by Greg Iles
“Beau, listen,” I started. “I’m telling you the truth. I haven’t even—”
“Wrap his head again,” Holland ordered, getting to his feet. “Go till he gives me the name.”
Farner laughed in anticipation of taking out his hatred of Holland on me. Then he wrapped the cold towel around my head once more, binding it to the bench. I strained my back and neck hard enough to snap ligaments, even break bones, but I couldn’t evade the little cascade of water falling onto the towel.
I’m drowning again.
I gasp, breathe water, choke, suck in more water. A man screams questions in my ear, over and over, but I can’t give him what he wants. They tip the bench to drain my windpipe, give me a few sips of air, then start again. My chest muscles burn as the animal inside claws between my heart and sternum. My brain feels like it’s being squeezed out of my ears. In the epicenter of my terror, a shattering truth blooms like a silent, slow-motion explosion, answering a question that has haunted me for years—
This is what my son felt as he sank to the bottom of that swimming pool. Above him, the surface lay utterly silent, or rippled under a breeze, reflecting the muffled crystalline laughter of women’s voices from inside the condo. But at the bottom my little boy endured this horror with no comprehension of what was happening to him.
He knew only that he was alone.
“WHO SENT THIS EMAIL?” roars the voice.
“He’s not hearing you. He’s out of it. Give him a second. We may have to turn him over again.”
I’ve been plunged into the most Kafkaesque nightmare imaginable: being killed for information I don’t have.
“Come on! We need to clear his trachea and sinuses!”
Someone twists my neck, and the towel is ripped away again.
“Let’s lay the whole bench over this time,” says the man in the hood. “He’s gray.”
As they take hold of the bench and tilt me left, a door opens and slams against a wall, reverberating through the tiled room.
“Sheriff Iverson says stop,” says a new voice.
“Stop?” says Farner. “Why?”
“I ain’t paid to ask questions like that. Sheriff says stop, you fuckin’ stop. Put him in the drunk tank.”
“This is absurd,” Beau Holland declares. “Iverson said I should stop? Has he talked to Claude Buckman?”
“All I know is Arthur Pine is on his way to talk to this guy. Right now.”
“The lawyer?” Farner asks. “That slimy bastard?”
“Judas is what he is,” says Holland.
“Get that fool dried off!” yells the deputy. “Throw him in the drunk tank like the sheriff said.”
Arthur Pine comes to the bars of the drunk tank alone. Even at this hour he’s wearing a suit, a brown pinstripe. It’s plain from his expression that he’d rather be anywhere but here. I’m sitting on a metal shelf bed jutting from the wall, and I don’t get up. Ten minutes after they brought me here, I started vomiting water and stomach acid. Most of it I managed to get into the toilet hole, but the rest is on the floor.
“Say what you’ve got to say,” I croak, and my ribs scream in protest. “I won’t be getting up.”
Pine watches me without saying anything.
“Your minions just waterboarded me.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Fuck you, Arthur. My father’s in the hospital, probably dying, and I’m getting waterboarded by your Poker Club brownshirts.”
“Then why in God’s name did you hit Max with a hammer? Surely you knew something like this would happen?”
I carefully hug my ribs, trying to muffle the pain to a manageable level.
“Were you trying to get that video from him?” Pine speculates. “Seems like a waste, since we already have it.”
“Do you? Because I’d be damned surprised to learn that a survivor like Max Matheson gave you his only hole card.”
A flinch in Pine’s face tells me my guess hit home.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” I tell him. “I don’t care about Max’s video. Because he can’t use it.”
Now I have the lawyer’s attention. “Why is that?”
“Think about that tonight during sleepy time, okay?”
“If you didn’t attack him to get the video, then why? Surely you don’t think he really killed Buck Ferris?”
“Beau Holland killed Buck Ferris. Dave Cowart helped him. Maybe Russo, too.”
Pine moves to his left, trying to make direct eye contact with me. “What’s going on between you and the Matheson family? And why the hell did Sally kill herself? Or did Max kill her?”
“You don’t know?”
Pine sighs in frustration. “I know that whatever’s wrong at the heart of that family is tied to the cache. It wouldn’t have been put together except for whatever this thing is.”
I say nothing.
“Does it have something to do with you?”
“Max wouldn’t tell you?”
“Max hasn’t been particularly helpful.”
At last I look up and smile with a confidence I don’t feel. “You think I’m going to tell you things I didn’t tell Holland and his waterboarding team?”
Arthur Pine looks like he’s on the verge of telling me something, but he doesn’t. Instead, he studies me the way he might some animal of passing interest during a forced trip to the zoo.
“How long have you guys known about Sally’s cache, Arthur?”
He hesitates, then answers, probably figuring I have no way to record him. “Sally called one of us about fifteen minutes before she died. She revealed the existence of the cache at that time.”
Now I’m learning something of value. “Why would she do that?”
“I think she was going to kill herself, but she wanted to make sure the cache accomplished what she wanted it to.”
“Which was what? Destroy Max?”
Pine shakes his head. “No. Max knows something that would traumatize his family. Something personal—nothing business related. Sally told us we had to make sure he never reveals it. If he does, not only Max but also the members of the Poker Club will be destroyed.”
At last, I think. Arthur doesn’t have enough information to understand Sally’s plan, but I do. At some point she must have figured out that Max had fathered his “grandson” by their daughter-in-law. Sally probably knew it was rape, but rather than confront Jet about something so uncomfortable, she decided to take things into her own hands—to make sure that neither Paul nor Kevin ever learned the truth about Kevin’s paternity. By framing Max for her own murder, Sally could prevent him from playing any role in the boy’s life—or, God forbid, ever getting custody of him. But Sally also knew her husband well enough to know that making Max rot in prison wouldn’t necessarily silence him. To do that, she’d have to put him under perpetual fear of death. She solved that problem with ruthless elegance. By placing every member of the Poker Club at risk of imprisonment, Sally ensured that they would keep Max quiet.
It’s a miracle they didn’t kill him outright, I think, to remove all risk of him destroying the Poker Club.
“How,” I ask Pine, “do you stop Max from revealing a secret when you don’t know what the secret is?”
He smiles in appreciation of the problem. “You let him know he’s one cunt hair from being dead already.”
“That sounds like Tommy Russo’s department.”
Pine shrugs. “Tommy knows how to deliver a message.”
For a time we simply look at each other, until it strikes me that Pine being here makes no sense. Surely he didn’t come for a casual chat. And I was so happy to escape the shower room that I haven’t bothered to ask why they stopped torturing me.
“How does this end, Arthur? What are you doing here? Why did Buckman make Beau stop torturing me?”
Pine reaches into his pocket and takes out a cigarette, then lights it and takes a drag like it’s the elixir of life.
“Take it
easy there, Arthur. You’ll blow a lung.”
“I allow myself one a day. This seems like a good time.”
“So, what are you doing here?”
He takes another greedy hit, then blows the smoke away from the bars. “We’ve been contacted by your accomplice.”
I go still. My accomplice?
“He spoke to Claude and provided some bona fides that have altered the situation profoundly.”
Who the hell is he talking about? “It’s about damn time. Past time, in fact.”
“You’re probably going to be getting out of here before long.”
“At what price?”
Pine shifts uncomfortably. “What happened in the shower room earlier was a mistake. Chalk that up to Beau Holland’s account. Rest assured that you’ll be compensated for pain and suffering. As you know from our meeting this morning, the club is prepared to be quite generous to acquire Sally’s materials.”
I make the mistake of shifting on the bed, and my ribs shriek again. “Do you think this is a negotiation, Arthur?”
He gives me the smile of the eternal fixer. He could have been a clerk under Pontius Pilate. “If it weren’t, whoever has the cache would already have gone public with it. And you’d be dead. As it is, your accomplice won’t deal until he sees you alive.”
That’s the best news I’ve heard all year. “What makes Claude and Donnelly think we’ll deal once you let me out of here?”
“You were ready to make a deal at midday.”
“You yanked that deal off the table.”
“That wasn’t my call.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Arthur. You had a vote. This afternoon you thought Max’s little porn video would keep me in line. You were cocky enough to shut down the paper and ruin my father based on that belief. Now you want to kiss and make up? What’s changed?”
He finishes off his cigarette with one ferocious pull. “Your accomplice has more sensitive information than we first imagined.”
“Translation, Buckman’s shitting his geriatric diaper.”
Pine wrinkles his lips in disgust.
“So, when do I get out?”
“That’s not my call, either. But it shouldn’t take long.”
“Then how about letting me get some sleep?”
“Tell me one thing first. What is this secret Max knows?”
The prurient light in Pine’s eyes tells me his interest is purely personal. He wants to know the intimate sins of Max’s life. Or is even that a business interest? Secrets are weapons to be hoarded for future use.
When the lawyer realizes that I don’t intend to answer, he says, “The club can make you whole again, Marshall. Think about what you’re going to need to put all this behind you.”
At last I let him see my hatred and disgust unmasked. I should keep my mouth shut until I’m free from this building, but all my instinct tells me they have no choice but to let me out. “What if I need your hide, Arthur? I told you today that I’m going to get you.”
“Don’t make this personal. It’s only business.”
“Yeah? Here’s how I see it. If my father dies this week, you killed him. You, Holland, Russo, Cowart, Buckman, Donnelly . . . the whole club. And I will balance that out. Think about that while you’re driving home.”
Pine taps the bars with a manicured nail. “Losing a father isn’t easy. I can still feel the pain like yesterday.”
“If you were the best he could do, your father was a failure.”
He gives me a cynic’s smile. “And yours is a drunk with one foot in the grave. That’s life.”
“Mine did some good in his time.”
Pine pushes off the bars and walks to the big metal door. “All this will look different in the morning. You’ll want your old life back.”
“Maybe. But no matter how this turns out, you’re part of the price.”
The lawyer turns and looks back at me. “Why me, more than the others? They’re the real power in the club.”
I struggle to my feet and walk to the bars. Every step sends a bolt of pain through my torso. “I’m not sure. Maybe because you’re the soulless drone who greases the track for the fat boys on top. The flunky who brings the devil coffee. You shine his shoes and defend him in court, and on TV. Right now the country’s full of empty suits like you. I met them every day in D.C. Buckman and the other big boys will go down in the end. But hacks like you tend to slip through the cracks when payback is handed out. I just want you to know that when that day comes, I’m going to make sure you don’t.”
Pine looks back in silence for maybe ten seconds. Then he raps on the door, which is opened from without. After he goes through, it closes behind him with a heavy clang.
I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait for freedom, but there’s no point sitting here trying to figure out who my “accomplice” is. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough. Half my ribs feel cracked or broken. All I want to do right now is forget what it means to drown in a small room on dry land. Curling into a fetal position on the hard, piss-smelling shelf, I blank my mind to everything I saw or heard over the past twelve hours.
The nightmares that come in the fetid darkness of the drunk tank are horrible. Drowning dreams, drowning and sinking, my brother and my son. Nothing I haven’t endured before, only now I have a more visceral understanding of the experience. But at some point, I find myself flying low over the big river at night, like a gliding bird. Ahead, in the moonlight, something floats in the shining water, half-submerged. It’s a man, floating faceup. I swoop lower, accelerating as I descend, expecting to see the face of my brother frozen at eighteen, like the young Elvis on his postage stamp. But as I come even with the body, it’s my father’s face I see staring skyward from the water. His eyes are open but lifeless, or else they’re looking far beyond me, to a sight I’ll be denied until I, too, undergo the final transformation. Passing above his supine form, I realize that—like Paul Matheson—I know something I did not realize I knew. I know what my mother meant when she asked me if I’d punished my father enough. What I don’t know is whether he’ll live long enough for me to ask his forgiveness.
Chapter 43
Cool air hits me like a spray of water as I push through the doors to leave the sheriff’s department. My Flex is parked out front, halfway up the block. A female deputy gave me back my keys and cell phones as I left, both phones powered up. She didn’t give me back my father’s gun.
My iPhone reads 3:17 a.m. The moon has fallen behind the downtown buildings. Paranoia tells me to power down both phones before I leave this area, but as my thumb moves to do it, a text from what appears to be a blurred out email address pops up on my iPhone. It reads: There’s probably a tracker on your vehicle. Maybe even someone waiting to follow. Shut off your phone. Pretend to go to Flex, then cut through the alley at middle of block. Run it! I’ll be waiting. You’ll know.
Unless the Poker Club is about to have me murdered, the text must be from my unknown “accomplice.” Instead of standing on the sidewalk second-guessing myself, I walk up the block toward the Flex, switching off my phones as I go. The alley mentioned in the text is ahead on my left, opposite my vehicle. Using my key fob, I remotely unlock the Flex, which also turns on its interior lights. But as I come even with the door, I break left at a sprint.
I can still run. A hundred yards will take me to the end of the alley, and I can cover that in twelve seconds, even in street clothes. Halfway down the alley, I see a car pull across the opening at the end, its headlights switched off. I guess that’s my ride.
Churning my legs as hard as I can, I recognize the waiting car as a Mazda Miata convertible with its top up. I don’t know anyone who drives that make of car, but beggars can’t be choosers. I run full-out until my hands slap into the fabric top.
“Get in!” shouts a male voice.
When I open the door, dual shocks of recognition and confusion go through me. The driver is Tim Hayden, Adam’s old tennis coach.
“You?”
I say, astonished.
Hayden grins like a teenager playing a prank on the police. “Every second you stand there you’re risking our lives.”
I get into the convertible. Hayden guns the motor, which slams the door and pushes me back against the seat.
“You have the cache?” I ask, staring at him in disbelief.
His eyes glued to the rearview mirror, Hayden wrenches the Miata through a ninety-degree turn, then slows as if looking for a turn. “I’m about to turn again, then slow down. When I say ‘go,’ climb through the window. If you open your door, the light will come on. Just go as fast as you can. I’ll make sure you don’t kill yourself.”
“Where am I going?”
He brakes hard, turns sharply left again. “Five seconds. You won’t see me again tonight.”
“Where are you going?”
“To lead a wild-goose chase. Go!”
He slows but doesn’t stop. Stuffing my long frame through the small window is no easy task, but I manage it by going headfirst. Hayden brakes just enough for me to land without killing myself. Then his motor whines, the Mazda fishtails, and he’s flying down the remainder of the alley.
There’s so little light here, he might as well have left me on the seafloor. Somebody has obviously knocked out some bulbs.
“Marshall!” comes an urgent hiss. “Over here.”
I can’t place the source of the voice. Then a tiny LED flashes like a supernova in the dark. Abandoning caution, I move toward the blue-white flare. As I near it, a soft hand grabs my wrist and says, “Through here.”
A vertical bar of light opens in the blackness. The hand pushes me through it and the door shuts behind me. Then the snick of a cigarette lighter precedes the bloom of a candle flame. By its light I see Nadine Sullivan looking up at me.
“Are you all right?” she asks. “Did they hurt you?”