Bette took a bite of her sandwich and chewed it slowly, uncertainly. “You didn’t see him hiding that pipe?”
“No.”
“Well, I did. As soon as we walked in.”
Layla cracked open her pop and took a sip. “Good thing you’re the security guard and not me.”
Bette raised her BLT, as if to take another bite, then lowered it to her lap, started rewrapping it.
“Is there something wrong with your sandwich?”
“No. Right now, I’m more tired than hungry.”
No wonder Bette was tired, Layla thought. She’d been awake much of the previous night. And after their conversation about what had happened to her mom, Layla hadn’t slept so well herself. But that hadn’t affected her appetite. Are you feeling sick again? Layla couldn’t quite bring herself to ask.
“Let me drive for a while,” she said. “You should get some rest.”
Bette sipped her pop. “I won’t sleep, not while we’re on the road. Anyhow, I need to drive. And you won’t like it if I don’t, trust me.”
Layla didn’t ask why. But it was hard to imagine Bette as a passenger, especially in her own truck. Behind its wheel, she seemed to gain strength, as if she were drawing energy from the engine while it lapped up miles of road.
In the silence that fell between them, Layla’s thoughts wandered back to the night before, and to Bette sitting on the window ledge of the motel. She remembered all the questions that had brought to her mind.
“Last night, I wondered if something more than insomnia was getting to you. You kept looking out the window. Like you were waiting for someone.”
Bette didn’t respond. She drained her pop and aimed the can at a distant trash can, scored two points.
“Were you?”
“No. I wasn’t waiting for anyone. I was just watching people come and go, to keep myself occupied.”
This response didn’t satisfy Layla, but she wasn’t sure whether she should keep pressing Bette, especially if she wasn’t feeling well. Then she thought of all the time that lay ahead for them—at least three more days to Phoenix and four days back—and all the uncertainty lurking in the back of her mind. She wouldn’t be able to take hours more of it.
“I feel like we’ve really been opening up to each other, Bette. I mean, we’ve talked about some really tough stuff. And as hard as that’s been, I’m really glad we’ve been able to do that, and be honest with each other.”
“Me too.”
“So, I’m hoping I can ask you about something that’s been bothering me.”
Bette looked away from Layla. “I’m listening.”
As Layla spoke, Bette started rocking herself in the swing.
“Yesterday, you seemed disturbed by that car behind us, the white car. Then you sped off the highway, like you were trying to escape.” Layla began to rock herself, too, as if it might calm her nerves. “I guess I’m wondering if someone’s following us. Or if something else is going on. Something I should be worried about.”
Layla realized that she might be projecting her own fears onto Bette, that the “someone” might very well be standing in for her mail stalker, who’d trailed her all this distance, if only in her mind. But she needed to be sure.
She followed Bette’s gaze to the parking lot, where a little boy was tugging a man’s hand, pulling him toward the playground. The man tugged back, store-ward, and won, taking them both into the Mini Mart.
“No one’s following us,” Bette said. “It’s just that—”
Layla waited long enough to doubt Bette would finish her thought. “It’s just that what?”
“That bogeyman I told you about? He was real.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he almost killed Dad, years ago. Almost killed me, too.”
“Shit. What happened?”
Bette patted her breast pocket, a smoker’s habit Layla remembered from her grandpa. If she had had cigarettes, she would have offered one, even though Bette must have quit, or was trying to.
“I was eleven, maybe twelve, and me and Dad were on the way from our place to some spot in southern Ohio, somewhere out in the sticks. As I recall, he wanted to pick something up from a friend, or drop something off, and I was just along for the ride.” Layla recalled reading about Vic’s “disciplined management” of the crews in the so-called Gold Ring, which stole cash, jewelry, and merchandise in three states. Back then, she never imagined him picking stuff up or dropping it off. Instead, she pictured him calling the shots from a corner office, at a remove from the grubby, bloody transactions of thieves. Once again, she was reminded that this was a fantasy.
“I don’t remember when the car started trailing us, but it must have been somewhere along the interstate. I first noticed it as we exited off the highway. We took one road, then another, then another, ’til we were out in the middle of nowhere, and the whole time that little car stayed on our tail. If Dad sped up, that car did. If he slowed down, it kept a distance away, like the driver was waiting for us to get far enough from civilization that no one would see what was about to happen.”
Bette followed Layla’s gaze to the Mini Mart, where the man and the little boy were making their exit, the man with a case of beer, the boy with what looked like a cup of pop. As they headed back to their van, neither of them cast a second glance toward Playland. A minute or two later, they were gone.
“Anyhow, the car kept that distance for a while. Then, all of a sudden, along some cornfield, it sped forward to pass us, and at that point things got kind of fragmented. I remember seeing this ski-masked guy in the passenger’s side, and I remember him drawing a gun. I remember Dad yelling, ‘Duck!’ and doing that. I remember hearing these explosions all around, then feeling the shattering glass.”
“My God,” Layla said. “I can’t believe you survived.”
Over the years, she’d imagined Vic being involved in scenes much like this. But she never pictured Bette in them, and now that she did, a wave of anger rolled through her. How could he have gotten his daughter into such a dangerous situation?
Layla thought again about that ill-fated road trip, about how Vic’s phone had kept ringing in the car. What kind of trouble was on the other end? What if it had shown up at that crappy motel?
“Neither can I,” Bette said. “We wound up in the middle of a cornfield with a banged-up car and some bruises. But we were alive, and the guys who shot at us were gone. Their car was white, by the way.”
“Aha,” Layla said, just a little relieved by this explanation.
“So, ever since then, white cars have had a way of—what’s the word?—triggering me. Especially if they’re right behind me, and especially if they’re older models. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, I just want to get away.”
Layla couldn’t remember whether the car behind them had been older or newer. Unlike a significant proportion of the population, she’d never paid much attention to vehicles of any age or kind, including her own.
“The car that went after you and Vic, do you have any idea who the guys in it were?”
“No. But I’m sure Dad did, or he at least had suspicions. And I’m sure he wasn’t an innocent victim of some unprovoked attack. I must have sensed that even then, because I kept my mouth shut the whole time. I never asked him why he didn’t flag down help. I never asked him why he took the license plates off our car and left it in that corn field. I never asked him why he walked us down the road, to a gas station pay phone, and then called one of his buddies instead of the cops. Because whenever I asked that kind of stuff in the past, he’d go quiet.”
Layla thought of the old photographs of Vic and their suggestion of dark, threatening silence. “Later on, when I visited him in prison, he said he kept quiet to protect me and my mom. But I don’t really know what to believe.”
Layla set dow
n what was left of her tomato-and-cheese sandwich. Somewhere in the middle of Bette’s story, she lost her appetite, and she kept seeing Vic’s face from those old photographs. It reminded her of another question, one she’d carried around for a long time.
“Do you know how he got involved in crime, or why?”
Bette scuffed at the gravel, raising dust. “Again, he never liked to talk about this stuff. But my mom blamed it all on his brother, Gene.”
“Gene?” Layla never knew Vic had a sibling.
“Yeah, I’d never heard of him either, until my mom told me about him, when I was ten or eleven.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No. He died long before I was born. And my mom didn’t really open up about him until after she split with Dad.”
“Why?”
Bette went quiet for a moment. “My guess? Dad didn’t want to be reminded of losing Gene. He was his only sibling, and according to Mom, the two of them were like this.” Bette brought her fists together.
“Were there any pictures of him?”
“Not out in the open, not that I ever saw. But one time, after the divorce, I went snooping around Dad’s apartment and found a photo of him and Gene, near the bottom of some drawer. They were really young—Dad maybe eighteen, and Gene twenty-something—and they were standing on some dock or pier. They’d thrown their arms across each other’s shoulders, and they looked like they were in the middle of razzing the photographer, and just having a good time.”
Layla wondered whether the brothers looked anything alike—whether Gene shared Vic’s slightly stooped posture and thick eyebrows, and the slight crook to the nose that both she and Bette had inherited.
“It was kinda weird seeing Dad like that,” Bette said. “’Cause he hardly ever smiled, and I’d never seen him looking that close to anyone. It made me think that losing Gene had changed him, shut part of him down.”
That seemed possible to Layla, and she wondered what parts of herself grief might have shut down, without her even being aware of it. “Why’d your mom blame him for getting Vic into crime?”
A muffler-less car blasted across the parking lot. Bette waited for it to pass.
“A few years after the divorce, when I was staying with her, I came home kind of late and found her sitting in the kitchen, in front of an almost-empty bottle of wine. I thought she was going to chew me out, ask me what I’d been out doing. But instead, she asked me to pull up a chair. And I don’t know if it was the wine, or loneliness, or just the need to unburden herself of something that had been on her mind for a long time, but she started talking about how Dad was on the ‘straight and narrow’ when she met him, how he’d gotten some college scholarship and wanted to study business. Then she started going off on ‘Gene’s gang of thieves,’ and how he’d lured Dad into it, glamorized the whole thing.”
Bette paused and stared off for a moment. “I’ll never forget what she said near the end: ‘Your father really could have made something of himself, something more than a base criminal.’”
Bette laughed, as if her mother’s description of Vic had been some gross exaggeration. Then she caught the look on Layla’s face. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Layla said. “I guess I sense some denial in her story, and a need to romanticize what could have been—if only. I mean, I don’t think you can blame Gene for Vic’s life of crime, not entirely. Vic made those choices himself.”
If Bette had taken offense to Layla’s words, she didn’t show it. “I’ve thought those very same things myself. But I don’t doubt that Gene was a factor, and a significant one.”
Layla wasn’t going to argue with this. “Seems he died young. What happened?”
“He vanished for some time, in the summer of seventy-eight. Then a few months later, his body was found in Guidry Lake, outside Reedstown. He’d been murdered. Shot.”
Layla remembered how Vic didn’t like being on or near large bodies of water. Was this the reason, or part of it?
“Did they find out who did it?”
“If you Google Eugene Doloro, you won’t learn of any arrests in the case. But when I pressed my mom on the subject, she said Dad found out who was responsible.”
Layla thought back on the old road trip, how Bette had said that Vic couldn’t stand the sight of blood. That didn’t mean he hadn’t asked others to shed it for him. “Did he have this person killed?”
Bette lowered her head, scuffed the gravel again. “My mom wouldn’t say, and it’s possible she didn’t know. There was no way I was going to ask Dad, maybe because I didn’t really want the answer. But something he said once, it kind of got to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was in high school, we were watching some stupid cop show that had the usual kind of ending, with the killer getting found out and busted. And I remember Dad mumbling something during the final scene, like he was pissed. ‘What?’ I said. He looked me in the eye for a long time. Then he said, ‘People get away with murder more often than you think.’ Like he knew what he was talking about. Like it came from personal experience.”
A buzz sounded from Bette’s back pocket. She pulled out her phone, then frowned at what she saw on the screen. “Nothing urgent,” she said, tapping the phone into silence.
Then she turned back to Layla. “Whenever I think about Dad and Gene, I thank God I never got mixed up in the shit they were involved in. That’s how Dad wanted it.”
Bette hauled herself up from the swing, signaling she was ready to go. Within a minute, they’d tossed out what was left of their lunches and were starting back for the truck.
Then Bette stopped. “There’s a restroom in there, right?” She nodded back toward the Mini Mart.
“Yeah.”
“I better use it.”
Layla watched Bette head for the store. As she neared the entrance, she reached into her back pocket and pulled out her phone. Inside the store, she put the phone to her ear, then vanished down an aisle.
Layla thought of the name she’d seen on Bette’s screen: Wes. Uncle Wes?
A friend of my father’s. From the good old days, not the bad ones.
Bette’s friend, too? Over the miles that lay ahead, she’d probably find out.
Chapter 12
The Travelers Inn
June 1997
As soon as the door closed behind him, Vic called that idiot in Johnstown, explained how he had one more chance to transfer goods the right way. A little too late, he remembered that the girls were in the next room. Hopefully, none of his threats had made it through the wall.
Then he sat on the bed and started returning calls, beginning with the most important one. Luke picked up on the first ring. “Hey, Vic.”
“Did you take care of our problem?”
“Yeah. About an hour ago.”
With Luke, Vic never bothered to ask about the clean-up. He was a professional, never leaving anything incriminating behind.
The messy part, for Vic, was what still had to be done. It made him sick to his stomach, which this business rarely did anymore. “I’ll tell Wes.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. This needs to be on me.”
“If you have second thoughts, let me know.”
Before the second thoughts could rise up and stop him, Vic dialed Wes’s number, each ring a stab to his gut.
On the fourth ring: “Hello?”
“Wes, it’s Vic.” Don’t wait; just come out with it. “I got some bad news about Frank. You probably know what it is.”
Silence on the other end, then the sound of Wes breaking down.
As he waited Wes out, Vic found himself growing irritated. He’d given Frank one more chance than he should have: one more step down a dangerous path, for all of them. Wes said something he couldn’t make out. The sound of vacuuming, from
somewhere, didn’t help.
“I can’t hear you.”
Wes spoke up: “I figured this was coming. It’s just … it doesn’t make it any easier.”
Frank hadn’t been just a brother-in-law to Wes. He’d been perhaps the closest person to him, other than Vic. And that had been the root of the problem, for all three of them. When Wes told Vic, Frank wants in, when he said, We can trust him, Vic made the mistake of setting aside an uncomfortable truth: that personal bonds could fog good judgment just as well as any drug. They were no guarantee that Frank wouldn’t mess up on getting goods securely from point A to point B (strike one) or that he wouldn’t slip his fingers into the till (strike two). Strike three was only a matter of time, as even Wes must have known.
“I wish these kinds of things didn’t have to happen,” Vic said, raising his voice over the ever-louder vacuuming. “But that’s the sad fuckin’ reality we have to deal with.”
Frank had cost them a lot of money, and risked exposing them. And in his younger days, Vic might have pulverized him himself, the way he’d pulverized Gene’s killer, Tommy Baines. Except it wouldn’t have been the same, nothing could be.
Bashing in Baines’s skull, Vic lost the sense of where he was, who he was. Yet, he’d never felt more powerful, more satisfied: a feeling he understood to be addictive and therefore risky. To give in to it was to lose control. So, he’d started leaving the killing to others, mostly, pleading a growing aversion to blood. “Wes?”
“I’m still here.”
What else was there to say? You’re like a brother to me? Over the twenty-five years they’d known each other, he’d told Wes that many times before. But saying it now would cheapen the sentiment, make it feel like just a ploy.
“This was the last thing I wanted to have happen, Wes.”
“I know, but—”
“But what?”
“Nothin’. I know you’re sorry.”
No, I’m never sorry—not about things that have to get done, even the worst things. Wes should have known that, but now wasn’t the time to set him straight.
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