Jeff Abbott: Cut and Run

He awoke suddenly, hearing the soft little click of the front door shutting, a wetness on his cheek. The linger of a kiss. The scent of gardenia.

He sat up in the darkness, the guest house too quiet, knowing it was empty. He glanced at the clock: 3:34 a.m.

Whit went to the guest bedroom. She was gone.

He hurried out the front door and up the driveway. Eve stood at the curb, one of his duffel bags packed and sitting at her feet.

‘Where are you going?’ he said.

She turned. ‘Oh. Honey. I hoped you wouldn’t wake. I shouldn’t have kissed you good-bye. But I had to.’

‘Where the hell are you going?’

‘I have unfinished business. The less you know, the better.’ She drew a hand through her hair. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

‘You don’t leave in the middle of the night if you plan on coming back.’ His voice rose; he suddenly felt as scared as a child, and he forced himself to calm down.

‘I don’t fit in with your life, Whit. I don’t. I do love you, but

…’

‘Bullshit. Bullshit. I’m calling you on your bullshit, Mom.’

‘I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. But I need to do this. Alone.’

He saw it then. ‘You know where Frank is. With the money.’

She glanced down the darkened street.

‘Did he call you? After what he did you’d go back to him?’

‘Of course not. But I can find him.’

‘Who gives a shit about that money, Mom? You’re here. You’re home.’

‘But it’s five million, honey. Five million.’ She gave a quick little shrug. ‘Probably four by now, knowing Frank, but still…’

Whit shook his head. ‘You aren’t going to do this to me again.’

Out of the dark a cab from a Corpus Christi taxi service rolled up and stopped three houses down. Of course. She wouldn’t give the cab this address; the headlights might wake him up.

She tried to smile at him. ‘Whit, honey. Let’s not have a brutal little scene. You can either let me go or tie me up, but I’ll go eventually. That’s the hard, bitter truth. Love me, but don’t change me into what you’ll love better.’

‘Mom-’

‘And I want to change you, and I can’t. You don’t want what I call life. You’re going to look at me every day and see the bad things you did. Don’t be more like me. Be like your father. Your brothers. Even Claudia.’

‘I can tell the police about James Powell,’ he said, desperation rising in his voice. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.’

‘Go right ahead.’ She gave her little shrug. ‘He threatened to kill you and your brothers if I didn’t do what he said, so I killed him. You want me to confess to a crime, there you go. I’m not one bit ashamed of it.’

‘Mom. You killed him for that money.’

‘Believe what you want. Do what you like. Lock me up, throw away the key.’ She leaned over, kissed his cheek again. ‘Stay good, baby.’

‘Please don’t. Please don’t do this,’ he said.

She leaned down, picked up her duffel. She didn’t look back, didn’t wave. He watched her get into the cab, vanish into the dark.

Eve who became Ellie

I’m breaking one of my own rules now, because I’m close to a beach. Beaches are okay for me now. To the police I’m a city girl. The Mosleys think of me as a beach girl. But Whit won’t come looking for me again, and he won’t find me if he does.

The beach here at Princeville is absolutely pristine, and the tourists are mostly honeymooners, nice kids, a few golf widows sunning and reading fat novels. The beach here is far prettier than the ones in Texas, but it’s so pretty it almost doesn’t seem real. A dream. So it seems safe.

Here I am Ellie again, now Ellie Masters. Eve fit like a suit faded from fashion, so I shed it. I stayed a while at a small hotel on the south side of Kauai, waiting, thinking, until I found a condo for rent by a landlord living in California. Retired lady, she and her husband moved here, then he died and she moved back to San Francisco to be close to her grandkids. I hope she decides to sell and I bet she’d like cash. God knows I do.

Jacksonville, Florida, was where Frank landed; it was where he spent summers as a kid, visiting grandparents, and he always spoke fondly of it. See, he broke the first rule. I traced him there via a false ID he thought I didn’t know about, he’d gotten it a few years ago from the same guy who got me the Emily Smith cards. Mistake number two. I found him in a beachside house, a modest little bungalow, and walked right up to him on his back porch one cold night and, before he could say I’m sorry, put the bullet in his face. No hello, no good-bye you sorry piece of trash. Not in the mouth like James Powell but right between the wide, lying eyes. Frank was surprised. I was surprised he had as much brain as he did voice. But he was never stupid. My mistake.

The money was hidden in the house, in six different places. I took it and then phoned the Houston police, anonymously reported that I thought I’d seen Frank Polo, who they were looking for, at the Jax address and hung up. My second good deed for the day.

Frank had laid low, hadn’t spent more than a few thousand, and I headed down to Miami, caught a plane to the Caymans, and started re-cleaning the money back through a series of accounts. Finally I put half in an account for me. Half in an unnumbered account for Whit. Mailed him a note with the bank name, the account and access numbers, and ‘I love you.’ Nothing else. I hoped he wouldn’t give it away or refuse to touch it or call the police about it like a high-minded idiot. I sort of tied my boy’s hands; he won’t tell the police now because it’s too many questions, and the money can help make up for all the trouble I caused him and his brothers their whole lives.

I don’t have to work, what with my cash settlement from Frank, but I get restless sitting around so I took a part-time job in a little coffee shop/bookstore in Hanalei. It’s a hippie town near Princeville. The young people here all have dirty feet and it’s not the kind of Hawaiian destination anyone from my previous lives would pick. So I am the world’s oldest barista and I sell travel books and bestselling paperbacks to the vacationers. The dirty-feet kids all like to read Beat Generation writers. They don’t know what life lived running is, trust me. But most of the customers are tourists who come in once and only once, and the other clerks are nice but aren’t nosy. I say I’m from California, where it seems half the world is from, and it’s answer enough.

But every day is a terrible temptation.

The bookstore owner, Doris, a really sweet lady, set up an Internet access on a couple of computers in the store. Thought it’d sell more coffee, and it does; the hippies love it. They come in and e-mail their parents for more money.

But when the store’s not busy, I sit down and I open to a search engine and I want to type in Whit’s name so bad I could cry. I want to know he’s okay. But I’m afraid, every Web site you visit on that machine is recorded in a file somewhere in the world, I’m sure of it, and having made myself vanish again I don’t want to risk it. I would for him and him alone. Because if I know he’s okay, will that be enough? Will I keep from e-mailing him? Or phoning him? Did he get the two-plus million out of the account? Is he having fun with his share or did he give it all away to charity out of pointless guilt? I won’t ever know.

The temptation is like hunger, hell, starvation of the worst sort. Because you imagine that the barest crumb would keep you going.

But I don’t. For weeks and weeks, I don’t. Then I get an idea. I log on using Doris’ account (her password was ‘doris,’ for God’s sakes), go to the Web site for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. I don’t search by Whit’s name on the archives, I search for ‘justice of the peace.’ How many are there in the Coastal Bend? Not many, right?