“Basically my life is ruined,” Rachel said somewhere near Lewiston, Maine. “Even if I could clear my name.”
“Big if,” Brian said.
“I’d fuck myself financially to do it.”
“Spend a lot of time in jail while that was happening.”
She shot him a dirty look he didn’t see because his eyes were on the road. “And they could still bury me deep on ancillary charges.”
He nodded. “Obstruction of justice comes to mind. Cops tend to get a bit miffed when you forget to tell them there’s a corpse sitting at your dining room table. Leaving the scene of a crime, unlawful flight, reckless driving, I’m sure I’ll think of a few more.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said.
He looked over at her. “When did I give the impression it was?”
“Right now. You’re being sarcastic, snarky.”
“I get that way when I’m terrified.”
“You’re terrified? You.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Beyond terrified. If no one’s found the safe house and we can do what we need to do there and if we can slip into Providence without being made, and if we can get into the bank and get to the safe deposit box where I stashed the passports and the running money, if we can still get back out of that bank and out of Providence and grab Haya and the baby and find an airport where no one’s looking for us and our faces aren’t plastered over everyone’s home screen and the nine TVs tuned to CNN in the airport bar, and if they don’t have someone waiting for us in Amsterdam, then, yes, we could possibly survive the year. But I’d put our odds at successfully navigating all those obstacles at, oh, I dunno, grim to none.”
“Amsterdam,” she said. “I thought the bank was in the Caymans.”
“It is, but they’ll definitely be waiting for us there. If we get to Amsterdam, we can wire it all to Switzerland.”
“But why stop in Amsterdam?”
He shrugged. “I’ve always liked Amsterdam. You’d like it too. The old canals are pretty. Lotta bikes, though.”
“You talk like you’re taking me sightseeing.”
“Well, that’s the plan, isn’t it?”
“We’re not together,” she said.
“No?”
“No, you lying sack of shit. This is a business arrangement from here on out.”
He rolled down his window for a moment, took a blast on his face to wake himself up. Rolled the window back up.
“Okay,” he said, “you play the business tip. But I’m in love with you.”
“You don’t know the first thing about love.”
“Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.”
“Did you ever search for my father?”
“What?”
“When I met you, you were a private investigator.”
“That was a scam. My first one, actually.”
“So you were never an actual private investigator?”
He shook his head. “I set up that front to do background checks for all the employees of a tech start-up that was setting up shop in the area.”
“Why would you set up a front just to do background checks?”
“There were sixty-four employees of that company, if memory serves. Sixty-four DOBs, sixty-four SSNs, sixty-four histories.”
“You stole sixty-four identities.”
He nodded. It was a quick nod but full of pride. “One of them’s on your passport.”
“But when I came through your office door?”
“I tried to talk you out of hiring me.”
“But when I came back a few months later, you just took my money and—”
“I looked for your father, Rachel. I busted my ass on it. I wish I’d been smart enough to consider that James was his last name, but I wasn’t. But I ID’d every professor with the first name James who’d taught in that region over the previous twenty years, just like I said I did. The only honest work I ever did as a private eye, I did for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re good.”
“I’m what?”
“You’re good. You’re one of the only good people I’ve ever met. And you’re worth fighting for and fighting with. You’re worth everything.”
“You’re such a liar. You’re running a fucking con right now. On me.”
He thought about that. Eventually he said, “When I met you in the bar that night, Caleb and Nicole kept telling me to get rid of you. Grifters can’t have love lives, they said, just sex lives. This from my sister who would end up getting knocked up by a married guy. She’s giving me advice on love. And Caleb, who would marry a woman who couldn’t speak English. Those are my Dear Abbys.” He shook his head. “‘Don’t fall in love.’ Well, that worked out fucking great for all of us.”
She willed herself not to look over at him but instead out the window.
“I fell for you because that’s what you do when you meet the woman whose face you want to be looking into when you die. You fall. And keep falling. And if you’re really lucky, she falls with you and you never get back up again to where you were because if that was so great, you wouldn’t have needed to fall in the first place. But when I fell, I fell all the way. I had just started this con. I met you the night I closed papers on the mine. Caleb was supposed to meet me at the bar to celebrate, but I saw you and I texted him and told him I’d eaten bad tuna at lunch, and he went out to dinner somewhere by himself. And I looked across the bar and I thought, ‘That’s Rachel Childs. I tried to find her father once. I used to watch her on the news.’ I used to wonder who was lucky enough to go home to you. And then that drunk fucked with you and I got to come to your rescue and the irony is, you thought it might be a con. I always loved that. Made me believe in God for a minute. And you left and I ran out onto the streets looking for you.” He looked across at her. “I found you. And then we had the walk and the blackout and found our amazing bar.”
“What was playing when we entered?”
“Tom Waits.”
“What song?”
“‘Long Way Home.’”
“Should have been ‘16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six.’”
“Be nice.” He shifted in his seat, resettled his wrist against the top of the wheel. “You might not like my methods, Rachel, and it may be unwelcome news to learn I make my living running long cons. So you can fall out of love with me, but I can’t fall out of love with you. I wouldn’t know how.”
She almost bought it, if only for a second, but then she remembered who this man was—an actor, a con man, a grifter, a professional liar.
“People who love each other,” she said, “don’t wreck each other’s lives.”
He chuckled softly. “Sure they do. That’s what love is—where once there was one, now there’s two, and that’s so much less convenient and less orderly and less safe. You want me to apologize for blowing your life up? Okay. I’m sorry. But what did I blow up? Your mother’s dead, you never knew your father, your friends are transitory at best, and you never leave the apartment. What life did I take, Rachel?”
What life indeed, she wondered, as they entered Woonsocket at sundown.
It was a faded, cauterized mill town with hopeful pockets of gentrification that couldn’t compensate for the air of abandonment. The main street was peppered with vacant storefronts. Some mills rose up behind those buildings, their windows broken or nonexistent, the brick edifices festooned with graffiti, the land reclaiming the lower floors and punching cracks through the foundations. It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grown up in the absence, in other people’s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in sear
ch of food: Once I get mine, you’re on your own.
Brian drove over a series of dark hilly streets and then down to a quartet of long, four-story buildings that comprised a failed mill sitting along the river with nothing else around it for blocks. Each brick building had at least a hundred windows fronting the street and the same amount again on the river side. The high window frames in the center of the buildings were twice as large as the others. Brian drove around the complex to reveal a pair of covered passageways between the fourth floors connecting the buildings, so that the complex, if seen from the air, would look like a double H.
“This is your safe house?” she said.
“No, this is an abandoned mill.”
“So where’s the safe house?”
“Nearby.”
They rolled past broken windows and weeds the height of the Range Rover. Gravel and rocks and pebbles of broken glass crunched under his tires.
He took out his phone and fired off a text to someone. A few seconds later it vibrated with the return text. He put the phone back in his jacket. He drove around the mill twice more. At the tip of the property, he killed the headlights and rolled up a small knoll, just upriver from a dam by the sound of it. At the top of the knoll, partially obscured by a stand of half-dead trees, stood a small brick two-story house with a black mansard roof. He put the Rover in park but left the engine running and they sat and watched the house.
“Used to be the night watchman’s. City’s owned all this land ever since the mill went tits-up in the seventies. Most of the land is probably poisoned and no one has the money to test it, so they sold us this house for pennies on the dollar.” He shifted in his seat. “It’s got good bones, actually, and clear sight lines. Impossible to approach without being seen.”
“Who’d you text?” she asked.
“Haya.” He nodded at the house. “She’s inside with Annabelle. Wanted her to know I was coming.”
“So why aren’t we going in?”
“We will.”
“What’re we waiting for?”
“For my sense of terror to be overridden by my impatience.” He looked up at the house. A light came from somewhere deep in the back of it. “If all was clear, Haya was supposed to text ‘I am OK. Come in.’”
“And?”
“She only texted the first half.”
“Well, it’s not her native tongue. And she’s scared.”
He chewed on the inside of his mouth for a moment. “We can’t tell her about Caleb.”
“We have to.”
“If she thinks he’s just held up and will meet us in Amsterdam in a couple days, she’ll keep her shit together. But if she doesn’t?” He turned in the seat, touched her hand. She pulled it back. “We can’t tell her. Rachel, Rachel.”
“What?”
“If this goes south, they will kill us all. The baby too.”
She stared through the dark Range Rover at him.
“We can’t give her any reason to be any more unpredictable than she’s liable to be already. We tell her in Amsterdam.”
She nodded.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“We tell her in Amsterdam.”
Brian looked at her for a long time before he said, “You still got your gun?”
“Yup.”
He reached under the seat and came back with a 9mm Glock, put it behind his back.
“You’ve had a gun the whole time,” she said.
“Shit, Rachel,” he said with a distracted sigh, “I’ve got three.”
They walked around the outside of the house twice in the dark before Brian led them up the sagging back steps to a door that had lost most of its paint over the years. The floorboards squeaked underfoot and the house itself creaked in an unseasonably cool wind, more early autumn than early summer.
He moved along the porch, checked all the windows and the front door before they returned to the back. He unlocked the door and they entered.
An alarm beeped to their left and Brian punched in her birthdate on the keypad and the beeping stopped.
The central hallway ran straight from the back door, past an oak staircase to the front door. The house smelled clean but dusty, maybe a light foundational odor of mildew that a thousand housecleanings could probably never remove. He produced two penlights from his jacket, handed her one, and turned on his own.
Haya sat below the mail slot in the front door, junk mail off to her right, a gun clasped in her hands.
Brian gave her a wave and a warm smile and came down the hall to her. She lowered her gun and he hugged her awkwardly and then they stood in front of her.
“Baby is asleep.” She pointed at the ceiling.
“You need sleep,” Brian said. “You look exhausted.”
“Where is Caleb?”
“The bad men, Haya, they may be following him. He didn’t want to lead them here. To you and Annabelle. You understand?”
Her breath was coming too fast. She bit her upper lip so hard Rachel feared it would spout blood. “He is . . . alive?”
Jesus.
“He is,” Brian said. “He’s going to go out through Maine. Remember how we talked about it? He’s going to cross into Canada and fly out of Toronto. No one will be able to track him in Maine. We know that terrain. You understand ‘terrain’?”
She nodded twice. “He will be . . . okay?”
“He will be,” Brian said with a firmness Rachel despised.
“He does not answer his . . . mobile phone.”
“We explained that. They can track a phone, Haya. If any of us thinks they’re being followed, they stay off the phone.” Brian took her hands in his. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll all be out of here in the morning.”
Haya looked at Rachel, woman to woman, a look that transcended any language barrier: Can I trust this man?
Rachel blinked an affirmative. “Get some sleep. You’ll need the rest.”
Haya climbed the dark stairs and Rachel resisted the urge to run to her and tell her everything they’d said was a lie. Her husband was dead. The father of her child was dead. She and her infant were about to go on the run with a pair of two-faced strangers who lied to her and would continue to lie to her until she couldn’t fuck up their escape.
Haya turned right at the top of the stairs and Rachel lost sight of her.
Brian read her mind. “What do you want to tell her?”
“That her husband is dead,” she whispered.
“Fine. Be my guest.” He waved his arm at the staircase with a flourish.
“Don’t be cruel,” she said after a moment.
“Don’t be judgmental,” he said, “unless you’re willing to walk the walk.”
They checked the downstairs together, room by room, and it was empty.
Only then did he turn on the lights.
“Sure that’s wise?” she asked.
“If they knew about the place,” he said, “they’d have been out in the mill or inside with her. They aren’t, which means this safe house is still safe. Nicole didn’t give it up. Probably because they didn’t know to ask her.”
“Haya’s got the bedroom up top on the right.” His body sagged with exhaustion all at once and she realized how wiped she was as well. He used his gun hand to point vaguely back up the stairs. “There’s a linen closet outside the bathroom. The first bedroom on the left has a dresser with a bunch of clothes in your size. Let’s each take a shower, I’ll put on some coffee, and we’ll get back to work.”
“What do we have to work at?”
“I gotta teach you a little forgery.”
32
CONFESSION
Hair still wet, coffee in a mug, wearing a T-shirt, hoodie, and sweats that were, as promised, in her size, she sat at the table with her husband—was he still that?—as he placed a pad of blank paper in front of her with a pen. He then laid down several documents with his sister’s signature on them.
“I’m going to be Nicole?”
?
??For the five minutes it should take to get in and out of that bank, you’re going to be Nicole’s last alias.” He dug around in a gym bag until he came back with a small stack of IDs and credit cards wrapped in a rubber band. He extracted a Rhode Island driver’s license. It was in the name of Nicole Rosovitch. As he placed it on the table in front of her, Brian shook his head tightly. She got the feeling he didn’t know he was doing it.
“I don’t look anything like her,” she said.
“Similar bone structure,” he argued.
“Eyes are different.”
“That’s why I keep a set of color contacts.”
“They’re shaped differently.” She pointed. “And hers were bigger. Her lips are thinner.”
“But your nose is close and so’s your chin.”
“Anyone will be able to tell I’m not her.”
“A straight, almost-middle-aged guy with the two-point-two kids, the world’s most boring job, and I’ll assume the corresponding world’s most boring wife? He’s gonna remember one thing about the hot blonde in his office three months ago—that she was a hot blonde. So let’s make you a blonde. The hot part’s already covered.”
She ignored the appeal to her vanity. “You’ve got the right hair dye in this place?”
“I got wigs. Same one she wore.”
“Banks have face recognition software these days, you know.”
“Not at this bank,” he said. “That’s why I picked it. When in doubt, go mom and pop. This bank has been in Johnston for three generations. They only got an ATM four years ago and only after their customers filed a petition. The owner, that’s who you’ll be meeting, is also the bank manager and handles all safe deposit transactions. His name is Manfred Thorp.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” she said.