“So have I,” Jay said. “So have I.”
But he couldn’t convince her.
“She was twenty-three,” he said to us. “You know? A kid. I’d forget that a lot, but she had a kid’s way of looking at the world, even after all the shit she’d been through. She kept thinking that somehow everything would just work out, all by itself. The world, she was sure, had a happy ending in it for her somewhere. And she wasn’t going to have anything to do with all that money that had caused all this shit in the first place.”
So Jay began to tail Price again. But Price never went near the money as far as Jay could tell. He had his meetings with his drug dealer friends, and Jay bugged Price’s room and ascertained that they were all concerned about a boat lost at sea off the Bahamian coast.
“That boat that sank the other day?” Angie said. “The one that sent all the heroin up onto the beaches?”
Jay nodded.
So Price was worried now, but he never went near the money as far as Jay could tell.
While Jay was out tailing Price, Desiree would read. The tropics, Jay noticed, had given her a taste for the surrealists and the sensualists he’d always favored himself, and he’d come home to find her lost in Toni Morrison or Borges, García Márquez or Isabelle Allende, the poetry of Neruda. In the fisherman’s shack, they’d cook fish Cajun-style and boil shellfish, fill the tiny space with the smell of salt and cayenne pepper, and then they’d make love. After, they’d go outside and sit by the ocean, and she’d tell him stories from whatever she was reading that day, and Jay would feel as if he were rereading the books himself, as if she were the writer, sitting beside him and spinning fantastical yarns into the darkening air. And then they’d make love again.
Until one morning Jay woke to find that his alarm clock had never gone off and Desiree wasn’t in bed beside him.
There was a note:
Jay,
I think I know where the money is. It matters to you, so I guess it matters to me. I’m going to get it. I’m scared, but I love you, and I think you’re right. We wouldn’t be able to hide long without it, would we? If I’m not back by ten a.m., please come get me.
I love you. Completely.
Desiree
By the time Jay reached the Ambassador, Price had checked out.
He stood in the parking lot, looking up at the U-shaped balcony that ran along the wall on the second floor, and that’s when the Jamaican housekeeper began to scream.
Jay ran up the stairs and saw the woman bent at the waist and screaming outside Price’s room. He stepped around her and looked through the open door.
Desiree’s corpse sat on the floor between the TV and the minifridge. The first thing Jay noticed was that the fingers and thumbs of both her hands had been severed at the joints.
Blood dripped from what remained of her chin onto Jay’s LSU sweatshirt.
Desiree’s face was a shattered hole, pulverized by a shotgun blast fired from less than ten feet. Her honey hair, which Jay had shampooed himself the previous night, was matted with blood and speckled with brain tissue.
From far, far away, it seemed to Jay, he heard the sound of screaming. And the hum of several air conditioners, thousands going at once it seemed in this cheap motel, trying to pour cool air into the hellish heat of these cinder block cells, until the sound was like a swarm of bees in his ears.
23
“So, I tracked down Price at a motel just up the street from here.” Jay rubbed his eyes with his fists. “I got the room next door to him. Cheap walls. I sat with my head against the wall an entire day listening to him over there in his room. Maybe, I dunno, I was listening for sounds of regret, weeping, anguish, anything. But he just watched TV and drank all day. Then he called for a hooker. Less than forty-eight hours after he shot Desiree in the face and cut off her fingers, the prick orders up a woman like takeout.”
Jay lit another cigarette, stared at the flame for a moment.
“After the hooker left, I went over to his room. We had some words and I pushed him around a little bit. I was hoping he’d grab a weapon, and whatta ya know? He did. A six-inch switchblade. Fucking pimp’s knife. Good thing he pulled it, though. Made what I did next look like self-defense. Sort of.”
Jay turned his worn face toward the window, looked out as the rain let up just a bit. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and souless:
“I cut a smile through his abdomen from hip to hip, held his chin tight and made him look me in the eyes as his large intestine spilled out onto the floor.”
He shrugged. “I think Desiree’s memory was owed that.”
It was probably seventy-five degrees outside, but the air in the diner felt colder than slate in a mortuary.
“So what are you going to do now, Jay?” Angie said.
He smiled the smile of a ghost. “I’m going back to Boston, and I’m going to open up Trevor Stone, too.”
“And then what, spend the rest of your life in jail?”
He looked at me. “I don’t care. If the fates so decide, fine. Patrick, you get one shot at love, that’s if you’re very lucky. Well, I was very lucky. Forty-one years old, I fall in love with a woman nearly half my age for two weeks. And she dies. And, okay, the world’s a tough place. You get something good, sooner or later you’ll get served up something really bad just to even up the scales.” He patted the tabletop in a quick drumbeat. “Fine. I accept that. Don’t like it, but I accept it. The scales have evened up for me. Now I’m going to even them up for Trevor.”
“Jay,” Angie said. “It’d be a suicide mission.”
He shrugged. “Tough shit. He dies. Besides, you think he hasn’t already put a hit out on me? I know too much. The moment I broke off daily contact with him from here, I signed my death warrant. Why do you think he sent Clifton and Cushing with you guys?” He closed his eyes, sighed audibly. “Nope. That’s it. The fucker eats a bullet.”
“He’ll be dead in five months.”
Another shrug. “Not soon enough for me.”
“What about the law?” Angie said. “You can testify he paid you to kill his daughter.”
“Good idea, Ange. Case should reach trial maybe only six or seven months after he’s already died.” He dropped several bills on the check. “I’m taking that old piece of shit out. This week. Slowly and painfully.” He smiled. “Any questions?”
Most of Jay’s things were still in an efficiency unit he’d rented when he’d first arrived at the Ukumbak Apartments in downtown St. Petersburg. He was going to swing by, grab his stuff, and hit the road, planes being too undependable, airports too easily watched. Without sleep or any other preparation, he was going to drive twenty-four hours straight up the eastern seaboard, which would put him in Marblehead by two-thirty in the morning. There, he planned to break into Trevor Stone’s house and torture the old man to death.
“Hell of a plan,” I said as we bolted from the steps of the diner and ran toward our cars in the pelting rain.
“You like it? Just something I came up with.”
Angie and I, having no other options that we could conceive of, decided to follow Jay back to Massachusetts. Maybe we could keep discussing it at rest stops and gas stations, either talk Jay out of it or come up with a more sane solution to his problem. The Celica we’d rented from Elite Motors—the same place Jay had rented his 3000 GT—we’d send back on an Amtrak, have them send the bill to Trevor. Dead or alive, he could afford it.
The Weeble would discover we were gone sooner or later, and fly back home with his laptop and his tiny eyes, and figure out a way to explain to Trevor how he’d lost us. Cushing, I assumed, would climb back into his coffin until he was needed again.
“He’s crazy,” Angie said as we followed Jay’s taillights toward the highway.
“Jay?”
She nodded. “He thinks he fell in love with Desiree in two weeks, but that’s bullshit.”
“Why?”
“How many people—adult people—do you kno
w who fall in love in two weeks?”
“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” I said.
“Maybe. But I think he fell in love with Desiree even before he met her. The beautiful girl who sat alone in the parks, waiting for a savior. It’s what all guys want.”
“A beautiful girl who sits alone in parks?”
She nodded. “Waiting to be saved.”
Up ahead, Jay turned onto a ramp leading onto 275 North, his small red taillights blurring in the rain.
“Possibly true,” I said. “Possibly. But whatever the case, if you got involved with someone for a short time, under intense circumstances, and then that person was taken from you, shot in the face—you’d become obsessed, too.”
“Granted.” She downshifted into neutral as the Celica hit a puddle the size of Peru and the back wheels slid out and to the left for a moment. Angie turned into the skid and the car righted itself as we passed beyond the puddle. She shifted back into fourth, and then quickly into fifth, stepped on the gas, and caught back up with Jay.
“Granted,” she repeated. “But he’s going to assassinate a virtual cripple, Patrick.”
“An evil cripple,” I said.
“How do we know that?” she said.
“Because Jay told us and Desiree confirmed it.”
“No,” she said as the yellow dorsal fins of the Skyway Bridge climbed into the night sky about ten miles ahead. “Desiree didn’t confirm it. Jay said she did. All we have to go on is what Jay’s told us. We can’t confirm it with Desiree. She’s dead. We can’t confirm it with Trevor, because he’d deny it in either case.”
“Everett Hamlyn,” I said.
She nodded. “I say we call him when we get to Jay’s place. From a pay phone out of Jay’s earshot. I want to hear it from Everett’s mouth that this is all as Jay said it is.”
The rain, as it drummed the canvas hood of the Celica, sounded like ice cubes.
“I trust Jay,” I said.
“I don’t.” She looked at me for a moment. “It’s nothing personal. But he’s a wreck. And I don’t trust anyone right now.”
“Anyone,” I said.
“Except you,” she said. “And that goes without saying. Otherwise, everyone is suspect.”
I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes.
Everyone is suspect.
Even Jay.
Hell of a weird world in which fathers give orders to assassinate their daughters and therapeutic organizations offer no real therapy and a man I would have once easily trusted with my life suddenly couldn’t be trusted.
Maybe Everett Hamlyn had been right. Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.
Everyone is suspect. Everyone is suspect.
It was starting to become my mantra.
24
The road curved as we broke from a no-man’s-land of blacktop and grass and approached Tampa Bay, the water and the land that abutted it so dark behind walls of rain that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Small white shacks, some with signs on their roofs that I couldn’t read in the blurry darkness, cropped up on either side and seemed to hover effortlessly in a rainy netherworld without foundation. The Skyway’s yellow dorsal fins didn’t appear to grow any closer or any farther away for a minute or so; they hung suspended over a plain of windswept darkness, cut hard into a bruised purple sky.
As we climbed the three-mile ramp that led up to the center of the bridge, a car broke from the wall of water on the other side of the highway, coming off the bridge with its watery headlights wavering in the dark and floating past us as they headed south. I looked in the rearview, saw only a single set of headlights pocking the dark about a mile behind us. Two in the morning, the rain a wall, the darkness puddling out on all sides as we rose toward the colossal yellow fins, a night not fit to banish the most recalcitrant of sinners into.
I yawned and my body groaned internally at the thought of being cooped up in the small Celica for another twenty-four hours. I fiddled with the radio, got nothing but “yeah, buddy” classic rock stations, a couple of dance music ones, and several “soft rock” grotesqueries. Soft rock—not too hard, not too soft, perfect for people with no sense of discrimination.
I shut the radio off as the tarmac grew steeper and all but the closest of the dorsal fins rolled away from us momentarily. Jay’s taillights looked back at me through the rain like red eyes and on our right the bay kept widening, and a cement guardrail streamed past in a current.
“This bridge is huge,” I said.
“Jinxed, too,” Angie said. “This is a replacement bridge. The original Skyway—what’s left of it anyway—is off to our left.”
She lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter as I looked off to the left, found myself unable to discern anything in the shroud of falling water.
“In the early eighties,” she said, “the original bridge was hit by a barge. The main span dropped into the sea and so did several cars.”
“How do you know this?”
“When in Rome.” She cracked her window just enough to allow the cigarette smoke to snake out. “I read a book on the area yesterday. There’s one in your suite, too. The day they opened this new bridge, a guy driving to the inauguration had a heart attack as he drove onto the ramp on the St. Pete side. His car pitched into the water and he died.”
I looked out my window as the bay dropped away from us like the floor of an elevator shaft.
“You lie,” I said nervously.
She held up her right hand. “Scout’s honor.”
“Put both hands on the wheel,” I said.
We approached the center span and the entire configuration of yellow fins enflamed the right side of the car, bathed the rubbery windows in artificial light.
The sound of tires slapping through the rain on our left suddenly hummed through the small open space in Angie’s window. I looked left and Angie said, “What the hell?”
She jerked the wheel as a gold Lexus streaked past us, crowding into our lane, doing at least seventy. The wheels on the Celica’s passenger side bit against the curb between the road and the guardrail, and the entire frame shuddered and bounced as Angie’s arm went ramrod straight against the wheel.
The Lexus hurtled past us as we jerked back into the lane. Its taillights were off. It cut halfway in front of us, straddling both lanes, and I saw the stiff, thin head of the driver for a moment in a shaft of light from the fins.
“That’s Cushing,” I said.
“Shit.” Angie honked the tinny horn of the Celica as I popped the glove compartment and pulled out my gun, then Angie’s. I tucked hers on the console against the emergency brake, jacked a bullet into the chamber of my own.
Up ahead, Jay’s head straightened as he looked in his rearview. Angie kept her hand on the horn, but the wimpy bleat it emitted was lost when the nose of Mr. Cushing’s Lexus swung into the rear quarter panel of Jay’s 3000 GT.
The right wheels of the little sports car jumped up on the curb and sparks flew off the passenger side as it careened off the barrier to Jay’s right. Jay swung his wheel hard to the left and jumped back off the curb. His sideview mirror was ripped off the car, and I turned my head to the side as it rocketed back through the rain and crashed into our windshield, ripped a spiderweb through the glass in front of my face.
Angie bumped the back of the Lexus as the nose of Jay’s car slid to the left and his rear right wheel popped back up on the curb. Mr. Cushing kept the Lexus steady, grinding it into Jay’s car. A silver hubcap snapped off and banged off our grille, disappeared under the wheel. The 3000 GT, small and light, was no match for the Lexus, and any second it would be propelled broadside, and the Lexus would be free to push it straight off the bridge.
I could see Jay’s head as it bobbed back and forth and he fought the wheel as the Lexus ground harder against the driver’s side.
“Keep this steady,” I said to Angie
and rolled down my window. I leaned my upper body out into the pelting rain and screaming wind and pointed my gun at the rear windshield of the Lexus. As the rain bit into my eyes, I fired three quick shots. The muzzle flashes exploded into the air like heat lightning, and the rear windshield of the Lexus collapsed all over the trunk. Mr. Cushing tapped his brakes and I jerked myself back inside as Angie rammed the Lexus and Jay’s car shot out ahead of it.
Jay came off the curb too fast, though, and the right wheels of the 3000 GT bounced off the ground and then rose into the air. Angie screamed, and muzzle flashes erupted from inside the Lexus.
The Celica’s windshield imploded.
The rain and wind launched a storm of glass through our hair and off our cheeks and necks. Angie swerved to the right and our tires ate curb again, the hubcaps crunching against the cement. The Toyota seemed to buckle into itself for a moment, then swerved back into the lane.
Ahead of us, Jay’s car flipped.
It bounced on the driver’s side, then rolled over onto its roof and the Lexus accelerated and hit it hard enough to send it spinning through the rain toward the bridge barrier.
“Screw these guys,” I said and rose off my seat and extended my body over the dashboard.
I leaned so far forward my wrists passed through the shattered windshield and rested on the car hood. I steadied my hand as tiny specks of glass bit into my wrists and face and fired another three shots into the interior of the Lexus.
I must have hit someone, because the Lexus jerked away from Jay’s car and swung back across the left lane. It hit the barrier under the last of the yellow fins so hard it bounced sideways and then backward, its heavy gold body jumping trunk first into both lanes ahead of us.
“Get back in,” Angie yelled at me as she swung the Celica to the right, trying to clear the trunk of the Lexus as it jumped across our path.
The gold machine floated through the night toward us. Angie turned the wheel with both hands, and I tried to get back into my seat.