Barton said nothing.
“Like I said, I’ve always believed you’d make a hell of a detective. So at least think about it, okay? I hate to think of all your talent and hard work going to waste. I mean, you can’t want to work at a liquor store for the rest of your life.”
Barton said again, “I’ll see you,” then crossed the parking lot to the street, got into Miller’s pickup. She didn’t look back as she went, wanted only to get the hell out of there, get away not just from Mancini but also from the last known whereabouts of Abby Shepard and her antique suitcase.
It was one thirty and raining still in Southampton when Barton reached Miller’s apartment. He was exactly as she had left him. She sat beside him again, touched his hand, but he didn’t wake up this time. She needed to wash away the cold film still clinging to her face, felt it now on her entire body, so in Miller’s bathroom she undressed and ran the shower, stepped under the heavy stream. The sound of the water relaxed her, allowing her tired mind to wander, and it wasn’t long at all before it came to her, before everything suddenly clicked and the true sum of the equation and what it meant—what it had to mean, could only mean—was right there before her.
Despite the warm water washing down her, she felt a chill spill through her, tumbling down from her head to her groin. Her slender legs were suddenly very weak, and her heart ached as if she had just run for miles and miles in frigid cold.
It took a while for her to shake off the inevitable physical reactions that came with knowing what she now knew. Still, even as she recovered from them—strength returning to her slender legs, her heart calming—she was faced with the question of what to do with this knowledge. She wasn’t certain if there was anything that could be done, anything she could do. After all, who was she? Just a nobody. That much had been made painfully clear. She felt, though, a sense of purpose as she dressed, felt it growing inside her, into an urgency. To think this through, she went to Miller’s front windows, stood at one and looked across to the train station. There, staring out but not focusing on anything, letting everything in the visible world smear into a soft, rainy blur, she realized eventually what it was she would have to do, the only thing, now that she knew the truth, that she could do.
If Mancini wanted help, then maybe that was just what she would give him.
By the table upon which the equipment lay, she opened her cell phone and dialed a number, waited for her call to be answered. A risk, but at the same time, not really, not if she was right, which she knew she was.
When the call was finally answered, Barton said softly, “It’s me.” She looked at Miller, making sure he was still unconscious, then continued. “You and I need to talk. I’ll meet you anywhere you want, but it has to be right now. This can’t wait.” She listened for a moment, then said, “All right, I’m leaving now. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
Ending the call, she looked at her watch. It was just after two o’clock.
Though the afternoon sun was obscured by colliding clouds with steely black hulls, Bechet could still find its place above the crooked city skyline. Visible like a wound bleeding through bandages, its position, sinking bit by bit, told him that he had still a few hours till nightfall, when he would need to call Castello from a Southampton pay phone. There was time yet, but not much—less, of course, with each moment Bechet spent standing around and waiting for what he needed before he could make the return drive east.
In the elevated office he had converted into a bedroom and storage area—a fortress within a fortress, the safest place in his world—he waited for Gabrielle to finish checking Falcetti. The sedan was parked in the small loading dock, the garage-style door leading out to the street locked and bolted again, Falcetti, at last check, unconscious in the backseat. Bechet had called Gabrielle from his cell phone once he was a few streets away—he didn’t want to tell her that he was on his way till he had actually entered his neighborhood—and told her that Falcetti was badly hurt, to get the first-aid kit from the bedroom and ready everything she would need to treat a gunshot wound. She wasn’t surprised, then, when she saw Falcetti curled up in the backseat, but she hadn’t expected there to be so much blood. Just looking at it was enough for her to know that there probably wasn’t much she could do. Falcetti’s paper-white face and sunken, glassy eyes, once she looked up at them, only confirmed this.
Still, she and Bechet tended to the guy, moving quickly as they cut up the leg of Falcetti’s jeans to expose the wound, then cleaned and dressed it. Bechet’s kit, of course, was more than complete, contained even what Gabrielle would need to remove the bullet. But there was, she had said, no point in that; Falcetti had lost too much blood, and cutting into him now would only make matters worse.
As he waited now in his bedroom for Gabrielle to return from below, Bechet felt hungry and stepped away from the window, found a box of Clif Bars among his supplies, opened it and removed one, eating it as he stood back at the window, not far from the bed in which Gabrielle had spent her lonely night. A few minutes after he finished she was standing in the bedroom doorway, her arms folded low across her stomach.
Still looking out the window, Bechet said, “How is he?”
“Not good. I don’t think it will be long now.”
“Any chance he might come to first?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I need to talk to him. I need to know what he knows.”
“I thought you guys were friends.”
“We were.”
Gabrielle took a step into the room. “We should have taken him to a hospital, Jake. He might have had a chance if we took him when you first got here.”
Bechet shook his head. “It would have been too much of a risk, Elle.”
“Because it’s a gunshot wound.”
“Because it would have meant leaving a trail. Even if we had just dropped him off outside the emergency room and driven away, their security cameras would have caught us and the cops would be looking for us. We don’t need that right now.”
Gabrielle waited a moment, then took a few more steps into the room, stood at the opposing window, the one overlooking the interior of the building. She looked at the wire mesh running through the plate glass, then past it, first at the sedan in the loading bay, its back doors open, Falcetti visible through the back window, and then toward the far end of the open room, the corner where a speed bag platform was mounted on the brick wall and a heavy bag hung on a long chain from a crossbeam high above. Leaning up against a wall not far from that corner, under a tarp of clear plastic, was an old motorcycle.
Gabrielle studied all this, remnants of a life she knew so little about. Finally she looked back at Bechet.
“Are we going to talk about what’s on, Jake?”
Bechet thought for a moment, nodding. “You should have been a doctor, Elle,” he said. “The way you handled yourself down there.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Your hands never shook once.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t ever bothered by the sight of blood, even when I was kid.” She paused, then said, “How about you?”
“How about me what?”
“Does the sight of blood bother you or are you used to it?”
There was no way Bechet couldn’t know what she really meant by that. He looked out at the skyline again.
“It wasn’t like that, Elle.”
“It wasn’t like what?”
“What I used to do.”
“What exactly did you used to do?”
Bechet took a breath, let it out. “I’ve killed two men in my life, Elle. The first one was years ago. I did it for Castello.” He held out his left arm, showed her the dark star tattooed on his inner forearm. “That’s what this means. One kill. Like fighter pilots. Five of these means you’re an ace. The second man I killed was the man who taught me how to kill and get away with it. When I last knew him, he had nine of these on his arm, one kill shy of a double-ace. That was years ago, so he probably had more when I ki
lled him.”
“And when was that?”
“Last night.” He turned to face her. “I did it for you.”
Gabrielle winced slightly, saying nothing.
“The guy who shot Bobby in the leg, he had three of these tattoos. He was the son of the man who taught me. The man I killed.”
“Why would he shoot Bobby?”
“Because Bobby was working with him.”
“Doing what?”
“That’s what I need Bobby to tell me.”
“So if Bobby was working for him, why’d he shoot Bobby?”
“Because Bobby wouldn’t kill me.”
Gabrielle thought about that. “This guy, where is he now?”
“He’s dead.”
“How?”
“Bobby killed him.”
“Jesus, Jake.”
“I put that life behind me, Elle. I’ve tried every day to make up for that first man I killed. Everything I do is to . . . separate me from that. But I make no apologies for the second man. He was a dog, would have killed you and cut you into pieces and scattered them God knows where.”
“Stop, please.”
“You need to know this, Elle. I need you to understand what it is I’m trying to protect you from.”
“If you left that life behind, then why was this man going to kill me?”
“Because my old boss wanted me to come back to work for him. I’ve been living the way I live so he wouldn’t be able to find me. That’s how much I was determined to never go back.”
“But what were you doing there to begin with, Jake? How could you . . . ?” She didn’t finish her sentence, couldn’t.
Bechet walked into the bathroom. The old tub by the large window, the industrial-sized water heater in a corner, even more dry goods stacked in boxes. In another corner, a dark one, stood a metal filing cabinet. With his good hand, Bechet opened the top drawer, removed a heavy file, carried it into the bedroom, then dropped it on the unmade bed.
Gabrielle looked down at it, reached down finally and opened it. Inside were newspaper clippings. She read the top one. It was about a man called the Iceman.
“What are these?” she said.
“Articles about my father.”
Gabrielle flipped through a few of the clippings on the top of the pile.
“He used to kill people,” Bechet said. “It was his job. I didn’t know it, barely knew him, in fact, but after he died it all came out. It turns out the feds were closing in on him, suspected him in close to fifty murder-for-hire cases, most of them in the city.”
Gabrielle glanced at a few more articles—headlines, for the most part, a few paragraphs here and there—then looked out the window at the open space below. The loading dock, the drain in its floor, the lack of street-level windows. She understood then what it was Bechet’s father had used this place for. A sudden chill made her shiver.
Closing the file, Gabrielle looked at Bechet. “How’d your father die?”
“Heart failure.” He shrugged. “Natural causes.”
She nodded, waited for more.
“When my boxing career was over,” Bechet said, “I didn’t know what to do. I’d made okay money as a fighter, but after paying managers and taxes—and just the general cost of living in the city—it was pretty much all gone. I’d inherited these buildings by then, but they were my security, you know. I figured when I was an old man, I could always come here to live. Or maybe one day turn this into a neighborhood gym, find fighters of my own, train them and manage them. So even though I needed the money, I didn’t want to sell out, not unless I had to. I mean, they’d only get more valuable, right? So I hung onto them while I tried to keep the life I had made for myself going. I was used to a certain way of living, you know?” Bechet shrugged. “Pride, I guess. People tell you that you’re the next big thing long enough and you start to believe them, start to count on it, think you deserve to live like the next big thing. The question was, how? Then one night a friend of mine introduced me to a man named Jorge Castello. A South American businessman, he reeked of money, living the life. He tells me he’s got some businesses out on the island, would I like to come work for him? Security, he called it, but I knew what he meant. What else would someone hire a man like me for?”
“So you knew from the start what you were getting into.”
Bechet nodded. “Yeah. I don’t expect you to understand this, Elle, but it wasn’t just a job, it was a chance to be part of a family. Castello was this fatherly kind of guy, he and his son and the man who trained me, they took me in to where they lived, treated me like one of their own. I knew what kind of men they were, I wasn’t being fooled or tricked, but still there was something . . . seductive about the whole thing. Money, travel, living higher than I’d ever known. Living the way I would have lived had I become what everyone said I was going to become, the next big thing. Any . . . distraction I wanted I could get. Castello and his son, they knew what they were doing, in every possible way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Picking me in the first place. To be a boxer, you need a certain mentality. They recruited me because I was already preconditioned to violence, already so used to it. It would be easier for them to make me into what they needed me to be.”
“And you let them.”
He nodded. “The step from boxer to what they wanted me to be, it wasn’t really that much of a stride. And since there was nothing else I could do to earn money—the kind of money I was used to—the step seemed even shorter.”
“And then one day you just quit.”
“One day I found a way out, yeah.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A long time. Over six years.”
“And all of a sudden, after all these years, they want you back?”
“More or less, yeah.”
“How’d they even find you?”
“Through Bobby. Somehow he got mixed up with them.”
Gabrielle thought about all that, watching Bechet closely, nodding. “So now what?” she said finally.
“I need to talk to Bobby to know that.”
“And what if you don’t get to?”
Bechet looked out the window at the city. “I don’t know.”
Gabrielle walked to him then, stood beside him.
After a moment, Bechet said, “I’m curious about something, Elle. Why didn’t you go back to school after your parents were killed?”
“I told you. I didn’t have the money.”
“Your folks were wealthy, though. They didn’t leave you anything? There wasn’t any life insurance?”
“They were living the American dream.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were living far beyond their means. Even people of means can do that, it seems. They had nothing but debt. Their debts had debts. Whatever didn’t go to paying what they owed went to the lawyers.”
“Why didn’t you take out a student loan?”
Gabrielle shrugged. “I was debt-shocked, the idea of owing anyone anything freaked me out.”
“Couldn’t you have gotten a fellowship or grant or something?”
“Probably.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Maybe I just didn’t want to go back. Maybe I was in med school because my father wanted me to be.”
“Do you think that that’s true?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the reason I keep myself so busy now is so I don’t have to think about it too much.”
“I can’t imagine you want to wait tables the rest of your life.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“For now, maybe.”
“Our life was good, Jake. Simple, honest.”
“Was?”
“I’m not so sure we could go back to the way things were.”
“So what do we do?”
“I love you. Not much that can change that.”
“I love you, too, Elle.”
“So we’ve got that g
oing for us.” She smiled, waited for his. He offered her the best that he could manage. She watched him for a moment, then said, “This is going to sound weird, but I’ve never been with anyone before who hadn’t known me as a daughter. I mean, that’s what I was for so long, my parents’ daughter. It wasn’t such a bad thing—my parents really were my best friends, part of my everyday life, there for pretty much every major decision I ever made. When they were killed I was . . . lost. I was just . . . lost. I didn’t have a clue who I was without them, I really didn’t, but the one thing I did know was that my life as I knew it was over. I was over. It was more than just being broke, more than having to leave school to make money and pay my bills. It was simply that what had been there all my life was suddenly gone—I mean, like it had never even been there. When you and I met, we agreed not to talk about our pasts. For you it was because you had a past you didn’t want to remember. But for me it was because I didn’t have a past at all. Everything and everyone was gone. The idea of living . . . adrift with you, being a mystery to someone who was as much a mystery to me, was more than a conscious choice, it was all I could do. Every day I’d wake up and realize that what you knew of me—all you knew of me—was what you had seen the day before, and the day before that, going back to the day we’d met. It was surreal, literally, and that was probably what appealed to me the most about it. We were living in our own little world, never straying too far from where we felt safe, saying so precious little about ourselves, who we were before. Eventually what you knew of me became what I knew of myself. Eventually Gabrielle Marie Olivo the daughter was replaced by the woman you call Elle, the woman who works six days a week and sleeps a lot and loves this guy named Jake who likes to live in a way that will allow him to take off at any moment and leave no trail.”
“What are you trying to say, Elle?”
“All the time we were hiding, it never really dawned on me that it was death we were both hiding from. Deaths in our respective pasts—different sides of it, though, you know?” She waited a moment, then said, “If we’re going to continue, we’re going to need to be a little more . . . realistic, we’re going to need to know things about each other. Everything.”
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