Sacred (17 page)

“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 money 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.”

“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:

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.

“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 know 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.