Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

He shrugged. “Cool name. It’s got a good hard sound to it.” He pressed a button on the phone. “You work out?”

She smiled. “Pilates.”

“It shows.” He said into the phone, “Bring the keys over to the office, Ash.” He hung up. He handed her license back to her. “Should be just a minute.”

The relief flooded her body like a broken fever until he reached into a drawer and said, “Just a quick signature.”

He slid a signature card across the desk to her.

“You still use these things?” she said lightly.

“As long as the old man is still with us.” He looked up at the ceiling. “And thank God he is, as I say every day.”

“Well, he built all this.”

“He didn’t build it. My grandfather did. He just...” His voice trailed off. “Whatever.” He unclipped a Montblanc from his shirt pocket and handed it across the desk to her. “If you’d do the honors.”

Thankfully she hadn’t returned her license to her wallet. It was on the desk by her elbow. She’d learned last night through two hours of practice that even when the signature was right side up — particularly when it was right side up — the only way to duplicate it was by seeing it as a shape. Last night, she’d also done best when she’d taken it all in with one quick glance and then plunged straight into duplicating it without pause. But that had been last night, at the kitchen table in Woonsocket, without any stakes.

I am enough .

She looked at the license, drank in the signature, and put the tip of the Montblanc to the signature card. She was halfway through the signature when the door flew open behind her.

She didn’t look back. She finished writing.

Ashley came around to Manfred’s side of the desk and handed him a key ring. She remained by his side and stared down at Rachel as if she knew her name wasn’t Nicole, as if she could see the clips that held her wig in place.

Manfred went through the key ring until he found the one he liked. He noticed Ashley beside him.

“Are you on break?”

“Sorry, Manny?”

“Thank you for the keys, but we have a bank to run.”

Ashley smiled at him in such a way that Rachel knew he’d pay for it later, and just like that Rachel knew they were fucking, which may or may not be news to the blank-faced wife in the pictures, but probably would be to the two hopeful, pudgy boys in the same photos. As Ashley left, Rachel decided Manny cheated on the wife because of her blankness, but he cheated on his sons because they were fat. And you don’t even know it, do you, you son of a bitch? Because you have no integrity. So vows — the ones you made in a church or the ones you should have made to yourself — mean nothing.

He didn’t even glance at the signature card before he came out from behind the desk. “Let’s go then, shall we?”

When they exited the office, the girl had left the waiting area. Had she been waiting on a boyfriend or girlfriend, perhaps? They’d agreed to meet here because her lover had some banking to do before they could pop over to the Chili’s across the road. She wasn’t in the bank any longer, at least not the parts Rachel could see. So that was it — boyfriend or girlfriend came to meet her and they were now ordering the Tequila Lime Chicken across the road.

Or scenario number two: She’d ID’d Rachel, texted Ned, Lars, or men like them, and now she was driving home with plausible deniability in her pocket should the police ever question her about the woman in the blond wig who’d been assassinated in the parking lot around 10:15 that morning.

Manny stopped before an eight-foot-high vault door. He stepped in close to a keypad and punched some numbers onto it. He took one step to his left and pressed his thumb to another pad. The vault door clicked open. He pulled it back. Now they faced a gate. He unlocked that with one of the keys on his ring and then led her into the vault.

They stood there, surrounded by safe deposit boxes, and she realized she’d never asked Brian for the number.

And he’d never told her.

How do you spend hours teaching someone how to fake a signature, weeks, if not months, prepping for this worst-case scenario, make fake IDs, fake passports, pick the perfect bank... and still not tell your wife the actual fucking number of the actual safe deposit box?

Men.

“... in case you want privacy.”

Manny had been talking to her. She followed his gaze to a black door on her left.

“Did you use the privacy room last time you were here?”

“No,” she heard herself say. “I didn’t.”

“Will you need it today?”

“Yes.” There had to be six hundred boxes in here. For a small, former farming community? What were people putting in here — recipes for peach cobbler? Daddy’s Timex?

“Well,” Manny said.

“Well.”

He led her to the middle wall. She reached into her bag for the key. Held it between her index and thumb, felt the numbers there. She dropped it into her palm — 865 — as Manny inserted his own key into the box marked 865. She placed her key in the other lock and they turned them together. He withdrew the box, rested it along his left forearm.

“You said you would be needing privacy?”

“Yes.”

He indicated the door with a jut of his chin and she opened it. The room beyond was tiny, nothing in there but four steel walls, a table, two chairs, and thin white shafts of recessed lighting.

Manny placed the box on the table. He looked directly at her with their bodies only inches apart and she realized the asshole was actually hoping for a “moment,” as if his charms were so universal and magnetic, women had no choice but to act like porn stars in his presence.

“I’ll be out in a few minutes.” She moved around to the other side of the table and slipped her bag off her shoulder.

“Of course, of course. See you out there.”

She didn’t even indicate she heard him and only looked back up again once he’d closed the door behind him.

She opened the box.

Inside, as promised, was the messenger bag she’d seen Brian enter the bank with four days ago. Had it only been that long? It felt like a thousand years in her rearview.

She wrenched the bag out of the tight space and held it by the handles as it unfurled. The cash was on top, as he’d said it would be, stacks of hundred- and, in one case, thousand-dollar bills, neatly rubber-banded together. She transferred them to her bag. All that was left were the six passports.

She reached in and pulled them out and a small bit of bile and vomit reached her mouth when she saw that there were only five of them.

No.

No, no, no, no.

She beseeched the recessed lighting and the cold steel walls: Please, no. Don’t do this to me. Not now. Not after I’ve come this far. Please.

Hold it together, Rachel. Look at the passports before you lose all hope.

She opened the first one — Brian’s face stared back at her. His latest alias was there as well: “Hewitt, Timothy.”

She opened the next one — Caleb’s. His alias had been “Branch, Seth.”

Her hands shook when she reached for the third passport. Shook so bad she had to stop for a moment and clench them into fists and then press the fists together and breathe, breathe, breathe.

She opened the third passport, saw the name first — “Carmichael, Lindsay.”

And then the photograph:

Nicole Alden.

She opened the fourth passport: “Branch, Kiyoko.” Haya stared back at her. She opened the fifth and final one — the baby’s.

She didn’t scream or throw anything or kick over a chair. She sat on the floor and placed her hands over her eyes and stared into the darkness of herself.