“Apparently,” he said, “everything.”
“No,” she said, “just faith.”
He gave his own reflection a rueful smile. “Like I said . . .”
Brian texted Haya from the interstate. For the second time in twenty-four hours, he didn’t like her response.
As agreed upon, he wrote,
How’s everything?
If everything was all right, she was supposed to write back,
Perfect.
If anything had gone wrong, she was supposed to respond,
Everything’s fine.
After fifteen minutes, she sent a text back:
All OK.
In Woonsocket, he directed her up the main hill and then south several blocks. They turned onto a dusty scar of a street that dead-ended at a mound of landfill, crumbled Sheetrock, and bent rebar. From there they had a perfect view of the river and the mill and the night watchman’s house. He pulled a pair of binoculars from the glove box and adjusted the focus as he looked down at the house.
“The pantry shade is still up,” he said.
The sparrow flapped twice in her chest.
He handed the binoculars to her and she saw for herself. “Maybe she forgot.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“But you were pretty clear with your instructions.”
“But I was pretty clear with my instructions,” he agreed.
They sat and watched the house for a while, passing the binoculars back and forth, looking for movement of any kind. Once Rachel thought she saw the shade of the far left window on the second floor move, but she couldn’t swear to it.
Still, they knew.
They knew.
Her stomach eddied and for a moment the Earth’s atmosphere felt too thin.
After a little more watching, Brian took the wheel and they drove back down through the neighborhood and he drove a bit beyond where he had last night and approached the mill from a few blocks farther north. They entered the grounds from an old trucking route that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, and in daylight the skeleton of the mill was both more pathetic and more resplendent, like the sun-bleached bones of a slaughtered god king and his once-majestic retinue.
They found the pickup truck parked a few yards into the shell of the building closest to the river. There was no northern wall left and most of the second floor was gone. The truck was a beast of a machine, a black full-size Sierra, all hard form and function, its wheels and sides splattered with dried mud.
Brian put his hand on the hood. “It’s not hot but it’s a little warm. They haven’t been here too long.”
“How many?”
He looked in the cab. “Hard to tell. Seats five. But I doubt they’d bring five.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Manpower’s expensive.”
“So’s losing seventy million,” she said.
He looked around the mill for a bit and she knew him well enough to know this was how he processed, his eyes clocking his surroundings without actually seeing them.
“You want to confront them?” she said.
“I don’t want to.” He widened his eyes. “But I don’t see a choice.”
“We could skip returning to the house and just run from here.”
He nodded. “You’re willing to leave Haya and the baby behind?”
“We could call the police. Haya doesn’t know anything. She can easily claim ignorance.”
“If the police show up, what’s to stop the guys inside from shooting Haya and the baby? Or shooting the cops? Or entering into a standoff with hostages?”
“Nothing,” she admitted.
“So do you still want to hit the road? Leave them behind?”
“Do you?”
“Asked you first.” He shot her the tiniest of smiles. “What’s it that asshole said to you in Haiti?”
“‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”
Brian nodded.
“Can you get us out of here?” she asked.
“I can get you out of here. Can’t get myself out of here the way you’ve fixed it, but I can get you out, honey bunch.”
She ignored the dig. “Right this second?”
He nodded. “Right this second.”
“What’re our chances?”
“Our chances?”
“My chances,” she said.
“About fifty-fifty. Every hour, they drop five percent in Cotter-McCann’s favor. We add a terrified woman and a baby—that’s if we can extricate them from guys who know how to use firearms a lot better than we do—your odds of success drop even further.”
“So right now the odds are about even. But if we go up to that house”—she pointed at the other end of the mill—“it’s more likely we die.”
His eyes widened a little more and he nodded repeatedly. “Way more likely, yeah.”
“And if I say I want to run, you’ll just take me out of here now?”
“I didn’t say that. I said it was an option.”
She looked up through the blackened rafters and the shredded roof at the blue sky. “There’s no option.”
He waited.
“All four of us go.” She took several quick breaths and it made her light-headed. “Or none of us do.”
“Okay,” he whispered and she could see he was as terrified as she was. “Okay.”
She dropped the hammer. “Haya speaks perfect English.”
He squinted at her.
“She grew up in California. She was gaming Caleb.”
He let loose a high chuckle of disbelief. “Why?”
“So he’d rescue her from a shitty life, it sounds like.”
Brian shook his head so many times he resembled a dog after a bath. Then he smiled. The old Brian smile—surprised to be surprised by the turns of the world and somehow tickled at the same time.
“Well, shit,” he said, “I finally like her.” He nodded once. “She told you?”
Rachel nodded.
“Why?”
“So we’d know not to abandon her.”
“I’m not above leaving her behind,” he said simply. “Never was. But I wouldn’t leave Caleb’s kid up there to die. Not even for seventy million.”
He lifted the cover over the tire jack compartment in the Rover and came back with a short ugly shotgun with a pistol grip.
“How many guns do you need?” she asked.
He looked off in the direction of the house as he loaded shells into the gun. “You’ve seen me shoot—I suck. A shotgun levels the playing field a bit.” He shut the hatchback.
Whatever he’d just claimed about being unable to leave Caleb’s daughter behind, it didn’t alter the fact that he could kill her right now with that ugly weapon. It wouldn’t be the rational choice necessarily, but at this point rational choice was a luxury in the rearview mirror.
It didn’t seem to be the first thing on his mind, though, so she opened the driver’s door of the truck. The floor mat was caked with dried mud. She craned her head over the seat and saw the floor mat on the passenger seat was crusted with the same. Wherever they’d been searching for her or Brian lately, they’d walked through some dirt to do it. She opened the rear driver’s-side door—the mats back there were pristine. She could still smell the showroom in the rubber.
She showed it to Brian. “There are only two of them.”
“Unless the other car’s parked somewhere else.”
She hadn’t considered that. “I thought you were Mr. Positive Thinking.”
“We’ll call this an off fucking day then.”
“I mean—” She started but couldn’t finish the thought. Her hand dropped back to her side. She felt closer to vomiting than she had in a while. She mentioned this to Brian.
“Where’s a Scientologist when you need one, uh?” He pointed the shotgun down the end of the building, past mounds of dirt and trash and all the pieces of wall that had been torn out when the scavengers came for the copper wire. �
�Right at the end there’s a set of stairs. You go down them and you find a really small tunnel.”
“A tunnel?”
He nodded. “Caleb and me dug it over the last couple months. When you thought I was out of the country.”
“Lovely.”
“Figured if we were ever in that house and we had time to see the opposition coming for us, we’d scoot out, get over here, and make a run for it pretty much from where we’re standing now. You can go down—”
“I can?”
“We can, yeah. We’ll crawl over there and—”
“How tight is this tunnel?”
“Oh, it’s bad,” he said. “It’s more like a trough. If I ate a pizza right now, I’d probably get stuck in there.”
“I’m not doing that,” she said.
“You’d rather die?” He waved the shotgun like it was an extension of his arm.
“I’d rather die above ground than below it, yes.”
“You got a better idea?” It came out sharply.
“I haven’t even heard yours. All I’ve heard is the word ‘tunnel.’ And point that fucking thing at the ground, would you?”
He considered the shotgun. He shrugged an apology and pointed it at the ground.
“My plan,” he said calmly, “is that we take the tunnel under the house. We come up in the back bedroom on the first floor. We come out into the house, while they’re peeking out the windows for us.”
“And what’s to stop them from shooting us then?”
“We’ll have the drop on them?”
“The drop?” she said.
“Yes.”
“They’re professionals. A good man with a gun can’t defeat a bad man with a gun if the bad man is at ease in violent confrontation and the good man is not.”
“Fine,” he said, “your turn.”
“What?”
“Your turn,” he repeated. “Give me a better idea.”
She took a minute. It was hard to think over the terror. Hard for any word to find space in her brain besides Run.
She told him her idea.
When she finished, he chewed his lower lip and then the inside of his mouth and then his upper lip. “It’s good.”
“You think?”
He stared at her, as if judging how honest he could afford to be. “No,” he eventually admitted, “it’s not. But it’s better than mine.”
She stepped up close to him. “There’s one big problem with it.”
“Which is?”
“If you don’t do your part, I’m dead within a minute.”
He said, “Maybe even less.”
She took a step back and flipped him the bird. “So how do I know you’ll hold up your end?”
He pulled the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and offered her one. She waved it off. He put one between his lips, lit it, and returned the pack to his pocket.
“Be seeing you, Rachel.” He gave her a small shrug and walked off through the mill toward the night watchman’s house and never looked back.
35
FAMILY PHOTO
She drove the Range Rover along the train tracks that ran between the mills and the river. She left the tracks just past the last redbrick building and bounced over cinder block and boulders, and hoped that none of the things scraping the underside of the vehicle was strong enough or angled in such a way that it could puncture the gas tank. She bounced along until she found the little road Brian had described and then she was clinging to the backside of the hill that led up to the night watchman’s house.
Near the top, she stood on the gas and lurched up and over the ridge, the Rover tilting hard to the left, so hard she feared she’d tip over, so she went against her natural instincts and pressed down even harder on the gas, and the vehicle slammed back down on all four wheels and shot up into the clearing behind the house.
Both Ned and Lars came out on the back porch. They were armed. Ned cocked his head at her in surprise but also triumph, a look in his small eyes that she’d seen plenty of times in her life, a look that never failed to make her feel tiny and yet outraged at the same time:
Stupid girl.
She put the Rover in park and stepped out of it, keeping it between her and the porch.
“Don’t run,” Ned said. “We’ll just have to chase you. And the story will end the same way but with us just a bit more fucking perturbed.”
Ned had the Glock he’d killed Caleb with in his hand, the silencer already attached. The soundtrack of her death, she feared, would be a soft pffft. Then again, Lars cradled a large hunting rifle, the kind she imagined could take down a bear, so maybe her death would come with a bang.
They both walked off the porch at the same time.
She pointed her pistol across the hood at them and said, “Stay there.”
Ned held up his hands, looked over at Lars. “I think she’s got us.”
Was Brian somewhere safe, watching the scene play out with a smile on his face?
Lars kept walking toward the Rover. But he did so on a diagonal line. And so did Ned. But in the opposite direction. So that each step they took brought them closer to her yet farther from each other.
“Fucking stop.”
Lars sauntered a few more steps before he did.
It was quite possible Brian kept a backup passport. He could just let her die and go spend all the money.
“What’s this?” Ned said. “Red Light, Green Light?”
He took two steps toward her.
Brian, she wanted to scream. Brian!
She extended her arm across the hood. “I said stop.”
“You didn’t say red light.” He took another step.
“Stop!” Her voice bounced off the house and echoed down the hill.
Ned’s voice stayed level and smooth. “Rachel, you’ve seen some movies, I’m sure, where little girls with guns hold off big bad guys with guns. But, honey, it doesn’t work that way in real life. You let us come off that porch. And then you let us get meaningful separation from each other. Which means that now, in this real life of ours, you can’t shoot both of us before one of us shoots you. Instead, I’ll shoot you or he will and it’s not gonna be real hard to pull off.”
Brian, Jesus. Where the fuck are you? Did you abandon me?
Her hand shook enough that she placed her elbow to the hood of the Rover to steady it. She pointed the gun at Ned, but that left her unable to cover Lars.
Ned cocked an eyebrow at her elbow vibrating off the hood. “See what I’m talking about?”
Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Did you forsake me?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lars take two more steps.
“Please,” she said. “Just don’t move.”
Ned smiled at that. Checkmate.
From upstairs, the baby cried.
Lars looked up at the sound. Ned kept his eyes on Rachel.
And Brian stepped out on the porch, leveled the shotgun, and pulled the trigger.
The blast entered Lars’s back. It exited his front while the rifle was still in his arms. Pieces of buckshot and pieces of Lars hit the passenger side of the Rover and the rifle left his arms and landed on the hood. Lars went to his knees, and she shot Ned.
She couldn’t actually remember squeezing the trigger but she must have because he shouted as if he were shouting at a ref making a bad call at a sporting event, a dismayed and disgusted “Ahhhhhhhh,” and then he toppled back against the porch steps and she could see the gun was no longer in his hand.
She came around the Rover, kept the gun pointed at him. He watched her come, watched Brian come too, pointing that shotgun at him. Brian’s arm shook—hers, to her surprise, did not anymore—but it didn’t much matter when you were talking about a shotgun.
Lars made a soft thud when his face planted in the dirt.
She picked up Ned’s gun. She held on to it and put her own in the waistband of her jeans. Then they were both standing in front of him, wondering what they were going to do.
The hole she’d put in Ned was in his shoulder. His left arm drooped, as if there were nothing to hold it up anymore, so she presumed her bullet had shattered his collarbone.
He looked at her, breathing shallowly through his mouth. He looked forlorn and lost, a salesman at the end of a bad week. The blood spread down his off-white shirt and soaked the left side of his jacket, one of those plaid, fleece-lined shirt-jackets a lot of construction workers wear.
“Where’s your cell phone?” Brian said.
Ned grimaced as he reached into the right pocket of his corduroy pants. He handed Brian a flip phone.
Brian opened it, scrolled through the call log and then the texts.
“When did you arrive?” he asked.
“’Bout nine,” Ned said.
Brian opened one of his texts. “You told someone ‘We got C.’ What’s that mean?”
“Perloff’s wife was Objective C. You’re Objective A.” He gave Rachel a weary flick of the head. “She’s B.”
The baby wailed again, muffled by glass and distance.
“Where’s Haya?” Rachel said.
“Tied up upstairs,” Ned said. “Same room as the baby. Baby’s in the crib, and she’s not climbing-out age yet. They’re not going anywhere.”
Brian rechecked the call log and then the texts again. He pocketed the phone. “No texts or calls since nine-thirty. Why?”
“Nothing to report. We were waiting on you, Brian. Didn’t think you’d show.”
“What’s your name?” Rachel asked.
“What difference does it make?” Ned said.
Rachel couldn’t argue the point one way or the other.
Brian said, “How’d you find this place?”
Ned blinked a few times, hissed at the pain as he adjusted his position on the steps. “Dummy corp’s docs on your partner’s laptop. Same company that rented the mining probes out of Jakarta two years ago bought this place.”
“Where else are you looking?”
“Sorry,” Ned said. “Even if I could help you—and I’d probably serve up everything I know for a bottle of water right now—I’m only looped in on what applies to my project and my department, no one else’s.”
Rachel retrieved a bottle of water from the Rover, went to hand it to Ned, but he was struggling one-handed with his wallet, thumbing out a photograph. He dropped the wallet to the porch. Now, if she really wanted to know, she could pick it up and look at his license to learn his name. She left it there.
Since We Fell Page 35