“Yes.” Kent heard Spencer pad up behind him, and he wanted to turn to the boy and beg his forgiveness. Linda was staring at him with bright gray eyes, and he diverted his gaze past her to the street.
Spencer, my dear son, I love you so much. I could never hurt a hair on your head. Never. Never, never!
He should turn now and hold the boy. Spencer was all he had left. Kent swallowed and stepped past her. “Take care of him,” he instructed without shaking her hand. “He knows the rules.”
Every bone in Kent's body ached to spin and run back to Spencer. Yet he trudged forward to the Lexus waiting in the driveway. He saw his son from the corner of his eye when he slammed the door shut. The boy stood in the doorway with limp arms.
Kent roared down the street, thinking he had just stooped as low as he had ever stooped. Might as well have licked some concrete while he was down there. Why the subject of God sent him into such a tailspin he could hardly fathom. Death usually seemed to bring people to their knees, begging the man upstairs for some understanding. But Gloria's death seemed to have planted a root of bitterness in his heart. Maybe because she had died so violently despite her faith. And his mother-in-law Helen's prayers had ended where all prayers end: in her own gray matter.
He arrived at the red-brick bank filled with foreboding from its first sighting, ten blocks earlier. He would call Dennis again todayâfind out how quickly they could get a suit filed. Maybe then he could leave.
Kent made his way to the alley behind the bank. There was no way he would step through those fancy swinging doors up front and risk running into fat-boy Bentley. The rear entrance would do just fine for the balance of his tenure, thank you. He stepped down the dingy alley.
White fingers of steam rose from a sewer grate halfway down the narrow passage. Garbage lay strewn beside the dumpster, as if the whole cage had been tipped and then righted again. Some homeless vagrant too eager for his own good. Kent pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and found the silver one he'd been issued for the door a year earlier after complaining he needed longer access. Since then he'd come and gone as he pleased, often working late into the night. The memory sat in his mind now, mocking.
How many hours had he given to the bank? Thousands at least. Tens of thousands, all for Borst and Fat-Boy. If Spencer's God was somehow actually involved in the world, it was as a tormentor. Let's see which of them we can get to scream the loudest today. Kent pushed the key into the slot.
A whisper rasped on the wind behind him. “You ain't seen nothin' yet, you sicko.” Kent whirled.
Nothing!
His heart pumped hard. The dumpster sat still; the alley gaped on either side, empty to the streets, white strands of steam lifted lazily from the grate. But he had heard it, clear as day.
You ain't seen nothin' yet, you sicko!
The stress was getting to him. Kent turned to the gray-steel fire door and reinserted the key with an unsteady hand.
To his left, a movement caught his eyes, and he jerked his head that way. A man wearing a torn red Hawaiian shirt and filthy slacks that had possibly once been blue leaned against the dumpster, staring at him. The sight frightened Kent badly, and his hand froze on the key. Not three seconds ago, he would have sworn the alley was empty.
“Life sucks,” the man said, and then lifted a brown bag to his lips and took a slug from a hidden bottle. He did not remove his eyes from Kent's. Scattered patches of scraggly hair hung off his neck. His lumpy nose shined red and big.
“Life really
sssssucksss!”
He grinned now, and his teeth were jagged yellow. He cackled and lifted the brown bag.
Kent watched the vagrant take another slug. He yanked on the door and stepped in quickly. Something was haunting him; his mind was bending. G
et a grip, Kent. You're losing your grip.
The door swooshed shut, and suddenly the hall was pitch dark. He groped the wall, found the switch, and flipped it up. The long fluorescent tubes stuttered to white, illuminating the empty hall. Long and empty like the prospects facing his life now. Bleak, white, long, empty.
Life sucks.
Kent forced himself to the end and out to the main corridor. Somehow he had embarked on a roller coaster, swooping up and down and around sharp curves at breakneck speed, intent on throwing him to his death. Some thrill ride from hell, and he wasn't being allowed to disembark. Each hour was rolling into the next, each day full of new twists and turns. They say that when it rains, it pours. Yes, well, it was pouring all right. Fire and brimstone.
Betty was gone when he stepped into the Information Systems suites, probably to the john to apply yet another layer of mascara to her foot-long fake lashes. She'd always fancied herself to be half her age with twice the life. Kent slipped into his office and closed the door quietly.
Here we go then.
He sat and tried to still the buzzing in his head.
For a full minute Kent stared at the exotic fish making their predictable sweeps across the three monitors. It was not until then that it occurred to him that he still gripped his briefcase. He dropped it on the floor and picked up the phone.
It took five minutes for the cranky secretary at Dennis Warren's office to finally put him through, and then only after Kent's threat to call back repeatedly every three minutes if she didn't tell Dennis this very minute that he was on the phone.
Dennis came on. “Kent. How goes it, my friend? Go easy on my girls.”
“She was giving me lip. Shouldn't give lip to customers, Dennis. Bad business.”
“You're not a customer. Not yet, Kent.” A chuckle. “When you get a bill, you'll be a customer. So what's up?”
Kent chose to ignore the jab. “Nothing. Unless you call sitting in an office doing nothing for eight hours while everybody around you has their ear to the wall, listening for your
nothing,
something. It's falling apart here, Dennis. The whole bank knows.”
“Lighten up, buddy.”
“We have to move forward, Dennis! I'm not sure how long I can do this.”
A long silence filled his ear, which was rather uncharacteristic of his friend, who never seemed at a loss for words. Now Dennis was suddenly silent. Breathing, actually. Breathing heavily. When he spoke his voice sounded scratchy.
“We can move forward on this as soon as you are positive, Kent.”
“Positive? About what? I
am
positive! They think I've lost my mind around here! Do you understand that? They think I'm off the deep end, for goodness' sake! We're going to bury these guys, if it's the last thing we do!” He let the statement settle, wondering if his voice had carried out to the hall. “Right?”
A chuckle crackled on the phone. “Oh, we'll be doing some burying, all right. But what about you, Kent?” Now Dennis was speaking around short breaths, pausing after each phrase to pull at the air. “Are you positive about where you stand?” A breath. “You can't go soft halfway through.” A breath. Another breath. Kent scrunched his eyebrows.
The attorney continued. “It's not like God's going to reach down and hand you answers, you know. You decide to go one way, you go all the way that way. Right to the end, and screw them all if they need their crutch!” A series of breaths. “Right, Kent? Isn't that right?”
Kent furrowed his brow. “What are you talking about? Who's talking about going soft halfway? I'm saying we bury them, man! Screw 'em all to the wall.” He let the comment about the crutch go. Something was confused there.
“That's right, Kent,” the attorney's voice rasped. “You do whatever it takes. This is life and death. You win, it's life; you lose, it's death.”
“I hear you, man. And what I'm saying here is that, by the looks of things, I'm already a dead man. We have to move now.”
“You do things their way and you end up getting buried. Like some fool martyr.” A ragged pause. “Look at Gloria.”
Gloria? Kent felt his pulse rise in agreement with his attorney. He understood what Dennis was doing now. And it was brilliant. The man was reaching out to him; connecting with him emotionally; drawing the battle lines.
“Yes,” he said. And Dennis was saying that the bank and God were on the same side. They both wanted to do some burying. Only God was really fate, and fate had already done its burying with Gloria. Now the bank was having its go. With him.
The hair lifted on the nape of his neck. “Yes. Well, they're not going to bury me, Dennis. Not unless they kill me first.”
The phone sat unspeaking in his palm for a few seconds before Dennis came on again. “No. Killing is against the rules. But there are other ways.”
“Well, I'm not actually suggesting killing anybody, Dennis. It's just a figure of speech. But I hear you. I hear you loud and clear. And I'm ready. When can we get this ball rolling?”
This time the phone went dead for a long time.
“Dennis? Hello?”
“No,” Dennis returned. His voice was distant, like an echo on the phone now. “I don't think you are ready. I don't think you are ready at all, my fine friend. Perhaps this afternoon you will be ready.”
The phone clicked. Kent held it to his ear, stunned. This afternoon? What in the world did this afternoon have to do with anything? A sudden panic rose to his throat. What was going on? What inâ
The phone began burping loudly in his ear. An electronic voice came on and told him in a roundabout way that holding a dead phone to the ear was a rather unbrilliant thing to do.
He dropped the receiver in its cradle.
Yes indeed, the roller coaster from hell.
After him, lads! After him!
Now what? What was he supposed to do in this cursed place? Sit and stare at fish while Borst sat across the hall, planning how to spend his forthcoming fortune?
Cliff poked his head in once and offered a “Good morning” around that pineapple-eating grin of his. Kent forced a small smile and mumbled the same.
“You keep your nose clean, now. You hear?” Cliff said.
“Always. Clean's my middle name,” he returned. He tried to find some levity in his own irony, but he could not.
“Okay. Just hang in there. Things will look up if you hang in there.”
When Kent looked up, Cliff had pulled out. The door clicked shut. Now what did
he
know? Like some father offering sound wisdom.
Hang in there, son. Here, come sit on my lap.
He tried to imagine Cliff catching air on a snowboard. The image came hard. Now Spencer, there was someone who could catch air. Only it was on a skateboard.
Kent spent an hour running through e-mail and idiotic bank memoranda. Most of it went to the trash with a click. He expected that at any moment one of the others would pop in and say something, but no one did, and the fact began to wear on him. He heard their muffled voices on several occasions, but they seemed to be ignoring him wholesale. Maybe they didn't know he'd come in. Or more likely they were embarrassed for him.
Did you hear about Kent and Bentley? Yeah, he's really flipped, huh? Poor guy. Lost his wifeâthat's what did it. For sure.
Several times he contemplated calling Dennis backâasking him what he'd meant about this afternoon. But the memory of the man's voice echoing in the receiver made him postpone the call.
He called up AFPS and entered the new password: MBAOK. The familiar icon ran across the screen, and he let it cycle through a few times before entering the system. A program like this would be worth millions to any large bank. He should just download the source code and take it on the road. It was his, after all.
But that was the problem. It was not his. At least, not legally.
Kent was startled by the sudden buzz of his phone. Dennis, possibly. Calling to apologize about that ludicrous exchange. He glanced at the caller ID.
It was Betty. And he was in no mood to discuss office business. He let the phone buzz annoyingly. It finally fell silent after a dozen persistent burps. What was her problem?
A fist pounded on his door, and he swung around. Betty stood in the door frame, stricken white. “You have a call,” she said, and he thought she might be ill. “It's urgent. I'll put it through again.”
She pulled the door closed. Kent stared after her.
The phone blared again. This time Kent whirled and snatched up the receiver. “Hello.”
“Hello, Mr. Anthony?” It was a female voice. A soft, shaky female voice.
“Yes, this is Kent Anthony.”
A pause. “Mr. Anthony, I'm afraid there's been an accident. Do you have a son named Spencer Anthony?”
Kent rose to his feet. His hands went cold on the receiver. “Yes.”
“He was hit by a car, Mr. Anthony. He's at Denver Memorial. You should come quickly.”
Adrenaline flooded Kent's bloodstream like boiling ice. Goose flesh prickled down his shoulders. “Is . . . Is he okay?”
“He's . . .” A sick pause. “I'm sorry. I can't . . .”
“Just tell me! Is my son okay?”
“He died in the ambulance, Mr. Anthony. I'm sorry . . .”
For a moment the world stood still. He didn't know if the woman said more. If she did, he did not hear it because a buzzing had erupted in his skull again.
The phone slipped from his grasp and thudded on the carpet. Spencer? His Spencer!? Dead?
He stood rooted to the floor, his right hand still up by his ear where the receiver had been, his mouth limp and gaping. The terror came in waves then, spreading down his arms and legs like fire.
Kent whirled to the door. It was shut. Wait a minute, this could have been one of those voices! He was going mad, wasn't he? And now the voices of madness had touched him where they knew he would be hurt most. Tried to yank his heart out.
He died in the ambulance,
the voice had said. An image of Spencer's blond head lying cockeyed on an ambulance gurney flashed through his mind. His boy's arms jiggled as the medical van bounced over potholes.