“I’m sorry.” I glanced at her. “I’m a million miles away.”
“Talk to me,” she said. “What did Malone tell you? When you came in from the deck, you looked devastated.”
I told her about Malone’s diagnosis, what little I knew. It was stage four, inoperable. Chemo and a spate of experimental treatments hadn’t worked.
“He has about two months,” I said. “Maybe less. I thought he could just stay with us at the Inn. He doesn’t have anyone else.”
“We’ll take care of him,” she said.
“He came back to reconcile with me before it was too late. About Boston,” I said. She was silent, waiting, probably not wanting to say anything that might tip me one way or the other about telling her. I focused on the road ahead, gripped the steering wheel, and for the first time since it happened, I told the terrible story of my downfall.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
“MALONE CAME TO me at the end of our shift one night,” I said. Susan settled back in the passenger seat to listen. “He said he had a problem. A good friend of his, a woman he went to college with, needed help. Her daughter had gotten involved with a real psycho, a violent, abusive guy, and while they were together, they made a sex tape. It was stupid, of course. The girl was young and she’d been trying to make her parents mad, so she went for the typical bad boy. She broke up with him, but now the guy was saying he was going to put the tape on the internet unless she got back with him, and once it was out there—”
“It’s out there forever.” Susan eased air through her teeth. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly. All this boy had to do was click a button. He said if she brought cops into the picture, he’d post it. So Malone came to me with this plan all worked out. He wanted to go to the boy’s apartment while he was out and steal the computer that the girl said had the video on it. I said I was in.”
On the road ahead of us, a mother deer and two fawns sprang onto the asphalt, danced in the gold light, then leaped into the trees. I watched them go, feeling a weight ease off my shoulders as I spoke.
“The night we show up at the guy’s building, Malone’s got an empty backpack with him. I didn’t ask questions about it—hardly noticed it. He says all he needs me to do is guard the lobby, so I do just that. He goes up to the apartment, and after a while he calls me in a panic. The guy is there. Malone was sure he wasn’t, but he came out of a back bedroom and Malone’s holding a gun on him. I go up there and … ” I took a breath. The words were tumbling out of me, bottled up for too long. “I just lost it.”
“What did you do?” Susan asked.
“Look, I had a case when I was a brand-new officer. Boston cops are walk-around cops. The brass like you to be seen out there on the streets, you know? Out of the cars and talking to the people. Well, one day, Malone and I are running down the street responding to reports a guy and his girlfriend are fighting outside a café. As we turn the corner to break up the fight, he’s got her by the hair. She frees herself and runs away from him—right into the path of a city bus.” I exhaled slowly. “I didn’t see a lot of bad shit in my time on the beat. I was pretty lucky. But that was bad.”
Susan reached over and held my hand. I squeezed her fingers.
“So, in the apartment with Malone, I beat this guy up,” I said. “I admit it. I mean, I broke bones. I thought he had been whaling on his girlfriend and he’d put the icing on the cake by threatening to ruin her life. Malone tried to stop me, but I really did a number on him. And then as we’re leaving, I see Malone’s backpack is full.”
“Oh no,” Susan said. Her voice told me she could see ahead, into the depths of my downfall.
I continued. “In the hall I say to Malone, ‘What’s in the bag?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know which device the kid’s got the tape on. I took laptops, tablets, hard drives, everything. I’ll find the file, delete it, and send the stuff back.’ Already I’m fuming, because this is not what I agreed to. We go our separate ways that night, and the next morning Malone’s on top of the world. I figure the girl and her mother must have thanked him, and the boyfriend had taken the beating and maybe learned from it. It must have all gone perfectly.”
I gripped the steering wheel hard, trying to shut down all the screaming voices in my head, the thoughts about what I could have and should have done to stop what happened.
“Turns out there was no girl,” I told Susan. “No sex tape. It was all lies.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
“THE APARTMENT MALONE robbed—that I helped him rob—belonged to Ivan Pilkos, an illegal arms dealer in Boston,” I said. “Malone took a quarter of a million bucks from the guy, and then I go in there and bash his head in about some girlfriend and some tape that never existed. Pilkos was just some low-level scumbag Malone had heard was all cashed up. He’d never even met the guy. He was asleep on the couch when Malone walked in.”
“Oh my God.” Susan covered her mouth. I nodded.
“What Malone didn’t realize,” I said, “is that across the street from the apartment building was a private storage facility. A big, expensive, highly exclusive private storage facility. This place has storage boxes and vaults for rich people who don’t trust banks, and it has cameras all over the front of the shop.”
“But surely he looked for cameras,” Susan said.
“There were obvious ones and hidden ones,” I said. “Malone thought he was taking us in at the right angle so the cameras couldn’t see us, but he didn’t know about the hidden ones. The firm was so paranoid, they had cameras all over the street. Sure, they wanted to get video of the robbers when they were inside the facility, but they also wanted video of their car, their escape route, their getaway driver. The cameras got Malone and me outside the apartment building. They got video of us in the lobby. They even got a shot through the apartment window of Malone stuffing his backpack with stacks of cash. A rooftop camera. Clear as day. It was unbelievable.”
I sighed, exhausted.
“The people who worked for the secure facility thought we were common burglars, and they turned the footage in to the department,” I said. “We were fired two weeks later.”
“Did they take back the money Malone stole?”
“The department wanted to keep it quiet,” I said. “Keep it away from the press. A story about dirty cops in Boston would have been front-page news for a month. They asked Malone where the cash was, but he clammed up. He was fired anyway, and he knew they wouldn’t prosecute him. Pilkos wouldn’t press charges on the beating. There was a search of Malone’s place for the cash, but nothing was found.”
“Why did he take it?”
“He said back then it was because he was in debt,” I said. “I knew he’d bought his apartment at the wrong time, and the market downturn had left him in trouble. But tonight he told me that he came up with the plan just after his diagnosis. He wanted to get experimental treatments that insurance wouldn’t pay for. He gave twenty years to the city and he wanted something back. I mean, I understand where he was coming from. That money would have been used for a good cause. Who knows what Pilkos was planning to do with it?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. It seemed, for a moment, that Susan could read my mind. That in the closeness of the car, she might have sensed my secret, the cash under my bed. When she spoke, it was a relief.
“You didn’t try explaining what had happened to the commissioner?” Susan asked. “Telling her why you got involved?”
“There was nothing to explain,” I said. “I was guilty. I’d robbed and beaten a man. Just because I thought what I was doing was right didn’t excuse it. And turning Malone in would have been serving my best friend up on a platter.” I looked at her. She was watching me, her eyes dark and thoughtful. “Whatever wrong I’ve done in the world, I’d never turn in a friend.”
“Has he apologized?” Susan asked. “I mean, I don’t want to be judgmental. I don’t know what was going on in this man’s life. But you were his partn
er. He betrayed you.”
“What can the guy do? He can’t take it back.”
“Well, he owes you,” she said, sitting up in her seat. “Bigtime.”
I drove in silence, thinking about Susan’s words. After a while, I began to pick out a familiar stretch of road from the darkness, the trees and hedges that I knew led me past somewhere I did not want to go. I spotted the house in the distance and saw that a light was on in one of the windows.
I made the decision and latched onto it, afraid that if I questioned it at all, I would change my mind.
“What are we doing?” Susan asked as I pulled the car over outside my wife’s killer’s house.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
CLINE LIKED A purge night, liked to get all his business taken care of in one hit, before his targets could scatter like roaches from a kitchen light. The first time he’d cleaned house, he’d wiped out his whole crew only weeks after assembling them. He’d found out he had a rat in his pack when a cop had dragged him in and told him about it; the cop wanted half Cline’s stash for the favor. Cline had called the crew in, told them there was a last-minute job on, and driven them to a field in a big van. Then he’d turned around in the driver’s seat and said nothing while he sprayed them all with an automatic like fucking Tony Montana. Made them dance in their seats. He’d sat in the field afterward and watched the van burn, the coiling smoke and embers rising into the night. He’d felt pure.
Now he closed the door of the Escalade quietly, put his gloved hands in the pockets of his coat, and counted off the street lamps as he walked toward Addison Gilbert Hospital’s parking lot. He pulled his cap down low on his brow as he crossed the lot and opened the back door that Dr. Raymond Locke had left unlatched for him.
There’d be no playing around with Russ the way there had been with Simbo. He’d knelt by Simbo’s body after the thrashing stopped and looked at the red starbursts in the whites of his eyes, the colors still leaking in the last stutters of his heart. Cline walked the halls of Addison Gilbert and took the stairs to the second floor, following the scrape marks in the paint of thousands of gurneys passing.
Cline found the curtains pulled around bed fourteen. He checked his weapon, nosed the gun between the curtains, and shoved the fabric aside suddenly. The skinny white guy in the bed jolted awake.
Cline recalculated quickly. Let the gun waver just an inch. “Who the fuck are you?” he snarled.
The guy didn’t answer. Cline lifted the chart from the bottom of the bed. Russell Hamdy. Right name, wrong target. Cline walked down the hall, swept the curtains back from all the other beds, checked the vile snoring and moaning creatures he found there.
In the parking lot, sweat seeping into the arms of his coat, he saw a black blob lumbering between the vehicles. He recognized her from the ER. Cline walked up behind the woman and stuck the gun in the back of her neck. She froze against her flamingo-pink coupe, the cardboard box of fluffy, shiny treasures in her hands pinned against the window.
“Russell Hamdy,” he said. “Where is he?”
She turned, and Cline stepped back. Yes, this was the one he’d seen at the triage desk once when he’d come to speak to Locke in the ER; he remembered her ridiculous yellow claws and regrettable pink eye shadow. Bess was her name, he thought. A big buffoon in a clown outfit. She didn’t even look at the gun.
“I thought you’d come.” She smiled, shifted the box in her hands. “When they brought Mr. Hamdy in, I knew it was connected to you. That’s what happens when someone like you comes into town. First you get the overdoses, then you get the suicides, then you get the kneecaps blown to dust. And people like me who won’t shut up about it, who won’t stand by and let you keep on killing—we get sent packing.”
Cline looked at the box she was holding. He could see a novelty mug with a little crown on it that said SASSY SINCE BIRTH.
He thought about asking her again where Russ was stashed, but the defiance in her eyes told him he was wasting his time.
Cline raised the gun in both hands.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
SUSAN SEEMED TO know my purpose, though to my knowledge she had no idea where Monica Rink lived. I exited the car without waiting for her and started walking up the pebble driveway. Cline had offered to tell me what happened the night Siobhan died, and I’d refused to hear it. But his words had started a fire in me, one that was threatening to consume me. I couldn’t wait any longer.
An orange cat fled out of my way, leaping into a hedge, as I advanced toward the door.
“Bill, stop.” Susan grabbed my hand as I went to knock. “You don’t know what you’re—”
I knocked. We waited, Susan still holding my hand. I looked at her and realized she was scared, frightened for me, perhaps, and the heartache I was about to put myself and Monica through. A figure in a green T-shirt, maybe expecting someone else, bounced to the door and opened it.
I recognized her from the photographs in the paper after my wife’s death. Her mouth was big and expressive, turning before my eyes from an expectant grin to an uncomfortable grimace. She knew exactly who I was. Monica grabbed her flame-red ponytail as though for comfort and glanced back into the empty hall.
She couldn’t speak, so I did. “I’m not here to cause trouble,” I said, putting my hands up.
“I can’t—” She tried to shut the door, but my foot was in the way. Susan tugged on my arm.
“Bill, this isn’t a good time,” she said. “You’re upset about Malone. It’s been a rough week. You need to just—”
“No, you need to just.” I pointed a finger at Monica. “Just tell me the truth. It’s been long enough. I can’t take it anymore.”
The young woman hesitated, looked back into the hall again. I wondered if there was a boyfriend or some friends there whom she was mentally begging to call the police. I could imagine them, a posse of twenty-somethings slumped in beanbags waiting for pizza or more friends to arrive so they could watch a horror movie and cuddle together. Generally enjoying their lives, the way Siobhan had once. Siobhan had been a twenty-something, and then she had grown, matured, married me, created a dream of running an inn by the sea and falling asleep to the sound of waves on the shore and wind in the leafless trees. I held the door just in case Monica thought she could kick my foot away.
“It has been a rough week,” I said, locking eyes with the woman whose very house made my stomach shrink. “I’ve lost some people I love, and I’ve learned that not only are there terrible things behind me, but more of them are coming my way. I’m taking this moment to cut the bullshit.” I squeezed Susan’s hand. “I want answers. What happened that night? What happened to my wife?”
Monica drew a deep breath. Her lips worked around silent, agonized stutters. “I h-hit your wife accidentally. Siobhan Robinson. I was alone in the car. There’s nothing more for you to know except that I’m … I’m … I’m so sorry.”
I looked at the girl before me and knew she was lying. Susan pulled on my arm again, and I almost let her lead me away. I was telling myself that I had all the answers I was going to get when a figure stepped into the hall behind Monica Rink.
She was smaller than Monica. Same fiery hair and lean, waiflike frame. A little sister, seventeen, maybe a touch older. She yanked white earbuds from her ears at the sight of me. I looked at the young girl across the miles between us and knew the truth. Monica took advantage of my shock and slammed the door in my face.
Susan put an arm around my shoulders and led me toward the car.
“That young girl—” I began.
“I know,” Susan said.
“She was the driver,” I said. I could feel that my eyes were wild as I tried to take in everything about this moment, not thinking of the horror or comfort that it might bring. I looked at the stars as we reached the car. “The younger girl was the driver. She’d had a couple of drinks. The vodkas open in the footwell of the car. She hit Siobhan and called her sister for help. Monica Rink covered for her l
ittle sister.”
“That girl couldn’t have been old enough to drink.” Susan gripped me by the shoulders, her dark blue eyes square on mine. “She did something incredibly reckless and stupid. She killed a woman on the side of the road. Monica probably covered for her to save her from the stain on her record or … I don’t know. The shame. The stories. Bill, you saw that little girl’s face as well as I did. She’s never going to escape what happened.”
“I want to go back.” I turned toward the house. “I need to tell her it’s okay. I’ll tell them both it’s okay. That I forgive them. They didn’t mean to do it.”
Susan pulled me to her and pressed her lips against mine. I put my arm around her waist and drew her closer, sought that safety in her embrace that I’d experienced once on the beach, that sealing-off from the world. There were tears on her cheeks or possibly mine; I couldn’t tell. I held her to me and breathed her in.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
SUSAN AND I walked around the side of the house, knowing we were probably being tracked by Effie’s gun, and sneaked up onto the end of the porch in case Vinny was camped out near the dining-room windows. Like naughty children, we crept through the hall and the kitchen, pausing at the sink to push and grab at each other, moaning between kisses, her hands fumbling at my belt. Someone came halfway through the kitchen door, saw our tangled silhouettes, and backed out quickly. We froze and listened to the retreating steps, laughed guiltily.
I didn’t want to rush things. We were hot in each other’s arms, sweating with anticipation, shivering with excitement. There was a strange relief tingling in my body at Susan and I finally knowing, at least in this moment, what we wanted from each other. Maybe I was high from having looked my wife’s killer in the face, knowing after so many nights worrying that it had all been an awful accident, a mistake. I took a bottle of cold water from the fridge, and we both drank from it, looking at each other in the golden light, smiling.
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