Twenty-One
Catherine was not a great shooter. But she wasn’t half bad either.
Dalton Crane belonged to a gun club that had its own indoor firing range where police officers trained, and once he had procured
a firearm for Catherine, he took her there to teach her how to use it.
She enjoyed the instruction, in no small part because of the way Crane would wrap his hands around hers, teaching her the
fine points of how to hold, point, and fire. In the early lessons, he used his own gun for the exercises.
“You don’t just pull the trigger like you’re flicking a wall switch.” She could barely hear him through the heavy-duty, soundproofing
headphones. “You squeeze it, very deliberately. Slowly. Okay, you try it.”
At the end of the firing lane was a paper target hanging from a clip. Once she had fired off several rounds, the paper would
be brought forward on a kind of mechanical clothesline and she could see how well she’d done. Her early attempts were as one
might have expected.
“I fired six shots, didn’t I? But there are only two holes in the paper.”
“Yeah, well, those other four bullets went on vacation,” Crane said.
Their third lesson, he presented her with her own gun to practice with. She was delighted, but wary.
“There’s no record, is there? The police aren’t going to come to my door asking to see a license?”
“No.”
“Because if they do, Brent will know I have this.”
“The only way your husband will learn you have this is if you leave it someplace where he can find it.”
She snorted. “In that case, I’ll leave it in the washing machine.”
Jokes aside, Crane said she needed to keep it someplace where it was easy to get in a hurry. Burglars didn’t wait while homeowners
went to fetch their firearm.
“What do you suggest?”
He shrugged. “Maybe someplace you keep your own personal items.”
“Lingerie drawer,” she said quickly, the first thing that occurred to her.
The corner of his mouth curled up. “If I were your husband, I might be in there on occasion, perhaps offering a consult on
what you could wear on our next assignation.”
Catherine blinked. Now there was a word you didn’t hear every day. And the way he had delivered it, there was some kind of
subtext there.
This hadn’t been the first time she felt there was something going on. Crane had been more attentive, more helpful than she
might have expected when it came to getting a handgun. And she had been curious about how he had come to acquire it.
“Sometimes things have a way of falling into one’s hands. Passed under the table, so to speak. There are instances when it’s
preferable to avoid a lot of paperwork, to eschew recordkeeping.”
This guy, he was better than a thesaurus.
The dodgy nature of how Crane had come into possession of this weapon—a Beretta, he called it—somehow excited Catherine. Someone
breaking the rules for her made her feel special, like she was operating outside societal norms.
“You’ll need some extra practice,” he said. “This particular gun, it’s not as heavy as some, which makes it a good gun for
a woman, and the trigger is a bit lighter, so it doesn’t have to be squeezed as hard. It’s had some modifications, like the
safety has been pretty much disabled. So you don’t want to pick this up and aim it at anything unless you intend to use it.
It reacts very quickly. You need to learn the feel of it.”
He put some emphasis on feel.
“We’ll try it at the range, and if you find it’s not quite right for you I’ll see if I can find something more to your liking.”
“I’m sure it will be perfect,” she said. “And let’s hope I never have occasion to use it. But I feel better just knowing it’s
available.”
During their times together, she would ask him about what it was like to work for Graham Wiffel.
“Interesting. Being in his employ facilitates opportunities for travel to places I might not otherwise frequent. I think I’ve
been to almost all fifty states and ten provinces.”
“So you’re not just some bodyguard for Mr. Wiffel, are you? You’re more than that.”
“Yes.”
“Are you what they call a fixer?”
“A fixer?”
“Someone who, you know, fixes problems. Puts out fires.”
Crane smiled. “I suppose I am. I fix things. Wiffel-Smith has many people who fix things. Lawyers, lobbyists, publicists.”
“But if it’s not a problem for one of them, that’s where you come in.”
“Yes. I do my best to make sure there are no waves on Mr. Wiffel’s pond.”
Pond, Catherine thought. She didn’t like any on hers either.
She prodded him for examples of problems that needed fixing. It wasn’t until they’d been to the firing range a few times before
he felt more at ease talking about it.
“Some problems can be solved with a carrot. Others, a stick. Wherever possible, I prefer the carrot. For example, there was
an FDA official whose approval we needed on a groundbreaking medication—not Oxy-Mirac, this was before then—and she was being
particularly nitpicky. We praised her to the hilt, told her we valued her opinion so much, we would like her to work for us.
Specifically in our Seattle research wing, where her family was from, and would she consider joining us at a salary twice
what the federal government was paying her? She accepted our offer, and as one of her last acts at the FDA, she approved our
drug.”
“A carrot.”
“A carrot.”
“What about the stick?”
“There was a doctor in Memphis. With certain inducements, he started prescribing Oxy-Mirac for his patients dealing with pain
issues. But we learned that many of the scrips he was writing were for fictitious patients. He hoarded supply, then resold
the medication on the black market at a considerable profit. Mind you, even bogus scrips make Wiffel-Smith money, but we suspected
he was being watched by the police, and his antics would reflect badly on us. I paid him a visit.”
Catherine waited.
“I had a very serious conversation with him. I believed that, as a doctor, he would understand the negative health effects
of having Drāno poured down one’s throat.”
Catherine felt a chill.
“I thought that prospect would prove persuasive, but our good doctor found making money on the side as addictive as some allege
our Oxy-Mirac to be. The police, I became more convinced, were getting ready to pounce. The publicity from an arrest would
have reinforced negative perceptions that our groundbreaking medication was attracting the attention of the illegal drug trade.”
“You paid him another visit.”
He weighed how much more to say. “Our doctor was an avid fisherman. Liked to get away on weekends, by himself. Had a small
aluminum boat he would take out. In a little boat like that, a person can lose their balance fairly easily. And you’d be surprised
how few people like to wear a lifejacket.” He paused, then added. “A real tragedy. Very sad.”
Catherine had a question she could not bear to utter.
He flashed a smile. “Anyway, I enjoy what I do.”
For the first time, she felt frightened of this man named Crane. And something else. What was it? Enamored. That was it. Just the kind of word he might use.
Tamp those feelings down, she told herself. She had the gun. He’d taught her how to use it. There was no reason to see him again.
“Another lesson next week?” he asked as he pulled up in front of her house.
“Okay,” she said.
That was the one she should have taken a pass on.
After, he invited her back to his place. He lived in a sprawling waterfront, tenth-floor Toronto condo. A stunning view of
Lake Ontario and the airport on a cluster of small islands just off the city’s shoreline.
A celebration, he said, of her progress.
“Wow,” Catherine said upon entering his place. Exposed beams and ductwork, brick walls adorned with massive abstract paintings.
It was basically one huge room, except for an enclosed bathroom. Kitchen area flowing into the living space, which in turn
expanded into the bedroom area.
She wandered the apartment, spotted a framed photo of a girl, probably about eight or nine years old. Catherine held it up.
“Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“She’s beautiful.”
Crane smiled, but it struck Catherine as sad. Wandering farther, she ran her finger along the spines of some shelved books.
Multiple encyclopedia sets. Brittanica, Funk & Wagnalls, World Book. Sets by publishers Catherine had never heard of. Some in foreign languages. All neatly arranged and in alphabetical order.
“It’s like a college library,” she said. “I’ve never seen so many reference books.”
“I like to know things,” Crane said, opening the stainless steel door to one of two large refrigerators. He brought out a
bottle of Veuve Clicquot and went to work twisting out the cork.
“You don’t have any fiction,” she said, still checking out the shelves. “No novels. Not one.”
He filled two champagne flutes and approached. “I don’t care about things that are made up,” he said.
She took her flute by the stem as he handed it to her. Tapped his glass to hers. “To my star pupil.”
She took no time emptying her glass and allowed him to refill it. Crane suggested a softer seat and steered her to an L-shaped
sectional. They went into the corner, Crane at one angle, Catherine at the other, their knees touching, within sight of the
king-size bed not twenty feet away.
Wordlessly, Crane put his flute on the coffee table, pried Catherine’s gently from her fingers and placed it next to his,
then leaned in and put his mouth on hers. She responded tentatively at first, unsure how enthusiastic to seem. She had to
know this was coming, and if she didn’t want it to happen, why had she accepted the invitation to come up here?
Because, she told herself, some part of her wanted to step outside her life, to walk that emotional tightrope, but now that
the moment had arrived, now that he was pushing her down onto the couch, she wasn’t sure.
But could you say no to a man like Dalton Crane? He hadn’t fully revealed himself to her, but there were plenty of hints.
He was more than a fixer.
He was a killer.
Not some crazed psycho killer. A methodical, thoughtful, pragmatic killer. She wasn’t sure whether that made him less, or
more, scary.
And yet, the word came out, albeit in a whisper: “No.”
She put a palm on his chest and pushed back. Not hard, just enough to send a message. But there was his hand, sliding up the
inside of her leg.
A more forceful rejection was going to be necessary. “No,” she whispered. “No, I can’t. I can’t do this.”
The hand stopped its ascent but was not removed.
“Yes, you can,” he said softly. “We’re good together. We can take it slow. That’s okay. Slow’s good. Slow can be fun. I can
be very, very slow.”
“You killed that doctor,” she blurted.
The hand came away. He sat back.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “I don’t . . . I thought this, all of this, I was liking where it was going, but . . .”
“You’re afraid of me,” he said.
She nodded. “A little.”
A sly smile. “Do I look dangerous to you?”
Catherine blinked. “What?”
“I mean, look at me. I’m borderline nebbish. No one’s going to mistake me for Clint Eastwood. You clearly have an inflated
sense of my capabilities.”
“It’s . . . what makes you good at what you do,” she said. “You blend in. You don’t look . . . intimidating. That’s how you
catch people off guard. They think you’re a pushover, and then you’re making them drink drain cleaner.”
He slowly shook his head. “Catherine. That doctor, he really did have an accident when he went fishing. There was an investigation.
Things just happened to go our way, that’s all. Sometimes it happens.”
Catherine was willing to accept the lie. But there was more she had to say.
“I love my husband,” she said.
“A fine man.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, I do, but I can’t . . . I want you to know I’m grateful but—”
“Let me drive you home.”
“I know how it would go,” she said, thinking out loud more than telling him. “It’s . . . it’s fun at first, but then, eventually,
somehow, Brent finds out. The boys do too. And I lose everything. Not just my family, but my life.”
“Catherine—”
“I like my life. I like the life Brent has made for us. We have a beautiful home. We go to Europe every other year. We can have whatever we want.”
She paused, then said, “I grew up in a trailer. A trailer. Not even a double-wide, just a sixty-foot-long trailer that was like living on a train. My father was a high school janitor. My mother took in laundry. Somehow they scraped enough money together to send me to university, where I met Brent. He took me away from that, and I will not go back. This . . . this could be fun, but it would be the beginning of the unraveling.”
Crane listened.
“I’m . . . I’m flattered. And thank you for teaching me . . . I can still have the gun?”
He smiled. “Of course. Just promise me you’ll be careful with it.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said.