Harlan Coben: Don’t Let Go

“Go ahead and try.”

We both smile like two lovestruck dopes. She puts her hand on mine and keeps it there. “So where to?” she asks.

“The Hunk-A-Hunk-A,” I say. “I’ll grab my car and take it home.”

“Okay.”

We enjoy the quiet for a few moments. Then in a soft voice Maura says, “I can’t tell you how many times I picked up the phone to call you.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Where would it have led, Nap? One year later, five years later, ten years later. If I had called you and told you the truth, where would you be right now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. So I’d sit there with the phone in my hand and I’d play it all out again. If I told you, what would you do? Where would you be? I wanted to keep you safe. And if I came home and told the truth, who’d believe me? No one. If someone did — if the police took me seriously — then those guys at the base would have to silence me, right? And then I started thinking about it this way: I was alone in the woods that night. I ran away and hid for years. So maybe the guys at the base would pin Leo and Diana on me. How hard would that be to do?”

I study her profile. Then I say, “What aren’t you telling me?”

She puts on the turn signal with a little too much care, puts her hand back on the wheel, keeps her eyes too focused on the road. “It’s a little hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“I was on the road for a long time. Moving, hiding, being on edge. Pretty much my entire adult life. That’s the only life I knew. That constant rush. I was so used to it, to running and hiding, I didn’t get being relaxed. It wasn’t my baseline. In my own way, I’d been okay like that, under threat, trying to survive. But then when I slowed down, when I could see clearly...”

“What?”

She shrugs. “It was empty. I had nothing, no one. It felt like maybe that was my fate, you know. I was okay if I kept moving — it hurt more when I thought about what could have been.” Her grip on the wheel tightens. “How about you, Nap?”

“How about me what?”

“How has your life been?”

I want to say, It would have been better if you stayed, but I don’t. Instead I tell her to drop me off two blocks away, so I can walk to the club without anyone seeing her on CCTV. Sure, there is a chance we’ll be picked up by another camera in the area, but by then, this will all be played out, whatever way it ends up going.

Before I get out of the car, Maura again shows me the new app I should use to contact her. It’s supposedly untraceable, and the messages are permanently deleted five minutes after they arrive. When she’s done, she hands me the phone. I reach for the door handle. I’m about to ask her to make me a promise that she won’t run, that no matter what happens, she won’t just disappear on me again. But that’s not me. I kiss her instead. It’s a gentle kiss that lingers.

“There are so many things I’m feeling,” she says.

“Me too.”

“And I want to feel them all. I don’t want to be guarded with you.”

We both get this connection and openness, don’t we? Neither one of us is a kid anymore, and I understand how this potent cocktail of lust and want and danger and nostalgia can warp your perspective. But that’s not what is happening to us. I know it. She knows.

“I’m glad you’re back,” I say, which may rank as the biggest understatement of my life.

Maura kisses me again, harder this time, so that I feel it everywhere. Then she pushes me away, like that old song about the honesty being too much.

“I’ll wait for you by that office in Newark,” she says.

I get out of the car. Maura drives off. My car is where I left it. Hunk-A-Hunk-A is, of course, closed. There are two other cars in the lot, and I wonder whether they too were claimed to be the result of too much drinking. I need to fill in Augie about Maura’s return and Reeves’s demise.

As I drive home, I call him on my mobile. When Augie answers, I say, “Muse wants to meet me at nine A.M.”

“What about?” Augie asks.

“She wouldn’t say. But there are some things I need to tell you first.”

“I’m listening.”

“Can you meet me at Mike’s at quarter to nine?”

Mike’s is a coffee shop not far from the county prosecutor’s office.

“I’ll be there.”

Augie hangs up as I pull into my driveway and park. I manage to stumble out of my car when I hear a laugh. I turn and see my neighbor Tammy Walsh.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” she says.

I wave to her. “Hey, Tammy.”

“Long night?”

“Just some work.”

But Tammy smiles as if it’s written all over my face. “Yeah, okay, Nap.”

I can’t help but smile too. “Not buying that?”

“Not in the least,” she says. “But good for you.”

“Thanks.”

Some twenty-four hours, am I right?

I shower and try to get my head back in the game. I pretty much have the truth now, don’t I? But I’m still missing something, Leo. What? Or am I overthinking it? The base was hiding a terrible secret — that it was a black site for high-value potential terrorists. Would the government kill to keep that a secret? The answer is so obvious the question is by definition rhetorical. Of course they would. So that night, something set them off. Maybe it was Maura running toward the fence. Maybe they spotted you and Diana first. Either way, they panicked.

Shots were fired.

You and Diana were killed. So what could Reeves and his cohorts do? They couldn’t just call the cops and admit what happened. No way. That would expose the entire illegal operation. They also couldn’t just make you both disappear. That would lead to too many questions. The cops — and especially Augie — wouldn’t rest. No, they needed a good ol’-fashioned cover-up. Everyone knew the legend of those train tracks. I obviously don’t know all the details, but my guess is they pulled the bullets from your bodies and then transported you to the tracks. The impact of the train would leave the corpses in a state where no medical examiner would find any clues.

That makes total sense. I have all my answers now, don’t I?

Except.

Except fifteen years later, Rex and Hank are murdered.

How does that fit in?

Only two members of the Conspiracy Club are left alive now. Beth, who is hiding. And Maura.

So what does that mean? Don’t know, but maybe Augie will have a thought.

Mike’s Coffee Shop & Pizzeria somehow manages to look like neither a coffee shop nor a pizzeria. It’s in the heart of Newark, on the corner of Broad and William, with a big red awning. Augie sits by the window. He’s staring at a guy who is eating pizza before nine in the morning. The slice is so obscenely enormous it makes his full-sized paper plate look like a cocktail napkin. Augie is about to crack wise about that when he sees my face and stops.

“What happened?”

There is no reason to sugarcoat any of this. “Leo and Diana weren’t killed by a train,” I say. “They were shot.”

To his credit, Augie doesn’t start with the “What?” “How can you say that?” “There were no bullets found” standard-issue denials. He knows I wouldn’t just say something like that.

“Tell me.”

I do just that. I tell him about Andy Reeves first. I can see he wants to stop me, wants to argue that none of this means Reeves or his men killed Diana and Leo, that he was waterboarding me because he still wanted to protect the secrecy around that black site. But he doesn’t interrupt. Again, he knows me well enough.

Then I get to Maura rescuing me. I skip how Reeves dies for now. I trust Augie with my life, but there is no reason to put him in a spot where he may have to testify to what I’m saying here. Simply put, if I don’t say Maura shot Reeves, then Augie can’t testify to that if he’s under oath.