by Lisa Unger
My mind scrambled back there. Mom was supposed to be in Key West that night. I was sneaking out to meet Seth. But who knew that?
“Tell me everything,” I said. I searched his face for something I needed—remorse, sadness. But he had his fighting face on, features heavy, blank, eyes lidded, almost sleepy. Never let your face betray you—your effort, your fear, your anger. Let them look into a clean canvas that they can paint with their own insecurities. His words.
“Your dad heard about the money from a CI,” said Mike. “He told Paul about it, about plans he had to take it. Your father was in trouble—debt, some issues with gambling. He was into it with everyone from the credit card companies to a local loan shark. Paul talked him out of doing the job.”
Paul talked him out of it. Of course, he did. He’d never let my dad do something like that.
“So, Paul put together a team, me included, and we robbed Whitey Malone,” said Mike.
The information landed hard. Words can hurt worse than any blow.
“You and Paul?” I thought of the question my imaginary dad asked me back at the Bishops’ house. Do you want all your childhood illusions shattered? Had I on some level always suspected?
“You and Paul robbed a drug dealer and took a million dollars?”
“Don’t look so heartbroken, Zoey,” he said. Impatience curled his lip. “We robbed a drug dealer, not an orphanage.”
The other man dragged Rhett Beckham into the middle of the tarp. Then the woman. He left two thick skeins of blood along the blue-white of the tarp. I stared at Beckham. He was mine to kill, but I’d hesitated. Now he was dead, nothing but medical waste, everything he was in this world gone. I wanted to be happy he was dead, that he died ugly and stupid, cowering in front of someone bigger, stronger, tougher. But again, there was only that vast nothingness within me. No joy, no ecstatic sense of vindication, just a dark spiral.
You’re one of the good guys.
I wasn’t sure that was true. I mean—it obviously wasn’t. Maybe there weren’t any good guys.
“Paul paid us out,” Mike went on. “We were just the hired men, at a hundred each. Which was fine. It was Chad’s discovery, and Paul’s plan. It was seamless. We were in and out.”
I walked over to the man on the tarp, avoiding the slicks of blood. He stood to face me, and I lifted his mask. Seth. The muscles of his face did a little dance of shame.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I thought you were one of the good guys,” I said.
“I am,” he said, looking down at the bodies at his feet. “We’re none of us just one thing, are we, Zoey?”
He shook his head, then bent to fold the tarp over the bodies. Beckham and his girlfriend stared up at me from beneath the folds of the milky white film, surprised, disappointed in how things turned out.
“But Paul didn’t take his cut,” said Mike, still standing behind the table. “He didn’t want the money. That’s how he was. What he did? He didn’t even do it for Chad. That guy—I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, of your father. You loved him—but Chad was a user. He used Paul all their lives—not for me to judge. But Paul wanted that money for you and your mom. He wanted you to be safe, taken care of. That’s why he talked Chad out of doing the job, why he did it himself. If someone got hurt, if someone got caught, Paul wanted it to be him, not Chad. But it wasn’t fair that Chad got all of it. It just didn’t sit right with me.”
“So you hired Didion and Beckham to go get it from him?” I guessed.
Those half-lidded eyes revealed no emotion. He lifted his shoulders.
“We didn’t know your mom didn’t get on her plane. We didn’t know that your boyfriend wouldn’t show and that you’d come back so fast. And that bastard,” said Mike, shaking his head. I didn’t like the way he was talking about my father, even if it was all true. “He wouldn’t give up that money. And then everything went to shit. And Seth—who, by the way, had nothing to do with this back then, just your boyfriend, a stupid kid—called the cops. And that money sat, well hidden by your old man, all these years.”
My mind scrambled to put all the pieces together—the fractured versions of my father, of Mike, of Paul. They were in tatters; I couldn’t stitch them back together.
“You,” I said. “You were the fourth man. The one waiting in the car.”
At least he had the decency to hang his head.
“Who was the other guy with you the night you robbed Whitey Malone?” I asked. The world was spinning, but my voice was calm.
“Does it matter?” Mike asked, shaking his head. Then he answered his own questions. “It doesn’t. None of it matters now. It’s done.”
There was a heavy silence, all of us just standing there.
“You and Beckham jumped me last night,” I said. “You took the key.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for how all of this intersected with your life. I wish it hadn’t. I’ve tried to make it up to you over the years.”
That explained why they didn’t kill me last night, why I wasn’t hurt worse. They beat me, just not too badly.
“Make it up to me?” I said. “I watched my parents die. I was fourteen years old.”
He lifted his palms.
“Because of Didion and Beckham,” said Mike. “They were rabid dogs.”
“They were dogs that you called,” I said.
He dipped his head in a single nod of concession. “And they’ve both been put down. You got what you wanted, Zoey. Now we can all move on.”
Seth used duct tape to bind the tarp around the bodies. He seemed to have some experience with this type of thing, given his calm and the deftness with which he completed the task.
I worked to push through my numbness. Underneath it all, some part of me was screaming in rage and sorrow, but I couldn’t get to her. She was buried deep, suffocating. Saving her was saving myself, I knew that. But I was probably too late. Once I drove that knife into Didion’s heart, I became one of them. Why hadn’t I realized that? I made a decision about what was right and wrong, who deserved to live and die, but the only judge and jury was my own selfish rage.
“He never told you about it?” asked Mike. “All these years. He never told you the truth? You didn’t know about the money?”
I shook my head. Paul wasn’t a big talker. We spent a lot of time together, but mostly we just talked about me, or ate, or went to the movies. He would never tell me about this dark side of himself, of my father. His only goal in life was to protect me. I knew that on a cellular level. Even if it meant lying to me about them, about his own dark deeds. He’d have figured it was the right thing, to keep all the ugly out of my life. Little did he know I’d been infected long ago.
Mike shouldered the bag and walked toward me.
“Think about the girls; think about what this money can do for them, for the school,” he said. “Think about how comfortable we can make Paul. You know he doesn’t have much time.”
I squared myself toward him, spread my legs, and gripped the gun in my hand.
“I can’t let you take that money, Mike,” I said. “It’s not right.”
He smiled, cocked his head. It was an expression he used, the patient teacher indulging his student’s youth and naïveté.
“Not right? Come on. This money belonged to a drug dealer, earned off the suffering of others. It sat in the dark for ten years. If it goes back to the police, it will sit in an evidence locker until some other dirty bastard gets his hands on it, one way or another. Let’s not get hung up on some paint-by-numbers morality. Your parents died for this money. Don’t you want it to do some good in this world?”
There was a kind of street logic to this. The school was a force for good in the community, a place where girls learned to be strong, to stand up, where kittens became dragons. But I couldn’t teach them unless I could lead by example. I knew that now.
“You don’t deserve this payday,” I said. “None of us do.”
“
Who are we to judge who deserves what in this world?” asked Mike.
He looked old suddenly, tired. There were dark circles under his eyes. But his belly was full of chi, and I could see by the twinkle in his strange light eyes that he was ready for a fight.
“I am going to judge tonight,” I said.
“Your hands are dirty, too, little girl.”
I nodded. “I don’t deny it.”
“Walk out of here with me, leave the past behind,” he said. “Seth will get rid of these bodies. We’ll take this money and do good with it. Live to fight another day.”
“There are too many hanging threads,” I said. “Josh Beckham for one.”
“We’ll pay him off,” he said. “He’s weak, has an elderly mother to care for.”
Mike would kill Josh Beckham. I knew that; he wouldn’t leave it to chance.
“The Bishop woman,” I said.
“Threats will keep her quiet.”
No. I’d unleashed a chain of events when I killed Didion that led to the opening of a long, dark tunnel that had been locked too long. All our secrets climbed out, and we couldn’t stuff them back down there. I felt a creeping lightness, the lifting of a burden I’d carried. Maybe I had wanted answers after all, not just revenge. The truth, no matter how dark, shed a new light.
“Drop the bag,” I said.
His smile grew wide. It was loving, kind—but there was a shade of something else there—condescension maybe, amusement. We both turned at the hard scrape of plastic over concrete, Seth was dragging the bodies toward the door. How did he fit into this? I couldn’t believe, hapless as he had seemed back then, affected as he was, that he’d known that night what his role was. He couldn’t have. But then I’d been wrong about so many people, so many things.
“Let’s just move on from here, Zoey,” said Seth, breathless from pulling the bodies. “We’ve all made mistakes.”
“It’s too late for that.”
I backed up, blocking their exit from the warehouse.
“We’re calling the police. This ends here.”
“If you do that, Zoey,” said Mike, “you’re only hurting yourself. You’ll go to jail like the rest of us.”
“So be it.”
A flash in those eyes, a flicker of anger.
“It’ll kill him, you know that. To lose you and me. To understand what I did to your family. He won’t come back from it. He’ll die alone.”
The thought put a vise on my heart.
“Who called him that morning?” I asked, thinking of the call he took. “What upset him so much?”
Mike shook his head. “Beckham had some idea that Paul might know where the money was. He may have called, tried to intimidate him. I thought Beckham was crazy. But turned out, he was right. Paul knew where it was all along. Just left it. Well, not all of it, right? I wondered how he was paying for NYU.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I guess he took his cut after all,” said Mike. “He’s as dirty as the rest of us.”
The thinker panics. The watcher waits. The Red Hunter acts.
I moved in quick, a hook to his jaw flew in so fast that he never even got a hand up to block. He absorbed the blow with a tilt of his head, lifted a finger to the line of blood that trailed from the corner of his mouth.
“Zoey,” he said. “I’m not going to fight you.”
I took the gun out of my hoodie and his eyes dropped on it. I was aware of Seth to my left. I could hear him breathing
“Where’s your gun?” I asked Mike. “The one you used to kill those two.”
He held my gaze. It was a look I knew well, the patient teacher, waiting for his student to catch on.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “I know you’re angry. You have a right to be. But let’s go home, work through it. We have a long history together, and all of that came after what happened to your parents. Let’s take care of Paul and run the school. I can afford to give you a real job there now. No more waitressing.”
His face, his voice—so soothing. He knew me. He knew I wanted all of those things.
“The gun,” I said.
He was fast, too. He’d dropped the bag and used a lithe sidekick to knock the gun from my hand. It went skittering across the floor and landed at Seth’s feet. I dove for it—too late. Seth picked it up and looked at me, worry etched in his brow. He popped the chamber and dumped the bullets into his palm, shoved them into his pocket.
“This is not how any of this was supposed to go,” Seth said. He put the gun in his other pocket. I had to recast him. Who was he? Whose side was he on?
“Did you know that night?” I asked him. “What you were doing?”
“No,” he said, he looked down at this shoes. “Of course not. I was just a kid.”
“They knew about Seth—your parents, Paul,” said Mike. “They monitored your calls, your email. Your dad was a cop. You think he didn’t know you had a boyfriend?”
“He knew I was going to sneak out that night?”
“He knew,” said Mike. “Your dad was going to wait and follow, scare the bejesus out of the kid. He mentioned it to Paul, who told me. Just in passing, just conversation. I knew Heather was going to be away, as well.”
“But she wasn’t away,” I said. “Why didn’t you stop it? You were the fourth man. The one waiting out in the car. When you knew she was there, when you saw me come back—you didn’t stop it.”
“It was too late by then,” he said. The weight of regret in his voice only made me hate him more.
“Too late because if you left us alive it would have come back to you. You would have been caught,” I said. “They were always going to kill him. No matter what.”
“No,” said Mike. “No. If he’d given up that money, they’d have taken it and left. That was the plan. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t.”
I wanted to believe that, that Mike never planned on hurting my father. I know he wouldn’t have planned to hurt my mom and me. He just wanted the money that none of them deserved. He hired Didion and Beckham to get it. If my dad gave it up, that would have been the end of it. He could hardly report the robbery. He’d have to let it go. Or tell Paul. Or go after it himself.
“Paul would kill you if he knew what you did,” I said.
Mike shook his head as if I were annoyingly stubborn. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
There was a red pulse moving through my body, a dangerous amount of anger like a tide washed through me.
I flew at him, an elbow to the jaw hit hard, eliciting a grunt. My upper cut headed for his thick chin, which he deflected. My knee to his groin—which he easily sidestepped. My movements were clumsy with rage, too much power, not enough accuracy.
“Don’t,” he said, barely out of breath.
I came at him again. But a palm strike to my solar plexus sent me flying back, landing hard beside the wrapped up bodies. Winded, I lay there, looking at Rhett Beckham’s dead face through sheets of plastic. Pain throbbed from my center; adrenaline, cortisol raged as I struggled to regain my breath. He was stronger than I was, a better fighter. Always had been, always would be. He came to stand over me.
“Are we done?” He looked to Seth. “Get these bodies out of here.”
Seth looked uncertainly at me but did as he was told.
“When did you start working for him?” I managed, staring at Seth.
“He’s been keeping an eye on the place for me for years,” said Mike. “To see who came after the money, he thought so we could find out who killed your parents.”
“You knew,” I said. “At some point, you figured out who was behind it.”
“I suspected,” said Seth. “I wasn’t sure until recently.”
“I thought you were one of the good guys,” I said. He looked away from me, grabbed the tarp, and started dragging until he disappeared into the dark of the warehouse.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Mike said. “He struggled with it. But he was broke, about to l
ose the firm. Money. There’s no seductress more alluring, no corruptor more total.”
I scissor kicked, taking Mike’s feet out from under him. He fell hard, surprised, but he pencil rolled quickly away from me, leapt to his feet. I was up, too, and it was on. We danced around the warehouse space in the dim light. I am small, so I must be fast, come in tight. He is large, at least three times stronger. My first order of business is to tire him out. You can’t fight for long; your body can’t handle all those brain chemicals, the effort it takes to punch, kick, deflect, evade. A cheetah can run sixty miles an hour, but only for thirty seconds.
He threw three powerful strikes: A roundhouse kick. I ducked; it flew over my head and sent him spinning off balance. A hook intended for my head. I backed away and felt it graze the tip of my nose. A claw headed for my throat, which I deflected and stepped around, bringing my elbow hard into his kidney.
He kicked his leg out and tripped me as I came around. I landed hard on all fours, but hopped up quickly to my feet and turned in time to take a blow to the side of the head that sent me staggering back. Then he’s a freight train, coming at me with blow after blow, some of which I evaded but most of which I took—a crushing strike to the ribs, a hard kick to the shin, punch to the jaw. Then I’m down, the ground rising up, the world in an ugly spin. His face, blank and hard hovered, a face I loved, a man I trusted. All the fight left me. I was beaten. I was beaten long before it ever began.
My father stood on the edge of the light. Didion lay on the floor bleeding. My father was stoic, but a single tear drifted down his face.
“If I told them where it was,” Dad said. “They’d have killed us all. I was buying time. I swear it.”
I knew it was true. My father may have been a dirty cop, a gambling addict drowning in debt, but he loved us, and I always knew that. He wouldn’t have let us all die for money. He was stalling, trying to keep us alive until help came.
“I thought maybe, maybe you’d come back,” my dad said. “That you’d know something was wrong before you came through the door. I thought you’d run for help.”
“I tried,” I said.
