Marcus Sakey - The Blade Itself

The answer hit him like a slap, and despite everything, he found himself grinning. Sure you could .

One day a year.

After all, tomorrow was Halloween.

Danny picked up his truck from the parking deck at the Sears Tower – speaking of robbery, twenty dollars for a couple of hours – and headed west. His day was nearly over. A final stop at the office to keep up appearances and drop off the updated work schedules from the job site he’d visited earlier, and then it was time to go home.

What he would do when he got there was a bigger question.

The way Karen had stormed out on him last night, leaving him sitting alone at the table – she didn’t act that way normally. It had made part of him smile – what a woman, like an old-time movie star – but still, it was a problem. She’d had an intuition that something was wrong before Nolan called; now she was clearly sure of it. Worse, even if the call had nothing to do with the kidnapping, it had inadvertently pointed her in the right direction. She must be wondering if he had gone back to his old ways.

If he had backslid.

And she’d be right.

Danny almost heard the voice out loud. He looked over to the passenger seat where his father sat, a cigarette smoldering. As a kid, Danny had always tried to convince him to quit, saying it would kill him. He’d been wrong about that. About so many things.

“It’s only two more days,” he told his father. “Then I go back to the truth.”

His father stared at him, his face craggy and hard as stone, his eyes judging. Danny didn’t need to imagine him talking. He knew what the words would be.

“I know,” he said aloud. “I know. Gold statues with clay feet. Can’t build truth on lies, right?”

Still. With a little care, couldn’t he get through the next day without Karen ever finding out? Once the job was done, Evan would be out of their life. He’d have protected Karen and Tommy both. Things could go back to normal.

“Tell the truth. Do the right thing. Be a man. It was always so easy for you to say.” But even as silence swallowed his words, Danny knew them for a lie. Nothing in his father’s life had been easy. An eighth-grade education and no skills in anything but construction. A twice-mortgaged tract house with a wife and child inside. There had been no blinders on his eyes, no visions of financial ease or early retirement. But every morning he’d gotten up, squared his shoulders, and done what was needed. His life had been a monument to doing things anyway.

Danny turned left, heading for the office, past hot dog joints and pawnshops with signs that glowed against the dying sky. For what had to be the ten thousandth time, he asked himself the question.

What if he went home and told her the truth?

Would she understand?

Would she leave?

There was no way of knowing, not really. As much as she loved him, he knew her terror of that old world was strong. Maybe stronger. Telling her could go either way.

Only suckers played even money. Even money meant you won as often as you lost. With stakes this high, the smart play was to lie low.

In the passenger seat of his imagination, his father snorted with disgust and looked away.

And suddenly Danny realized that the question wasn’t what she would do if he told her. It was whether he could live with himself if he didn’t. Whether he wanted to be the kind of person who could live with that.

Was he content to be just a thief with a better address?

“Okay,” he said. “You win. I’m going to drop these papers off, and then I’m going to drive home and bet everything that matters on your principles. Happy?”

His father was as silent in death as he had been in life. But as Danny pulled into the firm’s parking lot, he felt something in him loosen, like his chest had been wrapped with bands of steel that suddenly gave. He took a deep breath that filled him to the soles of his shoes.

Screw the smart play. He’d tell her the truth.

Danny stepped out of the car, grabbed his bag, and started for the back door. Overhead, the sky glowed an imperial violet, the city light stretching to bounce off the clouds. Dry leaves crunched under his shoes, and the air smelled clean, crisp with autumn and its promise of winter. Five minutes here, and he’d be on his way home, toward whatever followed the truth.

“Danny?”

The voice from behind him was female and scared, and the moment he heard it he knew something was terribly wrong.

He’d been thinking of Karen, and so some part of him was surprised, when he spun around, to see Debbie. She looked lousy, her back slumped, eyes raw, cheeks a slapped red. There was little trace of the rock diva pose she usually affected. His first instinct was primal, a male urge to comfort a female, to put his coat around her cold shoulders and make everything okay.

His second was to wonder what she was doing in the parking lot of the man whose kidnapped child she was supposed to be babysitting.

“Debbie.” He glanced in both directions. No one in sight, but there were still a dozen cars in the lot. Including, he noticed, her beat-to-crap Tempo. Why hadn’t he spotted that coming in? “What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.” Her voice came out with a hint of sniffle.

Was she losing her nerve? Just what he needed, something else to shake the fragile structure he was holding together with will and prayer. “You shouldn’t be here.” His voice came out harsh, and she shrank back a half step.

“I know. I’m sorry. I just, I need to talk to you.”

He shook his head. “I’ll come by the site in the morning, we can talk then.” He took her arm and steered her toward the Tempo. He had to get her out of here before somebody came out the back door and saw them together. Even her car was a problem – it was a small company, people noticed things, and half the car’s back window was covered with punk band stickers, not exactly par for the construction business. She let him hustle her along, but kept talking.

“No, look, it’s important. Danny, I’m serious. It’s important!” She yanked her arm out of his. “It’s Evan.”

His stomach dropped, and he felt the bands on his chest cinching back up. He looked at her, and saw how wide her eyes were. This wasn’t her touchy-feely side freaking out. Something was actually wrong.

“Okay.” He looked around again. “Only not here. Okay?”

She nodded, and he gestured to her car as he started for his own. “Follow me.”

They got out of the parking lot without anyone spotting them, and part of him relaxed, until he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the intent expression on Debbie’s face, her lips pressed thin and pale.

It’s Evan , she’d said. What could that mean? Nothing good had ever followed those words, and there wasn’t much reason to hope this time would be different.

He drove half a mile to the Sunshine Plaza, a strip mall boasting a Jewel-Osco, a tanning salon, one nail place with signs in English and another with signs in Spanish. The parking lot was only half full, but he steered past empty aisles, turned left at the side of the building, and pulled around back. The mall’s Caribbean-fantasy facade was replaced by gritty reality: generators and air conditioners, graffitied brick walls, rows of delivery bays. He backed in beside a Dumpster as she pulled up. Sour milk and old exhaust filled his nostrils when he stepped out of the truck.

“Okay. What is it?”

She looked at him, looked away. “You have a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

She nodded. “I quit a couple of years now.”

He waited.

“I’m sorry for jumping you like that. I was trying to find you, and I remembered that we’d followed you there, and the only other place I could think of was your house. But I thought that would be a bad idea. I figured you wouldn’t want your girlfriend to see you talking to me.” Her voice sounded sad, like it was a line she had too much experience delivering.