Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

She looked in his eyes and he looked back and neither of them said a word until she said, “So all six of us were supposed to leave the country together?”

“That was the plan, yeah.”

“You, your best friend, his wife and child, and your two wives.”

He dropped her hand. “Nicole wasn’t my wife.”

“Then who was she?”

“My sister.”

She stepped back and took a hard look at his face to see if he was telling the truth or not. But then what did she know about that? She’d lived with him for three years and never knew his real name or profession or history. Just two nights ago, he’d convinced her he was dead, stared back at her with sightless eyes from the bottom of the ocean. This was not a man who wore his lies the way normal people wore theirs.

“Was your sister pregnant?”

He nodded.

“Who was the father?”

“We don’t have time for this.”

“Who was the father?”

“Guy named Joel, okay? Worked at the bank with her. Married guy, three kids of his own. It was a fling. But Nicole always wanted a kid, so even after she broke things off with Joel, she went forward with the pregnancy. She didn’t need Joel’s support; we were going to be sitting on seventy million. You want to meet Joel? I can set it up. You can ask him if his dead ex-mistress was six months’ pregnant with his child when someone executed her in her kitchen because her brother” — he was pacing now, agitated — “her dumb fuck brother left his car in front of her house while he went back to Boston to shock you back to reality.”

Her laugh sounded like a bark. “You what ? You tried to shock me back to reality?”

He was all earnest innocence. “Well, yeah.”

“That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard.”

“I needed you ready to run. I didn’t expect Cotter-McCann to bite down hard on the hook for, shit, three months. Six? I was hoping for six. But they fucking bit early because they’re aggressive and greedy and they want what they want on their timetable, no one else’s. I didn’t expect them to put the money into our account and hire an independent consulting firm to double-check the mine on the same day. But they did. And I didn’t expect them to put a two-man hit squad on me and my crew simultaneously. But, once again, they did. So I had to skip plan A, dump plan B, and go right to plan C, the one where I shock you the fuck awake. And, whattaya know, it worked.”

“Nothing worked. Nothing—”

“You afraid to drive anymore?”

“No.”

“Afraid to take cabs?”

“No.”

“Afraid of wilderness or wide open spaces? How about elevators? Diving into the ocean? Have you had a panic attack, Rachel, since this whole thing started?”

“How could I tell? I’ve been in a state of panic ever since I saw you walk out of the back of a building in Boston when you said you were in London.”

“Right.” He nodded. “And you’ve overcome that panic, every minute of every day since, to do what needed to be done. Including killing me, by the way.”

“But you didn’t die.”

“Yeah, well, my apologies.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not afraid anymore because you stopped listening to anyone but your own primal self. You had all the ‘evidence’ you needed to crawl back into your life and stay there. I didn’t paint the clues in neon; I made you work for them. You could have trusted your eyes — the visa stamps looked real enough, to give you just one example — but you trusted your instinct, babe. You acted from what you knew there” — he pointed at her chest — “not here.” He pointed at her head.

She stared at him for a long time. “Don’t call me ‘babe.’”

“Why not?”

“Because I hate you.”

He took that into consideration. Shrugged. “That’s how we usually feel about the things that wake us up.”

They left Caleb’s smashed-up SUV in the woods and drove the Range Rover three hundred miles south to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, just south of the Massachusetts border and about fifteen miles north of Providence. They’d had a lot of time to talk on the drive but hadn’t really, except about the essentials. They’d listened to the radio long enough to hear they were both considered “persons of interest” in the deaths of two people in two different states. Police in Providence and Boston were tight-lipped as to why they believed the murder of a small-town bank employee in Providence was connected to the murder of a businessman in Boston, but they were determined to meet with Brian Alden, the brother of the Providence victim and business partner of the Boston victim, and with Brian Alden’s wife, Rachel Childs-Delacroix. Handguns registered to both “persons of interest” had not been recovered at their Back Bay home, so they were to be considered armed.

“Basically my life is ruined,” Rachel said somewhere near Lewiston, Maine. “Even if I could clear my name.”

“Big if,” Brian said.

“I’d fuck myself financially to do it.”

“Spend a lot of time in jail while that was happening.”

She shot him a dirty look he didn’t see because his eyes were on the road. “And they could still bury me deep on ancillary charges.”

He nodded. “Obstruction of justice comes to mind. Cops tend to get a bit miffed when you forget to tell them there’s a corpse sitting at your dining room table. Leaving the scene of a crime, unlawful flight, reckless driving, I’m sure I’ll think of a few more.”

“This isn’t funny,” she said.

He looked over at her. “When did I give the impression it was?”

“Right now. You’re being sarcastic, snarky.”

“I get that way when I’m terrified.”

“You’re terrified? You.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Beyond terrified. If no one’s found the safe house and we can do what we need to do there and if we can slip into Providence without being made, and if we can get into the bank and get to the safe deposit box where I stashed the passports and the running money, if we can still get back out of that bank and out of Providence and grab Haya and the baby and find an airport where no one’s looking for us and our faces aren’t plastered over everyone’s home screen and the nine TVs tuned to CNN in the airport bar, and if they don’t have someone waiting for us in Amsterdam, then, yes, we could possibly survive the year. But I’d put our odds at successfully navigating all those obstacles at, oh, I dunno, grim to none.”

“Amsterdam,” she said. “I thought the bank was in the Caymans.”

“It is, but they’ll definitely be waiting for us there. If we get to Amsterdam, we can wire it all to Switzerland.”

“But why stop in Amsterdam?”

He shrugged. “I’ve always liked Amsterdam. You’d like it too. The old canals are pretty. Lotta bikes, though.”

“You talk like you’re taking me sightseeing.”

“Well, that’s the plan, isn’t it?”

“We’re not together,” she said.

“No?”

“No, you lying sack of shit. This is a business arrangement from here on out.”

He rolled down his window for a moment, took a blast on his face to wake himself up. Rolled the window back up.

“Okay,” he said, “you play the business tip. But I’m in love with you.”

“You don’t know the first thing about love.”

“Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.”

“Did you ever search for my father?”

“What?”

“When I met you, you were a private investigator.”

“That was a scam. My first one, actually.”

“So you were never an actual private investigator?”