by Jeff Ross
“How the hell did he catch up?” Grady says, looking in the rearview mirror again. I turn and see the silver BMW coming up behind us. “He must be driving like a maniac.”
“Said the pot to the kettle,” I say. “Where can we lose him?”
“Maybe the industrial park,” Grady says. “But if he catches us in there, we’re totally screwed.”
“No, we need somewhere public.” I keep scanning the news sites for information about Tom, and finally I find something on Twitter. “They think Tom’s downtown.”
“Where?”
“It doesn’t say Tom is there. But someone’s tweeting that there’s a major police presence in the 800 block of Fallgate near Toluse.” I stare at the screen for a moment, thinking. We’re on the outskirts of Resurrection Falls, driving past the endless line of big-box stores. The downtown core is maybe ten minutes away if we go straight and hit all green lights. Grady blows a red light, and JJ follows right along behind us.
Grady is right: there’s no way we can lose him.
“We’re screwed,” Grady says. He sighs. “But what does it matter?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re closing in on Tom, right?”
“You don’t think all of this matters?”
“What can we do about it, Lauren?”
“He hid the fact that his son had something to do with a kid’s death? That doesn’t bother you?”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Grady says, suddenly turning right.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m taking you to the police station. This has all been about Tom from the beginning, right? To make certain he was okay. To find out where he went and why. Well, if the police have found him, then you need to go there. To help him.”
“No,” I say. I hold the USB drive out toward Grady. “There’s more to it than that.” I pause for a moment, then say, “It’s all on here.”
“What is that?” he says. “Where did you get it?”
“Everything is on here.” I wave it at him. “The payments, the payoffs, all the places the money went. I bet there’s a payoff to the cop who put the wrong time down on JJ’s incident report. If we don’t get this out, it doesn’t matter what happens to Tom or Ben—all of this will be buried forever.”
Grady glances at the USB drive as we go under a streetlight. “Wait a second.” He grabs the drive from me before I know what’s happening. “This is a paired USB drive. You can’t see what’s on here unless you have both drives.”
“I know,” I say.
“How do you know that?” He hands me back the drive.
“I just do.”
“What’s going on, Lauren?”
“Go to the mayor’s house,” I say.
There’s a long pause, which breaks my heart a little. Grady is trying to figure out what I know and how I know it. Wondering what secrets I’ve been keeping from him.
“What aren’t you telling me, Lauren?” he asks.
I close my fist around the drive. “You have to trust me, Grady,” I say. “I can make this right. But you need to get me there as fast as you can.”
TWENTY-FIVE
We’re driving through my suburban world.
“You think the other flash drive is in the mayor’s house?” Grady asks.
I say, “If the brothers are working together but didn’t trust one another, they’d split the information exactly like this.”
“But then every time someone wanted to work on the file, they’d have to be together.”
“Which is where JJ stepped in,” I say.
We’re two blocks from the Carters’ house. Grady stops at an intersection and looks both ways. The house on the corner has a giant hedge, which is impossible to see around. Grady looks at me as we pull into the intersection. He opens his mouth to say something, but the words never come out.
“Grady, look out!” I scream.
It happens so fast that my words are buried beneath the crunch of steel and the shattering of glass. We have rammed into a telephone pole, and the resulting jolt sends my entire body into the air, only to be yanked back down by the seat belt. I watch as my face comes within inches of the dash. The BMW, which must have been moving at an incredible pace, spins away from the pole and smashes into the back of a parked pickup.
The seat belt has held me tightly, but my neck feels as though it’s been snapped. There’s a ringing in my ears, and when the car was thrown sideways, I smashed my hand into something.
“Are you okay?” I say.
“I don’t know.” Grady holds his hands up before him. “What just happened?”
“He rammed us,” I say.
I open my hand to find it empty. There are bits of broken glass all over my lap, but the windshield is a spiderweb of lines. It’s the side window that is broken.
I undo my seat belt and look between my feet at the floor. “Where’s the drive?” I say.
Grady looks at me like he’s been hit in the head with a shovel. Which, I suppose, is not that far from what has actually happened.
“What?”
“The USB drive. Look for it, please.”
Grady touches his head, then turns to his window. “There’s JJ,” he says.
I look up to see JJ falling out of his car. He lies there for a second before attempting to stand—without success. I go back to looking for the drive.
I move my hand around on the floor until I feel something slice into my thumb. “Shit,” I say.
Grady is still staring out the window.
“I have to go,” I say.
“What?” Grady mutters.
“Did you bang your head?”
He touches his head again. “No. I just…” His sentence stalls, and he goes back to staring at JJ on the ground outside his car.
“Tell me when he gets up,” I say. I hammer on the door until it pops open. Already I can hear sirens cutting across the sky. People are coming out of their houses, calling out to one another.
“You’re going to be okay,” I say. “You’re going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.”
My heart is going triple the speed it should. I slide out of the car and drop to my knees beside it. The drive has to be under the seat. It can’t be outside the car—there’s just no way.
Because without it, I’m lost.
Grady looks down at me, stunned.
“I can’t go without that drive.” I glance back up at Grady. “Grady, you have to help me.”
“This?” he says, holding up the USB drive.
“Yes, that,” I say. I reach out and take it from him. “Thank you.”
“Sure.” He points out the window. “JJ is coming over here.”
“Don’t worry about JJ,” I say, clasping the flash drive. “This will all be over soon.”
“Are you all right?” someone yells. I look up and see an older man with his hands on JJ’s shoulders. “Son, are you okay?” There are people pouring onto the street now.
JJ stumbles as he pushes away from the man. There’s a tear in his pant leg, and blood is staining his expensive shoes. I back away from the car. JJ looks at me, his eyes not quite focusing. The older man grabs him again and tells him he should sit down. JJ’s uncle is still in the car. There is blood on his face, and he’s not moving. The air bag has inflated on the driver’s side, but not the passenger’s. For some reason, the right turn signal is flashing.
I give JJ a quick smile a
s I hold the USB drive up.
I see the recognition on his face. What that little piece of plastic means.
“You’ll never find it!” he yells.
But he’s wrong. I already know exactly where the other USB drive is.
And I’m going to get it.
I turn and cut through the advancing crowd. Running as quickly and strongly as I ever have before.
The patio door is open, and the alarm is off inside the Carters’ house. I slip in as quietly as possible, even though I already know no one is home.
I go straight to Jack’s den, a place I have only been once before, on the day Erin showed me the USB drive. There’s a catch beneath the middle of his desk that unlocks a small compartment. I slide my hand along until I feel the hard plastic there and pull out the matching USB drive.
As I push the compartment back into place, I move the curtains aside to look out the window. An ambulance flashes past, followed by a cruiser. Lights go on in the driveway as another police car starts up. I hadn’t thought anyone would be left outside the Carters’ house. Luckily, I decided to go in the patio door.
The scream of sirens invades the house. A pulsing of noise, wave upon wave descending on the neighborhood. I wait at the doorway, listening. I thought I heard a sound. Footsteps, or the banging of the patio door closing. But there’s no way that JJ, in his condition, would have been able to make it here. A firefighter or paramedic would have stopped him and forced him to sit down.
I pass Benny’s room and look inside. It’s clean, cleaner than any kid’s room should be. But that is the way he likes it. I notice his stuffed elephant lying on the floor, slightly beneath the bed skirt. I go in and grab it, then run to the patio door. I stop for a moment, knowing I’ll never be in this house again. Knowing that with all I have just done, everything has changed. But that it’s changed for the better.
I turn toward my house but quickly realize the police will almost certainly be there. They’ll be expecting Tom to run home. Plus, if JJ has been in contact with his father, the police will be looking for me by now as well. My name and picture popping up on all the little in-car computers.
I look up and down the street. There has to be somewhere I can go to download the information from the USB drives and still get away. Headlights break the darkness of the street, so I lean into the shadow surrounding a large maple tree on the Carters’ lawn. The car slows, though it isn’t a cruiser. It speeds up as it passes the house and a moment later is gone. I look at the sidewalk and wonder how many times I’ve walked these streets. How many times my feet have touched the earth.
Then I know exactly where I can go.
Marlene looks at me there on her front porch.
“You look frazzled,” she says. And I love her for it. I step inside, and she shuts the door. “Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“For what?”
“For the past two years. For suddenly no longer being your friend.”
“You were with different people,” she says. “Same here.” She shrugs, as if my abandoning her was nothing more than a missed step along the road. Something neither of us could have seen coming but that doesn’t change anything that came before.
“Well, I’m still sorry.”
“And you still don’t have to be.” She smiles. She’s as big as ever, but her whole family is big. I see her mom out jogging now and then, but she never seems to slim at all. Her brother is in the fifth grade and is already the size of a small tank.
Families just work that way.
“Can I use your computer?” I say.
“Sure.” Again, without question. There’s the sound of sirens as more emergency vehicles rip past the house.
“I wonder what that’s all about,” she says.
We go up to her room. It smells of lilacs and cinnamon, like the kind of place a good person spends time.
Marlene logs in to her computer, then sits on her bed where she can’t see what is on the screen. “Should I ask what is going on?”
I put the USB drives into the computer and wait. “It’s my brother,” I say.
“Yeah, I heard about all that.”
The directory window opens. At first there is nothing. Then tiny lights on each of the drives come on, and files fill the screen.
It’s ridiculous. They didn’t even bother to hide the names. The files are called things like Payment from Centrum Construction and Balance for Andre Tree Removal. There’s one called Proof of Bribes.
I open up the Centrum file, which turns out to be a balance sheet of payments and expectations. It looks as if this particular company has already paid Jack Carter over two hundred thousand dollars for his vote and support in city council meetings.
And all the files are like this. As I read through them, a clearer picture appears: Jack’s been playing construction companies against one another. Getting more and more cash as the stakes were raised.
And Grady was right. Jack has his sights set on that industrial complex as the next big Web-based business hub, and his land around Otomo Lake as the vacation spot of choice.
He’s set to make millions after he leaves public office. Even if all of this came out once he was no longer mayor, it wouldn’t matter. His brother would have been the official owner of the property. If anyone decided they’d been on the losing end of a deal, he would have proof that they bribed him—or, if these files could be seen a different way, attempted to bribe him.
He has rough building plans, payouts from different businesses interested in a spot in the reworked industrial complex—he’s even accepted payments from professional cleaning services for the exclusive rights to the buildings. I expect it was his brother who was the face of all these deals. If anyone knew it was the mayor behind this, they’d be very hard pressed to prove it.
Unless, of course, they had these files.
“Do you have something there that’s going to help your brother?” Marlene asks.
“Not really,” I say. “But it’s going to be a start.” I log in to my web mail and bring up the addresses I have saved there. Ben Richer at the Post, Dawn Coarse at the Sun, Frank Hardy at the Resurrection Falls Times. I add reporters from the New York Times and the larger papers in Albany.
I add Detective Evans’s address and start attaching files.
The subject line is simple: Major Corruption in the Resurrection Falls Mayor’s Office.
Luckily, Jack created many of the documents on his work computer, so the files are date-stamped as well as having Property of Jack Carter, Mayor, tagged in the properties.
He must have been so sure he would get away with it all. That he was entirely untouchable.
I manage to get a quarter of the files attached before I reach the size limit. I send the document to Drafts and start on the next bunch of files.
“Can I ask you for a favor?” I say to Marlene.
“Sure,” she says.
“Actually, two favors. First, I have to leave in a second. Can you send these emails once I’m out of here?”
“That sounds easy enough.”
“Also, can I borrow your car?”
“No problem,” Marlene says.
It just about makes me cry.
I had totally written this girl off. But there’s still no hesitation on her part. She’ll lend me her car. She’ll help me out. And she won’t even ask any questions.
“I’m trying to be a better person,” I say.
“You’ve never been a bad person,” Marlene says.
“Yeah, I have. But I’m trying to b
e better.”
TWENTY-SIX
I am halfway downtown in Marlene’s mint-green Volvo when Detective Evans texts me.
What are these e-mails?
I pull over to text back. Another truth.
I wait. The engine rumbles beneath me. Cars flash past.
These are personal files, she texts.
They are proof of what Jack Carter has been doing, I reply. He’s selling this town out for his own gain. If anyone has Ben, it’s the mayor’s brother, Joe.
I wait again, my heart hammering. Now that it is all coming together, I’m anxious and afraid it will fall apart.
Her response pops up on my screen. What are these pictures of a car I received earlier?
A year ago JJ Carter’s car was reported stolen, I type. It wasn’t stolen. It was likely involved in the death of Michael Brent on Beacon Hill Road and then hidden to conceal the crime. The mayor was aware of this as well.
There’s no reply, so I drive on toward downtown.
The glow of a dozen cruisers lights up the end of Fallgate Road. I take a right toward the river. There are people everywhere, and the driving is slow. I turn my face away from the other cars and the people on the sidewalks and hope I’m not too late.
Percy Street dead-ends near the rapids that give Resurrection Falls its name. I pull into the parking lot near the falls and shut off the engine.
Are you going to bring the mayor in for questioning? I text. Did you know that Joe Fisher even existed? Will you be interviewing JJ Carter? I wait for two minutes as the engine clicks and cools. I think back to something Grady said. Something so simple, so absolutely basic.
Everything is about wanting.
Everything.
And if you can promise someone they will receive the one thing they want, you can get anything from them.
I can bring you Tom, I text. But only if Mayor Carter is in custody and explaining what those files are all about.
I get an immediate response. I can’t promise that.
Mayor Carter has to be at the police station before I bring Tom out. Otherwise, you will never find him. Ever.
