Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Because she hadn’t given him the chance.

She went back out on deck. She felt calm. Too calm. And she recognized it for what it was — shock. She could feel herself in her body but not of it.

She found her gun on the deck where he’d dropped it. She tucked it in her waistband at the small of her back. She lifted Brian’s gun off the table. She walked toward Caleb with it and he narrowed his eyes at her, too late to stop her from whatever she planned to do with it.

She flicked her wrist and tossed it past his head into the ocean. She looked down at him.

“Help me wash the blood off the deck.”

On the drive back, Caleb had trouble taking clean breaths without pain. They both began to suspect Brian had fractured at least one of his ribs. Once they reached the city proper, Caleb bypassed the first exit for Back Bay. At first she thought he meant to take the next one, but when he passed that too, she said, “What’re you doing?”

“Driving.”

“Where?”

“I have a house that’s safe. We need to go there, figure this out.”

“I need to go to my apartment.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“There are very pissed-off people who could be after us by now. We have to get out of this city, not into it.”

“I need my laptop.”

“Fuck your laptop. With the money we’ll have you can buy a new one.”

“It’s not the laptop, it’s the book that’s on it.”

“Download another one.”

“Not a book I’m reading, a book I’m writing.”

He looked wildly at her as they passed under a series of bright lamps, his face white, slightly ghoulish, and helpless. “You didn’t back it up?”

“No.”

“Put it in the Cloud?”

“ No .”

“Why the fuck not?”

“I need my laptop,” she repeated as the exit approached. “Don’t make me pull the gun again.”

“You don’t need your book with the money you’ll—”

“It’s not about money!”

“Everything’s about money!”

“Take the exit.”

“Fuck!” He screamed it at the ceiling and swerved the car into the exit lane.

They came out of a short tunnel onto the edge of the North End and turned left and headed through Government Center toward Back Bay.

“I didn’t know you were writing a book,” he said at one point. “Is it, like, a mystery? Science fiction?”

“No. It’s nonfiction. It’s about Haiti.”

“That could be a tough sell.” His tone was almost chiding.

She loosed a bitter chuckle. “Check your fucking privilege, my man.”

He shot her an apologetic smile. “I’m just telling you the truth.”

“Your truth,” she said.

Up in the apartment, she went into her bedroom and changed again, back into a dry bra and underwear and swapping out the jeans for black tights, a black T-shirt, and an old gray sweatshirt from her college days at NYU. She opened her laptop and dragged the book files into a folder, something she probably should have been doing all along. She addressed an e-mail to herself and attached the folder and hit send. Voilà . Her novel was now accessible to her no matter what computer she used to access it.

She came out of the bedroom with the laptop under her arm to see Caleb had made himself a drink, as she’d known he would. The kicks to the groin, he said, made sitting uncomfortable, so he stood at the kitchen bar and sipped his bourbon and gave her a thousand-yard stare as she entered the kitchen.

She said, “I thought you were in a rush.”

“We have an hour’s drive ahead.”

“By all means then,” she said, “imbibe.”

“What did you do?” he said with a hoarse whisper. “What did you do?”

“I shot my husband.” She opened the fridge but then couldn’t remember why and closed it. She brought a glass to the bar and helped herself to some of the bourbon.

“In self-defense?”

“You were there,” she said.

“I was on the ground. I’m not even sure I was fully conscious.”

The equivocation irritated her. “So you didn’t see it happen?”

“No.”

No equivocation there. So what would he say from the stand someday? Would he say she acted to save his life and her own? Or would he say he wasn’t “fully conscious”?

Who are you, Caleb? she could have asked. And not in the day-to-day parts of you but in the essential ones?

She drank some bourbon. “He turned his gun toward me and I could see in his face what was going to happen, so I shot first.”

“You’re so calm.”

“I don’t feel calm.”

“You sound robotic.”

“It’s consistent then with how I feel.”

“Your husband’s dead.”

“I know that.”

“Brian.”

“Yes.”

“Dead.”

Now she looked across the bar at him. “I know what I did. I just can’t feel it.”

“Maybe you’re in shock.”

“That’d be my guess.” A horrific realization lurked at the back of her skull, deep in the lizard folds, that for all the grief she could feel swelling in her heart, pushing and scraping at its walls, the rest of her body felt alive in a way it hadn’t since Haiti. The grief would consume her when she stopped moving and stopped focusing on the problems immediately at hand, so the trick for now was to not stop moving and not widen her focus.

“Will you go to the police?”

“They’ll ask why I shot him.”

“Because he was kicking me to death.”

“They’ll ask why he was doing that.”

“And we’ll say he freaked out because you discovered his double life.”

“And they’ll say it wasn’t because you were fucking each other?”

“They won’t go there.”

“It’s the first place they’ll go. Then they’ll want to know what business you were in together and if you had any recent disputes over money. So whatever you and Brian were into, you better hope none of it gives you motive to kill him. Because then they’ll decide not only were you and I fucking each other, we were fucking over Brian on a business deal. And then they’ll want to know why I threw the gun in the water.”

“Why did you?”

“Because, Jesus Christ, I was fucking confused? In shock? Overwhelmed? I mean, take your pick. And now, once Brian’s death comes to light, I can’t imagine one scenario in which I don’t end up serving some time in prison. Even if it’s just three or four years. And I won’t go to prison.” Now she could feel something, a flutter of fear that bordered on hysteria. “I won’t sit in a box with someone else holding the key. I won’t fucking do it.”

Caleb watched her, his mouth a small oval. “Okay. Okay.”

“I will not.”

Caleb drank a little more bourbon. “We’ve got to go.”

“Where?”

“A safe place. Haya’s already there with the baby.”

She took her laptop and keys off the counter and then stopped. “His body will resurface.” The realization kicked something loose in the center of her. She felt a little less numb suddenly, a little less calm. “It will, won’t it?”

He nodded.

“Then we have to go back.”

“Go back and do what?”

“Weigh the body down.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know. Bricks. A bowling ball.”

“Where are we going to get a bowling ball at” — he looked at the clock on the microwave — “eleven o’clock at night?”

“He has barbells in the bedroom. Two of them.”

He stared at her.

“For curling. You know the little ones. They’re twenty pounds each. Two of those should do the job.”

“We’re talking about weighing down Brian’s corpse.”