Days 263 and 264

Writing exercise

…

I made a mistake. 

And for that mistake, I was probably going to pay for it for the rest of my life.

The mere fact that I was set up by someone I trusted implicitly made not one jot.

There were no such things as friends, simply marks who were there to be exploited by people who didn’t care whose lives they ruined.

And it was our fault, I finally realised.  I had sought to blame everyone else, but in the end, I had the power to not go along with the plan.

But, human nature being what it was, and having someone flatter you and feed that ego, and that element of bravado that dwelt in us all, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

I was sitting opposite that person right now.  The call was not a request.  If I didn’t show, I would suffer the consequences.  If I did not comply, I would suffer the consequences.

And those consequences?  People who didn’t deserve to die would.  People I cared about.  And what was worse, some other schmuck would take my place.

My tormentor had gleefully told me the world was full of schmucks just like me, lining up to be used.  Everyone had secrets, secrets they didn’t want exposed.

The thing was, he wanted me to become one of those scmucks and blackmail my best friend, probably one of only three.

Because he had an idea, and they wanted that idea, and they didn’t want to pay for it.  That was how the rich got richer and the poor, the ones who had all the good ideas, stayed poor.

Now, having got through college and about to take a step onto the world stage, Jeremy, my friend, was going to take his idea and change the world.

It was an idea that my tormentor had told me was utterly brilliant and worth a gold mine.

Just not for Jeremy.  People like him didn’t understand that giving away life-changing technology was not the right thing, that people had to pay, and keep paying.

Like the man he worked for, who already had so much wealth he could not spend it in a dozen lifetimes.  He wanted it because he could.

He was going to take it because he could.

And I was going to help him.

“So, what is your report?”  My tormentor had just lit a large cigar and was all but blowing the smoke in my face.

If I had a fire extinguisher, I would put it out, and him with it.

He was lucky I didn’t.

“They want to set up a flat and invited me to stay with them.”

“He hadn’t told you about them?”

“Mo.  Maybe you got it wrong.”

He snorted.  I’d said that the first time he told me they had become lovers, and the reason why Allison had sort of left me to think we might have a future, except she was as distant today as she was when she first suggested it.

For some reason, he didn’t want me to know, or anyone else.  They certainly played their parts well, and I would not have guessed.  Not until my tormentor gleefully played the tapes of them together, in several small out-of-the-mainstream hotels.

I was neither surprised nor shocked.  Allison had told me she was interested in him and was happy I had found what I believed to be the one. 

My tormentor had been particularly pleased when he told me Jeremy had set me up, smoothing his way to take Allison, and then strategically arranged to have the girl dump me, having rendered any chance with Allison gone.

I let him have his moment.  Allison and I were never going to be an item, then or now or ever.  Nor was Jeremy, no matter what he thought.  And my tormentor, with everything in his bag of tricks, would never find out.

So…

“Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?  But, why would they want me to stay with them?”

“The rent.  It’s more than they can afford.  With you, it’s more affordable.”

“He just has to get a better job.  After all, he graduated top of his class.”

“He doesn’t want a better job; he wants to work on his pet project.”

“Until you take it off him.”

He shook his head.  “You’re oversimplifying things again, Stephen.  He will never get the backing he needs to make it work.  No one will do it for pennies on the dollar.  My boss made him an offer, just about everything he wants.  All he has to do is show proof of concept.  We need you to stay, make him feel safe, not having to trust an outsider, for just a little bit longer.”

“You’re going to steal it, aren’t you?”

“No.  I’m not.  I wouldn’t know anything about it.  I just have one job.  You’re keeping him safe.  Then you’re off the hook.”

I doubted it.  My tormentor was not one to let me go that easily. 

I glared at him.  “Seeing is believing.”  I stood.  “Until next week.”

‘Don’t lose the faith.”

Out on the street, I had to try very hard not to throw up.  Being in the presence of that creature was sickening.  The problem was, if it was not time, there would be someone else.

His expensive suits, the grandest suites in hotels, the car that cost an eyewatering sum, he was a creature of a particular sort.  They fed off the weak and manipulable, people like me.

When three blocks away from the hotel and out of line of sight and outside listening range, I checked for and found a listening device planted in my coat.  I had wondered why he insisted I take it off and leave it inside the door.

An app on my phone found it.  Another app on my phone rendered it useless.  But not in a way that he would immediately find out.  Jeremy was clever like that.

Jeremy had worked out that someone was leading him down a particular path, and his first thought it was me.  I simply shook my head and told him to put his cards on the table.

He said I’d been compromised by a huge multinational company run by a criminal dressed up as a businessman.

I told him he was nuts.

He said he followed me.  He gave me my movements for every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for the last year.

At least, I said, I didn’t try to hide where I was going.  Since each time I was going to an expensive hotel, he would also have seen an expensive girl go in too.  What did he think was going on?

Allison wouldn’t be pleased.

Allison didn’t like me in that way.  Maybe Allison was leading him down the garden path.

He gave me a look that told me he didn’t know who to trust.  I simply said keep your friends close but your enemies closer.  I thought I was a friend, he thought I was the enemy.  Win-win.

It was then that I told him that he was never going to achieve his objective, that, like the inventor of a car that ran on water, they would find a way to stop him.  He said he’d never heard of anyone who had, and simply said that proved my point.

We’d had this conversation before.

“I thought you were going to have a heart attack.  You OK?”

That voice in my head, the one that could scare the daylights out of me.  It wasn’t through an earpiece and a detectable transmitter.  Another of Jeremy’s inventions.

“You don’t know what he’s going to do to me and my family if or when I screw up.”  It felt weird talking to myself.

“You did that when you let him take over your life.”

“Easy for you to take that high moral ground.”

We’d had that conversation before, and anyone not in my position, at the time, didn’t understand why I didn’t just spit in his face.

Five years down the track, why hadn’t I grown a spine?  There was one reason.  A demonstration of what he could do if I strayed.  That I never told Jeremy.  His concept of evil was far different from mine, and would be until he suffered loss.

“We agreed to disagree,” he said.  “So it’s status quo.  Good to know they think they have me right where I want them.”

“They won’t be so easily fooled, Jeremy.  His boss doesn’t lose.”

“David versus Goliath, Stephen.  David versus Goliath.”

I was 13 and had the father from hell.  When he attacked my sister one night after he had been drinking heavily, not for the first time, I did the only thing a 13-year-old could think of to stop him.

I picked up the hammer under my bed, went into her room and hit him as hard as I could on the back of the head.

He was dead before I could yank the hammer head out.  Sylvie didn’t stop screaming for five solid minutes.

Our mother didn’t hesitate.  She got Sylvie un hysterical and my older brother and she wrapped the body in a tarpaulin and disappeared into the night.

I was the secret we kept until a man came visiting about a month later and said he knew what I had done.  He said that my father got what he deserved, but there was always a price to pay.

One day, he would return, and that day, he would have a job for me to do.  I would do it, or there would be consequences.  To prove a point, he made Sylvie very, very sick, and asked me a week or so later if I understood.  When I said yes, he made her better.

I had lived in dread of his return.

That came about a year ago when he summoned Mr to a hotel room and told me what he wanted.  It was not as bad as I thought.  All I had to do was tell him what Jeremy was up to.

And be his friend, the one he told me what he was doing.  Jeremy always had his head in the clouds, and I’d never believed him.  The man did.  He seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

That was when I told him, the first time, that secrets like those he had in his head, others would want them, that they would not understand his ideals.

He was naive back then.

Until one of his family members got sick.  When he described it, I knew.  The man was sending a message.  Jeremy didn’t understand or believe me.  That was when I told him.

And that it was too big for him to go up against them.  They were the ones who held all the cards.

Instead of going back to the apartment where Jeremy and Allison would be waiting, I went to the park.  For the first time, I didn’t want to participate in a game no one was going to win.

I think I also realised in that moment that my life and that of my family were over.  People like my tormentor kept people like me alive only when it suited them.  Win or lose, we would become collateral damage.  Loose ends to be tidied up.

I heard a door slam in my head and the sound of a scream.  Allison.  The sounds could only be coming from Jeremy’s.

What sounded like a gun fired once, followed by a very loud and extended “Noooooo…”

“You were not as clever as you think, Jeremy.”

The voice of my tormentor.

“You didn’t have to shoot Allison.”

“I did.  You failed to understand the basics.  I was not asking for the proof of concept.  You had to deliver it.  An hour ago.”

“I’m not giving it up.  To you or to anyone.”

Another shot.  I think I knew where that ended.  A sob told me he had just killed Allison.

“Was it worth losing her?”

“She was already dead.  As I am, once I hand over the plans.  I’m sure Stephen will be next.”

“The plans are in my head.  Not on paper.”

“Not what Blaikie said.  He saw the proof of concept, and it was everything you said.  So the plans have to be somewhere.”

Blaikie had been his science teacher in high school, a mentor.  He had died in an accident several years before.  Seems it was not an accident.  It explained how the man knew about Jeremy’s idea.

Another shot, and I heard a body slumped to the ground.  “I have eleven more bullets.  You are going to wish you were dead.”

“I already do.  Kill me, and it goes to the grave with me.”

Another shot, and a grunt.  “Get your boss to come.  I’ll give it to him and him alone.”

A startling change of tactics.

I could hear the man calling his boss.

Then, “Come now, Stephen.  Gun in the hall cleaners’ cupboard.  Shoot them.  You’re about ten minutes away.  You have time.”

I ran.

I guess Jeremy’s insistence that we join a gun club was just one of his weird ideas.  Until he explained what might happen one day.  Well, that day had arrived.

I was at the elevator lobby when I saw an expensive car stop our the front and as the doors opened, and man got out of the rear, joined by two barely disguised thugs.

I stepped in, the doors closed as the men came in the front entrance, and I was whisked up to the eighteenth floor.

I went to the closing, and there was the gun, just visible under the towels.  It had a suppressor and a full clip.  I chambered the first round.

I had to go around the corner to get to our apartment.  The man outside the door saw me and died.

I waited.  The men downstairs arrived and, without fear, strode towards the door, saw the body on the ground and turned.  All three died right there.

The man inside must have heard the yelp one of the men made when I shot him, and I saw the gun before he came out.

He saw me, fired, and I fired back.

He hit me in the arm.  I hit him in the head.  I was in a great deal of pain.  He was dead.

I went into the apartment.  Jeremy had been shot in both knees.  He would recover.  Allison had body armour, that much I could see, and was in a great deal of pain but unharmed.

“We won,” Jeremy said.

“No.  Look around you.  The guy out on the passage owns everything and everyone.  And has a clone waiting to take over, and they will come after us.  We need to go.”

He looked up at me through teary eyes.  “It’s not as if I can get up and walk away.  How?”

A man in EMT clothing came tentatively in and announced himself before walking in on us.

“Larry?”

He put his head around the corner.  “Steve.  You said it would be messy.  Elevators are on manual control; we have three minutes.”

He motioned for help, and two more came on with a guernsey, hoisted Jeremy on it it and were out the door in under a minute.  Larry and I got Allison, still half out of it and half carried, half dragged her to the elevator.  The doors closed and we went down to the car park.

“No one will know.  They think the elevators have stopped on various levels.

The doors opened.  An ambulance was waiting.  We all jumped in, Jeremy was loaded and sedated, and we were gone.

Three minutes and counting.  Outside the building, they lit up the siren and lights.

Larry was sitting in the back.

“What was plan B?” he asked.

“We were all dead.  Bad guys win.”

“You’ve only taken one off the board.  You know the drill.”

“Three actually.”

“Your father, yes, and the others?”

“His sons, the ones we didn’t know about, to his mistress.  The men I just shot.”

“They didn’t recognise you?”

“Never met them, formally.  But the boss did visit us once, not long after my father disappeared.  His younger brother came later with the threats.  Ignorance sometimes is bliss.”

“Now?”

“We clean up.”

Allison sucked in a deep breath and looked at me.

“Steven.  What just happened?”

“The worst case scenario.”

“Jeremy?”

“Banged up a little, but safe.”

“It worked?”

“Miraculously, yes.  Now we clean up and then disappear for a while.  Job well done.”

I hadn’t known when I was 13 that I had killed a high-ranking crime boss who was living a double life.  We only know him as Louie the factory worker, not James McDougal, crime boss with two other families.

The sheriff had told me the truth when I told him what had happened, and instead of arresting me, he introduced me the the State investigation officers who said that I would one day be approached by a man who would tell me what I would have to do.

That day came and went. 

Then they told me a story about another boy who was going to invent a miracle product, and along with a girl, we would become a team that would lay a foundation of bread crumbs to expose the rest of that crime family.  Who could resist an invention with a gold mine and easy enough to steal from gullible children?

Undercover for seven years.  The whole of my childhood, thermirs too I guessed, two hot-headed about to become criminals given a second chance.

The ambulance travelled for an hour, north, I guessed, until we hit a dirt road, and then it stopped.  The doors opened, and the man who had been in charge of the operation was there.

“Well done.  We’ll get you cleaned up and then somewhere to recover.  Then, a few months’ vacation, you’ve earned it.”

So, no going our separate ways, as promised.  I should have known it was too good to be true.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025