Desperate (23 page)

R
oy and I were in the hotel bar. It was just after ten in the morning, so we needed to seek out hotel staff to serve us a drink. Roy ordered a double shot of whiskey, and I nodded a request for the same. Roy was really working his toothpick, gnawing at the thin sliver of wood like a starving termite. I was numb, in shock. In the span of a few hours, I’d become nothing I recognized, nothing familiar to me. The old me wouldn’t drink whiskey before the sun went down. Now I was drinking it not long after it had come up.

The first swallow passed like a screech of fire, but the second tasted a whole lot better, and before Roy could say a word, I was ordering myself another.

“I’m sorry, Gage,” Roy said. He took a long drink for himself. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.”

My eyes went wide.

“Really? Tell me, Roy, how was it supposed to go down? Was I supposed to have enough in my bank account to cover your cigarette debt?”

The bartender, a twentysomething guy, was polishing some glass bottles for want of something to do. He shot us a curious over-the-shoulder glance and Roy looked at me, worried, so we took our drinks over to a table out of his earshot.

“So what now?” Roy asked.

I wanted to reach across the table and slap Roy across the face. Everything tough about him had been evaporated. Nothing about Roy intimidated me anymore—not a twitch of his sinewy muscle, a flash of his tattoos, or a sneer on his curled lips. It felt like I was pulling apart a matryoshka doll of maladies, with Lily the littlest doll inside Roy, inside the Moreno brothers, inside Nicky Stacks. Roy was no longer the hard man—he was a vulnerable man, same as me. And because of him everything and everyone I loved was in grave danger.

“What now, Roy, is you’ve got to save your life,” I said. “And in the process, you’ll save mine. So . . .” I knocked on the table for emphasis. “How are you going to come up with a million dollars? How do you criminals do that?”

Roy looked down at his feet and shook his head.

“You don’t get this, do you?” he said. “We’re dead. I can’t come up with that kind of money. We’re dead men. Drink up, because you’re not going to have many drinks left.”

Roy downed half his whiskey in one long gulp.

“Why didn’t Nicky just kill us? Why give us the chance to run away?”

Roy gave a dismissive laugh. He straightened his posture and leaned across the table, pointing a finger at me like it was the tip of Nicky’s switchblade targeting my heart. A furious look came over his face, dark and snarling, the kind that can only be perfected behind the walls of a prison. I still wasn’t intimidated.

“He gave us a chance to come up with his money,” Roy said. “Don’t you get it? Nicky wins either way. He’s just hedging his bets and seeing if we get lucky. You ask me, he doesn’t think we’ll come up with the cash, but if we’re dead, we definitely don’t get it.”

“So we go to the cops,” I said.

Roy looked at me like I was an exasperating child who would never learn to ride his bike. “Let’s say we do that,” Roy said. “We go to the cops with the threat, and Nicky produces evidence that you committed murder. You get grilled, you turn on me, and we both go to jail.”

“So, we’ll be safe.”

“Your family will be dead,” Roy said, emphasizing his point by repeatedly stabbing the table with his finger, like Nicky would be stabbing my family. “And so will Lily.”

“Not if we warn the cops. They’ll be protected.”

“There are crooked cops on Nicky’s payroll, remember? Besides, if we go inside, Nicky has people there who will put us both in the ground.”

I shrugged away my own mortality.

“So be it,” I said.

I would be a shell of a person—skin, bones, and soulless—if anything happened to Anna, or to my parents.

Ever since the accident, I’d surrounded myself with memories of the dead or with the dying. I’d talked and shared with other parents who had lost a child, and spent my free time in hospital rooms making model rockets for sick kids, some of whom had no hope of ever breathing fresh air again. I gravitated to the people who hungered for second chances, because I’d learned the hardest way possible how precious those chances really were.

I would sacrifice myself to give Anna the second chance she deserved.

“You might be comfortable getting shanked on your way to lunch, but not me.” Roy shook his head, his chiseled face flush. “I ain’t going back inside. No way. We’re going to get out from this.”

“Okay, hotshot,” I said, taking another sip of whiskey. “What’s your plan?”

“I’m thinking,” Roy said, looking at his finger as he traced some design on the table surface.

“I heard on NPR that the average bank robbery nets about twelve thousand.”

Roy looked up at me, trying to get a read on my sarcasm.

“Do you still have the Oxy you siphoned off? Maybe we could sell that.”

“Shut up, Gage,” Roy said, his flush turning a different shade of red.

“Or maybe we could try a kidnapping plot? Extortion? I’m just brainstorming here,” I said in a sarcastic tone. “It’s a little something I learned at work. You toss out ideas, but remember, no idea is a bad idea.”

Roy’s dour expression darkened even more.

“Look, Gage, you better start getting creative here,” Roy said. “You got a rich family? Because I suggest you call them and start collecting.”

“A million dollars? My family doesn’t have that kind of money, not even close. My father has been on disability for twenty years. I send them money to help pay the rent. If you know so much about me, you should know that.”

“What about Anna?”

“She doesn’t have it, either.” We fell silent, taking slower sips of our drinks, thinking, thinking.

Eventually, I was the one to break the quiet. “Look,” I said. “What if Stacks is just bluffing?”

“Bluffing? Nicky Stacks?”

“Yeah, what if he doesn’t want to kill me because it would be too high profile? I’m a white-collar professional, and an investigation into my death might get back to Nicky.”

“What does that mean? What does white-collar mean?”

“It’s a business term. It means professional, managerial work.”

Roy got quiet, thinking, the hard man thinking.

“So, what do you do for a living anyway?”

“I thought you checked up on me,” I said.

“Only a little. I didn’t friggin’ look at your stupid job. What do you do?”

“Why?”

“Just tell me.”

“I work for Lithio Systems,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“We make batteries.”

“For flashlights and stuff?”

“No. More like cell phones. Computers. Laptops. Airplanes.”

A smile, the first I’d seen from him.

“That sounds fancy,” Roy said. He took a sip of his whiskey and his eyes darted. Thoughts were coming to him, something appealing.

“It’s high tech,” I said.

“Valuable?” he asked.

My throat went dry.
What could he have in mind?

I told Roy a little about Olympian, not the trade secrets, just a thirty thousand foot overview of the landscape. He seemed to sort of understand what I was saying, but when I told him about the billions in market cap for the battery, his eyes went wide.

“That’s a lot of Benjamins,” he said, licking his lips.

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

Roy had the look of a guy on speed.

“Nicky’s been around,” he said. “He knows a lot of different types of people, all fine, upstanding citizens just like him.”

“What’s your point?”

“What if he can give me a name, somebody who might want to pay a lot of money to know how to make a battery like yours?”

My teeth clenched. “You want me to steal my company’s secrets?”

“If I can find us a buyer, why not?”

“No,” I said. “No way. I’m not going to do that.”

“So, what, you’ll just do nothing?”

“For a while, maybe. See what happens.”

“In that case, let me offer you some advice,” Roy said. “Treat your woman real fine these next couple weeks, because I’m betting they’ll be the last you’ll ever have.”

H
ome.

It had never looked so good, smelled so inviting, or made me feel so despondent. My fresh pop of Adderall was just starting to kick in when I entered through the front door with my overnight bag, looking just like the guy who’d returned home from a short business trip. I was nothing of the sort, but Anna didn’t know that.

I’d spent the day in the hotel room and then just walking around Boston aimlessly, trying to kill enough hours so I could come home from my bogus business trip at a realistic time. Anna was in the kitchen when I showed up, cooking something for dinner. I smelled asparagus and got a faint whiff of the garlic and olive oil she used to baste my favorite vegetable. The important thing was that Anna was cooking my favorite food as a way of welcoming me home. She was being kind, loving, and thoughtful, and all the good things Anna was on a daily basis.

It made me feel hopelessly sad for us, for what we were about to lose, which amounted to everything. I thought about the events leading to this moment, this terrible lie I was living, and asked myself: Could this have played out differently? What if I had refused Roy’s offer to assist him on the drop? What if instead he had told Anna that Lily and I had slept together? Or what if Roy had played Anna the recording of me offering them a bribe to leave? I suspect Anna and I would be in therapy, a lot of therapy, or separated, but Jorge Moreno would still be alive, and I wouldn’t owe Nicky Stacks a million dollars.

But that wasn’t how it played out. I made the deal to save my marriage, and everything else went right into the shitter.

Anna entered the hallway through the dining room. She wrapped her arms around my neck and gave me a passionate kiss on the lips.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I was only gone a day.”

I hoped my attempt at a smile didn’t look as sad as it felt.

Anna took my hand and led me to the kitchen. “Come, darling,” she said. “You must be starving.”

I didn’t think I could get down a bite of food, but for Anna’s sake I would try. Besides, I could use something to wash away the harsh bite of whiskey still souring my throat. Thankfully, getting back into the groove of being home was a seamless transition. I made a salad while Anna put the finishing touches on dinner. She seemed light on her feet, pleased with life. I could feel her excitement like it was my pulse.

“So, I’ve got a date from Margret for our home study,” Anna said as she stirred the turkey chili and sampled a bit with a wooden spoon. “It’s in two weeks.”

I choked on a swallow of air and nearly cut my pinky finger off while chopping a cucumber.

“Two weeks?” I repeated.

Anna gave me a backwards glance along with a smile that touched my heart. Did my eyes give me away? Could she tell I was sweating out my booze-laden morning? Two weeks. In that amount of time I would need to come up with a million dollars to save my life and get approved by the state to become a father once more. It was to be an epic two weeks.

“So what do we have to do to get ready?” My voice came out in a warble.

“We’ll start by not using any of the furniture,” Anna said. “I’m going to cordon it off with ropes like a museum exhibit.”

Anna tried to hold a serious expression but couldn’t contain the smile. Then she noticed I didn’t think the joke was particularly funny. Normally I would have laughed right along with her, but I kept seeing Nicky Stacks looming above me, twirling the blade of his knife against his fleshy palm, telling me I didn’t know the meaning of pain. My tongue felt thick in my mouth. Would Stacks kill me? Worse, would he hurt Anna? Kill her, even? What about my parents? Bessie?

Two weeks . . .

I thought about Roy’s suggestion. What if Nicky did have a contact for him? What if it was the only way? I could do it, because I had Security Breach Team access privileges. The question was, would I?

“Honey, are you all right?” Anna asked as she crossed the kitchen floor. She got to me and got her answer all in the same instant. “Gage, you’re shaking.”

I held it together by biting on the inside of my cheek until tangy droplets of blood filled my mouth.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I guess it’s all happening and I’m a bit emotional, is all.”

“Oh, sweetie.” Anna’s eyes brimmed with sympathy. She smoothed her hand over my cheek, the one I had been biting, and looked deeply in my eyes, trying to comfort me with the intimacy of our connection. She pulled her hand away, but I could feel her love for me linger. I battled back the tears, trying to hold myself together.

“Baby, I know this is emotional for you. I know how hard it is and what it’s bringing up for you.”

“No,” I wanted to say. You have no idea what’s really happening. Why I’m breaking down. You have no idea how much we have to fear. How close we are to death.

“I can’t take away the hurt, sweetie,” Anna said, pulling me into her arms. I smelled the sweet aroma of her hair, the faint scent of lilacs. I took in several deep breaths, letting her familiar smells ground me. Each breath I took served as a powerful reminder of what I was fighting for. We were two halves of two shattered lives that somehow found each other and fit together like the pieces of the same broken vase. I would do anything to protect her.

And that included getting a million dollars I didn’t have.

“Seriously, what do we have to do to get ready?” I asked.

“Well, we really are going to have to keep the house spotless,” she said. “I know they say they don’t give us grades for housekeeping, but I’m not taking the chance.”

“We don’t have to baby-proof, right?” I felt sick for leading her on, because I knew how this was going to play out. But it would be better for our future if Anna felt the sting from Lily’s betrayal rather than from mine.

“No, baby-proofing is not required. Speaking of baby, I’m going to call Lily. I invited her to eat with us tonight. She said Roy was away and I didn’t want her to eat alone.”

Roy was away, all right,
I thought. I knew
exactly
where Roy had gone.

Anna went to the kitchen to get the phone while I set the table for three. She was dialing Lily when she returned and took notice of my place settings.

“Before you know it, we’re always going to set the table for three,” Anna said, putting the cordless phone to her ear. She stood marveling at the three place settings, hands on her hips, looking at it like it brought a warmth all its own.

I cringed, knowing we’d be a table of two for the foreseeable future.

“Lily’s not answering,” Anna said, ending the call.

“Maybe she went out,” I suggested. “She works nights after all.” Already I felt a twinge of panic.

Anna went to the front door.

“I’ll just ring the bell and make sure. She did accept my invitation.”

I followed Anna outside, into a warm summer’s eve with the dusk sky draped in a serene amber glow. When Anna reached Lily’s apartment door she paused. Something was troubling her. Only when I got closer could I see what it was. The door to Lily’s apartment had been left slightly ajar. Anna pushed it open fully and called up the winding wooden staircase.

“Lily, it’s Anna! Are you there? We’re ready to have dinner.”

No response.

Anna took a cautious step inside and again called up into the empty stairwell. She waited at the foot of the stairs and motioned for me to join her inside.

“Maybe something is wrong,” Anna said, her tone urgent. “I think we should go upstairs and check.”

What could I do? I would agree with her without reservation if I weren’t so terrified about what we’d find. Soon though, I found myself following Anna up the stairs. At the landing, I could see the door into the apartment was left slightly ajar as well. Anna pushed it open with the palm of her hand and took a tentative step inside.

“Lily?” Anna called out.

Her voice carried down the long hallway. Anna shot me a nervous look. Something was amiss.

I went into the living room while Anna ventured toward Lily’s (and Roy’s) bedroom. From down the hall, I could hear Anna calling Lily’s name. There was a subtle uptick of worry to her voice each time Lily failed to answer.

Why was the door open? Why wasn’t Lily home? She knew we were having dinner together. Where was Lily?

I was heading down the hallway to meet Anna when I heard a soft cry of surprise. My heart leapt to my throat, hairs on my arms straightening as my pace quickened. What could she have found? I passed the entrance to the kitchen and took a quick glance inside, seeing nothing of alarm.

Anna was in the bedroom and I could hear her gasping for breath. When I entered, I saw her standing in front of Lily’s bedroom closet, one hand covering her mouth, eyes wide. On the windowsill, I saw the Pac-Man mug Lily had painted for a friend and wondered if that friend had been Roy. Anna stood stock-still, gazing at something in the darkness of the closet. My stomach flipped a dozen ways. I wasn’t ready to see what I thought I’d see: Lily’s body, bloodied by the steel blade of Nicky’s knife, or a bullet hole to the head.

But I saw something else entirely.

The closet was empty. There were no clothes. No shoes. No black outfits or laced boots to be seen anywhere. I didn’t see any of Roy’s clothes, either. Missing was the vintage green suitcase Lily had carried with her on the day she moved in.

“Gage, Lily is gone,” Anna said, tears pricking the corners of her eyes. “I really think she’s gone.”

I tried my very best to look surprised.