“You think she killed him?” Langford smiled, then considered it. “Maybe from blue balls.
“Not that I could blame him,” he added.
“You knew her?”
“Just from what Perry told me. Said she was a good-looking woman. Some fuckup ex-con for a husband. Perry figured she was working for him trying to butter him up so he’d help get her husband’s prison record cleaned up, help out with his parole. Perry, class act to the end, was just stringing her along while he tried to drag her out to the Palisades. His friend had a house out there Perry used for a fuck pad. Why do you ask about her?”
“She was my mother,” I said.
Langford sucked in air through his teeth and winced. “If it’s any consolation, I never heard about her going along with it. Perry liked girls who took a hard sell, and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I’d probably have heard.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Give-and-take,” Langford said. “I imagine you know that game. Now, how did you find me?”
“Malcolm Haskins.”
“And how did he find out I knew about the evidence against Henry?”
“He never told me,” I said. “We didn’t really have a lot of time to chat before Henry killed him. Is Haskins the reason you disappeared?”
Langford nodded. “He started bugging me, asking me questions about all this. I stonewalled him. But when a Supreme Court justice sets his mind to making you testify, dying is one of your more palatable options. And if Haskins knew, then I was sure that eventually Henry would find out and then we’d be back to the RC Cola–and–skinning scenario. So I ran, tried to hide. This thing with Henry, it’s personal for you?”
“Yes. More and more with everything I learn.”
“He offered you some kind of deal?”
I nodded. “It was strange; he wanted me back. He seemed more interested in my obedience, in being able to watch me suffer under him, than anything else.”
“You said no.”
“I kicked Marcus in the face and tried to strangle Henry.”
“Good,” he said, then corrected himself. “Well, survival-wise it was pretty dumb. You should have taken the deal; it was the reasonable thing to do. I said good because I like seeing those guys hurt, and the only thing you have going for you is that Henry has trouble dealing with unreasonable men. Somehow, though, no matter who he’s working on, he always manages to find a compelling enough reason to get the guy to do his will.”
“Is that why you’re talking to me? You think I can get out of this?”
“No. You should have said yes to Henry. You’re going to be a corpse, or worse, before the week is out. I’m talking to you because if you can find me, he can. I’m as good as dead. And it’s nice to go down making a move instead of waiting for Tuesday lasagna.”
He looked around at the furnished room, the same nailed-to-the-wall landscapes that who knows how many people had seen from the same bed as they died slowly. I got the feeling he’d taken a deal, a long time ago, and it had left him here, at the end, nameless and alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SENDING THE MESSAGE through Cartwright, I told my father to find me where he’d lost me once. The Cutlass growled along the dirt road and parked beside the baseball diamond. I was taking a risk, for both of us, by meeting him, but I needed to make sure he was okay and warn him that Henry was coming for him
I rested the Halligan bar against the chain-link fence of the backstop. When I was ten, my father left me at this field, thinking my mother had taken me home after the game. As night fell, I found some local kids and we had a ball playing manhunt then taking turns shooting one another with a little one-pump BB gun. I’d never seen my father scared, but he was white as a ghost that spring night as he came stalking through the fields looking for his son.
He looked just as worried now.
“You okay?” he asked me. His eyes took inventory of my bad week: the friction burns on my face, a mottled black bruise across my throat (which still wasn’t working quite right), and a marked limp from crashing the car into the wall. The gash in my thigh from Haskins’s country place had finally scabbed over. It itched like a motherfucker, which was good, a sign of healing.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Been better?”
I nodded. He hugged me.
“Anybody follow you?” I asked.
“No. Haven’t given someone the blow-off in a long time. I sorta miss it. Were you the one who killed those two on the news?”
“No,” I said. My name still hadn’t gone public as the main suspect in the murders. I imagine Henry had something to do with that, keeping my identity out of this so he could lure me back, dangle the promise of making it all go away if I gave in to him. Just one more piece of leverage.
“Stomp the cop?”
“Yes, but just to get away. The rest is a frame-up.”
He seemed unsurprised.
“They’re watching you?” I asked.
He nodded. “The cops occasionally and some guys I took to be private muscle are parked across from the trailer. I called them in as peepers, whack-off artists, and sneaked out the back when the local PD came to check them out. Your friends Marcus and Henry paid me a visit too.”
“They threaten you?”
“In a real classy way. They said if you cooperated with them, they’d make all your troubles go away. They wanted me to help.”
“What’d you say?”
“I told them I hadn’t talked to you, but I would see what I could do. It’s better to keep them on the hook while I get my bearings in the situation than to tell them to fuck off straightaway. Keep them interested in case we want to make a play at them.”
“Did you kill James Perry?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “They mentioned that to me too. Are they trying to lever you with it?”
“Yeah. They want me to help cover up that they killed the Supreme Court justice and the girl.”
“Give me up then,” he said. “I’ve got the hang of prison.”
I looked at the scar on his cheek. Someone on the inside had slit open the side of his mouth, with what kind of nasty shiv I couldn’t imagine. No. He wasn’t taking any hits for me. He’d done his time.
“I got myself into this, Dad. If there’s a fall, I’m taking it. Why’d you kill Perry? Were you working for Davies?”
“No. I never met Davies before this week.”
“Then why?”
“I didn’t want to,” he said. “You remember Perry? You may have met him when you were a kid.”
“Vaguely,” I said, thinking back to a hazy recollection of a company picnic, something like that. “Fat guy? Thin hair?”
“That’s him. He was a real glad-hander, always chortling right in your face. I don’t know how your mother met him, maybe around the courthouse, but he was a big deal politically. After I got out the first time, she thought he’d be a good friend to have. He offered her a job as a secretary. She took it.
“She never told me about it, but I guess he was…hot for her. And, as with most of those respectable folks, his kindness turned out to be a scam. He was holding my parole over her, breaking his word, trying to get her…”
He scratched the infield dirt with his toe.
“…you see?”
I got it.
“I didn’t know any of this. Maybe I hadn’t been looking hard enough. She called me at home one night. She’d been out working late. She and Perry had been driving back from a meeting. He said he had to sign some papers, out in the Palisades, some house. He got her inside, and he started getting a little pushy, I guess.
“She distracted him somehow, called me. She didn’t want to bring the cops in. Understandable. I showed up in a rare mood. Perry was drunk, obnoxious. He came at me. I shoved him, kept him back. He stumbled, tripped over a step, and fell. He landed on his temple on the corner of the hearth. It was a lot of blood. Just gushing. I sent your mother home to take car
e of you, and I cleaned up Perry.
“I dropped the body down in Southeast, fixed it so it looked like a mugging. That went over, eventually; it took a few days for anyone to find the body. I went back to the house that same night with some bleach and hydrogen peroxide. It was a fucking mess. Hours. When I was done, with the trash down at the dump, just taking a last look at the place, the sirens came. Somebody must have called them. I was in and out all night in a beater that didn’t fit the neighborhood. I was stuck. I smashed a lock and played it like a badly planned B and E. The rest I think you know.”
He’d told most of the story in a calm voice, looking over the woods surrounding the fields. Then he turned to me.
“I don’t want you thinking I’m a killer, Mike.”
As a con man, he’d made a living making people believe him, and I believed the gist of his story, believed that he was protecting my mother, that he wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer. Yet something about his account was off, something I couldn’t place.
I didn’t say anything. What can you say when you find out that the defining facts of your life are false, that you’ve hated your father, tortured him for sixteen years, because you didn’t have the story straight, had it exactly backward, in fact? He wasn’t covering up for anyone. There was no sordid thieves’ honor at play. He’d stayed silent to protect my mother, to protect me, to save himself from a life sentence, maybe worse, for killing a powerful man.
I didn’t need to ask him why he’d never told me. He blamed himself for that night and didn’t want to get me involved. What would he have said? I was a fuckup, and when your mom tried to help me out, my bad decisions—the past crimes, the parole—made her vulnerable to scum like Perry? To scum like me? I mean, after all, Perry was an extortion artist the same as I was when I worked for Davies.
There was nothing to say.
Not that it mattered, because we didn’t have time to talk. Flashlights scanned the park. I don’t know how they had found us. Far off I could hear cars doors slamming shut and the clanks of chains: dogs. They were a few hundred yards away, near where I’d parked the Civic. There were a lot of them, and they didn’t look like police. A shaft of light turned. My father and I were already in the woods, sprinting, but I had made out faces: Marcus was here.
I ran with my father until fire coursed through my legs and lungs. We hauled each other back up when we stumbled, racing blind through the woods. A half a mile in, my father led us splashing down a freezing creek, then cut a ninety-degree turn. I hoped we’d lose them. We had a decent lead.
Then I heard it, a rustling behind us, then panting, now and then a clinking of chain. Closer and closer, the noise came fast. I knew it was the dogs. But I didn’t hear any barking. The pack materialized out of the dark, a dozen gleaming eyes circling us on the wet leaves, mouths snapping, teeth like razors, yet all so strangely silent. Their vocal cords had been cut.
Sir Larry Clark, ever helpful, must have loaned Henry his dogs.
I’d seen them take a kill order once before, the weekend I met Larry. They’d cornered a rabbit at his house. Larry gave the command. They hadn’t seemed like dogs anymore, just a blur of muscle and sharp white teeth. When they finished, slinking away with bloodstained faces, it looked like someone had thrown the rabbit in a blender.
There was a strange moment of calm. They kept a circle. When the first moved, the rest would join. I had the Halligan bar and could probably fend them off for a minute or two, but by then we’d be found. I held it with two hands, the sharp point of the pick ready to strike.
A Doberman started toward me.
“Leave it,” I heard a voice say behind me. The dogs eased back.
I turned. Annie stood above me on a downed tree. Apparently she was part of the posse.
“Who the fuck is she?” my dad asked.
“My girlfriend.”
“Pretty.”
“Thanks.”
“How’s that going, by the way?”
“Not too great.”
I could handle Annie selling me out and stealing my job, could probably even put up with getting eaten by a pack of Dobermans, but having my ex-girlfriend supervise and savor the butchery? All right, life, you win. You got me. I mean, how fucked up was this whole thing going to get?
Annie stepped through the circle of dogs and moved closer to me. I guess I should have taken a swing at her, but she was just too sweet-looking to KO with the Halligan.
She threw herself into my arms, then leaned her head back and kissed me.
“You’re okay!”
Actually, more confused than okay.
“They’ll be here any second,” she said. She held my hand.
“But what about the tape Henry showed me, of you in his office? Aren’t you working for him?”
“Mike, no!” she said. She stepped back, took me by the shoulders, and looked into my eyes. “I only went along with Henry to find out if what you were telling me was true.”
“And?”
“I’ve been watching him. I believe you now, Mike. I had to see for myself. It was all so fucking crazy. You can’t expect me to buy that whole story—the murders, the framing—without double-checking. You’re a great guy, but come on, there are a lot of nuts out there.”
I couldn’t blame her.
“I joined the search so that I could find you before they could hurt you. I’m inside, Mike. I can help you stop them.”
“There’s evidence against Henry,” I said. “I know where it is. It’s a file, but we need the name on that file to find it and stop him. Without that name, we’ve got no chance.”
My father scanned the shadows. “Annie, very nice to meet you. You seem like a lovely woman, but I’m afraid we need to get going.”
Annie looked back through the woods. I took her hand.
“I can’t let you go back to him,” I said. “He’s a monster.”
“You can’t take him without someone on the inside,” she said. “That’s your only chance.”
“Annie…” I looked from her to my father. It was the truth. And if she ran with us, with no one to mislead Henry, he’d catch us all. I told her to get a prepaid phone, to call when she was safe, that I’d find her.
“Head toward the highway,” she said. It was a faint yellow glow in the distance. “I’ll lead the dogs the other way.”
She kissed me again, started back, then stopped.
“Wait!” she said. “They won’t believe that you just miraculously escaped.”
A look passed among the three of us.
“Hit me,” she said.
“What?”
“Either one of you. Mark me up a little. Or else you got away too easy. They’ll know. Then we’re all screwed.”
I could see from my father’s face that he was in awe of this girl’s wiles.
She looked to me.
“Annie, I can’t.”
“Oh, fuck it,” she said; she shut her eyes and brought her fist up hard into her upper lip and nose.
“God!” I stepped to help her.
“How’s it look?”
Blood trickled between her front teeth and beaded in her nostril.
“Awful.”
“Great.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Now go.”
My father pulled me away. We sprinted for the highway.
“Marry that girl,” he said as we ran.
“No shit.”
A half a mile on, we jumped into a culvert, then scrambled into the far back corner of a half-empty strip-mall parking lot.
“You know how to steal cars?” my dad asked.
“The light touch.” I swung the Halligan into the passenger side window of a VW sedan. I set the bar’s pick in the groove around the glove box and pried it open. Then I leafed through the manual. Nothing. I smashed the window of an Audi and repeated the process.
“It’s in the manual?” he asked doubtfully. I detected that distinct fatherly note
of I-don’t-think-you’re-doing-this-right.
“Yes,” I said, and pulled the valet key from the back page of the car’s manual. When you buy the car, it’s glued in there, and people always forget to take it out. Really, who reads the instructions for a car?
I unlocked the doors. “Get in,” I said.
We tore out of the parking lot and raced down back roads toward farm country. We were both still breathing fast, pulses racing, high from the chase.
“It’s weird. I almost miss the thrill,” my father said.
“Me too.”
“Though I am sorry everyone’s trying to kill you.”
“I appreciate that. Thanks for telling me what happened, with Perry. I’m sorry. For everything.”
“I’m glad you know why I never talked. It killed me not to tell you.”
Finally understanding each other, we set to work like old accomplices.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MY FATHER AND I hauled a box of supplies and a Coleman propane stove into the cabin. Rambling, lunatic graffiti covered the walls. I never tried to hurt mother. They put handcuffs on me. They tore my skin.
“Who’s your decorator?” I asked Cartwright.
He looked at the walls. “Oh. Some junkie squatted here last year.”
It was a three-room house in the hills outside Leesburg that Cartwright, who had more black-market sidelines than I could count, kept for whenever he needed some serious privacy. “And the smell?” I asked. It was a potpourri of BO and socks.
“I had like nineteen Salvadorans holed up here last week.”
I didn’t ask.
“Do you have everything?” I said.
He pulled six cans from the bag—I was going to make chili—and then an envelope. Inside was a heavy gold badge with an eagle across the top. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms seal filled the center, with DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE above and SPECIAL AGENT underneath.
I glanced at my watch. Annie was supposed to have been here two hours ago. I hadn’t seen her since our encounter in the park last night. I was sure that Marcus and Henry had figured out her double cross, that she was dead or worse. God knows what they would do.
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