Day of Reckoning

by John Katzenbach

  “Good.”

  “I want my boy back. If you so much as harm one—”

  “Don’t you threaten me!”

  “I’m not threatening. I’m promising.”

  She laughed and leaned forward.

  “Got that little speech out of the way? Anything else you’d like to say? Some other little act of bravery? Prove your manhood? Prove your bankerhood?”

  “I could have the guard in here in a minute.”

  “And they’d be dead within the half-hour.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “You think so, math-man? Call it.”

  Duncan didn’t move.

  “Come on, Mr. Bigshot Bank Executive. Call it! Call my bluff!”

  He didn’t move.

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Now that’s the real question, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Why don’t you leave us alone?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I told you. Everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.”

  He was silent, feeling the depth of her hatred within him.

  “Why have you done this?” he asked again.

  “Because of what you stole from me. Think of the marker I hold on you. Betrayal. Emily’s death. Eighteen years. I can see your profit. Don’t you think it’s time to share it?”

  “Why didn’t you turn us in?”

  “What makes you think I won’t?”

  Duncan didn’t answer.

  “Come on, Duncan! What makes you think I won’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She laughed harshly.

  “You see, that’s the little wild card in all of this, that’s the part I like best. You know, I got to learn a little criminal law during idle moments over the past eighteen years. Prisons are great places for learning law, probably next to Harvard or Yale the best we’ve got, and certainly with a better clinical program. Anyway, Duncan, I figure technically you were guilty of felony murder—same as me. Conspiracy to commit armed robbery. Conspiracy to commit murder. Bank robbery. Auto theft. Weapons violations. Hell, Duncan, when you ran away you were jaywalking; they’d probably charge you with that as well.

  “Now, let’s take a best-case scenario: statute of limitations. Not applicable on any of the murder-related crimes. Well, let’s say you hire a clever lawyer who argues that you’re now a pillar of the community and anyway, you were only the wheelman, et cetera, et cetera. You know, both those men that died were former cops—and they never forget. So what’re we talking about? Probation? Suspended sentence? Not fucking likely, Duncan. Maybe for Megan—let’s not forget her little part in all of this—but you, Duncan? A little bit of hard time, I would guess . . .”

  Olivia grinned and hesitated.

  “. . . Of course, I could be completely wrong about all this. Maybe the authorities out there will just slap you on the back and say let bygones be bygones. What do you think?”

  “Get on with it.”

  Olivia’s voice seemed squeezed together, compacted into a tightly wrapped ball of hatred: “That’s why I never told them, Duncan. Even if it would have meant getting out sooner. Because I didn’t want you to be paying off your debt to the state of California. Your debt was with me.”

  She hesitated, then whispered, hissing:

  “With me, you son of a bitch!”

  Again, she paused, sitting back in her chair.

  “And you’re going to keep on paying. Because even if you get your boy back—even if you manage that, and personally, I doubt you’ve got the stuff to do it—I’ll always have that little ace in the hole. You know there’s a prosecutor out there who’d love to have your name. A couple of FBI agents, as well. And let us not forget the families of the men who died. I’m sure they’d be interested in knowing the names of the other members of the Phoenix . . .”

  He felt his entire body quiver.

  “. . . They’ll never forget. Not in eighteen years. Not in a hundred years. They’ll never forget.”

  She whispered again: “Just as I never forgot.”

  Duncan found himself thinking of a moment shortly after Tommy had been born; the news that night had been filled with the story of a toddler who’d fallen into a drainage ditch and become trapped. Rescue workers had worked through the night to free the tiny child. Duncan remembered holding Tommy in his arms, feeding his restless son a bottle of formula, watching the footage on the late news with tears streaming down his face, his insides convulsed. He remembered how surprised he’d been that the child had survived; usually there are no happy endings, no miraculous rescues. The world is always trying to kill off our children, he thought. They are such easy targets.

  Olivia glanced at her watch.

  “I need to make a phone call,” she said brusquely.

  “What?”

  She grabbed the telephone and pulled it toward her.

  “I need to make a phone call. You want your son to stay alive, then you’ll tell me how to get an outside line.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Duncan, don’t be obtuse. If I don’t call a series of telephone numbers every ten minutes and tell the person on the line I’m okay, then he—or she—is to assume I’ve been betrayed again, and to execute the judge and the boy. Now, how much more specific can I be?”

  Duncan looked at her in horror.

  “How do I get an outside line, Duncan?”

  “Dial nine.”

  “Thank you. One minute to spare.”

  Olivia quickly dialed a number.

  Three blocks away, at a pay phone, Ramon Gutierrez stood waiting, looking at his own watch, unsure what he would do if the phone didn’t ring. He was flooded with relief when it did.

  He picked it up: “Yes.”

  “Everything’s okay.”

  “Right. Move to phone two?”

  “Right.”

  He hung up, smiling.

  Olivia returned the phone to its cradle. She took her wristwatch off and placed it on the desk in front of her. “I’d better keep a closer watch on the watch,” she said, smiling. “Hate to screw up and miss a call.”

  She fixed Duncan with a harsh look.

  “It would be a dumb way to die, no? Because someone forgot to make a phone call. Like being on Death Row and being marched into the gas chamber—or electric chair, whatever—and blocks away, in the governor’s office, his chief aide is frantically looking for the piece of paper with the number of the direct line to the execution chamber on it, and realizing damn if he didn’t leave it in his other pair of pants.”

  She laughed.

  “Did you know they threatened me with it, Duncan?”

  “With what?” he asked, barely able to speak.

  “The death penalty. Happily, it was ruled out of my case early enough . . . But not yours, Duncan. Not yet.”

  When the buzzer at the front door sounded, Megan jumped. At first she thought it was the twins, who’d forgotten something and come back, but then she realized they would have let themselves in with their own key. And then she thought they probably wouldn’t bother, relying instead on teenage laziness and the certain knowledge that their mother would let them in: Why struggle with a key when one can simply ring the doorbell? She hurried across the hallway and reached for the door handle without taking a moment to think clearly about what she was doing.

  She pulled the door open and froze.

  First she saw large sunglasses, out of place on the overcast day. Then she saw the half-grin that hit at the core of her memory. She watched as the man standing before her slowly lifted off the sunglasses. The
features that stared at her seemed to rise out of a nightmare that she’d hoped was long past. She stared, open-mouthed, taking a step back, as if she’d been struck.

  “But we thought you were—”

  “Dead? Disappeared? Vanished? Beam me up, Scotty, I’ve had enough of life here in the good old U.S. of A.? What did you think, Megan? That I ran away from that bank and never gave it another thought?”

  Bill Lewis laughed at the fright in Megan’s face.

  “Have I changed that much?” he asked calmly.

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so. Well, Megan, aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  She nodded.

  Bill Lewis stepped inside the house and glanced around.

  “Nice,” he said. “Nice. Rich. Really rich. Solid. Have you become Republicans, too?”

  Megan couldn’t respond.

  “Answer the question, Megan,” he said in a low, angry voice.

  “No.”

  “I bet,” he snorted.

  She watched as his eye took in the substance of the house. He looked down at an antique table in the hallway. “Not bad,” he said coldly. “Shaker design, what, eighteen-fifty maybe?” He glanced back at Megan. “That was a question,” he said. He ran his finger over the rough wood of the antique table.

  “Eighteen fifty-eight,” she answered.

  “It’s a fine piece. Probably worth a couple of grand, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so? You guess so!” He laughed, a sarcastic, braying sound.

  He wandered into the living room, where he saw some framed pictures and went over to look at them closely. “Duncan has put on some weight,” he said. “He looks like I would expect a happy burgher to look like. He hasn’t got the fire anymore, has he? No leanness, no commitment, just fat figures and swollen bottom lines, huh?”

  He hesitated, looking at Megan.

  “No,” she said. “He’s in good shape. He runs four miles a day.”

  Bill Lewis let out a hissing laugh. “I should have expected it. The sport of the bourgeoisie. Probably wears a pair of hundred-dollar New Balance sneakers and a three-hundred-dollar Gore-Tex running suit from L. L. Bean. Doing high-tech, high-cost battle with the waistline.”

  He stopped, looked harshly at Megan and said: “He should try starving. It keeps one very lean and tough. Starving and hiding from the FBI and the cops. It’s a great conditioner.”

  He did not smile as much as snarl. He turned back to the sideboard and picked up another photograph. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “The girls are as pretty as you, and they look almost like you did back then. Spitting images.” He picked up a photograph of Tommy. “He looks much happier here,” he said. “Where we’ve got him, he hardly ever smiles.”

  Megan gasped.

  “Tommy,” she whispered.

  Bill Lewis turned savagely toward her.

  “What? You thought that this show was just Olivia’s? You didn’t think there was someone else out there who had spent some time thinking about you and Duncan and wondering when he was going to get a chance to repay you?”

  “Tommy,” she said again. “Please, my baby . . .”

  “He’ll die. He’ll die unless you do what you’re told. So will the old bastard, only he’ll die a bit more painfully.”

  Bill Lewis put the photograph down. He seemed to think for an instant, then he picked it up again and looked closely at it. He looked over at Megan and suddenly, violently, smashed the photograph down on the edge of a table, shattering the glass and frame. The glass breaking sounded to Megan like a shot, and she thought for an instant that she was bleeding.

  “We’re in control now,” Lewis said. “Don’t forget it.”

  He stepped over to Megan and grasped her face with his hand, twisting the cheeks together.

  “They will all die, do you understand? Not just the boy and the old man, but then I’ll come back and kill the girls too. Think about that, Megan. Then I’ll kill Duncan, but I’ll leave you alive, because it will be a lot worse for you than dying. Do you understand that? Do you understand!”

  She nodded.

  “All this, Megan, all these things, all this life, well, kiss it good-bye.”

  He released her.

  “All right, Megan. Turn to the wall. Count to sixty. Then you can go on doing whatever it was you were doing before we took time for this pleasant little conversation. Little housework. Little cleaning. Wash the dishes. Darn some socks. Do something nice and safe and middle-class. Nice seeing you again, after all these years. All these years, Megan.”

  Bill Lewis pushed her against the wall and started out.

  “Oh, hey, give my best to Duncan, too. Tell him he’s lucky I didn’t kill his wife today, the way he killed mine.”

  Then he left, leaving Megan sobbing, face to the wall.

  She dialed the number of the second pay phone swiftly, and when she heard Ramon Gutierrez’s short “Yes” on the other end, brusquely said: “Keep going.”

  “On to the third phone,” Ramon said.

  “Right.” Olivia replaced the receiver in its cradle. She watched Duncan’s eyes, searching for signs of rebellion. “All right, Duncan, let’s get on with it.”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Take out a piece of paper and a pencil.”

  For a moment he stared at her, wondering what she had in mind, then he complied.

  “Good,” she said. “Okay, Duncan, how much do you make?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Duncan,” Olivia said, “don’t test my patience. How much do you make?”

  “My salary is ninety thousand a year.”

  “And?”

  “There are perks, like insurance, car allowance, favorable rates on loans and mortgages, health plan, which are worth something.”

  “Make a guess,” she said.

  “Another twenty-five thousand.”

  “Keep going. Retirement fund?”

  “My wife and I have about twenty thousand each in IRAs. The bank contributes to my pension fund, in addition—”

  “Write it down.”

  He scribbled those figures on the pad.

  “Good,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “I own a piece of vacation property in Vermont, just the acreage, really, we wanted to build something, maybe next year . . .”

  “Add it in.”

  “Well, it cost me thirty-six thousand for six acres . . .”

  “When?”

  “Seven years ago.”

  “I’d guess it’s worth what, a hundred? One hundred and twenty?”

  “At least.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Close to Killington.”

  Olivia smiled. “Nice. Real nice. I gather the skiing is great there. Probably will be a real fine season. Do they already have snow?”

  “Some.”

  “Write it down. Stocks and bonds?”

  “I have a small portfolio.”

  “You’re too modest. What do you own?”

  “Just the blue chips.”

  “That’s what I would have guessed.” She motioned toward the pad.

  “What else?” asked Duncan.

  “Put down your house. And don’t forget Megan’s real estate work. How did she do last year?”

  “She made fifty thousand dollars.”

  “This is a booming economy here, isn’t it?”

  Duncan just nodded.

  “Who would have thought that the tired old Northeast would make such a revival? Why, back when we were such close friends, Duncan, it seemed like it was simply going to hell in a handbasket, didn’t it? Imagine my surprise when I got ou
t and learned that this was boom time, that everybody out here was getting rich.”

  Olivia reached across and took the paper from him, looking at the line of figures. She let out a long, low, mocking whistle. “Not bad. You’ve been a busy fellow, haven’t you?”

  He nodded.

  She ripped the paper off the pad and put it in her pocket. Then the smile faded and she leaned forward in her chair. “Listen, Duncan,” Olivia said, her voice a single harsh, hissing whisper. “Listen carefully. I’m going to open an account.”

  “What?” He was confused. “An account?”

  “Right, math-man. And you’re it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You will.”

  He looked at her and waited. He could tell she was savoring the moment.

  “Don’t you wonder why I came here today?”

  He shook his head.

  “I had to see you, Duncan. In person. I could have done all this by telephone, and think how much safer it would have been for me. But I wanted to see you for myself, Duncan. I had to see that you had become the enemy. I knew you had. I knew you didn’t have the heart. But even I had trouble thinking that you’d fallen so far.”

  She sat back in her chair and laughed.

  “Don’t you look in the mirror, Duncan, and feel ashamed? Don’t you see everything that is wrong with America wrapped up in your petty little money-grubbing ways? Don’t you wake up in the middle of the night and think back to the time when you were important, to when you were doing something! You were part of a struggle. You were dedicated to making the world better, and look at you now. Dedicated to making more money. It’s disgusting.”

  She suddenly reached across the table and grasped his hand. Her grip was iron ice, and he felt her taut, hard muscles pulling and squeezing at him.

  “There, Duncan, that’s what commitment is. I’ve never changed. I’ve never stopped believing in the struggle. I am as tough as I was then . . .”

  She released him suddenly, and he slammed backward in the chair.

  “I am as strong—stronger. Prison is like being reborn, Duncan. It puts everything into focus. It makes you come out all new and hard.”