The Temporary Agent (3 page)

PART TWO

Five

Tom received the first call on his cell phone at ten o’clock on a Friday morning.

But he was at his job and unable to answer—Specialty Fabrication Inc.’s policy prohibited any employee from engaging in cell phone use while working.

It was just one of the many rules that were strictly enforced by the foreman who seemed to be always watching from a glass-enclosed office high above the crowded machine-shop floor.

Tom had programmed his phone to generate a specific vibration whenever Stella called or texted, but what he’d felt in his pocket wasn’t that. The notification for all other incoming calls or texts was a set of five rapid vibrations, followed by a set of five more.

Five-and-five was the pattern that had suddenly buzzed in the pocket of his jeans.

Even if cell phone use hadn’t been prohibited, or his foreman wasn’t likely to be watching, Tom wouldn’t have dug out his phone to see who was calling, because that would have been unsafe.

He had come too far and sacrificed too much to do something as foolish as losing a body part to the prewar-era press brake machine he operated nine hours a day, five days a week—for fifteen dollars an hour and no benefits.

Tom was in the dingy break room located just off the work floor when he finally checked his phone.

The call he had missed had come from a number he did not recognize. And no voice mail message had been left.

A wrong number, then,
he decided.

Placing the phone facedown on the table, he proceeded to eat his lunch. Stella always texted during his noon break, and sure enough, a few moments later, his phone buzzed on the tabletop with a familiar pattern.

Two quick vibrations, a pause, two quick vibrations, another pause, two quick vibrations.

Stell-a . . . Stell-a . . . Stell-a
.

It was a staccato pattern that he was unlikely to ever miss, especially as he worked the hydraulic press, which sent its own steady vibrations, like currents of electricity, through the concrete floor and up his legs.

The other members of the day shift spoke Portuguese and Tom did not, so he sat through lunch alone. Even if he could understand their language, or they better spoke his, he still would have kept to himself, simply because he wasn’t much of a talker.

Reticence was more of a habit than an indication of his nature.

But there was another reason why he chose to sit alone.

Stella’s lunchtime texts had recently begun to include the occasional selfie.

Picking up his phone, Tom saw at the top of the display screen the small preview of a text message.

It contained a minuscule photograph—not so small, however, that his eye couldn’t immediately detect a significant degree of bare skin within its frame.

He calmly entered his four-digit passcode with his thumb to open the message.

And there was Stella, facing her ornately framed bedroom mirror, her cell phone held off to the side to capture her full reflection.

She was wearing a white Oxford shirt, a string of knotted pearls, and nothing else.

The shirt was unbuttoned and open.

The long string of pearls was her ever-present trademark.

A brief message accompanied the selfie:

Come straight home tonight.

The command was a joke they shared. Tom always went straight home.

Where else would he go?

Where else would he want to be after a long shift of stamping and folding metal?

He sent a reply:

Yes, ma’am.

This was another of their jokes, one that Stella enjoyed because it emphasized the differences in their ages.

She was forty-five, Tom thirty-three.

This difference was something Stella called attention to often, but Tom seldom thought of or even cared about it.

He’d seen the world, more or less, by the time he was twenty-four.

He’d seen men die—comrades and enemies alike.

He’d seen family members die, too, this when he was just a boy—too early, by far, to have learned firsthand what certain men were capable of. And while he more often than not kept the details of his past to himself, Stella knew enough about him to know about that.

Of course, he understood why she would enjoy calling attention to the fact that her live-in boyfriend was a younger man.

As grounded as Stella was, she was not above vanity.

Her reply read:

That’s a good boy.

Tom smiled.

They exchanged a few more texts—the errands she needed to run today, that maybe they could splurge tonight and get takeout.

Today was her only day off, and the last day of Tom’s work week.

A precious alignment of free hours, and the energy that came with it, that they knew better than to squander.

Tom signed off, too, then paused to take another look at the photo he had received.

Stella wore her dark, curly hair cropped to the exact length of her oval face. Twirled strands often fell in front of her eyes, which she would pull back and tuck behind her ears with long fingers, only for those strands to fall free again, often seconds later.

For some reason, Tom loved that gesture—the futility of it and that it was something she did so often that she didn’t notice doing it anymore.

Prior to taking the selfie, Stella had shaken her head, tousling her hair so her face was partially obscured.

Tom could still see, though, her dark-brown eyes looking boldly at the camera.

Locking with his.

He could see, too, her delicate features—Anglo nose, high cheekbones, sharp jawline.

He’d never had beauty in his life before—beauty that slept when he slept, woke when he woke.

Living beauty, breathing beauty.

He couldn’t imagine life without that now.

Not that he’d have to.

Tom took one last look at the photo before deleting it along with their text conversation. He then deleted from his call history the incoming call he had missed.

He kept his phone as clean as possible. And he only ever needed to glance at a number—any number, no matter how long—to commit it to memory.

Returning his phone to his pocket, Tom went back to his lunch.

The image of Stella would linger in his mind as he worked this afternoon, which was, of course, why she had sent it.

Tom had washed up in the men’s room and was about to punch in and head back out to the shop floor for the second half of his shift when his phone buzzed again.

Five rapid vibrations erupted in the bottom of his jeans pocket, followed by another five.

Stopping to check the phone, Tom saw on the display the same unfamiliar number that he had seen just an hour before.

He waited for the call to go to his voice mail, then watched the phone’s display for notification that he had received a voice message.

Ten seconds passed. Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds.

Nothing.

So either a long message was being left or the caller had hung up and left none at all.

It was a minute past one o’clock now. Tom had missed punching in exactly on the hour, one of their petty foreman’s many requirements, but that didn’t concern him. Tom was the best machinist in the shop, could do this work in the dark.

What was the man going to do? Fire him?

What Tom was concerned about was the fact that it was unusual to receive a call from anyone but Stella.

Actually, Stella rarely called, preferring to communicate by text.

But in the six months he and Stella had been together, Tom’s phone had been virtually dormant.

And while he was still using the same phone he’d purchased upon his discharge from the navy five years ago, he could count on one hand the people with whom he had exchanged numbers.

The incoming number did not belong to any of those select few.

In this day and age, no phone number could remain private forever. Tom understood that eventually his own would fall into the hands of some telemarketer and from there spread to countless others, at which point his only connection to the outside world—a limited connection, by his own choosing—would likely begin to ring frequently with numbers he did not recognize.

Today seemed to be that day.

Nearly another minute had gone by—no voice mail.

This wasn’t a distress call, then, one that could not be ignored.

The protocol in place had established that any attempt at contact by his former commanding officer would come from a specific number.

That number and no other, so Tom would know to answer.

Since this wasn’t that number, he was in the clear.

Returning the phone to his pocket, Tom pushed through the thick fire doors and walked out onto a noisy shop floor crowded with heavy machinery that raged like giant beasts.

The afternoon shift had begun without him.

He glanced up at the glass-enclosed office. Seeing that Tom was looking at him, the foreman raised his left arm and pointed at his wristwatch.

Or he started to, because before the man could complete the gesture, Tom shifted his line of sight and, looking straight ahead, ignored him.

Six

The sun was already behind the surrounding high hills when Tom exited the machine shop just after five and started across the poorly lit parking lot, covered from head to boots with a fine, metallic dust that turned his dark hair and full beard prematurely gray.

And made him look more than a little like a ghost.

Inside his truck, he texted Stella to let her know that he was on his way, then started the motor and turned on the heater. Before he could even shift into gear, Stella responded.

Meet you in the shower.

Canaan Village, in Connecticut’s isolated northwest corner, was barely a stopover on Route 7 as it wound through the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. All of three blocks long, with a single traffic light. Unchanged, more or less, since the end of the Second World War.

The last of the truly small towns.

No street cameras, a small police force, and an insular
population—these were just some of the reasons why Tom had chosen
to end his years of roaming here.

Steering his truck into the narrow alley that led to the small parking lot behind Stella’s building, Tom pulled into his space, climbed out of his truck, and locked the door. He moved back through the alley on foot and stepped out onto the open sidewalk.

Main Street was busy—well, busy for Canaan. It was a Friday, though, and despite the colder-than-usual November evening, a number of townspeople were out.

The only restaurant in town had already begun to fill up. The second-run movie theater, its grand marquee framed with blinking yellow lights, was, like the town itself, something out of another era.

By eleven at the latest, however, the town would be all but closed up, the only foot traffic beneath their windows being a handful of moviegoers leaving the last showing of the night.

After that the town would come to a complete stop, silence and stillness settling in till morning.

Unlocking the street door, Tom entered the narrow stairwell and began to climb the steep steps toward the only door above.

Before he was halfway up, his phone vibrated once again. Five vibrations, then five more.

Drawing his phone from his pocket, Tom saw on the display the same unfamiliar number that had called twice already.

He stood there for a moment, staring at it.

Stella had no doubt heard the street door open and close and was waiting for him to climb the stairs and enter their apartment.

She was likely wondering why it was taking him longer than usual to do so.

Still, Tom lingered.

If he answered and the caller was a telemarketer, then he could forget the whole thing. It would be the same if someone had simply misdialed.

But if it wasn’t either of those?

If it was the call he had sworn he would answer?

The call that could potentially turn his quiet life upside down.

Yet, if this were that call, the fact that it was coming from a number unrecognizable to Tom meant that it was contrary to protocol.

Of course, that number could have been abandoned for a variety of reasons. But there was a protocol for that, too.

If I change phones,
Carrington had instructed,
I will text you a confirmation code from my new number.

Tom had received no such text.

He had, in fact, heard nothing at all from Carrington since the night he’d passed on the lucrative contract Carrington had offered him.

Walked away from more money than he could easily spend and began his years of drifting.

Drifting that eventually led him to Stella.

No, this isn’t that call,
Tom decided.
It can’t be.

And more important, he didn’t want it to be.

Those days were behind him.

In terms of years as well as miles traveled.

He powered down his phone, pocketed it, and resumed climbing the steep stairs.

Reaching the door at the top, he thought only of the woman waiting for him beyond it.

And the hot shower they would take, and the few hours they would have together before sleep took their exhausted bodies.