Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“Will do.” Ned stretched out his hand to Kessler. “Nice to meet you, Detective.”

“You too, Mr. Temple.”

“Hemple,” Ned said, shaking his hand.

“Of course. My bad.” Kessler dropped his hand. “Take care, sir.”

For an odd few seconds none of them moved. Eventually Ned turned and headed east along the sidewalk, his hands in his pockets. Rachel glanced over at Detective Kessler, who seemed to be waiting on something. When she looked back down the darkened street, Ned was nowhere to be seen.

“So that’s Ned.”

“That’s Ned.”

“He and Rosemary been married a long time?”

“Ages.”

“No wedding ring, though. He didn’t strike me as the bohemian type thinks rings are just symbols of societal oppression from the dominant paradigm.”

“Probably just in for a cleaning.”

“That could be it,” he said. “What’s he do, our friend Ned?”

“You know, I’m not sure.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Some kind of manufacturing, I think.”

“Manufacturing?” Kessler said. “We don’t make shit in this country anymore.”

She shrugged. “You know how it is with neighbors these days.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“Everyone guards their privacy.” She gave him a tight smile.

He opened the passenger door to a dark four-door Ford. “Let me give you a ride to get your cigarettes.”

She looked back down the street. Every twenty feet was a pool of light cast by the streetlamps. In between those lights lay the dark.

“Sure.” She got in the car.

Kessler got in, put his hat between them on the seat, and pulled away from the curb. “I been on some fucked-up cases, if you’ll excuse my language, but this is one of the more fucked-up ones I been on of late. I got a dead blonde in Rhody, a missing guy leading a double life, his lying wife—”

“I’m not lying.”

“Oh ho!” He wagged a finger at her. “ Yes yes yes you are, Mrs. Delacroix. You’re telling so many lies I can’t even count them. And your neighbor there, the married guy in the Members Only jacket and the JCPenney slacks without the wedding ring? Guys like him don’t live in buildings like yours. He didn’t even know where the fucking garage was, and the doorman had clearly never seen him before.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Lucky I’m a cop. They fucking pay us to notice shit like that.”

“You say ‘fuck’ a lot.”

“And why not?” he said. “It’s a great word. Verb, noun, adverb, adjective. ‘Fuck’ is fucking utile.” He turned left. “My problem with your lying is that I don’t know why or what you’re lying about. It’s still too early in the case. But, man, do I know you’re lying.”

They stopped at a light and she felt certain Ned was going to appear by Kessler’s window and start firing into the car.

The light turned green and Kessler took another left and parked outside the Tedeschi’s on Boylston, across the street from the Prudential. He turned in the seat toward her and all the hard mirth left his eyes and what replaced it was something she couldn’t identify.

“The late Nicole Alden,” he said, “was executed. As professional a hit as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. So your husband with the double life? There’s a good chance he’s a pro at, you know, ending lives. And either him or some of his friends may come a-calling. And Rachel?” He leaned across the seat, close enough that she could smell the Altoids. “They will fucking execute you.”

He couldn’t save her. Even if he was interested, and she doubted he was. His job was to close the Nicole Alden murder. He’d decided with a cop’s narrow certitude that the best way to do that was to pin the murder on Brian. But when Brian didn’t turn back up, Kessler would dig deeper. Maybe he’d find out she’d been in Providence just before the victim was killed. Zipcars, she was fairly certain, had tracking devices on them so the company always knew where their cars were. Wouldn’t take much to put Rachel on that street outside Nicole Alden’s house. And then the scenario was easy to see — wife discovers husband has another wife with a baby on the way to boot and kills her. And if that scenario wasn’t damning enough, there was the dead body of her husband’s business partner sitting up in her apartment. And a coroner’s examination would prove said partner was dead prior to Rachel claiming to this very police officer that he was alive and well and passed out on her couch.

“I don’t like being bullied,” she told Detective Kessler.

“I’m not bullying you. I’m stating facts.”

“You’re stating conjecture. In the most threatening manner possible.”

“It’s not conjecture,” he said, “to notice you’re terrified right now.”

“I’ve been terrified before.”

He shook his head slowly, this tough cop looking at this entitled yuppie without a day job. Probably pictured her walk-in closet full of high-end workout clothes, Louboutin heels, silk business suits she wore to restaurants no cop could afford.

“You think you have but you haven’t. There’s darkness in this world you can’t learn about watching TV and reading books.”

That night at the camp in Léogâne, the men strode back and forth through the mud and the heat in the light of the trash can fires, serpettes and bottles of cheap liquor in hand. Around two in the morning Widdy said to her, “If I let them have me now, they may only” — she made a circle with one hand and drove the index finger of the other hand in and out of the circle several times — “but if we make them wait, they may grow angry and” — she drew the same finger across her throat.

Widdy — Widelene Jean-Calixte was her full name — was eleven years old. Rachel had convinced her to stay hidden. But, as Widdy had predicted, all that did was make the men angrier. And a short time after sunup, they had found her. Found them both.

“I know a little bit about the darkness in this world,” Rachel told Trayvon Kessler.

“Yeah?” His eyes searched hers.

“Yeah.”

“And what have you learned?” he whispered.

“If you wait for it to find you, you’re already dead.”

She got out of the car. When she came around to the sidewalk, he’d rolled down his window. “You planning on giving me the slip?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“I’m a cop. Kinda good at keeping people in my sights.”

“But you’re from Providence. And this is Boston.”

He acknowledged that with a slight tilt of his head. “Next time you see me, then, Mrs. Delacroix, I’ll have a search warrant in my hand.”

“Fair enough.” She walked up the sidewalk as he pulled away. She didn’t even pretend to walk into the store, just watched Kessler turn right at the next corner before she crossed Boylston to the cab stand in front of a hotel. She hopped into the back of the first cab and told the driver to head for the marina at Port Norfolk.

The parking lot at the marina was empty, so she had the driver wait a few minutes to see if anyone had followed her but the entire neighborhood was gone to bed, so quiet you could hear the boats bump against their slips and the old wood buildings creak in the night breeze.

Back on the boat, she went into the galley, turned on the lights, and pulled the keys out of the drawer where she’d left them when they’d tied the boat off. She untied the ropes next and then motored out into the harbor, running lights on full. Twenty minutes later, she could see Thompson Island appear in the starlight, and a minute after that she reached the minuscule island with the one bent tree. She went back into the galley, and this go-around, with the luxury of time, she found the scuba gear: mask, flippers, oxygen tank. She rummaged around a little more and found another flashlight and a wet suit, woman’s medium, belonging, she presumed, to the late Nicole Alden. She changed into the suit, donned the oxygen tank, flippers, and mask, and returned with the flashlight to the stern. She took her seat on the gunwale and looked up at the sky. The cloud bank from earlier had moved on and the stars arrayed themselves in clusters, as if seeking the protection of the herd, and she felt them not as celestial things, as gods or the servants of gods, but as castoffs, exiles, lost in the vast ink sky. What appeared as clusters down here were, up there, fields a million miles wide. The closest stars were light-years apart, no closer to one another than she was to a tribeswoman of the Saharan steppe in the fifteenth century.