Monkey in the Middle Read Free

he’s not ready to go home. He closes the bible and stands. Janie is lying exactly as she was, only her eyes have turned away. She will not look at him now.
    â€˜You want me to call the aide?’
    Blink.
    â€˜You want me to leave?’
    Blink.

Three
    C arter boards the N Train at Eighth Street and settles in for the ride out to Newtown Avenue in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria. He finds a seat on a long bench, crosses his legs, folds his hands in his lap. Though Carter takes great care to present the world with an instantly forgettable persona, the man who is not there, his conscious aim is to be acutely aware of his surroundings. But this time his attention drifts as the train rumbles through Manhattan, describing a long arc that takes it as far west as Seventh Avenue.
    Janie’s shame has unsettled Carter. Her shame has become his guilt. Carter had been drifting through Africa when Janie’s illness was first diagnosed. He continued to drift for two years afterward, first through Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast and Liberia, then south to Angola and the Congo. Working for anybody who’d have him, doing whatever he was told. He might have come back at any time. No shackles bound him to the carnage. Instead he chased . . . Chased what?
    But that’s just it. Carter can no longer answer this question. Diamonds, that’s how he would have responded if asked even six months before, the pot of gold at the end of the bloodiest rainbow on the planet. And blood there was. An ocean of blood, the locals reduced to slavery, the women with no hands, no arms, no feet, twelve-year-old soldiers high on kaat wielding fully-automatic Kalishnikovs. Children mutilating children.
    It was all a video game to the boy soldiers, right up until they squared off against battle-hardened professionals like Carter. Then they threw down their weapons and their young bodies trembled and their eyes turned inward. And when they finally realized there were no rules and the bloody-thirsty god they served would drink their blood as well, they cried like babies.
    A rapping on the floor at the other end of the car jolts Carter’s awareness. A man in his mid-twenties with a cane and no sign of a limp, glancing around before again jabbing the cane into the floor.
    Bap, bap, bap.
    Without looking directly at the man, Carter takes inventory. He registers a white male, five-ten, maybe 190 pounds, his greasy blond dreadlocks partially concealed by a baseball hat with a torn brim. Despite the cold, the man wears short pants that cover his knees, a hooded sweatshirt and low-top basketball shoes without socks. His face is big and square, his cheeks pitted. His fixed smirk, the mark of a bully, is instantly recognized by Carter.
    Bap, bap, bap.
    The passengers closest to the man huddle in their seats, eyes fixed to the ceiling or floor. His behavior diminishes them. He takes their space and awards it to himself. And if they don’t like it . . .
    Carter doesn’t know when the man got on the train. An oversight, ha-ha. More slippage. There was a time when his own shadow couldn’t sneak up on him.
    Bap, bap, bap.
    Dropping his elbows to his knees, Carter leans forward, drawing the attention of the man at the other end of the car. The man looks at Carter, then turns away, his smirk vanishing as if he’s read Carter’s mind in that brief moment.
    How easy, Carter is thinking, how easy it would be to kill this man, how easy, easy, easy, easy, easy . . .
    After locking the door to his apartment, Carter turns on his computer. When prompted, he enters a password that allows him access to the hard drive: @e4oIBn3o87y5()&. Memorizing this password took nearly a week, but the result is worth the effort. This level of encryption will frustrate any government agency short of NASA. Or so Thorpe claimed when he insisted that Carter install the program.
    Thorpe is even more paranoid than Carter, which is the only thing