Brad Parks - The Girl Next Door

“Oh, that’s just what people call him around the office. He’s one of my colleagues, Kevin Lungford. Would you mind opening that?” I said. “Lunky likes puzzles, so I sent him the sexual harassment complaint and told him to figure out the whole ‘Caesar 710’ thing.”

“Yeah, no problem,” McNabb said, cleared his throat and began reading:

“Mister Ross, this is almost too easy. The ‘Caesar’ is a reference to the Caesar cipher, one of the oldest cryptology methods known to man, so named because Caesar used it to communicate with his generals. It’s really a simple form of alphabetic substitution, but with a three-letter shift down. So while ‘7-10’ would make you think G and J, it is actually J and M. The person in this complaint has the initials J.M.”

“J.M.,” I said out loud. “Who’s J.M.?”

There was only one person in Nancy’s life I could think of whose initials were J.M., and that was Jim McNabb.

Who was now pointing a gun at my head.

McNabb trained the barrel of the Smith amp; Wesson an inch above Ross’s ear. All the idiots who watch too many movies always stick the gun at the target’s temple. But while that might do the job, it also might send a bullet racing through one soft part of the head and out another soft part without ever hitting anything hard enough to make it expand. It was only when expanding that a bullet did the full, flesh-tearing damage that would guarantee killing a man.

McNabb felt the tension of the trigger against his right index finger and reminded himself to stay calm and take deep breaths. He didn’t think Ross would make any sudden moves. Ross didn’t seem like the type to do anything that irrational. But McNabb wanted to make real sure that if the guy tried anything, he wouldn’t get very far.

What amazed McNabb-thrilled him, actually-is how thoroughly unaware Ross had remained, right until the very moment the gun came out. Ross knew about the sexual harassment, the NLRB, even the Cadillac Escalade. Yet for all his supposedly honed reporter’s instincts, Ross had never been able to put it all together.

McNabb had played a role in that, of course, having spun that marvelous bit of fiction about Gary Jackman and the threats. None of it had ever happened, of course. Oh, there had been a meeting between the Eagle-Examiner’ s publisher and representatives from the IFIW that Thursday afternoon, and it spilled into the evening. But it had just been another negotiating session. It was not followed by any trip to any bar. That one fabrication had kept Ross off track.

But McNabb knew it wasn’t going to work forever. All those twisted little lies were eventually going to get straightened out.

So he spent the afternoon preparing for a visit to “the bar,” finding the ideal place for everything to go down, planning the route, thinking about what he’d say, anticipating how his adversary might react. They were only a few hundred yards away from their destination when the e-mail came in.

The e-mail was, admittedly, a wrinkle. McNabb couldn’t simply make Ross disappear now, as he had planned. There was too much of a trail that might be followed-if someone started looking at Ross’s e-mail, if someone plied answers from the NLRB, if someone pulled all those loose strings …

But no, Ross was the only one who was even close to tying them together. And the poor sap wasn’t going to be alive to tell anyone about it.

So McNabb-aka Caesar 710, J.M., Big Jimmy, whatever anyone wanted to call him-just needed to improvise a bit, to orchestrate the reporter’s death in a way that made it look like it was something other than what it really was. Just as he had done with Nancy.

A new scheme was already forming in his mind. And the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. He relaxed and reminded himself to breathe again. He was the one with the gun. He was in control. Total control.

It’s surprisingly difficult to look at a gun out of the corner of your eye while driving, especially when it’s being pointed at the side of your head. But from what little I could see, McNabb’s piece was short, black, and made for the express purpose of ruining someone’s day. Gun enthusiasts go back and forth all the time about the merits of various calibers and bullets, chamber types and trigger actions. Not being a gun enthusiast, all I knew is this one would likely leave a significant portion of my brain splattered on my driver’s side window.

In my previous thirty-two years on this planet, despite brushes with some unfriendly people, I had never had a gun aimed at me from this short a distance. Or any distance, for that matter. I tried to keep walls, or at least bulletproof glass, between me and anyone inclined toward discharging a firearm in the general direction of my person.

Now here I was, with nothing but three inches of air between this gun barrel and some body parts that I preferred to keep unsplattered.

And perhaps it should have been unnerving. Or disconcerting. Or at least mildly off-putting. I certainly don’t fancy myself some kind of big tough guy impervious to bullets. I’m not especially brave in the face of danger. I have no illusions about my own fragile mortality.

Yet the only thing I felt was this strange calm. Maybe it’s just because it was all so foreign, I didn’t know how to react.

A few raindrops-big, fat, heavy ones-thwapped on the roof of the car. Then a gust of wind lashed us with another band of rain. The storm had arrived.

“Keep it nice and steady,” McNabb instructed. “Don’t try anything silly. If I feel even an ounce too much brake or accelerator, I’ll shoot.”

Up until the moment he had pulled the gun, McNabb had been his usual gregarious self. Now he seemed jumpy, on edge, neither of which were qualities I appreciated in a man with a gun.

I studied him, as best my peripheral vision would allow. His mouth had gone into the same ugly pout he had worn when I first told him that Nancy’s hit and run was no accident. At the time, I thought the reaction was because of his friendship with Nancy. Now I knew it was because he realized he had not gotten away with his crime.

He almost did. If not for one El Salvadoran woman who liked to watch sunrises, neither of us would be in this spot right now.

McNabb had turned his body toward me, his eyes staring a hole in the side of my head where a fast-moving projectile might soon follow. I could see, now that he was twisted slightly, that he had been wearing a small shoulder holster. I’m not sure how I missed it before, except of course that it had never occurred to me to look.

Had he been unbelted, I would have simply jerked the wheel and crashed into the railroad trestle we were approaching. At sixty miles an hour, I’d take my chances. But he was wearing his seat belt. Crashing the car wouldn’t necessarily improve my situation. Sure, it might make it more likely he would get caught for killing me, because the crash would attract attention, and he might be incapacitated enough he wouldn’t be able to escape. But he’d probably shoot me as soon as he figured out what I was doing. And while it might be some small consolation for my loved ones that my killer got caught, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good from six feet under.

So I kept it steady. Like the man with the gun said.

“Slow down. Take a right here,” he said as we passed under the railroad. “Right after the bridge.”

There was an entrance to a warehouse about a hundred feet ahead. Just short of it was a small, packed-dirt road.

“Right here?” I asked.

“That’s the one,” he said.