“But you do?”
Mr. Wright nodded. “I have the power to do a great many things.”
“Such as kill me,” Jay offered, trying to sound defiant in spite of the wet, fearful ball rolling down his throat.
“If I choose,” Mr. Wright answered without hesitation. “There are plenty of out of the way places in this state to dispose of a body. The brushy banks of some stream, or in a rocky gully somewhere. Countless places. And, maybe ten years from now, some hunter will step over a log and put one of his LL Beans through your rib cage. Into your bones, Mr. Grady. Birds will have picked you clean of meat long before then.”
So casually, so knowledgeably did this Mr. Wright speak of such matters that Jay could imagine very clearly a magpie plucking his eyes from their sockets and making a meal of them. Could hear the
keawwing
of a flock circling ever closer to his remains. He could see this and more, and he thought how odd it was to finally glimpse a death that was his own.
“I could kill you, Mr. Grady. This very moment if I so choose. I’d simply be saving the ‘Show Me’ state the expense of a trial.” Mr. Wright let his fists open so they laid flat upon the file. “But I want you to live—at least for a while.”
“Why?”
Mr. Wright tapped the file twice with one stout finger. “You’ve led an interesting life, Mr. Grady. I’ve done some reading about you.”
Jay eyed the file and tried to ignore the hands. “What’s in there?”
“Everything about one Jay Marcus Grady. Newspaper articles, magazine articles...” Jay looked away from the file now and stared at a bare spot on the tabletop as his captor went on. “...police reports, school records, SEC filings, passport application, medical history, birth certificate, financial statements, etcetera, etcetera.” Mr. Wright grinned. “Amazing the amount of information that a single thumb print from a murder weapon can lead one to.”
Jay breathed hard through his nose and said nothing.
“Yes, you have led a very interesting life, Mr. Grady,” Mr. Wright said again, then opened the file and removed a sheet of paper. He slid it toward Jay and spun it his way. It was a photocopy of a
New York Times
article, with a photo accompanying the story. A somewhat grainy photo of a younger Jay Grady, smiling smartly and dressed the part of the sophisticated businessman. “Hell of a suit. You looked good. What kind was it?”
Jay didn’t need to look long. A glance brought it back. That time. That moment. A bleak, wintry pall clutched his heart. “Armani.”
Mr. Wright turned the copy back his way and took it in hand. He examined it casually. “Very, very interesting. Tell me, how old were you in this picture?”
“It says in the article.”
“Refresh my memory,” Mr. Wright said, glancing sharply over the top of the paper at Jay.
“I was twenty four.” A lifetime ago, Jay thought, though on the rare occasions when that time did come back to him, whether in dreams or in moments of unguarded rumination, it seemed another life entirely.
“Pretty fucking dapper,” Mr. Wright commented, then slipped the paper back into the file. Something about his expression, his manner, seemed to change. It settled somewhere toward wonder as he ogled Jay, his head cocking slightly. Maybe a stone’s throw from disdain, as well. “And look at you now. Eight years later. Look at Jay Marcus Grady.” He snickered. “Things sure have changed, haven’t they?”
Again, Jay had nothing to say.
“You see, this is what I find so fascinating: the change.” Mr. Wright eased back where he sat and crossed his arms. They looked like fleshy pythons entwined across his chest. “Eight years ago you’re the hottest stock broker on Wall Street.
Newsweek
called you the Street’s wunderkind. You’re picking stocks that no one else will touch. Low grade stuff that, lo and behold, goes through the roof after you pick it. Stop me if I’m getting any of this wrong, will you?” He smiled wryly at his prisoner, then went on. “Again and again you did this. You were mucho hot, my friend. You made a load of money. You were the kid with the Midas touch. On top of the fucking world.” Mr. Wright quieted for a moment, then shook his head at the man who was avoiding his stare. “And here you are now in some dirtwater town in a nowhere state, about as far from Wall Street, as far from that life as you can get without going to the moon. You’re a fucking nobody here, unremarkable except for the fact that you’re a murderer.” A little chuckle slipped from Mr. Wright and Jay looked up.
“You must find this really amusing,” Jay observed coldly, his tone edged.
Mr. Wright leaned forward to the table and shoved the file toward Jay. It stopped just before him, some of its contents avalanching free of the folder. “I find it
interesting
, Mr. Grady. The transformation. The ‘why’. The ‘how’. How you ended up here. And why you murdered someone.”
Jay glanced at the file. “You’ve got this. I’m sure you can put it all together.”
“A man’s life can’t be documented in a few hours. Not all of it. You can only go back so far. Still, maybe I could, as you say, put it all together. Maybe not. Either way, I think that there are some things only you can tell me. Things that aren’t on paper anywhere. We’re in Missouri, Grady; you can’t show me, so tell me. Tell me how you went from there to here, from then to now.”
Jay swallowed and looked hard at Mr. Wright. “Who are you? How did you know to find me?”
“I’m not the one here to answer questions.”
“Why should I answer yours?”
“Because I am the only hope you have. I am your judge and jury. I can be your executioner.”
Death, Jay thought, feeling old, hollow echoes pulse deep within. Not so long ago he’d wished for death to befall him. Now it was sitting across from him and could be his for less than the asking. All he had to do was nothing. Not speak, not tell, not share of his life. This life and the other one. So easy. So easy to just let it happen.
But now, in this place, this time, this life, he wanted death to come as a scalpel, killing not all that he was, but rather excising the parts of his two lives that burned like caustic tumors in his soul. To break the chains of memory that bound him to old and horrible wounds.
He wanted to live. The desire was still alien to him. It had been so long since he’d done anything more than accept each day as his eyes opened after sleep. Since he’d actually longed to see the next day come. But now he craved the tomorrows that his life might hold. The next day, the new sunrise. The one after that. And the one after that. He wanted those. Yes, he did want to live. To put all that had happened behind. To forget.
But to live he would have to remember. To...
“Tell me, Grady. It’s your only chance.”
...recount.
“I was just an ordinary guy once,” Jay said, leaden thoughts weighing on him. His recollections raced back, far back, to the old time. The real time, when his life was often sweet, sometimes sad, and always random. “I wasn’t always on top.”
“But you got there,” Mr. Wright observed. The point of his tongue slipped out a bit and glistened his lips.
Jay nodded, smiling wanly. “I got there all right.”
“How?” Mr. Wright pressed him. “How did you get there?”
Beneath the table, out of view, Jay’s bound hands began to tremble. “You know, some lives are best lived once and then buried.”
Atop the table, very much in view, one of Mr. Wright’s hands condensed to a fist. The crunch of his knuckles cracking clicked off the cinder block walls. “Is burial what you want to talk about, Grady? Is it?”
The threat lay there, still and waiting, as Jay focused on the big, rough hands. The one that wasn’t clenched scratched slowly at the tabletop, as if its fingers were legs ready to propel it across the table to his neck where it might...
“There’s no way you can understand,” Jay told him. “You’ll think I’m insane.”
“I’m an understanding sort of fellow,” Mr. Wright said with unconvincing coldness. “Try me.”
Jay took a shallow breath and swallowed what moisture his mouth could muster and focused, trolling back in time, back to his previous life, and as dark, dead memories blossomed into clarity his eyes snapped shut like traps and his head shook defiantly, fearfully, from side to side. “Please, I don’t want to go back there.”
“Grady...” Impatience welled dangerously beneath Mr. Wright’s words.
“I don’t want to think about...”
...T H E D O N Z E R L Y L I G H T
“...him.”
Anticipatory furrows cleaved into Mr. Wright’s brow. “Him? Who is that, Grady? Who?”
“Sign Guy!” Jay answered sharply, quickly, before fear could staunch the reply, his eyes opening slowly and his voice heavy with resignation, as if he’d just started across a bridge and set it to burn behind him.
“Sign Guy,” Mr. Wright repeated softly, breathily, as though sampling the words. His gaze narrowed and ticked briefly away from his prisoner. After a moment he looked back and his fist relaxed and went flat on the table. His scratching fingers stilled. “Tell me about this Sign Guy.”
Jay breathed, and the air seemed scented with dread.
One
A Mean Streak Of Humanity
Sign Guy was a bum. But he was a bum with an angle.
If asked on that April night in 1989, Thursday the 6
th
to be exact, Jay Grady would have said that the bum’s sign was his angle. But that was the folly of the obvious. The truth was somewhere south of credulity, a truth Jay would not realize for some time. And so that April night, as he stood across Broadway with a wistful smile building on his face, he could only gaze fondly at the bum while taxis passed between them as humming yellow blurs.
By appearance he was maybe forty, possibly a little less, even, and was, on the whole, far easier on the senses than your typical New York transient. Every few days he was clean shaven, his beard never making it much past stubble, and the thrift store clothes he wore looked to have made the acquaintance of a washer and dryer at least once a week. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, which in daytime kept his tanned face in shadow, and an old army parka when the season or the night brought a chill. Blue Converse high tops, the old canvas kind, rounded out his attire.
Like a lot of bums in the city he had a ‘spot’, a tiny piece of Manhattan to call his own. His was on the Broadway side of Trinity Church, where Wall Street started or stopped depending on one’s perspective. He would sit there all day, every day, his back to the landmark church’s magnificent stone spire and his butt planted on an overturned plastic bucket that, going by what remained of a label on its side, had once held five gallons of Ganello pitted black olives. Simply sit there on his makeshift stool, smiling serenely, keeping mostly to himself as he watched the suits and skirts ebb in and out of the concrete canyon that was the world’s financial center in a bipedal gray tide, an empty Yuban coffee can at his feet and his sign leaning against his knees.
His sign.
A piece of plywood maybe three feet by four, painted a bright and spotless white, and atop that stark background a message Sign Guy had crafted in bold black letters. A morsel of cryptic wisdom that was fresh with each sunrise. A new offering for the new day. Jay had passed him a hundred times coming and going to his job at Stanley & Mitchell, one of the Street’s oldest and stodgiest brokerage houses. Since his first day in the city some three months back, he had seen nearly every sign, mostly on his way home when his direction of travel took him toward the bum, though there had been a few occasions on the way in when a backfire or some other noise had made him look back as he crossed Broadway and, by happenstance, he had seen that day’s message in the morning’s cold, gray glow. Black on white. Always something to raise an eyebrow, or maybe even elicit a grin.
But never, until this evening, something that took him back like a time machine to the innocent days of his youth. The happy days before fate’s cruel hand changed everything.
Yes, to those happy times. Jay smiled. Smiled full and bright, with only a hint of nostalgic melancholy, and savored the day’s sign as traffic segmented the sight into bits of light and motion that flickered like an old movie. Just stood there waiting for the light to change and took it all in.
B U Y T H E
D O N Z E R L Y
L I G H T
I was how old? Seven? Eight?
His head moved in an almost imperceptible nod.
Seven. I was seven. I remember.
Jay stared at the sign, remembering, the memory coming at him like a warm and pleasant breeze. Stared at those words, that nonsensical grouping of words, and then at the bum who had made them for a moment more, watching him as a very well dressed older man walked casually, wordlessly up and slipped a bill, maybe two, through the slit cut in the plastic lid of the coffee can, then continue on his way. The exchange seemed oddly uncomplicated, Jay thought, reminding him somewhat of paying the rent in grad school—a couple knocks, the landlord would open his door, and Jay would hand over the envelope. The one big difference, though, was that he had never enjoyed forking over money that, had the need for shelter not been paramount, might have been better spent on beer, or pizza, or maybe a weekend skiing with Carrie. But this man, he must have gotten something out of giving, because he was grinning from ear to ear, almost as big as Sign Guy was.
The light changed, and Jay stepped into the crosswalk with a fellow about his age, but blue collar all the way. Probably one of the maintenance workers in one of the Street’s many office buildings. Not that he, himself, was the epitome of male model fashiondom. His suit was off the rack, as was every piece of business attire in the closet of the very modest Greenwich Village apartment he shared with his girlfriend. He could still remember his very first suit, the one his parents had made him get when he was nine for his Uncle Anson’s wedding, a Sears special that was some color between gray and brown that he had never seen before or since, thank goodness. His wardrobe now was a little farther on in the color department, thanks mainly to Carrie, but not far from Sears. Not yet it wasn’t. But it would be. It damn sure would be.