The Survivor (22 page)

“You’re going out there?” Cielle asked.

“Lock the door behind me.”

Janie and Cielle followed him down. Stepping onto the porch, he waited for the thud of the dead bolt; seconds later two worried faces appeared in the living-room window.

His bare feet squished in the grass. The form waited patiently as Nate neared, the face becoming recognizable by degrees in the dim light.

“Get the fuck off my lawn.”

“It is not even your lawn anymore.” The cigarette flared orange. “Pavlo will watch you and your family as he please. Through my eyes or through someone else.”

Rain spit at them. Nate lifted his eyes past the big man’s shoulders to Mrs. Alizadeh’s perch by her upstairs window. She drew back slightly at his movement. Yuri’s gaze ticked left past Nate, no doubt taking in Janie and Cielle. Two men squaring off on an unlit stage of grass, a can’t-look-away spectacle. The wetness brought up the scent of the night-blooming jasmine. One wrong move and violence would explode here in the perfumed air of Santa Monica.

“You’re scaring the neighbors. Someone’ll call the cops.”

“We don’t worry about police.
You
must worry about police.” The cigarette bounced at the brink of Yuri’s mouth, a prop from a black-and-white movie. “You must pray we stay free men. If you let us get taken in by police, well…” His lips clamped the cigarette and curled up at the edges. The loglike arms made a slashing gesture, the fists gripping the handle of an imaginary rescue saw.

“Get off my property,” Nate said. “Let me do the job you need me to do.”

“No, I think I will stay awhile. Finish my cigarette.” Yuri splayed a hand toward the house. “Go back to your beautiful women.”

Nate took a step forward, and Yuri stiffened ever so slightly, a gathering beneath his great dark coat. Standing ready, he made a scolding noise through pursed lips, a ticking of the tongue.

Nate’s breath clouded about his face. He let the rain dampen his temper. Let it sizzle the rage until it was safe to move. To retreat.

Walking back, he kept his eyes trained on Janie and Cielle, their faces disembodied behind the pane. When he reached the porch, he finally turned.

The front yard, empty.

A cigarette butt smoldered in the wet blades, a last gasp before it was extinguished by the needling rain.

Chapter 26

Despite waking up on the couch, Nate felt as though it was almost a normal morning. He changed the dressing on his shoulder wound, took his pills, put coffee on for his soon-to-be ex-wife, and flipped through the soggy newspaper to the bleeding obits.

An avid golfer, Kevin Struthers leaves two daughters, Nancy and Olivia, both pediatricians, and (as he tenderly called them) a “brood” of seven grandchildren. His wife, Elsie, predeceased him.

Nate raised an orange-juice toast to good old Kevin and washed down the bitter aftertaste of the riluzole and antibiotics.

Glancing through a window, he checked the front yard. Nothing there but two boot-shaped indentations in the soggy front lawn. He withdrew from the late-morning gloom and sat at the kitchen counter, listening to the coffee percolate and flexing his hand, testing the muscles. The numbness had crept from wrist to forearm. With mounting dread he regarded his arm. Maybe the stress had accelerated the disease. He wondered if his body would give out before he could get done what needed to get done.

After Yuri’s intrusion last night, he and Janie had sat on Cielle’s bed for hours to honor an unspoken agreement to stay with her until she drifted off. They were all three wired from the encounter, tension jumping from one to the other. It wasn’t until the morning sun crept through the windows and overtook the shadows that Cielle had dozed off. After an awkward moment at the top of the stairs, Nate and Janie had parted ways.

She shuffled into the kitchen now, rubbing her eyes, a snarl of hair raised in the back. Drawn by the scent of coffee. Cielle was still slumbering; there’d been no question she’d miss school today.

“Don’t you look all perky and ready to go,” Janie mumbled.

“Got a date with the bank.” He poured her a cup and slid it across.

Her gaze snared on something on the counter. His left hand, trembling slightly against the marble. Involuntary. He pulled his hand into his lap but in doing so knocked over one of his pill bottles, which rattled more loudly than seemed probable. The silence made an awkward return.

“You were really gonna do it?” Janie said. “Kill yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Idiot.” She took a sip. “Why? Because of the disease?”

He thought about it. Given the monumentality of the decision, it struck him as odd that he had no ready answer. “I wasn’t killing myself because of the disease,” he finally allowed. “I was killing myself because there was nothing left
but
the disease.”

She leaned against the doorway to the study. “You couldn’t find
something
? Anything? To make it worth it for another day, another week?”

“Like what?” he said. “I’m not researching the cure for cancer. I’m not Lou Gehrig—don’t get to make a speech in front of a sold-out crowd at Yankee Stadium. All I had left was to inflict this on myself and others.”

Her face stayed firm, whether from grief or anger, he didn’t know.

He got up and started digging through the kitchen drawers, leafing through take-out menus, old receipts.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I need a pretense to get back into that private viewing room at the bank. Best bet is bringing something official-looking to put in my safe-deposit box, something I can just leave in there.”

He was pulling together a few old pieces of mail when Janie said, “Take
this.
”

Something in her voice sounded different, and he stopped what he was doing and looked up. She was offering up a stapled document. Even from across the room, he could see what it was.

He took a beat, because he didn’t trust his voice. “You sure?”

“Of course not.”

He stayed put by the kitchen drawer, unsure what to do next.

At length she nodded. “Yes. I’m sure.” She shook the divorce papers impatiently.

He crossed and took them on his way out.

*   *   *

The line at the bank offered a good vantage to the private viewing rooms. There were two of them, an added complication that Nate was none too keen to account for. A wizened man stepped into the desired room as Nate neared the front of the line, forcing him to stall by pretending to fill out deposit slips. When the man at last shuffled back into sight, Nate hurried forward to the next available teller and was buzzed through. The security guard waited, the same older gentleman from round one. As they stepped into the vault, he studied Nate with eyes as small and hard as marbles.

“Two twenty-seven, right?” he asked.

Nate offered his best grin even as his hand left a sweat stain on the divorce papers. “Two twenty-
six
.”

The guard said flatly, “Senility must be comin’ on stronger than I imagined.”

Nate got his safe-deposit box and strolled as casually as possible into the open private viewing room. The watercolored girl at the beach—still there. He hastened the pneumatic door closed with an elbow, then tossed down the box and rushed to pluck the painting off the wall, flipping it over.

At first he could scarcely believe it was still there. The business-size envelope taped firmly to the backing. So many worst-case scenarios had flashed through his mind in the past twenty-four hours that he’d half convinced himself he’d willed one into existence. But no, the envelope easily peeled free. Stepping out of a sneaker, he folded the envelope three times and hid the dense rectangle beneath the insole. He pulled the shoe back on, laced it tighter than necessary.

As he placed the divorce papers inside the safe-deposit box, bade them good-bye, and lowered the lid, he couldn’t help but note how the contraption resembled a coffin. This was one burial he didn’t mind a bit.

The security guard helped him deliver the box to its resting place within the vault, refusing to return his smile. As Nate headed out, the thrice-folded envelope dug into his arch, but he felt like he was walking on air.

Chapter 27

“Should we open it?” Janie asked.

“No,” Nate said at the precise moment Cielle said, “Dunno.”

The three of them were pulled into the kitchen table, the envelope sitting untouched on the otherwise blank surface like some unsavory dish. Outside, the hunched clouds seemed to be giving way to dusk, a transition from gray to grayer.

Janie’s laptop glowed on the counter opposite, open to the home page for New Odessa restaurant, complete with the number for reservations. Beside the computer stood the cordless phone. Nate’s impatience burned beneath his skin. He wanted to call the restaurant to see if Pavlo was there and willing to take early delivery.

“Did Shevchenko ever say anything about
opening
it?” Janie asked.

“He didn’t even mention what it was.”

Cielle took the envelope and held it up against the overhead light. They’d each given this a try, hoping for a better result. A single sheet, folded, no writing or typing visible.

“What could be so important that it could fit on a single piece of paper?” Janie asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Nate said, rising. “Let’s just get it to the man and call it a day.” He’d reached the counter and was thumbing the area code into the phone when he heard a ripping behind him.

Cielle, sliding her finger beneath the flap.

Nate hung up.

She tilted the envelope, and the folded paper fell out. She reached for it delicately, laying it open. Janie rose, leaning over the table. She gave a faint, dismayed groan.

“What?” Cielle said. “I don’t get it.”

Nate’s legs carried him across, and he stared over Cielle’s shoulder, seeing what the paper held as Janie answered in a voice flat with regret, “A list of names.”

There they were. Eight of them. Handwritten. And beneath each one an address in the L.A. area. The top name was crossed out.

Nate felt his stomach lift, as if he’d fallen off the edge of something.
“No.”
His voice was loud, almost a shout. “You were
safe.
You were in the clear.”

“What
is
it?” Cielle asked.

Nate took a mental snapshot of the first few names, turned back to the laptop, and typed furiously. The sole crossed-out name at the top,
Patrice McKenna,
and then her neighborhood,
Brentwood.

“What, Mom? Why are you guys being so weird?”

Google spit out results, and he clicked the first link.

Brentwood, CA—The body of thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher Patrice McKenna was found in her apartment today, with multiple stab wounds inflicted by a lock-blade hunting knife discovered at the scene.

He pictured himself in the dark entry of Danny Urban’s shot-up town house, crouched over that FedEx box. The clank of dozens of murder weapons inside.

At the table Janie was murmuring, her voice slurred by her hands pressed to her mouth—
“my God, why does it have to be—”

His fingers had moved to the next entry,
Luis Millan, Marina del Rey.
A dozen Google links, none indicating a murder.

Because the name hadn’t been crossed out yet.

The third—
Wendy Moreno, Westchester
—yielded a similar nonresult.

Nate spun around, put his back to the counter.

Cielle said, “Someone tell me what this is. You’re freaking me out.”

“Honey.” Nate exhaled, hard. “Why would a hit man keep a list of names?”

The answer struck, Cielle recoiling in her chair. “Wait. No. What? These are … these are people he was planning on
killing
? And this guy, the Ukrainian, he wants the names to…”

Janie said, “To finish the job.”

In his head Nate replayed Shevchenko’s raspy voice:
We had disagreement over fee and ownership of object.
Given how badly the Ukrainian wanted this list, he clearly didn’t have the names on it, so he must have hired Urban to
identify
these people as well as kill them. But the whole venture had gone south when Urban demanded more money to keep going. Which raised a bizarre question: If these were people Shevchenko wanted dead, why didn’t he know who they were?

“Eight people,” Cielle said. “Eight
lives.
”

“Seven.” Nate pointed at the list. “One’s already crossed out.”

Cielle folded the sheet back up, stuffed it into the torn envelope, as if trying to rewind the past five minutes. “What do we do?”

The complications and ramifications raised by that single folded sheet seemed too vast to reason through. Hand over the sheet, kill seven strangers.

“We give it to Shevchenko,” Janie said, “just as we planned.”

“Mom! How can you
say
that?”

“For all we know, they’re rival thugs.”

“Or they could be innocent.” Cielle whirled to Nate. “That first name. The woman who was killed. Did it say what her job was?”

He couldn’t speak.

Janie said, “We don’t need to know that. We don’t.…”

Cielle glared at Nate. “
Answer
me.”

“Schoolteacher,” Nate said.

Janie dragged her elbows back off the table and fell into her chair.

“So what do
you
think?” Cielle asked him. “Turn over the list? Kill all those people like Mom says?”

Nate reached behind him, eased the laptop closed. He could feel his heartbeat, pushing blood through his veins, one tiny surge at a time. He thought about a pink bundle in Janie’s lap as he’d steered her wheelchair out of the maternity ward. Those faded lines in the doorway upstairs, marking off his daughter’s height at each young age.

At his hesitation Cielle’s face turned incredulous. “But what about those people?”

“I don’t love
them.
” The intensity in his voice, even to his own ears, sounded like fury.

“We can get the cops to help,” Cielle said.