Harken

1 The Midnight Client

There are some places in the world so empty you could scream and hear your voice echo a hundred times, like an entire village crying out at once. Almost everywhere else in Los Angeles, even in the vacant hours before dawn, there are distant rumblings of cars over concrete bridges, screaming jets flying from the LAX airport over shingled apartments, a nearby husband and wife arguing in Spanish over the credit card bill.

But not where I waited. There was nothing down the deserted street long forgotten by municipal workers, the uneven road speckled by potholes and gleaming lines of tar left behind from shoddy repairs. Even the grass barely swayed as the soundless wind crept through the ends of my hair like fingers. You never notice the crickets until their hum has died.

I stood on a thin strip of gravel beside the road, surrounded on all sides by trees and boulders tall enough to block my sight of the San Fernando Valley of California. The road was swept gently by the glow from a single streetlamp a few paces away, only bright enough to stroke my face and the body of my silver BMW, its usually-sparkling paint now dusty from our drive up the hills. I sniffed. That was the terrible truth about nice cars: you might pay a fortune, but you still drive the same dirty roads as everyone else. Funny how roads were the great equalizer.

I leaned my back against its door, checking the time on my phone then the street in both directions. The client had told me midnight; he was ten minutes late. Every second I was gone was another chance my mom might get up and do a check through my door, or my little sister might have a nightmare and run into my room for consolation. Both were circumstances that’d result in my absence being discovered.

Rule Two: No clients on school nights, I could hear my mom’s voice saying.

For a hundred-twenty an hour, I think it’s worth the risk, I’d murmur back. That came out to two dollars a minute. She’d just grin and remind me of Rule Three: If I was caught, all the money I made that night and from my next two clients would go to my sister’s college fund.

For the risk, I added a surcharge.

I finally saw the blue-tinged headlights of a car appear around the bend of a hill in the distance. I grumbled and stood straighter, hoping it was really the client and not some random guy from school out for a joyride. I always had late-night clients meet me here, where I could get a good look at them as they approached. Late clients made me suspicious. A few extra minutes was easily enough time to check a soundproof basement’s padlocks, mix up more chloroform, and test the sharpness of some butcher knives.

But again, I couldn’t complain: tardiness brought another surcharge.

The car inched to a park behind mine but the windows were too tinted for me to see who was inside, its lights nearly blinding me. It was regal and as silver as the moon above us, fresh-from-the-factory and polished on every beveled edge—the three-pronged Maserati emblem on its front like a miniature trident. A Gran Turismo, I recognized. Wealthy clients were not uncommon purchasers of my skills, but I still had trouble acting unimpressed. I opened my hands in greeting as the driver’s door opened and my client stepped out.

“Mr. Sharpe?” I said, finally getting my first look at his face: a nearly square chin, tanned complexion, blonde hair cropped short with the stubble of a matching beard. Even in the faint glow his eyes narrowed toward me like scalpels. This wasn’t out of the ordinary either. My new clients were usually startled when they saw I was only sixteen.

“Michael Asher?” he checked, a hand still holding on to his door. I nodded.

“One and only, at your service,” I replied. “At least, for the next fifty minutes. The contract does stipulate your hour started at midnight, I’m afraid, and it’s…”

I pulled my phone out to find the new time, but Mr. Sharpe had already slammed his door and locked it with the remote. He glanced up and down the road, which had resumed its deathly state, and approached me with his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

“Where’s the target?” I asked.

“My wife is down the road a bit,” he said with sharp correction. “She’s meeting him over by the lookout I think.”

“Your email said this has been happening all year,” I pointed out. “You could have contacted me earlier and fixed things before it got this bad.” Lies, of course. My practiced marketing spiel.

“It’s probably been more than a year,” he replied, brow furrowing. “Likely not even all the same man, knowing how she is. Who knows how many she’s—?”

He cut himself off and his eyes dropped from mine, suddenly unable to continue what had spiraled into a spitting rant. I shrugged.

“I’d figure at least four or five men by now,” I proposed, which was rather solid math in my client experience. He looked at me with dismay. I was never good at the sympathy part. It was impossible to feel for him, not after being mentally numbed by a hundred overburdened businessmen all suddenly anxious to keep up with their wives as their marriages crumbled from years of neglect. This was likely the most attention Mr. Sharpe had paid Mrs. Sharpe since their wedding day.

But my job wasn’t to solve his romantic problems. I gestured to my car.

“Climb in,” I told him. “I’ll drive. Just tell me where I can watch from.”

He strolled around stiffly and huffed as he looked over my BMW. “Work must be good.”

“A lot of people like to know the truth,” I replied with a shrug. This was why the car was worth the money: it left an impression that I was successful, that I was right, that my gift was true enough for me to be paid well. And in business, impressions are everything. One good word from a client to his friends and soon I might have thirty more jobs.

Mr. Sharpe sat crammed against the armrest and door with his long legs uncomfortably bent. His clothes were too fancy for being out on this type of work: a bold jacket over dark slacks, hair trimmed perfectly and skin that showed no flaw. He wore a misty white ring on his right hand that was undecorated except for a single vertical line cut in its center. He could have been a movie star, but I wasn’t supposed to ask questions like that. I was supposed to follow the way he told me, and drive down the winding streets he directed me onto.

My headlights divided the night from the road ahead as he pointed me to turn another corner, going deeper into trees and mountains. As we drove, I crept glances his way, but his eyes told me nothing—he was too determined or distracted to betray himself.

“So you’re absolutely certain you can read their thoughts,” he asked as I drove.

“Not their thoughts,” I reminded him.

“You know what I mean.”

“All I need is a photo,” I replied. “Get me a direct shot, you go up and talk to her, I’ll snap my photo and we’ll be done. I’ll have your answer.”

“Have you ever been wrong?”

“I am always right,” I told him firmly. That ended it. After all, I was Michael Asher: the Eye Guy, some called me. I’d read more eyes by my sixteenth birthday than in an optometrist’s career. It was why this man, and so many countless people before him, travelled for miles to see me.

Mr. Sharpe squeezed his hands together, glancing at me then back to the road again. We came to a crossing and he pointed left. The minutes began to tick by in silence, which was odd to me. Usually when I was dealing with a client who thought his spouse was cheating on him, he would continue to babble and make excuses and eventually start to defend her. He’d proclaim dozens of times that perhaps we should turn around because he was being stupid, only for us to continue driving without pause, because the truth was simply too tempting to ignore.

The trees got thicker, and the numbers on the dash clock continued to roll higher. I wondered if we would even make it to this secret rendezvous point before he’d have to start paying for overtime. I really just wanted to get this one done. I could get home and rest before school, and use the cash to pick up the camera lens I’d been eyeing for weeks at the photography shop.

“How old are you again?” he asked. Even though they always wondered, it wasn’t the usual type of question from clients—an unwritten rule that the less we knew about each other, the less trouble we be in if we were caught.

“Five days until I turn seventeen,” I said. “I accept tips for my birthday.”

He gave a low and yet not amused laugh, and I gave up trying to make him lighten up.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “The lights.”

I slowed down and switched the beams off. Darkness enveloped us once again, this time unbroken by anything besides the moonlight. At first it appeared that we had stopped in the middle of a long stretch of road winding up the canyon, but when I followed Mr. Sharpe’s gaze, I saw that there was a thin dirt path leading into the trees to our right.

He nodded toward it.

“They’re down there?” I said.

“No,” he replied. “But we’ll be able to see them. There’s a clear view of the cabin.”

I sighed and considered my car’s underbelly, but in the end began to leave the road. I’d done bizarre things for clients so many times before that this wasn’t strange. I’d once had a teenage girl as a client who was convinced her father wasn’t really biologically related to her, even thinking he’d kidnapped her at birth. She’d led me all the way out of town to grab my photograph of him when she confronted him at his office, only to find out that yes, he was her father, and no, he was not at all amused by her bizarre accusations.

There was a bump as my tires left the pavement and sank into the loose dirt. The woods glowed with a dim haze. Finally, when the road had disappeared entirely from my rear-view mirror, he held a hand up.

“Here,” he whispered. I put the car in park, turned off the engine, and bathed in silence.

We sat still for a minute, just listening for anyone who might have discovered our presence. My eyes scanned the forest. I couldn’t detect any motion or life between the leaves and branches and gnarly trunks. It was a place even deader than the road I’d been on before, and would have been frightening if I hadn’t developed an immense disregard for fear by then.

I grabbed my binoculars and camera from the back seat as Mr. Sharpe pointed out my window. I switched on the night vision so that I could scan the trees in its exposing green hue. A cabin, I reminded myself. That should be easy to find out here.

But even as I scanned the area, I couldn’t see any building breaking the endless tangle of trees. I pressed the binoculars harder against my eyes, trying to spot anything unnatural at all, to no avail. All I saw was more brush, tangled even thicker off the path.

“You’re sure it’s this side?” I asked, looking at Mr. Sharpe. He nodded so I tried again. Still nothing. I breathed out with irritation. There wasn’t a building anywhere in those woods, and if there was, the cabin was far too invisible for me to spot anyone’s eyes. All I needed was one photo.

“Why don’t you look?” I proposed, turning to toss the binoculars to Mr. Sharpe. He hadn’t been ready to catch it and the binoculars dropped heavily into his lap.

I opened my mouth to apologize but stopped in that same split second. The moment the falling binoculars surprised Mr. Sharpe, the camouflage that he had so masterfully held over his gaze vanished, and I saw the Glimpse.

It was gone a half-second later. But that was all I ever needed.

I felt so stupid for not seeing it before.

I’d studied killers, mostly from afar through history textbooks and documentaries. Usually they were nervous, balancing their barely-restrained aggression against the aching of their almost-stifled conscience. But sociopaths had no conscience. There was no fear in this man’s eyes for what he was about to do because life simply meant less to him than a blade of grass.

He unbuckled his seat belt and leaned forward, pretending to study the empty woods—as he’d been doing the entire time. All of it had been an act. There were no lovers in the woods, there was no cabin, and there was no reason for this man to have brought me this far into the middle of nowhere, except for one. I tightened my hands into fists, hoping that this one time, I had read someone wrong.

Unfortunately, I was never wrong.

“I was sure they’d be here,” he said with false lament. “It’s a pity I brought you all the way out.”

Then, with a swift and practiced motion devoid of feeling, Mr. Sharpe jerked his hand from the inside of his jacket, tearing a hidden seam as the handle and blade of a long and thick knife broke free. The knife swung at my shoulder and would have pinned my corpse to my own seat if I hadn’t been ready, sliding down in one swift motion with my head under the steering wheel, my foot flying up and slamming hard into the man’s unsuspecting chest.

Breath exploded from his lungs but I wasn’t finished, catching the handle of his door next so that it flew open. He shouted at me, teeth ground together in rage, ripping his blade from the seat and tearing the cushion and material out in the process. His voice came as a maniacal shriek, striking within inches of my heart, scraping the skin on my arm as I dodged the knife.

I shouted though I knew that no one would hear it, the man turning into a beast of thrashing and striking and stabbing.

“Curse you!” he yelled. He swung the knife but in his momentum, I kicked him again and he tumbled backward, half inside my car and half on the dirt, his knife still splattered with red from my wound.

In a flash of motion, I turned the keys in the ignition and threw all my weight onto the gas pedal, heart racing as the car flew into reverse. I missed him only by the inches he dove out of the way. With the passenger door still flapping against brush and grass, I rocketed backwards, the murderous gaze of the madman still chasing me through the woods.

My arm stung like a thousand teeth had bitten it. Blood ran over the gray material of my seat, its split-open insides an image of what my chest would have been if I’d acted a second later. But still, the man continued to chase me, shouting, clinging the torn bits of his clothes as he ran, diving to reach the passenger door.

I pressed the pedal harder, shaking as I flew back onto the main road again, brakes screeching as the car whirled around and my headlights grazed the trees in all directions. The momentum threw my door to slam shut. I hit the locks as the man burst out of the woods a few steps behind. I scrambled to switch the gears just as he hit the opposite window, pounding the glass with his sweaty face behind it, his hands grabbing for the handle. I shot off, throwing him from his feet again.

Always, always check for weapons, you idiot! I mentally yelled at myself, breathing so fast that I was dizzy, my heart racing and every inch of me trembling with a foreign feeling of terror. I’d had crazy ones before, but nothing like this maniac. I shouted just because it boiled up inside me, trying to hold my arm against my shirt so the blood wouldn’t run everywhere.

Mr. Sharpe refused to give up even as I pushed my car to its limits. He’d appear in the mirror then fall back into the trees, only to dive back out closer to me again. I cursed at him, sweaty hands slipping on the steering wheel. As I glanced at the speedometer, I saw something else horrifying.

Holy hell, no… I thought. The gas was nearly on empty. If this car died, so would I.

I checked the mirror, but suddenly the man was gone. I hit the steering wheel. This was exactly why I never met clients at my house. I had a website and a special email address for them to reach me. I didn’t want any of them knowing where I slept at night. But that insane gaze behind his eyes—that Glimpse I still hadn’t had a chance to fully process—had been so intent on my death that I knew he’d find a way to track me down.

My car engine whirred in protest. I checked the mirrors for him again.

In answer, there came a gigantic slam on the roof of my car that nearly threw me swerving off the road. The ceiling had dented above me from being struck, the hand of Mr. Sharpe clinging to the top of my car outside the front window. I wrenched the steering wheel to the left to get back on the road, sending him sliding over the side of my roof. His face stared at me wide eyed again, punching the glass with the rounded handle of the knife, breaking a hole in it and spraying me with the shards.

“Why won’t you give up?!” I shouted. He tucked the knife under his arm and reached through the hole to grab me with his free hand as the road and trees sped on behind him. I pushed myself against my door. He swung his hand further, catching the end of my shirt, seizing it and pulling me toward his growling face.

The pull on my arm caused my hand to slip, sending the car flying over the edge of the road and into the grass. My right headlight exploded when I bounced off a tree—the same tree that threw Mr. Sharpe from my car as I careened into the woods.

I couldn’t regain control as I sped over sticks and brush, tires rumbling against pointed rocks as the bottom of my car rattled from being beaten. My head hit the ceiling painfully, my hands struggling to turn the car away from the trees as my shoes tried to find the brakes. I could see a clearing ahead, coming so swiftly that I knew it was a precipice.

Suddenly, there was a pair of trees too close together for me to pass between. My car bumped one and then the other, slamming me hard into the steering wheel airbag as I came to a stop.

I waved the bag out of my face, breathing heavily and looking up. There was nothing out my front window but the glittering landscape of the San Fernando Valley, houses and cars and streetlights sprawling for miles. The car had come to a stop with its front wheels over the cliff’s edge, the car’s body sandwiched between a pair of tree trunks and tilting dangerously forward.

Somehow I managed to regain control of myself, diving into the back seat and wrestling the door open. I slid to the ground and crawled away on all fours as the grass and sticks cut my palms, and I collapsed behind a thick bush with my head buried in leaves. Dizzy, breathless… I had to force myself not to pass out as my vision faded in and out of black.

No more than two seconds later, I heard something tearing through the woods, branches being knocked aside like a ferocious animal approaching. The terror brought back my wits, and I buried myself deeper into the bushes, just as Mr. Sharpe appeared from the path my car had created.

Gone were his decorous jacket and his perfectly styled hair: now, his clothes were tattered from thorns and covered with tree bark, his hair a wild fray above his head. But even more shocking than his frenzied state was the leap that Mr. Sharpe suddenly took, taking to the air like he was weightless. He was lifted with a shriek of anger, slamming feet-first into the top of my car, fingers curled open.

To my shock, ten pointed blades sprouted from the ends of his fingers, emerging from his skin like a cat’s claws. The razors were long like a lizard’s though, six inches at least, flashing and gleaming as if they were silver implants. They struck the roof of my car, embedding into the metal so powerfully that they split through the roof like blades against paper; claws aligned exactly where my skull had been moments before.

But they hadn’t struck anything. I couldn’t restrain my gasp, unable to believe my own eyes. Mr. Sharpe heard me and looked up, catching my gaze.

He jerked to stand; tiny sparks flying where the claws of his right hand scraped my car. But unexpectedly, he slipped when he found that his left arm was still stuck in the metal, the jagged edges drawing deep lines down his arm. I couldn’t move. He pounded the roof with his other fist and pulled harder, but this only served to upset the already unbalanced vehicle. My car began to tilt forward.

Mr. Sharpe struggled to pull his arm free, digging his free claws into the roof and tearing through the metal like it was paper. But it did nothing: no matter how hard he pulled, he was held tight. With a sudden scraping and crumbling of rocks, my car fell over the edge.

I heard a single crunch of metal against rocks, against skin and bones.

Everything went silent again. I trembled in the bushes, too terrified to move, the grass shaking against me. When he didn’t reappear, I managed to stand, fingers tearing into the bark as I breathed in dizzy gasps. My mind was so shaken that I was in a daze, so I stumbled uneasily to the edge and looked over.

My car—my beautiful, gleaming car, whose mere down payment had taken me months to afford—was not far below, upside-down with its now-beaten underside showing. One of the wheels was still turning leisurely. The car had fallen against a tall part of the mountainous rocks, spiked in the middle so abruptly that it had been smashed almost flat. It was between this rock and my car that I saw what was left of Mr. Sharpe: two feet, one arm still stuck in my roof, and the other hand sprawled open in death’s weakness, its silver claws gleaming like daggers in the moonlight.