Charade

Benji

When Vic called out, I knew something was off.

I jumped the stairs two at a time and glanced down both ends of the hallway. There, I saw a shadow laid out across Eddie Louis's bed. I froze, believing for the longest of moments that there was somebody else in this house, and that we were totally fucked.

I inched towards the room, passing a small table with an old nineties phone sitting on it, accompanied by a pen and pad of paper. Without thinking, I gripped the pen in my fist and crept towards the room.

I peered between the crack in the door and frame, trying to see if somebody else was inside.

"Benjamin!" Vic snapped.

I jumped and jerked my head towards the door.

"What are you doing?"

"I-I thought somebody was in there."

"So you were going to stab them with a pen?"

"Seemed like a good idea at the time."

Vic's lips thinned to a line and he rolled his eyes.

"Come look at this," he said.

I followed him inside the bedroom, not paying close attention to anything except the beat of my racing heart, as Vic held his torch to the back of the built-in wardrobe. My eyes widened and my blood ran cold.

Inside, stuck to the back wall, were hundreds of photos of Vic, Lily, and I. There was me working behind the counter at the newsagency, Vic picking someone up in his taxi, Lily eating lunch on the oval at school. I let my eyes fall to the boxes underneath the collage, opened, and revealing files and files of things labelled, 'Casino', 'Art', and 'ATM'. They were all the scams Vic set up and profited from.

"Holy fuck," I said.

"He has everything." Vic said quietly. "From the low-key street scams to the elaborate systems, like the mass-produced art. Everything. Times and dates where we met. Footage of us making exchanges. Everything he needs to take us down."

"Then why hasn't he?" I asked. "What's stopping him?"

"He has an obsession," Vic said coolly. "He doesn't just want to put us in jail, he wants to destroy us. Completely. Until we are nothing."

"What should we do?" I asked, looking up at him.

Vic, the worry showing in his eyes, managed his cool composure.

"Burn it," he said. "All of it."

"I know that, but after that. What if he keeps digging?"

"We'll kill him, most likely."

"You can't be serious."

"Look at me," he said. And I did. I looked into his cold, dead eyes. "Do I look like I'm joking?"

I breathed in, trying to process.

"You're not a killer, Vic."

"We are running out of time!" He shouted. "I don't care about ethics anymore! If I have to kill this man to silence him, I'll do it. In a heartbeat, I'll do it."

"Oh, god." I said, my eyes locking with a single photo of Ashley, sitting there in a corner on the back wall. I switched the flashlight off and watched her right eye flash red. "He's recording us."

Vic's head jerked around to the photo. Sirens began to wail out on the street.

"This was a trap," Vic said. "He knew we found him. He knew we'd come here. Benjamin, go. Go now! RUN!"

I turned towards the door and Vic grabbed my bag, pulling out a bottle of scotch and throwing it into the wardrobe so it smashed all over the files. The last thing I saw before I fell down the stairs was Vic striking a match and the world going a blinding, radiant orange.

© A.G. Travers 2015