The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  Camilla turns and walks across the lawn, regretting this path immediately as her spiked heels sink into the grass, threatening to stick and eject her foot and send her sprawling. But she knows it would be humiliating to retreat, as ever. So with great concentration and balance and, she hopes, poise, she manages to cross the wide lawn without hideous incident, past the couches that have been arranged on carpets en plein air, past the fountains filled with sparkling wine, past the sushi bar and the caviar bar, past the liquor bar and the wine bar, and finally to the well-groomed lip of the driveway, where she hands a boy her ticket.

  “Two minutes, ma’am,” he says, and literally sprints away, down the drive, in search of her Mustang rental, parked safely out of sight, so the Rollses and Ferraris and Maybachs can occupy the more visible positions up here, by the house, by the guests.

  Camilla is pretty sure it’s Demi Moore who walks by, coming while she’s going. She watches the elegant woman saunter effortlessly across the grass.

  She wonders if her life will become elegant and effortless, once she turns this manuscript into an international blockbuster. If other people will envy her, for a change.

  The driveway winds down the mountain, past other massive houses surrounded by meticulous landscaping, and then a US-embassy-in-Africa-style gate that opens to release her out of the private community, into the public world, where anyone is free to drive around.

  The street continues to spill down the Beverly hills, twisting, switchbacks appearing out of the dark night with alarming frequency. Camilla realizes she’s been riding the brake pedal, and shifts into low gear. The car complains briefly, then slows, and the transmission’s noise sounds more normal.

  Camilla can hear her phone ringing, muffled within her handbag. This is no time to be searching for a phone; that’s how people die. But then again, this could be important; it could be Stan.

  She notices another car behind her, the reflection of its headlights momentarily blinding her, until she swings around another switchback. After the curve, her hand rummages through her bag, finds the phone, pulls it out.

  The road levels out at an intersection, and she allows herself to look away from the windshield, to glance down at the device’s screen: it is indeed Stan.

  Now the road is curving and dropping again, and the car behind is following nearer, closing in, tailgating. She can’t answer the phone at this moment. Plus, if Stan is calling already, that means he’s interested. It wouldn’t be bad to make him sweat, if only a little.

  In her rearview, the other car’s high beams are blinding. “Bugger off,” she mutters.

  She leans toward her door, averting her eyes from the reflection. She’s beginning to worry that the turn she took was wrong. And this other car is practically upon her. She’s getting nervous.

  Her tires skid on the gravel of the shoulder. She shifts out of low gear, and the car lurches forward, then steadies, approaching another hairpin turn.

  “Fucker!”

  After the turn she accelerates on the straightaway, but then has to ease off again as she takes another curve, the tires kicking up gravel. Her heart races, and she barrels through an intersection, barely slowing through the stop sign, rushing to get out in front of this arsehole. She’s not merely anxious anymore; she’s terrified.

  The road levels but takes a long turn around a rock outcropping. Camilla notices a street off to the right that drops down into dark nothingness. She glances in the rearview but doesn’t see the lights; the other car hasn’t yet made it around the outcropping. So in a moment of panic or clarity or irrationality or brilliance, she yanks the wheel to the side and bumps over the precipice and bounces down this unlit street, under cover of trees, away from the main road, out of sight.

  Camilla brings the car to a screeching, skidding halt and turns off the lights and grips the wheel with both hands. She’s panting.

  She spins around, looks over her shoulder. She watches that maniac speed around the curve on the main road, the sound of the car receding, then gone. Thank bloody God.

  Camilla sits behind the wheel, her chest heaving, catching her breath. She’s still high up in the hills, looking down at the city, which just a minute ago was a terrifying view; now it’s pretty again. She knows that if she keeps descending, sooner or later she’ll end up in the flats. She’ll be able to find her way once the terrain is level.

  She descends this secondary street, past vine-covered stucco walls, past palm trees and orange trees, painted metal gates at the tops of steep driveways. She finds a major intersection with a familiar name, a street that she knows will take her to the bottom of Beverly Hills. She takes a long, deep breath of relief, and turns onto the thoroughfare.

  Camilla moves her right foot off the brake and onto the gas. She brings the convertible up to fifty, then what the hell sixty, the wind flowing through her hair.

  She never even glances in the rearview to see the other car that reappears behind her, because now its headlights aren’t on.

  CHAPTER 40

  The two-tone wail of an ambulance siren grows nearer for a few seconds, then farther, then is distant and quiet for a long time, the sound waves bouncing off Lake Zurich, before disappearing entirely. The author takes a drink of water, and recommences staring at the ceiling.

  He’d met the potential witness again the following week for a proper date, a desirable table at a popular restaurant, a difficult reservation to procure; she claimed to know the chef from business, though she was vague about the specifics, and it seemed marginally unlikely. Plus she was calling herself Anne, which he knew was not her real name, or at least it hadn’t been her name back in college. She didn’t seem to be particularly trustworthy. Or maybe she wasn’t particularly trusting.

  Regardless of the lies this woman was telling, she was definitely entertaining, and undeniably good-looking, and smarter than he’d expected, and funnier. She was a good date. Great. And she clearly didn’t recognize him from anywhere.

  But he couldn’t prevent himself from thinking, every few minutes, that he might end up killing her. It wouldn’t be a tragic burst of violence in a passionate moment, nor the reckless disregard for life in a vehicular manslaughter. It would be premeditated, purposeful, cold-blooded killing. First-degree murder.

  Every time this horrific thought intruded, he forced himself to smile. She must’ve thought he was an idiot. Or uncontrollably smitten, helplessly amused at every little thing she said.

  When dessert was on the table they both started at the sound of a man’s voice, booming beside them. “Well, hello!” Charlie Wolfe was standing there, grinning down. “Funny finding you here.”

  After introductions, Charlie invited himself to join them for a drink. Three vintage ports, elegant little tulip glasses, a plate of almond cookies, another of meticulously painted chocolates.

  The woman was definitely examining Charlie closely, maybe curiously, perhaps suspiciously. It was undeniable that Charlie was charismatic, and always had been. The author felt a pang of jealousy intrude on his underlying anxiety with bouts of occasional horror; it was a messy emotional stew simmering inside him, everything but the kitchen sink.

  The three of them had all gone to college in the same town, at roughly the same time; they had a lot of Finger Lakes reminiscing they could do. They all lived in Manhattan and worked in the media, so there was a productive six-degrees-of-separation interrogation. It was one of those not uncommon New York conversations, exclamations of surprise at utterly unsurprising non-coincidences, the intersections of Ivy League classmates and Hamptons neighbors, ex-colleagues and ex-girlfriends.

  When the port was gone, even smaller glasses, for grappa.

  And when the grappa was gone, a sudden look of recognition crossed the woman’s face, then a dark cloud. “I know!” she exclaimed, leaning away from Charlie, staring at him. “I know who you are.”

  The author awakens again in the middle of the night, panicked again, grabbing his gun, again. And again he realiz
es that the problem that woke him—the thing he’s terrified of, tonight—is once again not something that’s solvable with a gun.

  He collapses back onto the pillow, in a cold sweat, his mind still flooded with dream detritus mingling with real memory, a recollection that seems impossibly fresh and incredibly old at the same time. It was just a half-year ago. But a half-year was a lifetime ago.

  He remembers walking out of the hospital, a cool crisp day, fallen leaves everywhere, a foreboding chill in the wind.

  “Charlie,” he said, after a ten-minute taxi back to the office, a soft rap on his boss’s door. “I’m sick.”

  He’d been losing weight all autumn, fifteen pounds. He was pale and gaunt, his suits hanging off him like a kid trying on his father’s clothes in the secrecy of an empty house, the parents at work, four o’clock on a lonely bored weekday afternoon.

  “Sorry to hear it, Dave. Take all the time you need.”

  “No, Charlie, you don’t understand.” Dave shut the door behind him, the loud din of the big busy office instantly disappearing into a low background hum. “It’s not that I have a cold. Or shingles.”

  He’d been anticipating this conversation for a long time, practicing in the mirror, trying to not sound rehearsed, to not look disingenuous. There was a lot at stake, and it wasn’t easy.

  “I’m dying, Charlie.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows, a question, but not a lot of emotion. Ever since their conversation about the Finnish debacle, Dave had felt a gulf growing between them, a frostiness. Something not dissimilar to the end of his marriage.

  “Stage-four cancer.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dave. That’s … terrible.”

  Charlie stood up, walked around his desk. He opened his arms, and they shared a brief, awkward embrace.

  “How long?”

  Dave shrugged. He was prepared to provide a plethora of details, but as it turned it out he didn’t need to. He looked down at his feet, and noticed that his right shoelace was almost entirely untied. But now would’ve been a bad time to fix it.

  “I’m so, so sorry.”

  And then there didn’t seem to be anything left to say.

  He took a DC taxi to the jam-packed airport, the chaotic throng and din of the busiest travel day of the year, the airplanes and -port packed to bursting capacity, tens of thousands of people moving among one another in oblivious isolation, from check-in to fast-food to restroom to gate, where the guys with gazillions of frequent-flyer miles and two-brass-buttoned blazers swaggered up to the counter to demand upgrades or bulkhead seats or whatever preferential treatment they thought they were entitled to by virtue of being guys who spend a lot of time on airplanes.

  Then flying over the gray denuded landscape, the factories along the rivers belching white plumes of noxious gas, the New Jersey Turnpike looking like a modern-day Great Wall, the green-gray marsh of the Meadowlands giving way to the brown-gray buildings of Jersey City and Hoboken and then the vast blue-gray of the Hudson River, skirting over the green-gray Statue of Liberty and flying up the length of the gray-gray island, and he could pinpoint actual buildings where he’d lived, then veering over the East River and looking off to the South Bronx, its slummy blight and the pot-holed truck-laden expressway and the gigantic cubes of warehouses, the bombed-out buildings and vacant lots littered with the torched shells of stolen cars and abandoned vans, dropping precipitously over All in the Family–style Queens and then the terrifyingly close serpentine spit of the mouth of the Long Island Sound, screeching onto La Guardia’s tarmac with a brief, alarming bump.

  The Grand Central Parkway was choked with the glowing embers of bumper-to-bumper taillights streaming in both directions, commuters and reverse-commuters and the kids coming home from college with backpacks filled with dirty laundry, the business-attired with overnight bags calling to say I’ll be home in twenty, the low gloaming gray and ominous layers of clouds forming color-neutral folds like a soft-focus black-and-white photograph of an unkempt bed, a light rain falling and the wipers set to the second slowest speed, squeaking, and the directional sounding click-click, click-click, the wipers sounding whish-squeak, whisk-squeak, these November noises and November shades and textures and layers of grayness, the landscape exuding cold and damp that chilled his spine.

  And then stop-and-go through north Queens and the brownstony parts of Brooklyn—Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights and Prospect Heights—then deep into the thick meat of the large dense borough—as a standalone city Brooklyn would be the fourth largest in America—to the tree-lined street and the sprawling Victorian filled with people who were usually protected from one another by distance and busy-ness, by technology and excuses, all now stripped away to reveal the strains and feuds and simmering resentments, brought to the surface by chores left untended and dishes unwashed and leaves unraked and shoes unwiped and ringing phones unanswered, by poor behavior at the festively decorated table, by late arrivals and unintended slights and overt insults, by seething sotto voce and withering contempt and searing stares and sarcastic solicitousness, everything laid bare in the weak oblique light of Thanksgiving, every year, as ritual, until everyone finally pulls themselves off the sofas and out of the armchairs, away from the televisions and tannic red wine and mismatched mugs of mulled cider, when they exchange kisses and hugs and open the front door and walk gingerly down the possibly icy stairs, and then in the privacy of their nuclear unit they turn to each other and recap yet another in the seemingly endless series of final Thursdays in November.

  But this one, suddenly, was his last.

  CHAPTER 41

  Hayden started reading on the helicopter from New Jersey to Westhampton. Then he read in another overly large SUV, on the long tedious drive from the airfield out to the beach community. He was still reading when the car pulled to a halt within sight and smell and sound of the ocean, a hundred yards on. And now he sits in the backseat, racing through pages, before coming to a breathless stop.

  He climbs out of the truck, and walks down to the beach, and stares out at the sea. Fuck. This book would be an unmitigated disaster, the end of him.

  He returns to the truck, but doesn’t climb in. “Tyler,” he says through the window, “you wait here.” He checks his sidearm, and tucks it into his waistband. “Colby, you and me, let’s scout the perimeter.” He fits the earpiece into his ear, with the microphone dangling at his throat.

  Hayden surveys the semi-dark country lane. The blacktop is rough, gravelly, sandy, its shoulder falling away gently into wild scrub on one side, while the other’s border is cleanly demarcated with landscaping, with shrubs and small trees, with lawn and flowerbeds, with cultivation, civilization. The two men walk on the tamed side, where the vegetation offers more cover.

  There are a couple of streetlamps down here near the beach, bathing the tiny parking lot in yellowish light, discouraging backseat sex, underage drinking, brazen pot-smoking, the other petty misdemeanors of summertime indiscretions. A sandy lane marked PRIVATE ROAD, parallel to the shoreline, provides access to the driveways of a handful of beachfront houses in a jumble of styles. There’s a massive shingled thing that looks newly built, and a modest white cottage with overgrown gardens, and a Victorian with dark clapboard and porches and a widow’s walk, and a stark contemporary structure, glass and concrete and steel, right angles and cantilevered planes. This is the only house with lights on.

  Hayden and Colby look incongruous here on the beach, wearing long pants and shoes. But it’s dark, and no one can see. Hopefully.

  They approach the big modernist box from the sand. The ground floor is half-lit, as is one room on the second floor, casting discrete envelopes of light out to the grounds, ten yards of illumination in a few vectors. A wood-plank path cuts through the low dunes to a gate, which Colby opens, and scampers around the western side of the house to a wide lawn in total darkness. Hayden goes around to the east, ducking between a couple of shrubs near the property line, a long arbor of pin
es. Good cover.

  A curtain flutters upstairs, and Hayden can see that it’s a woman. But it’s not the woman they’re looking for; a brunette, not a blonde. They are, unsurprisingly, at the wrong house.

  He leans on a branch, fragrant and sappy, weighing the viability of his other hunch, and how he should investigate it.

  But then he hears a car engine on the street, and he hears Tyler say “Fuck” loudly in Hayden’s earpiece. “Local police arriving.”

  Hayden’s heart sinks. “You hear that, Colby?”

  “Unh.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got”—he can hear heavy breathing—“no cover here. Running.”

  Hayden can see the cruiser’s lights aimed down the private lane.

  “Move the vehicle one street to the east, at the beach,” Hayden orders into his microphone. “We’ll meet there. Go! Now!”

  “Police!” the shout comes from around the side of the house. “Freeze!”

  “Oh fuck,” Hayden hears Colby exclaim. “Recommend action?”

  “Run.” Hayden is moving through the yard of the neighboring house, the big Victorian. “Do not allow yourself to be apprehended.” He runs across another planked path. “I repeat, do not—”

  That’s when Hayden hears the first shot.

  Colby’s earpiece will be the first clue. Then the fact that the man isn’t carrying any identification, or a mobile phone, or a wallet, this will all be highly suspicious. But still, these are only small-town police. What will they think?

  “The next road is a half-mile,” Tyler says into Hayden’s ear, electronically. “Can you make it?”

  Hayden stops running, takes a seat in the sand against a dune, removes his shoes. “I’m going to need to ditch the earpiece and mike.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if the police stop me I have to look like someone like me would look, out for a walk on the beach.” The possible conversation quickly unspools itself in Hayden’s imagination. “Listen,” he continues, “I need to be someone’s guest. Find me a name, and an address.”