by Harlan Coben
When we reached the car, Zuker took an angle so that the vehicle and my body were still shielding him. "Open the door," he told me.
I hesitated.
He pressed the gun against my neck. "Open the door."
I looked back at Natalie. She gave me a confident smile that reached into my chest and crushed it like an eggshell. As I slipped into the driver's seat, I realized with mounting horror what she was doing.
There was no plan to save us both.
There were no other Fresh Start members who were going to intercede. There was no one hiding, waiting to pounce. Natalie had kept my attention, had offered up this hope in her eyes, so I wouldn't fight back, so I wouldn't make the sacrifice she was about to make for me.
To hell with that.
The car started up. Natalie began to lower her weapon. I had a second, no more, to make my move. It was suicide. I knew that. I knew that there was no way the two of us could survive this. That had been her thinking. One of us had to die. In the end, Jed and Benedict and Cookie had been right. I had messed up. I had stubbornly followed some love-conquers-all inner mantra, and now here we were, exactly where I was warned we would be, with Natalie facing death.
I wouldn't let that happen.
Once I was in the car, Natalie stopped walking and turned her attention to Danny Zuker. Zuker, understanding that it was his turn, moved the gun away from my neck. He changed hands so that the weapon was too far away from me, sitting as I was, to make any kind of foolish move.
"Your turn," Zuker said.
Natalie put her weapon on the ground.
Time was up. I had spent the seconds planning my exact move, the exact calculation, the element of surprise, all of it. Now I didn't hesitate. Zuker would have time, I was fairly sure, to take a shot at me. That didn't matter. He was going to have to defend himself. If he did that by shooting me, it would give Natalie the time to either run or, more likely, pick her own gun back off the ground and shoot.
No choice for me now. I wasn't driving off, that was for sure.
Without warning, my left hand shot up high. I don't think he expected that. Zuker had figured that if I did anything, I'd go for the gun. I grabbed his hair hard and pulled him toward me. As I predicted, Danny swung the gun in my direction.
With my left hand, I pulled his face closer to mine. He expected my right to go for the gun.
It didn't.
Instead, using the right hand, I jammed the cyanide pill Jed had given me into Zuker's mouth. His eyes widened in terror as he realized what I had done. That made him hesitate--the realization that there was cyanide in his mouth and that if he didn't get it out, he was a dead man. He tried to spit it out but my hand was there. He bit down hard, making me scream out, but my hand stayed still. At the same time he fired the gun at my head.
I ducked away.
The bullet hit my shoulder. More agony.
Danny started to convulse, taking aim for another shot. But he never got that one off. Natalie's first bullet caught him in the back of the head. She fired twice more, but there was no need.
I fell back, my hand on my throbbing shoulder, trying to stop the blood. I waited for her to come over to me.
But she didn't. She stayed where she was.
I had never seen anything more beautiful and crushing than the expression on her face. A tear ran down her cheek. She just slowly shook her head.
"Natalie?"
"I have to go," she said.
My eyes went wide. "No." Now, finally, I could hear the sirens. I was losing blood and feeling faint. None of that mattered. "Let me go with you. Please."
Natalie winced. Her tears came heavier now. "I can't live if something happens to you. Do you get that? It's why I ran the first time. I can live with you heartbroken. I can't live with you dead."
"I'm not alive without you."
The sirens were growing closer.
"I have to go," she said, through her tears.
"No . . ."
"I will always love you, Jake. Always."
"Then be with me." I could hear the plea in my voice.
"I can't. You know that. Don't follow me. Don't look for me. Keep your promise this time."
I shook my head. "Not a chance," I said.
She turned and started back up the hill.
"Natalie!" I called out.
But the woman I loved just kept walking out of my life. Again.
Chapter 36
ONE YEAR LATER
A student in the back of the room raises his hand. "Professor Weiss?"
"Yes, Kennedy?" I say.
That's my name now. Paul Weiss. I teach at a large university in New Mexico. I can't say the name of it for security reasons. With all the dead bodies at the lake, the powers that be realized that I'd be best off in witness protection. So here I am, out in the west. The altitude still gets to me sometimes, but overall I like it out here. That surprises me. I always thought I'd be an East Coast guy, but life is about making adjustments, I guess.
I miss Lanford, of course. I miss my old life. Benedict and I still stay in touch, even though we shouldn't. We use an e-mail drop box and never hit the send button. We created an e-mail account with AOL (old-school). We write each other messages and just leave them in the draft section. Periodically we go in and check it.
The big news in Benedict's life is that the drug cartel that was after him is gone. They were wiped out in some kind of turf battle. In short, he is free at last to return to Marie-Anne, but when he last checked her Facebook status, it had changed from "in a relationship" to "married." There were photographs of her wedding to Kevin all over both their Facebook pages.
I'm urging him to tell her the truth anyway. He says he won't. He says he doesn't want to mess up her life.
But life is messy, I told him.
Deep thought, right?
The rest of the pieces of the puzzle have finally come together for me. It took a long while. One of the Minor henchmen that Jed shot survived. His testimony confirmed what I had suspected. The bank robbers known as the Invisibles broke into the Canal Street bank. In Todd Sanderson's box, there were both last wills and testaments and passports. The Invisibles had taken the passports, figuring that they could be resold on the black market. One of them recognized Natalie's name--the Minors were still actively looking for her, even after six years--and reported it to them. The box was in Todd Sanderson's name, so Danny Zuker and Otto Devereaux paid him a visit.
You know where it went from there. Or you know most of it.
But a lot of things didn't add up. I had raised one with Danny Zuker right before his life ended: Why were the Minors so consumed with finding Natalie? She had made it pretty clear that she wouldn't testify. Why stir that up, flush her out, when the end result could very well be her running back to the police? I had at one point surmised that it was really Danny Zuker behind it all, that he had killed Archer Minor and wanted to make sure that the one person who could tell Maxwell Minor that fact was dead. But that didn't really add up either, especially when I saw the befuddlement on his face when I accused him of the crime.
"You don't have a clue, do you?"
That was what Danny Zuker had said. He'd been right. But I'd slowly started putting it together, especially when I started to wonder about the central question left here, the incident that started it all: Where was Natalie's father?
I figured out the answer to that almost a year ago. Two days before they sent me to New Mexico, I visited Natalie's mother again at the Hyde Park Assisted Living facility. I wore a cheesy disguise. (Now my disguise is simpler: I've shaved my head. Gone are the unruly professorial locks of my youth. My dome gleams. If I wore a gold earring, you'd mistake me for Mr. Clean.) "I need the truth this time," I said to Sylvia Avery.
"I told you."
I could see people needing new identities and vanishing because they'd been accused of pedophilia or had upset members of a drug cartel or had been battered by brutal husbands or had witnessed a mob hit
. But I didn't see why a man involved in a college cheating scandal would have to vanish for life--even now, even after Archer Minor was dead.
"Natalie's dad never ran away, did he?"
She didn't reply.
"He was murdered," I said.
Sylvia Avery seemed too weak to protest anymore. She sat there, still as a stone.
"You told Natalie that her father would never, ever, abandon her."
"He wouldn't," she said. "He loved her so. He loved Julie too. And me. Aaron was such a good man."
"Too good," I said. "Always seeing just the black-and-white."
"Yes."
"When I told you that Archer Minor was dead, you said, 'Good riddance.' Was he the one who killed your husband?"
She lowered her head.
"There's no one who can hurt any of you anymore," I said, which was only partially true. "Did Archer Minor kill your husband, or was it someone his father sent?"
And then she said it: "It was Archer himself."
I nodded. I had figured that.
"He came to the house with a gun," Sylvia said. "He demanded that Aaron give him the papers that proved he'd cheated. You see, he really did want to escape his father's shadow and if word got out he cheated . . ."
"He'd be exactly like his father."
"Yes. I begged Aaron to listen to him. He wouldn't. He thought Archer was bluffing. So Archer put the gun against Aaron's head and . . ." She closed her eyes. "He smiled when he did it. That's what I remember most. Archer Minor was smiling. He told me to give him the papers or I'd be next. I gave them to him, of course. Then two men came by. Men who worked for his father. They took Aaron's body away. Then one of the men sat me down. He said if I ever told anyone about this, they'd do horrible things to my girls. They wouldn't just kill them, he said. They'd do horrible things to them first. He kept stressing that. He told me to say that Aaron ran off. So I did. I kept the lie up for all those years to protect my girls. You understand that, don't you?"
"I do," I said sadly.
"I had to make my poor Aaron be the bad guy. So his daughters wouldn't keep asking about him."
"But Natalie wouldn't buy it."
"She kept pressing."
"And like you said, the lie had darkened her. The idea that her father had abandoned her."
"That's a horrible thing for a young girl to think. I should have come up with another way. But what?"
"So she pressed and she pressed," I said.
"She wouldn't leave it alone. She headed back to Lanford and talked to Professor Hume."
"But Hume didn't know either."
"No. But she kept asking questions."
"And that could have gotten her in trouble."
"Yes."
"So you decided to tell her the truth. Her father hadn't run away with a coed. He hadn't run away because he was afraid of the Minors. You finally told her the full story--that Archer Minor had murdered her father in cold blood while smiling."
Sylvia Avery didn't nod. She didn't have to. I said good-bye then and left.
So now I knew why Natalie was in that high-rise late that night. Now I knew why Natalie had gone to visit Archer Minor when no one else would be around. Now I knew why Maxwell Minor never stopped looking for Natalie. He isn't worried about her testifying.
He's a father who wants to avenge his son's murder.
I don't know this for sure. I don't know if Natalie shot Archer Minor with a smile on her face or if the gun went off accidentally or if Archer Minor made threats when she confronted him or if it was self-defense. I don't even ask.
The old me would have cared. The new me doesn't.
Class ends. I start across the commons. The Santa Fe sky is a blue like no other. I shade my eyes and keep walking.
That day a year ago, with the bullet still in my shoulder, I watched Natalie start to walk away. I shouted, "Not a chance" when she asked me to promise not to follow. She wouldn't listen to me or stop. So I got out of the car. The pain in my shoulder was nothing compared with the pain of her leaving me again. I ran toward her. I wrapped my arms, even the one aching from the bullet wound, around her and pulled her close. Our eyes squeezed shut. I hung on to her, wondering if I had ever felt such contentment before. She started to cry. I pulled her even closer. She lowered her head into my chest. For a moment, she tried to pull away. But only for a moment. She knew that this time I wouldn't let her go.
No matter what she might or might not have done.
I still haven't let her go.
Up ahead, a beautiful woman named Diana Weiss wears a wedding band that matches mine. She has decided to teach her art class outside on this glorious day. She moves from student to student, commenting on their work, offering guidance.
She knows that I know, even though we've never talked about it. I wonder whether that was part of her leaving the first time, if she felt as though I could never live with the truth about what she'd done. Maybe I couldn't back then.
I can now.
Diana Weiss looks up at me as I approach. Her smile shames the sun. Today my beautiful wife is glowing even more than normal. I may be thinking that about her because I'm biased. Or I may be thinking that because she is seven months pregnant with our child.
Her class ends. The students linger before slowly drifting away. She takes my hand when we're finally alone, looks into my eyes, and says, "I love you."
"I love you too," I say.
She smiles up at me. The gray has no chance against that smile. It vanishes in a wonderful haze of bright color.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harlan Coben is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty previous novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Stay Close, Live Wire, Caught, Long Lost, and Hold Tight, as well as the popular Myron Bolitar series and more recently, a series aimed at young adults featuring Myron's nephew, Mickey Bolitar. Winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony awards, Coben lives in New Jersey.
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