The Comfort of Black

by Carter Wilson

  “But you didn’t do it,” Black said. “Smooth didn’t have any burns on him, least none I ever saw.”

  “He woke up. Woke up and smiled at me. Told me, ‘Better finish what you started, Hannie. You light me up, or I’m gonna come and kill you.’”

  “Jesus.”

  Hannah was silent as Jill approached and set another drink in front of her. And she was silent as she walked away, suddenly not wanting to jump right back into a story she had rarely talked about with anyone. But since there was little left to tell, she took a gulp of her drink—more Jack and less Coke this time, as if the bartender just knew—and finished.

  “I tried to do it,” she said. “I brought the flame to the gas, but he was too fast. He stomped on my hand, and the flame went out. And that was it for me.”

  This time Black was silent as she paused.

  “It was the first time he had laid his hands on me. It had only ever been my mother, though with her he’d always used an open hand. Not with me. I got his fists. I was fifteen. My mother finally called the police, something she never did when she’d been the victim. When they arrived, I was on the floor near his feet, unconscious. He was sitting back in his favorite chair. Smoking a cigarette, so I’m told. Watching TV.” Another swallow, and then she began to feel the dulling of her brain, the glorious dampening of her senses that a second drink offered when it was made strong enough. “That’s why Billy went to jail. Because he liked to beat up women and girls.”

  Black stared at her awhile longer, then dropped his gaze when she kept staring back.

  “How bad?” he asked.

  “Bad enough.”

  “You healed well.”

  “I was lucky.” But there was nothing truly lucky about five stitches above her eye, or multiple contusions to the chest, shoulders, and left cheek. She hadn’t been killed, and hadn’t had any permanent damage. So, yeah, if that was lucky, so be it.

  “No wonder he never said anything,” Black said. “He did have a temper. Got into a lot of fights. He was usually on the losing side of them.”

  “He wasn’t used to people hitting back.” Seconds later she swallowed the contents of her glass, the second drink disappearing so much faster than her first.

  Black pointed at her empty glass.

  “Want another?” he asked.

  “I’m getting drunk tonight, so, yes.”

  He nodded in somber acceptance of this, not seeming to endorse her idea, nor dissuading her from it. Black held up two fingers for Jill.

  “Where did you go after that? Did you stay in the house?”

  “That’s the best part of the story,” Hannah said. She tilted her glass and one last syrupy drop slid along her tongue, teasing her. “My mother became a wreck without Billy. She was so fucking dependent on him—and his beatings—that she didn’t know how to survive without him. Much less take care of two girls. She claimed disability, though her only real disability was coping with life. For three years after Billy went to prison Justine and I took care of everything, taking the government checks and adding it to the income from the minimum-wage jobs I rotated through each afternoon after school. We barely scraped by, and there was no other family member willing to help us out. By the time my mom killed herself three years later, it was almost a relief. Drank herself to death.” Hannah looked at the empty glass on the table and offered a short, bitter laugh at it.

  “There was a little insurance money, and that’s when Justine and I moved out to Seattle. She was still a minor, but the courts gave me guardianship of my sister. I feel like I saved her, but sometimes I think Justine blames me for everything. As if that fucked-up life we had in Kansas gave her some kind of comfort. Structure.”

  “Did he ever hit your sister?”

  “No, never. He treated her the best of all of us. Though that means he just basically ignored her.”

  He saved the verbal abuse for me and the physical abuse for Mom, Hannah thought. Justine always just watched. Watched and then hid. Billy never even seemed to notice her, yet she’s the one he mentioned in prison. His one daughter Justine. I suppose his other daughter was dead to him at that point. Well, fine by me.

  “So you fired him?” Hannah asked. “You said he didn’t work for you anymore.”

  Black patted the welt on his forehead as if checking it was still there.

  “We were about to part company,” he said. “He kept asking for more and more responsibility, more pay. I just didn’t trust him. I knew I made a mistake in hiring him, despite his work. Peter and I were planning on moving on, taking what money we’d saved up and going somewhere else, establishing new identities, rebuilding our business.”

  “But something happened,” Hannah said. She knew the answer before he responded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You happened.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Black ordered food and waited until Jill walked away before he told Hannah anything else.

  “It was the first I heard of you,” he said. “I hadn’t seen Smooth in over a month. Didn’t have any new work for him, and was starting to roll up my operation, getting ready to relocate. Peter was setting up new accounts for us. Truth was, I had a nice amount of cash saved up by that point, but not enough to be without work for an extended period of time. I wanted enough to retire, disappear forever. Europe. There’s a little town on a lake in Italy I’ve had my eye on.”

  “How much did you need to retire?” Hannah asked.

  “A lot more than I had, and my lack of patience made me vulnerable. Smooth was a liability to me, but the money was coming in. Stupid. I should have disappeared the moment he came back in my life.”

  “So it was his idea,” Hannah said. “He’s the one who approached you about me?”

  Black nodded. “Called me one day and said he had a job. A big one. I asked who the client was and he told me he was.”

  “Not Dallin?”

  “As far as I could tell, Dallin was just the bankroll for the job. But he wasn’t the brains behind it.”

  “So, why would Dallin do it?”

  “I can’t answer that for you.”

  “You never asked?”

  Black folded his arms on top of the table. “Hannah, I’m not noble. I’m a criminal. I murdered someone, then escaped from prison. I didn’t ask questions because Smooth, through your husband, offered me a fee that I couldn’t turn down.”

  “How much?”

  “A half-million up front. Another half-million once the plan worked, meaning you disappeared. I agreed once they proved to me they had that kind of money, and once I was assured you weren’t going to be hurt. But they didn’t want you dead.” A fluorescent light above them buzzed and then finally died, dropping a shadow over half of his face. “They wanted you scared badly enough to want to disappear. Why? I don’t know. They never told me. I figured it was something to do with wanting to avoid a costly divorce, and your husband was going to pay off Smooth as part of the plan. Now, based on what you told me, it seems part of the motivation was based on Smooth getting revenge.”

  A million bucks, Hannah thought. Dallin was willing to pay a million dollars to make me disappear. But what was the point of any of it?

  “But…but why not just kill me from the outset?”

  “Hard to say for sure. But murder isn’t an easy thing to pull off,” he said. “Especially the murder of a pretty white woman, particularly a rich one. The police would be all over it. If your marriage was bad, Dallin would be a suspect. The plan was for me to stay with you for at least six months, and then to always know where you were. That way, if Dallin or Billy were ever implicated in your murder, we could always produce you. Show you were actually alive. The plan would have failed by that point, but there wouldn’t be a murder charge.”

  Hannah fell back against the hard, cracked vinyl of the booth. “This is so fucked up.” She crossed her arms. “So everything about me being in danger was faked?”

  “Yes. My job was to orchestrate everythi
ng.”

  “Dallin speaking in his sleep was an acting job? Him shoving me against a wall and choking me?”

  “Yes.”

  Hannah stole a glance over to the bar where Jill leaned on the countertop and chatted with the bartender.

  “Yes,” Black said. “Her, too. All an act.”

  “And our chance meeting at the coffee shop?”

  “Arranged,” Black said. “I was pretty certain you would stop there before meeting with Dallin. If not, I would have ‘bumped’ into you in the street, just so you might remember me later.”

  “And the guy shooting at us at your cabin?”

  “Real bullets, but purposefully bad aim. If that shooter was for real, we’d have been killed instantly.”

  “And the ‘cop’ you shot?”

  “Peter’s brother,” Black said. “Remember when we were downtown, walking to my car, and then I went into that store? You saw me on the phone. I was communicating our position to Peter’s brother, so he knew how to find us. Everything was set up. All the bullets were fake.”

  Hannah thought back to the cop’s body doubled over in the alley. The terror she felt in that moment.

  “And what was that talk of embezzlement? That I stole money from Echo?”

  “Part of the plan,” Black replied. “That was actually Smooth’s idea and Peter’s execution. They actually did siphon eight million dollars from one of Echo’s cash accounts and left your electronic trace on it. If you went back to Seattle, you’d have a hard time proving you didn’t steal that money. The idea was to put enough pressure on you to feel you had no choice but to disappear. I’d like to know what they actually did with that eight million.”

  “You thought of everything, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “I was highly paid to do a good job. I’m not going to lie to you, Hannah. I knew your life was being ruined, and I’m sorry to say I was okay with it. But that changed last night. When they changed the plan.”

  “What about you fucking me? Was that part of the plan?”

  He leaned forward. “You fucked me, remember. And no, that wasn’t part of the plan.”

  She leaned across the table and changed her voice from a shout to an angry hiss.

  “And they never asked you to kill me?”

  “Not until last night. Peter called and told me Smooth had killed Dr. Britel, that she was a liability because no one knew what you might have told her about Dallin. Then he said Smooth ordered me to kill you.”

  “And why would Billy think you’d agree?”

  “Because there was another million dollars in it for us if I did.”

  Hannah felt a rush of cold air run over her arms, coolness that didn’t exist in the bar, but in her blood.

  “That’s a lot of money,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “And yet I’m still alive.”

  Black scowled. “I’m not a monster, Hannah.”

  “So what did you tell Peter?”

  “I told him to stall. Buy a little time, even if he had to pretend we were on board. But we need to run. There are two bodies now, your shrink and that redneck back in the woods. There’s no wiggle room for us here. It’s time for you, me, and Peter to disappear.”

  “Or maybe this is just another part of the plan,” Hannah said. “Keep layering more and more pressure until I agree to disappear forever.”

  Black jerked a thumb to point behind him. “You saw that man’s brains today, yes? How his skull opened up and spilled everything out? You think that was part of some plan?”

  Hannah couldn’t keep the image of the gore from her mind, but she let it in only a few seconds before she was able to shut it back out.

  “Yes,” she said. “I saw it.”

  “I can get you Internet access. Then you can read about Dr. Britel’s murder as well.”

  “Maybe her murder was always part of the plan.”

  “No, too complicated. They would have simply killed you, like you said earlier.”

  “I just don’t know who—”

  Black held up his palm to her. “Hannah. I’m going to disappear soon, and when I do, no one will be able to find me. I’m not going to pretend I don’t care about you, because I do. More than I’m going to let you know. But I need to take care of me first. Do I want you to come with me? Yes. Am I going to force you to come? No. You have to make your own decision, but I’m not going to put myself at more risk for you. They murdered someone, Hannah, and now we’re tied up in that, whether we had something to do with it or not. This thing is out of control, and I never should have taken the job. I don’t want to go back to prison. I can start over with a new identity, but it needs to happen soon. With or without you.”

  He leaned back, held his drink to his lips for a few moments, and then closed his eyes as he drank. That seemed to be all he had left to say, and he was right. Hannah did have to make her own decision. Her life was so tattered and unrecognizable that all she could rely on was her own instinct. Logic couldn’t apply anymore, because logic had been twisted into lies layered on more lies.

  “And Peter? Is he supposed to come with us?”

  Black smiled. “No. Peter has his own plans. He’s a very smart man, and he’s also a bit of a loner. In prison, he talked about buying a small vineyard in Argentina. That’s all he wants to do. Live alone in Mendoza and make wine. He’s already bought the vineyard under the name of a dummy corporation, and he has a small staff running it. The only reason he hasn’t left already is he wants to make sure we get away first.”

  “I have a hard time picturing him as a good guy,” Hannah said. “After all, he drugged me.”

  Black shook his head. “He hated doing that. Truth is, he’s the only man I truly trust. Trust him with my life. He actually reminds me of the partner I had when I was a cop, back when my wife was killed. Strange to think about. My best friends were my partners, the first when we were law enforcers and the second when we were law-breakers. I’m going to miss Peter.”

  “But you could stay,” she said. “We could all stay. We don’t have to run.”

  “Yes. We do.”

  “So I’m just supposed to let them win?” she asked.

  “Would you rather be dead? Don’t be fooled, Hannah. Things have changed. I think Smooth has gone rogue. He killed your shrink, and I’m guessing he thinks it’s worth the risk to kill you as well. Maybe he planned this all along, maybe he always wanted to see you dead. But somehow he’s convinced Dallin it’s easier now to have you dead than hidden. Once they find out I’m not doing the job, they’ll do everything they can to do it themselves.”

  The alcohol made it so much easier to rage and to cry, and the latter took over. “Why are they doing this to me?” she said. Hot tears spilled over her cheek. “Why would anyone do this? I haven’t done anything. I…I’m a good wife, goddammit. Not perfect, but good. Why would Dallin do this? If he hated me so much, why not just divorce me?”

  Black reached out and stroked her forearm. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t think it was Dallin’s idea to have you killed. I think that was all Smooth.”

  “I just need to know the truth,” she said, wiping her cheek with one hand. “Can we at least get that? Before I make any decision, can we at least find out the truth?”

  His fingertips brushed lightly, back and forth, over her skin. “How do we do that?”

  “I want to talk to him. To Dallin.”

  She expected a terse no from him, but it didn’t come. Instead, he said, “If we could get him talking, we could get access to the money. They did something with that eight million they took from Echo. Peter set up the account for them, but we don’t have access anymore. Having that cash would make things a whole lot easier for us.”

  “What do you propose?”

  He swirled the last of his drink in his glass. “We need a little time to make preparations. We can stay here, lay low. It has to be done right.”

  “How much time?”

  “Tw
o, three weeks.”

  Hannah sighed. “In this place?”

  “It’s no resort,” he admitted. “But it’s anonymous.”

  Hannah wasn’t even sure what the plan was exactly, but there was a plan now, wasn’t there? She felt a little more in control, but that didn’t stop the tears. They kept coming, tears of exhaustion, of desperation, of the pain of betrayal by her husband, and, in a small part, tears of gratitude she wasn’t in this alone.

  She needed to cry, so Black finished his drink as she wept, looking down at the table, giving her as much privacy as someone could in so small a space.

  After a few minutes of neither of them speaking, Jill came over to check in on them. Hannah looked up at her and saw the expression on Jill’s face change from reserved haughtiness to something approaching concern.

  “You okay, sweetie?” Jill asked.

  Hannah thought about that for a moment and decided there was no easy way to answer. So she simply said, “Men fucking suck.”

  Jill looked over and scowled at Black.

  “Amen to that,” Jill said. “Next round’s on me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  DAY 28

  Three weeks passed, and the tiny hamlet of Silverson morphed from a depressing shithole to a depressing shithole with a few Christmas wreaths hung on rusted lampposts. Twice it snowed, just enough to cover the ground and trees in a thin blanket of white, each time lasting only a few days before succumbing to the occasional bursts from the early-December sun.

  Thanksgiving came and went with little fanfare. Hannah hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the holiday at all. This year she and Dallin had planned on hosting dinner in their condo, inviting Justine, her nephews, and a small group of friends. For years after the Thanksgiving that she’d last seen Billy, Hannah had ignored the holiday altogether, but in her twenties she’d realized it truly was a time to be thankful; Hannah knew her life was blessed because Billy was no longer a part of it. So she began embracing Thanksgiving once again. Thanksgiving was a good time, a time to be reminded of how things were much better than they could have been.

  What did Dallin do for Thanksgiving? she wondered. Did he still get together with Justine, cursing Hannah, blaming her for embezzling money and disappearing? Would Justine believe his words at all, remembering the voice mail Hannah had left? And what did Justine do with that message? Did she share it with the police?