Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,50

the living room. The backpack was just where he had left it, in the middle of the floor. Who’s paying attention now? he almost said aloud, but didn’t—a brief flash of restraint that made him feel momentarily lighter, as if his burdens had become diaphanous, little more than veils.

The backpack contained four items: a hatchet, a roll of duct tape, a rope, and a six-inch Bowie knife. Like the pieces from a game of Clue, he thought. Junk bond trader in the basement with the hatchet. Ha, ha. He had bought them all in Boston, in four separate locations, using cash. For a while, as he’d gathered materials, he had found himself dreaming through the situation, as if sleep had become less a matter of rest than of rehearsal, a kind of psychic run-through. He would see the house, the basement, the old man duct-taped to a kitchen chair. Or, at least, he thought it was the old man; in the dreams, he could never quite get close enough to tell. All he knew was that things had been reversed, that power lay in his hands. As to what happened next, the dreams offered no oracle; he always woke up before the denouement.

The plan was simple: He was going to take the RTA to Chatham and kidnap the old man. Then, he would force him to drive back here, where he was going to exact an appropriately ruthless revenge. Downsizing, they had called it when the layoffs started. The company was downsizing. It was the type of corporate speak that drove him crazy: meaningless, a lie. His father had been a master of such double-talk, always saying the opposite of what he meant—Why can’t you be normal? when the real question was why couldn’t he be normal, why couldn’t he be like the other dads? What was it that made him see in his son his own legacy of failure? What was it that made him attack? It’s a harsh world, he liked to say, I’m just trying to prepare you. But this, of course, was just another lie.

Stop, he thought. Forget about him. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. He shook his head, trying to still the voices, took a deep breath, and exhaled. Backpack in hand, he went to the kitchen, grabbed a white wicker chair from the dinette set, and humped everything down the basement stairs. He had meant to come down here last night, but it had been so dark, and he had felt so buffeted by history …

It didn’t matter. He was here now.

The basement had been cleaned out sometime during the last quarter century and left as empty space. For a moment, he was startled—there had been no photo on the realtor’s website—but then he realized it was better, a template on which he could erase the past and write whatever future he wanted, not that there would be much for the old man. The idea was to get him down here and show him a new way to think about downsizing, to show him what a word like that really meant.

That was what the hatchet was for—to downsize the old man digit by digit, limb by limb. That was why there was rope and duct tape, to keep him in the chair while his fingers, those greedy little fingers, were pared from him one by one. Talk about severance, he thought and laughed once, short and sharp. In the empty basement, it echoed like the barking of a dog.

He set the chair in a back corner and laid the hatchet and the rope and duct tape on the floor. The Bowie knife he rolled in his right hand. This, he was going to bring with him to Chatham; this, he was going to show the old man. You’re coming with me, he would say, and then he’d stick him, just a little, not enough to hurt him but enough to break the skin. He could almost see it: a small pinpoint of blood, no bigger than a pimple, but at the same time, the biggest thing in the world. This would let the old man know he was serious, that it was his turn to be in charge. The old man would talk, trying to keep everything calm, trying to look for leverage, trying to make some kind of deal. Only later, when they got back here, would he realize that his bargaining days were behind him, and that all those things he’d