Patrick Quinlan - The Hit

He had helped her up, brought her here to the kitchen table, and told her that he worked for the courts. He deliberately kept it vague, allowing her to believe whatever she wanted to believe about that. It seemed she had come to the conclusion that he was a court officer of some kind, maybe a special detective who reported directly to the judges. That was a fine thing to believe. He had also told her that he was trying to help her son, not hurt him. He had told her that if the police got to Davey first, her son might not get off as easily. You could tell by the bruises and the stitches in his head that the police had very little compunction about the use of force, even deadly force. The court system was a great deal more humane than the police.

He had won her over so thoroughly that she had agreed not to call anyone right away. She had also agreed to let Gordo look around in Davey’s room for a few minutes. There wasn’t much to see. A twin bed that might cramp the style of a ten-year-old. Posters of obscure heavy metal bands still on the walls. An aluminum fire ladder attached to the window sill and hanging down to the alley – quite the escape artist was our little Davey. And one thing that might actually mean something, though at this moment Gordo couldn’t imagine what: the business card of a security consulting firm located in Charleston, South Carolina. Gordo found it on the bedside table, which suggested to him that Foerster had it out for a reason. It was a very curious thing, that card.

‘Well, it happens,’ Gordo said now. ‘People go bad. It’s no reflection on how you raised him.’

Mrs. Foerster looked up, and in her eyes Gordo detected the light of hope. ‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Of course I do. Jonah here can vouch for what I’m saying.’

Jonah nodded his head solemnly. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course I can.’ But it sounded empty, like the absent-minded blather of a man who wasn’t listening and had no idea what he was agreeing to.

Gordo soldiered on with the lie. Jonah had already tuned the whole thing out, and Gordo himself was even growing a little bored with it. He wanted to keep Foerster’s mom on the hook by projecting compassion, and he even wanted to feel compassion for her. But in reality some plenty warped shit must have gone on in this house during Foerster’s upbringing, and no amount of hand-wringing was going to unmake that fact. In Gordo’s experience, a career whacko like Foerster didn’t get that way entirely on his own. He had help, and the help started early.

‘In our line of work,’ Gordo said, ‘Jonah and I deal with some very bad men. Some of them – not Davey, mind you, but some others – are the worst men in our society. And we find over and over that many of them were raised in good homes. Maybe they have some kind of defect, a chemical imbalance in their brains, or maybe they get led down the wrong path by people they meet on the street. I don’t know what it is.’

‘I don’t, either,’ she said.

‘Whatever the reason in this case, it’s very important that Davey be taken off the street for a while. It’s important that he get help from professionals. And it’s important that other people… well…’

‘That he doesn’t hurt anyone else,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’

She nodded, as if finally coming to a difficult decision. ‘I should have called someone as soon as he showed up here. But I wanted to protect him. I love my son, Mr. Lamb.’

Gordo nodded. ‘I know you do.’ His hand moved to her shoulder. ‘We can make things right for Davey. Will you help us do that?’

She began to cry again, silently this time. Her body shook all over. ‘I’ll do anything you want.’

Gordo held up the business card. ‘Do you know anything about this? I found it upstairs. It could be a clue.’

She took the card in one hand. ‘He told me he has a job lined up in South Carolina. I don’t know if it’s true or not. He’s lied so much that I have no idea whether I’m coming or going sometimes. He wanted me to give him money so he could go down there, but I didn’t believe that’s what he wanted it for.’

‘Did you give him any money?’

‘I gave him forty dollars. He said it wasn’t enough. I was actually afraid of him, what my son might do, to get more money from me.’ She started crying some more at the thought of it, but not as forcefully as before. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

‘Do you have any idea what kind of work he might do with a security firm?’

She shrugged. ‘Something with computers, maybe. Like I said, he’s very smart.’

‘Can you do this for me? Can you call the phone company, right now, and find out if by any chance Davey called that number from this phone? I’d do it myself, but I’d have to go through channels and it might take a couple of days. We’re really working against the clock here.’

‘Well, he was only here one night, and he came quite late. I don’t know when he would have called.’

‘Mrs. Foerster, a man like Davey can be quite resourceful.’

‘Well, OK,’ she said, but she sounded uncertain.

‘Good. That’s good. Here’s the phone.’

Gordo and Jonah waited while she sat on hold. Jonah was pacing a little bit, and if he was going to do that, Gordo wished he would go out on the street where Mrs. Foerster didn’t have to look at him. But she was a good girl, a trooper. When she got someone on the phone, she did just as he told her – she asked them to outline all the calls made from her phone in the past twenty-four hours. As she listened, she jotted something down on a piece of scrap paper. She turned it around so that Gordo could read it.

3:07 AM.

She looked deeply into his eyes. He noticed her eyes were bloodshot, and yellowing. He nodded. She nodded.

Jonah floated closer and looked at the note.

‘OK, thank you,’ Foerster’s mom said into the phone just before hanging up. ‘You know, I have some family visiting, and I just don’t like the way they think my phone is their phone. Calling wherever they please, anytime they want. I have to keep close tabs on them.’

Gordo liked the story. She was clearly a veteran liar. She had flowed into it just as smoothly as he would have.

‘Well, you were right,’ she said. ‘He called there in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. But the call lasted less than a minute.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ Gordo said. ‘I wonder what it means.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Jonah said as they walked back to the car. ‘The guy called some random office in the middle of the night when he knew nobody would be there. He probably did it so he could lie to his mother a little more about some place that was supposed to hire him. I can’t imagine anybody hiring that guy.’

‘Sure, that could be,’ Gordo allowed. ‘Or he might have called there for a hundred other reasons. He’s a crazy person, so he might actually think that some private security firm wants to hire him. For all I know, he’s so delusional he thinks he works for the government, or for some clandestine foreign spy agency.’

‘Or the New World Order,’ Jonah said.

‘Right. He might go to South Carolina and walk in the office there, and they won’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. It could be bad for them because it might set him off.’

They were almost to the car. For some reason, it bothered Jonah to think that any firm, especially a security contractor, would want Foerster to work for them. It burned him up. He didn’t want his mind to think it.

‘Or, and I know this is a little hard to swallow,’ Gordo said. ‘Foerster might have some skill or combination of skills that makes this security company want to hire him. Hey, these guys might be people who hire rent-a-cops with tinfoil badges to hang around empty shopping malls and make sure nobody walks off with the sheetrock or the wiring. But we know one thing about Foerster – he thinks about two steps ahead, and he can be pretty fucking hard to catch. These might be enticing traits to somebody. And we know one thing about private security companies in this day and age – it’s not always clear what they’re really up to.’