by PJ Adams
Again, Denny made her think of a salmon fisherman playing his fish, cutting it some slack and then drawing it back in. She could believe that Denny had spent a large part of his life working out just how to keep people hooked.
“Phone apps, add-ons that integrated with Facebook and Tumblr and just about anything else you’ve ever used online. You never saw our name, but I guarantee you’ve seen our work. We were part of the infrastructure just as the whole social media thing was taking off. But we were riding a wave. The business was full of ups and downs and when we hit a big down this year Brady decided to protect our interests by getting a little creative with the company finances. Moving money around through ghost accounts, and God knows what else. I had no idea what he was doing and how bad things were until it was too late. I had no idea the money Brady was moving around to keep us afloat had come from the kind of investors you’re never going to find profiled in Forbes.”
“And the girl?”
Denny shrugged, as if it was nothing. “I found the two of them one night, when I went back to the office. She was naked on her back on my desk, a long white line of coke between her tits and down the center of her belly, and Brady was bent over her snorting it all up through a rolled one hundred dollar bill. I wasn’t impressed and I expressed my dissatisfaction with him. Well, when his face stopped bleeding and he was still blubbing I figured it was more than just the drugs and the whiskey and the shame talking and that was when he confessed that he’d lost it all and he was scared, really scared.”
He paused, reached up, adjusted the rear-view mirror. When he turned briefly to look at her she could see the hurt in his eyes.
“I’d been blind,” he said. “I’d let my old buddy keep digging himself deeper and I’d been so lost in my own world I hadn’t even noticed. It wasn’t just Brady who’d blown it all: it was me.”
“So what did you do?”
Another shrug. Eyes back on the road ahead, the interstate still anonymous. “I made him tell me everything. I worked out who was the kingpin, the one guy who, if we could convince him to give us time and space, would protect us from all the other hyenas at the door. And I went to talk with him, to plead our case. I tell you, that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I did it because it was the only sensible thing to do.”
A flash of that grin, and then he went on: “And then when that failed I took Brady gambling and in no time at all we turned a five million debt into ten and it was pretty much downhill from then on in.”
§
They traveled in silence for a time. Cassie flipped down the sun visor and studied herself in the vanity mirror. She looked pale and tired. Why did she have a face that showed up the day’s wear and tear like that? Why couldn’t she be one of those women who always looked flawless?
She rummaged through her new bag for the bits and pieces she’d picked up at Walmart. A little foundation did wonders, even if she did get some of the powder on her jeans. Lips a soft pink, then some blusher to give her a bit of color.
“It’s okay for you guys,” she said. She’d seen him glancing across at her as she worked. “Run a hand through your hair and you’re fine.” He laughed. He seemed to be relaxing again, now that he’d told her his story. When he’d been telling her, he’d tried to play it cool, but it was clear that saying those things aloud, reliving them... it was all still very intense for him.
Doing her eyes was a little more tricky. Just as well Denny had such refined taste in cars: far easier doing her face in the Lexus than in Lou’s battered old SUV – and she’d done that more than once, on supply runs into Bangor. Shadow, eye liner, a little mascara... and all the time, Denny kept glancing across, as if he’d never seen a woman doing her face before.
Next time he looked, she gave a brief smile and he seemed awkward. She wondered what kind of women he was used to, if he’d ever shared domestic moments like this with a woman. There was so much she didn’t know. And so odd to be feeling this way: so domestic and intimate, when they were on the run from armed gangsters!
She mulled over what Denny had told her. His business partner Brady Lowe, the girl, the staggering scale of the money he had blown. She didn’t know how much of it was true, of course, or how much of it he’d spun so that he didn’t come off so badly, but the pattern rang true.
Way back, she’d tried to piece together her father’s story. She’d tried to make sense of the man who had only ever been in the shadows of her life. She’d only ever met him a handful of times, usually when he’d been arguing with her mom. Later, when her mom’s MS had become so much worse and then her pop was arrested for the first time, Cassie had educated herself about Billy Ray Dane from the newspapers and websites and, when his trial hit the headlines, the TV. The timing couldn’t have been much worse, with all that attention just as her mother was in decline, and then her mom was gone and Cassie’s only remaining relative was behind bars.
According to the media profiles, Billy came from a poor family in Brooklyn. He’d grown up on the streets and had no real education. In later life, he portrayed himself as the kid who’d risen from nowhere, and as far as Cassie could tell that was pretty much how it had been. He’d started as an office runner on Wall Street when he was fifteen, with only smooth talking and a bullish determination to ease his way. He’d worked out who he needed to impress and he’d worked hard at it, and somehow he’d managed to overcome all the barriers that lined up in the way of someone who hasn’t taken the conventional route. He’d shone as a floor trader, working nights for his license, and in no time at all he was head-hunted by one of the big investment banks before, finally, setting up on his own.
But when you reach the top, where do you go from there? What do you do with all that drive? All that determination to prove everyone wrong? Enjoy your wealth, everyone told him, and pretty soon he was applying himself to that with all the drive and determination he’d shown in getting there.
Perhaps Billy Ray Dane’s biggest flaw – other than his willingness to discard women and daughters along the way – was that he didn’t know when to let go. When the super-rich partying lifestyle got too much and he found himself struggling to stay afloat, he’d done exactly what Denny’s business partner had done: he’d taken finance from wherever he could, always convinced he could free himself of those connections when things hit an up-turn again.
Was he a bad man? Was he the sleazy villain the press had made him out to be?
Bottom line was, he’d taken the money that was on offer. When you take bad money – money from murderers and drug cartels and God knows who else – what does that make you?
Yes, the pattern of Denny’s story rang true, with bad money following good. And maybe Denny came out of it less bad than his business partner, but it was a world Cassie wanted nothing to do with.
Just as they were passing an exit near Newport, she opened her mouth to speak, but before any words came Denny had yanked down on the steering wheel and swung them abruptly off onto the exit.
“What is it?” Cassie gasped, as the acceleration pushed her back into her seat. “Why are we going this way? Why the sudden driving like a maniac?”
“We’re being tailed,” he said, as they surged up the off-ramp. “Hang on.”
They swung a sharp right onto another highway, accompanied by the blaring of a big truck’s horn. Past a McDonald’s on the right, a hardware store and then through a red light, a hard left, and they were tearing out of town.
Checking his mirror again, Denny slowed to a normal speed and said, “I think we’ve lost them.”
“Hell, honey,” said Cassie. “You damned near lost me.”
A few minutes later, he pulled over onto a closed down car sales lot and parked up in the shelter of the boarded-up office, nose out to face the highway so they could watch the traffic.
“What are we looking for? Who was following us? Al and Luis? What were they driving?”
Her heart was thumping in her chest. Every car that passed
could be the two gangsters who’d held her up at Pappy’s...
“Chevrolet Malibu, dark blue, Maine plates. I’m guessing they stole it from somewhere after the cops let them go, unless it was someone else. I think they must have been on our tail since Bangor, at least.”
A red Ford. A black SUV. A long truck loaded with metal pipes. A silver Chevy.
She glanced down and Denny had a handgun in his lap. It was a Glock, just like the one Al had leveled at Cassie’s forehead that morning.
Denny was checking it over. Clicking the magazine back into place he looked up, and smiled guiltily, as if he’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Where did you get that?”
“You don’t think I’d have left it with Al, now, do you? The guy has a temper at the best of times, and leaving him all tied up for the cops to find is never going to improve it.” Satisfied, he tucked the pistol down into a pocket in the door. “I think we’re okay, though,” he went on. “No sign of them since we left the interstate. I think we threw them. There’s a map under your seat. You want to show me where we’re headed?”
She found an old fold-up tourist map, the kind given away free at gas stations. “You telling me this thing doesn’t have GPS?”
She found Newport on the map and tracked where they’d come out heading west. “We must be on Route 2,” she said. “So we just keep on going to New Hampshire, and then we skirt around top-side of the White Mountains until we can head down towards Crawford Notch. See here?” She was pointing to a road that wound down past Mount Washington and through the heart of the forest. “Place I know. I worked there a summer and winter, before I headed out east. The folks there are good people. They always said I’d be welcome back any time. We can stay there tonight, at least.”
It was early afternoon now, still plenty of time for them to make it there before nightfall.
Cassie barely used her phone normally, but now, without it, she felt strangely cut off from the world. She’d left her cell somewhere back at Pappy’s and Denny... well, Denny didn’t really have much in the world right now, beyond some clothes, a roll of cash, an automobile and a stolen handgun.
4
They set off again, and Cassie flipped radio stations as if somehow they might pick up something useful on the airwaves. “You like music?” she asked, and he nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “You can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ all you like, or you can make conversation, tell me a little bit about yourself. Remember you agreed to take me on a date? This is it. You’re supposed to be winning me, wooing me. How’s your wooing, Denny? Something tells me you haven’t quite brought out your A game yet.”
“Sorry. No, really I am. It’s just... all this. It’s not who I am. I’m not the kind of guy who gets involved in car chases and casually carries a loaded pistol around with him. Hell, I’d never even touched a gun before yesterday.”
“You see? That’s useful information. It tells me you’re not the kind of loon who has a room full of a gun collection, which I kind of like. But also it tells me that, in a pinch, you’re probably not going to be much of a shot, which I like less right now.”
She flipped to another station, this one playing Bruce Springsteen. “You like music?”
He laughed, nodded, and said, “Yes, I do. Some people, they have to have absolute silence to work. One of my coders, he plays white noise through big earphones all the time. Drowns out the world. Drowns out his own thoughts so he’s in some kind of cocoon and all he has to do is code. Me? I play music all the time when I’m working. Anything from blues to rap, all mixed up so it might be the Beatles one minute, Luther Vandross the next, Gregorian chant the next... Push me right now and I’d go for some roots, maybe Lead Belly or Lester Flatt.”
“You see?” she said again. “That nod sure packed a lot of information. So baseball or football?”
“Soccer. It’s my shanty Irish upbringing, so when I was growing up it was all Manchester United and Celtic. My granda’ used to listen to the games on the radio all the time and you can’t help but have some of that passion rubbed off on you, you know?”
“Meat or fish?”
“Depends on the meat and fish. The best cut, with the best preparation is what matters.”
“Red or white?”
“Lynmar Five Sisters Pinot Noir, or perhaps the Merry Edwards. You can’t beat a Russian River Valley Pinot, in my book.”
“Bourbon or Scotch?” The night before – it seemed so long ago! – when he’d walked into Pappy’s and said , So tell me, what does a guy have to do to get a drink around here? It had been bourbon then.
“Bourbon. Hancock’s President’s Reserve. On ice. That’s a wicked good drink.”
He was smiling all of a sudden. A big mad grin that completely took over his face.
“Winter or summer?”
“Autumn.” The Irish in him: autumn, not fall. “The color on the trees, the bite in the early morning air, the sense of the world slowly letting out the breath it’s held in all summer. Hell, but what are you doing to me? You’re making me talk rot.” But he was smiling, enjoying the way she dug.
It felt shallow of her to find him so attractive just then. There had to be more than a cute smile and the occasional sidelong glance that just stole right through you. More than the complexities of a man who one minute is protective of himself, unwilling to expose the workings of his mind, and the next is laughing as she chipped away at him like this. More than the recognition of a kindred spirit: a person who’s had his share of unlucky breaks and who’s made more than enough bad choices in life.
She leaned across and kissed his shoulder through that horrible check shirt. Denny McGowan was so not a clothes from Walmart kind of a guy.
“Dunkies or Krispy Kreme?”
“Well I don’t really have that much of a sweet tooth, as it happens. Ask me barbecue ribs and buffalo wings and I’d be torn.”
“Barbecue ribs or buffalo wings?”
“Buffalo wings.”
“Pepsi or Coke?”
“Bourbon. See? No sweet tooth. Never have.”
Other than the occasional heavily-loaded logging truck, the highway was pretty much deserted now. Cassie had always thought of the Maine coast as pretty bleak before she’d really got to know it. In reality, while the weather could be extreme the landscape was lush and green. There were proper communities and strip developments along the coast. It was a place she’d grown accustomed to quite quickly.
This interior Maine had a very different feel to it: genuinely wild and remote. It was an empty landscape, and for a Brooklyn girl like Cassie this really was a wild and foreign place.
§
When she woke it was with a start, the car’s tires crunching in off-road rutted dirt and stones.
She sat bolt upright and looked around, convinced that Al and Luis had never been shaken off their tail and were now, finally, closing in for the kill.
A calming hand on her leg, and Denny said, “It’s okay, babe. Everything’s grand.” He gestured out of the front of the Lexus. “You said you wanted a date. I figured we could at least check this out.”
They were on a roughly-surfaced area by the highway, a place clearly used as a rest area and camping ground. Beyond this patch of rough ground, the land fell away to give a view out across dark, coniferous treetops to a great, silver loop of river. It was a wild, dramatic view, and now Cassie saw why people would stop here.
Denny nodded and she followed his look and there... A little wooden cabin tucked away beneath a cluster of pine trees, a porch at one end and a sign over the door proclaiming it to be Daisy’s Diner.
“That date you mentioned,” said Denny. “I saw this and I thought of you.”
She laughed and turned to him, clutching at his arm and then leaning in, burying her face in that check shirt until she had stopped laughing.
“Of all the places... A diner? Out here?”
He shrugged. “I guess the loggers need to eat. And m
aybe there’s seasonal traffic. I don’t know. Place might not even be open this late in the year, but I thought we could give it a try.”
He swung his door open and climbed out, then paused and leaned back in. “Just give me a moment, okay? Let me check it out.”
He had that spark in his eye again, a look that would melt anyone.
Cassie shrugged nonchalantly. “Whatever,” she said, and pretended she was checking her face in the mirror again.
§
He opened the passenger door for her a short time later. Taking her hand, he leaned forward and kissed it, a light brushing of the lips, and then he helped her out.
“We’re in luck,” he said. “They have a table.”
Before they reached the diner’s door, it opened for them. Cassie glanced at the smirking Denny before stepping inside. A guy with a belly the size of Rhode Island and a white towel over one arm was holding the door. Somewhere inside the cabin, tinny speakers played light classical music. Violins. The guy had found some violin music!
He stepped back to let them through and she saw a row of half a dozen tables topped in check Formica. The cabin had been positioned so that the windows along that wall looked out over the valley. You couldn’t ask for a more dramatic view over lunch in mid-Maine.
And there, at the third table along, cutlery had been set, wine glasses awaited and there was even a tin vase holding three artificial blue flowers. The guy had moved along now, and was holding a chair back for Cassie to sit. She glanced at Denny, and then moved along the cabin to take her seat.
“Imagine,” said Denny, “that’s a real quartet playing, just down there in the space beyond the last table. The place is full – place like this you have to book weeks in advance. We were really lucky to get in, you know. I pulled strings with Maxim. Let’s call him Maxim, by the way. Suits him, don’t you think?”
