Killer Instinct (31 page)

“News to me.”

“And did you know the director grew up in Malden? He used to write for
Major Dad.
”

“I think maybe you’ve been spending too much time on the Internet,” I said. I noticed that her bookmark in
The Brothers Karamazov
was still only about a millimeter of the way into the book. “How’s the Brothers K? A real page-turner, I see. Can’t put it down if you don’t pick it up.”

“That’s the thing about bed rest,” she said. “You have all the time in the world, but you lose the ability to concentrate. So I just go on the Internet and look something up, and that leads to something else and something else, and I just click and click and click and pretty soon I’m lost in cyberspace. I thought you have a game tonight.”

“I do, but I’m staying here with you.”

“For what? Don’t be silly. If I need to reach you, I know how. Just keep your cell on this time.”

Kurt was really pitching lights-out that night, as the radio announcers say. But what was really amazing was how many long balls Trevor hit. He was good, and he usually hit a home run in each game. This evening, though, every time he stepped up to the plate, the balls just exploded off his bat, each flying easily three hundred feet. Trevor himself seemed amazed at how well he was playing. I figured his confidence was stoked by the possibility of bringing me down. He was playing better than Kurt.

The Metadyne guys weren’t great, weren’t terrible. This was a company that made testing equipment for semiconductor chips, which is as exciting as it sounds, so softball was the high point of their week, but they weren’t enjoying this game.

In the fourth inning, Trevor slugged another one, and his bat went flying out of his hands, slamming against the dirt with a loud metallic ping, and then something bizarre happened.

The end of his bat had popped off. The end cap had separated from the barrel and rolled a good distance away into the infield. A bunch of the players laughed, even Trevor. The ball was gone. One of the out-fielders gamely gave chase. Another one of the Metadyne players picked up the end cap as Trevor ran the bases.

He looked at it curiously, weighed it in his hand. “Man,” he said. “Heavy. Look at this!”

He took it over to another one of the Metadyne players, who I remembered was an electrical engineer. The engineer weighed it in his palm just like the other guy had done. “Oh, man, someone put, like, lead fishing weights and hot melt inside this cap. Unbelievable.” Then he walked over to the decapitated metal bat and picked it up. He looked inside, then waved some of his teammates over.

“Hey,” one of them shouted. “This bat is juiced!”

Trevor, running triumphantly home, nowhere near out of breath, looked to see what the commotion was.

“You doctored the bat,” another one of the Metadyne guys shouted.

“What?” Trevor said, loping over to where they were all inspecting his bat.

Our own team had left the benches to see what the fuss was about.

“The inside of this bat’s been machined, or lathed, or something,” the engineer was saying. “Like maybe with one of those Dremel tools. You can even see the shavings—graphite or resin, I think. And check out this lead tape inside the end of it.”

“Hey, I didn’t do that!” Trevor protested. “I wouldn’t even know how.”

“Nah,” said another Metadyne guy with an adenoidal, buzz-saw voice, “he sent it to one of those bat doctors.”

“No way!” Trevor shouted.

“It’s a forfeit,” the engineer said. “The game gets forfeited. That’s the rules.”

“No wonder these Entronics guys are suddenly on a winning streak,” said the buzz-saw-voiced guy. “They’re cheating.”

The Metadyne team insisted on doing a visual inspection of all the rest of our bats, and all they found were the usual scratches and dings. Only Trevor’s bat had been doctored. Apparently thinning the walls with a lathe to make it springier, and weighting the end, increased what the Metadyne engineer called the trampoline effect, making the bat really hot.

But Trevor was not going down without a fight. He stood there in his cargo shorts and his
LIFE IS GOOD
T-shirt and his pukka shells and his brand-new white Adidas and his backwards faded Red Sox cap, and he protested that he’d never in his life cheated at sports, that he’d never do such a thing, that he wouldn’t even know how to begin.

It was hard to tell how many of the guys believed him. I overheard Festino say to Letasky, “For a company softball game? Now
that’s
competitive.” Letasky, ever the diplomat, pretended he hadn’t heard. He was playing basketball with Trevor and Gleason on Thursday, he’d told me. He was being very careful not to take sides, as he’d put it.

“Either the thing came that way,” Trevor said, “or…”

He looked at Kurt. “This bastard did it.” His voice rose. “He set me up again.” Now he pointed to me, then to Kurt. “Both of these guys. It’s like a goddamned reign of terror around here, have you guys noticed?”

Kurt gave him a puzzled look, shrugged, then headed off toward the parking lot. I followed him.

“How come?” I said when we were out of earshot of our teammates.

“You don’t think I did that, do you?”

“Yes. I do.”

But Trevor had caught up with us, walking alongside us, speaking quickly, in clipped tones. “You’re an interesting guy,” he said, addressing Kurt. “A man of many secrets.”

“That right?” Kurt said blandly, not letting up his pace. It was twilight, and the sodium lamps in the parking lot were sickly yellow. The cars cast long shadows.

“I did a little research on you,” Trevor said. “I found this Special Forces website, and I posted a notice. I asked if anyone knew a Kurt Semko.”

Kurt gave Trevor a sidelong glance. “You discovered that I don’t exist, right? I’m a mirage. I’m in the Witness Protection program.”

I was looking back and forth between the two of them, watching this verbal tennis match, bewildered.

“And someone posted an answer the next day. I didn’t know you had a dishonorable discharge from the army, Kurt. Did you know that, Jason? You vouched for him. You recommended him.”

“Trevor, that’s enough,” I said.

“But did you know
why,
Jason?”

I didn’t answer.

“How much do you know about the—what’s the term they used?—‘sick shit’ Kurt got into in Iraq, Jason?”

I shook my head.

“Now I see why your friend is so willing to do your dirty work,” Trevor said. “Why he’s so willing to be your instrument in your little reign of terror. Because you got him a job he never would have gotten if anyone did a little digging.” He looked at Kurt. “You can threaten me all you want. You can try to sabotage me. But in the end, both of you are going down.”

Kurt stopped, came close to Trevor. He grabbed Trevor by the T-shirt and pulled him close.

Trevor drew breath. “Go ahead, hit me. I’ll see to it you don’t have a job to go to tomorrow morning.”

“Kurt,” I said.

Kurt lowered his head, moved right in so their faces were almost touching. He was just about the same height but much broader and much more powerful-looking. “I have another secret I want to share with you,” he said in a low, guttural voice.

Trevor watched him, wincing, waiting for the blow. “Go ahead.”

“I killed Kennedy,” Kurt said, letting go of Trevor’s T-shirt abruptly. Trevor’s shoulders slumped. The fabric of his
LIFE IS GOOD
T-shirt remained bunched.

“Trevor,” Kurt said, “are you sure?”

“Am I sure of what?”

“Your shirt, I mean.” He pointed at Trevor’s T-shirt. His index finger circled the
LIFE IS GOOD
logo. “Are you sure life is good, Trevor? Because I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.”

44

When I got home, Kate was still awake. She was clicking away on her laptop, surfing a tsunami of trivia on the Internet, digging deep into movie adaptations of Jane Austen novels.

“Aren’t you the one who said that watching movie versions of Jane Austen’s novels was like hearing a Beethoven symphony played on a harmonica?” I said.

“Did we ever rent
Clueless
? You might be into that one. It’s Jane Austen’s
Emma,
but it’s set in a Beverly Hills high school and it stars Alicia Silverstone.”

“You know they’re remaking
Pride and Prejudice
with Vin Diesel as that guy?”

“Mister
Darcy
? No way!” She was appalled.

“Way. In the first scene, Vin drives his Hummer through the plate-glass window of this English manor house.”

She glared at me. “I asked Kurt to take a look at the cable,” she said. “As you suggested.”

“That’s nice.”

“He’s coming over tomorrow after work. I also invited him to stay for dinner.”

“For dinner?”

“Yeah, is that a big deal? You’re always saying I exploit him—I thought it was only right to invite him to break bread with us. Or papadams, at least. Maybe you can pick up some Indian, or Thai, or something.”

“I thought your sister’s coming tomorrow.”

“I thought she and Kurt might enjoy meeting each other. Ethan would definitely love Kurt. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it be okay?” I could think of a couple of reasons, like she was still spending too much time with Kurt. Or like I couldn’t see Kurt and St. Barths Susie having a whole lot to talk about.

Or like he scared me.

“Um, Kate, I think we need to talk.”

“Isn’t that my line?”

“It’s about Kurt.”

I told her what I should have told her before.

“How come you never said anything?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said after a long pause. “Maybe because I was embarrassed.”

“
Embarrassed
? About what?”

“Because if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t believe that. Maybe he gave you a leg up, but it’s you who’s doing the job so incredibly well.”

“I think maybe I was afraid that if I told you, you’d want me to just—shut up and go along. Put up with it.”

“Why in the world would I want that?”

“Because of
this
.” I waved around the room, just as she’d once done, indicating the whole house. “As long as Kurt was helping me up the greasy pole, I knew we’d have this. And I know how much this house means to you.”

She blinked and shrugged. Then I saw the tears at the corner of her eyes.

More softly, I said, “And I knew that as soon as I went up against him, I’d be putting all this in jeopardy.”

She bowed her head, and a few tears dripped to the bedsheets. “So what?” she said, her voice muffled.

“So what? Because I know how important this house was to you.”

She shook her head. Her teardrops were making big damp splotches. “You think that’s what I care about?”

I was silent.

She looked up. Her eyes were red. “Look, I grew up in a huge house with servants and a pool and tennis court and horseback-riding lessons and ballet classes and winters in Bermuda and spring vacations in Europe and summers on the beach. And all of a sudden, poof, it was gone. We lost the house, the Cape house, I got yanked out of school…It was really hard to lose all that. And yeah, I miss it, I won’t lie to you. But that’s not what I’m about.”

“Hey, correct me if I’m wrong here, but aren’t you the one who was looking at houses on Realtor.com?”

“Guilty. Okay? Did I want our kids to grow up in a house that has room to run around in, and a yard, and all that? Sure. Did it have to be this nice? Of course not. I love this place, I won’t deny that. But I’d give it up in a second if we had to.”

“Please.”

“I didn’t marry you because I thought you’d make me rich again. I married you because you were
real
. All those phonies I went out with, mouthing all that crap about Derrida and Levi-Strauss, and then all of a sudden I meet this guy who’s got no pretense, no phoniness, and I loved it.”

“Levi-Strauss,” I began.

“The anthropologist, not the jeans,” she said, shaking her head, knowing I was about to poke fun at her. “And I loved your energy. Your drive, your ambition, whatever you want to call it. But then you started to lose it.”

I nodded.

“You can see how you’ve changed, can’t you? The confidence? You’re not settling anymore. I admire you so much, you know that?”

Tears were running down her cheeks. I flicked my eyes at her, looked down. I felt like a jerk.

“Because you know something? When I was born, I was handed the keys. And you had to earn them.”

“Huh?”

“I was given everything, all the advantages, all the connections. And what have I done with them? Nothing.”

“Look what you’re doing for the Haitian quilt lady,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said miserably. “Once in a while I help out some poor artist. That’s true. But you—look at where you’ve come from. What you’ve achieved on your own.”

“With the help—”

“No,”
she said fiercely. “
Without
Kurt.
That’s
what makes me happy. Not all the toys we can afford to buy now. Like that ridiculous starfish.”

“That Tiffany’s thing?”

“I hate it. I’m sorry, but I do.”

I groaned. “No wonder you never wear it. Do you have any idea how much—” I stopped. “Thanks for telling me now. It’s kinda late to return it.”

“Jason, it’s not me,” she said gently. “It’s glitzy and showy and…hideous. It’s Susie, not me.”

“You went gaga over it when you saw it on her.”

“I was just trying to make her feel good. You think I want to compete with Susie on everything? I don’t want her husband and I don’t want her kid and I hate the way they treat him and I don’t want her stupid glitzy social-climbing life. You think I’m like my sister? Ever notice she’s got a thousand dollars’ worth of cosmetics in her travel bag? I use stuff from CVS. We’re just worlds apart. Always have been.”

Maybe I underestimated her even more than she ever underestimated me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve hurt your feelings.”