The Accident (44 page)

Over the years Charlie made a great many similar decisions, and Dave had sat idly by, and let him. Dave had unwittingly hitched his wagon to Charlie’s star, without ever explicitly intending to. It happened one obvious-seeming choice at a time, one practical consideration after another over the course of a quarter-century, sliding down the slippery slope of convenient amorality, becoming a person he couldn’t have ever imagined becoming, until he just couldn’t stomach it anymore. That’s when he started typing.

Dave had given it a lot of thought over the years, that choice he’d faced on the quiet rural roadside. What was the worse crime: the split-second of unintentional, unavoidable inattention while driving a car? Or the purposeful decision to cover up a vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, to run away to a luxurious summer vacation in France, letting the dead girl’s body rot in a ravine?

Who was the villain in this story?

I
t had been almost unbearably painful to write the passage in
The Accident
about the accident itself, to revisit the minute details, the sounds and sights, the feeling of the light night rain. Dave was overwhelmed by guilt, and again furious at the unfairness that it was himself behind the wheel, instead of the person who’d been the rapist, the drunk driver, the conspirator to flee from the scene of the crime, to bury the evidence.

So last week he’d sat there at his sleek little computer, facing out onto the glittering Swiss lake, and tried something else: he revised the pages so they conformed to Charlie’s understanding of what had happened on that road, formalizing the lie that they’d been living with for the entirety of their adult lives. The lie would live on, in print, in perpetuity.

It was just a couple of pages of text, representing a couple of minutes of life, and death, and a couple of minutes’ time it would take to read the passage. Just a dozen alterations, changing the name of the driver from Dave to Charlie.

Dave re-read the passage over and over, debating whether to revert to the actual truth, or whether to disseminate this improved truth, this more true truth, in which it was the bad person who’d done the bad thing.

He hit Save, and closed the document.

H
e forces himself to concentrate, to try to calm down, to slow the little roadster to 80 kph, humming steadily on the smooth pavement, through the flickering sunlight under the dense tree canopy in the hills above Zurich.

He’s still shaking when his phone vibrates, a heart-stopping startle after the adrenaline rush of the police car. The phone is upside down in the passenger seat, and he can’t see the screen. He reaches to turn the device, but his jittery right hand knocks the thing to the floor. He reaches farther, taking his eyes away from the windshield for a split-second. He can’t quite reach—

No, he thinks. Too dangerous.

It must be Isabel. Does she have news? An offer from a publisher?

He glances over, sees the device lying there on the clean gray carpet. No one has ever sat in the passenger seat, the floor mats have never been sullied with the soles of shoes.

He reaches down again, loses sight of the road again, feels his fingers wrap around the device. As he starts to straighten, his shoulder bumps into the leather-clad steering wheel, and his head too, and he’s briefly trapped, panicked—

He frees himself, pops up, straightens his back quickly. He brings his eyes above the level of the dashboard, and sees, too late, his car crash through the low metal rail, out over the side of this mountain …

It doesn’t surprise him that it’s an image of his ex-wife’s face that he now sees. Not the age-lined, saddened, tragic face he saw last winter, standing in her uptown hallway, listening to him claim that he had cancer, was dying. But her face from that night years ago, sitting across from him at that Italian restaurant off Washington Square with the grappa and port glasses and plates of cookies and chocolates cluttering the table, leaning away with a playful dimpled smirk on her face, her cheeks flush with all the wine and all the attention, the closing hour of a long first date, before either of them realized this was the beginning of a romance, a proposal, a wedding, a beautiful baby boy …

And for a few days back then, he thought he might have to kill Isabel Reed. But he ended up marrying her instead.

It would be ironic if he’s really about to kill himself, too, in a car accident.

CHAPTER 55

F
or a few seconds nobody says anything, or moves, staring at one another in the dim light from the smoldering fire and a single low-watt bulb behind a parchment lampshade.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Hayden asks.

“Put down your gun,” she says.

He can see that Isabel’s knee has been torn open, a flap of gory flesh at the patella, blood streaming down her shin, around her ankle, the top of her foot.

“I don’t think so.” Hayden can’t ignore that her hand is shaking; she may very well shoot him by mistake. That would be an awful shame. He’d considered many possible closing moments to this complicated charade, but getting killed by mistake wasn’t one of them.

He feels much calmer than he thinks is appropriate, for the gravity of this situation. He wonders if this is his version of suicide-by-cop. Suicide-by-victim.

“Have you thought this through?” he asks. “Do you imagine I’m going to just walk out of here, and leave you alone?”

She doesn’t respond, doesn’t even open her mouth.

“You understand that in all likelihood you will
miss
? It’s not as easy as you may think to shoot someone from forty feet away.”

Hayden presses the barrel of his pistol tighter against Fielder’s head, and tightens his grip. Projecting his willingness to shoot the editor in the head, even though he’s not at all willing to do this.

“On the other hand, it’s really impossible for
me
to miss.”

Isabel is still silent, motionless. Making no attempt to advance her position, or change the situation in any way. Which doesn’t make much sense. And she’s not a senseless person.

“The only question is where, exactly, Mr. Fielder’s brains will end up. Spattered on that wall? Or spread across the coffee table? Or just sort of
oozing
out onto the floor?”

Hayden is pretty sure that this woman is trying to trick him again, now. But how? What could she be doing, just standing there …?

She must be killing time. Which means she’s waiting for something to happen. Which means she’s waiting for some
one
. She’s keeping Hayden’s focus aimed at this end of the house, because someone else will be coming from somewhere else. From behind.

“Get up.” He yanks Fielder by the hair.

“Ouch!”

Hayden drags Fielder backward, to the side of the living room, a wide wall that’s hung with a giant jumble of framed photographs, some of which come crashing down at his feet when he leans his back against the wall, with Fielder in front of him as a shield, and beyond the tinkling of broken glass Hayden hears another sound, a creak, and he turns his eyes and his weapon away from Isabel to the far side of the house, the dark hall and the wood-paneled foyer and the front door, which is opening, and he squeezes the trigger and gets off four rounds of splintering wood and shattering glass, a man’s yelp and a thud as the guy’s body hits the floor, and Hayden repositions his aim and squeezes three more rounds into what’s now clearly a dead person, and he rapidly returns the weapon to Fielder’s temple as Isabel screams, quick and piercing. And then everything is silent.

“Are there more?”

She doesn’t answer, quaking. She’s not even aiming her weapon at anything other than the floor.

“Are there more of them?”
Hayden yells.

She nods. “Another one, shot. I think dead. On the beach.”

“Who are they?”

“Bodyguards.”

“You have
body
guards? You hired bodyguards?”

“I didn’t even know about them. Till a couple of minutes ago.”

He understands: the author hired these guys, to watch the agent. To protect her. Not shocking, after all.

Hayden didn’t want this to turn into a goddamned bloodbath, but look at this. Blood is pouring out of the holes in that guy in the doorway, dripping off Isabel’s gashed knee, no doubt drained out of Tyler somewhere down on the beach, along with this dead guy’s partner. And now Hayden notices that blood is also trickling around his own left wrist, his thumb and palm, falling drop by drop to the floor from the tip of his pointer finger. His shirtsleeve feels moist. His left arm has begun to burn.

Hayden has apparently been hit in the arm.
Fuck
.

He has always expected to get shot, and is surprised that it hasn’t happened until now. He’s
almost
been shot plenty of times. Hell, he was almost shot earlier today—or was that yesterday?—in Copenhagen. But
almost shot
and
shot
are very different things.

He needs to get the hell out of here.

“Where is it?” he asks firmly.

“What?” Barely audible, shaking her head. “I don’t know—”

“Where’s the goddamned manuscript?”
At the top of his lungs.

She cries out, again. Then she whimpers, “Not here. Somewhere safe. In New York.”

Hayden turns to Fielder, frozen like a worthless lump of nothing. Hayden can see the plea in the guy’s eyes,
Please don’t tell her. PLEASE
. Hayden swings the weapon and hits Fielder in the jaw with it.

The guy crumples, crying out in pain.

“You lying idiot.” He kicks Fielder in the abdomen. But not as hard as he could’ve. He turns back to Isabel. “And you’re lying too.”

His left arm has begun to throb. He’s running out of time, and patience.
“WHERE IS IT?”

Hayden drops his right arm and squeezes the trigger and there’s an explosion and a crack of the wood floor and Fielder screams, a hole in his foot. Hayden returns his aim to Fielder’s face, now contorted in pain, and absolute terror.

“I
will
kill him,” Hayden says, with as much conviction as he can muster. He’s not killing anyone else tonight. Hopefully never again.

“No,” she says, fighting through tears, “you won’t. Look”—she’s pointing—“the bookcase. Fourth shelf from the floor, next to that book with the thick red spine.”

Hayden’s gaze finds the spot on the shelf, a dark glossy circle.

“And there—” She points at a wicker bowl on a console table. “There are others. Motion-activated. Video cameras.”

Hayden takes a step toward the bookshelf, as if to yank the thing off and stomp on it. “Don’t bother,” she says. “They’re networked to a laptop that’s streaming the video to a server that’s, well,
somewhere else
.”

Hayden turns to face the woman, considers coming clean, telling her that she’s wrong. Telling her that he’d already disabled this complicated video system, disconnected the cameras from the laptop, wiped the laptop clean. Which he did because he knows why she’s here in this house, because he’d listened to her phone conversation with Naomi, because he knew she’d be coming here, even though she’d pretended to go somewhere else, and he pretended to be fooled by that, and unaware of what she did in the copy shop, this morning. Because even though she is very clever, he is more clever.

But the person he needs to fool is not her.

He starts walking toward Isabel.

“You would be filmed committing cold-blooded murder,” she says.

Hayden is standing just a few steps from her. He admires this woman,
her bravery, her deviousness, her diligence. He pities her too, the bad luck she has faced in her life, the death that has surrounded her for two decades now. He wants to explain it to her, wants to tell her that it will be all right. That she will win.

But he can’t do that. He needs to maintain his character, his fraud.

“You know what?” he says. “I’m fine with that.” He raises his weapon yet again, toward her face, and she gasps.

“No!”
Fielder screams from behind him. “It’s in the kitchen.”

Hayden can see in the woman’s face that this is true.

“In the freezer.”

Hayden strides calmly across the room and snatches her weapon—Tyler’s gun. He continues through the dining room, turns on the kitchen light, opens the door to the densely packed compartment, quarts of frozen clam chowder and pints of ice cream and bottles of vodka and Limoncello and condensed-juice containers and a cryovac’d bag of lobster tails and a box of a dozen ravioli and a big plastic bag, zippered shut, containing a thick stack of paper.

F
rom the bathroom he grabs gauze and surgical tape and tweezers and scissors and iodine and painkillers and a half-filled jar of prescription antibiotics, and dumps these supplies into a canvas beach bag, along with the Ziploc with the manuscript, plus the handgun from the now-dead rent-a-cop, as well as a baseball cap and a big poncho from the coat rack in the foyer, and a box of granola bars and a bottle of water from the pantry.

Collecting these supplies takes him two minutes.

He hustles back through the dining room, into the living room, expecting to see Isabel hunched over Fielder’s shot-up foot. But he freezes when he sees her standing in the middle of the room, aiming a pistol at him. Where the hell did she get another gun?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, but doesn’t move. Maybe she’s not
being ridiculous. “Put that thing away before you hurt yourself. Or is it even loaded?”

She pivots her arm to the side and fires at the wall, then trains the gun again on Hayden. He has two weapons on him, but at this moment neither is in either of his hands.

Perhaps this is the end of it; perhaps this is what he deserves. To be shot here, by an amateur. That would be poetic justice, of a sort. After a lifetime spent among professional agents and assets and criminals and diplomats, in Europe, to get shot by a literary agent at someone’s Long Island weekend house. If only there were a pool, he could be found facedown, like Gatsby.