J. Black - The Shop

“A shark?”

“You stop moving, you die. If you’re a celeb in this day and age, you can’t just tread water and expect to remain viable.”

Cyril looked confused. Apparently, he didn’t know everything .

“Stardom today has to be maintained. If you’re not in the headlines, the public forgets about you. So you have to work harder—incredible pressure. That’s why she took drugs.”

“She took drugs?”

“Hell yes. Oxycontin and hydrocodone, stuff like that. If those two dickheads hadn’t broken in here and killed her, I would have bet she’d be dead in a year.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Oh, believe it.”

He told Cyril these kids weren’t prepared for fame. They were thrown into the deep end and they had to perform. It changed them. They became tough, greedy, and hard-nosed. They had only one job: to stay in the public eye any way they could. Drive over a paparazzo’s foot? Good. Have a baby? Great, especially if it broke up someone else’s marriage. Split up with your boyfriend? Make sure it’s messy. Get into a public fight with another woman? If you grabbed her hair in your fist and knocked her off her Manolo Blahniks—fabulous.

If all else failed, go commando.

“Why can’t people just let their children grow up and be normal?” Cyril said.

Cyril expertly brushed the fish with beaten egg whites, coated it with salt, pepper, and cornmeal, and placed it in tinfoil before carrying the platter out to the deck. He started the grill, then regarded the trout with a frown. He opened the foil, added some beer from his own bottle, and closed it back up. The shadows were longer now. Nick excused himself and went into the house. He really did have to take a leak, but first he took a dozen photos with his phone. Quietly, he made his way upstairs, worried about creaking floorboards. There were none.

He knew Ray and Donny Lee, those knuckle-dragging white supremacists, had done their worst work up in the back bedroom. It was vicious—the pictures posted on the Internet. Disgusting photos, so bad you didn’t even know what you were looking at. Whatever it was, it looked like raw, bloody beef sliced from a gnawed T-bone. Apparently, the idea that a white kid and a black kid were sleeping together unhinged Donny and Ray. The interracial romance, which had been developed (cynically, by the producers) over a period of weeks, might have been the reason Donny and Ray targeted the house in the first place.

The door to the room was closed.

He turned the knob. Unlocked. Good.

He was surprised to see that ground sheets covered the floor. And that wasn’t all.

On the wall behind where the bed had been, Nick saw the ghosts of bloodstains. Someone had slapped on a coat of paint, but it didn’t completely cover them. Like a Rorschach test.

Weird, the guy buying the house in this condition.

It sort of shocked him, but not so much he forgot to take pictures.

23

Landry unpacked his groceries on the small table by the honor bar. Although his purchases were representative of the items the hotel sold at a premium, they were much cheaper at the grocery store. With his savings, he was able to buy Carr’s water crackers instead of Cheez-Its, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies instead of Oreos. He lined his remaining purchases up on the table: brie, smoky sharp cheese, pickled artichoke hearts, and a half bottle of Penfolds red—a nice meal.

He sat down on the king-sized bed and took off his shoes. He liked the room, which was done in a generic Spanish style. The coverlet was floral, the colors burnt umber and burnt sienna. The walls were clean white. A carved cabinet concealed the TV—the usual.

He turned on the TV and channel-surfed.

CNN had a special on Afghanistan. He clicked right past it.

Afghanistan, in his opinion, was the nut that could not be cracked. Far worse than Iraq on its worst day. The terrain was impossible. The little villages in the mountains were the same now as they were a thousand years ago. Like some of the cliff-dwelling ruins you’d see in New Mexico.

His platoon, in joint operations with the CIA, had gone after terrorist cells and the Taliban along the border with Pakistan. They’d been given an intelligence package regarding a man named Matteen Wahidi. Landry thought it was pretty thin. They went in at the optimum time, three a.m., rousting the target and his family in the rabbit warren where they lived. The family consisted of Wahidi, his wife, his children, his father, his mother, and his grandfather. Landry had his doubts Matteen Wahidi was working with Al Qaeda. The problem involved his accusers, the two men who spoke up against him. Landry knew they had been paid for their help. They say you can’t buy an Afghan, but you can rent one. The accusers gave it away in their shifty eyes, the holes in their stories, the cues they took from each other, and in the rank stink of their sweat. The smell of fear rolled off them. Landry realized they were afraid of Wahidi in a deep, atavistic way that inferior men always feel in the presence of the genuine article. Wahidi spoke in his own defense, then stood silent, his family behind him. “Matteen” in Pashto meant “well-mannered” or “disciplined one.” His wife was in tears, a two-year-old boy clinging to her leg and screaming. But Wahidi’s other children were stoic, like their father. Matteen Wahidi looked each of his captors in the eye, one by one. When his gaze reached Landry, they took each other’s measure. Wahidi knew what was in store for him. He knew—and his family knew—he would not be coming back.

It was the way of the world. Landry had learned early on that things like this happened. When he was eight years old, Landry had watched his favorite racehorse, a gelding who had dropped down the claiming ranks, be led onto a van that would take him away. He ran to the fifth wheel and put his head under the pillow so he would not hear the van pull away. His mom came in to comfort him. She told him the horse was going to a farm, but Landry had seen the van on the backstretch before. He’d heard people talking. The horse wasn’t going to a farm.

Like the horse, Matteen Wahidi was taken away. The horse’s death had been horrifying but short. Wahidi would dwell in the terrible twilight between life and death, sanity and insanity, desperation and hope. They would break him. No ifs, ands, or buts. He would eventually talk—be eager to talk—and tell them what they wanted to hear, whether it was true or not. The disciplined one, the well-mannered one, would babble about anything and everything to get some respite.

Landry couldn’t have done anything, and anyway, he had long ago hardened himself to injustice. People lived and people died, and nothing in life was fair. Wahidi would have to find his reward in paradise.

Landry shifted through the channels and landed on E! There was more on Brienne Cross, six weeks after her death. They interviewed her sister, who looked exactly like her. Sabrina. He spread a towel on the bed and ate there, watching television. This was something he’d never do at home, eating on his bed. But he was in a hotel, so anything went.

After eating, he powered up the Hewlett Packard laptop to see what he could find. The answers could be on Holloway’s computer. Nick himself had been disappointing. He really didn’t know who had spared him.

As expected, the security was minimal. You just needed a password to get in—the family pet, your sister’s name, your favorite baseball team. From the suitcase crammed full of records and written correspondence he’d brought with him, he’d mined a list of words. He tried one after the other, and got in on the third try.