Just Fall (23 page)

Ellie tunes Crazy B out, willing her brain to decide what to do next. This wait seems fruitless. There’s been no more movement at the house. She wonders out loud if she imagined that shadow in the window, a question that unleashes Crazy B’s next round of stories.

At least she feels somewhat safe here. Ironic, feeling safe while on the run from both the police and ruthless killers. Not to mention camped outside a haunted house with a delusional drug dealer. A bitter smile flickers across her face.

Crazy B mistakes her smile for invitation. Suddenly his meaty hand is on her thigh.

“Stop it.” Ellie’s tone is sharp. She scoots away from him.

“Come on, beauty. We’ve got nothing but time.”

“Stop!” The word is only a squeak and she curses herself. “Stop,” she says again more firmly. “Don’t you ever touch me again,” she spits. She clutches her beach bag, remembering the pointy tip of the screwdriver hidden inside. It’s the only weapon she has.

The merry, crazy glint in Crazy B’s eyes goes dark with rage.

There’s the creak of the gate. The whine of a car.

“Listen!” she exclaims, desperately relieved. “Someone’s here.” He’s heard the car too. She ducks behind the thicket of birds of paradise that screens them. Peers out.

Ellie sees Gold Tooth’s taxi rumble onto the crushed-shell driveway.

The taxi draws to a stop. Quinn exits. Followed by Gold Tooth, who opens the back door and pulls someone—a small child—from the car. The boy is crying, shouting for his mother. Ellie hears Gold Tooth curse and then, “The little fucker
bit
me!” Whoever that kid is, he’s fighting back; good for him.

Gold Tooth shoves the boy into Quinn’s arms. “I’m not staying here,” he snaps. “There be no amount of money that make me stay at this house!”

As Gold Tooth pulls away in the taxi and Quinn wrestles the boy to the front door, Crazy B exclaims in horror, “It’s not drugs, is it? It’s those children! Those missing kids!”

Before Ellie can reply, the front door to the mansion swings open.

Ellie gasps, a sharp, painful inhalation. Framed in the doorway is Rob.

Marcy and Ethan Clark were delighted that their matchmaking had been successful. Soon the two couples were double-dating often, taking full advantage of all the city had to offer people with a bit of money and few family encumbrances. They hit up the latest restaurants, the bars in the meatpacking district, Broadway plays, and concerts. They argued over the best pizza to be found below Fourteenth Street and above Seventy-second. They agreed Chinatown’s best dive was Excellent Dumpling, with its wonderful soups, and launched a fruitless quest for good Mexican food. The foursome took a long weekend road trip together to Vermont, where they marveled at the changing leaves and gorged themselves on local cheeses and pancakes with real maple syrup.

Rob welcomed the rhythm their group activities afforded, and also his burgeoning friendship with Ethan. Ethan was a bright guy, a born-and-bred Park Avenue New Yorker, savvy about the city and well connected. Ethan always knew someone who knew someone who could score the tickets they wanted for a sold-out show or a reservation at the hot new restaurant. Rob genuinely liked Ethan, his smart conversation, his commitment to team building at the office, his open affection for Marcy, his easy self-assurance.

But Ethan was his assignment. And Ellie was part of his access to Ethan. It was bad enough he was falling in love with her; true friendship with his victim was impossible.

The clerk at the taxi commission confirms to Lucien that a blue Volvo with a red door had been registered at one time, but has been decommissioned as a taxi. Lucien runs a check on the title and registration. The Volvo had been sold to Carter Williamson’s company. Lucien has issued an APB for the taxi, but it has not yet turned up.

Lucien now sits across from a very anxious-looking Pascal Jarett. The American has answered every question put to him in the last twenty minutes with an unwavering, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

Lucien leans in toward him and speaks kindly.

“Listen to me, Pascal. Your partner is dead. A car registered to this company is potentially linked to another murder and to the abduction of a child. What is it you’re not telling me?” Lucien’s eyes narrow, his tone shifts to one of nuanced threat. “Do we need to beat it out of you?”

Pascal’s Adam’s apple bobs up and down in his scrawny neck. “You’re the police. You can’t just beat me up.”

“Don’t you read the papers?” Lucien asks with quiet menace.

Pascal squirms back in his seat. His fingers twist a dreadlock. There have been several instances of police brutality reported lately, young men of the island who have been badly beaten in the course of their arrests. Violence begets violence. Just a week ago there had been a riot in one of the slums. Rocks and knives. Gasoline fires. Guerrilla fighters against uniforms until the fire department hosed the instigators down. “But I’m—”

“What? White? American? You live in St. Lucia now. Our rules. My rules.”

“I swear. I don’t know anything.”

Lucien’s cellphone bleats. He glances at the number. “Yes?”

He listens, and his face changes. Fear clouds his features.

“I’ll be right there.”

He clicks the phone off.

“What do you know about your partner’s boat?”

“Carter’s boat? Not much. He keeps it at Rodney Bay.”

“He ever take you out on it?”

“Nah. He used to joke it was his love shack. I think he took girls out on it so he could keep Cookie in the dark.”

“That’s not all he was keeping in the dark.”

Her fever was high, he could tell just by touching her forehead. This morning, when Rob had left for work, Ellie had groaned and said she was going to stay home again, it was the second day in a row she felt flu-ish. But now, coming home, he was unprepared for how sick she seemed. He tried to urge her into a sitting position so that he could get her to swallow some water. Her body felt like dead weight in his arms. He held the cup up to her chapped lips.

“Sweetheart. Please try to drink.”

She moaned and batted limply at the air in front of her with her hands. “Stop the arrows! They’re coming at me!”

“Baby, there are no arrows. It’s just the fever. Come on, drink some water.”

He got her to take a sip, before she collapsed back against the pillows. She was soaked in sweat and Rob tried to remember whether this was good—did it mean the fever was breaking?

“The arrows! They’re hurting me,” Ellie moaned.

Rob flashed on the tattoo that graced Quinn’s wrist, a dancing skeleton gripping an arrow. Quinn had pressured Rob to get the same tattoo, a rite of bonding, he had said. But Rob had resisted. He was more effective, he argued, if he had no permanent marking that could betray him. Now Rob grimaced. It was as if his hidden past was piercing its way into her subconscious.

Ellie lapsed back into restless sleep, her face ashen, her breathing shallow. Rob touched her forehead again. She was burning. He got up to see if they had any canned broth in the kitchen, his anxiety over her illness giving rise to a need to do something, anything, to help her. As he heated a can of chicken noodle soup, he heard a
thump.
He ran to the bedroom. Ellie had fallen to the floor. Her eyes looked sunken in her skull; her face was filled with fear.

“Make it stop! Make them stop! Please!” She clawed at him desperately.

Her eyes rolled back in her head and her body jerked. He scooped her up in his arms and, cradling her shivering body, ran.

They rushed her in at emergency.

After she was out of danger, the ER doctor told him he had done exactly the right thing. Ellie had been dangerously dehydrated. She could have died. That night, as Rob stood by her hospital bed and watched her sleep, saline drip in her arm, Rob was assaulted by a dire realization. He could have lost her.

“A tale of woe,” that was the phrase that defined today. The expression was one he had first heard in L.A., where he had last lived before coming to New York. Directors and producers, executives and lawyers, actors and writers all used the phrase as they launched into laborious tales of projects gone south.

It had been Rob’s first time in L.A. He expected to hate it, but he loved it immediately. Loved the weather, loved his house in the hills with the swimming pool, was delightfully amused by the absurd self-importance of industry people in an industry town. The women were beautiful and easy for a man with an expensive car and a lot of cash. He had the use of a Ferrari, and a wardrobe of luxurious casual clothes. He jogged on the beach, hiked in the hills, and spun stories that allowed him to infiltrate the circles he needed to. He killed someone there.

The man he killed, Ken Corcoran, was a money manager with a wife and three young kids back in Idaho. Corcoran had somehow finagled a position as a CFO with a start-up production company (through a college connection, long attenuated but recently and opportunistically exploited). Ken had big aspirations, and a rapacious taste for all L.A. had to offer. He flew private to Vegas, fucked hookers, and snorted blow in his office on the Sunset Strip. He wrangled premiere invitations, hit all the clubs, and stretched his lavish expense account to the breaking point.

Hollywood folded Ken in (to a point); some access is easy with a business card labeling you an executive with a company bringing fresh money to town. Ken was admittedly clever about money, but he didn’t have a creative bone in his body, nor much emotional intelligence (but to be fair, hustle and swagger have gotten many people pretty far in this world, not just Ken).

At a network party, he picked up a hot young chick, took her home, and banged her senseless. He recorded the whole thing. Looking at trade coverage of the party after she was gone in the morning, he discovered the chick was the daughter of the network head. Ken took a little time to process the angles here (as noted, creativity was not his strong suit). Finally he tried blackmailing the network head (not for cash, nothing so crass; he wanted a production deal). Unfortunately for Ken this backfired big time. The network chief told Ken to go ahead and release the sex tape; his daughter was only sixteen. Ken would be tried for statutory rape and his daughter could get a reality show off the publicity (“This is a win-win for my family, you cocksucker” was how he ended the call). Ken buried the tape and kept his mouth shut.

But the network head was an old friend of Quinn’s (arms dealing back in the day, was the rumor) and so six months after the blackmail attempt, Ken Corcoran was buried under the newly renovated pool in Rob’s backyard.

When the job was done, the “For Sale” sign posted on the house he had owned just long enough for his needs, Rob was restless. He had loved L.A. but now he felt repulsed by his time there—the befriending of Ken Corcoran, the steps taken to assure all copies of the sex tape were destroyed and that nothing could connect Rob or Ken back to the network head (who insisted on coming to spit on the body before it was folded into wet concrete).

Rob had money, he had women, he had everything he was supposed to want. But a malaise was creeping into his cells, seeping into his bloodstream—a disgust at himself, the knowledge that he was weak when he appeared to be strong, ugly when he appeared to be beautiful, a twisted, corrupt old soul who looked like a handsome, healthy young man. He thought about Solana, the cute Cuban girl, who had washed ashore, drowned, not long after he had killed the meth head in her presence. He wondered if Quinn had had a hand in her death.