The man with the gun took his left arm out of his pocket. Dwayne looked down, maybe expecting to see another weapon, then noticed the missing hand.
He paled instantly. A moment later, the crotch of his jeans darkened.
“Aw, shit, don’t piss on my floor, man,” said Banura, although he had to know that a puddle of urine on his basement floor was going to be the least of his worries in a few minutes.
“I take that to mean that you do remember me,” Oscar Fine said, pointing the gun below Dwayne’s waist.
“Yes,” Dwayne said.
“Tell me your name.”
“Dwayne. Dwayne Osterhaus.”
“Well, Dwayne Osterhaus, it’s very nice to meet up with you at last. Although we didn’t have a real face-to-face, I believe you were the driver.”
“You shoulda had a combination or something,” Dwayne said. “Then, you know, things would have been different. Wouldn’t have had to, you know, with the hand.”
“It was difficult to communicate a combination to you once you’d shot me with the dart,” he said.
“I’m really sorry, man, honest to God,” Dwayne said. “And I know you kind of passed out and everything, but you understand, I wasn’t the one who actually did it, you know that, right?”
“I remember who did it,” Oscar Fine said. “Where is she?”
Dwayne hesitated.
Oscar Fine said, “Please, Dwayne, you must see where this is going. It’s in your interest to be cooperative. Here, let me show you something.” He held up his left arm. The shirt cuff was tucked around the stump, and Oscar Fine slipped it up his arm with the index finger looped through the trigger of his gun.
“No, that’s okay,” Dwayne said.
“Not at all, my pleasure,” Oscar Fine said. He pulled away the fabric and displayed the ragged, but healed, end of his arm.
“Jesus,” Dwayne said.
“He can’t help you,” Oscar Fine said. Satisfied that Dwayne had had a good look, he tucked his shirtsleeve back around the wound. He asked, “Are you left- or right-handed?”
The spot on Dwayne’s pants broadened. Oscar Fine repeated the question.
Dwayne swallowed. “Right.”
“Then I shall take your left. No sense making this any more difficult than it needs to be. And I trust Banura here has something that will allow me to make a cleaner cut than the one I was left with.”
Sweat droplets were forming on Dwayne’s forehead. “You don’t need to do anything like that. If you let me go, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the truck.”
“Why didn’t she come in with you?”
“She’s nervous,” Dwayne said.
“And why would that be?”
“She thinks Mr. Banura here was offering us too much money. She got suspicious. So she took some of the diamonds to someone else to look at, and they said they’re worthless.”
Oscar Fine nodded. “But yet you’re here.”
Dwayne appeared on the verge of tears. “I took Mr. Banura here at his word.”
“So it’s ‘Mister’ now,” Banura said. “No more ‘Banny Boy.’”
“Hey,” Dwayne said, smiling nervously. “No disrespect.”
“So she thought something was wrong,” Oscar Fine said. “Does she suspect I’m here?”
“She never said that. She’s just spooked, is all.” Dwayne brightened, wiped the tears from his eyes. “I got an idea. You don’t take my hand off, you let me walk away from this, and I’ll go out to the truck, and I’ll tell her there’s a problem, that some of the money, it’s in some weird currency, like euros or Canadian, and she needs to help me count it, and I’ll get her in here, and then you can let me go. Because, swear to God, I never wanted her to cut your hand off. I was all, hey, let’s go someplace, get some stronger tools. What we brought wasn’t good enough, to cut through the chain? You know what I’m saying? I’d drive the limo somewhere where we could take some time, do it right, so you wouldn’t get hurt. But she got all kind of caught up in the moment and went crazy, but you need to know, I was totally opposed to that shit.”
Oscar Fine nodded, as though considering the proposal.
“So you bring her to me, and then I let you go.”
Dwayne nodded furiously, offered up a nervous smile. “Yeah, that’s right. That’s the deal. I wanna help you out here.”
“I have some questions,” Oscar Fine said.
“Oh yeah, sure, no problem.”
In fact, Oscar Fine had quite a few. About where the two of them had been the last six years. About who Constance Tattinger had become. Where she’d been living, and with whom. Dwayne tried to be as obliging as possible. He told Oscar Fine everything he knew.
“You’ve been very helpful,” Oscar Fine said.
“Yeah, well, you know, it’s the least I can do, considering.” Dwayne attempted another smile. “So, whaddya say, I bring her in here, and you let me go?”
“I don’t think so,” Oscar Fine said, and shot Dwayne Osterhaus in the center of his face. “There’s no reason I can’t go out and talk to her myself.”
FORTY-FIVE
Oscar Fine offered his apologies to Banura. “I have made a mess, and I accept full responsibility for that.”
Banura was looking at the blood and brain matter on the wall behind where Dwayne had been standing. The bullet had gone through his head and out the back.
“I seen worse,” Banura said.
Oscar Fine wrote a number on a piece of paper on Banura’s work-table. “Call that number, tell them Mr. Fine told you they’d handle things. They’ll come and take care of all this. Cleanup as well as removal.”
“Appreciate it,” Banura said.
“But you might as well wait a few minutes until I have the other one,” he said, and Banura nodded.
“Do you have any other way out of here?” Oscar Fine asked. “Someone could be watching this door.”
“No,” he said. “This is all walled off from the rest of the house, only access is from the back door. You can’t even get to the furnace from here. There’s another set of stairs down in the regular part of the house. But there are cameras.”
“Show me.”
Banura led Oscar Fine over to the worktable, where in addition to his jeweler’s tools there was a keyboard and an ultra-thin flat-screen monitor. Banura tapped a couple of keys, and suddenly the screen was divided into equal quadrants, each one offering a different view of Banura’s property.
“There’s a wide-angle camera on each side of the house,” he said.
Oscar Fine leaned in, looking at the upper right corner, which was a view of the street out front of the house, with the driveway off to the far right. He could see the pickup, but given the angle and the way the light was reflecting off the windshield, it was difficult to make out who, if anyone, was inside. There was no one on the passenger side, and too much glare to determine whether anyone was behind the wheel.
“Hmmm,” he said.
The camera mounted at the back door showed no one in the yard, which appeared to be empty by design. No storage shed to hide behind, no trees with broad trunks. Just a flat yard of dead grass bordered by a six-foot plank fence.
Banura pointed to the lower left quadrant.
“You see that?”
Oscar Fine had missed it. “What?”
“There was—look.”
In the upper right image, the pickup truck was starting to back up.
The moment after Dwayne disappeared around the corner of the house, Jan thought, I’m outta here.
She was working out possible scenarios in her head for what was going on:
Banura was a moron and didn’t know the first thing about diamonds. Unlikely.
The woman in the jewelry store was a moron and didn’t know the first thing about diamonds. Ditto.
Banura knew they were fake, didn’t like being conned, and was going to teach them a les
son when they returned. Possible, but why wait until 2 p.m.? Why not teach them a lesson earlier?
Banura needed time to set something up. That seemed likely. But Jan didn’t think it had anything to do with getting the money together.
Could he have been in touch with Oscar Fine? After all these years, could that man still be putting the word out, reminding those in the business to be on the lookout for a large quantity of fake diamonds? And a particular woman who matched her description?
Get out of here, she told herself.
She had her hand on the key, got ready to turn it. All she had to do was start the engine, put the truck in reverse, get on the interstate, put as much distance as possible between herself and the greater Boston area.
And go where?
All these years, she’d had a plan. Get out of Promise Falls, head to Paradise. But she needed the cash from those diamonds to buy her ticket.
Worthless.
She waited all that time to get what she wanted, never stopping to think for a moment she might already have something.
That phony life was a real life.
A real house.
A real husband.
A real son.
All traded away for this. A long shot. A chance to have enough money to live the rest of her life on her own terms, playing only herself. All so she could head to that mythical beach. She’d never even figured out where it was. Tahiti? Thailand? Jamaica?
Did it matter?
And when she got there, she could dream of telling her mother and, especially, her father, Fuck you. I’m here, living the life, and you’re not.
The beach seemed far away now.
She was sitting in a pickup truck outside Boston, waiting for some clueless ex-con to show up with six million dollars, wondering whether her entire world was about to go to shit.
She took her fingers off the keys and reached into her purse. Tucked into a side pocket was a photo, creased and tattered. She took it out, held it carefully, the photo as light and fragile as a fallen autumn leaf. She looked into the face of her young son.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She set the photo on the seat next to her.
She sat there another moment, her hand on the keys, ready to bail. But there was part of her that still wondered: What if.
What if, by some fluke, Dwayne had called it right?
Everything told her he had it wrong. But what if he walked out with the money and she wasn’t there?
She needed a sense of how things were going.
Jan left the keys in the ignition and got out of the truck, first grabbing the gun she’d been unable to persuade Dwayne to take. She walked down the side of the house, rounded the corner, and went up to the door.
Didn’t knock. Just looked at it. Wanted it to open. Didn’t want it to open.
Very faint noises, muffled by the heavy door, came from inside. The hint of a voice, high-pitched, whiny. The kinds of noise she could imagine Dwayne making.
She caught a few phrases.
“… swear to God, I never … I was all, hey, let’s … get some stronger tools … know what I’m saying? I’d drive the limo….”
Jan didn’t need to hear any more. She’d been sold out. They’d be coming for her next. Any second now that door would be opening.
Should she wait, shoot whoever came out? No, not good, just standing there. It was just as likely she’d be the one to end up taking a bullet. She moved off the door, pressed herself up against the house, and in doing so happened to look up and saw the tiny camera mounted below the eaves.
She’d spent so much time at Five Mountains, scoping out where all the closed-circuit TV cameras were, she thought she might have noticed that one sooner. If there was one there, there was probably one on each side of the house.
They might already know she was out there, waiting by the door.
She had to run.
She bolted, rounded the corner of the house, grabbed the handle on the driver’s door with her left hand, the gun still in her right. She jumped in, dropped the gun onto the seat, and turned the ignition.
The engine didn’t catch the first time.
As she turned the key a second time, she noticed a figure coming out from behind the house. A man in a long jacket, wielding a gun in his right hand. It was pointed in her direction.
The engine caught and she threw the column shifter into reverse and had her foot on the gas even before she’d turned to make sure no one was there. She threw her right arm over the seat, turned around, bounced from the driveway to the street and cranked the wheel.
The windshield shattered.
For a millisecond she looked back in the direction of the shot, saw the man with the gun.
Saw the left arm with no hand at the end.
A blue Chevy coming down the street laid on the horn as the back end of the pickup lurched into its path. The car swerved, a man shouted “Asshole!” and the car kept on moving.
As Jan slammed on the brake and put the truck into drive, Oscar Fine fired again. The shot didn’t hit the truck, but Jan had the sense it went in through the passenger window and out the driver’s door.
Oscar was running into the street now, his face set in grim determination. Jan cranked the wheel hard again and stomped on the accelerator, narrowly missing him with the truck’s right front fender. He pivoted so hard he went down to the pavement, even though he hadn’t been hit.
The gun was still on the seat next to her, but there was no time to use it. And what kind of shot could she get off anyway, driving flat out, Oscar Fine directly behind her?
She raced past the black Audi, guessing that was his car. But he was still a good fifty feet away from it. By the time he reached it, got in, fired it up, she could be a block or two away.
It might be just enough of a head start.
She heard a sharp ping, above and behind her head. Sounded like a bullet had gone into the cab, above the back window.
It just made her drive faster. She glanced into her mirror, saw the man running for the black car. It was the last image she had of him before she hung a hard right and kept on going.
She never noticed that, in all the excitement, the wind had swept up her picture of Ethan and carried it out the window.
Oscar Fine was about to take chase when he saw the piece of paper fluttering through the air.
He was almost glad for an excuse not to get in the car and go after Jan Harwood. Chases invariably ended badly. A crash. Attracting the attention of the police. And with only one hand, it was difficult for Oscar Fine to perform quick steering maneuvers.
If he could find her once, he could find her again. Especially with everything Dwayne had told him. He let the car door close and walked up the street to pick up the piece of paper. It appeared to be nothing more than a simple white square, but after he bent over, picked it up, and flipped it over, he saw that it was a photograph.
A picture of a small, smiling boy. Oscar Fine slid it into his pocket.
That was when it occurred to him that if he was going to have to go out of town, he was going to have to call someone to feed his cat.
FORTY-SIX
Not long after my talk with Gretchen Richler, there was an unexpected call.
I grabbed the phone before the first ring was finished. “Hello?”
“Mr. Harwood?” A woman’s voice. Something about it was familiar.
“Yes?”
“You’re not the person to do this story anymore.”
“What? Who is this?”
“I sent you the information about Mr. Reeves’s hotel bill. So you could write about it. Why didn’t you do a story?”
I took a second to focus. “He paid Elmont Sebastian back,” I said. “My editor felt that killed it.”
“Well, then give that list to someone else, someone who can get the story done. I called the paper and they told me you were off or suspended because your wife is missing. I don’t want anyone who might have killed his wife working on th
is story, no offense.”
“List? What are you talking about? A list?”
She sighed at the other end of the line. “The one I mailed to you.”
I patted my jacket side pocket, felt the envelopes I’d stuffed in there when I’d passed my mailbox on the way out of the Standard. I dug them out. One of them was from payroll, another was a useless news release from a soap company, and the third was a plain white envelope addressed to me, in block printing, with no return address. I tore it open, took out the single sheet of paper and unfolded it.
“Mr. Harwood?”
“Hang on,” I said, scanning the sheet. It was a handwritten list of names of people on Promise Falls council, with dollar amounts written next to them. They ranged from zero up to $25,000.
“Jesus,” I said. “Is this for real? Is this what Elmont Sebastian’s been paying these people?”
“You’re just looking at this now?” the woman said. “That’s what I mean. That’s why someone else should be looking into this. That son of a bitch Elmont has screwed me over one time too many, and I want to see him nailed. You want to do a story, ask women at Star Spangled Corrections how they like getting felt up every day by the male employees and no one at the top giving a damn.”
So she did work for Elmont. And the hell of it was, considering my current situation, she was right. Someone else should be doing this story.
I asked, “Why didn’t you show up at Lake George?”
“What?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“The email you sent me. To meet you up there.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I’m not meeting you or anyone else face-to-face. You think I’m stupid?”
She hung up.
I sat there a moment, slid the paper back into the envelope and stuffed it back into my pocket. Any other time, this would have made my day, but getting a great story wasn’t exactly a priority at the moment.
But one thing my anonymous caller had said stuck with me. She had not emailed me to meet her in Lake George. Someone else had lured me up there. It was all part of the setup. It fit in perfectly with Natalie Bondurant’s theory.