You're Next

‘Michael Wingate’s wife, right?’ she asked. ‘I need to borrow you for a picture.’ She clasped Annabel’s hand in hers, leading her away. Annabel shrugged in mock helplessness and went with a smile.

Mike made his way across the room and caught the bartender’s attention. ‘Can I get a Budweiser?’

The bartender, a handsome aspiring-actor type, gestured at the bottles in the ice bucket behind him. ‘Only Heineken. You’re at the wrong party.’

Mike took the cold bottle. The bitter beer felt great going down. The last two days had dragged out, made slower by how much he’d been dreading tonight.

Gazing across the swirls of people, Mike spotted Andres at one of the elegantly set tables by the dais. Carrying his wife’s purse and looking bored senseless, Andres rolled his eyes, and Mike had to look away to hide his smile.

The sight of the governor’s chief of staff holding court one table over made the half grin go brittle on Mike’s face. Catching Mike’s eye, Bill Garner offered him a head tilt that he couldn’t help but interpret as conspiratorial. Were other people looking at him that way, too? He couldn’t get a handle on his uneasiness. For a week now, he’d been jumping at shadows.

At the far end of the room, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out across a sloping golf course, now dark. Mike angled his way through the crush, offering greetings to passing faces. Getting to the fringe of the gathering and having a view of the horizon calmed him a bit.

Just as he’d started to unknot his concerns, someone collided into him from the side. Stumbling to regain his footing, he spilled beer down the leg of his trousers.

A voice floated over his shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry.’ A wiry man with a patchy beard leaned in at him, gripping his arm. ‘I have CP.’

The man had breath like a birdcage, his lips spotted with black flecks. Sunflower seeds? He reached into a ratty brown sport coat and withdrew a handkerchief. Mike took it and swiped at the wet mark on his thigh, but the liquid had already seeped through the fabric.

‘Cerebral palsy,’ the man said. ‘Bad balance, you know? Again, I’m real sorry for that.’

‘That’s okay. I hate this suit anyway.’

The man’s sport coat looked like Salvation Army – corduroy, worn elbow patches, frayed sleeves. Mike offered back the handkerchief, and the man hooked it in a hand curled like a monkey’s paw. His eyes, set in a jaundiced face, twitched from side to side.

A hulking man stood idly several feet away, not uncomfortable but not at ease – not anything at all, in fact. He was so detached that it took Mike a moment to register that the two were together.

‘I’ve had my Achilles tendon lengthened eight times, my hamstring five,’ the man in the sport coat continued. ‘Eleven tendon releases in my right foot alone. Forty-four surgeries in all. That don’t even count Botox injections into spastic muscles. Then there’s the seizure meds, then the meds for med side effects, and… well, hell, you get the picture.’

Mike loosened his tie, wondering what the guy wanted. The big man remained immobile, looking at the draped walls, at nothing. Was he even listening?

‘And still the muscles tighten. I walk a little worse each year. Need a few more snips and cuts. Expensive as hell. Keeps me working, that’s for sure.’ He brought a wineglass up to his chin and spit sunflower seeds into it. A soggy wad had collected in the bottom of the glass, steeping in a quarter inch of leftover red wine. ‘All this ’cuz I didn’t get enough oxygen when I was riding down that birth canal. No fault o’ my own. But I gotta pay anyways, day after day.’ He snickered. ‘Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, Mike? Catches up to us all.’

Mike studied the guy’s face. ‘How do you know my name?’

The man nodded at the newspaper blowups. ‘Man o’ the hour.’

‘And you are…?’

‘William.’

‘William…?’

William smiled, showing off yellowed teeth. ‘My kid cousin had scars like that.’ He nodded at Mike’s knuckles. ‘Old-fashioned fighting.’

Mike slid his hands into his pockets. ‘Had?’

‘People with knuckles like that don’t generally make it to happy middle age.’

Kat ran by, chasing Andres’s son, shrieking laugher.

William gestured at them with his chin. ‘Look at the little ones. I could watch ’em play all day.’

The way William was looking at the kids made Mike squirm.

‘Cute girl,’ William said. ‘Must be yours – strong resemblance, those cat eyes. You can tell she ain’t adopted.’

A creepy remark, creepier still since Mike didn’t think he and Kat looked all that much alike. Why would the guy give a damn if Kat was adopted? Had Mike heard wrong, or had William actually placed extra emphasis on the ‘she’? A veiled reference to Mike’s foster-home past? Meaning what? And how could William know? Mike felt a pulse beating in the side of his neck.

‘So who do you know here?’ Mike asked.

‘Well, Mike, now I know you, don’t I?’

‘Sure,’ Mike said evenly. ‘But who invited you?’

Someone made an announcement, and they all began settling into their chairs. The woman with the clipboard waved Mike toward his seat by the podium, her gesture emphatic: We need you here now.

‘Better get going,’ William said. ‘Looks like they want you onstage.’

There was no denying it; this second evasion was intentional. Something had shifted in the air, gone sour.

And Mike’s patience had worn thin. He swallowed, tried to rein in his irritation. ‘You didn’t answer my question. How are you hooked into this?’

‘I’m just a guy who likes a party.’ William kept his eyes on Mike and spit out another sunflower shell, this time over the lip of the cup onto the carpet. ‘Plus, there’s a whole mess of finelookin’ women around.’ He gestured, again with his scraggly chin. ‘Look at that slice o’ pie there.’ Annabel was sitting at the edge of the banquet table up on the dais. Her chair was pulled sideways as she spoke with one of the waiters. Though her legs were closed, her dress was hitched on a knee, and from their lower vantage they could see a little triangle of white silk between her legs.

Mike felt his face go hot. He stiffened, and the big man, never shifting his blank gaze from the far wall, sidled a half step toward them.

Mike felt a surge of old instinct rising in him, gathering heat. His face was close enough to William’s that he could smell the stink leaking through his teeth.

The woman with the clipboard called Mike’s name. He untensed his muscles and stepped calmly away. Walking up onto the dais, he whispered in Annabel’s ear, and she straightened her dress, smoothing it over her knees. The lights dimmed, save those beating down on the banquet table, illuminating Mike and the other award recipients. Squinting out at the room, he could discern little more than shadowy figures around the far tables.

The governor made a grand entrance, his frame dwarfing the podium. He threw out a few opening cracks, a broad grin showing off the trademark gap in his front teeth. Mike registered the crowd’s titters but little else; his eyes were picking over the crowd. Annabel, misreading his tension, squeezed his hand supportively. Kat waved from Andres’s table down in the front.

The other honorees got up and made brief speeches, but Mike couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. He thought he spied William’s form moving across the back, but then there was an awful silence and he realized everyone was staring at him. The familiar woman, sans clipboard, said Mike’s name again into the microphone. Annabel urged him to his feet, and, walking on wooden legs, he took the podium.

‘I, um-’ A feedback squawk; his mouth was too close to the mike. The wet fabric from the spill felt cold against his thigh. He did his best to put the bizarre confrontation out of mind. ‘I don’t really deserve to be here,’ he said.

At the VIP table, Bill Garner looked up at him, head cocked, lips wearing a tense little smile.

‘I mean, to give me an award when I already feel so lucky for what I have and what I get to do. I wake up every day thinking I’ve won the lottery.’ Finally relaxing a bit, Mike glanced at his wife. She was looking back at him with adoration. ‘Because I have. I mean, my wife, my daughter, steady work that I love.’