Never Look Away

by Linwood Barclay

  Girl Scouts selling cookies.

  But never him.

  After a year or so, she started to relax. Connie Tattinger was dead. Long live Jan Harwood.

  At least until Dwayne got out.

  She could do this. Play the role. Wasn’t that what she’d been doing since she was a little girl? Moving from one part to another? Imagining herself to be someone she wasn’t, even if the only one she was fooling was herself?

  That was certainly what she did when she was little. It was the only way she got through her childhood. Her father ragging on her all the time, blaming her for fucking up their lives, her mother too pissed or self-absorbed to run interference and tell her old man to lay off.

  She did what a lot of children do. She created an imaginary friend. But it was different in her case. She didn’t hang out with this make-believe companion. In her head, she became her. She was Estelle Winters, the precocious daughter of Malcolm and Edwina Winters, stars of the Broadway stage. New York was her home. She was only living with this bitter, mean-spirited man and his drunken bitch of a wife as research for a role she was destined to play. She wasn’t really their child. How could she be? She was much too special to be the daughter of such common, horrible people.

  She knew the truth, of course. But imagining herself to be Estelle, it got her through until that day she walked out that door and never came back.

  And then, after a very long run, Estelle Winters, her imaginary friend/defense mechanism, was allowed to die.

  For some time, she was actually Connie Tattinger. But even as Connie, she could be whoever she needed to be. She could be a good girl, and she could be a bad girl. Whatever the situation demanded.

  When she was living on the street, the bad-girl thing wasn’t so much an act as it was a way to survive. You did what you had to do, and with whoever you had to do it with, to get a roof over your head, some food in your stomach.

  If you got a lead on a half-decent job, in an office, say, what her mother would have called a “shave your legs” position, well, she could do that, too. She could turn herself from a street kid to a nice girl in a flash.

  Whatever the part demanded.

  When she met David, she fell easily into the role of small-town wife. It didn’t take a lot of effort. It was actually fun to play. She could do as long a run here as she had to. And when the time came to pack it in, she could do that, too.

  The thing Jan hadn’t counted on was the kid. That was definitely not part of the plan.

  They hadn’t been married long before she suspected she was pregnant. Couldn’t believe it, sitting there in the bathroom one morning after David had gone to work. Got out the test, waited ten minutes, looked at the result, thought: Shit.

  Great day for David to have forgotten some notes. Suddenly appears upstairs. She’d been pretty good—excellent, in fact—at keeping on the mask, but he caught something in the way she looked, saw the pregnancy-test packaging. She ended up telling him she was pregnant.

  This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, he says.

  Part of her decision, she knew, was calculating. A child would make her blend in even more. Make her more invisible. And David wanted this child. Ending the pregnancy, it could send this new marriage—this terrific cover—off the rails. So far, this marriage thing was going very well.

  And being a loving mother, well, wasn’t it just another role? One of the most challenging of her career? If she could play all these other parts, she could play this one, too.

  Once she started looking at it this way, Jan wanted the child. She wanted the experience. She wanted to know what it would be like. She didn’t think about the future, what she would do when Dwayne got out. For once, she wasn’t thinking long-term. She was in the moment. Like all great ladies of the stage.

  But now Dwayne was out. And she’d stayed with the plan. She was going for the money, and once she had it, she’d move on to her final role. The independent woman. The woman who didn’t need anyone else for anything. The woman who didn’t have to pretend anymore. The woman who could just be.

  She was going for the beach and piña colada. No more David. No more Dwayne.

  But there was a hitch.

  Ethan.

  She’d really gotten into that whole mother act. So she knew she’d feel something. What she hadn’t anticipated was how hard this role would be to walk away from.

  Jan knew the Five Mountains thing was going to be tricky to pull off.

  But she’d been out there a couple of times on her days off, scoped out where all the CCTV cameras were. There was the remote chance she’d see someone they knew, but Jan figured she had a couple of things in her favor. She wasn’t going to be there long, and for much of the time she wasn’t going to look anything like Jan Harwood, not once she came back out of the women’s restroom.

  And if she had been spotted at Five Mountains—by a friend, a neighbor, someone who’d come into Bertram’s to get a furnace part—then they’d abort. She’d told Dwayne, if I don’t show up, we’ll try this another way, soon.

  But it went well. It went perfectly.

  It just never, not in a million years, occurred to Jan she’d run into someone she knew after they got away. Once they were miles from Promise Falls.

  If only Dwayne had picked someplace else to get gas. The needle had been a quarter tank off empty. He could have gone another sixty, seventy miles, but he wanted to start off with a full tank. Psychological, he said.

  So outside Albany, he gets off the highway near one of those big malls. And guess who’s filling up right next to them?

  “Jan?” Leanne Kowalski said. “Jan, is that you?”

  The dumbass.

  On cue, like he knew she was thinking about him, Dwayne said, “We’re making good time. Should be in Boston pretty soon.”

  “Great,” Jan said. The fact was, the closer they got to Boston, the more on edge she felt. She told herself she wasn’t being rational. It was a big city. And she hadn’t been there in half a decade. What were the odds anyone was going to recognize her? And it wasn’t like she and Dwayne were planning to spend a lot of time there.

  “So let me ask you this,” Dwayne said. “You feel kind of bad for him?”

  “I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel bad about leaving my son,” she said.

  “No, not the kid. Your husband. I mean, the poor bastard, he’s not going to know what hit him.”

  “What do you think would be better?” she asked. “Would it be better to have every cop in the country wondering where I’d run off to, have them looking for me? Or would it be better to have them thinking I’m already dead?”

  “Listen, I’m not saying you did the wrong thing. It’s fucking brilliant, that’s what it is. Acting all depressed, but just for him, letting him think one thing, setting it all up so the cops will think another. I’m in awe, okay? I’m in fucking awe. All I’m saying is, you did live with the guy for a long time. How’d you do that, anyway? Stick with him only as long as you needed him? Make him think you cared about him when you really didn’t?”

  Jan looked at him. “It’s just something I do.” She went back to looking out her open window, hot wind blowing in her face.

  “Well, you did it good,” Dwayne said admiringly. “You ask me, it’s okay if you don’t feel bad about it. That’s probably even better. No sense striking off on a new life feeling all guilty about what you did to get it. But I just keep picturing the look on his face. When he finds out what you told the guy at the store. When he finds out you never went to the doctor. And when they can’t find you on those park cameras. The guy’s got to be shit-tin’ himself.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Jan said.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “When’s the last time you talked to your guy who wants to buy our stuff?”

  “The day after I got out,” Dwayne said. “I call him up, I say, you’re never going to guess who this is. He can’t believe it. He says he gave
up on me long ago. I never got a chance to call him after I got picked up for the assault thing, so when we didn’t show years ago, he just kind of gave up on us. So I say, hey, I’m back, and we’re still ready to deal. He goes, shit, are you kidding me? He figured maybe I was dead or something. The other thing he said that was kind of interesting was, there was never anything in the news about it, I mean, about the diamonds actually going missing. He said there was something in the paper about some guy got his hand cut off, but nothing about diamonds.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Jan said.

  “How you figure?”

  “You don’t go reporting illicit diamonds stolen,” Jan said. “There’s not even supposed to be any of them anymore, not since that whole diamond certification thing got going back in 2000. The Kimberley thing. You never saw that movie because you were in jail, the one with Leonardo Di-Caprio, all about Sierra Leone and—”

  “Don’t you mean the Sierra Desert?” Dwayne asked.

  “That’s the Sahara Desert.”

  “Oh yeah. Okay.”

  “Anyway, even with the certification thing going on, and the whole industry clamping down, there’s still a big market in illicit diamonds, and you don’t go to the cops whining about having some ripped off, even as many as we got. Did you know that al-Qaeda made millions off the sale of illicit diamonds?”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah,” she said, holding her hand out the window, pushing against the wind.

  “So what we did, in a way, was help fight the war on terror.” Dwayne grinned.

  Jan didn’t even look at him. You had to be careful, she thought. You started thinking he was dumb as shit, it made you forget he could also be very dangerous.

  Funny thing was, he didn’t mind inflicting pain, but he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Complex, in his own stupid way.

  “So who is this guy?” Jan asked.

  “His name’s Banura,” he said. “Cool, huh? He’s black. But really black. I think he’s from that Sierra place you mentioned.”

  “How do you get in touch?”

  “I got his number written down in my pocket. He lives on the south side, in Braintree.”

  “Does he know we want to do this tomorrow?”

  “I didn’t tell him an exact day. I was kinda just putting him on alert.”

  Jan said she thought it would be a good idea for him to get in touch. Banura might need time to start pulling the cash together, in anticipation.

  “That’s a good idea,” Dwayne said.

  Jan didn’t want to be around the Boston area any longer than she had to. Get the merchandise, exchange it for cash, get the hell out.

  They got off the turnpike and Dwayne went looking first for a place to fill up. While he was pumping gas, Jan wandered into the store to look around. She was twirling the sunglasses rack when she noticed the heavy-set woman next to her. The woman was leaning over, telling her daughter to stop whining, and she’d slung her purse over her shoulder and onto her back.

  It was open. Jan was staring straight into it.

  She didn’t care about the woman’s purse. She had enough cash to get to Boston, and once they delivered the diamonds, there was going to be more money than she knew what to do with.

  But the woman’s cell phone might come in handy.

  Jan pulled it off in one clean move. She leaned over the woman as if to reach for something on a shelf, one arm going for a package of two cupcakes, the other sliding down into the purse, grabbing hold of the slender phone, and slipping it into the front pocket of her jeans.

  She bought the cupcakes—they were Ethan’s favorite; he liked to eat around the little white squiggle across the chocolate icing and save it for last—and got back to the truck about the time Dwayne was done filling the tank. She tossed the cupcakes through the window, got in, and handed him the phone once he was behind the wheel.

  “Phone your guy,” she said.

  By the time they decided to each have a cupcake, the icing had melted to the cellophane wrapper.

  Jan worked carefully to peel it away, and she managed to free one cupcake with relatively little damage. She handed it over to Dwayne, who shoved the entire thing into his mouth at once.

  The second one turned into a horror show. Most of the icing lifted off, so she bared her teeth and scraped it off the wrapper.

  A technique she had learned from her son.

  “Look, Mommy.”

  Ethan’s in the car seat, Jan’s up front, driving home from the market. She glances back, sees that he’s not only managed to peel the icing from the wrapper in once piece, like a layer of pudding skin, he’s eaten along each side of the white squiggle. He’s lined it up along the underside of his index finger. His mouth is a mess of chocolate icing, but he looks so proud of himself.

  “I have a squiggle finger,” he says.

  Dwayne snapped the phone shut. “We’re good to go, tomorrow. I told him we should be there about noon. Maybe even earlier. The banks open at what, around nine-thirty, ten? We hit mine, we hit yours, and unless you stashed your half in fucking Tennessee or something, we should be done pretty quick. Sound good to you?”

  Jan was looking away. “Yeah.”

  “What’s going on? You okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just drive.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Oscar Fine had parked his black Audi A4 on Hancock Street, looking south, the back of the State House up ahead to the left. From this side, parked on the downslope, the gold dome was not visible. But that wasn’t what he was looking for, anyway.

  He liked Beacon Hill. He appreciated it. The narrow streets, the sense of history, the beautiful old brick homes with their extraordinary window boxes full of flowers, the uneven sidewalks and cobblestone streets, the iron boot-scraper bars embedded into almost all the front steps, not quite so important now that the streets weren’t full of mud and shit. But it was too crowded for him around here. Too jammed in. He didn’t like having a lot of neighbors. He liked being on his own.

  But still, it was nice when his work brought him up here.

  He was watching an address about a dozen doors up, on the other side of the street. It was early evening. It was about this time that Miles Cooper got home from work. His wife, Patricia, a nurse over at Mass Gen, was, as usual, working the late shift. She’d left about an hour ago. She usually walked, although sometimes she’d only hoof it as far as Cambridge and then grab a bus part of the way, and occasionally she’d even grab a cab. Most nights, when she got off, she was dropped off by a coworker who drove and lived in Telegraph Hill and didn’t mind taking Hancock on her way home.

  Oscar had been watching their routine for a few days now. He knew he was being more cautious than he needed to be. He already had a good idea of what Miles Cooper did, day in and day out. He knew Cooper liked to spend his weekends on his boat, that he spent too much money on the horses, that he was a lousy poker player. Oscar knew that firsthand. The guy had so many tells it was laughable. If he was dealt a useless hand, he shook his head side to side. Not noticeably. A millimeter in each direction, if that, but enough for Oscar to notice. If he was holding a flush, you could feel the floor shifting underfoot because Miles’s right knee was bobbing up and down like a piston.

  There were other things Oscar knew about Miles. He was seeing his doctor about gastrointestinal pains. He went through a medium-sized bottle of fruit-flavored Tums every day. He had a storage locker outside of the city where he was hiding, for his younger brother, three stolen Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Every second Monday, he went to the North End and paid three hundred dollars to a girl who worked out of her apartment over an Italian bakery on Salem Street to take her clothes off very slowly and then blow him.

  Oscar also knew he was stealing from the man they both worked for. And the man had figured out what Miles was up to.

  “I’d like you to look after this for me,” the man said to Oscar.

  “Not a problem,” Oscar said.

&n
bsp; So he’d tracked Miles’s movements for the better part of a week. Didn’t want to drop in on him when the wife was home. Or their daughter. She was in her twenties, lived in Providence, but she often came to visit her parents on weekends. This being Sunday, there was a chance she could have been here, but Oscar had determined she was not. If Miles Cooper followed his usual routine, he’d be walking down the hill from the direction of the State House any moment and—

  There he was.

  Late fifties, overweight, balding, a thick gray mustache. Dressed in an ill-fitting suit, white shirt, no tie.

  As he reached his home, he fished around in his pocket for his keys, found them, mounted the five cement steps to his door, unlocked it and went inside.

  Oscar Fine got out of his Audi.

  He walked up the street, crossed diagonally, reaching the other side out front of Miles Cooper’s home.

  Oscar rang the bell.

  He could hear Miles’s footsteps on the other side of the door before it opened.

  “Hey, Oscar,” Miles said.

  “Hi, Miles,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Can I come in?” Oscar said.

  Something flickered in Miles’s eyes. Oscar Fine could see it. It was fear. Oscar had gotten a lot better at reading people the last five years or so. Back then, he’d been a bit cocky, overconfident. Sloppy. At least once.

  Oscar knew Miles wouldn’t close the door on him. Miles had to know that if Oscar didn’t already suspect he was up to something, he surely would if Miles refused to let him into his house.

  “Sure, yeah, come on in,” Miles said. “Good to see you. What are you doing around here?”

  Oscar stepped in and closed the door. He asked, already knowing the answer, “Patricia home?”

  “She’ll be at work by now. She’s usually half an hour into her shift by the time I get home. What can I get you to drink?”

  “I’m good,” Oscar said.

  “You sure? I was just going to get a beer.”

  “Nothing,” Oscar said, following Miles into the kitchen. Oscar Fine did not drink, which Miles could never seem to remember.