I Mean You No Harm

by Beth Castrodale

  “He knows it exists, and that I need to get to it safely. But not much more. Dad always said, ‘Keep things on a need-to-know basis, even with those closest to you. You’ll spare yourself a lot of grief.’”

  Layla wondered what he might have held back from Bette, perhaps with the best of intentions. What unforeseen trouble might he have left her to walk into as a result? “How much does Marla know about all this?”

  “Nothing, really. And I haven’t mentioned a word about the money. But when I get home, I’ll tell her all about it, and my own situation.”

  If you get home, Layla thought.

  The “good sister” she’d tried to be, the one who’d set off on this trip as Bette’s monitor and protector, she’d be stepping up right now, potential dangers be damned. She’d be offering to pick up the money, on the condition of Bette going to a hospital, or boarding the most direct flight home.

  But the good sister had been lied to, or seriously misled, and she was at risk of becoming an even bigger sucker, or worse. The only thing that kept Layla from lashing out at Bette was news that she was dying, news that would have brought the good sister to tears. Instead, she was just numb.

  “You’re not going to make it to Phoenix, Bette.”

  “Oh yeah?” Bette pushed herself up from the milk crate, swaying till she found her feet. “Just watch me.”

  As Bette charged ahead, Layla called after her, helpless: “I’m telling Marla!”

  Bette whirled around, thrust a middle finger at Layla. “Fuck you! And fuck Marla!” Then she rounded the building, vanished.

  Anger stilled Layla, like the sun’s growing heat. Yeah, she was fucked all right—out in the middle of nowhere, on a hopeless, failed mission. But now she was free. And she had the means—albeit minimal—to get home.

  Then she imagined Bette passing out at the wheel, swerving into oncoming traffic.

  She imagined Marla and Jake getting the news of Bette’s death, after it had traveled through those slow and wayward channels that surely figured into tragedies involving lone travelers.

  She imagined Marla judging her, after those first waves of grief rolled through: What in God’s name happened to Layla? Doesn’t she have a soul?

  The good sister, the sucker, wasn’t done just yet. At the vroom of the truck’s engine, she raced back to Bette’s side.

  During the next run of miles, they kept silent, fear slowly displacing Layla’s anger. She had no idea how Bette felt, didn’t want to ask. Some of the old distance, the distance Layla had felt on that first road trip, seemed to have settled between them. An hour or so later, Bette’s phone buzzed. She grabbed it from her lap and answered it, listened for a while. Then she said, “Fantastic. Thanks, Wes. I owe you one. And I owe your man in Amarillo, big time.”

  Bette signed off, saying nothing to Layla, offering no explanation of what she must have assumed was clear: the two men in the white car were no longer a problem.

  To Layla, the silence felt like a form of denial. “So, those guys got killed.”

  A new calmness seemed to have descended over Bette. She’d slouched back a bit, free of her obsession with the rear-view mirror. “Let me tell you what Dad used to say: ‘In an ideal world, no blood would ever be shed. But this isn’t an ideal world.’”

  That Bette seemed to regard this saying as some charming heirloom chilled Layla. “That makes me feel a whole lot better. Thanks.”

  Bette shot her a look. When she spoke, each word was a shove. “Those guys would have stopped at nothing to get to the money, Layla. And I don’t feel one ounce of guilt that they’re out of the picture. Neither should you.”

  Layla didn’t feel guilt, which would have required some minimal care for, or connection to, those two men in the car. Still, she was troubled. First, by the ease of this deadly solution, its businesslike expedience. Second, by the fact that half of her blood came from a man who seemed to have no qualms about ordering killings like this.

  Had this endowed her with a greater-than-ordinary comfort with murder? Bette seemed to have inherited this, and maybe Layla just hadn’t put it to the test.

  No, she told herself. None of this is normal. None of this is normal, and you damn well know it.

  Layla understood that there could be consequences, not just for Bette. She herself might be considered guilty by association—by law enforcement, or darker actors.

  She looked out at the flat, brown land, tried to make her mind just as blank. But there was no blotting out her fear. Soon, they were on Route 60, making their way back to 40 West.

  Chapter 16

  Some Chain Diner

  at an Off Hour

  Five months earlier

  The storm-dim emptiness of the diner, the waves of sleet rattling the front window, they made this old meeting spot feel strange to Vic. Like he’d been dropped without notice into the Afterlife, with comfortless echoes of the world as he’d known it, and hints of the hell to come.

  But Wes, he was more than an echo. He sat before Vic in his red cashmere sweater, practically pulsing with life.

  Forever Forty Wes. His slim build and full head of black hair, barely grayed, had earned him the nickname, which continued to be more than justified, though like Vic, Wes was well into his sixties. He was going to outlive everyone who was left in their circle, starting with Vic.

  Yesterday morning, when Wes had called to say, “The deed’s been done,” Vic could have left it at that. Nothing more needed to be known or discussed, about the hit on Cross at least. Still, Vic wanted to get a few things off his chest before his curtain came down for real and for good, things he couldn’t say over the phone. Who else could he tell them to but his closest confidant?

  Wes leaned forward, over what remained of his egg-white omelet. “I have a picture of the damage,” he mumbled, “in case you wanna see for yourself.”

  Apparently, Wes had forgotten that Vic couldn’t stand the sight of blood: a myth, as it happened. But there was no point to such an admission, at this stage in the game.

  “That isn’t why I wanted to meet. And what did I tell you about photos? You better get rid of that thing, especially if it’s on your phone.”

  It used to be that no one could cover his tracks like Wes. But maybe he was more past his prime than outward appearances let on. Even Vic knew that electronic bits of evidence were nothing that could be scrubbed from a floor or buried.

  “Will do,” Wes said.

  Understanding that Wes had had the best of intentions, Vic tried to sound conciliatory. “Anyhow, I take your word as proof. Always have.”

  “I know.”

  Vic glanced at his sweating water glass, regretting the double order of bacon he’d just finished. But he knew that satisfying his thirst would cause the diuretics to kick in, prompting at least one trip to the bathroom.

  Try to limit water to pill time. That’s what he kept telling himself, even as swallowing that daily handful of drugs seemed more and more pointless, like communion for an atheist. Every day he felt weaker, less able to breathe.

  Wes drained his coffee mug and pushed it aside. “So, what’s on your mind?”

  Vic got right to the point: “Cross found out about the money for Bette. That’s why he resurfaced. The only reason.” Why else would he have gotten back in Vic’s face after so many years—after having been convinced, or so it had seemed, that Vic’s coffers were empty? The argument that Wes and the rest of the guys had made, that Cross’s recent overspending on real estate got him shaking every possible money tree—even the seemingly leafless ones—never washed with Vic.

  “How do you know?” Wes’s last slice of multigrain toast had been on its way to his mouth, but now he returned it to his plate.

  “Gut instinct, that’s all I got. But I’d bet my life it’s the truth.” What’s left of my life, Vic thought.

  Part of Vic�
��s gut instinct, or strengthening it, were the nightmares that had started a month or so ago. In them, Cross appeared by Vic’s bed, bearing a pillow and a soulless look in his dark eyes. Before Vic could roll away or shove the pillow aside, it was on his face, smothering him. Eventually, Vic bolted up from this death struggle, awake and gasping for air, realizing he was once again experiencing just another symptom of advanced heart failure. “Sleep-disordered breathing” was the term his doctor had used.

  Surely, these nightmares were born of an undeniable reality, that Cross would have had no qualms about smothering him, if that had meant getting what he’d most wanted: every last cent Vic had put away.

  Things hadn’t always been bad between the two of them, business-wise. In fact, they’d once had something of a partnership.

  Those days, Cross trolled tony suburbs for what he called “golden targets”: the wealthy widow who proudly displayed her silver and kept her jewelry in an unlocked dresser; the gadget-junkie bachelor who golfed every Tuesday morning, leaving treasures behind in his echoing mock Tudor; the rich-boy drug dealer who kept loads of cash in a laundry bag, cleverly mingling it with his stinking tennis whites. It seemed that Cross found the hunt for these targets nearly as rewarding as the score, and he’d been known to attend open houses for pricey homes, pass himself off as a caterer’s aide at lawn parties, and listen for useful gossip at country club bars, where fake member cards gained him entry. There, according to Cross, it wasn’t uncommon for booze to loosen tongues, and get club members bragging about expensive new acquisitions, or about upcoming vacations, sometimes with mentions of dates.

  Although Cross excelled at the up-front work, he was weak on execution. That’s when he turned to Vic, who had the expertise and crew to disable complicated alarm systems, make swift and undetected entries, lifts, and exits, and—in the best of times—turn a single-house hit into a double, or triple. The best of the best of times was the Rose Hills Heist in eighty-five, when a tip from Cross led to a six-house clean-up yielding close to three million.

  Yet, Rose Hills was also the beginning of the end of Vic and Cross’s relationship. Until then, Cross had agreed—albeit grudgingly—to a fifty-fifty split on the target house, with Vic and his crew taking one hundred percent of collateral gains. But with Rose Hills, Cross insisted on half the total take, claiming he was owed it for all the targets he’d provided over the years. Just to get him off his back, Vic paid him a quarter-million extra. A strategy that had failed in the long run.

  Wes laid his fork and knife across his plate, finished. “Your gut’s never steered you wrong. But do you have any theories about how Cross found out about the money? If he found out.”

  “He heard something, maybe. Or was told something.”

  “By who? Your helpers in Phoenix?”

  Wes said “helpers” with the usual resentment. Vic couldn’t blame him for this feeling, but Wes was going to have to keep living with it.

  That commonly criticized phenomenon at poorly run businesses, that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing—Vic had adopted it as a strategy for protecting his assets, the most important of those being the money he’d set aside for Bette and Jake. There was no reason for Wes to have details on the Phoenix operation, and there was no reason for Phoenix to have any connection to Wes, or to any of Vic’s other remaining associates in Reedstown. Because, in Vic’s experience, the greater the number of connections among operatives, the greater the chance of messy entanglements, betrayals, and worse. Even though Wes didn’t like this arrangement, Vic hoped he understood, deep down, that it was safest for everyone, including Wes.

  As for the “helpers” in Phoenix, they amounted primarily to Zav Leos, another old confidant, whom Vic had spoken to just a few days ago, probably for the last time. Then, as always, Zav had that edge of sadness to his voice, an edge Vic first detected after Zav lost his son all those years ago. As a gesture of condolence, Vic started a college fund for Zav’s daughter. But even then he knew that such gestures were next to powerless against grief. The losses of Gene and Sara had taught him all he needed to know on that front.

  “I don’t know who,” Vic said now. “I just have a feeling that info got leaked. A strong feeling.”

  Wes wasn’t entirely off base in suspecting a misfire in Phoenix, where Zav captained a one-man money-laundering ship—for years, a tight and trustworthy one. But he had to stay on top of a growing set of front operations—bars and restaurants, at least two car washes, a mini-golf course, and who knew what else? Maybe Cross had done enough snooping to find a weak link in this network, a link that let on that Vic was one of Zav’s larger investors.

  But no outsider had ever gotten to investors’ cash, because Zav’s security operation was top-notch, the main reason he had attracted so much business. Vic presumed that eventually Cross hit this security wall, giving him no other choice than to approach Vic directly and resurrect old gripes about Rose Hill. Maybe Cross had bet that making the same old arguments loudly enough and long enough would get Vic to cough up a share of the Phoenix money, just to shut him up. He’d bet wrong.

  Vic wiped his hands on his napkin, laid it over his plate. “But that’s not the most important thing right now. Right now, I need you to stay focused on helping Bette get to that money safely, when the time comes. Which’ll be soon, I’m sure.”

  Wes lowered his gaze, looking as troubled as he always did when the subject of Vic’s end came up. Though Vic hated to see this expression on his old friend’s face, he couldn’t help but be moved by it.

  “You know I’ll always do right by her,” Wes said. “And you.”

  “I know. And I hope you know how much that means to me.”

  Vic remembered something else he needed to bring up. “Speaking of money, you got enough for paints and company?”

  “Paints and company” was code for Wes’s two favorite forms of recreation: oil painting and call girls. Years before, Wes had explained the latter expenditure by saying he wasn’t “big on commitment.” But once, after a few too many drinks, he mentioned “the one who got away,” saying little more. Yet the way he’d stared off at the back bar, as if some movie of his lost love were playing there—it told Vic almost everything he needed to know. Whoever she was, she’d hit Wes hard, in a way that had lasted.

  “I had to paint her from memory,” Wes said then. “Capture a bit of her magic.”

  Vic hadn’t seen this particular painting or many of the others, because whenever he visited Wes, the door to his “studio room” was usually closed—like he was ashamed of what lay behind it. But the still life Wes had painted for Vic’s fiftieth birthday (Bowl of Fruit with Lobster) was nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it was museum-worthy, in Vic’s opinion.

  Now, Wes nodded. “Yep. I’m fine.”

  Vic wasn’t entirely convinced. Although he’d paid Wes handsomely over the years—most recently, sixty thousand to take care of Cross—Wes had never been good at managing his finances. And lately, he’d been pissing money away at the casino that had opened the previous year, just an hour’s drive away: not the best strategy for a man on the edge of retirement age.

  As if reading Vic’s mind, Wes said, “I started looking at that investment literature you gave me.”

  “Good.”

  Vic caught the waitress’s eye, signaled for the check.

  The sight of her reminded him of the last thing he wanted to get off his chest. The most difficult thing. Once she’d dropped off the check and moved out of earshot, he spoke up. “You ever hear that expression about dying men seeing the truth?”

  Wes looked at him blankly. “Can’t say I have.”

  Vic readied himself to speak her name, which he hadn’t done for years. He knew it would make her present, but only in painful ways.

  “That feeling I had years ago, about Cross and Sara?” He couldn’t bring himself to say, about Cross mu
rdering Sara. “It’s come back to me, in a physical sense. Like a weight on me. A certainty. And I hate myself for not—” He lowered his voice. “I hate myself for not having him wiped out years ago, before he could do what he did to her.”

  Vic knew that what he’d said might not make sense to Wes. He’d never had anyone killed based purely on a hunch about a wrong they’d done, much less a prediction about a crime that had yet to be committed. But there was no arguing with the way he felt. Just as there’d been no arguing that Sara had killed herself, not in his presence anyhow. Vic knew that she’d never leave Layla, and that the killer had made her death look like a suicide, out of self-preservation.

  Whenever Vic started to imagine what the killer had done to her before ending her, his mind seized up, black and red flashing before his eyes.

  “What about that delivery guy?” Wes said, “Whatever his name was.”

  “Lady Fingers.”

  The nickname they’d given to the pasty-faced, pasty-fingered guy who used to deliver desserts to the Red Rose, and who, according to Sara, used to give her a hard time until Vic came along. At some point when Vic was on the road, Lady Fingers resurfaced at the diner, apparently thinking it was safe to bother her again. Until Wes made it clear to him that it wasn’t. Some months after that, Sara was gone.

  “That guy wasn’t a killer,” Vic said, though he’d allowed Wes to convince him otherwise at the time. Law enforcement was on his trail then, and he was so preoccupied by that, and by the loss of Sara, that he couldn’t think clearly. Definitely not clearly enough to order a hit.

  Within a month of her death, Lady Fingers took himself out, by getting drunk enough to plow his car into a bridge. Problem solved, Vic had told himself then, though he knew that the loss of Sara was nothing that could ever be solved.

  “Cross was the one who did it, I’m sure,” Vic said. “Remember that time at the Red Rose?”

  During one of their last mutual visits to the diner, Vic saw a look on Cross he’d never witnessed before. They’d all—Vic, Cross, Wes, Dave, and Luke—set up shop in their usual booth, and everything was going along as usual when Vic left to take a piss.