“Appawhat?”
“They’re going to be very upset. How would you feel if you’d entrusted your dog to someone and they lost him?”
“I would be peeved,” Gordie said. “Yes, that’s what I would be. What about you, Bert?”
“I’d be peeved, too,” he said.
“Come on,” Braithwaite said. “What do you want? Does Mr. Fleming want to see me? Like I said, I’ve been wanting to talk to him. I want to end our arrangement. It’s making me uncomfortable.”
“Really?” said Gordie.
“That’s right. And I’m willing to pay him back the money he’d already paid me. As a sign of good faith. But I’m not comfortable with it.”
“You’re going to pay him back, you say?” Gordie asked.
“That’s right. In full. He’s given me three thousand dollars. I can pay that all back.”
“With what?”
“I’m sorry?”
“With what?”
“With . . . the money he gave me. I haven’t spent it.”
Gordie shifted around in his seat. “You sure you haven’t come into any other money lately?”
“What are you talking about?”
The van lurched around a corner, and Braithwaite nearly fell over.
“When’s the last time you were in the Cummings house?”
“It’s been a few days. They’re away on vacation. I sent you a note. Well, to Mr. Fleming. I let him know that they were going to be away for a week.”
“And so you haven’t been over there in the meantime?”
“No. They boarded their dog. There was no reason.”
“But you could’ve if you wanted to.”
Braithwaite said nothing.
“Hello? What do you say to that, Nate?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at. Of course I could get into their house if I wanted to. You know that. I have a key. I know the code. I can get in anytime I want, but there’s no point going there if Mandy’s not there.”
“That’s the dog’s name?” Bert asked. “Like in the Barry Manilow song?” Bert had always liked Manilow, although he never liked him as much as the Carpenters.
“Yeah,” Nathaniel said.
“Are you sure you weren’t in that house last night, Nate?” Gordie asked.
“What? No. I wasn’t. Why would I have been there?”
“Maybe to solve your cash flow problems? I hear you haven’t always been in the dog-walking game. I don’t even think there’s a community college course for that. What I hear is there was a time when you were in a slightly higher income bracket. That right?”
“Yes.”
“That you had some kind of computer company?”
“Apps.”
“Hmm?”
“We designed apps for phones and tablets. That’s what we did.”
Gordie nodded. “So you were making gazillions doing that, and now you clean up after dogs doing a dump on the sidewalk. That is what I would call a downfall of fucking epic proportions.”
Braithwaite struggled to maintain balance. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”
“So it strikes me that if you saw an opportunity to get back a little of what you once had, you’d take it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Why d’you think our boss wanted to get into that house in the first place?”
“I don’t know and I didn’t ask. He just gave me his word that he’d never take a thing, he wasn’t going to steal anything, that the owners would never know anyone had ever been in the house. I figured—I don’t know . . . I thought maybe he was using the house to watch some people across the street, or maybe he was putting in bugs, you know, to listen in on the Cummings.”
“And you were okay with that?”
“Your boss is hard to say no to.” Braithwaite shook his head. “He said he did me a favor. I couldn’t believe this. Some guy who’s been seeing my ex, he had him beat up. Broke his jaw.”
“Yeah,” Gordie said. “I nearly busted my hand. Fucker never saw it coming.”
“Jesus, you did that?” Braithwaite said.
Gordie shrugged.
Braithwaite said, “Vince said, in appreciation, I better help him. Or word might get out that I’d done it, or had someone do it. The man’s a goddamn manipulator. But I don’t care. I don’t want to be under his thumb anymore.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Gordie said. “I think I can speak on Mr. Fleming’s behalf that your services will no longer be required.”
Braithwaite looked uncertain. “Seriously?”
“Yup,” Gordie said.
“That’s . . . that’s terrific. It’s almost too good to be true. I appreciate it. I really do. Is that what you wanted to tell me? Because if it is, great, but I’d like you to drop me off.”
“Not yet,” Bert said.
“What are we doing? Why are we driving around?”
“We’re just looking for a spot,” Gordie said.
“A spot?”
Gordie said to Bert, “How long we going to keep wandering? Gas ain’t cheap, you know.” Gordie had been so engrossed in conversation with Nathaniel Braithwaite that he’d lost track of where they were. But he was guessing it was the road that led up to Derby. Two lanes, regular traffic, but more isolated than stopping on the Boston Post Road.
“I think this is good,” Bert said. “I can just pull over to the side. It’s not like anyone can see in.”
The van’s tires crunched on gravel as it veered from pavement to shoulder. Bert moved the column shifter up to park but left the engine running so the air-conditioning wouldn’t shut off.
Gordie got up and slipped through the space between the two front seats. Braithwaite took a step back to make way for him.
“I don’t want any trouble,” he said. “If there’s something you guys want, or Mr. Fleming wants, just tell me what it is.”
“We want the truth,” Gordie said. Now Bert was getting out from behind the steering wheel, moving into the cargo area, but not before reaching under his seat for a small case made of rigid black plastic. On the side were the words Black & Decker.
Braithwaite wiped sweat from his brow. Even with the air going, it was hot in this metal cell that suddenly felt much smaller. Three grown men, jockeying for position.
“Sure, whatever you want to know,” the dog walker said, glancing nervously at the case Bert was carrying.
“Where’s the money?”
“I don’t know, and that’s the truth. I don’t know what money you’re talking about.”
“The money you took from the Cummings house last night. Two hundred grand, give or take. Where is it? If you give it back right now, we’ll only hurt you. But if you make us work for it, well, it’s gonna be very bad.”
“I didn’t take any money. Are you saying there was money in the house? Was that why your boss wanted to get in? To hide money?”
“You ready?” Gordie asked Bert.
The other man nodded and set the case on the floor. He flipped back two clasps, opened it, and brought out an orange and black cordless drill.
“What the hell?” Braithwaite said.
Gordie suddenly moved on the dog walker, hooking his foot behind his leg and driving him back with two hands to the chest. Braithwaite landed hard, with a loud metallic thump. The van jostled. Gordie jumped on top of him, straddling him. He grabbed the man’s wrists and pinned them to the floor alongside his head, sitting on him like a schoolyard bully.
“Get off me!” Braithwaite said.
Bert stepped around them and stood just beyond the man’s head, looking down, holding the drill in his right hand. He gave the trigger a quick squeeze, the quarter-inch drill bit spinning furiously as the device emitted a high-pitched whirring sound.
“I think you might have a cavity,” Bert said. “D’ya ever see Marathon Man? That was like getting a flu shot next to this. I’m gonna need you to open your mou
th wide.”
“No,” he said quickly, then clenched his jaw.
Bert got down on his knees, hovered over the man’s face. Teased the trigger of the drill.
Whizz. Whizz. Whizz.
Nathaniel continued to clench his jaw and press his lips together.
Gordie offered a suggestion. “If he won’t open his mouth, just drill into his forehead.”
Bert said, “You got one last chance to tell us where the money is.” The drill bit was an inch from the man’s lips.
Spinning.
“Don’t know!” he said through clenched teeth.
Bert touched the tip of the drill to the man’s upper lip for a millisecond. Tender flesh ripped and blood sprayed. Nathaniel screamed.
“Oh shit, you got some on me,” Gordie said.
“Sorry,” Bert said. “Maybe if I forget the teeth and go in through the ear. Might be less messy.”
Nathaniel’s eyes widened with even greater fear.
Bert was repositioning himself when there was the sound of a cell phone. The two thugs looked at each other, wondering for a moment whose phone it was.
“Not me,” Gordie said.
“Shit,” Bert said. He set the drill on the floor and reached into his pocket for his phone. Glanced at the screen and winced.
“Jabba?” Gordie asked.
Bert nodded and put the phone to his ear. “Yeah? I told you, I can’t make the meeting. Just tell them to keep the old bat. We can’t take her. Yeah, that’s what I said. The old—”
Nathaniel saw his chance.
He’d only made it to a purple belt in karate, but he remembered at least one move. When someone is straddling you, holding your wrists down, gravity is on your opponent’s side. You can’t raise your arms.
But you can make them go sideways, and use your attacker’s weight against him.
Nathaniel swept his pinned arms down across the van’s floor to his side, quick as lightning. Gordie, his hands still locked on Nathaniel’s wrists, found himself pitching forward. Nathaniel scurried out from beneath him, and as Gordie started to turn over, Nathaniel drove the palm of his hand into the man’s nose with everything he had.
Gordie screamed, “Fuck!”
It all happened so quickly, Bert was caught unprepared. He still had the phone to his ear as it all went down.
Gordie put both hands to his face, over his nose, while Braithwaite scrambled, crablike, to the van’s side door. He pulled on the handle, kicked the door open, and leapt from the vehicle.
The car was parked so far onto the shoulder that the ground sloped immediately away into tall grass. Braithwaite quickly found his footing, pivoted left, and ran toward the front of the van.
Bert caught a glimpse of the man streaking past the front window, running across the road.
“Fuck!” Gordie said again. But he’d taken his hands away from his face and was getting up, blocking Bert, who was about to give chase, from moving around him.
Gordie stumbled out into the grass. There was loose gravel underfoot, too, and he needed a second to get purchase. He charged around the front of the van, started running across the road.
That was when Bert heard a panicked screech, rubber sliding on dry pavement, and a very loud FWUMP.
Sounded like a side of beef dropping from a second-story window. That moment when it hit the sidewalk.
A man shouted, “Jesus!”
Rather than go out the side, Bert threw open the rear doors. A FedEx truck was stopped parallel to the van, engine rumbling. Bert ran between the vehicles, stopped when he got to the courier truck’s front bumper.
Gordie lay on the pavement, his body a bloody pretzel. The FedEx driver, kneeling close to Gordie but too horrified to touch him, saw Bert and said, “He ran right out in front of me! I swear! I couldn’t stop!”
Bert forced himself to look away, scanned the surroundings for Nathaniel Braithwaite.
Not a sign of him.
He ran to the back of the FedEx truck, looked again. There were a thousand places where the dog walker could have disappeared. A wooded area. Half a dozen houses he could have sought cover behind.
Fuck it.
Bert slammed shut the rear doors of his van after first snatching his phone off the floor, opened the driver’s door, and got in behind the wheel. The engine was still running.
Without bothering to close the side doors, he put the truck in drive and hit the gas, speeding past the FedEx guy, who’d backed away from Bert’s dead coworker and had a cell phone to his ear.
“Hey!” he shouted as Bert raced past. “Hey!”
Bert kept his foot to the floor. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew for sure he wasn’t headed back to the body shop.
And he wasn’t headed to the nursing home.
And he wasn’t going home.
He’d been thinking about this, planning for this, for a long time.
Bert was done.
FORTY-EIGHT
TERRY
ONCE Teresa had been dismissed, Cynthia and I continued to search the house. We finished with the boxes we’d dragged out from the furnace room and turned our attention to a crawl space under the stairs. There were another half a dozen boxes in there. I hauled them all out into the middle of the room and then we each grabbed one and went to town.
I’d briefly considered waiting until Vince showed up—assuming he kept his word and came over—and letting him lead us to it, but the thought that something in our home had been secreted there was so unnerving we both wanted it found, and out of there, as soon as possible. Especially if its presence made us some kind of target.
Grace came back down and asked what we were doing.
“We’re looking for money,” I said.
She blinked. “This is where you keep your money?”
“No. We think there may be some hidden in the house.”
“What? Why?”
“All good questions.”
“Can I help look?” she asked.
“Knock yourself out,” Cynthia said.
“It’s somewhere in the basement?”
“We don’t know where it is. It just seemed a logical place to start,” I said.
“If I find it, can I keep it?” our daughter asked.
Together: “No.”
She didn’t look happy about that, but was still intrigued. “Do you know how much it is?”
We told her we did not. She said she was going to look in the garage, and we gave her our blessing. Cynthia, who had just emptied a box of Grace’s childhood drawings, stopped and blew some hair out of her eyes.
“What if it’s not in any of these boxes?” she asked. “What if it’s, I don’t know, in the walls?”
I stopped. “It’s possible. But no, I don’t think so. If he hid money in our house, he’d want to be able to get to it quickly. He’s not going to want to rip off drywall to get to it. And besides, he’d have had to get it in there. I don’t exactly remember returning home one day and finding one of the walls replastered.”
“Then it must be tucked away somewhere. After you pulled all these boxes out, did you see if maybe it was jammed in between the studs or anything?”
That seemed like a good idea, since the walls were unfinished in there. I crawled over on my hands and knees and went back into the storage area under the stairs, feeling around between the studs. I didn’t come up with anything.
“What about under the beds?” Cynthia asked.
“Too obvious. Too risky, too. We keep small suitcases under there. Something hidden there could be stumbled upon.”
Upstairs, the doorbell rang.
We looked at each other nervously. We didn’t want Grace answering. She’d be able to hear the bell from the garage. I charged up the steps two at a time, shouting, “I’ll get it!”
Grace was coming through the doorway that joined the kitchen to the garage. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Just stay there.”
I got to the door and
took a quick peek through the small pane of glass that was at nose height.
Vince Fleming.
I turned the dead bolt, opened the door, and said nothing.
“I’m here,” he said. With forced politeness, he added, “Can I come in?”
I let him in. Cynthia reached the top of the stairs and stopped when she saw who it was. “You son of a bitch,” she said.
Vince said nothing. He looked like he was expecting this.
“You goddamn lousy son of a bitch,” Cynthia said, putting a little more into it this time. “I shared a beer with you. You sat there and talked to me about your life like you were almost a human being. But that was an act. You’re something vile. Something absolutely despicable.”
Vince looked very tired. “Go ahead. Get it out of your system.”
“You blackmailed Teresa. To get into our house whenever you want.”
He shook his head. “Not blackmail. I offered to help her son.”
Her cheeks flushed. “Why us?”
“Why not you?” he shot back. “You’re perfect.”
“I still don’t quite get this,” I said. “What it is you’re doing. How you used us.”
“I hide things for people,” he said. “People who can’t afford to have these things found by the authorities. Money, drugs, guns, jewelry, anything. I hide it where no one would think to look. In the homes of people who are above suspicion. Good, upstanding folks whose places would never be searched by the police. You fit the profile.”
“If I’m supposed to feel flattered,” I said, “I don’t.”
“There are lots of people that fit that profile,” Cynthia said. “So again, why us?”
Vince ran his tongue over his teeth. “I drive by here once in a while. I saw your cleaning lady arrive one day. I got this idea, a service I could offer. I decided to start with you. Seemed like the least you could do for me.” He paused. “Considering everything.”
“I don’t believe this,” Cynthia said.
“I started recruiting others. Other cleaning ladies, babysitters, nannies. People who are trusted by their employers.”
“Let me guess,” Cynthia said. “At least one dog walker.”