The Helper (40 page)

‘Then tomorrow you’ll have to catch lots more. Hundreds of them. Or maybe even dozens.’

Doyle smiles. ‘I guess I will. It’s gonna be a busy day.’

‘I’m gonna be busy too. I hafta draw two pictures for Miss Olefski.’

‘Mrs Lefty?’

‘No, Daddy! Miss Olefski. My teacher.’

‘Oh! I thought you said Mrs Lefty. Like maybe she has only one hand. And the other arm has a big crab claw at the end of it. And she has a big hump on her back. And one of her eyes has
a—’

‘Daddy, stop it!’ says Amy, even though she can’t stop giggling. ‘I’m gonna tell Miss Olefski what you said about her.’

Doyle puts his hand to his mouth as though he’s terrified at the prospect. ‘Oh, no. Please don’t do that.’

‘All right, I won’t. I’m not a tattle-snail, are I?’

‘No you’re not a tattle-snail.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘Hey, I got something for you.’

‘You have? What is it?’

‘It’s been in my pocket for days. I keep meaning to give it to you. Here . . .’

He slips his hand into his pocket and takes out the object he found taped to Gonzo’s apartment door. It’s the button. The one with ‘Captain Awesome’ written on it. The
one he pinned on Gonzo.

He says, ‘Shall I put it back in your shiny box?’

‘You don’t have to. You can keep it if you want.’

‘Can I? I’d like that. Thank you. It means a lot to me.’

‘That’s okay. Can you turn out the light now? I’m tired.’

Doyle gives her a goodnight kiss and then switches off the light. As he leaves, he closes his fingers tightly around the button, then drops it back into his pocket.

In the living room, Rachel is at the computer again, working on her photographs. As he strolls over to her, music starts playing over the computer speakers.

‘Why Does It Always Rain On Me?’ by Travis.

Doyle stops in his tracks. Rachel turns to face him.

‘What’s the matter? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

A ghost? Yeah, something like that.

‘What? No. It was just . . . the music. Took me by surprise. After me asking about it the other day.’

‘Actually, that’s what made me dig it out. I haven’t listened to this in ages. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No.’ Although he does mind. He could happily live the rest of his life without ever hearing this song again.

Doyle steps closer to Rachel. Standing behind her, he looks at what she’s working at on the computer. He sees the same image he saw a couple of weeks back: the old black man sitting on the
stoop of his apartment building.

‘Whatcha doing?’ he asks.

‘A local magazine saw my photo. They want to use it on their cover. Only they don’t want any product placement.’

Doyle leans closer. ‘What product placement?’

Rachel grabs the mouse and makes a few clicks. Another window opens alongside the first. The same man on the stoop again.

‘Spot the difference,’ says Rachel.

He sees it then. In the original photograph, there’s a can of Dr Pepper on the step at the man’s feet. In the new image, it’s gone. Not a trace of it ever being there.

‘The soda can,’ says Doyle. ‘Where’d it go?’

‘I took it out.’

‘You can do that?’

‘I can do anything I want. The wonders of technology. I can turn him into the President, or Mickey Mouse. The media do it all the time. The newspapers take people out of photographs and
they put others in. Foreign governments put their dead leaders in situations that make it seem they must still be alive.’

‘I guess so. That private eye I was telling you about? He musta done something like this to fake a photo of Mrs Sachs’s daughter.’

‘See? Happens all the time. Never believe what you see on an image that’s been through a computer.’

A call of ‘Daddy’ comes from Amy’s bedroom.

‘I’ll get it,’ says Rachel. She gets up from the chair.

Doyle continues to stare at the computer screen.

Never believe what you see . . .

‘By the way,’ Rachel says. ‘You might need to get your pal Lonnie to come and look at that machine. Amy says it’s been doing funny things when she’s talking to
Ellie on it. She says it keeps showing her pictures of a weird guy with red hair and glasses. I haven’t seen it myself, but that’s what she says.’

And then she’s gone to tend to Amy.

Slowly, Doyle raises his eyes and looks straight into the webcam.

‘Gonzo? Are you out there, man?’

He expects no response. Expects just to feel stupid for talking to an inanimate object and waiting for it to talk back.

But a response is what he gets.

The screen darkens. The photographs Rachel was working on disappear.

When the monitor brightens again, it shows Doyle a view into an empty room. A study, with lots of bookshelves. Doyle doesn’t recognize it.

He wonders whose room this is. Wonders, too, how many other supposedly private places in the world are being observed right now. If Gonzo could do it, then so can others.

Movement on the screen. A figure enters the room, walks across it and sits in front of the computer.

No, thinks Doyle. It can’t be.

It’s one face he thought he would never see again. A face that is being shown to him in order to taunt him, to make him realize that he doesn’t always get things right. To make him
feel humble.

And he does. Humble and sad and guilt-ridden.

Because the person staring back at him, now somewhat older than in the photographs he has seen, is Patricia Sachs, long-lost daughter of Olivia Sachs.

MARKED

By David Jackson

Turn over to read the opening of
Marked
, the new Callum Doyle thriller

So yet again she’s on the edge of death.

A tumor. A friggin tumor. Why would it be a tumor, for Chrissake? Why can’t it be a headache like any normal person would have? A migraine even. He could cope with her saying it was a
migraine. People get migraines all the time. They don’t immediately assume their brains are about to disintegrate.

It was the same when she had those stomach pains last month. Appendicitis, she said. Or maybe even bowel cancer. He told her what it was. It didn’t take no medical expert to work it out.
The bananas. Too many friggin bananas. She should be a monkey, the number of those things she eats. A big hairy ape.

He chuckles to himself. I’m married to a gorilla in a dress, he thinks. King Kong in frilly underwear. I better not take her to the Empire State Building anytime soon. Might give her
ideas.

Harold Bloor hefts the two large garbage sacks out into the hallway, then closes the door softly behind him. He knows she’ll only complain if he makes the slightest noise. ‘You
slammed it,’ she’ll say. ‘My head is pounding like a drum, and you went and slammed the door, you unfeeling bastard.’

He knows this because he’s heard it all before, many times. When she was anemic it was because he’d once talked her into making a blood donation. When she had a stiff neck it was
because he’d thoughtlessly opened a window behind her. He’s always the one to blame. If she does have a friggin tumor – which she doesn’t – there’ll be an
explanation that involves his inconsiderate behavior. Like not insisting they should move farther away from Japan when those nuclear reactors were hit by a tsunami.

He hitches his pants over his ever-expanding gut, picks up the bags again, and heads out of the building. At the top of the front stoop he pauses and watches a group of young men go past,
dressed in T-shirts even though it’s the middle of October and heavy rain is forecast. He inhales a deep lungful of the city air. He smells exotic spicy food from the restaurant next door,
mixed with the usual heady aroma of exhaust fumes. It makes him cough. This city, I should wear a face mask, he thinks. Or I could get one for the wife. A full face mask, completely covering every
inch of visible flesh from the neck up and suppressing all noise generated in that vicinity. Purely for health reasons, of course. She shouldn’t keep breathing in these nasty city germs.

He chuckles again, then descends the stone steps. When he gets to the sidewalk, he turns and shuffles into the shadows of the stoop. He puts the bags down and removes the lid from the nearest
trashcan.

Son of a bitch.

He replaces the lid, then tries the next one. And the next, and the next.

That’s it, thinks Harold Bloor.

This means war.

Two blocks away from the flashpoint of World War Three, Geoffrey Landis stares intently at his caramel torte, his arms and legs tightly crossed and his lips pursed in what he
believes to be his most indignant pose.

‘It won’t jump off the plate and into your mouth, you know. You have to make a degree of effort.’

Geoffrey turns his glare on his boyfriend. ‘And what effort did it take to put whatever went into your mouth today? That’s what I want to know.’

‘Oh, puh-lease,’ says Stuart. ‘Don’t tell me we’re back on that again. I told you. It was a drink. One drink. He’s my boss. How could I say no?’

‘You start with an n, and then you put an o after it. It’s not difficult. Just because Antonio is your boss, it doesn’t mean you have to mince after him every time he clicks
his fingers. There are limits, you know.’

Stuart gets up from the table and picks up his empty plate. ‘For God’s sake, you can be so childish sometimes. I had a drink with my boss in a public bar. I didn’t go down on
him in the back of a taxi. Get it in perspective, Geoffrey. Maybe if you had a job of your own, you’d understand it a little bit more.’

He turns then, heads toward the kitchen area.

Geoffrey pushes back his chair and follows him. ‘I wondered when that would come up. I do work, and you know it. I work on this apartment. I work on doing all your washing and cleaning and
ironing. I do all the jobs you hate to do. If it wasn’t for me, this place would be the stinking shithole it was before I moved in. So don’t you tell me—’

‘I’m not denying what you do here, Geoffrey. I’m simply pointing out that you don’t have an employer. You’ve never had an employer. If you did, you would understand
that it’s sometimes a wise move to keep on your employer’s good side. And just because Antonio’s a good-looking Mediterranean type—’

‘You think he’s good-looking?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. With those teeth, I think he looks like a horse.’

Stuart smiles. ‘Well, he has been compared to a horse before, but not because of his teeth.’

Geoffrey crosses his arms again. He does it so abruptly that he punches himself in the bicep and has to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

‘Oh, so now we’re getting to it,’ he says. ‘The sex angle.’

‘Which angle’s that, Geoffrey? Do we need a protractor?’

Geoffrey has to resist the impulse to stamp his foot. He has done it before, and it only causes Stuart to laugh at him.

‘You know, you’re really starting to infuriate me. This is serious. I’d like to have a proper adult conversation about this, please.’

Stuart throws down his dishcloth and rounds on his partner. ‘Well, we can have an adult conversation when you stop behaving like a child. Now if you don’t mind, I need to clear away
all this food you didn’t eat while you were sulking. So go away and come back when you’re in a more civilized frame of mind.’

Right, thinks Geoffrey as Stuart shows him the back of his head again. Right!

He storms toward the apartment door. Thinking, I’m going out. I’m going to find a bar and get drunk and maybe even pick somebody up and go back to their place. I may never even come
back here again.

He opens the door, pauses at the threshold while he takes the deep breath he needs for the commencement of this decisive journey.

‘And don’t forget Agamemnon,’ Stuart calls after him.

Geoffrey lets the air out of his lungs again. The dog. It’s time for his walkies.

Not my problem, he thinks. Let Stuart do it for once.

Except that it is my problem. Aggie is my dog. He’ll miss me, even if nobody else in this place will.

Sullenly, Geoffrey heads back into the apartment, the planned demonstration of his independence on indefinite hold.

They’re all smiles when he first walks in. That’s because they figure he’s just another dumb schmuck they can rip off with their overpriced monosodium glutamate
crap.

‘You want table?’ the girl asks him.

She’s pretty, thinks Harold. Even if she is a gook.

‘No,’ says Harold. ‘I want manager.’

The girl looks helplessly behind her, and one of her co-workers scurries over. He’s beaming idiotically too.

‘You want table?’

‘No. I want the manager. Are you the manager?’

‘No. No manager.’

‘Then get me the manager.’

‘No manager. Is family business. No manager.’

Harold sighs. ‘Okay, then get your dad.’

‘Dad?’

‘Your father.’

‘He not here. He very busy.’

‘Doing what? Putting out the trash?’

The young waiter simply blinks his lack of comprehension. Around them in the restaurant, the customers sense that something untoward is taking place, and the buzz of conversation fades, to be
replaced by a few uneasy whispers.

‘I’m asking you about the trash,’ says Harold. ‘The garbage. Who put the garbage out tonight? Was it you?’

‘Garbage? No garbage.’

Two more male staff members glide silently toward Harold.

The smiles have all evaporated now, but Harold isn’t fazed by the pathetic attempts to look stern. These guys have never encountered Mrs Bloor.

‘You don’t have garbage? Of course you have garbage. Everybody has garbage.’

One of the men calls over to the man behind the bar. Gives him some instructions in Chinese. The barman picks up a phone.

Says Harold, ‘You want to know where your garbage is? In my trashcans, that’s where. Your stinking garbage is in my trashcans.’

There is much head-shaking now. A whole row of heads on swivels. ‘No garbage.’

‘Yes garbage. In my trashcans. And it’s not the first time, neither. Every time I go to put out my trash, I can’t because the trashcans are full. They’re full of your
shitty Jap food.’