Discretion (28 page)

“So…what’s on your mind, boys?” Mike says, staring at the TV. “Colin, I saw Jamal on the news…how’s he doing?” He takes a long drink.

I fill him in on the details and he is somber, attentive. I wish Christel would tell me what he’s thinking.

“Glad to hear he’s fighting. Saw it all on the news last night,” Mike says.

I nod and wait an uncomfortable moment to ask, “What happened that day, Mike? When we went out there armed, you knew where Natalie was…didn’t you?”

He looks around the room, as if he’s pondering how to answer. “You know the answer,” he says at last. “Knew all along. So why even ask?”

Mike turns down the television volume and makes eye contact for the first time. The fear in his eyes is impossible to miss. Maybe it’s just me, but he looks like a man who’s reaching his tipping point, where reality and your greatest fear meet. I know the feeling—the day Chelsie died. The moment an hour ago when I was told to kill my best friend.

“Natalie remembers the boat she got on, the damage to the rail of yours. She remembers hanging out with Mayra,” I say, mentally acknowledging the lie after the fact.

Mike stares at me, as though this comes as no surprise. He holds back emotion, staring off at nothing in particular. He snickers at nothing, a thought perhaps.

“What happened after she was on the boat?”

“We drove around on the water for a while, then ended up at a party. Big boat party, not far from the beach.”

“And then what?” Jackson asks.

Mike nods. “After so long, I guess I had too many and well, Mayra and I left. Hell, I’m not convinced we did any thinking back then. More drinking than thinking.” He manages a nervous laugh. “We forgot that Natalie came with us.”

Does he think he did nothing wrong? Letting her stay on the boat with no way home…and keeping it a secret?

“Why didn’t you come back and tell me later on? Or at least tell the sheriff what happened?” I ask. “You drove around the lake for days…why keep it a secret?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He shakes his head. “I’ve been fighting with that for years. Driving me insane. And no one will believe me. Not unless that someone is batshit crazy like me.”

“Try me.”

“Mike. What is it?” Jackson says, but Mike pays him no attention.

“I was told…to leave Natalie behind.”

“From who?” I say.

Only his eyes move toward me. He watches with apprehension, as though I might attack him.

The real enemy.

Mike says, “I don’t know who she is, but…I could hear her like…like…I can hear my own thoughts…she told me what to do…and she promised she would leave me alone if I did what she wanted. I thought I was hearing things…like she was at the party and messing with my head.”

“What did she sound like?”

“I don’t know…a woman. A young woman, I guess…she sounded…like something out of a fantasy movie. She was whispering. It was weird.” He scratches his head nervously. “What does it matter?”

“She told you what to do?”

He nods. “She gave me instructions and I swear I didn’t know her intentions.”

“Did you talk to her?”

He snorts and turns off the television. “How could I? And why would I? I concluded later on, after I didn’t hear her anymore, that someone must have put some shit in my drink at the party. I didn’t know it was real. It’s like I was dreaming.”

“How did Mayra take leaving Natalie?”

He shrugs. “She had so much to drink.” His eyes roll. “These guys were going around giving out drinks to girls, one after other. All of them were blitzed, so I had to help Mayra into the boat. Can’t imagine she remembers anything.”

“Where did you go after the boat party?” Jackson asks.

“Cruising…I think.” He looks around the room as though it’s a new and unfamiliar place. Then his gaze arrives on Jackson and me. “I should have told you this years ago and got it off my chest but I didn’t because I was afraid. After all the grilling I got from the cops, all the questions…then time passed and I kept telling myself I’d say something, and it just became more convenient to forget about it.”

He’s lying. He sold Natalie.

“What else, Mike? It’s important that we know any other details you can remember, since Natalie’s case is open and ongoing.”

Jackson shoots me a look, one that says he doesn’t agree with sharing information.

Mike’s jaw drops open on its own. “What?”

Jackson eyes me a moment, and then takes a few minutes to fill Mike in on the details of the ring, the victims, and the feds looking into the shooting that rescued Natalie. Mike is terrified. Jackson begins the explanation about the ballistics work on Dasher, the dead kidnapper, and Mike holds his hands up.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Mike says. “I mean, it’s been forever since this happened. This is a con if I’ve ever seen one.”

I chime in, “You’ve kept this a secret for fifteen years, Mike. We all knew, riding back to the sheriff’s office, that the shooting and Natalie being on that boat, would be difficult to explain. The sheriff covering the whole thing up to make himself look good was an easy fix. But now they’re digging into evidence and my recorded statement and it’s just a matter of time before they are calling us in.”

He laughs a little to himself, in a way that troubles me. After all these years, my own friend is the bastard who took Natalie from me—the real enemy. He ruined my life. He ruined Natalie’s. He damaged so many other people for his own benefit. I never wanted to believe it would be Mike, but now that the truth is clear, I silently accept that the truth was best left in the dark. This truth is not setting me free.

Kill Mike.

Jackson starts questioning Mike, interrogating, but I hardly pay attention. Mike was being a dumb teenager, drinking and having a good time. He doesn’t know anyone who’s connected to the crime ring—he’s lucky to know how he got home that day.

He’s the enemy. Kill him.

“Jackson,” I say, standing. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Give me your gun.”

Jackson pauses a moment, then draws a black pistol from behind his back and hands it to me.

Mike shifts about on the seat, unsure if he should run, frozen to the chair. He’s caught. There’s no time to think. I have a gun and a close target. And now I have to decide what to do with my old buddy Mike.

M
ike is a few feet from me, seated on his comfortable leather recliner, kicking back in his great room at home. And here I am, with Jackson’s black Ruger in my hands, the barrel pointed at Mike’s chest.

“What the fuck, Colin? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but Jesus, stop pointing that at me.”

“What else are you holding out on, Mike?”

Jackson remains still, on the edge of the sofa as if this gunpoint interrogation is a normal day at work. He’s got to be wondering the same thing I am—what else does Mike know that he’s keeping to himself?

“Nothing. Jesus, man. Jackson, that better not be loaded.”

Mike’s feet reach the floor.

Kill him.

After all the years going by, I thought I’d like the chance at revenge. To even the score for taking Natalie. Christel wants me to kill him—but this is a choice I have to make. I can have revenge but can I live with myself if I take it? Dasher was a stranger. This is a friend who made a dumb decision as a teen. Does he deserve to die for it?

Jackson encourages me to lower the gun. Mike does the same.

Can I live with the truth?

I lower the weapon and Mike grabs the gun from me and in one fast motion, hits me across my head and I land hard on the stone floor.

“Colin? You there?” Jackson says, looking over me. He touches the side of my face with a careful ease. Jackson starts asking questions, which seem simple and harmless enough, so I answer them. It’s then that I notice I’m lying flat on the stone floor of Mike’s great room, staring at the ceiling.

“What happened?” I get out, but my voice sounds slurred, distorted.

“Mike didn’t like the gun in his face approach for questioning. The puffiness is going down on the side of your face.”

The room has a slow spin and pain emerges at the back of my head. Must be where Mike hit me. Or where I hit the floor. I sense more than a few minutes passed since the event. “Where’s Mike?”

“He’s here and happy you didn’t shoot him,” Jackson replies.

“Why did you give it to him?” Mike snaps.

“He asked for it. I’m tempted to kneecap you myself for withholding evidence.”

Mike curses under his breath.

It pains me to sit up and take in my surroundings. Not much changed. Mike is on the recliner, jittery.

Mike says, “Yeah, and your quest for Natalie had nothing to do with that, right? I know you wanted to beat a confession out of me. All about being the hero, right, Jackson?”

“It was wrong to keep the information to yourself, Mike. If you’d told me years ago, we may have caught them and you wouldn’t have carried the secret,” Jackson says.

“Oh, no. No, no. Don’t go blaming this on me. I didn’t do anything to Natalie. I did what either of you would have done back then. Not my fault she went missing and I didn’t want to share in on the blame. And I did what I could to get her back.”

“Whose idea was it to go out there again?” Jackson asks me.

I vouch for that and Mike does too.

“And whose idea to bring the guns?” Jackson says.

“Mike.”

“Who pulled first?”

“They did,” Mike and I say.

“Which means…” Jackson says, pausing several seconds. Mike watches without reservation, as if he’s accepted whatever fate is to come. “They recognized you. They knew you. The men on that boat knew you were coming for Natalie, so they drew guns to show they were armed and not about to give her back.”

Mike hangs his head. “You’ve pegged me guilty from the start. So there you go. Doesn’t matter that I helped rescue the girl. I risked my life to get her back.”

Jackson’s voice takes on a tone of contempt. “It’s called seller’s remorse. So the supposed kidnappers thought you changed your mind about the price you got for her and let you know how they felt.”

We sit in silence a few minutes and I can only guess what’s going through Mike’s mind.

Jackson is unpredictable. Jackson would call in the boys in blue if he thought new information would come of it, but he’s calculating here—if Mike committed a crime, brokering a deal for Natalie, it will be impossible to prove after fifteen years. All witnesses are dead.

“You’ve made your conclusion. Happy now? It’s not going to do any good. Blame me if you want for what happened, but it’s not my fault. I didn’t know what was happening to Natalie. Maybe I was naive—but I didn’t harm anyone,” Mike says.

“Still defending yourself? Well, you can stop,” Jackson says.

“I’ve told you everything. There’s nothing more to say. One kidnapper is dead and the other is who knows where after he got out of prison. You’re wasting your time. And if the feds dig up the old shooting, we’re screwed. Plain and simple.”

“I want to know more of this voice you heard,” I say.

Mike sighs. “My memory there is hazy at best. The voice I heard was short-lived. Why the curiosity? You’re chasing something I imagined.” He shrugs. “Maybe some woman was in the water talking to me, and I just didn’t see her.” He shrugs again, as if this is no big deal. “It’s plausible I didn’t hear anything at all.” He finishes his glass of water. “Like I said, my memory of what happened is sketchy. Might have imagined the whole thing.”

Liar.

I recount my conversation with Natalie, Mayra having experience hearing a voice.

“Jackson, I think you’re right. You were right from the beginning.” Mike and Jackson look at each other, and then back at me. “We are chasing a ghost.”

I
spend the next hour explaining Christel to Jackson and Mike. The house is silent and my voice seems to reverberate off the walls, to the bedrooms and beyond. Telling the story feels foreign, but the words are my own. And the experience is liberating. With the passing of the tale, it’s as if a poison in my soul is leaving, like toxins purged from my lungs. I tell them about the order to kill Jamal, at which point Jackson stops me.

“How much more is there?”

“More to what?”

“What other pertinent information?”

He is seeking his own fame.

His face is rigid, as if he’s become angered by the conversation. Why is he upset to know new information?

The scent of blood has Jackson going and he can’t let go of the bone once it’s his. Now, fifteen years after the case began, he’s still hanging on, in hope of bringing a conclusion as famous as the star NBA player that hired him: my father.

“What’s all this got to do with me?” Mike says. “I put it to bed. I played the stupid teenager in Natalie’s disappearance, sure, but that’s all. And for the record, I’m convinced drugs brought on the voices in my head, so you can stop the bullshit ghost story.”

“How’d you know she was drugged?” Jackson says.

Mike jumps to his feet. “Police report. I got grilled, remember? I was at the lake the day of and one of the few around, so I got lots of attention. Why do you think I was willing to go out on the lake, armed, to get her back? I made damn sure we were bringing her home that day.”

“So why didn’t this tale of heroism get reported?” Jackson says.

“You know why. Colin said where to go and the guys pulled guns on us, so the story is from nowhere. The cops didn’t buy the story. At all. I lived it and I can’t believe it.”

“Christel told me where she was and told me to shoot Dasher,” I say.

Jackson and Mike exchange glances and Jackson abruptly suggests that he and I leave. Mike seems to ease up. We make a quick goodbye, knowing the friendship, if it is to survive, will be tough.

Jackson and I hit the road and my mind returns to Jamal. It’s hard to fight the emotion and guilt. I’m on edge, like I’m ready to jump out of a moving car if called upon.

Neither Jackson nor I know what to say, so we don’t talk. It’s an understatement to suggest we are disappointed with the lack of progress. He’s disinclined to give up the case and I feel the need to present useful evidence when the feds call. I drop him off at his curb and pull away without a word. Then the lonely drive home begins.