Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Last Summer
It was the evening after Jack received the letter in the diner, the one that read Tio will tell your family everything you did and who you really are.
Jack was at his daughter Kennedy’s soccer game, alternating between needing to throw up and screaming congratulations at Kennedy, who’d already made two goals for her team.
Everyone around him said Kennedy would be an important player one day.
Addison was beside him, her smile aglow.
It hurt him tremendously to see her like this, to know that the moment she learned what he’d done and who he really was and how much he’d lied to her, she’d never smile at him like that again.
Maybe she’d never trust anyone on the planet again.
He clapped harder and yelled Kennedy’s name louder. He thought he was going to pass out.
That night, he couldn’t sleep. He sat in his kitchen, sweating and watching the clock.
The letter from Tio Angelo was still in the pocket of his jeans, so he found it and turned it over and over again in his hand.
He couldn’t believe he’d tracked him down.
He couldn’t believe he’d seen his father and heard from his uncle, all in the span of a single day.
But at around three o’clock that morning, something occurred to him.
The handwriting on the note did not belong to Tio Angelo.
It meant someone else had written it. Was this someone in cahoots with Tio Angelo?
Would this other person lead Jack to his uncle?
It was the only clue he had to hang onto. He would do everything he could with it.
What Jack hated most about his uncle’s threat was that he felt like a caged animal. He felt like Tio Angelo could see him clearly and knew what he was doing, whereas Jack couldn’t see him at all. Jack wanted to turn the tables on his uncle. He wanted to track him, rather than the other way around.
He had to be smarter than his uncle thought he was.
The following morning, about an hour before Addison’s alarm clock went off, Jack slid into bed and wrapped his body around hers.
He kissed her shoulder, her neck. She continued to sleep, so he held her until they all had to get up, pack lunches, say they loved one another, and leave for the day.
Jack prayed that he’d be able to return tonight after tracking down Tio Angelo and ending this.
But he kissed Addison as though he’d never see her again.
He didn’t understand why he felt this way, why he felt that everything was about to collapse.
Jack brought the handwritten note back to the same diner where he’d bought the vanilla ice cream.
Legs shaking, he sat in the same booth. The same server was working.
She’d styled her hair slightly differently than she had yesterday, with a braid going all the way down the center of her back.
When she took his order, she slapped her notepad on the table and wrote with a blue pen.
He watched, captivated, realizing that her handwriting matched the handwriting on the notecard from yesterday.
His heart hammered as she left to fetch his toast, eggs, and coffee.
When she returned, he pulled the notecard out and set it on the table.
She blinked down at it, her cheeks inflamed.
She’d realized her mistake. Almost immediately, she tried to turn around and leave, but Jack stood and said, “Please, I need to know why you wrote it. I’ll do anything. I’ll pay you.”
This stopped her in her tracks. Slowly, she turned to look at him. The eggs were steaming between them, and everything smelled like butter.
“I thought it was creepy,” she said of the notecard. “I didn’t want to do it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jack told her.
“I don’t want to talk about it here,” she said, her eyes darting this way and that.
Jack suggested they talk in a back room, somewhere private.
She led him through the double kitchen doors and into her boss’s office, explaining that he never used it because he had two families and told his wife he was at work while he secretly spent time with his other kids. “But don’t tell anyone,” she said.
Jack softened. He saw that he’d scared the poor woman, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. He hated, too, that her boss made her keep his secrets. Jack tried to make himself seem smaller.
“The man who had me write this note was a regular,” the server explained, playing with her hair.
“His name is Ricki. He’s a Mexican guy who lives near the beach.
He always gets a big stack of pancakes and leaves enormous tips.
Yesterday morning, he was here, eating his pancakes.
You were here at the same time, I remember that.
But I didn’t know you. I didn’t know you were anybody important. ”
“I don’t come in often,” he agreed. He didn’t add that he wasn’t important.
“Ricki asked if I would do him a favor for money,” she said.
“He asked if I had any paper in the office, so I came in here and wrote what he’d told me to write on a piece of paper and slipped it into one of the envelopes my boss has but never uses.
I put it on the table in front of you a few minutes after that.
He paid me two hundred dollars! I couldn’t believe it.
I couldn’t pass it up. I’m saving up to leave the island. ”
The server looked worried. “You aren’t going to do anything to Ricki, are you? I don’t want him to be upset with me. And I don’t want him to get hurt or anything! I thought he was just a kind man. He doesn’t have family around here.”
Jack promised her that he wouldn’t do anything to Ricki, that Ricki would be fine. “You said he lives by the beach?”
After some hemming and hawing and after Jack promised he wouldn’t do anything to Ricki, the server gave him Ricki’s house’s exact location, then hurried out of the office to tend to her other guests.
As he left, Jack slid a hundred-dollar bill into her hand, then shot to his car and sped off to Ricki’s place.
It was clear that Ricki was involved with Tio Angelo.
He wondered whether Tio Angelo was blackmailing Ricki and forcing Ricki to do what he wanted.
He couldn’t believe this nightmare had found him here, on this gorgeous island, where the sun beat down on the rolling waves, and the palm trees fluttered in the breeze.
Jack parked his car on the road in front of Ricki’s beachside shack.
Pretending that something was wrong with his car, he got out, popped the hood, and peered inside, yet kept one of his eyes on the house’s front window.
Ricki was in what looked like the kitchen, talking on the phone.
Ricki was a middle-aged Mexican man Jack had never seen before, with a healthy tan and sculpted biceps.
From the look of his garage, Ricki was rebuilding a car engine.
Numerous other rusted-out car parts were strewn across the lawn and near the sand.
There was no sign of Tio Angelo. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t somewhere in the house, maybe resting in a back room, eager to tell Ricki what to do next. Jack prayed that this was the end of the line, that he could rush the house, threaten Tio Angelo somehow, and get him off his back.
Maybe Jack could go home when this was over. Maybe he could cook dinner for his family and help Gavin with his homework.
Jack considered what to do next. He didn’t consider himself a violent person.
He wouldn’t have known what to do if anything violent happened in front of him, let alone to him.
The best way of getting through to this guy, Ricki guessed, was via money.
Maybe due to the circumstances of his past, Jack had secured thousands of dollars in cash and hidden it in odd places around his house—places he felt sure that Addison would never find.
That morning, while Addison was showering, he’d gathered all that money and now had it lining his shirt, pants, and wallet. He hoped he didn’t need all of it.
Jack closed the hood of his car and strode to the front door.
He couldn’t breathe. He wondered if these were his final moments on earth, if he was walking into a situation from which he wouldn’t be able to escape.
But he couldn’t live like this anymore. He rapped his knuckles on the door and told himself to stop gasping for breath.
When Ricki opened the door, he snapped his head from left to right, searching for people who might be Jack’s backups.
“Hello?” Ricki said when he didn’t sense a threat.
In response, Jack showed him the notecard that the server had given him. “Why did you have her write this and give it to me?”
Ricki snarled, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Annoyance filled Jack’s chest. “You know what this is. Tell me what this is! I can make it worth your while. More than what you gave the server. More than your rent for the month.”
This caught Ricki’s attention.
He ushered Jack into the house, which smelled of coffee and warm tortillas. Jack wondered if he’d get the chance to eat anything the rest of the day or if he’d be chasing his uncle around till night. Ricki slid his hands through his hair and demanded, “How much?”
Jack realized that he had to show some of the cash first. He removed three hundred from his wallet, but he didn’t hand it over yet. “Is anyone else here?” Jack asked.
“Who else would be here?” Ricki demanded.
“An Italian guy,” Jack shot back. “Older. Have you dealt with him?”
“I don’t know any Italian guy,” Ricki said.
Jack’s stomach tightened. “I’m only going to give you this money if you tell the truth.”
“I have no reason to lie to you,” Ricki said, raising his right hand toward the sky.
“Who put you up to the notecard thing?” Jack asked. He wanted to scream, but he knew that wouldn’t put him in good standing with this stranger, especially not in his house.
Ricki turned back toward the counter to pour himself a coffee, as though acting too busy for Jack would illustrate how little he cared about this. “Everything I do, I do for myself,” Ricki said.
Jack closed his eyes. “I get that. I do.”
Ricki turned back around, holding a mug of coffee between his hands.
“Whoever put you up to this,” Jack began, speaking delicately, “can you ask them about their connection to an older Italian man? I need to speak to the Italian man. My Tio.” He snapped his finger against the word “Tio” on the notecard.
Ricki let all the air spill from his lungs.
For the first time, Jack considered the idea that maybe his Tio Angelo wasn’t on the island at all.
He remembered his father had told him that Tio Angelo had come to threaten Benjamin to his face.
After that, Benjamin had learned of “Seth’s” whereabouts via a young woman’s testimony, after he’d paid her to go into the bar and talk to Tio Angelo.
But had Benjamin ever actually seen Tio Angelo get on the plane?
Was it possible that Tio Angelo had laid a trap for both Benjamin and Jack, and they’d both walked directly into it?
Jack’s heart hammered. Suddenly exhausted, he collapsed on Ricki’s couch, his knees clonking together. He still had the three hundred dollars in his hand. Ricki looked at him as though he’d never seen anyone more pathetic.
“Listen, man,” Ricki said, reaching for the cash and ripping it out of Jack’s grip.
“My cousin called me to set the notecard thing up. He told me to go to the diner down the road from my place. It’s a diner where I’m a regular, by the way.
A diner where I know all the employees. I took my cousin there when he visited six months ago.
So he knew the lay of the land. He knew how quickly I could get there.
He told me exactly what to write on the notecard.
Listen, man. It means that someone knew exactly where you were and when you were there.
That’s something you should consider here. I’m just a pawn in their game.”
Jack’s stomach thrashed and bubbled. For the hundredth time today, he thought he was going to throw up. He couldn’t live like this.
“I want to talk to your cousin,” Jack said.
Ricki folded his arms over his chest and raised his chin. “Family is very important to me.”
“It’s important to me, too,” Jack said. “It’s why I have to find my uncle.”
Ricki snorted. “Your uncle wants to threaten you. That’s what the note sounded like to me.”
“It’s a long, long story,” Jack said, hanging his head.
“All families have long stories,” Ricki pointed out. “All families have drama and chaos. Mine included. It’s why I don’t feel good about giving out my cousin’s phone number.”
Jack understood that. He rubbed his chest, trying to will his heart to stop pounding so hard.
From where he sat, he could hear the rush of the waves outside and the caw of the seagulls.
Slowly, he shifted his hand between the buttons of his shirt and removed another hundred-dollar bill.
“I came to Hawaii to build a different life for myself,” he breathed, hardly able to speak.
“I came here because I couldn’t be myself elsewhere.
As a teenager, my uncle set me up to be a criminal.
Maybe you could say I was old enough to know better.
Or perhaps you could see it the way I do, which is that I was young and naive and looking up to my uncle for guidance.
In any case, what happened after that tore my family apart.
In Hawaii, I’ve been able to build a new family.
One of my own. And I have no interest in letting my Tio Angelo tear this one apart as well. ”
Jack wasn’t sure why he thought pleading to Ricki’s emotional side would help his case. He searched for compassion in Ricki’s eyes but couldn’t find it.
But then, he watched Ricki reach for that fourth hundred-dollar bill. He looked contemplative, like he was on the brink. Pushing his luck, Jack reached for another bill, followed by another. He watched Ricki count out his six hundred dollars, his lips fluttering.
Ricki said, “All right, man. I think we might be able to work something out.”