by Greg Iles
“Down by the gate. Headlights!”
Chapter 39
Sure enough, a half mile from Parnassus Hill, a pair of blue-white LED headlights sits motionless where the plantation’s gate should be.
“Maybe it’s teenagers,” I suggest, “looking for a place to make out.”
“They’ve come through the gate,” Jet says in a taut voice.
She’s right. Far below, the lights are cutting across the field now, moving fast.
“You think Max called the police?” I ask.
“He couldn’t have. I have his cell phone.”
“Let me see it again.”
She digs into her back pocket and brings out the big smartphone I saw earlier. “That looks like the Samsung he had in my house yesterday.”
“Maybe that’s the landowner down there,” Jet suggests, still watching the headlights. “Maybe he saw Max’s lights earlier, and he’s just now checking them out.”
“No. Mr. Hales would be coming from the direction of his house, not the main gate. Do you think Max could have had two cell phones on him?”
“No. I went through his pockets.”
“Every one?”
“Yes.”
“Then he must have had one in his truck.”
“We just wiped it down! I didn’t see any phone.”
I shake my head in anger and regret. “All I know is that Max is shadier than we ever thought about being. If anybody would carry two phones, it’s him. I kept the truck doors shut so the light would stay off. Maybe it was down in a door pocket or something.”
“Goddamn it!” she curses. “We can’t be this unlucky.”
The headlights are halfway to the hill and moving faster than any trespassing teenager or poacher would likely drive. While other possibilities certainly exist, all my instinct tells me that whoever is in that vehicle was summoned here by the wounded man on top of the hill. If we’re going to get off Parnassus alive, we may have to fight our way down.
The Samsung in Jet’s hand lights up as she punches numbers into it.
“What are you doing?”
“What I should have done the second I found the phone. Trying the passwords from the back of Sally’s necklace.”
“You memorized them?”
She looks up at me like I’m an idiot. It was a stupid question. The public school kids didn’t call Jet “the Brain” without reason. She has an eidetic memory for numbers.
“How can this be?” she asks, stabbing the keypad again. “The only possible phone password of the two is the shorter one, and it doesn’t work. Now we can’t even be sure this phone has the video on it.”
“It might not. Instead of using cash burner phones, Max may have kept two identical Samsung phones to fool Sally. A clone phone.”
Jet shakes her head and stuffs the Samsung back into her pocket. “That car’s got to be some random person, right? Or maybe Hales called the sheriff’s department, thinking we’re poachers.”
“That’s better than the alternative. Although a deputy or game warden will call in Max’s truck if he finds it abandoned.”
“That beats Max running out of the woods yelling that I tried to kill him. I told you we should have finished it back there.”
Knowing what I know now, I’m starting to think she’s right. “If Max called whoever’s in that car, then we know he has another cell phone.”
“Which means I went through all that shit for nothing,” she says in a grim voice.
“Listen. We’re going to sit tight in these trees until that car passes. It could be anybody. Russo and his mob guys. Even Paul—”
“Don’t say that.”
“It could be, Jet. We’re going to get down in our seats. Don’t even breathe when they pass.”
We hunker down below the doorframes, like teenagers on a lover’s lane trying to make themselves invisible to a cop. The headlights have vanished below, which means our new visitor is climbing the hill.
“I know you’re freaking out about what I told you,” she whispers, finding my eyes in the darkness. “Can you still love me?”
“I still love you. Don’t even think about that. It’s just . . . it’s like everything suddenly went four-dimensional. I can’t believe you’ve carried that secret alone for thirteen years.”
“Not alone. I’d welcome carrying it alone. Max has known. That’s the hell of it.”
A dozen new questions rise, but I simply nod in the dark.
“The reason I didn’t tell you before,” she says, “is because I never wanted you to look at Kevin and think of Max. And I never wanted you to make love to me and think of Max.”
“I understand.”
“Would you tell me now if you felt different about me? I mean it.”
“Yes. I just wish I’d known about this when I saw you swing that hammer. I’d have run over there and helped you finish the motherfucker off.”
She squeezes my arm in the dark, then lays her cheek against my shoulder. I strain my ears, listening for the low note of an engine, but I hear only our ticking motor and the high whistle of crickets in the night.
“Whoa,” I whisper, gripping her arm. “The sky just got brighter.”
“I see it.”
A crazed drummer beats out an arrhythmic solo in my chest. I’m praying that nothing on this Explorer reflects light back to the eye of whoever’s behind the wheel of that vehicle. For the first time, I’m glad to be in Dixie Allman’s rust bucket. Without being obvious, I reach down and grip the butt of my pistol, then slide it up into my lap.
The headlight beams grow brighter, turning our windshield into a blue-white trapezoid. An isosceles trapezoid, I think crazily.
“I can’t take this,” Jet whispers, clenching my hand hard enough to cut off circulation. “Fuck, fuck, fuck—”
At the last moment I slide up in my seat, just high enough to see a sleek red car glide silently across my field of vision.
“Did you see that?” I ask. “I know that car. A Tesla Model S. Bright red. There’s only one in the whole town.”
“Warren Lacey,” she says, sliding up in her seat.
So much for Max dying quietly on the hill. Lacey is the doctor whose license Jet got suspended for a year. He’s also a certified Poker Club member. “Max called him,” I tell her. “That’s the only explanation. He’s definitely got another phone up there.”
“Damn it! What do we do now?”
“We can’t do much. But Max calling Lacey is a good sign. He could have called the sheriff, and he didn’t.”
“He could still be dead, right?” she asks. “He could have died after calling Lacey?”
“Absolutely. But we can’t count on that.”
“Marshall, can we please get the hell out of here? If Max leaves with Lacey and they lock the gate, we’ll be stuck.”
“No, we won’t. We can push down some fence posts with this SUV if we have to.”
“What if there are more people on the way? You want Russo and his thugs out here hunting us?”
“No. You’re right. It’s time.”
I pull the parking brake release, wrench the wheel right, and let the Ford roll down onto the road. Then I crank the engine and press the gas pedal harder than I should. The wheels spin in the dirt, then catch and throw us forward.
Squinting through the dark, I start down the perpetual curve that circles the dark hill in its slow descent. Beneath the overhanging trees I can hardly track the left edge of the road, but I can’t hold myself to a crawl. After ten seconds we’re going thirty-five, and in twenty we’re careening down the hill like two kids in a teenage death anthem.
“You want me to slow down?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“No!” she cries, bracing her arms against the dash as we fly through the dark.
She lets out a sigh of relief as we land on level ground. On the flats there’s enough moonlight to see, and I push the Explorer to sixty, then seventy-five across the bean field. Jet rocks forward and back
as though willing the vehicle faster. When we finally shoot through the gate, which is standing open, it feels like blessed deliverance.
“My God,” she gasps. “My God, my God, my God. We made it!”
I click on my headlights and turn hard right onto the dark line of Cemetery Road, headed toward Bienville. After thirty seconds, something lets go in Jet. She shudders and sobs beside me. I reach out and take her hand, trying to calm myself as much as her. I haven’t felt this shaken since Iraq, and no one has even fired a gun tonight. What can she be going through? The prospect of telling me this secret has probably terrified her since before we got back together. Now she’s done it. I should leave her in peace, no question. But nearly everything she told me has raised a question. One flashes like a tower beacon above all the others.
“Jet, can I ask you one more thing? Just one. It’s a tough one.”
She’s still rocking in her seat. “You might as well. We’ll see where we stand.”
“Why did you keep the baby? Were you sure it was Max’s?”
She closes her eyes, and her mouth makes what looks like a painful smile, but she’s still weeping.
“Take your time,” I tell her.
“How can I explain it so that you’ll understand? Paul and I had been trying for so long to have a child. He’d tried suicide, twice. Pills. I found him. You don’t know how he was after that mess in Iraq. Your book ended up making him a hero to a lot of people, but the government barred him from the country. He lost everything that was his, you know? And that broke him. Working for Max is hell for Paul. And not being able to father a child . . . that was the last straw.”
I drive steadily, my eyes on the faded white lines, trying to understand. “Did you know from the start that it was Max who got you pregnant?”
“No. Early on, I didn’t think the baby was his. He’d only been in me that one time. Paul had . . . managed to finish in me three times that month. So the math was on his side. I clung to that. But the further along I got, the more afraid I became. I tried to tell myself I was being irrational, that everything would be okay.” She reaches out and taps the dash with her forefinger. “But some part of me knew.”
I feel her watching my face, searching for the slightest judgment. I do all I can to watch the road without reaction.
“At that point,” she says, “I had two choices. Stay and try to make the best of things, or abort the baby and quit. And when I thought about quitting . . . Marshall, I had so much guilt.”
“Over the rape?”
“No. Over marrying Paul.”
This takes me aback. “What do you mean?”
“I’d married a man I didn’t love. Not really. Not the way I knew love could be. But I’d done it anyway.”
I know where this is going, but I’m not going to challenge her tonight.
She turns in her seat, facing me full-on. “And when I thought about leaving, I’d think, ‘What am I going to do? Start over single at some big law firm? At thirty-three?’ In my mind, you were my refuge. But you’d just gotten married.”
“Please don’t try to put this on me,” I say, despite my intention to remain silent.
“I’m not putting it on you. I’m just saying, what was I supposed to do? Abandon Paul in the state he was in? Let him drink and drug himself to death, so I could have an abortion and go somewhere else to start over from scratch?”
There it is. Max’s crime had been terrible, yet to Jet, living with the result of it had ultimately seemed the sanest path. Was it the lesser of two evils? I wonder. Or simply the path of least resistance? Especially as long as she could keep her doubt alive.
“Do you know for sure that Max is the father? Like, DNA sure?”
She nods once. “I didn’t intend to get a test. I’d have been perfectly happy never knowing beyond a shadow of doubt. But Max got one done.”
“How’d he manage that?”
“He stole some hairs from a baseball cap he’d given Kevin on his first birthday. He had them tested in secret. That’s what he told me, anyway.”
“You never saw a report? Max could be lying.”
“He tried to show me the test results, but I refused to look. I didn’t need to, Marshall. I’ve seen Max in Kevin’s face and body ten thousand times. A hundred thousand. And it kills me every time. I think it’s driven me close to crazy.”
“No one else saw the resemblance?”
“Of course they did.” Exasperation has entered her voice. “But why should that bother anybody? To other people, Max is Kevin’s grandfather by blood.”
A pair of headlights appears in the distance. Totally normal, yet the sight of them nudges up my stress level.
“And Sally? She never suspected?”
“No, thank God.”
This I find hard to believe. “She never said anything to you. That’s all you know for sure.”
Jet is shaking her head. “She never knew, Marshall. Sally would have said something.”
Despite Jet’s certainty, I’m starting to wonder about Sally’s suicide. “Didn’t you tell me Sally tried to talk to you on the day before she died?”
She runs her hands back through her hair, then shakes her head with sudden violence. “Are you suggesting she killed herself because she figured out the truth about Kevin?”
I look away from the road long enough to see the last of Jet’s emotional fortitude crumble. She bends over as though she might throw up, then covers her eyes with her left hand.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m just trying to understand it all. Because if Max is still alive, we’ve got big problems. I need to figure out what he might do. Sally’s death never made sense to me, not as a suicide.”
“Until now, you mean.”
“Well . . . I never believed that bullshit alibi about Nadine’s mother. But if Sally figured this out . . . she really might not have been able to live with it.”
The headlights are almost upon us, undimmed by the rude driver behind them. The interior of the Explorer fills with light, and Jet shields her swollen eyes with her hand. After the truck roars past, I say, “What if Sally didn’t figure it out? What if Max told her the truth that night?”
“Why would he? To purposefully hurt her? He’s threatened to tell Paul before, even Kevin. But never Sally. Not first.”
Yet another epiphany rocks my perception of the situation. “Think about this. If Sally knew about Kevin, why would she kill herself? Why not Max? Seriously. Maybe she did try to kill him that night, and they struggled over the gun. Maybe Max killed her out of self-defense. But he can’t explain that to anybody without revealing the truth about Kevin.”
“Don’t say that,” Jet whispers. “Don’t even think that. I can’t deal with that.”
As much as she wants to avoid all culpability in Sally’s death, that scenario sounds more reasonable than anything else has to me. “There’s only one thing that makes me believe that’s not it,” I think aloud.
“What?”
“The blackmail cache she made. The one that’s scaring the Poker Club to death. That shows premeditation on Sally’s part. That’s the piece that doesn’t add up, no matter what kind of math you use. She puts together something that can destroy not only Max but all his partners, then doesn’t use it. Why?”
“I can’t think about it right now,” Jet says in an exhausted voice. “I can’t think at all.”
“We have to figure this out. Sally gave that cache to somebody else. Why? What were they supposed to do with it?”
“Didn’t they send you a piece of it? That PDF file?”
“I don’t know who sent me that. It could have been the person with the cache, but I don’t know for sure.”
Jet is thinking again; I can see it in her rigid posture. “All I know is this,” she says. “If Sally really figured out that Max is Kevin’s father, the only thing she would have cared about was making sure Paul and Kevin never learned the truth. And framing Max for murder wouldn’t guarantee his silenc
e. He could broadcast it live from death row if he wanted to. Farewell world, I’m Kevin Matheson’s father!”
This nightmarish image makes me shudder. “I can actually see Max doing that. You’re right. So we haven’t got to it yet. The bottom of all this.”
We ride in silence for a mile or so, and three cars pass us in that time. We’re not far from the eastern edge of Bienville. Before I can even filter my thought, I say, “Paul never suspected that Kevin might not be his?”
Jet turns to me, and this time I see something in her eyes that’s hard to look at—her awareness of her husband’s weakness and his potential for lethal overreaction.
“If even a germ of that thought was born in Paul’s head,” she says, “he would crush it. He’d kill himself before he’d admit that’s the reality of our lives.” She touches a finger to her lips. “Maybe that’s what he’s been doing all these years.”
It’s nearly impossible for me to believe that this has been Jet’s existence for more than a decade. Since the year before my son was born, she has lived with this lie every minute of every day, knowing that at any moment Max could blow her family apart. I’m surprised she didn’t kill him years ago. Or herself.
“I don’t know how you’ve stood the stress.”
She sits back in her seat and exhales slowly. “I’m not sure I have. What do they call people like me in war? Walking wounded?”
“Did Max ever let you forget about it?”
She stares into an invisible void between us, the way I saw guys in war zones do after getting bad news from home. “Honestly? For the first eight or nine years, it was fine. Max kept his distance. And Kevin was such a gift that he accomplished the impossible. You know how people say babies can’t save a marriage? They don’t know what they’re talking about. Kevin was literally Paul’s salvation. He redeemed us.”
I recall the miraculous effect my own son had upon me. He was the only tonic that ever eased my grief for my brother. “Believe it or not, I understand.”
“I know you do.”
She reaches out and takes my hand again. We’re in the periphery of Bienville. There are more cars on the road, and I see the first highway lights a half mile ahead. “When did Max start to change?”