Termination Man: a novel (63 page)

She examined the carnage about her—Shawn’s body on the floor, the spilled blood and the wreckage of her kitchen. She began to frantically grope about her on the surrounding floor space, as if her cell phone might magically appear.

“
Need to call the police!
” she said again.

I walked over to her, knelt and wrapped my arms around both her and Alyssa. They huddled into my embrace. I thought for a moment that this must be one of the simple pleasures that keeps men toiling away at those workaday jobs that I so disdained: The embrace of a woman and a child. The simple realization that you are protecting them, providing for them.
But I had not done a very good job of protecting Donna and Alyssa, had I?

I removed my cell phone from my pocket and dialed 911.While I was talking to the emergency dispatcher, I heard the front door open again.  A woman’s voice calling out: “
Shawn!
”

I terminated the call with the emergency dispatcher. The police and ambulance were en route. At that moment Claire strode into Donna’s living room like she owned the place. She was carrying her purse. At the time, I didn’t grasp the significance of that purse. Within a few minutes, I would wish that I had.

Claire’s face registered a brief flicker of surprise at Alan’s presence. I saw her eyes grow wide. There was no fear in her expression, though. Rather, it might have been described as mild contempt.

“Where is Shawn?” she asked.

“Shawn’s in there,” Alan said, cocking his thumb toward the kitchen. “But I don’t think you’ll want to see him now. I had to shoot him, you see.”

I noticed that Alan had begun to shake. He might have fired a gun before; but he had never killed a man. And by the looks of Shawn, Kurt Myers’s son was never going to spend another day behind his desk at UP&S—or any other company, for that matter.

Claire ran past Alan and me, toward the kitchen. She ignored Donna and Alyssa. She ignored Donna’s explanation that Shawn had been about to kill them both. That Alan had saved their lives. This made no impact on Claire. She dropped her purse on the kitchen floor only a few inches from her lover’s body. She knelt and placed both of her hands on Shawn’s bloodied shirt. Her hands were red, wet with his blood. (
Blood on her hands
, I thought, for no particular reason.) 

For a moment I believed that Claire was going to cry. Then I thought:
No, Claire does not cry. She has so
hardened
herself that not even this w
ill
move her to tears.

Still kneeling, Claire looked over at Alan. There was pure hatred in her eyes.

“It’s over,” Alan said to all her wordless questions. He laid his pistol down on the floor.

Without turning her gaze away from Alan, Claire removed an object from her purse. It was the .38 special.

“No, Alan. It’s
not
over.”

In that instant, a sudden, fatal realization spread across Alan’s. Claire leveled her .38 special at him. She did not even have to stand. She was still kneeling; but the gun was steadied in her two outstretched hands, and Alan was sitting only a few yards away.

I tried to stop her. I threw myself in her direction; but I was too late. Claire managed to get off two shots before I reached her. The first one struck Alan near the top of his head; the second one struck him in the center of his chest.

Claire didn’t even resist me as I threw her to the floor and took the pistol from her. She kept looking at Alan. When I wrestled her to the floor, she began to cry hysterically, screaming Shawn’s name, and cursing Alan and me—the two men who had killed him.

It was January in central Ohio, the season when the dull grey lid of the Midwestern winter slams shut over the region. A light snow was falling on the windshield of my parked car as I waited in the lot of the Starbucks for the two young women to arrive.

I had never met them before. Moreover, I had never had the slightest desire to meet them while Alan was alive. But now it seemed, for a variety of reasons, like the most important meeting of my life. I was actually nervous, as I contemplated what would be a brief encounter with two young women of student age.

I let the Lexus’s heater run and turned on the windshield wipers. According to the dashboard clock, I had arrived twelve minutes early. It was a Monday afternoon, between the lunch hour and the evening rush. We would have the coffee shop more or less to ourselves.

After a while, their vehicle pulled into the parking lot. I knew that it was them right away. They parked directly in front of the shop entrance. I had parked toward the rear of the lot. This was an old habit from my many surveillance outings over the years. Some old habits die hard, try as one might to reform them.

I watched Alan's daughters step out their car, a blue Chevrolet sedan with a loose tailpipe and balding tires. They could have stepped out of the framed photos that had occupied a place of prominence on Alan's desk at UP&S.

I recalled that their names were Kate and Morgan.
“Kate is just like her old man,”
Alan once said.
“I can see my personality in her, you know?”
And I had responded that Morgan would therefore provide his only chance at grandchildren—the point being that a female with Alan Ferguson’s personality traits would have zero chance of finding a mate. As I recalled this conversation, I smiled in spite of myself. It was a sad smile, but one that I treasured. My moments of humor had been few and far between in recent weeks.

Kate was the older of the two. She was tall with long brown hair. She would be a freshman or sophomore in college now. Morgan was still in high school; she looked like a more diminutive version of her sister.

They were both quite pretty young women. I reflected, sadly, that if Alan were still alive, I would rib him about the two girls getting their looks from their mother.

I stepped out of my car and hailed them by name. “Kate, Morgan!” I called.

They waved tentatively and stood outside the front door of the Starbucks, waiting for me. Clearly they were less than enthusiastic about this meeting.
And how could I blame them?
I had contacted them out of the blue, barely a month after their father had been gunned down by Claire.

We proceeded to a booth in a private corner of the nearly empty coffee shop. Neither side was in the mood for small talk.

“Can you tell us what happened?” Kate asked. “The police haven’t told us much. And frankly, the whole thing seems a bit suspicious.”

It was only a matter of weeks since the shootout in Donna’s kitchen. The violence had made the papers, of course; but the media had not yet delved into many of the background details. Kate and Morgan had no real idea of who I was, or what I was. They knew only that I had been connected with UP&S, that Alan had been my friend, and that I had been with him on that evening he was killed. 

I suppose you could say that the girls deserved to know the truth. They deserved to know that Alan had been entrapped and that I had entrapped him. But that would have required me to reveal that Alan had also fallen prey to base temptations of his own. I didn't believe that Alan would want his daughters to know that. So I decided to protect him, and to protect myself in the process. I knew that this was really a cop-out on my part. But I wasn't up to telling these two girls that I had approved a scheme to lure their late father into an act of gross sexual misconduct.

Forgive me, Alan.
Please forgive me
,
I thought.

“Your father was my friend,” I said. “He had come to visit me on the night that two men with guns showed up at the home of the woman I was seeing—
am
seeing, in fact. One of those men had attempted to force himself on the woman’s teenaged daughter. In all likelihood, this man was also guilty of two prior murders. Your father accompanied me to the woman’s house, and that was where the confrontation took place. Alan killed one of the men; and then a third party—a woman whom the dead man was involved with—showed up and shot your father when he had already laid down his gun.”

Kate nodded in response. What I was telling her jibed, more or less, with what had been reported thus far in the papers. But I could tell that she was weighing my story for missing facts and inconsistencies.

“I all seems strange. We knew that Dad had lost his job. He didn't want to talk about it, though. He seemed to be ashamed of something that he had done. Dad wasn't communicating with anyone very much for a few weeks there. I spoke to him once right before—well, you know. He said that he was doing some sort of an ‘investigation’ into the circumstances of his firing, whatever he meant by that. To tell you the truth, I was actually beginning to wonder if he might have been losing his grip on reality. Then all of this happens, and I—I’m sorry, Mr. Walker, I’m going to need a moment here.”

I gave her a chance to wipe the tears from her eyes. She squeezed her younger sister’s hand. Morgan sniffed and leaned against Kate, the older one, the stronger one. 

“Listen to me,” I said. “Both of you. Your father was a decent man. No, more than decent. A truly good man. I know that he loved you both very much. And as for him getting fired: It was all wrong, terribly wrong, although the details of that are complicated and not very important now. I don’t want either of you to ever imagine that you should be ashamed of him. Alan was honest and open, and dedicated to his vision of the work that needed to be done at UP&S. He was a good friend, a good coworker.”

They nodded, seeming to accept this much at face value.

“I know that you two aren’t in the mood for a protracted conversation,” I said. “So I’m going to get right to business, to the main reason I asked you here for this meeting.”

I withdrew an envelope from my pocket and handed it to the elder of the two. She opened the envelope and unfolded the paper inside. They both read it over, no doubt taking note of the large number at the bottom of the paper.

"What is this?" Kate asked. “This is a lot of money.”

"It's a statement for an account at US Bank, taken out in both your names. I don’t know where you stand with college money; but I want you to have this.”

“This is your money?” Kate blurted out, incredulously.

“It came from a corporate donor,” I said. “A consulting firm that recently did some work for UP&S.”

“Wait a minute,” Kate said. “My dad told me that some consulting company was behind him getting fired. Who are you,
really
, Mr. Walker?”

As I felt the scrutiny of Alan’s daughters upon me, I wondered:
How much
did
Alan
tell
them? Do they know the full truth, even now?

“Your father was my friend,” I said. “And I swear to you that that statement is true. And yes, I had a hand in securing these funds for you. Think of it as my way of showing my appreciation for what your father did for me, and for others. He saved two women’s lives that night. One of them was about your age, Morgan.”

“You believe that it was your fault that our father was killed? Is that what you are saying?” Kate asked.

I hadn’t said this; but Kate, I reminded myself, was Alan Ferguson’s daughter.

"Fault," I replied, "Is sometimes difficult to define. Let's just say that I do feel some responsibility for your father's death. If you want to get specific about it, he would be alive today if the two of us had never crossed paths. You can call that fault if you like."

"So this is—”

Kate was searching for a particular word, a word that I had already articulated in my mind; but I was not going to enunciate this word for Alan’s daughters. The word was “penance.”

So instead I said: “This is my way of expressing my condolences for your loss, and my appreciation to your father, my friend.”

“Alright,” Kate said. “Thank you, I suppose. This is very generous of you, despite what happened. But I don’t know if I should—”

“Please, take the money,” I said.

She paused for a while, and then finally nodded. “Okay, then. If that’s what you want.”

“I do want.”

“Thank you, Mr. Walker,” Morgan said.

“You’re both very welcome.”

Under more pleasant circumstances, this would have been my opening to make inquiries regarding their educational plans. But these were not pleasant circumstances; and I knew that the money given to them by Craig Walker Consulting would go toward worthwhile ends. I knew from my conversations with Alan that both of the girls were straight-A students.

“We’re going to miss him,” Kate said.

“I know,” I replied. “Me too.”

“Anyway, Mr. Walker, I hope you’ll understand; but we’re really not much in the mood for conversation right now. If you don’t mind—”

“I understand,” I said. “I’m glad you came here today. And once again, I’m sorry about what happened. Sorrier than you’ll ever know.”

With that the two young women took their leave of me. I sat there in the booth and watched them leave. I wanted to wait until they were gone; there was no need for a second, more awkward goodbye in the parking lot.