Jason Pinter - The Fury

With the economy tanking the way it was, with people watching their wallets to a degree I'd never ex perienced in my lifetime, it wouldn't surprise me if dis posable income for recreational drugs-like it was for

all other consumer products-was being severely limited. Especially since coke was a favorite amongst bankers, financiers (i.e., high-salaried types). The kind of people whose livelihoods were being dashed against the rocks as the economy tumbled.

Maybe Stephen and Helen really were trying to start a new life. After all, Helen had desired nothing more than to raise her son with James Parker (why on God's green earth she would want to do this is an entirely dif ferent matter. One I'm not sure had a satisfactory answer).

Leaving the country would enable them to start their lives anew, to begin fresh somewhere they weren't known. Where demons and drugs wouldn't follow them.

But that last word…Fury. I still didn't know what it meant, if anything. It might have been a spasm, some thing Helen Gaines wrote while her mental faculties bounced around like Ping-Pong balls.

I put it on the back burner. If it was relevant, it would come up again.

The apartment felt warm and inviting, though compared to the visitation room in a correctional facility an icebox would have felt warm and inviting. We both stripped off our clothes, Amanda jumping into the shower while I pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

Before long, steam was pouring through the slat in between the door and the tiling.

I approached the door silently, then knocked gently.

There was no answer. I knocked again, and when there was still no reply I knocked again, louder.

One more knock and I heard the water turn off.

"What is it, Henry?" She sounded annoyed.

"Just wanted to say hi," I said. "Go back to your shower."

"Gee, thanks."

The water came back on. Good thing there was no lock on the bathroom door.

I gently turned the knob, the cool air flowing into my face. I could see Amanda's body hazy behind the shower glass. She hadn't seen me yet.

I stripped off my shorts, flung the T-shirt onto a chair.

Then I pulled open the shower door.

Amanda spun around, shampoo in her hair. The look on her face quickly went from annoyance to surprise to pleasure. She pushed the door open and I joined her, wrapping my body around her, feeling her warmth surround me.

We kissed, and then our bodies were clinging to each other, skin on skin. Pain and hurt and everything else melted away as we touched. My body was on fire as I kissed her neck, Amanda throwing her head back as she sighed. I kissed her up and down her body, feeling her skin tingle below my fingertips. Then I pressed myself against her, hard, and she moved in perfect rhythm with my body.

We touched and held and moved against each other under that beating stream for a long time, until the heat became so unbearable that we ended up in bed, naked, clinging to each other like we always did when we wanted the world to melt away for a little while.

I left Amanda sleeping in bed and crept into the living room. Booting the computer up, I poured myself a cup of ice coffee from the jug we kept in the fridge. I took a sip. Stale. It'd probably been sitting in there close to a week. I checked the freezer, but we were fresh out of grounds. Instead, I poured a healthy dollop of milk, added enough sweetener to make my teeth chatter and sat down.

Our Internet connection was spotty at best, so it was a sigh of relief when my home page came up. I'd changed my preferences so that the Gazette 's page would load whenever I opened my browser. I took a moment to read the latest stories, then went to Google and began my search.

I typed in the name "Scott Callahan." To no great surprise, over four thousand entries came up. To refine the search, I added "New York."

That narrowed it down to under a thousand. There were a few wedding notices and Web sites for law offices, but unfortunately none of them had any pictures. I scrolled through a few dozen pages hoping for something that would perhaps be linked to the Scott

Callahan I followed the other day, but nothing came up.

I went back to the Google home page and typed in

"Kyle Evans" and "New York." Two thousand entries came up. I sighed, having no choice but to slog through.

Nothing seemed to be terribly interesting until the fourth page. The page title was "Dozens laid off in wake of financial collapse." I clicked the link.

The article was from a financial magazine, dated about six months ago. It was a feature on the recent meltdowns of several financial institutions and the decision to lay off massive numbers of workers, some of whom had just graduated from business school. The author had interviewed several recently fired employ ees, including one man named Kyle Evans.

The section read:

Kyle Evans expected to pay off his student loans in a matter of months, having taken a six-figure job right after receiving his MBA. Yet within weeks of his first day, Evans, a twenty-seven year-old Wharton graduate, was unemployed and unable to find a job.

"Between undergrad and Penn I owe about a hundred thousand dollars," Evans said. "I was going to have a bitch of a time paying it back anyway, but now what do I do?"

Though the article was posted on the Web, there were several photos taken of its subjects. They were small thumbnails, and according to the site these were exclu sive and had not been printed in the physical magazine.

And there, in a group of three other men and woman his age, was the very Kyle Evans I'd seen on the street the other day. His hair was shorter and he was about ten pounds heavier, but there was no doubt it was him.

Suddenly Kyle's career choice made more sense.

With no income, and training for jobs that didn't exist anymore, Kyle had decided to take another route to paying off his loans, joining an industry that didn't have as many down cycles. One that could afford him the same lifestyle. The same money.

It was a fair assumption that Scott Callahan-and maybe some, if not all, the other briefcase men-were victims of the same circumstances as Kyle. If you thought about it, who would make better drug couriers?

These people were young, energetic, highly motivated, perhaps by money above all else. And, most of all, they owed. And if they owed enough, they'd be willing to take a few risks, break the law for a while before they found their footing. But who was employing them?

What was 718 Enterprises?

I pulled "718 Enterprises" into Google, Yahoo! and half a dozen other search engines. Less than a dozen hits came up, none of them looking as if they had anything to do with a company of that name or with any relation to New York. I twiddled my thumbs. I'd never been a thumb twiddler, but at this point I wasn't quite sure where to go or who to talk to. And we still had no idea where Helen Gaines was.

I opened up the music player on my computer, took a pair of headphones out and put on some Springsteen.

Something about the Boss always made me think a little more clearly. There was honesty in his voice that was often missing from popular music, and his earlier works were like pure blasts of adrenaline. That's what I needed right now. An energy boost to carry me along. There were half a dozen threads in this story, and I had no doubt that when unravelled they would all lead to

Stephen's killer. I just needed that one connecting thread that told me how the story would all play out.

I sat there for half an hour, shuffling between songs.

"Dead Man Walking" came on. It was a haunting tune, composed for the movie of the same name where Sean

Penn played a character named Matthew Poncelet, on death row for the murder of two teenagers. The film was based on a book by Sister Helen Prejean, and Poncelet as actually a composite of two men Prejean had coun seled. Prejean grows closer to this man many viewed as a monster, trying to understand the humanity beneath the inhumane crime. The music was simple, tragic, and the lyrics filled my head as my eyes closed, the sounds enveloping me.