The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  I finished that long rant with: “I am totally and completely screwed.”

  And then Amanda, who had apparently not just driven all this way to watch her fiancé have a mental breakdown, got this look of determination and, in her most proper Mississippi way, said, “Well, maybe not.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She made me compose myself before she told me what she meant.

  For at least a little while, this involved treating me like the large toddler I had become. She bought me a bottle of water and a cookie from the vending machine. She made me take deep breaths. She told me to walk a few laps around the room.

  This, naturally, brought an inquiry from the CO. But Amanda was ready for that and fended the guy off with: “His meemaw died. It was very sudden. She had been in good health.”

  After my tears stopped and my respiration had returned to nearly normal—I was still taking these sharp, involuntarily gasps now and then—she sat me back down. We talked in low voices, our heads close.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “A little. How are you so calm?”

  “Oh, believe me, I wasn’t at first. I went through everything you just did and worse when Brock told me about Danny. We were at a restaurant. I was so mortified by the scene I was making, I actually ran out. But I’ve had twelve hours to process this. Brock and I talked a lot on the way down here. He’s been a prince.”

  “Please thank him for me.”

  “I will. But first things first. David Drayer.”

  The assistant US Attorney who, at least technically, convicted me. “What about him?”

  “He’s in on it. He has to be. He’s the link between the very fake FBI of Danny Ruiz and the very real justice system that put you in here. He was the one who put in all the paperwork, who made it look like you were confessing to a real crime. Without a David Drayer who knows how to work the system, none of this happens.”

  “Okay, assuming you’re right, how does that help us?”

  “I don’t think he wants to be in on it,” Amanda said. “Do you remember what he was like when he came to see us at the Holiday Inn? He was really uncomfortable the whole time. He kept looking at Danny and Gilmartin like, ‘Am I doing this right?’ He knew they were frauds. Looking back on it, I think he was afraid of them.”

  “Oh my God. Kris Langetieg,” I said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Remember when Danny asked you to leave the room so he could show us some super–top secret classified documents?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It wasn’t documents. It was a photograph of a murdered assistant US Attorney named Kris Langetieg. They had obviously tortured the guy before they killed him. It was . . . horrible. Indescribably horrible. Danny presented it like this was his motivation for being such a dedicated agent, like he was somehow Kris Langetieg’s avenging angel. But he was actually sending a message to Drayer: Keep your damn mouth shut, or this is what you’ll get.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about that?”

  “It sounds stupid now, but I didn’t want you to worry. Maybe I . . . I also didn’t want you talking me out of doing this.”

  She frowned just slightly. “Okay. I understand. But from now on, we have to be a thousand percent honest with each other. About everything. No more holding back, okay? As a matter of fact, I have something I need to confess to you. Remember your friend from Arkansas?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “On Labor Day, while you were out on the deck chatting with your mother, he called to see if you were interested in taking that job with the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. I told him you had taken another job, which was technically true. Then I pretended like it never happened, because the truth was I didn’t want you changing your mind. I was just as blinded by the money as you were. So when you say you’re sorry and you ruined our lives, you can give yourself a break. I’m just as responsible for all this as you are. And if you want to be mad at me, you’re certainly entitled to be.”

  I wasn’t. Not even close. I looked into her eyes and the only thing I felt was extreme gratitude for whatever luck, fate, or happenstance had brought me into contact with this remarkable woman. Here I was at the lowest moment of my life, a wreck of a man, and she could have easily walked away from me. Yet she wasn’t merely sticking by me. She was lifting me up, putting half of those Honda Civics on her own back.

  Amanda had talked in the past about how she worried that our relationship had never been tested. It was being sorely tested now. And she was absolutely passing.

  “You have no idea how much I love you right now,” I blurted.

  “Don’t make me cry. We need to focus. David Drayer.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What you’re saying about Kris Langetieg only confirms Drayer wanted no part of this. My guess is the cartel first approached Langetieg, who was Drayer’s colleague. Maybe Langetieg went along with them for a while and then pulled out, or maybe he told them right away to go to hell. Either way, they killed him and then confronted Drayer with a combination of incentive and coercion.”

  “So it was ‘take this bribe or we’ll give you the Langetieg treatment’?”

  “Something like that, yes,” Amanda said. “My point is, he’s not truly working for the cartel. What he does for them, he does only reluctantly. I have to go to Martinsburg and try to talk to him.”

  “What if he runs straight to Danny?”

  “I don’t think he will. In his heart, David Drayer is still one of the good guys.”

  “And you’re thinking that if he’s been coerced into cooperating with the cartel, we can get him to uncooperate somehow?”

  “Or he’ll know a way out of this,” Amanda said. “He seemed like a man who had been backed into a corner. Maybe he’ll know where there’s a window you can climb out of.”

  “It’s possible. And maybe there’s room for Mitch to crawl out, too,” I said, then proceeded to tell her about the whistle-blowing, the SARs, the deposit slips, and the duplicity of Thad Reiner.

  As the visitors’ room continued filling up, I kept having to talk louder to be heard. Before long, it was getting difficult for us to say anything that wasn’t potentially going to be overheard by someone else.

  And so, while it was painful, we agreed we should part ways rather than run the risk of something we said falling into the wrong ears. I had to go back to being Pete Goodrich, committing myself to a character who now had the extra burden of pretending he didn’t know anything more than he had when he first walked into the room.

  What’s more—and I reminded Amanda about this—Pete couldn’t even talk honestly over the phone with his wife, Kelly, because I had bugged those phones for the cartel. We would have to wait until Friday for our usual call, and even then we would have to converse as if nothing had changed.

  To say anything or do anything differently, including destroying the listening devices, might tip off the cartel that I was onto them. In case David Drayer really did have an escape hatch for us, we would be giving away one of the few advantages we had over the cartel: the element of surprise.

  After our one sanctioned kiss and hug, both of them far too brief, I had to whisper my final words: “Promise me you’ll be safe. If you get the slightest hint Drayer is taking this to the cartel, run like hell and don’t stop. You can leave me in here. I’ll be fine. The last thing I want is for you to be seen as a threat by the cartel.”

  Then I added, “I’ve seen what they do to threats.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Amanda had two conversations on the way to Martinsburg, one of which went much more smoothly than the other.

  The easy one was with Brock, whom she briefed on what she had learned from Tommy.

  Then there was what happened when Barb—who had made waffles for Amanda, thinking that would be a nice
Sunday morning treat—discovered that her future daughter-in-law wasn’t just sleeping in. Barb called, frantically certain that Amanda was “lying in a ditch somewhere.”

  It didn’t help when Amanda attempted to reassure her by saying she wasn’t in a ditch, she was in West Virginia. After that, Barb wasn’t going to be satisfied with vague answers and half explanations.

  “That’s it,” she announced when she had finally wrested the truth from Amanda. “I’m coming down. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  Amanda tried to protest, saying there was nothing Barb could do to help.

  To which Barb replied, “I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.”

  Then she hung up.

  Before long, Brock had delivered Amanda back to exit 13. A few hours later, Barb joined them. They didn’t stay at the Holiday Inn. Amanda would have spent the whole time worrying she was going to round the corner and bump into Rick Gilmartin. They chose the Days Inn instead.

  On Monday morning, they crammed into Brock’s Mini Cooper for the short drive down the street to the W. Craig Broadwater Federal Building and United States Courthouse. Brock let the women off in front. They had agreed he would stay outside. If Drayer did something unexpected—had the women arrested? had the cartel come grab them?—Brock was their only backup.

  They entered the same glass doors that Tommy had when he surrendered himself and were met by the same blue-blazered court security officers. Amanda said they were there to see David Drayer. One of the CSOs asked for their identification. Amanda couldn’t be Kelly Goodrich, of course. So she handed him her Amanda Porter license.

  The name would likely mean nothing to Drayer. But that was a good thing.

  “Do you have an appointment?” he asked.

  “No,” she said curtly.

  “Can I say what this is regarding?”

  “No,” she said again. “That’s between me and Mr. Drayer.”

  The guy studied her for a moment. She was ready to tell him she wasn’t going away until she talked to Drayer. She would stand in that lobby all day, stalk Drayer if he tried to leave for lunch, follow him as he walked out to his car, whatever it took. She was practically spoiling for a fight.

  Something had finally clicked back into place in Amanda’s mind, perhaps on the ride down from New Jersey, perhaps while talking with Tommy, perhaps during the trip to Martinsburg. Sometime during the last few months—more than likely during that horrible half hour in Hudson van Buren’s office—she had forgotten herself. She had stopped being that scrappy girl from Mississippi. She had allowed herself to wallow, to feel sorry for herself, to let her obstacles define her.

  To hell with that. Amanda was done being the victim. She was done with Hudson van Buren’s leering face. She was the five-foot-two strawberry blonde with the adorable freckles who was ready to kick some ass.

  It was possible she had managed to convey that to the guy in the blue blazer with one steely glance. Because after some back-and-forth on his walkie-talkie, he said, “Okay. Fourth floor.”

  * * *

  • • •

  They rode up the elevator in silence. A secretary greeted them and ushered them to Drayer’s office. He was sitting behind a desk, staring at his computer screen through his rimless glasses. His fine white hair was more unkempt than it had been the first time Amanda saw him.

  The moment he recognized Amanda and placed her—she was the woman from the hotel room, the woman whose husband he had sent to prison—his face went almost as white as his hair.

  “Barb, close the door, please,” Amanda said with quiet firmness, the voice of a woman who wasn’t going to be disputed.

  Barb did as she was told, then took a seat. Amanda stood in front of Drayer’s desk with her arms crossed.

  “You remember me. I can tell,” Amanda said, keeping that deadly serious tone. “My fiancé, the man you sent to prison in October, isn’t really named Pete Goodrich. His name is Tommy Jump. And he didn’t rob a bank. But I think you knew that already.”

  Drayer either couldn’t—or wouldn’t—respond.

  “The men in that hotel room weren’t FBI agents,” Amanda continued. “They work for the New Colima cartel. But you knew that, too.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  The sentence limped out of his mouth, then died before it got much farther than the desk. No one in the room believed it, least of all Drayer.

  He shifted his glance from Amanda, with her disbelieving scowl, to Barb, who looked ready to claw out his throat. His right leg started bouncing nervously. He simply couldn’t maintain the guise of ignorance. He was a man who had built a career constructing castles of truth with boulders of incontrovertible evidence.

  Finally, he gave up his attempt at artifice.

  “You don’t understand, I . . . I didn’t have a choice,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “They came to my house and told me exactly what happened with Langetieg. They made him an offer, he refused, and they killed him. Just like that. They said they’d do the same and worse to me and my whole family. By that point, we all knew Langetieg had been murdered. And we knew the body had been mutilated and that he had probably been tortured before he died. What was I supposed to do? Test them to see if they’d do it to me, too? I just—”

  “So you sent an innocent man to prison?” Amanda snapped.

  “Look, I didn’t know anything about him. He’s your fiancé? I still don’t know anything about anything,” Drayer protested. “I assumed he was working for the cartel too. I just thought . . . Well, I don’t know what I thought. I was following orders. That’s it. Those cartel guys told me to write up charging documents, and I did. They told me this guy would go along with whatever I came up with and plead guilty, and he did. I just wanted the whole thing to go away.”

  “But you still took their money,” Amanda said. “You took money from them the same way we took money from them. The difference is, Tommy believed they were FBI agents. You knew better.”

  “I gave the money to charity,” Drayer said. “My daughter works for a nonprofit, the Virginia Institute of Autism. I gave all the money to them.”

  “I’m sure that makes you feel a lot better about yourself. My fiancé is still in prison.”

  Drayer shook his head and reiterated, “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Well, you have a choice now,” Amanda said. “You can do the right thing. My fiancé isn’t a criminal. He’s an actor. That’s why New Colima hired him. They told him they wanted him to play a role that involved going to prison for them. I know it sounds crazy, but he went along with it. He’s totally innocent in this. He doesn’t belong behind bars.”

  “And what do you think I can do about that?”

  “You got him in there. There’s got to be a way you can get him out.”

  “How?” Drayer asked. “I’m just a prosecutor here. I’m not God. I don’t get to tell the federal judiciary or the Bureau of Prisons what to do. Even if I did take this to a judge and say, ‘Your Honor, this inmate has been cooperating with federal authorities and I’d like you to reduce his sentence,’ there would need to be a hearing. The judge would expect testimony from the FBI. I can’t invent cooperation that doesn’t exist. I’m sorry. I wish I could help you here, but I can’t.”

  Then Barb, who had managed to stay silent, finally couldn’t contain herself any longer.

  “You can’t, huh?” she said. “You know, that’s too bad. Because I noticed something on the way in here. There’s a newspaper office next door to the courthouse. And you know something about newspapers? They love pretty young white girls with names like Amanda.

  “And you know what they love more than their names? Their pictures. Newspapers love printing pictures of pretty young white girls in trouble. It doesn’t even matter what the story is, whether they have somethin
g to say, or whether they’re lost in Aruba, or what. The paper will run the story on the cover just so horny old men will walk by the newsstand and say, ‘Hey! I wonder what’s wrong with that pretty young white girl? I think I better buy the paper to find out.’ Do we have to go that route? Do we have to march her into that newspaper office and tell her to start talking and posing for pictures?”

  If it was possible for Drayer to shrink any further, he did.

  “Please don’t,” he said in a barely audible voice.

  “All right, then I think you need to be a little more creative in your thinking here. Tommy Jump, the man you sent to prison, is my son. And once the paper was done with her, they could talk to me. Newspapers might not love wrinkled old women as much as they love pretty young girls, but scorned mothers make for pretty good copy too.”

  “Okay, okay,” Drayer said, breathing out heavily. “I want to help you. I do. I just don’t know . . .”

  He shook his head. “There are only two options that I can think of. Number one would be if we got him a new trial. The problem there is, I’m not sure how to do it. You can only get a new trial if there is genuinely new evidence that comes out, something that couldn’t possibly have been discovered at the time of his conviction. It’s a high bar. Especially when you’re talking about disproving an event that was completely fabricated in the first place. It’s not like we’re going to find someone who will say, ‘Oh yeah, that was actually me who robbed that bank.’ There was no bank robbery.”

  “What about an alibi?” Barb suggested. “I don’t know when this fictional bank robbery was, but I’m sure Tommy was hundreds of miles away, doing a show somewhere.”