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The house was not laid out for more than one person. Sure, it had more than one room, but one had been converted before Wilford had even bought the place, and the other was at the bottom of the worst set of stairs in existence. There was his bedroom, but the bed had cost almost $2000 and wasn’t a place for a bed-wetting toddler. If he didn’t do that, he’d probably fall off the enormous thing.
With Michael sleeping on the couch with a couple of blankets between him and the leather, Wilford had been falling asleep in his recliner again. He woke sharply to the sound of a car crashing outside and got up to look out the window. One of the neighbours had crashed one of their cars into the other, trying to back out of the driveway. Fucking idiot.
But he was up. Once he was awake, he never managed to get back to sleep, so there wasn’t much point in trying. Letting Michael sleep, Wilford quietly roused the dogs and led them into the kitchen. He tossed an egg to Buster, wondering why he was still surprised and disappointed every time the idiot missed it and got splatted on the face with it. Bailey was there to help him clean it up while Wilford started quietly making their breakfast, careful not to bang around too much with the kid sleeping just a few feet away. He’d figure out their breakfast once the kid woke up. For now, he could get by on coffee and nibbling on the vegetables he cut up for the dogs.
School starting up again was the best part of the year. Summers effectively meant full house arrest, and by the time September came along, Wilford was going stir crazy. No sports. No clubs. Just two and a half months of staring at the walls. He was so glad to finally get out of the house, he’d left almost an hour early, and stayed after the final bell to see what kind of excuses he could find on the event schedule that would give him a reason to let him stay out past his stupidly early curfew until baseball started up again. A photography club would look good on his transcripts, and he could definitely up his skills in that area for the school paper.
He expected to get shouted at when he finally wandered back home. Walter was already home, sitting on the sofa and staring at the TV. Sitting around watching TV was the last thing Wilford wanted to do. He dropped his bag by the door and kicked off his shoes to go head back to his bedroom to find something to do. His teachers hadn’t even had the decency to assign him something to do.
His bedroom door was open. He usually kept that closed. He knew he’d closed it when he’d left.
“What are you doing in my room?” he demanded when he walked in on his parents going through his dresser. “Get out of my stuff!”
He pushed past his dad to his bed, where every drawer in his desk had been emptied and laid out. There was a lot missing. “Get out!” he shouted.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” his mom asked, holding up a butter knife.
Wilford shrugged. “From the kitchen? So what? Get out!”
He noticed a half-full trash bag in the corner and reached for it. Before he could grab it, his dad grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. “Do you want to go back to jail?” his dad asked. “Why do you have a knife?”
“I’m gonna go back if you don’t get out!” Wilford was having a hard time not shouting. He wanted to shout and scream. They were in his room, going through his stuff and taking things.
His dad held up a lighter. It was one of the things he was under no circumstances allowed to possess, just before knives on the list. “That’s Walter’s,” he said.
“Why do you have it?” his dad asked.
“Why are you in my room?”
His mom shook her head and grabbed the trash bag from the corner. For about half a second, Wilford thought she was going to give back what she’d taken. Instead, she pushed everything that was on the bed into the bag.
“What the fuck?” Wilford shouted, stepping toward her. Before he could even figure out what he was going to do, his dad grabbed him by his shirt and dragged him out of the room.
Michael didn’t want to be stuck in a chair. Wilford didn’t want to be stuck at the clinic. But neither of them were getting what they wanted. Wilford watched the new doctor put headphones on the kid and struggle to keep them there. Eventually, he got Michael to cooperate and was able to step back toward his computer.
Wilford watched the whole thing from a seat in the corner of the room. He hadn’t actually considered how something like this would be tested until they’d walked into the room. A long discussion about what he’d observed was expected, and the doctor had seemed just as puzzled as Wilford about the inconsistencies. He’d respond sometimes, but someone could be screaming and shouting and it was like Michael didn’t even realise they were in the room. Whatever that was, it probably wasn’t his ears.
“I’m going to play some tones,” the doctor explained. “Varying volumes and pitches in one ear or the other. He can’t tell us if he can hear it or not, but most healthy kids will look for the sound if they can hear it.”
Wilford nodded. It didn’t seem too awful. The doctor did something on his laptop and Michael looked up over his left shoulder. A few moments later, he turned his head toward the right. For ten minutes this continued, with various gaps between each time Michael looked around. Neither the doctor nor Wilford said anything, to avoid somehow telegraphing to Michael. Watching it, Wilford had no idea if what he was seeing was expected or not.
“Okay, Michael,” the doctor said finally, heading over to take the headphones back. “Good job!”
He wound up the headphone cord as he turned back to Wilford. “Good news is I don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” he said.
Wilford had expected that somehow. It was funny to irritate Jim by pretending Bailey was deaf, but Wilford knew what that really looked like. But he’d rather be thorough than miss something out of cockiness.
“So what now?” he asked.
“Keep your appointment with the psychologist. Take a lot of notes. Any information you can take in there will help.”
Wilford nodded, while Michael started ba-ba-ba’ing and slapping the table. It was usually an easy enough sound to ignore, but for some reason it caught Wilford’s attention this time.
“What does that sound like to you?” he asked.
The doctor shook his head. “Babble?” he said.
Wilford pulled his phone out of his pocket and loaded up the MeTV app. It took about ten seconds to find what he was looking for and play the video. Some nerd in his bedroom was playing some game, running around shooting zombies. Wilford scrubbed to the middle of the video to find a point with a lot of action. Almost immediately, Michael started shouting even louder, still slapping the table.
Son of a bitch. He was going to kill that woman.
Wilford knew Walter had some cigarettes somewhere. Sometimes he could even get lucky and find some weed attempting to hide somewhere. With no one else home, sneaking into his brother’s room was easy.
He immediately forgot all about cigarettes as soon as he opened the door. They weren’t allowed to play video games. Apparently they’d make you violent or some stupid bullshit. Whatever. Wilford didn’t care. Somehow, Walter had smuggled a GameStation in, and Wilford wanted to see what they all about. It was simple enough to get it started. No different from the VCR, really. Put the disk in, turn it on, and find the right channel on the TV. Apparently Walter was into shooting Nazis. That sounded fun.
Playing the game was less straightforward. The controller had about twelve buttons, and a couple of joystick sort of things. Wilford was always either looking at the floor or walking sideways like a crab or getting stuck on things. He wasn’t actually sure what he was supposed to be doing, but getting shot by Nazis probably wasn’t goal. Still, it was funny enough that just trying to figure out how to play the game was keeping him entertained.
So of course, Walter had to walk in. “What are you doing in here?” he demanded.
Wilford didn’t even pretend to stop what he was doing. “You’re not supposed to have this,” he said as his character fell off a building and died. That was a new one.
“You’re not supposed to be in my room!” Walter said. He walked over and turned off the machine.
“Hey, I was playing that,” Wilford said. Oh well. This was more fun anyway.
“You’re not supposed to be playing it,” Walter pointed out, snatching the controller away.
“Yeah, neither are you. What are Mom and Dad gonna say? Are they home? I’m gonna go tell them!” Wilford jumped up off the bed as Walter dashed to the door.
“You’re not going to tell them,” Walter said, blocking the way out of the room. Funny how he’d changed his mind about Wilford being in his room so quickly.
Wilford thought about this for a second. “Dad! Walter’s got a GameStation in here!” he shouted.
He did not know that Walter knew how to throw a punch.
Wilford knew that Nichola had about twenty meetings and teleconferences that week. Just because the show was off the air didn’t mean he had to stay away from the studio. In fact, there was probably some work he could get done. He planted Michael on the sofa with a few pens and some printer paper and booted up his PC for the first time in a couple of weeks. The emails were a nightmare. He hadn’t been looking at any of it, and somehow even without the show running, everyone in the network seemed to have something to say to him. Wilford deleted everything.
It didn’t take long for Nichola to find him. She let herself in and sat down on the sofa next to Michael to see what he was doing. “How’d it go?” she asked after a moment.
“Not his ears,” Wilford said, going through a stack of papers that had been left on his desk. Half the stories they’d been working on were out of date and irrelevant already. Goddamnit.
“Well, that’s good, right?” Nichola asked.
Wilford thought about it. “We’ve got another appointment on Wednesday, but I think I know what they’re going to say.”
“Same thing as everyone else?” Nichola guessed.
Wilford nodded. “Yep. Turns out, he’s a pretty good little mimic.”
“What?”
He pulled up another video on his computer and turned up the volume so Nichola could tell what it was from across the room. Wilford jumped to a point where the game was actually being played, and again Michael immediately started imitating the gunfire.
“Oh my god,” Nichola said, staring at Michael. “You’re kidding me?”
Wilford turned off the video. That was enough of that. He shook his head and shrugged. “We’ll see what they say on Wednesday,” he said. He sighed and watched the kid smack the coffee table, shouting, “Ba ba ba ba!” He knew what the problem was. He knew what he was going to hear on Wednesday. He didn’t know why, but it pissed him off to think about it. He’d never wanted kids in his life, and of course, the one he did wind up having was the biggest, fucked up waste of space on the planet. Wilford knew he was a self-centred prick, but Linda had found a way to take it to a whole new level.
If she was smart, she’d do everything she could to avoid parole, because Wilford was going to fucking kill her if she got out of prison.
Nichola started to say something, but was interrupted by a meek knock at the door. Before Wilford could tell whoever was on the other side of the door to piss right off, it opened and the new girl from reception stepped inside awkward. “Uh. These… guys are here,” she said.
As soon as Wilford saw who ‘these guys’ were, he sighed and buried his face in his hand. “Not a good time,” he said.
“You know, we hear that a lot,” Roberts said. He reached into his coat as the receptionist fled back outside. Wilford already knew what was coming next.
“Seriously?” Wilford asked. Christ. As if his day hadn’t been bad enough. “Can we not do this in front of my kid?”
The two detectives looked at Michael, and then one another for a moment before Roberts nodded. Wilford stood up, picking his keys up from his desk.
“Call my lawyer,” he said, tossing his keys to Nichola.
Nichola gaped at the entire situation. “Hang on. Wait. What?”
The assignment was stupid and Wilford hated it. Creative writing had been strongly recommended to him if he was serious about going to school for journalism. And he was, but somehow he thought he’d be doing a little bit more writing.
Obviously there was a point to the assignment, but it just wasn’t a very interesting one. The teacher had given them a series of character descriptions from various books, and wanted everyone to draw what was described. Wilford couldn’t draw for shit, but luckily the teacher’s definition of drawing was a very loose one. Armed with glue sticks, a delicate little pair of scissors he’d found in the bathroom, and a stack of his mom’s magazines, Wilford started cutting out faces at the kitchen table and gluing bits of them together. It still looked like dogshit, but he wasn’t going to fail the assignment just because it was stupid. He cut out a face, glued some new eyes on it, found someone else’s hair. He didn’t think any of them really looked right, but it probably had more to do with the fact that everything he’d made was creepy as fuck.
“What are you doing!?”
Wilford jumped so hard he almost stabbed himself with the scissors. “Homework,” he said, loving the way his mother only ever seemed to shout.
“I was reading those!” She started snatching up her magazines, catching Wilford’s assignment with everything.
“When?” Wilford demanded. “They’ve been in a basket under the coffee table for a year!” He tried to at least save the work he’d already done and got smacked with one of the magazines in return.
“Those are my scissors!” his mother shouted.
Wilford glared at her. “Have them,” he said, throwing them at her.
She ducked out of the way, giving Wilford room to get up and walk outside, ignoring everything else being shouted at him. He wasn’t outside for long though. Just long enough to grab the garden hose and turn on the tap. He walked back inside, waiting until he was right behind his mother open the nozzle and spray her in the back of the head with a jet of freezing water. She shrieked while Wilford stood there, soaking everything on the table. When his mother tried to grab the hose from him, he turned it on her and sprayed it full-blast in her face.
He’d forgotten his dad was home until he was grabbed by his shirt and swung around to the floor. In an instant, he was pinned to the ground with a knee in his back.
“Stop,” his dad said, grabbing both of Wilford’s wrists to pin them down as well.
“Get off!” Wilford shouted. He tried to get free, but his dad had the advantage. A second later, he had both Wilford’s wrists with one hand, freeing his other hand to hold Wilford’s head against the carpet.
“Stop,” he repeated.
Wilford did not want to stop. His mom was screaming, everything was soaked, and this was not how the evening was supposed to go.
“Is it too late to consider that military academy?” Walter said from somewhere.
Wilford screamed. As soon as he got free, he was going to murder his brother.
Wilford didn’t have to be psychic to know that this, right here, was exactly what Steve had been talking about when he said to stay out of trouble. He’d never seen the man look so tired before.
“You want to tell us again where you were between two and six on the first?” Ingall asked, looking down at a notepad that was probably full of random scribbles.
“Home,” Wilford said. “Where I go every Saturday, because there’s shit-all for me to do on Saturdays.” He could see Steve looking less than impressed with his answer, but he didn’t care.
“Can anybody back that up?” Ingall asked.
“My dogs. You want to talk to them?” Wilford asked.
“Not helping,” Steve said.
“Disappearing like that every week would be a pretty good way to cover up a change of routine if you wanted to kill somebody, wouldn’t it?” Roberts asked.
Wilford didn’t even need Steve to know that wasn’t a question he should even acknowledge.
“You want to tell us why you hired a PI to dig around behind our backs?” Roberts asked.
“You hired a PI?” Steve demanded. Apparently Wilford had forgotten to mention that.
“That’s one of those stupid things I wasn’t supposed to do, wasn’t it?” he asked. Well, shit.
“Yes,” Steve said. Fuck.
“No, you know why I hired a PI?” Wilford said, trying real hard not to get even more pissed off that this was what everything had come to. “You dumb fucks couldn’t even investigate the back of your own hand.” Steve slapped him hard on the shoulder, but Wilford didn’t care. “He was into a lot of dumb shit in his off-time, but that was his time. I didn’t fucking care. But he had to go get himself killed and sink a million-dollar investment. If I’m going to get any of that back, I need his case notes, but you morons are too busy thinking he got killed over a goddamn pet story. Have you even looked at his computer yet? That stupid fucker was doing all sorts of dumb shit on the deep web that would get anybody killed.”
There was an awkward pause while Roberts and Ingall looked at each other. “What investment?” Ingall asked.
Wilford could have rolled over and died from all the stupidity in the room. “You didn’t even check his social media?” he asked. “I was backing him for a new show. How did you walking clusterfucks miss that?”
“Excuse us a minute,” Roberts said. He and Ingall both quickly stepped out of the room, leaving Wilford and Steve alone.
“You know,” Steve said. “You are the only client I’ve ever had who gets in this much trouble by doing nothing at all.”
Wilford shrugged. How in the hell was that his fault?
Wilford couldn’t have cared less about the yearbook, but he liked flipping through to see how many of his photos wound up being used. Every now and then, somebody would come up and insist on trading signatures. It was kind of a stupid tradition, but being the moody kid who refused to sign yearbooks wasn’t a good image to have. He’d flip through until he found a page for one of the clubs he was in and write down some stupid joke while the other person did the same.
Around the middle of the book, he found the survey that had been going around a few months ago. He was honestly surprised to see his picture in the list.
“Most likely to become a super villain?” he read aloud.
“Oh, absolutely,” another kid at the lunch table said. “You got that whole deflection thing going. Everyone knows you probably want to burn down the school, but instead you’re over here all Mr Four-Point-Oh taking AP classes for fun.”
“Regular classes are boring,” Wilford said. Also, AP gave him a mountain of homework to keep him busy at home so he wasn’t staring at the walls all night.
“Exactly. Super villains do that so everyone’s all like, ‘oh him? No, he’d never do that.’ And then when you do finally do it, everyone’ll be all like, ‘oh yeah, we totally knew.’”
“What?” That made no sense. “I don’t want to be a super villain. Do you have any idea how stupid henchmen are? They’re henchmen because they’re so stupid they had to drop out of grade school. Who wants to deal with that?”
“The fact that you know that means you’re already looking into becoming one.”
“Please,” Wilford said. “Being a puppet master would be so much more fun. I’d rather surround myself with smart people and rule from the shadows.”
Nichola was already waiting at the station, looking as tired as Wilford felt by the time they gave him his stuff back and let him go. Steve had already left to get this latest disaster suppressed and erased, but that was getting harder and harder in the social media age.
“Where’s the kid?” Wilford asked when he saw Nichola was there alone.
“Didn’t think he needed to be here, and you probably need a break,” she said, starting to walk with him out to the parking lot. “Bill took him home for the night. Sharon’s been wanting to meet him anyway.”
Wilford nodded. That was a good plan. He was totally on board with it. When they got to the car, Wilford decided he was too tired to drive, and got into the passenger seat. He just wanted to go home, have a few drinks, and crash.
“So. What now?” Nichola asked as she started the car.
Wilford had no idea. “Hopefully they lay the fuck off and Steve can bury the arrest.”
“They actually arrested you?”
“Yep.” It had been years since he’d been properly arrested. A few nights in the drunk tank, but nothing more serious than a fine. He’d worked goddamn hard to keep it that way.
“What evidence did they think they had?” Nichola asked.
Wilford ignored the traffic around them and stared at the road ahead. “Who the fuck knows,” he said. “Probably just saw a high-profile target and went after it for a promotion.”
“Jesus Christ,” Nichola said.
Wilford agreed. After a moment, he pulled out his phone and looked at it. “What’s my blog password?” he asked. This was probably another one of those things Steve had insisted was stupid and shouldn’t be done, but maybe it was time to start hanging out with the grownups in his field.
“I don’t know. Rosa set that up for you. Why?” Nichola asked.
Wilford opened his phone book and found Rosa’s information. “Because I can think of a couple of guys who need to be fired.”
With Michael sleeping on the couch with a couple of blankets between him and the leather, Wilford had been falling asleep in his recliner again. He woke sharply to the sound of a car crashing outside and got up to look out the window. One of the neighbours had crashed one of their cars into the other, trying to back out of the driveway. Fucking idiot.
But he was up. Once he was awake, he never managed to get back to sleep, so there wasn’t much point in trying. Letting Michael sleep, Wilford quietly roused the dogs and led them into the kitchen. He tossed an egg to Buster, wondering why he was still surprised and disappointed every time the idiot missed it and got splatted on the face with it. Bailey was there to help him clean it up while Wilford started quietly making their breakfast, careful not to bang around too much with the kid sleeping just a few feet away. He’d figure out their breakfast once the kid woke up. For now, he could get by on coffee and nibbling on the vegetables he cut up for the dogs.
School starting up again was the best part of the year. Summers effectively meant full house arrest, and by the time September came along, Wilford was going stir crazy. No sports. No clubs. Just two and a half months of staring at the walls. He was so glad to finally get out of the house, he’d left almost an hour early, and stayed after the final bell to see what kind of excuses he could find on the event schedule that would give him a reason to let him stay out past his stupidly early curfew until baseball started up again. A photography club would look good on his transcripts, and he could definitely up his skills in that area for the school paper.
He expected to get shouted at when he finally wandered back home. Walter was already home, sitting on the sofa and staring at the TV. Sitting around watching TV was the last thing Wilford wanted to do. He dropped his bag by the door and kicked off his shoes to go head back to his bedroom to find something to do. His teachers hadn’t even had the decency to assign him something to do.
His bedroom door was open. He usually kept that closed. He knew he’d closed it when he’d left.
“What are you doing in my room?” he demanded when he walked in on his parents going through his dresser. “Get out of my stuff!”
He pushed past his dad to his bed, where every drawer in his desk had been emptied and laid out. There was a lot missing. “Get out!” he shouted.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” his mom asked, holding up a butter knife.
Wilford shrugged. “From the kitchen? So what? Get out!”
He noticed a half-full trash bag in the corner and reached for it. Before he could grab it, his dad grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. “Do you want to go back to jail?” his dad asked. “Why do you have a knife?”
“I’m gonna go back if you don’t get out!” Wilford was having a hard time not shouting. He wanted to shout and scream. They were in his room, going through his stuff and taking things.
His dad held up a lighter. It was one of the things he was under no circumstances allowed to possess, just before knives on the list. “That’s Walter’s,” he said.
“Why do you have it?” his dad asked.
“Why are you in my room?”
His mom shook her head and grabbed the trash bag from the corner. For about half a second, Wilford thought she was going to give back what she’d taken. Instead, she pushed everything that was on the bed into the bag.
“What the fuck?” Wilford shouted, stepping toward her. Before he could even figure out what he was going to do, his dad grabbed him by his shirt and dragged him out of the room.
Michael didn’t want to be stuck in a chair. Wilford didn’t want to be stuck at the clinic. But neither of them were getting what they wanted. Wilford watched the new doctor put headphones on the kid and struggle to keep them there. Eventually, he got Michael to cooperate and was able to step back toward his computer.
Wilford watched the whole thing from a seat in the corner of the room. He hadn’t actually considered how something like this would be tested until they’d walked into the room. A long discussion about what he’d observed was expected, and the doctor had seemed just as puzzled as Wilford about the inconsistencies. He’d respond sometimes, but someone could be screaming and shouting and it was like Michael didn’t even realise they were in the room. Whatever that was, it probably wasn’t his ears.
“I’m going to play some tones,” the doctor explained. “Varying volumes and pitches in one ear or the other. He can’t tell us if he can hear it or not, but most healthy kids will look for the sound if they can hear it.”
Wilford nodded. It didn’t seem too awful. The doctor did something on his laptop and Michael looked up over his left shoulder. A few moments later, he turned his head toward the right. For ten minutes this continued, with various gaps between each time Michael looked around. Neither the doctor nor Wilford said anything, to avoid somehow telegraphing to Michael. Watching it, Wilford had no idea if what he was seeing was expected or not.
“Okay, Michael,” the doctor said finally, heading over to take the headphones back. “Good job!”
He wound up the headphone cord as he turned back to Wilford. “Good news is I don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” he said.
Wilford had expected that somehow. It was funny to irritate Jim by pretending Bailey was deaf, but Wilford knew what that really looked like. But he’d rather be thorough than miss something out of cockiness.
“So what now?” he asked.
“Keep your appointment with the psychologist. Take a lot of notes. Any information you can take in there will help.”
Wilford nodded, while Michael started ba-ba-ba’ing and slapping the table. It was usually an easy enough sound to ignore, but for some reason it caught Wilford’s attention this time.
“What does that sound like to you?” he asked.
The doctor shook his head. “Babble?” he said.
Wilford pulled his phone out of his pocket and loaded up the MeTV app. It took about ten seconds to find what he was looking for and play the video. Some nerd in his bedroom was playing some game, running around shooting zombies. Wilford scrubbed to the middle of the video to find a point with a lot of action. Almost immediately, Michael started shouting even louder, still slapping the table.
Son of a bitch. He was going to kill that woman.
Wilford knew Walter had some cigarettes somewhere. Sometimes he could even get lucky and find some weed attempting to hide somewhere. With no one else home, sneaking into his brother’s room was easy.
He immediately forgot all about cigarettes as soon as he opened the door. They weren’t allowed to play video games. Apparently they’d make you violent or some stupid bullshit. Whatever. Wilford didn’t care. Somehow, Walter had smuggled a GameStation in, and Wilford wanted to see what they all about. It was simple enough to get it started. No different from the VCR, really. Put the disk in, turn it on, and find the right channel on the TV. Apparently Walter was into shooting Nazis. That sounded fun.
Playing the game was less straightforward. The controller had about twelve buttons, and a couple of joystick sort of things. Wilford was always either looking at the floor or walking sideways like a crab or getting stuck on things. He wasn’t actually sure what he was supposed to be doing, but getting shot by Nazis probably wasn’t goal. Still, it was funny enough that just trying to figure out how to play the game was keeping him entertained.
So of course, Walter had to walk in. “What are you doing in here?” he demanded.
Wilford didn’t even pretend to stop what he was doing. “You’re not supposed to have this,” he said as his character fell off a building and died. That was a new one.
“You’re not supposed to be in my room!” Walter said. He walked over and turned off the machine.
“Hey, I was playing that,” Wilford said. Oh well. This was more fun anyway.
“You’re not supposed to be playing it,” Walter pointed out, snatching the controller away.
“Yeah, neither are you. What are Mom and Dad gonna say? Are they home? I’m gonna go tell them!” Wilford jumped up off the bed as Walter dashed to the door.
“You’re not going to tell them,” Walter said, blocking the way out of the room. Funny how he’d changed his mind about Wilford being in his room so quickly.
Wilford thought about this for a second. “Dad! Walter’s got a GameStation in here!” he shouted.
He did not know that Walter knew how to throw a punch.
Wilford knew that Nichola had about twenty meetings and teleconferences that week. Just because the show was off the air didn’t mean he had to stay away from the studio. In fact, there was probably some work he could get done. He planted Michael on the sofa with a few pens and some printer paper and booted up his PC for the first time in a couple of weeks. The emails were a nightmare. He hadn’t been looking at any of it, and somehow even without the show running, everyone in the network seemed to have something to say to him. Wilford deleted everything.
It didn’t take long for Nichola to find him. She let herself in and sat down on the sofa next to Michael to see what he was doing. “How’d it go?” she asked after a moment.
“Not his ears,” Wilford said, going through a stack of papers that had been left on his desk. Half the stories they’d been working on were out of date and irrelevant already. Goddamnit.
“Well, that’s good, right?” Nichola asked.
Wilford thought about it. “We’ve got another appointment on Wednesday, but I think I know what they’re going to say.”
“Same thing as everyone else?” Nichola guessed.
Wilford nodded. “Yep. Turns out, he’s a pretty good little mimic.”
“What?”
He pulled up another video on his computer and turned up the volume so Nichola could tell what it was from across the room. Wilford jumped to a point where the game was actually being played, and again Michael immediately started imitating the gunfire.
“Oh my god,” Nichola said, staring at Michael. “You’re kidding me?”
Wilford turned off the video. That was enough of that. He shook his head and shrugged. “We’ll see what they say on Wednesday,” he said. He sighed and watched the kid smack the coffee table, shouting, “Ba ba ba ba!” He knew what the problem was. He knew what he was going to hear on Wednesday. He didn’t know why, but it pissed him off to think about it. He’d never wanted kids in his life, and of course, the one he did wind up having was the biggest, fucked up waste of space on the planet. Wilford knew he was a self-centred prick, but Linda had found a way to take it to a whole new level.
If she was smart, she’d do everything she could to avoid parole, because Wilford was going to fucking kill her if she got out of prison.
Nichola started to say something, but was interrupted by a meek knock at the door. Before Wilford could tell whoever was on the other side of the door to piss right off, it opened and the new girl from reception stepped inside awkward. “Uh. These… guys are here,” she said.
As soon as Wilford saw who ‘these guys’ were, he sighed and buried his face in his hand. “Not a good time,” he said.
“You know, we hear that a lot,” Roberts said. He reached into his coat as the receptionist fled back outside. Wilford already knew what was coming next.
“Seriously?” Wilford asked. Christ. As if his day hadn’t been bad enough. “Can we not do this in front of my kid?”
The two detectives looked at Michael, and then one another for a moment before Roberts nodded. Wilford stood up, picking his keys up from his desk.
“Call my lawyer,” he said, tossing his keys to Nichola.
Nichola gaped at the entire situation. “Hang on. Wait. What?”
The assignment was stupid and Wilford hated it. Creative writing had been strongly recommended to him if he was serious about going to school for journalism. And he was, but somehow he thought he’d be doing a little bit more writing.
Obviously there was a point to the assignment, but it just wasn’t a very interesting one. The teacher had given them a series of character descriptions from various books, and wanted everyone to draw what was described. Wilford couldn’t draw for shit, but luckily the teacher’s definition of drawing was a very loose one. Armed with glue sticks, a delicate little pair of scissors he’d found in the bathroom, and a stack of his mom’s magazines, Wilford started cutting out faces at the kitchen table and gluing bits of them together. It still looked like dogshit, but he wasn’t going to fail the assignment just because it was stupid. He cut out a face, glued some new eyes on it, found someone else’s hair. He didn’t think any of them really looked right, but it probably had more to do with the fact that everything he’d made was creepy as fuck.
“What are you doing!?”
Wilford jumped so hard he almost stabbed himself with the scissors. “Homework,” he said, loving the way his mother only ever seemed to shout.
“I was reading those!” She started snatching up her magazines, catching Wilford’s assignment with everything.
“When?” Wilford demanded. “They’ve been in a basket under the coffee table for a year!” He tried to at least save the work he’d already done and got smacked with one of the magazines in return.
“Those are my scissors!” his mother shouted.
Wilford glared at her. “Have them,” he said, throwing them at her.
She ducked out of the way, giving Wilford room to get up and walk outside, ignoring everything else being shouted at him. He wasn’t outside for long though. Just long enough to grab the garden hose and turn on the tap. He walked back inside, waiting until he was right behind his mother open the nozzle and spray her in the back of the head with a jet of freezing water. She shrieked while Wilford stood there, soaking everything on the table. When his mother tried to grab the hose from him, he turned it on her and sprayed it full-blast in her face.
He’d forgotten his dad was home until he was grabbed by his shirt and swung around to the floor. In an instant, he was pinned to the ground with a knee in his back.
“Stop,” his dad said, grabbing both of Wilford’s wrists to pin them down as well.
“Get off!” Wilford shouted. He tried to get free, but his dad had the advantage. A second later, he had both Wilford’s wrists with one hand, freeing his other hand to hold Wilford’s head against the carpet.
“Stop,” he repeated.
Wilford did not want to stop. His mom was screaming, everything was soaked, and this was not how the evening was supposed to go.
“Is it too late to consider that military academy?” Walter said from somewhere.
Wilford screamed. As soon as he got free, he was going to murder his brother.
Wilford didn’t have to be psychic to know that this, right here, was exactly what Steve had been talking about when he said to stay out of trouble. He’d never seen the man look so tired before.
“You want to tell us again where you were between two and six on the first?” Ingall asked, looking down at a notepad that was probably full of random scribbles.
“Home,” Wilford said. “Where I go every Saturday, because there’s shit-all for me to do on Saturdays.” He could see Steve looking less than impressed with his answer, but he didn’t care.
“Can anybody back that up?” Ingall asked.
“My dogs. You want to talk to them?” Wilford asked.
“Not helping,” Steve said.
“Disappearing like that every week would be a pretty good way to cover up a change of routine if you wanted to kill somebody, wouldn’t it?” Roberts asked.
Wilford didn’t even need Steve to know that wasn’t a question he should even acknowledge.
“You want to tell us why you hired a PI to dig around behind our backs?” Roberts asked.
“You hired a PI?” Steve demanded. Apparently Wilford had forgotten to mention that.
“That’s one of those stupid things I wasn’t supposed to do, wasn’t it?” he asked. Well, shit.
“Yes,” Steve said. Fuck.
“No, you know why I hired a PI?” Wilford said, trying real hard not to get even more pissed off that this was what everything had come to. “You dumb fucks couldn’t even investigate the back of your own hand.” Steve slapped him hard on the shoulder, but Wilford didn’t care. “He was into a lot of dumb shit in his off-time, but that was his time. I didn’t fucking care. But he had to go get himself killed and sink a million-dollar investment. If I’m going to get any of that back, I need his case notes, but you morons are too busy thinking he got killed over a goddamn pet story. Have you even looked at his computer yet? That stupid fucker was doing all sorts of dumb shit on the deep web that would get anybody killed.”
There was an awkward pause while Roberts and Ingall looked at each other. “What investment?” Ingall asked.
Wilford could have rolled over and died from all the stupidity in the room. “You didn’t even check his social media?” he asked. “I was backing him for a new show. How did you walking clusterfucks miss that?”
“Excuse us a minute,” Roberts said. He and Ingall both quickly stepped out of the room, leaving Wilford and Steve alone.
“You know,” Steve said. “You are the only client I’ve ever had who gets in this much trouble by doing nothing at all.”
Wilford shrugged. How in the hell was that his fault?
Wilford couldn’t have cared less about the yearbook, but he liked flipping through to see how many of his photos wound up being used. Every now and then, somebody would come up and insist on trading signatures. It was kind of a stupid tradition, but being the moody kid who refused to sign yearbooks wasn’t a good image to have. He’d flip through until he found a page for one of the clubs he was in and write down some stupid joke while the other person did the same.
Around the middle of the book, he found the survey that had been going around a few months ago. He was honestly surprised to see his picture in the list.
“Most likely to become a super villain?” he read aloud.
“Oh, absolutely,” another kid at the lunch table said. “You got that whole deflection thing going. Everyone knows you probably want to burn down the school, but instead you’re over here all Mr Four-Point-Oh taking AP classes for fun.”
“Regular classes are boring,” Wilford said. Also, AP gave him a mountain of homework to keep him busy at home so he wasn’t staring at the walls all night.
“Exactly. Super villains do that so everyone’s all like, ‘oh him? No, he’d never do that.’ And then when you do finally do it, everyone’ll be all like, ‘oh yeah, we totally knew.’”
“What?” That made no sense. “I don’t want to be a super villain. Do you have any idea how stupid henchmen are? They’re henchmen because they’re so stupid they had to drop out of grade school. Who wants to deal with that?”
“The fact that you know that means you’re already looking into becoming one.”
“Please,” Wilford said. “Being a puppet master would be so much more fun. I’d rather surround myself with smart people and rule from the shadows.”
Nichola was already waiting at the station, looking as tired as Wilford felt by the time they gave him his stuff back and let him go. Steve had already left to get this latest disaster suppressed and erased, but that was getting harder and harder in the social media age.
“Where’s the kid?” Wilford asked when he saw Nichola was there alone.
“Didn’t think he needed to be here, and you probably need a break,” she said, starting to walk with him out to the parking lot. “Bill took him home for the night. Sharon’s been wanting to meet him anyway.”
Wilford nodded. That was a good plan. He was totally on board with it. When they got to the car, Wilford decided he was too tired to drive, and got into the passenger seat. He just wanted to go home, have a few drinks, and crash.
“So. What now?” Nichola asked as she started the car.
Wilford had no idea. “Hopefully they lay the fuck off and Steve can bury the arrest.”
“They actually arrested you?”
“Yep.” It had been years since he’d been properly arrested. A few nights in the drunk tank, but nothing more serious than a fine. He’d worked goddamn hard to keep it that way.
“What evidence did they think they had?” Nichola asked.
Wilford ignored the traffic around them and stared at the road ahead. “Who the fuck knows,” he said. “Probably just saw a high-profile target and went after it for a promotion.”
“Jesus Christ,” Nichola said.
Wilford agreed. After a moment, he pulled out his phone and looked at it. “What’s my blog password?” he asked. This was probably another one of those things Steve had insisted was stupid and shouldn’t be done, but maybe it was time to start hanging out with the grownups in his field.
“I don’t know. Rosa set that up for you. Why?” Nichola asked.
Wilford opened his phone book and found Rosa’s information. “Because I can think of a couple of guys who need to be fired.”
