Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

I did that?

She took the car key and the gun with her and got out of the car and stood on the road. She experienced the worst craving she’d had for a cigarette since she’d quit seven years ago. She inhaled the impossibly fresh forest air instead and she couldn’t relate even a little bit to the person she’d been just hours ago, the one who’d contemplated suicide, the one who’d thought of giving up.

Fuck giving up. I’ll give up when I die. And it won’t be by my hand.

His door creaked open and his palms appeared above the window. The rest of him stayed below the roofline. “You done?”

“With what?”

“Beating the shit out of me.”

Her right hand was screaming now, but she wrapped it around the pistol just the same. “Yeah, I guess.”

He raised his head above the roofline and she pointed the pistol at him.

“Jesus!” He ducked down again.

She came around the car in three long strides and trained the gun on him. “Blanks?”

He lowered his hands from around his head and straightened from a crouch, resigned to his fate suddenly. “What?”

“Did you put blanks in this gun too?”

He shook his head.

She pointed the gun at his chest.

“No, really!” He raised his hands again. So maybe not so resigned after all. “Those are real fucking bullets in there.”

“Yeah?”

His eyes widened because he could see hers suddenly, could see what was in them.

She pulled the trigger.

Brian hit the ground. Well, he bounced off the vehicle first, trying to break to his left to escape the bullet. Bounced off the SUV, landed on the ground, hands still up in the universal, if wholly ineffectual, please-don’t-shoot-me gesture.

“Get up,” she said.

He stood, looked at the chunk of bark she’d shot out of the thin pine to his right. Blood dripped from his nose, over his lips, and off his chin. He wiped at it with his forearm. He spit red into the green grass by the side of the road.

“That looks like real blood. How’d you fake the blood in your mouth on the boat?”

“Wanna guess?” A small smile found his eyes but not his lips.

She put herself back on the boat, back in their conversation. She could see him sitting there so calmly as she confronted him about his second wife and second life. And he just sat there, eating.

“The peanuts,” she said.

He gave her a halfhearted thumbs-up. “Two of them were squibs, yeah.” He shot the gun a wary eye. “What are you going to do here, Rachel?”

“I haven’t decided yet, Brian .” She lowered the gun for a moment.

He lowered his hands. “If you kill me — and I wouldn’t blame you — you’re fucked. No money, no way of getting any, wanted for questioning in a murder, and hunted—”

“Two murders.”

“Two?”

She nodded.

He processed that and then continued. “You’re also being hunted by some very bad fucking guys. If you kill me, you’re staring down two, maybe three more days of free air and picking your own clothes to wear. And I know how you like to be stylish, honey.”

She raised the gun again. He raised his hands. He cocked an eyebrow at her. She cocked one back at him. And in that moment — what in the hell? — she felt connected to him, felt like she wanted to laugh. All the rage remained, all the sense of betrayal and fury at him for dismantling her trust, her life ... and yet entwined with it, for just a moment, were all the old feelings.

It took every bit of muscle control she could muster not to smile.

“Speaking of stylish,” she said, “you’re not looking it right now.”

He touched his face with his fingers, came back with blood. He looked at his reflection in the window of the SUV. “I think you broke my nose.”

“Sounded like it at the time.”

He lifted the hem of his T-shirt up his chest and dabbed at his face. “I’ve got a first aid kit stashed nearby. Could we go back for it?”

“Why should I do you any favors, dear?”

“Because I’ve also got an SUV back there that doesn’t look like someone drove it off a fucking bridge, dear .”

They drove back to the clearing and then walked into the woods no more than twenty feet and there sat, perfectly camouflaged, a forest green Range Rover, early nineties vintage, some rust in the wheel wells, some dents in the rear quarter panels, but the tires were new and it had the look of something that would run another twenty years. She kept the gun on Brian as he retrieved a first aid kit from a canvas cargo bin in the back. He sat on the bed under the raised hatchback and rummaged around in the bin until he came up with a shaving mirror. He went to work swabbing the cuts clean with rubbing alcohol, wincing occasionally, scrunching his face against the stings.

“Where should I start?” he said.

“Where can you?”

“Oh, it’s easy. You came in during the late innings. I put this in motion a long time ago.”

“And what is ‘this’?”

“In the parlance of my business, it’s a salting scam.”

“And your business is?”

He looked up at her with mild hurt and dismay, like a fading movie star she’d failed to recognize. “I’m a grifter.”

“A con man.”

“I prefer grifter. It’s got some panache to it. ‘Con man’ just sounds like, I dunno, some guy could be selling you penny stocks or fucking Amway.”

“So you’re a grifter.”

He nodded and handed her some alcohol swabs for her knuckles. She nodded her thanks, tucked the gun in her waistband, and took a few steps back from him as she cleaned her knuckles.

“About five years ago, I came across a bankrupt mine for sale in Papua New Guinea, so I formed a corporation, and I bought the mine.”

“What do you know about mines?”

“Nothing.” He worked on the blood in his nose with a Q-tip. “Jesus,” he said softly with something akin to admiration, “you fucked me up, girl.”

“The mine.” She suppressed another smile.

“So we bought the mine. And simultaneously, Caleb created a consulting company, with an entirely fictitious but quite believable deep history in Latin America, generations of it, if you didn’t look too closely. Three years later, that company, Borgeau Engineering, undertook an ‘independent’ study of the mine. Which by that point, we’d salted.”

“What’s salting?”

“You sprinkle a mine with gold in places that are easier to access — but not too easy — than others. The idea is one of extrapolation — if x percentage of gold is found here, then one can assume the totality of the mine is sitting on y percentage. That’s what our independent consultants—”

“Borgeau Engineering.”

He tipped an imaginary cap to her. “That’s what they ascertained — that we were sitting on resources worth up to four hundred million troy ounces of gold as opposed to four million.”

“Which would drive your stock up.”

“If we had stock, but we didn’t. No, what it would do was make us a potential threat to any competitors in the region.”

“Vitterman.”

“You have been doing your research.”

“I did spend ten years as a reporter.”

“You did. So what else did you find out?”

“That you probably got a loan from a VC concern called Cotter-McCann.”

He nodded. “And why would they loan us money?”

“Ostensibly to help shore the company up against a hostile takeover by Vitterman while you pulled enough gold out of there to make the company impregnable to takeover.”

He nodded again.

“But,” she said, “word around the campfire is that Cotter-McCann is predatory.”

“Very,” he confirmed.