Sacred

  Once Lila finished her story, the counselors hugged her and complimented her on her bravery in retelling such a horrific story.

  “Only problem was,” Jay told us in the diner, “the story was utter horseshit.”

  In the late 1980s, Jay was part of a joint FBI-DEA task force that went to Mexico in the wake of the murder of Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent. Ostensibly an information-seeking force, the real job of Jay and his fellow agents was to kick ass, take names, and make sure the Mexican drug lords would sooner shoot their own young before they’d entertain the idea of shooting a federal agent again.

  “I lived in Catize for three weeks,” he said. “There’s not a basement in the entire town. The ground’s too soft because the town’s built over swampland. The boyfriend getting shot in the back of the head? No way. That’s an American Mafia hit, not a Mexican one. You rip off a drug lord down there, you die one way and one way only—Colombian necktie. They cut your throat and pull your tongue out through the hole, toss your body from a moving car into the village square. And no Mexican gang rapes an American woman for six hours and lets her live to serve warning to other gringas. Warning for what? They wanted to send a warning, they would have cut her into pieces and airmailed her back to the States.”

  Looking for lies and inconsistencies now, Jay identified four other alleged Level Fives whose stories didn’t hold water. It was, he’d find out as the retreat wore on, standard operating procedure for Grief Release to place these frauds in groups of truly grief-stricken people because internal studies had shown that a client was far likelier to first confide in a “peer” before a counselor.

  And what pissed Jay off most was hearing the bullshit stories threaded in with the real ones: a mother who’d lost her infant twins in a fire she escaped; a twenty-five-year-old man with an inoperable brain tumor; a woman whose husband had walked out on her for his nineteen-year-old secretary twenty years after their wedding and six days after the woman lost a breast in a mastectomy.

  “These were shattered people,” Jay told us, “looking for a lifeline, for hope. And these Grief Release scumbags nodded and cooed and probed for every dirty secret and every piece of financial minutiae just so they could blackmail them later and enslave them to the Church.”

  When Jay got mad, he usually got even.

  By the end of the first night, he noticed Lila glancing at him, giving him shy smiles. The next night, he went to her room, and far from fitting the psychological profile of a woman who’d been gang-raped less than a year ago, Lila was joyfully uninhibited and quite inventive in bed.

  “You know the golf-ball-through-the-garden-hose analogy?” Jay asked me.

  “Jay,” Angie said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  For five torrid hours, Jay and Lila had sex in her room. During breaks between rounds, she’d probe for information about his past, his current means, his hopes for the future.

  “Lila,” he whispered in her ear during their final tryst that night, “there are no basements in Catize.”

  His interrogation of her took two more hours, during which he convinced her that he was a former hit man for the Gambino family in New York who was trying to lie low awhile and figure out Grief Release’s angles before he muscled his way in on whatever con they had going here.

  Lila, who Jay correctly guessed got turned on by men of danger, was no longer enamored of her position with either Grief Release or the Church. She told Jay the story of her former lover, Jeff Price, who’d heisted over two million dollars from the coffers of Grief Release. After promising to take her with him, Price ditched her and took off with the “Desiree bitch,” as Lila called her.

  “But, Lila,” Jay said, “you know where Price went. Don’t you?”

  She did, but she wasn’t telling.

  But then Jay convinced her that if she didn’t cough up Price’s whereabouts, he’d make sure her fellow Messengers knew she was in on the heist with Price.

  “You wouldn’t,” she said.

  “Wanna bet?”

  “What do I get if I tell you?” She pouted.

  “A flat fifteen percent of whatever I take off Price.”

  “How do I know you’ll pay it?”

  “Because if I don’t,” Jay said, “you’ll rat me out.”

  She chewed on that and eventually she said, “Clearwater.”

  Jeff Price’s hometown, and the place where he planned to turn the two million into ten by going in on a drug deal with old friends who had heroin connections in Thailand.

  Jay left the island that morning, but not before giving Lila one final piece of advice:

  “You hold your breath until I get back, and you’ll have a nice chunk of change. But, Lila? You try and warn Price I’m coming, and I’ll do far worse to you than any five Mexicans would have.”

  “So, I got back from Nantucket and called Trevor.”

  Trevor, far from what he told us or Hamlyn and Kohl, sent a car for Jay, and the Weeble drove him back to the house in Marblehead.

  He commended Jay on his diligent work, toasted him with his fine single-malt, and asked Jay how he felt about Hamlyn and Kohl’s attempt to remove him from the case.

  “It must be a tremendous ego blow to a man with your skills.”

  And it had been, Jay admitted. As soon as he found Desiree and returned her safely, he was going out on his own.

  “How are you going to do that?” Trevor said. “You’re broke.”

  Jay shook his head. “You’re mistaken.”

  “Am I?” Trevor said. And he explained to Jay exactly what Adam Kohl had been doing with the 401(k)s, municipal funds, and stock options Jay had so blindly entrusted to him. “Your Mr. Kohl invested heavily, and on margin I might add, in stocks I advised him on recently. Unfortunately, those stocks didn’t perform as well as expected. And then there’s Mr. Kohl’s unfortunate and well-documented gambling addiction.”

  Jay sat stunned as Trevor Stone detailed Adam Kohl’s long history of playing fast and loose with the stock and dividends of Hamlyn and Kohl employees.

  “In fact,” Trevor said, “you won’t have to concern yourself with leaving Hamlyn and Kohl because they’ll be filing for Chapter Eleven within six weeks.”

  “You ruined them,” Jay said.

  “Did I?” Trevor moved his wheelchair over by Jay’s chair. “I’m sure I didn’t. Your dear Mr. Kohl overextended himself as he’s been doing for years. This time, however, he put too many of his eggs into one basket—a basket I advised him on, I admit, but without malice.” He placed his hand on Jay’s back. “Several of those investments are in your name, Mr. Becker. Seventy-five thousand six hundred forty-four dollars and twelve cents’ worth, to be exact.”

  Trevor stroked the back of Jay’s neck with his palm. “So let’s talk truthfully, shall we?”

  “He had me,” Jay told us. “And it wasn’t just the debt. I was shell-shocked when I realized that Adam, and maybe Everett, too, had actually betrayed me.”

  “Did you talk to them?” Angie asked.

  He nodded. “I called Everett and he confirmed it. He said he hadn’t known it himself. I mean, he’d known Kohl had a gambling problem, but he never thought he’d stoop to wiping out a fifty-three-year-old company in about seven weeks. Kohl had even pilfered the pension fund on Trevor Stone’s advice. Everett was devastated. You know his big thing about honor, Patrick.”

  I nodded, remembering how Everett had spoken to Angie and me about honor in its twilight, about how hard it was to be an honorable man surrounded by dishonorable ones. How he’d stared at the view out his window as if it were the last time he’d ever see it.

  “So,” Jay said, “I told Trevor Stone I’d do whatever he wanted. And he gave me two hundred and thirty thousand dollars to kill Jeff Price and Desiree.”

  “I am more things than you could possibly fathom,” Trevor Stone told Jay that night. “I own trading corporations, shipping companies, more real estate than can be assessed in a day. I own jud
ges, policemen, politicians, whole governments in some countries, and now I own you.” His hand tightened on Jay’s neck. “And if you betray me, I will reach across any oceans you try to put between us, and rip your jugular from your throat and cram it through the hole in your penis.”

  So Jay went to Florida.

  He had no idea what he’d do once he found Desiree or Jeff Price, only that he wouldn’t kill anyone in cold blood. He’d done that once for the feds in Mexico, and the memory of the look in the drug lord’s eyes just before Jay blew his heart all over his silk shirt had haunted him so completely, he quit the government a month later.

  Lila had told him about a hotel in downtown Clearwater, the Ambassador, which Price had often raved about due to the vibrating beds and varied selection of porn movies available through the satellite TVs.

  Jay thought it was a long shot, but then Price proved stupider than he’d thought when he walked out the front door two hours after Jay began staking the place out. Jay followed Price all day as he met with his buddies with the Thailand connections, got drunk in a bar in Largo, and took a hooker back to his room.

  The next day, while Price was out, Jay broke into his room, but found no evidence of the money or Desiree.

  One morning Jay watched Price leave the hotel and was about to give the room another toss when he got the feeling he was being watched.

  He turned in his car seat and focused his binoculars, panned down the length of the street until he came face-to-face with another set of binoculars watching him from a car two blocks down.

  “That’s how I met Desiree,” he told us. “Each of us watching the other through binoculars.”

  He’d been wondering by this time if she’d ever really existed at all. He dreamed about her constantly, stared at her photographs for hours, believed he knew what she smelled like, how her laugh sounded, what her bare legs would feel like pressed against his own. And the more he built her up in his mind, the more she grew into something mythic—the tortured, poetic, tragic beauty who’d sat in Boston parks through the mists and rains of autumn, awaiting deliverance.

  And then one day she was standing in front of him.

  She didn’t drive away when he left his car to approach hers. She didn’t pretend it was all a misunderstanding. She watched him come with calm, steady eyes, and when he reached her car, she opened the door and stepped out.

  “Are you from the police?” she said.

  He shook his head, unable to speak.

  She wore a faded T-shirt and jeans, both of which looked like they’d been slept in. Her feet were bare, her sandals on the floor mat of the car, and he found himself worrying that she might cut her feet on the glass or pebbles that littered the city street.

  “Are you a private detective, perhaps?”

  He nodded.

  “A mute private detective?” she said with a small smile.

  And he laughed.

  22

  “My father,” Desiree told Jay two days later, once they’d begun to trust each other, “owns people. That’s what he lives for. He owns businesses and homes and cars and whatever else you can think of, but what he really lives for is the owning of people.”

  “I’m starting to figure that out,” Jay said.

  “He owned my mother. Literally. She was from Guatemala originally. He went down there in the 1950s to oversee construction of a dam his company was financing, and he bought her from her parents for less than a hundred dollars American. She was fourteen years old.”

  “Nice,” Jay said. “Real fucking nice.”

  Desiree had holed up in an old fisherman’s shack on Longboat Key, which she’d rented at exorbitant rates, until she could figure out her options. Jay had been sleeping on the couch, and one night he woke to Desiree screaming from a nightmare, and they both left the house for the cool of the beach at three in the morning, both too rattled to sleep.

  She wore only a sweatshirt he’d given her, a threadbare blue thing from his undergraduate days with LSU embossed on the front in white letters that had chipped and flaked over the years. She was broke, he’d discovered, afraid to use her credit cards on the chance her father would notice and send someone else to kill her. Jay sat beside her on the cool white sand as the surf roared white out of a wall of darkness, and he found himself staring at her hands clasped under her thighs, at the point where her toes disappeared in the white sand, at the glow from the moon as it threaded through the tangles in her hair.

  And for the first time in his life, Jay Becker fell in love.

  Desiree turned her head and met his eyes. “You won’t kill me?” she said.

  “No. Not a chance.”

  “And you don’t want my money?”

  “You don’t have any,” Jay said, and they both laughed.

  “Everyone I care about dies,” she said.

  “I know,” Jay said. “You’ve had some shitty luck.”

  She laughed, but it was bitter and fearful. “Or betrays me like Jeff Price.”

  He touched her thigh just below the hem of the sweatshirt. He waited for her to remove his hand. And when she didn’t, he waited for her to close her own over it. He waited for the surf to tell him something, to suddenly know the right thing to say.

  “I won’t die,” he said and cleared his throat. “And I won’t betray you. Because if I do betray you”—and he was as sure of this as he’d ever been of anything—“I definitely will die.”

  And she smiled at him, her teeth the white of ivory in the night.

  Then she peeled off the sweatshirt and came to him, brown and beautiful and shaking from fear.

  “When I was fourteen,” she told Jay that night as she lay beside him, “I looked just like my mother had. And my father noticed.”

  “And acted upon it?” Jay said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Trevor give you his speech about grief?” Jay asked us as the waitress brought us two more coffees and another beer. “The one about grief being carnivorous?”

  “Yeah,” Angie said.

  Jay nodded. “Gave me the same speech when he hired me.” He held his hands out in front of him on the table, turned them back and forth. “Grief isn’t carnivorous,” he said. “Grief is my hands.”

  “Your hands,” Angie said.

  “I can feel her flesh in them,” he said. “Still. And the smells?” He tapped his nose. “Sweet Jesus. The scent of sand on her skin or the salt in the air coming through the screens of that fisherman’s shack? Grief, I swear to God, doesn’t live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can’t smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.”

  He looked at us, as if suddenly realizing we were there.

  “You son of a bitch,” Angie said and her voice cracked as tears glistened on her cheekbones.

  “Shit,” Jay said. “I forgot. Phil. Angie, I’m sorry.”

  She waved away his hand and wiped her face with a cocktail napkin.

  “Angie, really, I—”

  She shook her head. “It’s just sometimes, I hear his voice and the sound of it is so clear, I’d swear he’s sitting beside me. And for the rest of the day, that’s all I can hear. Nothing else.”

  I knew better than to reach for her hand, but she surprised me by suddenly reaching for mine.

  I closed my thumb over hers and she leaned into me.

  So this, I wanted to say to Jay, is what you felt with Desiree.

  It was Jay who came up with the idea to rip off the money Jeff Price had stolen from Grief Release.

  Trevor Stone had made his threats, and Jay believed him, but he also knew that Trevor didn’t have long to live. With two hundred thousand dollars, Jay and Desiree might not be able to hide deep enough to elude Trevor’s grasp for six months.

  But with over two million, they could elude him for six years.

  Desiree didn’t want anything to do with it. Price, she told Jay, had tried to kill her when she found out about the mone
y he’d stolen. She’d only survived by cold-cocking him with a fire extinguisher, then bolting from their hotel room at the Ambassador in such a rush, she’d left behind every piece of clothing she owned.

  Jay said, “But, honey, you were casing the hotel again when we met.”

  “Because I was desperate. And alone. I’m not desperate anymore, Jay. And I’m not alone. And you have two hundred thousand dollars. We can run on that.”

  “But how far?” Jay said. “He’ll find us. It’s not just the running that matters. We can run to Guyana. We can run to the Eastern bloc even, but we won’t have enough money left over to buy off people so they’ll answer questions right when Trevor sends people looking.”

  “Jay,” she said, “he’s dying. How many more people can he send? It took you over three weeks to find me, and I left a trail, because I wasn’t sure anyone would be coming after me.”

  “I left a trail,” he said. “And it’ll be a hell of a lot easier for someone to find me and you than it was for me to find just you. I left reports behind, and your father knows I’m in Florida.”

  “It’s all about money,” she said, her voice soft, her eyes refusing to meet his. “Fucking money, as if that’s all there is in the world. As if it’s anything more than paper.”

  “It is more than paper,” Jay said. “It’s power. And power moves things and hides things and creates opportunities. And if we don’t take down this douche bag, Price, someone else will because he’s stupid.”

  “And dangerous,” Desiree said. “He’s dangerous. Don’t you get that? He’s killed people. I’m sure of it.”