Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology Read online

  Pamela didn’t know why she cared so much about such things. Maybe from her dad, a cold alcoholic who punished her if the house wasn’t perfectly tidy when he came home from a night at the bar. Then he would tie her up with a torn pair of dirty fishnets and lock her in that dark, damp cellar to teach her a lesson. She‘d scream but he wouldn’t let her out until the next day.

  She would have felt completely alone if not for Jessie.

  Pamela removed her hose from the sink and took them into the bathroom. As she hung them up to dry, she thought about Dr. Reynolds. With his white jacket and gleaming smile, he was the cleanest person she knew. The fact that he saw her in the newly painted Warwick Hospital also helped. Pamela called him her mental health professional; she hated calling him a psychiatrist as that indicated she was crazy, and she knew she wasn’t. She looked forward to seeing Dr. Reynolds today, to tell him the good news.

  She was about to leave the bathroom to get ready when her eyes flickered over to her fishnets. She shook her head.

  Not now.

  Pamela dressed, headed for the hospital. She walked in, feeling good being around all that fresh white paint. She took the elevator to the third floor, scrunching up in the back, away from the others, trying to be invisible. Then she marched down the hall to the doctor’s office. His receptionist, Angela, greeted her with a smile. Pamela intended to smile back as she usually did, but then she saw it—a tiny red speck in the middle of Angela’s white jacket. Was it tomato soup or blood? Pamela turned away in disgust, heart beating fast. She felt nauseated.

  Her nausea went away as soon as she sat in the doctor’s bright waiting room. A few moments later, he called her in.

  She examined the chair that she usually occupied, then, as always, pulled out her cleaning solution. She scrubbed it for a few moments, sat down. “Hi, Dr. Reynolds.”

  “Hello, Pamela, how are you today?”

  “Good.” She smiled.

  “Are you enjoying being out of the hospital?”

  She nodded. “I just had to tell you, Doctor, I met someone new.”

  The doctor’s brow creased. “Oh?”

  “Yes, last night. I went to a bar and this man came up to me. He said I seemed nice.”

  “I see.”

  “He was very handsome and he took my phone number.”

  The doctor tented his fingers as if they were a house that could fall apart at any moment. “You know this is wrong, Pamela.”

  “It’s not wrong.”

  “We’ve discussed this before. You shouldn’t be going out right now.”

  “Why not?”

  The doctor pressed his lips together. “Because of the murder.”

  “I told you I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I understand that’s the way you feel. But there is going to be a re-trial and the court asked me to spend the next several weeks evaluating you.” He pushed back his chair, stood up. Pamela’s chair screamed as she forced it back. “You know what that means, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course there’s no evidence you did anything wrong. However, that girl says she saw you and Hastings together on the night he’d been murdered.”

  “My lawyer proved she lied.”

  The doctor took a deep breath, nodded.

  The session continued but Pamela didn’t say much or listen very closely to what the doctor said. He had ruined it for her. Would she have to keep hearing about this damn case? How many times did she have to explain that she didn’t kill that man? Was everyone against her? Where was Jessie?

  She did remember the doctor saying she shouldn’t go out at night until he gave her the okay. So she went home, watched some TV, tried to write in her diary.

  As the day passed from clean to dirty, she couldn’t take her mind off her fishnets.

  They beckoned her.

  She took off her shoes, slid the stockings onto her bare feet, up her long legs. They felt warm. Powerful. The great thing about fishnets was that they made her feel like a new person. A better version of herself. Stronger. Not scaredy-cat Pamela anymore…but fearless Jessie.

  After she finished dressing, she took the subway down to The Stadium, a bar near the docks frequented by a rough crowd. She sat at a table in the back and ordered a beer, not caring if it interfered with the medicine Dr. Reynolds had prescribed her.

  She chugged the first beer down and instantly felt better. She decided to open one more button on her already open blouse. Jessie liked to show off her body. Then she smiled at the handsome blonde man sitting at another table. He moved toward her.

  “Mind if I sit down, sexy?” he said.

  She shrugged. Jessie wouldn’t answer him directly.

  His eyes ran down her body. “So what’s your name?”

  “Guess.”

  He paused a moment, then spoke. “I’m Dom. Never seen you here before.”

  “Never been.” She didn’t say anything more. Playing with him. Waiting for him to make the next move. He didn’t.

  She waited another moment, then forced her lips on his—tight. It felt good and evil and scary and wonderful and…dirty. A moment later, she got bold and stuck her tongue into his mouth. They kissed for a while. Hungry mouths.

  Suddenly, Dom pulled away from her. “Do you want to go?”

  “Where?”

  “My place.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “C’mon baby, you know you wanna play.”

  She kissed him again hard and in the next moment they left together, hands roaming.

  It happened fast. They entered his room and he tossed her onto the bed. He stared, transfixed by her body. Jessie liked being enjoyed—craved it, yearned for it deeply. He touched her, then slowly peeled off her fishnets.

  * * * *

  Pamela sat in front of a frowning Dr. Reynolds. He was holding a newspaper.

  “What’s wrong, Doctor?”

  He stared at her, his face white. “Another man was strangled with fishnet stockings last night. The same way as Hastings.” He inhaled sharply. “You didn’t go out, did you, Pamela?”

  Pamela cringed, noticing a smear on the newspaper. Then she gazed into the doctor’s bright blue eyes, feeling good, knowing it wasn’t her who went out last night.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  INSIDE JOB, by Mysti Berry

  Ashley cracked her knuckles above the keyboard and waited in the chilly room, computer monitors glowing in the dark. She breathed deeply, pumping oxygen into her brain. When Gary Fish showed up at his island home thousands of miles away, she couldn’t afford slow responses. Her enemy, one of the sexiest figureheads of the new technocracy, was wicked smart when he wasn’t drunk.

  He had started out as her CEO, not her enemy, until It happened. Well, until she understood his connection to It. Now, Mr. Fish was scheduled to arrive in St. Lucia at 3:00 PM local time. Ashley hoped that when she was through with him, he’d wish that he were dead, too.

  She stared at the surveillance camera feed from his home security system for any sign of him. It looked like a still picture—green-blue ocean in the background, a crisp new driveway and high fence in the foreground. She stared at the scene, squinting at the sun dogs that sparkled off the shiny brass of the gate. It looked so warm and clean there.

  As if hired for their charming looks, a burst of schoolchildren in dark uniforms ran past the rich man’s gate to their smaller homes up the road. Ashley had explored the island using satellite maps on the Internet, and discovered that the rich and poor lived impossibly close together. She wondered why the local people didn’t rise up and take away the lovely homes and alluring toys of the rich.

  They were so few.

  A deep green Land Rover crunched up to the entrance gate. Ashley blinked, frozen for a moment. It was actually happening. Everything she’d done up to now could be abandoned. Hacking. Snooping. Writing little blocks of code here and there and inserting them. Using OPP, other people’s passwords. But once she started with
him, she’d have to finish Gary Fish.

  She tapped a key in her darkened office. The monitor changed to the security camera in Gary’s garage. He was alone. With a rush of heat to her face, Ashley realized she had no contingency for Gary being with someone else. Her finger hovered over the keyboard, shaking. Had she really thought of everything? Go or no go, as they said at work.

  Still unsure, she watched Gary preen at his thinning hair in his rear-view mirror. He stepped out of his absurdly large vehicle and tugged off his expensive suit jacket, losing his balance in the process. Pretty jet lagged, or maybe pretty drunk. It must be hotter than hell in that garage, Ashley thought, watching the sweat flower on Gary’s expensive shirt. She saw him jiggle his own tummy, as if trying to decide if he was putting on weight.

  His vanity helped her decide. Go.

  Gary’s garage door slid closed, and fluorescent lights automatically flickered on, just as they had been programmed to. It looked like a movie set—not a tool out of place in the spacious garage. Her fingers danced over the keyboard as Gary moved toward the connecting door to the house. Accessing the new home’s computer system, she locked the rolling door and the connecting door to the house.

  She heard him swear and stumble as he lumbered toward the connecting door. She quickly tapped a few more keys. This triggered the lockdown feature—any “intruder” trying to get in would feel a shock from whatever door or window he tried to escape through, until the cops came. But of course she’d fixed it so the cops would not be alerted.

  “Ouch!” Gary stuffed his shocked hand under the opposite armpit, and swore for quite a while. She waited for him to wind down.

  He fumbled for his cell phone but she dialed the number before he could call anyone.

  “You are in some serious shit.” She used a voice filter, but she needn’t have bothered. He had no idea who she was, eight or eighteen levels down. Her boss had told her, “You’re one of the ones I don’t have to worry about.” And given her a few raises or bonuses in her ten years at the company. Because at Fish.net, not causing trouble wasn’t really valued.

  “Do you know who I am? You’re in serious shit!”

  “You shouldn’t have used your company’s network to wire your private home’s privacy features. Quite the security risk.”

  “Who is this!” Ragged, savage. This was the Gary she’d heard about, legendary for throwing things—he’d once heaved a laptop at the head of his own legal team, who had been trying to tell him something he didn’t want to hear.

  “We can’t tell you that.” Ashley wanted to sound like a force larger than one little employee. She didn’t have a lot of experience lying, but she didn’t want Gary to realize she was alone.

  He snarled incoherently and disconnected. Ashley had a virus ready to install on his phone to kill it the minute he turned it back on. But she didn’t have to do that. The bad-tempered man threw the phone at the garage door, shattering it.

  She also controlled the intercom system. It seemed like something her ancient aunt and uncle in Santa Rosa would have installed, not a technocrat in the new millennium. Apparently he didn’t know that in the last few years, St. Lucia’s Internet penetration had soared to 88% of the population. Ashley had learned a lot while preparing for battle.

  “Bad flight, Gary?” Her voice, distorted to sound like a boxer’s from Brooklyn, snapped Gary out of his temper tantrum.

  “Is that Security? The house has gone haywire!”

  “This isn’t Security. This is the voice of all the people you’ve crushed on the way up.”

  “Michael? Is this a joke? I’m just trying to get in the house and get clean.”

  “It’s not Michael or any of your executives, Gary. We’ve decided it’s time to expose you for the information imperialist that you are. Now I’m going to take the shock off your doorknob. I suggest you go inside. If you try to break out, I’ll burn your house to the ground. And as your construction team should have told you, the house is designed to keep intruders trapped.”

  Gary’s response was to leap into the Land Rover and rev the engine.

  Ashley gasped and fumbled for another control, holding her breath. With a few keystrokes, she killed his engine just as he dropped it into reverse—just before he blew through his own garage door.

  The expletives were long and loud as Gary threw himself out of the Land Rover and bellowed in the air. She saw his face bloat with rage, until he waved his hands in the air and then crashed tight fists of rage down on the hood of his own car, over and over.

  She waited, grateful for the chance to think.

  The humidity and heat of the island must be killing him. She clicked on the air conditioning, hoping he’d respond with a return to rationality. It made her momentarily sick to think she had all the same instincts as a predator working a kidnap victim. She stuffed the thought away, along with all the others.

  “Where are you?” Gary asked, his voice raspy from screaming. He looked around the garage wildly. His house was so new, she realized, he had no idea where the cameras were. “If you’re smart enough to hack into my house, you’re smart enough to know that you are leaving a trail.”

  “We don’t care about that. We care about the people you’ve crushed. You’ve hurt too many people.” Ashley cut her audio when she felt her voice catch. Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe through it.

  “So what?” Gary’s face relaxed. He knew how to negotiate. How could she make him feel vulnerable when she kept making mistakes like this?

  Gary saw something in the garage, but she couldn’t see what as he ducked behind the Land Rover to fetch it. Then she heard the clang of metal on metal. He was prying open runners along the door. If she didn’t stop him, he might be able to pop the door off its tracks and escape.

  Ashley clicked for a minute to the feed from outside the house. No locals hanging around to hear him. But if another flock of children ran by, they might hear him yelling.

  She clicked back to Gary, who had made a small dent in the runner. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and he grunted as he worked.

  It wasn’t going as she had planned. She had expected to pull digital trick after trick in rapid sequence, to overwhelm him before he could think about who was doing it or how to get out of it. But of course, he was familiar with doing battle, and she was a newbie, stomach churning and nerves shattered. But she’d rather die than let Gary know she was frightened.

  “I’m going to push a button to start your house burning, and then I’m going to walk away, unless you drop that and go into the house now.” She had no idea how to burn down the house, but she hoped Gary wouldn’t gamble on that.

  Gary breathed raggedly for a long moment. Then he dropped the heavy metal crowbar and shuffled toward the connecting door into the house. He took one last look around, and then quickly tapped the doorknob. No shock this time.

  Ashley switched the camera feed to indoors. She watched Gary grab a cold beer from the spotless refrigerator, and then throw himself onto a couch in the living room area. Normally it was open to the air, but had been shut up and locked against intruders until his first visit. The locks were on the inside, all electronic. She had altered the pass codes.

  Gary mumbled something. It sounded like, “I knew this house would kill me.”

  Ashley felt her throat ache with sudden grief. She trembled, remembering the horrible smell and the twisted, bloated corpse, leaning to one side, in her father’s favorite chair. It had taken her father’s place, she’d thought at first, shock suffusing her brain.

  “Hurry up, I need a shower,” Gary said after a large swallow of expensive lager. He still thought she was something he could dismiss.

  “Gary, we need you to admit that you’ve rigged the game. You and your Richie Rich friends. Just admit that you take full advantage. You let the hoi polloi believe they have a shot, but these days the pots of gold are all wired with burglar alarms and lobbyists and men behind the scenes, rigging tax laws and all the rest of it
. Just admit it and we’re done.”

  “You don’t have the balls to start your own company, and then you come after me? There would be no Fish.net without me, no way for thousands of people to earn a living, millions to make their businesses more profitable with our software. Stop this crap now, while you have a short list of felonies to do time for.”

  “That’s your position, Gary? It’s a level playing field, and the little guy has only himself to blame?” Ashley trembled with anger and frustration.

  A large screen television started up. She had figured out how to send a recorded stream to his set, using the equipment for renting movies installed on his state-of-the-art flat screen.

  “So what,” was all Gary said, as snippet after snippet of him throwing plates, screaming at underlings, and grabbing his admin’s ass played in an endless loop. The images, stolen from his own company’s security cameras, were grainy and herky-jerky.

  “You look like a convenience-store thief.”

  “You can’t share that without exposing yourself to enough felony counts to go to jail forever—and there’s no provenance without your identity,” Gary said, and then took a lusty draw from his beer.

  “There’s a smoking gun, Gary.”

  A silence stretched between them. She watched as he took a sip from his beer and waited. His cool act was cracking, she thought, watching him scrape the label off his beer bottle.

  Ashley waited, knowing he would feel just a little less in control if he spoke first. Finally, he said, “It’s capitalism, you spoiled brat. And it’s better than coal mining or whatever else you did before I grew a company that can pay you the best wages in the valley. If you don’t like it, grow a pair and build your own empire.” Gary punctuated his bravado by throwing his empty beer bottle at the television.

  “I know someone who did just that. But your style of capitalism killed him. You killed him, sure as if you’d pulled the trigger.” Ashley fought back the image of her dead father’s body, struggled to keep her voice calm. She realized too late that she’d switched from “we” to “I.”