would return to it, again and again, and it began to fuel her fantasies. Her marriage had turned barren, and she needed physical intimacy. Everybody did, but perhaps her more than most. It was a simple equation after all.
An ever funnier thing was how, now that she had an emotional and physical distance from him, she began to see Tyler clearly for the first time. She realized that when Tyler had given her everything she needed, emotionally and physically, along with all the creature comforts that went with being his wife, she had never really looked at him with a critical eye. She had let him be the sugar daddy. Was she really that self-serving, that immature? It seemed now that she was.
But now that was she was looking at him with a clear eye, it turned out she didn’t like what she saw. It was as if she had suddenly awakened from a long and deep sleep. About the only source of income he had that she knew about for sure was his pension from the Philadelphia Police Department. Other than that, Tyler was secretive. Certainly, he was some kind of a security contractor. His pension wasn’t paying for this house in a gated, secure community, for the two cars they drove, for the black market gasoline, for the swimming pool they had put in, for the big dinner parties they sometimes threw, for his personal trainer, and for all the rest.
But what kind of security did he provide? He was gone a lot, but where did he go? He would disappear in the middle of the night sometimes, a car picking him up outside at the front curb. He would leave only a short note on the kitchen table, and then return a day or two days or a week later. It made her curious.
He had only brief telephone conversations in the house, and not very often. Tyler seemed to have plenty of workers and subcontractors, but the only one he allowed to come to the house was the big, grinning redneck named Vernon. Vernon had a hook nose and a huge jaw and tended to wear a Caterpillar baseball cap and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, all the better to show off his massive, tattooed shoulders and arms. He had laughing eyes that seemed to size you up and find you wanting. Vernon struck Katie more as hired muscle than as some kind of security operative.
Katie would bite her tongue for long periods of time, but eventually she could remain quiet no longer. ‘How’s work?’ she would say to Tyler, usually after one of his business trips, or after one of Vernon’s appearances at the house.
‘Work is going good. It’s going OK. We’ve got something big we’re cooking up. It could be a step forward for us.’
‘Really? That’s great. What’s it all about?’
‘Katie, it really doesn’t concern you. You shouldn’t worry about it.’
‘Well, I’m not worried. I know you’ll be successful, whatever you decide to do. I’m just interested.’
‘Well, don’t be. OK? Sometimes it’s better if you just aren’t interested. You know a lot of my work concerns national security issues. I’m not free to talk about it, not even with my wife, who I love.’
National security issues? OK, that was one product she wasn’t buying anymore. It just didn’t feel like Tyler worked for the government. Tyler never seemed to look at any paperwork, and if Katie knew anything about the United States government, she knew that government contracts meant gigantic mounds of paperwork – she knew this from being an assistant at a law firm that dealt with government contracts. The paperwork generated could be astonishing. Breathtaking. And Tyler never had anything like that kind of paperwork lying around. In fact, he didn’t seem to have anything at all in writing. He was much more likely to sit in his study – which he kept locked from her when he wasn’t home – poring over maps than to ever read a contract. He had a telephone wired in there, and she didn’t have its number. Maybe ten minutes ago, yes, in the middle of the night, it had started ringing and then had gone to voicemail.
What was it all about? Anyway, would the government really hire an operation where the second in command was big, dumb Vernon? She thought not, and as she thought that, she realized she had reached a breaking point with Tyler. She would stay married to him, of course. It was hard times outside of this house, and she had no intention of being cast out there. But she didn’t believe in him anymore. And she would, within reason, snoop around to see what it was he was up to. She might even consider finding a way into that locked study – not tonight, but soon. He’d probably be back tomorrow, at least that’s what his most recent note said, but it wouldn’t be long before he was gone again.
‘Tyler Gant,’ she said aloud to the empty bedroom, and was just a little startled by her own voice. ‘What do you do for a living?’
Foerster lay awake in bed, in the small room that had been his throughout childhood. His bed was narrow, like a nun would sleep on, and the springs creaked whenever he moved. The mattress was lumpy. It was an uncomfortable goddamned bed. He probably didn’t get a decent night’s sleep the first eighteen years of his life, and it was no wonder why.
His door was open a crack, and down the hall he could hear his mother snoring. Good God, all his life, he had hated it in this house. He had half a mind to march down the hall and stifle those infernal snores for good.
The desklamp next to the bed was on, casting a weak pyramid of yellow light, and Foerster, on his back, held up a business card where he could see it. He’d found the card in the desk – he must have left it behind the last time circumstances forced him to stay in this pit of despair. Foerster had been given this card at least two years ago. Now it was a little crumpled and faded, but you could still make it out fine. On the left side of it was a picture of a chess piece, a white knight. Running down the right side were the words Executive Strategies – Security and Intelligence Solutions. Tyler Gant, President. Then it gave an office address in Charleston, South Carolina, and a phone number. No website or email address listed, but there was another phone number scrawled in ink along the bottom, which Foerster had called only a few minutes ago from the ancient rotary dial phone on the desk.
He wasn’t sure why he had waited until three in the morning to call the number, or why he had hung up without leaving a message, except that he wasn’t sure if he should call it, and at the same time he was curious to see if it still worked. It did work – the same bland ‘leave a message at the tone’ recording that was on the machine two years ago was still on there. Foerster knew that the phone rang in the upstairs den at Gant’s house. Or at least that’s where it used to ring. He also knew he was taking a chance by calling there. Gant had given him that card grudgingly, and had told him to never call the number except in a desperate emergency, and only from a pay phone.
Well, this probably qualified as an emergency – he was hiding out from bounty hunters at his mom’s house! Gant would probably pop a blood vessel if he knew where Foerster was calling from, but hey, pay phones could be hard to come by in this day and age. Anyway, Foerster needed to get a message to Gant that he was no longer where he said he’d be, and that he needed to be picked up quick before he got put away again. The fastest way to do that seemed to be by telephone.
But it was a risk. Phone calls were easy to trace, and Gant had said in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want the cops to have any way to connect them. Well, fuck it. If Gant wanted him to do the job, then he needed to know where Foerster was. If he sent one of his men over to Foerster’s apartment, Foerster wasn’t going to be there. And Foerster couldn’t wait around here forever, wondering when Gant would send somebody – he had fucking people on his trail, man.
Shit. Foerster could not understand why everything always got so fucked up. It seemed like the simplest thing would suddenly take a turn and head off down some trail toward disaster. It was the story of his life. By all accounts, he was a genius. From his earliest days, he had a tested IQ in the 150s. It was at the far right end of the bell curve, where fewer than one percent of the population could be found. He could sleepwalk through school – without even trying, he was done with the sixth grade curriculum before the end of fourth grade.
This wasn’t good enough. His father had wanted an athlete, a football player, not some scrawny kid with a big brain. Foerster’s drunken bum of a father had taken to calling him Nancy Boy, and beating him with a leather strap. When had this started? He wasn’t even sure. It seemed like his first memory was of a huge, red-faced beast standing over him, the smell of mingled beer and whiskey in Foerster’s face, the smack of the leather loud in his ears, the sting of the whip on his skin, and his father saying, ‘I’ll make a fucking man out of you yet.’ If there was a hell, Foerster hoped the old man was roasting there right this minute.
But his father had only been the start of his problems. It seemed that nobody in this entire world wanted a smart kid. Having intelligence made you some kind of a freak. Nobody ever liked Foerster. His school teachers hated him – probably, they knew he was smarter than they were, and were envious of him. The other kids? Forget about it. If they noticed him at all, it was to throw rocks at him, or chase him home, or hold him down and punch his legs
