This is Part 2 of a three-part serialization. Read Part 1 here.
He’s still too close to Fox and Fig. He should put more distance between himself and his pursuers, knows that, but finds himself strolling through the Trader Joe’s. He grabs a basket, swipes a bunch of nonfat vanilla Greek yogurts into it, and then scans the produce section for Honeycrisp apples and firm red grapes—the harder the better. Finally, he heads to the refrigerated case near the flowers, knowing instinctively that that’s where the kombuchas will be. But, when he gets there, he notices that—oh, shit, something’s wrong, something’s seriously fucked here—they’re out of the rainbow bottles.
A Trader Joe’s employee, a large, cheerful woman with a gray buzz cut and a Fitbit, looks up from a shelf she’s stocking with breakfast bars. “Can I help ya find something?”
“Kombucha,” the man barks, his voice hoarse. “The one with the rainbow-y label.”
She trots over to a stack of cardboard boxes, riffles through a few, and then shakes her head apologetically.
“Drat. Looks like we’re—”
The man’s face is now inches from hers. “Check in the back,” he growls.
The woman staggers back in surprise. “O.K., buddy, O.K. Calm down. Just wait right here.”
But he follows her into the storage room and hovers. Circuits misfiring. Memories returning in flashes. Lauren eating the yogurt on the couch. Allison dunking Honeycrisp slices into almond butter. Mimi washing the hard red grapes, popping one into her mouth. . . .
The employee turns to him, a rainbow kombucha in each hand. “How many do you need?”
He looks up at her, fuzzy. “They’re not for me. They’re for Katie.”
The employee nods cheerfully. “Cool beans. How many we talking?”
He tries to think. Tries to summon Katie’s face. Can’t do it. What the fuck is he even doing here?
“I don’t know. . . . I don’t know how many Katie wants.”
“Well, maybe ask her?” the woman suggests gently.
“I don’t know who Katie is. I don’t know who I am!” The man breaks down crying. He looks at the employee’s nametag. “Joy?” Joy nods.
The man wipes his nose with his sleeve. “I don’t even know my name. But I know that the yogurt is for Lauren. The grapes are for Mimi. She likes to freeze them . . . says they’re a healthy treat . . . but no carbs after 8 p.m. . . . ” At this point, he is sobbing uncontrollably. “No carbs after 8 p.m.”
“O.K., buddy, O.K.,” Joy says, placing her hand on the man’s back and guiding him to a seat at a desk covered in papers, a Slinky, and a dog-a-day calendar. “Let me get you some tea. Would that be O.K.? Hold on. Just sit tight.” Joy putters around the office kitchen and returns a few moments later with a steaming mug.
“Rooibos—the South African healer,” she says, handing it over. “It’s my favorite of our yummy herbal chillax teas.” She pops open a box of Joe-Joe’s and tips it toward him. He takes a cookie and nods weakly. Joy helps herself to a couple and sits looking at him, munching sympathetically.
The man eats and sips. He doesn’t know why, but he feels safe around this woman. He lets down his guard. Fills her in on the trawler. The laser projector with the weird logo. His mysterious skill set.
“I know which Le Labo diffuser oils go best in which rooms. In a woman’s shower, I can always tell which shampoo I’m not supposed to use. When I read a menu, I ignore my own preferences and wait to be told what to order. Why?”
Joy looks at him with kind eyes. “You might just be an observant, caring person,” she says, helping herself to another cookie.
The man shakes his head. “It’s more than that.” He nods toward a middle-aged man opening a file cabinet on the far side of the office. “That guy over there is wearing a sweater that he thinks complements his coloring and build. It doesn’t. He’d be better in a maroon three-quarter zip.” Joy stops chewing. “I can tell you the U.P.C. number for every item in the West Elm catalogue. I know the delivery dates of every Goldendoodle breeder in the tri-state area. I don’t have any fucking cuticles. My pubic hair is perfectly groomed. And I’m straight.” His eyes burn with desperation. “Now, why is that?”
Joy sits frozen, a half-eaten Joe-Joe in her mouth. She wipes away some crumbs, speechless.
“What’s a three-quarter zip?” asks the middle-aged guy across the room.
Just then, the man’s phone buzzes again. Another text from Katie.
“Still coming to my Dad’s seventieth, right, boo? Bring a jacket tonight cuz it’s gonna be fancy! My cousins are so excited to meet my hunky ‘plus one,’ lol.”
“Plus one.” The phrase rings a bell. He closes his eyes and remembers the engraving on the laser projector. The logo on the steel case.
Joy tilts her head. “Bad news?”
He ignores her, shuts his eyes again, concentrates harder. Apparently, Katie is his current girlfriend . . . but what does that mean? Is she a real person? He thinks so, but, even if she is, there’s something very wrong with the relationship. Something not even a weekend upstate bingeing “Frasier” could fix. Because he’s sure of it now—he’s being hunted.
The dozens of girlfriend photos. The feeling that he’s not in control of his own actions. . . .
All at once, he knows what he needs to do. He opens his eyes and texts back, “Can’t wait, baby,” with a heart emoji and three kiss emojis. Hits send and waits to see that it’s delivered. Then he turns to Joy.
“Can you drive me to the airport? I need to be on Martha’s Vineyard by dusk.”
Joy looks at the wall clock, concerned. “Sorry, bud, my shift isn’t over till—”
He reaches inside the gym bag and plunks a brick of cash down on the table. “Twenty thousand now. Twenty thousand when we get there.”
Joy puts her hand on her carabiner of keys. “The Cube’s outside,” she says, nervous. “Sure hope you don’t mind dog hair!”
Slicing through the clear, freezing air at thirty-eight thousand feet, Imogen sits back in her plush, white-leather recliner and scowls at the iPad in front of her. It shows a spreadsheet with the most up-to-date stats on her current units: a few dozen good-looking men, all between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-five.
Scanning the list, she notes some subpar B.M.I.s, three appearances of love handles, and several abysmally low C.O.B. scores (Compliments Out of the Blue). She frowns. She’ll have to bring those units in for emergency retraining. As if she has time for that.
The blond-pixie-cut woman approaches, wearing a satisfied smile. “The client’s playing ball. She sent the Vineyard text. He’s on his way.”
Imogen nods. “Deploy an agent to meet him on the plane.” She gazes out the window. “Use Cobra. He’s the best we’ve got.”
Pixie Cut smirks. “Sounds like our rebel’s in for one bumpy ride.”
She disappears through the curtains, but returns a few moments later. “Just to be crystal clear—”
“Our agent who is named Cobra should kill him on the plane and then throw his body off the plane.”
“Precisely. Noted!” chirps Pixie Cut, shooting Imogen a fearful thumbs-up as she darts back through the curtains. Imogen turns to the chiselled man in the navy three-quarter zip seated across from her.
“Sometimes I feel so alone. You know?”
“I know, baby. I know,” he replies, rubbing her knee thoughtfully.
Imogen looks at him silently for a moment, then jots down a few performance notes on her iPad. He had missed an Opportunity to Ask a Follow-Up Question, as well as an Opportunity to Pile On, in which he could have joined her in shitting on whomever she was venting about. But those are easy fixes, she thinks, stroking his face lovingly.
He’s almost ready for the field.
As Joy’s Nissan Cube squeals up to the J.F.K. JetBlue terminal, the man digs through his gym bag for the remaining twenty thousand. He blushes. “It seems I’ve miscalculated, Joy,” he says sheepishly. “There’s only, like, nine hundred dollars here.”
Joy waves him off. “You know what? I was thinking, don’t even worry about the bucks. You seem like a good guy, you’re in a bind. And I think you might need that cash more than me.”
The man puts his hand on Joy’s arm and squeezes.
Joy pulls out a Trader Joe’s bag. “I brought along some provisions for your journey,” she says, handing it to him. “Some Joe-Joe’s, a box of rooibos, a couple Honeycrisps. And, of course, a rainbow kombucha.”
He takes the bag from her, barely able to meet her eyes. “Thanks, Joy.”
She watches him walk through the sliding doors into the terminal, his broad, muscled shoulders rippling beneath his T-shirt. He turns and jogs back to the car. “Sorry, the plane might be chilly. Do you have a jacket I can borrow?”
Ninety minutes later, the man pulls Joy’s hoodie back from his face as the coastline of Martha’s Vineyard comes into view outside the window of the Cessna. The man watches it, knowing he’ll need every ounce of strength for what lies ahead. He takes a big, satisfying bite of a Honeycrisp and is suddenly flooded with memories—apple trees. A folding table with cider doughnuts. A group of laughing thirtysomethings. A guy his age named Dan, who worked in biotech. Super-boring dude. He was supposed to make conversation with that guy! Right! And Katie . . . there was Katie, at last, smiling at him over her shoulder, her blond hair falling over a black backpack with a “+1” sewn onto it—
The force of the cord around his windpipe instantly rips the man back to reality. Someone sitting behind him has slipped it over his head and is pulling, hard, and so expertly that he can’t even make a sound. Blood collects behind the man’s eyes as his hands fly frantically forward in search of a weapon.
There’s only one.
He yanks the rainbow kombucha out of the Joy bag and smashes it backward into his attacker’s forehead. It connects, and he hears a surprised grunt. The cord loosens, only for a moment, but it’s enough for the man to work his fingers under it, then push forward and up. This he does with such force that his attacker is catapulted into the air, slamming into the ceiling of the plane. Passengers scream and cower in their seats as the two men roll into the tiny aisle, fighting to the death.
The attacker gets a grip on the man’s neck and starts to choke him. Desperate, the man deploys his most powerful move. He looks deep into his attacker’s eyes, modulates his voice to a gentle, thoughtful tone, and asks, sincerely, “How was your day?”
His assailant’s eyes go wide with surprise. But then his face softens, his lips curl into a smile. He makes the man feel like he’s the most important person in the whole world. “My day was wonderful. Because I knew I was coming home to you.”
Holy shit—an equal. The man is taken aback. He’s on the verge of asking “Really?” when the attacker drops his sincerity like a mask and headbutts the man. He falls back, vision blurred, but recognizes the broken kombucha bottle out of the corner of his eye. He grips it and swipes wildly, feels the glass tear through flesh, sees blood spray, watches the hulking shape in front of him collapse.
The man kneels over his attacker, who is now on his back and bleeding badly. “Who are you?” the man screams down at him.
The dying assailant lets out a rueful, blood-choked laugh. “You must have fucked up bad,” he says, coughing, struggling to breathe. “Plus One . . . one-strike policy . . . totally fucked.”
The man lowers his face close to the attacker’s.
“What is Plus One?!”
The dying man doesn’t seem to hear. He spits up blood. Then, slowly, his eyes drift up to meet the man’s. “Do you get the e-mails?” he asks.
Stunned, the man loosens his grip. He’s never talked to anyone about the e-mails.
“From the fucking restaurants and spas and pop-ups the girlfriends make us go to?”
The man nods.
The agent’s body shakes; he’s almost at the end. “Must have unsubscribed from eight thousand fucking Listservs,” he gasps. “I like . . . a clean . . . in-box.”
“Me, too,” the man says. They share a deep, knowing look.
The assassin closes his eyes and whispers. “I ate a bath bomb once. . . . Thought it was a cupcake. . . . They didn’t teach us the difference. . . .”
And then he’s gone. The man is left staring at a lifeless face.
Goddammit. He’d been so close.
He lifts his gaze and takes in the terrified passengers clustered around him. “Everybody O.K.?” he asks.
They stare back at him, silent, their faces contorted in shock.
For a beat, he just sits there. Then he gropes for Joy’s bag, reaches into it, and tips the box toward the onlookers.
“Joe-Joe?”
This is Part 2 of a three-part serialization. Read Part 3 on March 12th.
From “Big Time,” by Jen Spyra, to be published by Random House.
No comments:
Post a Comment