Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“Maybe,” he said.

“But you were pretty clear with your instructions.”

“But I was pretty clear with my instructions,” he agreed.

They sat and watched the house for a while, passing the binoculars back and forth, looking for movement of any kind. Once Rachel thought she saw the shade of the far left window on the second floor move, but she couldn’t swear to it.

Still, they knew.

They knew.

Her stomach eddied and for a moment the Earth’s atmosphere felt too thin.

After a little more watching, Brian took the wheel and they drove back down through the neighborhood and he drove a bit beyond where he had last night and approached the mill from a few blocks farther north. They entered the grounds from an old trucking route that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, and in daylight the skeleton of the mill was both more pathetic and more resplendent, like the sun-bleached bones of a slaughtered god king and his once-majestic retinue.

They found the pickup truck parked a few yards into the shell of the building closest to the river. There was no northern wall left and most of the second floor was gone. The truck was a beast of a machine, a black full-size Sierra, all hard form and function, its wheels and sides splattered with dried mud.

Brian put his hand on the hood. “It’s not hot but it’s a little warm. They haven’t been here too long.”

“How many?”

He looked in the cab. “Hard to tell. Seats five. But I doubt they’d bring five.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Manpower’s expensive.”

“So’s losing seventy million,” she said.

He looked around the mill for a bit and she knew him well enough to know this was how he processed, his eyes clocking his surroundings without actually seeing them.

“You want to confront them?” she said.

“I don’t want to.” He widened his eyes. “But I don’t see a choice.”

“We could skip returning to the house and just run from here.”

He nodded. “You’re willing to leave Haya and the baby behind?”

“We could call the police. Haya doesn’t know anything. She can easily claim ignorance.”

“If the police show up, what’s to stop the guys inside from shooting Haya and the baby? Or shooting the cops? Or entering into a standoff with hostages?”

“Nothing,” she admitted.

“So do you still want to hit the road? Leave them behind?”

“Do you?”

“Asked you first.” He shot her the tiniest of smiles. “What’s it that asshole said to you in Haiti?”

“‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”

Brian nodded.

“Can you get us out of here?” she asked.

“I can get you out of here. Can’t get myself out of here the way you’ve fixed it, but I can get you out, honey bunch.”

She ignored the dig. “Right this second?”

He nodded. “Right this second.”

“What’re our chances?”

“ Our chances?”

“My chances,” she said.

“About fifty-fifty. Every hour, they drop five percent in Cotter-McCann’s favor. We add a terrified woman and a baby — that’s if we can extricate them from guys who know how to use firearms a lot better than we do — your odds of success drop even further.”

“So right now the odds are about even. But if we go up to that house” — she pointed at the other end of the mill — “it’s more likely we die.”

His eyes widened a little more and he nodded repeatedly. “Way more likely, yeah.”

“And if I say I want to run, you’ll just take me out of here now?”

“I didn’t say that. I said it was an option.”

She looked up through the blackened rafters and the shredded roof at the blue sky. “There’s no option.”

He waited.

“All four of us go.” She took several quick breaths and it made her light-headed. “Or none of us do.”

“Okay,” he whispered and she could see he was as terrified as she was. “Okay.”

She dropped the hammer. “Haya speaks perfect English.”

He squinted at her.

“She grew up in California. She was gaming Caleb.”

He let loose a high chuckle of disbelief. “Why?”

“So he’d rescue her from a shitty life, it sounds like.”

Brian shook his head so many times he resembled a dog after a bath. Then he smiled. The old Brian smile — surprised to be surprised by the turns of the world and somehow tickled at the same time.

“Well, shit,” he said, “I finally like her.” He nodded once. “She told you?”

Rachel nodded.

“Why?”

“So we’d know not to abandon her.”

“I’m not above leaving her behind,” he said simply. “Never was. But I wouldn’t leave Caleb’s kid up there to die. Not even for seventy million.”

He lifted the cover over the tire jack compartment in the Rover and came back with a short ugly shotgun with a pistol grip.

“How many guns do you need?” she asked.

He looked off in the direction of the house as he loaded shells into the gun. “You’ve seen me shoot — I suck. A shotgun levels the playing field a bit.” He shut the hatchback.

Whatever he’d just claimed about being unable to leave Caleb’s daughter behind, it didn’t alter the fact that he could kill her right now with that ugly weapon. It wouldn’t be the rational choice necessarily, but at this point rational choice was a luxury in the rearview mirror.

It didn’t seem to be the first thing on his mind, though, so she opened the driver’s door of the truck. The floor mat was caked with dried mud. She craned her head over the seat and saw the floor mat on the passenger seat was crusted with the same. Wherever they’d been searching for her or Brian lately, they’d walked through some dirt to do it. She opened the rear driver’s-side door — the mats back there were pristine. She could still smell the showroom in the rubber.

She showed it to Brian. “There are only two of them.”

“Unless the other car’s parked somewhere else.”

She hadn’t considered that. “I thought you were Mr. Positive Thinking.”

“We’ll call this an off fucking day then.”

“I mean—” She started but couldn’t finish the thought. Her hand dropped back to her side. She felt closer to vomiting than she had in a while. She mentioned this to Brian.

“Where’s a Scientologist when you need one, uh?” He pointed the shotgun down the end of the building, past mounds of dirt and trash and all the pieces of wall that had been torn out when the scavengers came for the copper wire. “Right at the end there’s a set of stairs. You go down them and you find a really small tunnel.”

“A tunnel?”

He nodded. “Caleb and me dug it over the last couple months. When you thought I was out of the country.”

“Lovely.”

“Figured if we were ever in that house and we had time to see the opposition coming for us, we’d scoot out, get over here, and make a run for it pretty much from where we’re standing now. You can go down—”

“ I can?”

“We can, yeah. We’ll crawl over there and—”

“How tight is this tunnel?”

“Oh, it’s bad,” he said. “It’s more like a trough. If I ate a pizza right now, I’d probably get stuck in there.”

“I’m not doing that,” she said.

“You’d rather die?” He waved the shotgun like it was an extension of his arm.

“I’d rather die above ground than below it, yes.”

“You got a better idea?” It came out sharply.

“I haven’t even heard yours. All I’ve heard is the word ‘tunnel.’ And point that fucking thing at the ground, would you?”

He considered the shotgun. He shrugged an apology and pointed it at the ground.