The Recruiter (A Thriller) Read online

  He is telling the truth.

  And the message to Julie Giacalone is crystal clear.

  He’s interested.

  In her.

  Forty-Seven

  “Fischer for three!”

  Her voice echoes off into the night. It’s a thin sound, like the hollow resonance of a fake laugh. The ball bangs off the backboard and veers off into the shrubs along the house. She hobbles over to it, scoops it up, pays no attention to the fact that it’s wet and cold, and that her hands are losing their feeling. Her shoes are untied, mud caked along the white bandage. Her shirt is untucked, and her hair is in loose, wet strands. A lopsided grin is on her face as she turns and faces the basket.

  Beth reaches down to the narrow cement path that runs between the driveway and the house. The whiskey bottle is almost empty. Holding the basketball under one arm, she unscrews the cap, takes a long pull from the bottle, wipes her mouth with her sleeve, puts the cap back on, and sets the bottle down. She releases the ball from under her arm, catches it with the other hand, and starts dribbling the ball on the driveway. She pounds it hard against the pavement, and as drunk as she is, the movement is so natural and so ingrained that it’s a perfectly timed, perfectly executed, unconscious movement.

  “Three seconds to go, Lake Orion is down by one, all eyes are on Beth Fischer.” Her enunciation is diminished, but her volume is not. Her words broadcast far into the night. Before the last one leaves her mouth, a light appears in the house next door.

  Beth doesn’t notice.

  “She fakes left,” Beth says, then hobbles left, the pain in her knee cuts through the whiskey fog and momentarily wipes the hysterical grin from her face. She grits her teeth and bears down on the ball. “She dribbles right.” A crablike motion gets her in that direction. “She’s like poetry in motion out there folks, I gotta tell ya, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” Beth, moving in nearly slow motion, mimes a slow head fake. “She’s got space between herself and her defender.” Beth, in a reckless but remarkably fluid motion, brings the ball from a dribble to a half hook shot. The ball sails through the air. “She shoots! The ball rotates beautifully, her follow through is magnificent…this girl has got the goddamn, motherfucking eye of the tiger, folks.” The ball careens at the basket like a missile but misses the hoop entirely and goes over the roof of the garage. She hears it bang off the roof, roll down the other side, and crash into the garbage cans. A cat hisses.

  “Whoa, that one got away from her, folks.” Beth sways on her feet, her arms upraised in mock victory. “But what do you expect? A knee made of rubber, a boyfriend fucking the opponent…it’s all just another day in the life of one Beth Fisch—”

  “Beth.”

  She whirls around

  “That’s enough,” her mother says. Anna is in a bathrobe, her hair squashed against one side of her head, sticking up on the other. Her white tube socks and slippers seem to glow in the night. “Come inside.”

  “Welcome to the game, Mom, but you’re too late. It’s over. We lost. I tried for the game-winning shot but it ended up in the garbage. Along with everything else, huh?”

  “Beth, I don’t know what’s going on, but you should come inside.”

  “We make a great team too, Mom. Don’t you think?”

  Anna doesn’t respond. She looks beyond Beth. Another light has turned on in the house next door.

  “Beth.”

  “You drink yourself into a stupor, get your stomach pumped, and I—”

  “You what, Beth?” Anna’s voice is soft. Beth, drunk herself, notes that her mother’s words don’t seem to be slurred. Is it some kind of reverse alcoholic effect? When you’re drunk, alcoholics sound sober?

  “I…” A whirlwind of thoughts and images ricochet around Beth’s head. She sways on her feet, takes a faltering step toward the basketball hoop. Anna lunges toward her, but she’s too late. Beth collapses, landing face down on the driveway.

  When she comes to, she’s not in the driveway anymore. She is in her bed. She’s wearing warm pajamas and the brace, bandage and all, has been cleaned and replaced. By her mother. By her mother? Is this possible? Through the numbing sensation clouding her brain, Beth again wonders what’s going on.

  The world must be ending, she thinks.

  Beth’s eyelids feel heavy. She isn’t sure what pills her mother gave her, but the pain is gone, and she is very close to sleeping. Unlike the last few weeks, the sleep that’s coming feels peaceful. An emotion she hasn’t felt in some time.

  Anna comes into the room. Beth opens her eyes and looks at her. Beth can see the pain in the mother’s eyes. She can see that her mother wants to know what happened, but the last thing in the world she wants to do is tell her mother what shit she just went through. How Peter shattered what little was left of her hope. No, she definitely doesn’t want to go into that now.

  But before Beth can stop herself, she says, “Peter was…screwing…Vanessa Robinson.” The words come out choked and hesitant. Like a confession.

  Anna’s face doesn’t register anything at first, but then her face sags inward and her mouth forms a silent “O.”

  Beth nods. “She’s the one who did this,” she says and gestures at her knee. “First she fucked me, then Peter.”

  “Oh, Beth. I’m sorry.”

  The tug of sleep is pulling at Beth, and she closes her eyes. Just before sleep overwhelms her, she clarifies.

  “Thoroughly. Fucked thoroughly.”

  A moment later, the only sound coming from her mouth is that of a soft, gentle snore. Anna pulls the blanket up tight beneath Beth’s chin. She strokes Beth’s forehead. Anna’s eyes are misty, and she hums a soft sound as Beth drifts off to sleep.

  She looks at the wall, at the empty walls where Beth’s basketball posters used to be. The ones she tore down and threw into the garbage.

  Anna curses everyone and everything.

  But she saves the worst for herself.

  Forty-Eight

  Anna is on the second label when the shakes hit her. At first, the sensation feels like when you’re at a movie theater, and you go to uncross your legs only to discover that your foot has fallen asleep. It’s a weird, detached feeling, and Anna quietly observes the tremors worming their way around her fingers and hands.

  She puts the pen down and pushes the sheet of stick-on labels away from her. The package cost her five bucks and she’s not about to ruin them by scrawling unrecognizable letters across their faces.

  That would defeat the purpose, now wouldn’t it?

  The shakes advance up her forearms like an evil little army that has infiltrated the very nerve center of her being. The army sends out a battalion of chills, and Anna shivers as a cold sweat breaks out along her forehead. Her face flushes hot and cold, her heartbeat accelerates, and she instinctively thinks about the whiskey bottle sitting out on the driveway. Is it still there? Is there any left? Did Beth finish it? She can see herself walking out, picking it up, and taking just a small drink—just a little one to combat these fucking withdrawal symptoms.

  Withdrawal.

  The word sounds so strange to Anna. She’s thought about it in the past, sure. Even read a little bit about it. Got as far as the AA’s parking lot before heading for the nearest tavern.

  She imagines herself standing up at an AA meeting and saying “I’m Anna Fischer, and I haven’t had a drink since I collapsed on the living room floor and my daughter called 911, and an ambulance came and got me, took me to the hospital where I had my stomach pumped. Then later, I found my only daughter in tears, drunk, and shooting baskets at two in the morning.”

  They would all stare at her quietly and then say, “Hi, Anna.”

  She pushes away from the table, away from the stack of padded envelopes and blank sheets of paper.

  She has to be careful not to push it, not to try to do too much too soon. She needs to move, to do something to take her mind off her body’s desperate screaming for alcohol. She needs something
to hold on to, both literally and figuratively.

  Anna thinks for a moment, her body cold and hollow inside, and then comes up with the answer.

  In her room, she opens her top dresser drawer and pushes aside the odd assortment of pennies, spools of thread, old letters and pictures, reaches for the back of the drawer. Her hands scrape the cheap plywood bottom of the drawer, and then she feels the tiny steel links.

  She pulls it from the back, and she hears it rattle slightly. And then she lifts it, scattering the papers and pictures, turning it all into a slightly different mess.

  The dog tags are dull and feel heavier than she’d imagined. She holds the chain, imagining the feel of Vince’s neck, of the sweat that must have poured from his skin onto the chain as he fought.

  Anna drops the dog tags into her palm, and her fingers close over them. She likes their heft, likes the tactile sensation of the edges pressing into her palm. The edges are sharp enough to hurt if she squeezes hard enough, but not thin enough to cut her skin.

  Anna closes her hand again, the shakes are coming back and then they are upon her. She sags against the dresser, holding onto Vincent’s dog tags with everything she’s got. She’s dizzy and, for a moment, isn’t sure if she’s going to faint.

  And then it passes.

  She opens her hand, and the edges of the dog tags, sharper than she’d thought, have made neat lines in her palm. She gives the tags a squeeze. Vincent would want her to do this.

  If she wants to keep what’s left of him alive—that part of him inside her and inside Beth—she’s got to keep from drinking. She’s got to save what’s left of her relationship with Beth.

  She’s got to do what Vincent would do.

  Anna shuts her top dresser drawer and drops the dog tags into her front pocket.

  Together, she thinks.

  You and me, Vincent.

  Together, we’ll help me stop drinking.

  Forty-Nine

  It is nearly unbearable.

  Beth can’t decide what hurts more: her head or her knee. She takes a handful of Tylenol, knowing that it will merely put a dent in the agony that is consuming her body, but it is all she has. The agony she feels inside, the image of Peter…well, there isn’t anything she can take for that.

  She sits alone in the living room. Outside the wind whips through the eaves, and somewhere in the house a wallboard pops. The sound of the coffeemaker finishing the brewing of its first pot of the day reaches the living room.

  Beth gets to her feet, a painful act that leaves her with a bead of sweat on her forehead and groaning from the pain.

  She goes into the kitchen, gets a chipped cup from the cupboard. The cup has a logo of a travel agency on it. A travel agency? When’s the last time she or her mother ever went anywhere?

  Beth fills the cup, adds cream and sugar, and navigates her way back to the living room.

  She hasn’t seen her mother this morning; her bed was empty. Where the hell was she? She never gets up early. Usually, she sleeps until late morning.

  Beth sips from the cup and her stomach, uneasy to begin with, recoils slightly at the harsh coffee settling in. Beth ignores it and drinks more. She needs a shot of something to face the day. To face whatever kind of future she has left.

  So what does she want to do?

  Beth knows the answer to that. She wants to revel in the agony. She wants to feel sorry for herself.

  Goddammit, though. She’s not going to.

  It’s pitiful. She never felt sorry for herself on the basketball court when she got into a shooting slump, or when the refs missed a bad call, or when her coach got on her case for something she didn’t deserve. She just got tougher, stronger, and she bore down harder.

  Despite her lifelong admonition to not end up like her mother, Beth has been doing just that for the last couple of weeks.

  Beth hobbles to her backpack. She rummages through it and finds the Navy brochure she’d had mailed to her.

  Beth looks again at the cover. It shows a woman on the prow of a battleship. The woman is strong, brave, and confident.

  Everything Beth used to be.

  The brochure has plenty of information about money for college, the financial benefits of joining.

  But for Beth, those benefits are secondary.

  The thing she wants is less concrete.

  She simply wants to escape.

  Beth takes the brochure, flips it over, and finds the local recruiting office’s address and phone number hand-stamped near the bottom of the page. She picks up the phone and punches in the number.

  The act has accomplished what the coffee and Tylenol could not.

  The pain is gone.

  Fifty

  From the start, the so-called “tour” is a disaster.

  Julie can sense it. There’s something about the way Samuel is acting. He seems tense and distant. Not all the time, granted. There are moments when his eyes seem to clear, when his focus returns, and she feels like he’s actually here with her. And then just as fast, it feels like he’s gone again, lost in some other world.

  But then again, she really doesn’t know him all that well—maybe that’s just his nature. She laughs at the irony, at the hypocrisy. She doesn’t know him well enough to gauge his interests, but she’s doing this whole ruse of a tour because she wants him? As exciting as the lure of Samuel Ackerman is to her, she feels like she’s hitting an all-time low.

  Still, she somehow thought he would loosen up, show more of his true personality. Whatever that personality may be. She senses his internal goodness. Again, she’s good at judging people, and despite his cool exterior, Julie feels like she can see into his heart.

  And his heart is good. She knows that as a given.

  So could it be that he is simply always this reserved?

  They have done a circuitous route through District Three. From the northern suburbs all the way through the worst of Detroit’s ghettos. For Julie, it’s extremely familiar territory; she is able to point out neighborhoods where she’s done well getting recruits, others that have yielded nothing. The areas are like that—pockets of interest, where good experiences have led to good word-of-mouth. And likewise, where there have been bad experiences, there is very little interest in the Navy, or any branch of the military.

  All told, they’ve spent nearly two hours in Julie’s car, and she is ready for a break. She wants to figure out a way to get Samuel to open up, to relax. She wonders if it’s because she’s a woman and his superior officer? No, her instincts tell her he’s not that insecure, even though the majority of men who have worked for her have had at least some issue with having a female boss.

  But Samuel is different.

  It’s partly why she is so attracted to him.

  She’s been trying to fight it. Trying to keep in mind that he works for her. That there are rules about officers dating their subordinates…but goddammit, I am more attracted to him every minute.

  They have made it through the city, and Julie has just hopped onto I-75, headed back toward the office in Troy. Traffic is beginning to get thick as they approach rush hour.

  “How does a drink sound?” she asks. It comes out as casually as possible, but her heart skips a beat when she hears the pause. Goddammit, she thinks, what’s wrong with him?

  “Sounds perfect,” Samuel says. He’s looking out the window when Julie asks, and he answers without turning to face her.

  This is a mistake, Julie thinks. I should have just kept my mouth shut. Well, too late now.

  She takes the same exit she would have to head back to the office, but goes east instead of west. A few blocks down, she turns into the parking lot of a place called The Preserve.

  She parks the Taurus—government plates, of course—and they head inside. The bar is made to look like a game preserve, done all up with knotty pine and log-cabin touches. It’s a big, cavernous space that’s only partially filled with customers, many who have snuck out of work early for a quick tot before headin
g home.

  Julie sees Samuel hesitate when they get inside. Should they get a table or sit at the bar? Julie instinctively knows that sitting at the table will be too intimate, will put too much pressure on Samuel. She wants to make him relaxed, get him to open up a little bit. Plus, she wants a drink now. She doesn’t want to wait for a cocktail waitress to take her time with their drinks.

  She heads for the bar.

  They order their drinks: a beer for him, vodka tonic for her. Julie tells herself to be careful. She doesn’t want to get drunk and make a total ass of herself. She takes a drink of the vodka, it feels good. She hadn’t realized how tense she is. Alcohol, the great social lubricant. She turns to Samuel, a gentle smile on her face that she thinks is both encouraging and slightly coy.

  “So what’s on your mind?” she asks.

  Fifty-One

  Escape, Samuel thinks. That’s what’s on my mind. Escape from you and this interminable tour that’s really nothing more than a thinly-veiled, desperate plea for me to sleep with you.

  He takes a drink of the beer to buy some time. He’s thought of his options to get away from her, but there are none.

  His hands are tied.

  “You,” he says finally.

  He sees the surprise in her eyes. Followed immediately by a goofy look of obvious pleasure. She obviously wants him, has been sending out signals like a goddamn radio tower. He’d have to be a complete moron not to see what she wants. Is she not aware of the power she has over him, or does she just refuse to acknowledge it because it would make her feel like all the men over the years who have put pressure on their female subordinates? Some sort of backward refusal to face the reality of what she is doing.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “You’ve talked a lot about your job, but not anything about yourself.” I can do this, Samuel thinks. I can do this. I’ve done worse than her, much worse. So keep it together.

  “That’s funny, I was going to say the same thing to you.”