Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“So they were going to eat up your little mine and all its profits anyway.”

“Yup.”

“But there wouldn’t be any profits.”

He was watching her carefully now, dabbing at the last of his cuts.

“How much was the loan for?” she asked.

He smiled. “Seventy million.”

“In cash?” She had to force herself to keep her voice low.

He nodded. “And another four hundred and fifty million in stock options.”

“But the options are worthless.”

“ Sí .”

She walked in a small circle, her feet crunching leaves and pine needles, until she got it. “All you’ve been after from the beginning was the seventy million.”

“Yup.”

“And you got that seventy million?”

He tossed the last of the bloody swabs into a plastic bag, held the bag out in front of her. “Oh, did I ever. It’s sitting in a bank in Grand Cayman, waiting for me to walk in and pick it up.”

She dropped her own bloody swabs in the bag. “So what’s the hitch in this great plan of yours?”

His face darkened. “The hitch is that the moment we wired the money out of the account in Rhode Island, we were on a clock. That kind of transaction gets noticed quick, particularly by the likes of Cotter-McCann. We made two mistakes — we underestimated just how fast they’d notice the wire because we had no way of knowing they had someone on the payroll in Homeland who flagged it for an SAR.”

“Which is?”

“Suspicious Activity Report. We knew we’d get flagged, but there’s normally a delay between the flagging and the payer hearing about it.”

“What else didn’t you count on?”

“You got an hour?” he said ruefully. “You try something like this, there’s about five hundred things that can go wrong and only one that can go right. So we didn’t count on them putting a tracker on my car. And they didn’t even do it because they were suspicious at that point. They did it because it’s their standard operating procedure.”

“And they followed you where?”

“Same place you did. Nicole’s.” Something caught in his voice. Authentic grief, she would have assumed, if she didn’t know how good an actor he was. “They probably missed me by ten minutes. But they found her. And they killed her.” He exhaled a steady stream of air through pursed lips. He stepped out from under the hatchback abruptly, closed it, and clapped his hands together. “Anything else you really, really need to know right now that can’t wait?”

“About a hundred things.”

“That can’t wait,” he repeated.

“How’d you look so dead? At the bottom of the harbor? With the blood flowing out of you and the...” She waved her hands as she trailed off.

“Stagecraft,” he said. “The blood was easy. That’s all squibs. The ones in my chest were wired up before you got on the boat. The ones in my mouth came out of the bag of peanuts, as you know. The oxygen tank was waiting for me as long as I could get to that rock in time. You dove in fast, by the way. Shit. I barely had time to get situated.”

“The look,” she said impatiently. “You looked right at me with dead eyes and a dead face.”

“Like this?”

It was as if someone had plunged a needle full of strychnine into the base of his brain. All light bled from his eyes and then from the rest of his face. It wasn’t only that his face grew impossibly still, its spirit vacated.

She waved her hand in front of his eyes and they remained fixed on nothing and never blinked.

“How long can you do this?” she asked.

He let out a breath. “I probably could have done another twenty seconds.”

“And if I’d stayed down there looking at you?”

“Oh, I had maybe forty more seconds, a minute tops. But you didn’t. And that’s what a good grift always relies on — that people will act predictably.”

“If they’re not Cotter-McCann.”

“Touché.” He clapped his hands together again and the ghoulish aura of death left his face. “Well, we’re still on a tight clock, so mind if I download the rest to you while we go?”

“Go where?”

He pointed north. “Canada. Caleb’s meeting us there in the morning.”

“Caleb?” she said.

“Yeah. Where’d you ditch him, the safe house?”

She stared back at him, no idea what to say.

“Rachel.” He stopped with his hand on the driver’s-side door. “Please tell me you went to the safe house after the boat.”

“We never made it.”

His face drained. “Where’s Caleb?”

“He’s dead, Brian.”

He put both hands to his face. He brought them back down and then pressed them flat against the windows of the Range Rover. He lowered his head and didn’t seem to breathe for a full minute.

“How’d he die?”

“They shot him in the face.”

He came off the car, looked at her.

She nodded.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Two men looking for a key.”

He looked helpless. Worse, she realized. Bereft. He gave the woods a wild look, as if he were about to faint again, and then he slid down the side of the Range Rover and sat on the ground. He trembled. Wept.

In three years, she’d never seen this Brian. She’d never seen anything close. Brian didn’t cave, Brian didn’t break, Brian didn’t need help . She was witnessing the reduction of him, the essential pieces at the core of him being removed and carted off. She engaged the safety on the pistol and placed it behind her back and sat on the ground across from him. He wiped at his eyes and sucked air in through wet nostrils that still glistened with blood.

His hands shook along with his lips when he said, “You saw him die?”

She nodded. “He was as close to me as you are now. The guy just shot him.”

“Who were these guys?” He blew air through his lips in short bursts.

“I don’t know. They looked like they sell insurance. And not the high-end kind, the kind you get at strip malls.”

“How’d you get away from them?”

She told him, and in the telling, she watched him return a bit to form. The trembling stopped, his eyes cleared.

“He had the key,” he said. “It’s over. Game fucking over.”

“What key?”

“Safe deposit box at a bank.”

She fingered the key in her pocket. “Bank in the Caymans?”

He shook his head. “Rhode Island. That last day? I carried around a bad feeling, an ugly hunch, I guess. Either that or I simply panicked like a fucking child. I dropped our passports in the bank. If anyone got to me, I figured Nicole could get to them. But they got to Nicole instead. So I handed the key off to Caleb.”

“What passports?”

He nodded. “Mine, Caleb’s, Haya’s, the baby’s, Nicole’s, yours.”

“I don’t have a passport anymore.”

He stood wearily and held out his hand. “Yes, you do.”

She took the hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. “I’d know if I had a passport. Mine expired two years ago.”

“I got you another one.” He still hadn’t dropped her hand.

She still hadn’t pulled it away. “Where’d you get a picture?”

“The photo booth in the mall that time.”

Not bad, she thought. Not bad.

She pulled the key out of her pocket. She held it up and watched him come back from the dead for the second time in fifteen minutes. “This key?”

He blinked several times, then nodded.

She put it back in her pocket. “Why did Caleb have it?”

“Caleb was supposed to get the passports. He and I could impersonate each other in our sleep. Shit, his version of my signature looked more like mine than mine.” He looked up at the hard sky. “You and I were supposed to slip into Canada, meet the others in a place called Saint-Prosper. From there — fuck — from there, we’d all go to Quebec City, fly out of the country.”