Chapter 9
In a life of crime, it’s unreasonable to expect for every extralegal activity to go according to plan.
Guess fucking what? Even legal shit doesn’t go according to plan most of the time. Or, if it does, it goes according to plan for the worst of humanity, like Judge Beaufort Hayes. He helped the consortium screw the remaining members of my family over heartily, and then he got a nice kickback. All within the bounds of the law of the land.
It shouldn’t be that way. People should be able to trust that they won’t get fucked over by an evil business group at the lowest moments of their lives, but they can’t.
You can’t trust anything but your own two hands.
Sometimes, your own two hands will fuck you over just like everything else.
I’ve tracked a chain of invoices to a ritzy little town north of Manhattan. It can’t be shell companies all the way down, and Malcolm Walsh prefers physical records, probably because they’re easier to burn or destroy. The digital shit is harder. A file made from ones and zeroes can, in many ways, be eternal.
So paper is what I’m after, and for once in my life, I’m completely focused on the task at hand.
And, of course, being completely focused is what fucks me over. I’m being taught a lesson by the universe. I don’t know which one it’s supposed to be, but I spent years being cajoled and threatened and coaxed to pay attention in class, and when it finally happens, it’s at the wrong place and the wrong time.
I don’t hear the ritzy couple’s college kids coming home from a party. I don’t hear them coming upstairs. I don’t hear them discovering me in the office. I don’t know they’re in the room until I nudge a filing cabinet shut with my hip.
“What the fuck?” one of them says.
“What the fuck,” I answer automatically, because I have plenty of paperwork in a scanner app in my phone and I’d thought, for a few minutes, that I was finally doing something right.
At least in the context of breaking and entering to exact vengeance on Malcolm Walsh. This visit was going according to plan. I disabled the security system, wiping the last few days’ worth of footage in the process, and went through the house in a manner that can only be called methodical. I got records off a computer and onto a thumb drive. I saved the paper shit for last.
I thought I was getting closer to finding Walsh, damn it, not getting beat up.
Jamie, please, my mom says.
“Not the time,” I tell her, which is when one of the brothers takes a swing at me.
In my favor: they’re drunk. There’s no way they should’ve driven home. It’s past two in the morning, and they’re not used to being up all night like I am. These kids look purposefully clean-cut, probably so that if they get pulled over, they can aww-shucks their way out of a ticket, and guys who’ve lived tougher lives don’t usually look like this.
In their favor: this is their house, and they’ve got all the blood-pumping chest-puffing adrenaline of catching somebody out. They’re in the right no matter how you spin this, and I’m breaking and entering.
The bigger one—I’m assuming he’s the older one, too—gallantly steps in front of his brother and lands the first hit.
Ouch.
Another punch splits the skin on my cheekbone. As long as they stay away from my ribs, I’ll be okay. If one of those breaks—re-breaks—then I’ll have a problem, because I don’t have any painkillers on me and shouldn’t be driving while I’m on them anyway.
Moral dilemmas everywhere.
Except not really. The driving force of all living creatures is to survive, and I am no different. I throw what I feel is the minimum number of punches. I’m not looking to enrage two drunkards—I just need to get out of the house and back to my SUV. There’s no time to ask them why their parents were financially involved with a contract killer, and the question would put them on the defensive anyway.
They want me out of the house, too, so actually we’re a united front. All of us want me to disappear into the night. In this one thing, we’re playing for the same team. We work together—them chasing, me running.
My escape, at least, is successful. And I’ve parked far enough down the street that when I start running, they figure they’ve won and shout at me in frat-boy manly tones.
I head north.
Best if I switch this car out for one with a different plate. For a crime scene, I haven’t totally fucked up my emergency preparedness plans. I have cars in different places all over the state of New York. Not just Manhattan. That would be the opposite of emergency preparedness.
In less than five minutes I’m back behind the wheel of my most nondescript SUV, heading north again in case they try to follow me or send cops after me or—who the fuck knows?—send a contract killer after me. I blend with traffic on the highway and get off two exits past the one I need so I can lose any unfriendly followers on the local roads.
Nobody seems like they’re following me.
They’d have to really want to catch me to be out past two in the morning on these, the most boring surface streets in New York.
I’m driving down a stretch of road that feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere when it really starts to feel like the middle of nowhere. Like I had to drive for fifteen years to get here, and it’s fifteen more years to the other side.
My lip throbs, and the cut on my cheeks aches in this dull, irritating way, and Jesus, I’ve been doing this for so, so long.
I’m so tired.
I could stop.
I could sleep.
That thought is a head-on collision that almost sends the SUV tumbling into the ditch. I correct at the last second, getting my ass back into the center of the lane. My mouth tastes like a battery and I can feel every individual hair on my body yanking on my skin.
I cannot sleep.
I can’t have that happen.
The only thing worse than staying awake for a week at a time, or a month at a time, or fifteen years at a time, is what I see when I’m sleeping.
I can’t have seven-year-old Remy dead in front of the couch or the silence in the air after Mason stops screaming or Gabriel with his hand pressed over a wound in his side. I can’t have one of them—all of them—any of them holding those photos in front of my face. I can’t have them looking at me like I’m the only one who can save them. I can’t. I’ve never even been able to save myself.
I land back in my body with the SUV drifting into the opposite lane, overcorrect, and finally straighten out.
It’s not safe to drive like this. Did you know? Driving this tired is like driving drunk. Or on drugs. Or both. People shouldn’t do it. I’m categorically against driving under the influence.
Out of everything I’ve done, driving like this might be the worst. The advance guilt is like a mouthful of lemon. It’s so bitter that it keeps my eyes wide open all the way to the commuter lot where I switch SUVs and start driving back to Manhattan.
Since my eyes are wide fucking open, I don’t think about milkshakes or teacups or Snowball sleeping in his cage. That is a bird who deserves to sleep. He’s never done anything wrong in his entire life.
I think about Lily in our bed for a little while.
She doesn’t know I’m gone. If I play this right, she’ll never know I was gone. I can get this under control.
I know what that sounds like. We both know what that sounds like. But we’re not going to make any comparisons, because I’m wide awake and I’m driving with the utmost care.
Maybe I should go to my cottage.
I start to exit the highway and have to force myself to stay in the lane. I’m not going to the cottage tonight, and it’s not because Lily’s grandfather or Malcolm Walsh or whoever the fuck the Good Samaritan is might’ve found it.
It’s because Lily is at Mason’s, and I need to be with her more than I need to sleep. More than anything else.
That’s enough to get me back into the city. Back into Mason’s parking garage.
The car is starting to lighten in the east when I pull into a spot on the secure floor. Secure. Ha. I’m in it. Isn’t that an oxymoron?
I wouldn’t say it’s full morning. It’s summer, so the sun rises early, but it’s not risen. It’s just starting to glow. I want to close my eyes.
Bad idea. I rest my head on the steering wheel instead. The logo in the middle is so close that it should be blurry, but it’s clear. I’m so tired that I could throw up.
Tea. Tea would be fine. Or coffee. Something in a mug.
Getting harder to think of next steps.
But that’s easy, right? I have to get into the elevator. That’s all.
I get my throbbing head and my burning eyes and my crime scene ass into the elevator and then into the foyer. Mason’s apartment is quiet, like it should be. I’m the only one who has any reason to be awake at this hour.
Oh—Robin might. But it sounds like he’s asleep, too. Good for him.
I make the responsible determination to get an ice pack from the kitchen. I’ll take it to the bathroom with me, where I will responsibly take a fucking shower. Then I’ll get another ice pack and take that to bed, so that when Lily wakes up, I’ll be?—
“Jameson,” Gabriel sings, from his spot at the kitchen table. My heart lurches at the sight of him, which is very fucking normal. He looks fine. He’s wearing pajama pants and a long-sleeved shirt with the logo from Elise’s bakery on it. Gabriel has a book open in front of him and a mug at his spot, and it is way too early—too late—for him to be here. “You’re back.”
“Did you stay the night?”
“You didn’t.” He quirks an eyebrow at me.
“I stayed most of it.” The lie is almost compulsive, at this point. I’m that tired.
“You just stepped out for a fist fight?” Gabriel closes his book and stands, looking me up and down. “Run-in with the cops?”
“Of course not. This was an accident.”
“A car accident?”
The whole kitchen spins, and then I really do almost throw up. Gabriel doesn’t look right because he’s standing in the doorway, facing the cop, and saying a car accident? and he’s not even sixteen yet, he won’t be sixteen for another month, and it does not occur to me that I might be full-on hallucinating until I dry heave and lose most of my balance and Gabriel’s there with his hand on my arm and his voice sounds echoey and wrong.
“Sit,” he says, more clearly.
I sit.
My vision starts to clear once I’m off my feet, and there’s Gabriel again. His face is right this time. He’s bent down to my level.
“Hey, buddy,” he says. “Was it the cops?”
“I fell.”
“Into a cop’s fist? How many times did they hit you?”
“It was a sidewalk, and it was just the once.”
I want to close my eyes so fucking badly.
“Okay,” Gabriel sings. He doesn’t believe me. “If I leave you here, will you fall off the chair?”
“No,” I scoff. “I’m fine.”
He walks away in a wavy line and turns on the sink. I watch him for entertainment. Gabriel tests the water temperature several times, then washes his hands. He wets one of Mason’s good washcloths. He gathers a couple clean dish towels and more washcloths, then gets an ice pack, too. He brings all of that back to the table and pulls his chair so close to mine that our knees touch.
“Hold still,” he says. “You have blood on your face. I’m going to get it off.”
“Okay.”
I’m definitely going to hold still until the washcloth touches the cut on my cheek, and then I jerk backward without meaning to. Gabriel catches my head with his hand on the back of my neck and shushes me like a startled animal.
It still stings like a motherfucker, but that’s good. It’s keeping me awake.
Gabriel cleans up the cut. He has some antibiotic cream from somewhere, and he puts that on, then dabs at my lip with another wet washcloth.
“Your lip is swollen.” He dabs at it a little more. “What are you going to tell Lily?”
“That I fell.”
“Not about the cops?”
“No cops this time. Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a Boy Scout.”
“Yes, I was. That one summer.”
“Sure.”
Gabriel sets aside the bloodied washcloth and wraps a dish towel around the ice pack, then helps me press it to my cheek and part of my lip.
“Ow.”
“Jameson.”
“That’s my name.” Should I sleep? No. Probably not. “What can I do for you, Loverboy?”
“There is one thing,” Gabriel muses. “You could stop doing this.”
“What? Going out?”
“Yes. You could stop going out.”
“I’m an adult.”
Never mind that he’s doing most of the work of holding the ice pack to my face.
“Also—”
“Don’t talk so hard. You have a swollen lip. And you have to stop. You’re scaring Lily.”
“She doesn’t know.”
Gabriel looks me in my single open eye. “Jameson.”
Several beats pass.
“Fuck,” I say.
This means Lily’s talked to at least Gabriel and probably Mason. If they both know, then?—
“Remy doesn’t know.” Gabriel shifts on his chair, but doesn’t put any more pressure on the ice pack. “I’m not going to tell her unless something happens. Although I don’t think she’ll buy the tripped and fell story.”
“I’ll tell it to her very sincerely.”
“Hear this sincerely. Mason’s worried about you. I’m worried about you. He thought you might not take this conversation well.”
“Like, that I’d cry?”
“That you’d leave.”
“I’m not leaving. Lily’s here.”
Pain flickers across Gabriel’s face and disappears.
“You don’t live here, anyway. Under normal circumstances. You wouldn’t notice if I left.”
“Yes, Jameson. I would.”
“Okay.”
“So I’m here to have this intervention.” Gabriel sings intervention in a tune that must be more melancholy than he meant for it to be. “Please. Stop. Or at least tell us what you need help with so we can go with you.”
“I’m just looking for information.”
“You’re looking for Walsh. Have you found him yet? And Lily’s Good Samaritan?”
“She told you about that too?”
“She did.”
I take the ice pack from him and hold it up all by myself. Gabriel remains his present self, thank fuck. The kitchen doesn’t spin. I don’t necessarily trust that it will stay put, but it’s here for now.
“I have to make this place safe for her.” It sounds like a weak excuse, but I mean it. I mean every word. Somebody has to do this, and it’s not like the family can spare anyone else.
“Don’t you think,” Gabriel says, “that it’s more important for Lily to have you?”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
The look in Gabriel’s eyes says my silence is answer enough.