Kaleb Nation: Harken

There are some places in the world so empty you could scream and hear your voice echo a hundred times, like an entire village crying out at once. Almost everywhere else in Los Angeles, even in the vacant hours before dawn, there are distant rumblings of cars over concrete bridges, screaming jets flying from the LAX airport over shingled apartments, a nearby husband and wife arguing in Spanish over the credit card bill.

But not where I waited. There was nothing down the deserted street long forgotten by municipal workers, the uneven road speckled by potholes and gleaming lines of tar left behind from shoddy repairs. Even the grass barely swayed as the soundless wind crept through the ends of my hair like fingers. You never notice the crickets until their hum has died.

I stood on a thin strip of gravel beside the road, surrounded on all sides by trees and boulders tall enough to block my sight of the San Fernando Valley of California. The road was swept gently by the glow from a single streetlamp a few paces away, only bright enough to stroke my face and the body of my silver BMW, its usually-sparkling paint now dusty from our drive up the hills. I sniffed. That was the terrible truth about nice cars: you might pay a fortune, but you still drive the same dirty roads as everyone else. Funny how roads were the great equalizer.

I leaned my back against its door, checking the time on my phone then the street in both directions. The client had told me midnight; he was ten minutes late. Every second I was gone was another chance my mom might get up and do a check through my door, or my little sister might have a nightmare and run into my room for consolation. Both were circumstances that’d result in my absence being discovered.

Rule Two: No clients on school nights , I could hear my mom’s voice saying.

For a hundred-twenty an hour, I think it’s worth the risk , I’d murmur back. That came out to two dollars a minute. She’d just grin and remind me of Rule Three: If I was caught, all the money I made that night and from my next two clients would go to my sister’s college fund .

For the risk, I added a surcharge.

I finally saw the blue-tinged headlights of a car appear around the bend of a hill in the distance. I grumbled and stood straighter, hoping it was really the client and not some random guy from school out for a joyride. I always had late-night clients meet me here, where I could get a good look at them as they approached. Late clients made me suspicious. A few extra minutes was easily enough time to check a soundproof basement’s padlocks, mix up more chloroform, and test the sharpness of some butcher knives.

But again, I couldn’t complain: tardiness brought another surcharge.

The car inched to a park behind mine but the windows were too tinted for me to see who was inside, its lights nearly blinding me. It was regal and as silver as the moon above us, fresh-from-the-factory and polished on every beveled edge—the three-pronged Maserati emblem on its front like a miniature trident. A Gran Turismo, I recognized. Wealthy clients were not uncommon purchasers of my skills, but I still had trouble acting unimpressed. I opened my hands in greeting as the driver’s door opened and my client stepped out.

“Mr. Sharpe?” I said, finally getting my first look at his face: a nearly square chin, tanned complexion, blonde hair cropped short with the stubble of a matching beard. Even in the faint glow his eyes narrowed toward me like scalpels. This wasn’t out of the ordinary either. My new clients were usually startled when they saw I was only sixteen.

“Michael Asher?” he checked, a hand still holding on to his door. I nodded.

“One and only, at your service,” I replied. “At least, for the next fifty minutes. The contract does stipulate your hour started at midnight, I’m afraid, and it’s…”

I pulled my phone out to find the new time, but Mr. Sharpe had already slammed his door and locked it with the remote. He glanced up and down the road, which had resumed its deathly state, and approached me with his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

“Where’s the target?” I asked.

“ My wife is down the road a bit,” he said with sharp correction. “She’s meeting him over by the lookout I think.”

“Your email said this has been happening all year,” I pointed out. “You could have contacted me earlier and fixed things before it got this bad.” Lies , of course. My practiced marketing spiel.

“It’s probably been more than a year,” he replied, brow furrowing. “Likely not even all the same man, knowing how she is. Who knows how many she’s—?”

He cut himself off and his eyes dropped from mine, suddenly unable to continue what had spiraled into a spitting rant. I shrugged.

“I’d figure at least four or five men by now,” I proposed, which was rather solid math in my client experience. He looked at me with dismay. I was never good at the sympathy part. It was impossible to feel for him, not after being mentally numbed by a hundred overburdened businessmen all suddenly anxious to keep up with their wives as their marriages crumbled from years of neglect. This was likely the most attention Mr. Sharpe had paid Mrs. Sharpe since their wedding day.

But my job wasn’t to solve his romantic problems. I gestured to my car.

“Climb in,” I told him. “I’ll drive. Just tell me where I can watch from.”

He strolled around stiffly and huffed as he looked over my BMW. “Work must be good.”

“A lot of people like to know the truth,” I replied with a shrug. This was why the car was worth the money: it left an impression that I was successful, that I was right, that my gift was true enough for me to be paid well. And in business, impressions are everything. One good word from a client to his friends and soon I might have thirty more jobs.

Mr. Sharpe sat crammed against the armrest and door with his long legs uncomfortably bent. His clothes were too fancy for being out on this type of work: a bold jacket over dark slacks, hair trimmed perfectly and skin that showed no flaw. He wore a misty white ring on his right hand that was undecorated except for a single vertical line cut in its center. He could have been a movie star, but I wasn’t supposed to ask questions like that. I was supposed to follow the way he told me, and drive down the winding streets he directed me onto.

My headlights divided the night from the road ahead as he pointed me to turn another corner, going deeper into trees and mountains. As we drove, I crept glances his way, but his eyes told me nothing—he was too determined or distracted to betray himself.

“So you’re absolutely certain you can read their thoughts,” he asked as I drove.

“Not their thoughts,” I reminded him.

“You know what I mean.”

“All I need is a photo,” I replied. “Get me a direct shot, you go up and talk to her, I’ll snap my photo and we’ll be done. I’ll have your answer.”

“Have you ever been wrong?”

“I am always right,” I told him firmly. That ended it. After all, I was Michael Asher: the Eye Guy , some called me. I’d read more eyes by my sixteenth birthday than in an optometrist’s career. It was why this man, and so many countless people before him, travelled for miles to see me.

Mr. Sharpe squeezed his hands together, glancing at me then back to the road again. We came to a crossing and he pointed left. The minutes began to tick by in silence, which was odd to me. Usually when I was dealing with a client who thought his spouse was cheating on him, he would continue to babble and make excuses and eventually start to defend her. He’d proclaim dozens of times that perhaps we should turn around because he was being stupid, only for us to continue driving without pause, because the truth was simply too tempting to ignore.