a decent story about what he had seen. “A pair of black shoes walked into the fuzzy periphery of my vision, shot Carmine, and then ran off . . . I think” would not have done the job. In fact, it would have probably left him high and dry in Jackson Heights without so much as cab fare. So he lied.

“Can we do it later? I'm really exhausted. You know, psychologically.”

Brittany nodded. She understood. The poor guy had been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours. Besides, she had him now. One day wouldn't hurt anything.

“Sure. I'll come back tomorrow morning and we can talk.”

As Brittany packed her files up, Brad noticed Stump standing quietly in a doorway watching them. How long had he been standing there and why the hell didn't that guy ever say anything? This is the person he was supposed to trust his life to, and he couldn't tell if Stump was sussing him out as a gutless coward or developing a severe man crush. It was disturbing. The safe bet was on Stump seeing right through his homina-homina-homina bullshit. Brad would have to watch his step around Stump, which would be every waking moment for who knew how long.

Like he didn't have enough to worry about.

Brad spent the day trying to distract himself with History Channel reruns and spent the night pacing in his room while re-creating the murder scene in his mind. Inevitably, every replay ended up looking like some poorly shot assassination film. Every detail crystal clear until the moment of truth when the camera holder forgot their primary responsibility and let the lens drift away to some random scenery that had nothing to do with the action. And no matter how often he rewound the film, the same mistake occurred. But he kept rewinding anyway.

There was the amazing interview. The elevator. Carmine standing there. Carmine ignoring Brad. The scuff mark. That goddamned scuff mark. The sneeze. And then Carmine again. He rewound and tried to focus on a different detail. The song playing in the elevator. The color of the carpet. What frigging floor did we stop on for the murder? He tried to slow down the sneeze and go frame by frame. Nothing helped. Eventually, Brad fell asleep.

His intense mental re-creations had left a sour residue on Brad's psyche and the reenactments bled into his dreams, serving up wall-to-wall nightmares of a very angry Frank Fortunato. Having never paid much attention to the papers and only seeing Frank live in person the one time while they were both in cuffs, Brad didn't have a firm grip on the exact topography of Frank's face. So his brain substituted his junior high school baseball coach's face as a placeholder in the dreams. They were completely different men, but the impression was just as scary. In the morning, Brad stayed in bed for a good ten minutes trying to shake the feeling of impending doom and reminding himself to hit the cut-off man, you pansy.

Brad's shower went a little long since he spent most of it trying to figure out what he was going to say to Brittany. Goddamn, he hated deadlines. The more he struggled to remember some relevant nugget of information, the angrier he got, first at himself for not being more aware of his surroundings, and then gradually his ire shifted toward Brittany. After all, he was the one who went through the traumatizing experience. Not her. Nobody was trying to hunt her down and turn her into a hilarious story told over fettuccini and gravy. She wasn't even there.

She wasn't even there.

Well, hello. It had taken a while, but it had finally occurred to Brad that he was the only person who (in theory) actually knew what had happened in that elevator. He had been so worried about getting it right, he had forgotten that there was no getting it wrong. Everyone already knew the beginning and the ending. All he had to do was fill in the middle.

With anything.

It didn't matter what he told Brittany as long as it was something she could use to put Frank Fortunato behind bars. He couldn't claim there were aliens or showgirls in the elevator, but perhaps some interesting dialogue and a heroic stance on his part wouldn't be out of the question. He just had to lie.

You're in advertising, man! Since when do you tell the truth?

This would be part of his reinvention. His chance to lay the foundation of his future self by creating some macho, confident, in-control character. Someone exactly unlike who he currently was. Perfect. He would give himself a fantastic backstory. Maybe he couldn't choose his own name, but by God this instant mythology would give him a huge step up in his new life.

Like magic, Brad transformed from naked, wet, cowardly informant into naked, wet, and confident storyteller. This is what he
did
. Only instead of cornflakes he was selling murder.
Five shots to the gut! Now with more fiber!
If he could sell tampons and action figures, certainly he could figure out an interesting punch for the setup that was already written for him. All he had to do was finish the script. Couldn't be that hard. He had been carrying his partners for years. Everyone knew the words were the easy part.

Brad turned the steam up and walked through the scenario one more time, only this time acting as his own Jerry Della Femina and Quentin Tarantino wrapped up in one. Quentin Della Femina. He accented it with Jason Statham-esque dialogue, hip, obscure references, and vintage Costner bravery, painting himself in a valiant and pop-culturally relevant light. Yes, this was quite a brand Brad was selling.

And it was easier than he thought. After all, he had seen Frank being escorted out of the building so he knew what the killer was wearing. He had heard Frank cursing the FBI so he had an idea of his accent and speech pattern. And he understood a mainstream audience well enough to pepper the scene with tough but sensitive dialogue that betrayed both a constitution of iron and a heart of gold, shielded by his imaginary forty-two-inch pecs. He debated throwing in a
We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Frank; it's up to you
or
Give me the gun, Frank. I can help you if you let me
, eventually settling on something he heard in a tiny independent Korean film Owen had lent him the week before. And suddenly he had himself a real Aww-shucks/Holy Shit version of the truth. In fact, the more he thought about it, the happier he got. This was exactly what Brad had wanted when he took the FBI up on their generous offer. A complete reinvention. And maybe a screenplay deal. Fuck painting. Screenplays were where the money was.

He was headed to a new city and a new job with a new last name. And now, a new brand of Brad. A Brad with a solid foundation of poise and memorable lines. Like the old Brad, but better. The new and improved Brad. He got a hard-on just thinking about it. Now all he had to do was sell it (the fantasy, not the erection) to Brittany.

“You feel better after a little rest?”

“Much. Thanks for the break.”

“You got it.”

Brittany dropped her stack of Fortunato folders on the dining room table, sat down, and flipped open her notebook.

“Let's get started.”

Brad joined her, nervous like she was contagious with some sort of truth-telling cooties.

“So, it's just me, huh? That's a lot of pressure. Isn't there anyone else who can help out?”

“Well, we've got witnesses who are coming forward claiming they heard Frank threaten Carmine and agents who witnessed him on the way there, but as far as murder eyewitnesses, I didn't see anyone else in that elevator. Did you?”

His first test.

“No.”

“Of course we had cameras all over the building, the hallways, the elevator.”

Uh oh.

They had cameras. Why wouldn't they have had cameras? And why hadn't he thought of this? Suddenly Clint Eastwood Jr. was spinning out of control, his mind reeling as he backpedaled internally. Toss the brilliant script from this morning. The matinee was canceled. Come up with something believable quick, Schpeel-berg.