‘If I left them in charge of my business and they let it go under, other people’s livelihoods are at risk. A lot of people who worked hard for me their whole lives would suffer. I haven’t worked my whole life to have somebody like him piss it all up the wall. I won’t let that happen.’
‘Don’t you have some kind of succession planning in place? The board of directors, that sort of thing.’
Hanna waved his hand dismissively.
‘Yes, yes, all that’s in place. But there’s something else.’
He suddenly looked very much his seventy-one years, his body frailer than when he’d pumped Evan’s hand energetically on his arrival, walking in with a spring in his step and looking like he owned the place.
A frisson of nervous excitement as if someone was walking over his grave went through Evan. He caught himself gripping the arms of his chair tightly, as if Hanna might try to pry him out. He forced himself to relax.
‘I want to make amends. Amends for something I did’—he looked down at his lap and Evan saw him swallow thickly—‘or didn’t do, a very long time ago. Something I’ve lived with and been ashamed of my whole life.’
No pressure.
‘You want me to help you make amends?’
‘Exactly.’
He fixed Evan with a stare, eyes clear and unwavering, raised his hand and pointed directly at Evan’s face.
‘I want you to know my illness is purely physical. There is nothing whatsoever the matter with my mind, when I tell you I want you to find somebody for me—somebody who may never have existed.’
Chapter 4
‘A LONG TIME AGO, I made a mistake. And I didn’t do the right thing.’
Things fell into place in Evan’s mind. All the talk of not wanting to leave his business interests to his daughter, and now the phrase the right thing.
‘You got a girl pregnant.’
Hanna nodded. His gaze was somewhere far off in the distance, about as far from the piercing stare he’d speared Evan with a moment ago as could be.
‘You want to know if she had the child. A son.’
‘It was the second biggest mistake I ever made,’ Hanna said, snapping out of his reverie. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
The sudden request took Evan by surprise. He was expecting Hanna to tell him what the biggest mistake was. And he’d never smoked himself, didn’t even have an ashtray.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,’ Hanna said, dropping the hand that had been on its way to his pocket.
‘No, it’s okay. Really. ‘
Hanna got his cigarettes out looking a bit sheepish. He cleared his throat noisily. Evan was sure he heard a death rattle in there, even if the cancer was pancreatic, not lung.
‘I wouldn’t normally impose ... it’s just I’ve never spoken a word about this to anyone. Not even to my wife, God rest her soul, and we were married almost fifty years. It’s affected me more than I would have thought.’
Evan nodded sympathetically, watched him as he put the cigarette between his lips, then pat each pocket systematically.
‘I can’t believe it. I’ve forgotten my lighter. I don’t suppose—’
Without thinking Evan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his Zippo, the one he carried with him everywhere. He passed it to Hanna. He didn’t even know if it worked. He’d never tried it.
‘Not sure if it works.’
Hanna took it and glanced at it. His face fell, his mouth slightly open. Then he shook his head.
‘Are you okay?’
Hanna didn’t answer immediately, tried the lighter instead. It caught the second time. He lit the cigarette and sucked half of it down in one hit, hung his head backwards and let it out slowly towards the ceiling.
‘I’m fine. It’s just the coincidence.’
Evan wasn’t listening. A hot little worm of excitement had started up in his belly. The lighter worked. He’d found it by chance in the basement of a farmhouse owned by Carl Hendricks, a lowlife degenerate Evan helped put behind bars for the rest of his unnatural life—and who was also stalking Evan from his prison cell. That wasn’t what concerned him now. His wife, Sarah, who’d been missing for the past five years had owned a Zippo just like it. He was trying to work out what the implications of the lighter working were. Did lighter fuel evaporate inside a lighter, particularly an old one like the Zippo? If so, what did that imply about how long it had been sitting in Hendricks’ basement chamber?
‘Are you alright?’ Hanna said, turning the lighter over in his hand.
‘Yeah, sorry—’
‘Nice lighter. You weren’t in Vietnam, were you? No, of course not. You’re far too young. You’ll see in a minute why I was taken by surprise for a moment there.’
He pushed the lighter across the desk towards Evan, took another hit on the cigarette, almost finishing it. It had done the trick. He looked a lot better for it, as ready as he’d ever be to bare his soul to Evan.
‘When I was eighteen, I met a girl, a Mexican girl, and got her pregnant ... you might want to take notes.’
Evan got a notebook out of his top drawer, found a well-chewed pen. Hanna waited patiently as he scrawled a few loopy swirls to get it going.
‘Okay. What was her name?’
‘Margarita Narvaez. I don’t think it’s a common Latino name, so that should help.’
As it turned out, Evan could have left his notebook in the drawer and written everything Hanna told him on the back of his hand. Apart from her name, the only thing he came away with was she was sixteen when they met and was born between mid-June and mid-September 1948. The baby would have been born sometime around December 1965 if it was born at all.
‘Was she a U.S. citizen?’
Hanna snorted, his lips pressed into a tight line.
‘Ha! You sound exactly like my father. May he rot in hell.’
Hanna didn’t apologize for or explain his outburst. Evan didn’t ask, he’d get to it if it was important.
‘According to him, she identified me as a good prospect, actively pursued me and then deliberately fell pregnant—all to get U.S. citizenship.’
Evan made the mistake of shrugging.
‘It happens.’
‘That wasn’t how it happened with us.’
Evan blanched at the tone of voice and held up his hands in apology. Hanna withdrew his jutting chin, his jaw moving tightly. The glint in his eyes said it’d be back in Evan’s face if he made another remark like that.
‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’
Hanna pinched the skin between his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Evan gave him time, controlled his natural urge to tap his pen impatiently on his teeth. Then Hanna reached out and picked up Evan’s Zippo, turned it over in his hands.
‘Have another cigarette, if you want.’
Hanna shook his head.
‘I was an idiot. I stupidly told my father.’
Evan guessed that was Hanna’s biggest mistake. It was a good guess even if he didn’t know it at the time—how that one single event set in motion all the tragedy that came afterwards.
‘You were eighteen, for Christ’s sake.’
Hanna gave him a look that said when he wanted sympathy or excuses from Evan, he’d ask for them. Until that time, Evan knew what he could do with his sympathy.
‘What did he do?’ Evan said.
‘He sent some people to see her.’
‘Some people?’
‘You don’t need to know.’
It was time to take Hanna at his word about not wanting anybody to pussy-foot around him. If he was going to get fired, he might as well do it before putting in any more time.
‘To do what exactly?’
Hanna shrugged, dropped his eyes.
‘I don’t know. Threaten her. Buy her off. Force her to have an abortion. He never told me and I never asked. I never saw or spoke to her again after that so I couldn’t ask her either.’
‘You didn’t try to see her again?�
�
‘No.’
He suddenly flipped the Zippo in the air, caught it again.
‘That’s where this comes into the story.’
He ran his finger over the inscription on the lighter. Evan watched his lips moving silently as he read the words.
We the unwilling
‘I wish I’d had one of these to carry around with me, remind me ...’
He shook his head, his lips a tight line under the nicotine-stained mustache, eyes not leaving the faded inscription. Evan couldn’t imagine why he’d want one. He’d never seen a face so utterly forlorn. And he could have told him, it didn’t bring him much in the way of comfort either. If he’d thought it would bring Hanna any peace, he’d have told him to keep it.
‘People of your generation have no idea what it was like back then, in the mid-sixties and early seventies. The whole Vietnam thing. Maybe your father told you?’
He held up the Zippo, raised an eyebrow. Evan shook his head.
‘It wasn’t his. He didn’t go.’
‘Lucky guy. Like me.’
His voice had a bitter edge to it now, not dulled by the passage of time.
‘It’s hard to comprehend now, being sent to the other side of the world to fight somebody else’s war. And if you were lucky enough to make it back home in one piece, you got spat on by your fellow, holier-than-thou, banner-waving Americans. You know, the ones who were lucky enough to not go. It was every young man’s worst nightmare.’
He was right, Evan couldn’t understand what it must have been like over there. It didn’t matter how many times you watched Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, nobody who hadn’t been there could understand. The bitterness in Hanna’s voice he understood all too well.
‘You were in college. That got you a deferment, didn’t it?’
‘It did. For as long as I was there.’
He held up a finger, a crux of the matter gesture.
‘But if I hadn’t toed the line, done exactly as my father said, I wouldn’t have stayed there very much longer. Not only that, the last resort safety net—family in Canada—would have been pulled out from under me. I’d have had to take my chances with everybody else.’
He let out a short bark of a laugh that was mainly bark, not so much laugh.
‘What?’
‘Life is so ironic.’
The twist to his mouth said ironic was a polite way of describing what he really meant.
‘If we’d got married and had the baby, I’d have been home free. Even after good old LBJ moved the goal posts and let them draft married men, having a baby cut the risk to almost nothing.’
He shook his head and tapped the Zippo on the desk, an irritating, insistent noise.
‘The thing is, Margarita would still only have been seventeen. She’d have needed her father’s permission to get hitched. The only thing I do know about her family is they were strict Catholics. There would’ve been nothing her father would’ve liked more than to send the privileged white bastard who got his daughter pregnant out of wedlock to rot in hell—or Vietnam, as it was called back then.’
They sat in silence, Evan not wanting to intrude on Hanna’s pain. He was right about one thing as Evan knew only too well—fate doesn’t pull any punches.
‘The long and the short of it,’ Hanna said eventually, his voice thick, ‘is I took the coward’s way out. I’ve made you sit here and listen to all of this, when I could’ve summed it up in those three words. Coward’s way out.’
He drummed each word into the desk top with the Zippo, each one harder than the last.
‘And now I want to make it right.’
No pressure, Evan thought to himself again.
***
‘THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE YOU need to know.’
It struck Evan that everybody has a worst part until last tone of voice. Hanna was using his now, his face equally serious.
‘You have to be very careful of Hugh McIntyre. He has substantial gambling debts with some very nasty people. Eastern Europeans, Russians probably. He’s got nothing to give them. They’ll be getting impatient. I’m sure you know better than me the methods those sorts of people use.’
Evan didn’t miss the implied criticism in there—this was Evan’s grubby, unsavory world they were talking about now.
‘McIntyre thinks if he sticks with Lisa then all his money problems will go away, because I’ve got nobody else to leave it to. And he’s right—at the moment.’
‘If he thinks that, you’re in danger too. You haven’t said anything about your illness. As far as they’re concerned you could go on for another twenty years. If things get desperate, he might think about helping you on your way.’
Hanna gave that an irritated head shake.
‘It’s not McIntyre himself we need to worry about, it’s the people he owes money to. If they find out there’s a potential goldmine and the only inconvenient thing between them and it is me—’
‘You really think he’d be so stupid as to tell them?’
Hanna sucked air in between his teeth. Nothing good ever follows that noise.
‘He might—if they put enough pressure on him. He’s very bitter because I didn’t bail them out. He hates me, blames me. And he’s vindictive.’
Evan didn’t need to feel his ear to convince himself how true that was. Nor did he need to look at his watch to know what time it had got to—it was guilt time, one of his favorite times of day.
Because it didn’t matter how much Hanna said he didn’t blame him, he felt responsible for everything Hanna described. It was the photos he took of Lisa and McIntyre that pushed Kevin Stanton over the edge. The fact that the root problem was McIntyre sticking it to Stanton’s wife didn’t make him feel any better.
‘There is a worse scenario than all this,’ Hanna said, almost as if he wanted to increase Evan’s discomfort.
‘Nuclear holocaust?’
That brought a smile to Hanna’s eyes if not his lips, the first for a long time.
‘That too. I’m sure you know’—there it was again, reference to Evan being part of life’s nastier side—‘that these people are always looking for a legitimate cover for their operations. If McIntyre tells them he’s about to take control of a massive corporation, they might think, forget the money, we’ll take control through him. Everything I’ve spent my life working for becomes a vehicle to launder drug money, or worse.’
If it wasn’t for his guilt and his own desire to make amends, Evan would have told him it was all getting too big for a small fry like him.
‘What if I find an heir? He or she will be in danger too. Do I approach them?’
‘No. Speak to me first. Only me. I can see from your face you think I’m being melodramatic, paranoid even. I think I’m being followed. I tried to lose them’—he made quotes in the air with his fingers—‘coming here today, but I’m a businessman, not a secret agent.’
He got up and walked over to the window, looked out at the parking lot. Evan worked hard at keeping a straight face as he stood to the side and peeked out. He came around from behind his desk and saw Hanna to the door.
‘I’m a good judge of people,’ Hanna said, resting his hand on Evan’s shoulder. ‘You have to be to get anywhere in business. Despite what I said, you blame yourself for this mess. Don’t. Kate Guillory made a good call when she recommended you.’
He squeezed Evan’s shoulder and smiled, a hint of mischief in his eyes.
‘Sure you don’t want to know what else she said about you? You’d be surprised.’
Evan steered him quickly through the door.
‘Quite sure, thank you. Seeing as you mention her, can I discuss this with her? I get a lot of useful information from her.’
Hanna thought about it before answering.
‘I’ve got no problem with you telling her you’re looking for somebody, but you can’t say who or why. You better hope she likes providing information without being told why.’
‘Great
. I can just hear her saying business as usual.’
Hanna gave him a knowing smile and left.
As soon as the door was shut, Evan retrieved the Zippo lighter from where Hanna had left it on the table and tried it again. After a half-dozen fruitless attempts, he snapped the lid closed again and dropped it in his pocket. Now he didn’t know what to think.
He went to the window and watched Hanna drive away, then placed the side of his head on the wall and closed his eyes.
Hopefully Guillory had some answers for him.
Chapter 5
HUGH MCINTYRE COASTED TO the curb, fifty yards back from the parking lot Frank Hanna’s quarter-million-dollar Bentley just turned into. He cut the engine, nodded to himself, a satisfied smile on his lips. He knew that office block, knew exactly who Hanna was going to see.
That bastard Buckley.
McIntyre broke into the building immediately after Buckley took the incriminating photos of him with Lisa, hoping to find and destroy all the copies. He wasn’t about to forget any time soon, forget about the man who’d brought his life crashing down around his ears. The man who was responsible for the mess he was in now. He’d been biding his time, waiting for the right moment, and now it looked as if fate had intervened in the form of Frank Hanna, the man he hated most in the world—after Buckley.
Before things got out of hand the previous evening, Lisa said the old man had been acting very strangely lately—ever since her husband hanged himself in the garage and set all this shit in motion. And it wasn’t just a reaction to finding out his daughter had been screwing around. No, the old bastard wasn’t sentimental like that, he was up to something.
Which is why McIntyre had been tailing him the last few days. It made him laugh, the way the old fool took such a circuitous route getting anywhere, as if he knew he was being followed. As if he thought he could be inconspicuous in a car that cost more than most people’s houses.
And as for that stunt he pulled this morning, throwing the car in front of the semi-trailer—he’d have done them all a favour if the truck had turned him into roadkill.
His stupid games didn’t make any difference anyway. The GPS tracker Lisa clamped to the underside of his car the last time she went over did all the hard work. All he had to do was follow along a discreet distance behind. He was just having a bit of fun this morning. After last night’s fight with Lisa, he wanted to rattle his cage, see what shook loose.
The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets) Page 57