Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

He shook his head. “I set up that front to do background checks for all the employees of a tech start-up that was setting up shop in the area.”

“Why would you set up a front just to do background checks?”

“There were sixty-four employees of that company, if memory serves. Sixty-four DOBs, sixty-four SSNs, sixty-four histories.”

“You stole sixty-four identities.”

He nodded. It was a quick nod but full of pride. “One of them’s on your passport.”

“But when I came through your office door?”

“I tried to talk you out of hiring me.”

“But when I came back a few months later, you just took my money and—”

“I looked for your father, Rachel. I busted my ass on it. I wish I’d been smart enough to consider that James was his last name, but I wasn’t. But I ID’d every professor with the first name James who’d taught in that region over the previous twenty years, just like I said I did. The only honest work I ever did as a private eye, I did for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re good.”

“I’m what ?”

“You’re good. You’re one of the only good people I’ve ever met. And you’re worth fighting for and fighting with. You’re worth everything.”

“You’re such a liar. You’re running a fucking con right now. On me.”

He thought about that. Eventually he said, “When I met you in the bar that night, Caleb and Nicole kept telling me to get rid of you. Grifters can’t have love lives, they said, just sex lives. This from my sister who would end up getting knocked up by a married guy. She’s giving me advice on love. And Caleb, who would marry a woman who couldn’t speak English. Those are my Dear Abbys.” He shook his head. “‘Don’t fall in love.’ Well, that worked out fucking great for all of us.”

She willed herself not to look over at him but instead out the window.

“I fell for you because that’s what you do when you meet the woman whose face you want to be looking into when you die. You fall. And keep falling. And if you’re really lucky, she falls with you and you never get back up again to where you were because if that was so great, you wouldn’t have needed to fall in the first place. But when I fell, I fell all the way. I had just started this con. I met you the night I closed papers on the mine. Caleb was supposed to meet me at the bar to celebrate, but I saw you and I texted him and told him I’d eaten bad tuna at lunch, and he went out to dinner somewhere by himself. And I looked across the bar and I thought, ‘That’s Rachel Childs. I tried to find her father once. I used to watch her on the news.’ I used to wonder who was lucky enough to go home to you. And then that drunk fucked with you and I got to come to your rescue and the irony is, you thought it might be a con. I always loved that. Made me believe in God for a minute. And you left and I ran out onto the streets looking for you.” He looked across at her. “I found you. And then we had the walk and the blackout and found our amazing bar.”

“What was playing when we entered?”

“Tom Waits.”

“What song?”

“‘Long Way Home.’”

“Should have been ‘16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six.’”

“Be nice.” He shifted in his seat, resettled his wrist against the top of the wheel. “You might not like my methods, Rachel, and it may be unwelcome news to learn I make my living running long cons. So you can fall out of love with me, but I can’t fall out of love with you. I wouldn’t know how.”

She almost bought it, if only for a second, but then she remembered who this man was — an actor, a con man, a grifter, a professional liar.

“People who love each other,” she said, “don’t wreck each other’s lives.”

He chuckled softly. “Sure they do. That’s what love is — where once there was one, now there’s two, and that’s so much less convenient and less orderly and less safe. You want me to apologize for blowing your life up? Okay. I’m sorry. But what did I blow up? Your mother’s dead, you never knew your father, your friends are transitory at best, and you never leave the apartment. What life did I take, Rachel?”

What life indeed, she wondered, as they entered Woonsocket at sundown.

It was a faded, cauterized mill town with hopeful pockets of gentrification that couldn’t compensate for the air of abandonment. The main street was peppered with vacant storefronts. Some mills rose up behind those buildings, their windows broken or nonexistent, the brick edifices festooned with graffiti, the land reclaiming the lower floors and punching cracks through the foundations. It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grown up in the absence, in other people’s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in search of food: Once I get mine, you’re on your own.

Brian drove over a series of dark hilly streets and then down to a quartet of long, four-story buildings that comprised a failed mill sitting along the river with nothing else around it for blocks. Each brick building had at least a hundred windows fronting the street and the same amount again on the river side. The high window frames in the center of the buildings were twice as large as the others. Brian drove around the complex to reveal a pair of covered passageways between the fourth floors connecting the buildings, so that the complex, if seen from the air, would look like a double H.

“This is your safe house?” she said.

“No, this is an abandoned mill.”

“So where’s the safe house?”

“Nearby.”

They rolled past broken windows and weeds the height of the Range Rover. Gravel and rocks and pebbles of broken glass crunched under his tires.

He took out his phone and fired off a text to someone. A few seconds later it vibrated with the return text. He put the phone back in his jacket. He drove around the mill twice more. At the tip of the property, he killed the headlights and rolled up a small knoll, just upriver from a dam by the sound of it. At the top of the knoll, partially obscured by a stand of half-dead trees, stood a small brick two-story house with a black mansard roof. He put the Rover in park but left the engine running and they sat and watched the house.

“Used to be the night watchman’s. City’s owned all this land ever since the mill went tits-up in the seventies. Most of the land is probably poisoned and no one has the money to test it, so they sold us this house for pennies on the dollar.” He shifted in his seat. “It’s got good bones, actually, and clear sight lines. Impossible to approach without being seen.”

“Who’d you text?” she asked.

“Haya.” He nodded at the house. “She’s inside with Annabelle. Wanted her to know I was coming.”

“So why aren’t we going in?”

“We will.”

“What’re we waiting for?”

“For my sense of terror to be overridden by my impatience.” He looked up at the house. A light came from somewhere deep in the back of it. “If all was clear, Haya was supposed to text ‘I am OK. Come in.’”

“And?”

“She only texted the first half.”

“Well, it’s not her native tongue. And she’s scared.”

He chewed on the inside of his mouth for a moment. “We can’t tell her about Caleb.”

“We have to.”

“If she thinks he’s just held up and will meet us in Amsterdam in a couple days, she’ll keep her shit together. But if she doesn’t?” He turned in the seat, touched her hand. She pulled it back. “We can’t tell her. Rachel, Rachel.”