Free Two for the Show by Jonathan Stone Page A

me. But I won’t let them chain me to the tub this time.”
    He sees my startled look, regarding him as if he is delusional, so he tries to explain. “Look, they were afraid I was going to get scared. Back out on them, run away. They saw me as only a pawn in the plan. And I started to see myself that way too.” He pauses, considers the logic of that for a moment. “But I’m stronger now. After this, they’ll realize they can’t mess with me like that anymore. I won’t tell them how I got away, but they’ll see I have the power to escape. And I still want my portion of the deal. Because I still want to get even with Wallace the Amazing, and this is the best way to do it. And they still need me, after all. I’m still the proof of his criminal past that would destroy him, that will give us all leverage . . . and cash.”
    I’m stronger now . Thanks to me. Thanks to my cutting the chain links in the bathroom. Thanks to my care and feeding.
    I thought I was saving the real Dave Stewartson. If I had thought I was saving the Stewartsons’ fellow blackmailer—and plunging my quiet, orderly life into question, confusion, anxiety, by discovering the real Archer Wallace—I would not have acted so heroically, so instinctively. I would have left him in that bathroom.
    He pauses, considering again. Sits up taller, adjusts his shoulders back. “Come to think of it . . . why do I even need them?”
    You need them because they are the pros, I’m thinking. Because they’re threatening. They’re scary. They generate consequences. You need them, because you think you don’t. Because you don’t understand the seriousness of the game you’re about to play.
    “Are you going to tell them about me?” I ask.
    “You’re part of the cash machine. You’re part of the goose and golden egg. You won’t confirm it, but I know. It’s obvious. So I’d be crazy to give you up. To risk unplugging the cash machine. I guess you’ll have to trust me not to tell. It’s in my own self-interest, all our self-interest really, to keep Wallace the Amazing generating income. Remaining successful. Plus, if I give you up, then you become the leverage; they don’t need me anymore—you take my place as the one to bring him down. So I won’t be doing that. No, you need to stay on his payroll.” He smiles. “A payroll that’s about to expand, that’s all.”
    “And you think they’re just gonna let you waltz back in and rejoin them? Like nothing happened? Like you never left? They’ll trust you less than ever. These are not nice people, Archer.”
    He shrugs. Is quiet. Is thinking about that, I hope.
    I try once again to find out more about Dave Stewartson—the ghostly original one, my Dave Stewartson—but these new Stewartsons have done a good job of obliterating him. I stumble across more and more of the new Dave all over the Internet—licenses, IDs, tax filings, applications, more social media. All of it has digitally consumed the original Dave Stewartson, swallowed up his memory and his evidence, so that all I have is that one original picture, which presumably the new Dave has attempted to take down if he knows about it. I stare at the old Dave again—offi cial, somber, expressionless. I didn’t search deeply enough, carefully enough. I made an amateurish error. I am staring at my own failure. The old Dave is in some government files, in someone’s old photo albums, but whose? Where? What broken family? What fleeting friendship? The picture says, in a small scratchy voice, like a thin, struggling radio transmission: It’s me. Don’t forget. It’s me. I’m still here. Find me.
    Carefully casing the motel for hours, rescuing Wallace just before dawn, I hadn’t slept at all. And since then, not surprisingly, I had continued to lay awake at night, restless, unable to sleep, thinking about both Wallaces, and myself, and my awkward painful last encounter with Debbie—Debbie now gone. A kind of strange, dizzying, intimate