You're Next (8 page)

Kat scratched at her head through the sheath of mayonnaise and cling wrap, her face somber and thoughtful, and asked, ‘What
if you and Mom die?’

‘We’ll be fine. You have plenty of time to worry about stuff like
that when you’re older. Your job right now is to be a kid and have fun. We will always protect you. Until you can protect
yourself.’

Kat rolled over, poked the pillow in the spot where her polar bear used to sleep. ‘But what if you just disappear one day,
like
your
parents did? What would happen to me?’

The question cut the breath off halfway down his throat, and it was a moment or two before he could reassure her and kiss
her good night. Walking down the hall to bed, he could have sworn he heard the buzz of that blowfly, portending ill, but when
he turned, there was nothing at the seams of the ceiling except darkness.

Mike’s oversize, pixelated face greeted him and his family one step into the Braemar Country Club. Tuesday’s
Los Angeles Times
article, blown up to the size of a door and mounted on foam, leaned against the entrance to the main dining room. Lined beside
it like enormous dominoes were similar clippings from the state’s other major papers, giving the effect of tabloid wainscoting.
Itching in his eight-hundred-dollar suit, Mike paused, uncomfortable.

Despite the newspaper photo’s clearly showing Mike’s heterochromia, the journalist had referred to his ‘blazing brown eyes,’
ignoring the fact that one of them was technically ‘blazing amber.’ But the oversight was nothing next to the fraud at the
core of the politicized hype – Mike’s receiving an environmental award for houses that shouldn’t have passed the green code.
Scanning the puff piece, which praised his work to the ozone-depleted heavens, Mike felt a rush of guilt and – feeling his
daughter’s tiny hand in his – shame.

Annabel finally tugged at his arm, breaking him from his thoughts. Reluctantly, he entered, nodding at various well-dressed
folks, many of whom beamed at him with recognition. Kat kept pace, clutching her backpack full of books, which she’d brought
in case she got bored. Waiters circled with glasses of champagne and hors d’oeuvres he couldn’t recognize. He popped a pastrylike
item into his mouth just to have something to do and scanned the crowd for a familiar face.

Kat had already engaged Andrés’s kids in a game of tag. Annabel looked stunning in a red dress with a cutout back. He watched
her drift effortlessly into a circle of heavily made-up women, moving with the grace bestowed by a proper upbringing and natural
confidence. The woman was a marvel; each situation brought out a new facet of her. But even as he watched with pride, her
ease seemed only to underscore how out of place he felt. It seemed the one place he fit in effortlessly was with his family.

He started toward his wife, but an older woman with a clipboard appeared between them, facing Annabel. ‘Michael Wingate’s
wife, right?’ she asked. ‘I need to borrow you for a picture.’ She clasped Annabel’s hand in hers, leading her away. Annabel
shrugged in mock helplessness and went with a smile.

Mike made his way across the room and caught the bartender’s attention. ‘Can I get a Budweiser?’

The bartender, a handsome aspiring-actor type, gestured at the bottles in the ice bucket behind him. ‘Only Heineken. You’re
at the wrong party.’

Mike took the cold bottle. The bitter beer felt great going down. The last two days had dragged out, made slower by how much
he’d been dreading tonight.

Gazing across the swirls of people, Mike spotted Andrés at one of the elegantly set tables by the dais. Carrying his wife’s
purse and looking bored senseless, Andrés rolled his eyes, and Mike had to look away to hide his smile.

The sight of the governor’s chief of staff holding court one table over made the half grin go brittle on Mike’s face. Catching
Mike’s eye, Bill Garner offered him a head tilt that he couldn’t help but interpret as conspiratorial. Were other people looking
at him that way, too? He couldn’t get a handle on his uneasiness. For a week now, he’d been jumping at shadows.

At the far end of the room, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out across a sloping golf course, now dark. Mike angled his way
through the crush, offering greetings to passing faces. Getting to the fringe of the gathering and having a view of the horizon
calmed him a bit.

Just as he’d started to unknot his concerns, someone collided into him from the side. Stumbling to regain his footing, he
spilled beer down the leg of his trousers.

A voice floated over his shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry.’ A wiry man with a patchy beard leaned in at him, gripping his arm. ‘I have
CP.’

The man had breath like a birdcage, his lips spotted with black flecks. Sunflower seeds? He reached into a ratty brown sport
coat and withdrew a handkerchief. Mike took it and swiped at the wet mark on his thigh, but the liquid had already seeped
through the fabric.

‘Cerebral palsy,’ the man said. ‘Bad balance, you know? Again, I’m real sorry for that.’

‘That’s okay. I hate this suit anyway.’

The man’s sport coat looked like Salvation Army – corduroy, worn elbow patches, frayed sleeves. Mike offered back the handkerchief,
and the man hooked it in a hand curled like a monkey’s paw. His eyes, set in a jaundiced face, twitched from side to side.

A hulking man stood idly several feet away, not uncomfortable but not at ease – not anything at all, in fact. He was so detached
that it took Mike a moment to register that the two were together.

‘I’ve had my Achilles tendon lengthened eight times, my hamstring five,’ the man in the sport coat continued. ‘Eleven tendon
releases in my right foot alone. Forty-four surgeries in all. That don’t even count Botox injections into spastic muscles.
Then there’s the seizure meds, then the meds for med side effects, and . . . well, hell, you get the picture.’

Mike loosened his tie, wondering what the guy wanted. The big man remained immobile, looking at the draped walls, at nothing.
Was he even listening?

‘And still the muscles tighten. I walk a little worse each year. Need a few more snips and cuts. Expensive as hell. Keeps
me
working, that’s for sure.’ He brought a wineglass up to his chin and spit sunflower seeds into it. A soggy wad had collected
in the bottom of the glass, steeping in a quarter inch of leftover red wine. ‘All this ’cuz I didn’t get enough oxygen when
I was riding down that birth canal. No fault o’ my own. But I gotta pay anyways, day after day.’ He snickered. ‘Karma’s a
bitch, ain’t it, Mike? Catches up to us all.’

Mike studied the guy’s face. ‘How do you know my name?’

The man nodded at the newspaper blowups. ‘Man o’ the hour.’

‘And you are . . .?’

‘William.’

‘William . . .?’

William smiled, showing off yellowed teeth. ‘My kid cousin had scars like that.’ He nodded at Mike’s knuckles. ‘Old-fashioned
fighting.’

Mike slid his hands into his pockets. ‘Had?’

‘People with knuckles like that don’t generally make it to happy middle age.’

Kat ran by, chasing Andrés’s son, shrieking laugher.

William gestured at them with his chin. ‘Look at the little ones. I could
watch ’em play all day.’

The way William was looking at the kids made Mike squirm.

‘Cute girl,’ William said. ‘Must be yours – strong resemblance, those cat eyes. You can tell
she
ain’t adopted.’

A creepy remark, creepier still since Mike didn’t think he and Kat looked all that much alike. Why would the guy give a damn
if Kat
was
adopted? Had Mike heard wrong, or had William actually placed extra emphasis on the ‘she’? A veiled reference to Mike’s foster-home
past? Meaning what? And how could William know? Mike felt a pulse beating in the side of his neck.

‘So who do you know here?’ Mike asked.

‘Well, Mike, now I know you, don’t I?’

‘Sure,’ Mike said evenly. ‘But who invited you?’

Someone made an announcement, and they all began settling
into their chairs. The woman with the clipboard waved Mike toward his seat by the podium, her gesture emphatic:
We need you here
now.

‘Better get going,’ William said. ‘Looks like they want you onstage.’

There was no denying it; this second evasion was intentional. Something had shifted in the air, gone sour.

And Mike’s patience had worn thin. He swallowed, tried to rein in his irritation. ‘You didn’t answer my question. How are
you hooked into this?’

‘I’m just a guy who likes a party.’ William kept his eyes on Mike and spit out another sunflower shell, this time over the
lip of the cup onto the carpet. ‘Plus, there’s a whole mess of finelookin’ women around.’ He gestured, again with his scraggly
chin. ‘Look at that slice o’ pie there.’ Annabel was sitting at the edge of the banquet table up on the dais. Her chair was
pulled sideways as she spoke with one of the waiters. Though her legs were closed, her dress was hitched on a knee, and from
their lower vantage they could see a little triangle of white silk between her legs.

Mike felt his face go hot. He stiffened, and the big man, never shifting his blank gaze from the far wall, sidled a half step
toward them.

Mike felt a surge of old instinct rising in him, gathering heat. His face was close enough to William’s that he could smell
the stink leaking through his teeth.

The woman with the clipboard called Mike’s name. He untensed his muscles and stepped calmly away. Walking up onto the dais,
he whispered in Annabel’s ear, and she straightened her dress, smoothing it over her knees. The lights dimmed, save those
beating down on the banquet table, illuminating Mike and the other award recipients. Squinting out at the room, he could discern
little more than shadowy figures around the far tables.

The governor made a grand entrance, his frame dwarfing the
podium. He threw out a few opening cracks, a broad grin showing off the trademark gap in his front teeth. Mike registered
the crowd’s titters but little else; his eyes were picking over the crowd. Annabel, misreading his tension, squeezed his hand
supportively. Kat waved from Andrés’s table down in the front.

The other honorees got up and made brief speeches, but Mike couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. He thought he spied
William’s form moving across the back, but then there was an awful silence and he realized everyone was staring at him. The
familiar woman, sans clipboard, said Mike’s name again into the microphone. Annabel urged him to his feet, and, walking on
wooden legs, he took the podium.

‘I, um—’ A feedback squawk; his mouth was too close to the mike. The wet fabric from the spill felt cold against his thigh.
He did his best to put the bizarre confrontation out of mind. ‘I don’t really deserve to be here,’ he said.

At the VIP table, Bill Garner looked up at him, head cocked, lips wearing a tense little smile.

‘I mean, to give me an award when I already feel so lucky for what I have and what I get to do. I wake up every day thinking
I’ve won the lottery.’ Finally relaxing a bit, Mike glanced at his wife. She was looking back at him with adoration. ‘Because
I have. I mean, my wife, my daughter, steady work that I love.’

Mike glanced down at the podium. ‘And it’s not like building Green Valley was all selfless. It was a paying job.’ Eager to
break the tension, a few people laughed, thinking he was joking. ‘I’m no great environmentalist,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want
my daughter and grandkids to look back at me decades from now and be angry that I didn’t do the right thing.’

Annabel’s new diamond ring glinted, the big rock seeming to sum up how full of shit he was. As if reading his thoughts, she
slid her hands into her lap and looked away, trying to keep her composure. Seeing her upset completely threw him, and for
a moment he lost track of where he was. The silence stretched out
uncomfortably as he grasped for words. He almost just came clean, admitted the lie, and walked off to start shoveling his
way out of the hole he’d dug for himself and forty families, but instead he heard himself say, ‘Thank you for this recognition.
I’m honored.’ Annabel closed her eyes, and he saw her heartbeat fluttering the thin skin of her temple. To applause, he stepped
out of the spotlight, touched her gently on her shoulder, and murmured, ‘Let’s go.’

The lights were up now in the dining room, the ceremony over. Mike scanned the space, but there was no sign of William or
the big guy anywhere. He felt ill, his mind racing, his stomach churning from the altercation earlier, from the phony award,
from the way Annabel had averted her gaze when he was up there, as if she couldn’t meet his eye. He wanted to get home, burn
off the night with a scalding shower, and put all this behind them.

A photographer approached: ‘We need you for one more set of pictures—’

‘Sorry,’ Mike said. ‘We really have to be going.’

Nodding curtly at well-wishers, he grabbed Kat’s hand and led her and Annabel to the door, Andrés calling after him, ‘What
the big hurry?’

Kat was beaming. ‘Dad said he built Green Valley for
me
.’

Annabel forced a smile. Mike rushed on, trying to leave Kat’s remark behind. A few guests had trickled outside, but for
the most part the parking lot was empty of people. Gleaming foreign cars and a good number of hybrids. Mike hurried Kat and
Annabel up and down the aisles, searching for that black Mercury Grand Marquis that he’d thought had followed him earlier
in the week.

‘Mike’ – Annabel shifted the award plaque in her arms, nearly dropping it – ‘what’s going on?’

‘Just give me a minute.’

At the far edge of the lot, slant-parked across two spaces, a
dingy white van stood out distinctly among the sleek vehicles. Wedged between windshield and dash was a torn-open bag of
David’s sunflower seeds. Mike halted twenty or so feet from the van. The driver’s and passenger’s seats were empty, but beyond
them the cabin was dark.

No front license plate.

Mike turned to his wife. ‘Take her, get into the truck, and lock the doors.’

Annabel’s forehead crinkled with concern, but she took Kat and hurried back toward the truck. Though a few more people were
making their way to their cars, here in the farthest row it was dark and still.

Tentatively, Mike circled the van. An old Ford, late-seventies model. Checked drapes covered a high-set rear window, slid
open to a dusty screen. With relief he saw there was a back plate, an old-fashioned California model with a blue background,
the yellow numbers and letters so faded he had to crouch to read their raised outlines – 771
FJK
.

The voice came at him, unnervingly close. ‘You let your
wife
go out dressed like that?’

Mike whipped upright. William’s face, leering out the van’s rear window, wore the checked drapes like falls of hair. The back
door came ajar with a creak, Mike peddaling back, heart jerking in his chest. William unfolded painfully from the dark interior,
the big man sliding out to loom behind him.