Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  “Yes, you do. You write them letters,” he said in that soothing voice. “We’ve mailed them postcards. Remember Camden?”

  Camden. Yes, of course. Camden, where she and Ed had gone together last December. Camden, the coastal village with its perfect little library and perfect little harbor and the Christmas by the Sea festival where Santa arrived on a perfect little lobster boat and where Ed had said, If I ever had kids, I would want to raise them in this town.

  Leah had wept that day, though not in his presence.

  “You mailed them postcards from—”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember.” But she couldn’t tell him that didn’t help because the cards went to a post office box in Atlanta and were forwarded from there. She did not know where they went, only where they paused in transit.

  She opened her eyes. “I need to get back to town,” she repeated. “I’ll need to go to them now. Quickly.”

  She couldn’t tell if he looked more afraid for her or of her. But he nodded.

  5

  Area code 502 encompassed portions of Louisville, Kentucky, and Leah drove southwest through Vermont in the dark, traveling alone. Ed had wanted to come with her, but Aunt Leah needed to travel alone. She was sure of that. She’d even left Tessa behind with him, and she always traveled with the dog. She hadn’t passed this way in years and was trusting her Jeep’s navigation system to guide her. Granite mountains bordered the road but they were invisible now, and the darkness on either side of the highway soaked up her headlights, leaving nothing clear except the road ahead. Her children somewhere at the end of it.

  No, no. Your niece and your nephew.

  When Leah and Doug had made their agreement all those years ago, when the DeLorme emergency messenger number had been acquired and memorized, the two of them exchanging it more like a prayer than a number, there had been an unspoken acknowledgment that all of it was a stage play designed for Leah’s benefit. The number represented the tiniest glimmer of hope that she might one day return to the only existence she desired. We are going to wipe you off the face of the earth, but in exchange, you get this phone number with no phone attached. Sound good?

  But then Hailey had called.

  I’m so grateful, Doug. So grateful that you prepared her.

  Thoughts to a dead man. This felt more familiar than not. For all intents and purposes, he’d been a dead man to her for a long time. Their relationship had started two years before the marriage, and the marriage had lasted five years before Nina Morgan died in Florida, and Leah Trenton appeared in Maine.

  You cannot hide from Lowery, Doc Lambkin had told her on the night that her life began to slip away. Not all four of you, not from him.

  So then there would be three. One dead parent and three survivors. The surviving parent was preordained, because it was Nina they wanted to kill, Nina that they would pursue. So it was Nina who had been murdered and thrown into a river in Florida’s backwaters.

  She felt cold acid stir in her stomach, and her foot went heavy on the accelerator; the Jeep roared toward ninety miles per hour before she brought it back down. She set the cruise control so the car could fight back against its driver’s worst impulses.

  There is no way Lowery is still looking for you. No way he’s still watching them, waiting.

  But she couldn’t be sure. He was still alive. She kept an eye on that. Followed the news about him, which was never much. For a man of such rare and terrible power and reach, he was relatively unknown. Mostly, what the Google News searches returned of J. Corson Lowery these days were references to his charitable contributions. He made many of them—to schools, to police departments, fire departments, libraries, gardens. His benevolent heart at work.

  The man who’d founded what one senator had termed “Blackwater on steroids” had always excelled at keeping a low public profile. Even in the days when scandal simmered and federal investigators waited on Nina Morgan to make their case, Lowery had done a fine job of avoiding the press. He had a spokesman for his conglomerate of mercenaries masquerading as security professionals, of course. Had it been merely a matter of testimony and a few underlings sent to prison, Leah wasn’t sure that she would have needed to change her name, let alone flee from her own family. But she’d been asked to bring the top man down.

  “You come at the king, you’d best not miss,” said Omar Little of The Wire, one version of an old saying, but Nina Morgan had learned that there was a worse outcome than missing: taking a shot at the king and hitting the prince.

  He will not let you live, Doc Lambkin had told her on that awful night in the warm Florida breeze, the sound of the Gulf of Mexico a whispered soothing in the background, blending with the tranquil lighting on the patio to create an atmosphere so serene that it seemed mocking. Here is one world, the spring night promised her, and you will never see it again. Soak it up. This is the last night of its kind for you.

  She’d resisted. Fake her own death and leave her family? Never. She ran instead, fleeing with her husband and children, hiding out in a cash-only cabin awaiting the new identities that would let them vanish permanently, cleanly. The Morgan family would cease to exist, but they’d remain together. Forever together.

  Then the assassins arrived.

  The family had been out of the house, thank God, but the security cameras picked them up. Two men dressed like contractors, tool belts on their waists and smiles on their faces. They rang the bell and paced the house and left, and Leah—Nina then—had sent a clip of the video to Doc Lambkin.

  “Not sure about these guys,” she’d told him. “But probably I’m just paranoid.”

  She wasn’t just paranoid. When Doc called back, his voice was unsteady for the first time in her memory.

  “We need to talk about this,” he said.

  “You recognize them?”

  “I recognize them.”

  Doug and the kids went to a hotel, checking in with a stolen credit card, and she returned to Doc Lambkin’s home. He’d poured her three fingers of single-malt scotch and told her about the men who’d visited her home.

  By the end, her hands were shaking so badly, she dropped the whiskey glass. It shattered on the patio stones and some of the fragments fell into the cobalt water of the swimming pool and only moments later it began to rain. Still they had stayed outside, her hair plastered to her neck and her face awash with rain and tears as she had listened to him tell her the only way she could protect her family.

  You have to die, Doc had said, and there might have been tears in his eyes too, or maybe it was just the rain. You have to die one way or the other, don’t you see? But if you die alone, your family is safe. He’ll extract no pleasure from harming them, not without you there to see it and suffer.

  She’d told him they could run. She’d talked of South American countries and remote Pacific islands, and Doc had listened and sipped his whiskey as the rain cascaded down and he never spoke, just allowed her to talk herself out until she saw the futility in her own ideas.

  I have to die, she’d said finally. One way or the other, as you said.

  Doc had nodded.

  Lowery will never believe it, she’d told him.

  Doc paused. Chewed on his lip for a moment. Said, There is one chance of convincing him.

  How’s that, Doc? How in the hell will he be convinced unless he sees my body?

  He trusts the men he hired to kill you. He knows how good they are. He knows that someone like you could never escape them.

  She was staring at him, bewildered. Yes, the idea that she couldn’t escape was the point; how was Doc missing that?

  But I don’t think they care for him, Doc said, speaking slowly and carefully. And I know that they like a challenge.

  That was how Nina Morgan ended up on a roadside on a sultry Southern night with an assassin’s knife tracing her scalp.

  And it had worked. Clearly, it had worked.

  My mom died so long ago I don’t even remember her, Hailey had said today on
the phone. Hailey was right; her mother was dead, which meant that Hailey had lived in safety. But then somewhere on a suburban Louisville street, Doug’s blood had flowed across the pavement, ending his own life but reviving another’s. Nina Morgan was born again, bleated into life through the chime of a pager.

  I cannot let this ruin them, she thought, remembering Hailey’s voice, the underlying maturity beneath the hysteria. How much had Doug told their daughter? It couldn’t have been much. Enough to convince her to make the call, though. Enough for that.

  Leah would take them, and she would keep them safe. It would not be easy—could not be, should not be—but it could be done. Time didn’t heal all wounds, but it added scar tissue that dulled the pain. This Leah knew better than anyone. All she needed was her children and time.

  This was all she had ever needed.

  Just after she crossed the New York state line, her fear got the better of her and she made the call she’d promised not to make unless the situation was beyond all hope.

  Doc Lambkin—“Dave” to those who didn’t know him—lived on an island off the coast of Washington. Once he, too, had been a member of the Lowery Group. Unlike Leah, he hadn’t been foolish enough to testify against them. Unlike Leah, he hadn’t gone into hiding. He’d simply retreated, leaving her with an apology and a promise: If he comes for you, call me, and I will help.

  There was no old-fashioned pager for Doc Lambkin, no secret system. Just his cell phone number, unchanged and—she prayed—unmonitored.

  “Hello?” he said in that bedside-manner tone that had earned him the nickname. Well, the bedside manner and his unusual knowledge about everything from poisons to body-decomposition rates.

  “This is L-Leah,” she stammered. The name was hers now, and she was so used to saying it that she’d forgotten he might not remember. All he’d done with the name was arrange for it to be on the documents. “I mean, this is Nina from—”

  “I know,” he said softly. “How are you? It’s so good to hear your voice. I’ve wondered…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but the rest of it would have been if you were still alive.

  “Doug is dead,” she said. “He is dead, and I am coming for my children, and I am so scared. Doc, I am so scared for them.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “My daughter. She called. Just as we—just as Doug and I had planned.”

  A pause. “And you’re going to them. You’re going to take them.”

  “Yes. And once you told me that I should call if I ever needed you. They were probably just the words you needed to say at the time, but I—”

  “You know better than that,” he snapped, the bedside manner gone. She took comfort in the anger. He did care. He always had.

  “He won’t find out,” she said. “Or maybe if he does, he won’t care. It’s been so long.”

  Silence. He was waiting for her to talk herself out of fantasy and back to reality.

  “I know,” she said. “If he learns, he will care.”

  “He doesn’t forget promises. The terrible one he made to you…he certainly will not forget that.”

  “No.”

  She could hear his breath moving in and out like the tide, and she could picture his face, the way his mouth tightened at the corners and his eyes narrowed when he pondered a dilemma. He would nod his head slowly as if listening to options and opinions from voices no one else could hear.

  “I shouldn’t have involved you,” she said. “There’s no one to help me, not against him. Turn to the FBI again? No. He’s too connected across too many layers, Doc. You know that.”

  “I wouldn’t look for government assistance,” he admitted.

  “That leaves nothing. Because there is no one crazy enough to take him on. Not with the network that comes with him.” Blackwater on steroids. An international network of contractors, killers, spies, and informants. Diminished in strength now, perhaps, but wasn’t that what people had said about the KGB? You presumed weakness at your peril.

  “There might be someone.”

  “Who, Doc?”

  Pause. “Maybe not anyone in a white hat, Leah.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “There might be an option,” he said gently. “Might be. But he’s not the kind of hero that you have in mind.”

  “Could he protect my children? That’s the only thing I’ve got in mind.”

  Pause. The soft breathing in her ear. Then: “Let me make a call.”

  6

  Dax Blackwell was in Italy when the call came. The sun was just up and the streets of Bernalda were filling with sidewalk vendors for the weekend market. He’d come in pursuit of hot peanuts from the same vendor he saw every Saturday, and he was trying to contain his rage at the way the stooped old man made a point of shifting the bag of peanuts away from Dax’s outstretched left hand and toward his right.

  The old man thought this was a show of kindness. In the early weeks, Dax’s left arm had been in a cast. The cast was gone now. The left arm, broken in seven places during an unfortunate morning when a woman had tried to run Dax over with a car, was getting better every day. The old man remembered it as a weakness, however, so he pushed the bag of warm peanuts toward Dax’s right hand.

  I could kill you with the left hand too, Dax thought. I could kill you in twenty different ways with the right hand and maybe only a half dozen with the left at this point, but I could kill you nevertheless.

  Then the old man smiled and the phone rang and Dax pushed petty concerns from his mind. There was no profit in killing the peanut vendor, and Dax Blackwell wasn’t a pro bono kind of guy. His was a family business, and while that sounded emotional, it was strictly practical.

  Instead of killing the old man or even envisioning the best method for the task, Dax simply smiled and said “Grazie” and accepted the peanuts with his right hand. The vendor was almost a friend, after all; his peanuts were delicious and packed with protein and healthy fats. Restorative. Dax Blackwell had come to Bernalda to restore himself.

  As he walked down the sun-splashed street toward the glistening Mediterranean, he shifted the bag from his right hand to his left, reached into his pocket, and grabbed his cell phone one ring before it went dead. After it rang twenty times, the caller would hear a dial tone.

  Dax Blackwell didn’t use voice mail.

  “Hello?”

  “Dax?”

  The speaker’s voice wasn’t immediately familiar, but he’d used the right name, and he’d used it with the right hint of trepidation. “Who’s asking?”

  “Doc Lambkin.”

  Doc Lambkin. Dax had a vague recollection of the name, nearly none of the man. Once he had hired Dax’s father and uncle for some work. Because Dax was a student of the killing trade, he’d been aware of his father’s work since he was ten—and involved by the time he was fourteen. What he remembered of Lambkin was that Dax’s father viewed him as a misplaced soul, a fundamentally moral man in a profoundly immoral business.

  “We met in Perth, Australia,” Lambkin said. “You probably don’t remember. Your father brought—”

  “I remember.” Dax shook one shelled peanut into his mouth, cracked the shell with his teeth, and spit it out neatly. He’d become very accustomed to working with one arm now. When he was back to full strength with both, he’d be even more formidable. A man, like a bone, could strengthen along old fracture lines.

  “I was a…mediator. A go-between. Not the client, but—”

  “An ambassador of the Lowery Group,” Dax said, and he smiled when he heard the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. Lambkin didn’t like hearing the client’s name said aloud. That was fine. Dax wasn’t looking for work.

  Also, his father and uncle hadn’t particularly liked the Lowery Group. The Lowery Group had once protected their own operators while sending Dax’s family members into a nearly suicidal situation. Suicidal work never intimidated a Blackwell, but they viewed it as poor form f
or employers not to provide them with the best possible intel beforehand. Even the Alamo got a scouting report, Dax’s father had said. If Dax remembered correctly, J. Corson Lowery had also once refused to pay a bill. He couldn’t recall the details of that one, but his family had spent many nights debating the situation and pondering recourses. They’d held off on killing the man, Dax remembered that. He’d been vaguely disappointed, but he understood the idea: a man had value when he could provide either money or protection, and there was a chance for Lowery to offer both in the future. Still, they’d been bitter about the situation, and as far as Dax knew, it remained the only unpaid tab on the ledger.

  “Speak,” Dax told Lambkin. “Unless you’re going to deny the truth of what I just said, in which case don’t waste my time.”

  “I was an employee of a security firm,” Lambkin said, refusing to use the name. “Quite the memory you have.”

  “It’s not so hard. Observe and think. Be considerate. Memory is about other people, when it comes right down to it. How much do you care? If you don’t care, you don’t remember.”

  A pause, and then a low, unamused laugh. “Your father’s son,” Lambkin said. “Yes, you are that. Your uncle was less…philosophical.”

  “Depended on the audience. He had his moments. You might recall that no one in my family worked for your security firm for many years. It was never a situation of high mutual trust. I’m surprised you think the circumstances have changed.”

  “I’m calling because I assume they haven’t.”

  “Clarify that.”

  “I don’t work for them anymore.”

  Interesting. Lambkin didn’t strike Dax as the sort of man who’d go freelance. He’d been more of the vanishing kind. An off-the-grid move, perhaps, a retreat to someplace where he did nature photography or landscape painting and tried to forget old bloodstains.

  “I’m also not looking for your services,” Lambkin said. “I’m simply back in the mediator role. The ambassador role, if you prefer.”

  “But not for Lowery.”

  “No.”