Michael drove the three of them out to the contest site, a secluded wedge of beach tucked into a crease in Montauk’s dun-colored bluffs. They’d found the ocean in chaos, waves running east to west across the rock reef, breaking at cockeyed angles. Simon had been overpowered by the raw swell, flaming out in the first round, while hours later Kippler lost in the finals to a lanky semipro kid from Babylon. Sometime during the blustery afternoon, Michael had driven back into town, to seek refuge at a bar; Simon hitched a ride and found him in the bar’s parking lot, after dark, stretched across the backseat of the family car, head wedged awkwardly into the crook between seat and door, his mouth slack, a white crust smeared across one corner. The four of them ended up spending the night in a motel off the Sunrise Highway after Michael declared he wasn’t interested in dealing with the drive home. Simon remembered the fury in his sister’s eyes, fury at the embarrassment that was their father. Simon had found it difficult to summon the same immediate anger; he simply added Michael’s behavior to the long list of grievances he nurtured, more water on the sickly plant of his resentment. He remembered returning from the trip more worried about Amelia and Ray than about his father.
Now, seven years later, he drove the same route he’d just traveled in his memory, stretches of dark road punctuated by clusters of one-story commercial buildings and then, every few miles, the towns themselves, their Main Streets even more picturesque in the snow, sidewalks pristine white carpets, streetlamps glowing softly like crystal balls. To Simon, the whole place still looked unreal, like the model town stuffed inside a snow globe.
“I’ve never seen this before.”
He glanced over at Maria. Her eyes were open, sleepily regarding the depthless swarm of flakes rushing over the windshield. “The snow?
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s. . . . rawer than I imagined. Wilder.” She sat up and stretched. “Where are we?”
“I’m not sure. Bridgehampton, maybe.”
“You know your way around out here?”
“A little bit,” he said. “I surfed near here once. It’s been a long time though.”
They spotted an open motel on the far side of Montauk, a mile past the edge of town. A single car, a Toyota pickup with a fishing-rod rack, was parked in the lot. The motel was a long, low building with two floors of rooms, their doors painted sky-blue. A small freestanding structure stood off to the side, its window glowing, “Office” stenciled onto the glass.
Simon pulled into the lot and turned off the RAV4’s engine. They sat in the lingering heat. The silence was sudden, shocking. Simon’s tensed shoulders fired off flares of pain as the adrenaline finally drained from his muscles. A tiredness verging on catatonia threatened to subsume him. He roused himself, afraid if he didn’t move now he’d fall asleep right where he was.
They gathered their bags and trudged through ankle-deep snow to the office, which was empty, a functioning space heater the only evidence that anybody might be nearby. Maria rang a silver bell on the counter. Nothing happened. She rang it again, and finally a door behind the counter opened, a teenage boy materializing, reddish patches of dry skin flaking on his cheeks and forehead, the whites of his eyes vermillion tinted. He blinked, as though their appearance in the office might be a glitch of his stoned brain.
“Help you?” he finally said.
“We’d like a room, please,” Maria said.
His eyes meandered over to Simon’s face and then back to Maria. “How many nights?”
Maria glanced at Simon. “We’re not sure. Does it matter?”
The kid shrugged. He consulted a weathered ledger filled with cryptic, crabbed glyphs and fussed underneath the desk before producing a key. “Room 12. They’re all the same, so . . .” He put the key on the counter, then told them the rate, which was far more expensive than the place’s appearance suggested.
“That’s fine,” Maria said.
“Solid. I just need a credit card.”
“We’re paying cash.”
“Uh, so we need a credit card for check-in? As, like, a deposit.”
“Here.” Maria withdrew a wad of twenties from her pocket and placed it on the counter. “All right?”
The kid eyed the money as though it might disappear if he looked straight at it. “Um.”
“That’s enough for two nights,” she said. “If we only stay one, you can keep it all anyway. You get me?”
A mercenary gleam flickered behind the kid’s glazed eyes. “That’s not our policy, but . . . maybe if you make it three nights . . .”
“I don’t think so.” Maria took the key off the counter and nudged the cash. “Recognize a good deal when it’s right in front you.”
He shrugged and quickly scooped up the bills. “You folks have a nice night,” he said, already retreating behind the private door.
Room 12 was at the end of the second floor, farthest from the office. Maria unlocked its door, revealing a boxy space done in a chintzy maritime style, an oar fixed onto the wall above the television, a gloomy oil painting, of what appeared to be a capsized whaling ship, over the bed. She shut the door behind them, hooking the lock chain into place. She turned and saw Simon sitting on the bed, watching her.
“What?” she said.
“We made it. That’s all.”
“For tonight.”
He nodded. “For tonight.”
He took off his shoes and jeans, throwing them into a heap on the floor, and climbed under the blankets. There’d been no discussion of splitting up or finding a room with two beds. He closed his eyes, listening to Maria move around the room from what seemed like a great distance, then feeling the mattress shift as she climbed into the bed beside him, her body warm without touching his back. He saw, coalescing out of the black behind his eyelids, Katherine’s face, her mouth a perfect O of surprise as she tumbled down onto the icy pavement. She must have already told DaSilva about his escape; he wondered how violently Peter had reacted, whether he’d taken his anger out on her. DaSilva wasn’t just going to let them go—Simon understood that much. He’d be looking for them—probably he already was—and Simon thought he might finally learn the real nature of DaSilva’s criminal self: a thug or just a hustler, a simple con man or an honest-to-God killer?
• • •
SIMON snapped awake from a dream of drowning. He’d been thrashing through the ocean at night, his limbs tangling with those of other unseen swimmers, the cold water roiling with dozens of struggling bodies. He’d tried with all his strength to push toward shore, but something underwater held on to his ankle, an icy hand that would not relinquish its grip, pulling him down under the surface of the waves. He fought to keep his head above water, but he wasn’t strong enough, and as he opened his mouth to scream, the frigid salt water poured in, and—
He woke up, his mouth open wide, taking in huge, desperate gulps of air.
The motel room was dark and warm, womb-like. As he lay there on his back, heart kicking and eyes open, shapes became objects: desk; chair; television. He could hear the ocean on the far side of the marsh behind the motel. He turned his head to the window: dawn’s gray glow framed the blinds. He felt shaky, panicky. Just because a bad dream was simple to understand—was almost idiotic in its literal-mindedness: Amelia, always Amelia—didn’t make the experience of it any less terrifying. He looked to his other side, and the dark shape next to him resolved into Maria’s body, covered by the sheets, and above, her bare neck, the curve of her shoulders. Her face floated within the dark mass of her hair, like a reflection of the moon on water.
She yawned, rolled onto her back, and rubbed at her eyes. She looked over at him.
“How long have you been awake?”
He shrugged. “Not that long.”
“Thinking?”
“Too much.”
She sat up against the headboard. “Why’d you pick this place, Simon?”
“We had to get out of the city.”
“Yeah, and that could’ve been anywhere.”
“I still had to pick somewhere, right?” He reached over and switched on the bedside lamp. “I didn’t want to just start driving.”
She got out from under the covers and pulled on a pair of jeans. “What’s your plan here?” She sat back down on the bed, cross-legged. “We run? We hide?”
“Just until—”
“Just until what? Until DaSilva gets bored of looking for us?” She shook her head. “Screw that. We can’t wait around. He’s going to come after us. He tried to have you killed, Simon.”
“I don’t know if I believe that. And, anyway, you could leave. I’m the one he needs to get rid of. You’d be safe.”
“Don’t be such a martyr,” Maria said. “And, yeah, maybe he can’t hurt me now, not while this investigation’s happening. But since I left with you, he’s got to figure I know all about his gig with Health Solutions, right? I can’t be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I won’t live like that.”
“So what do you want to do, Maria?”
“I don’t know.” She rubbed her face. “DaSilva or that woman, Katherine—have either of them called you?”
“I’m not sure.” He remembered that Katherine’s phone was still in the RAV4 out in the lot; she probably didn’t have his number at all now. But DaSilva had to be trying to reach him. He stretched for his jacket, crumpled on the floor next to the bed. He patted at the damp lump of wool, but he couldn’t find his phone in either of the outer pockets. Annoyed, he lifted the jacket and shook it out over the bed. His cell phone tumbled out of the inner breast pocket, followed by a sheet of folded, partially crumpled paper. He picked up the phone and jabbed at its buttons: the thing was dead, its battery long drained. He showed Maria the blank screen.
“Figures,” she said.
“Yeah.” He reached for the sheet of paper, and as soon as his fingers touched it—even before he’d unfolded it, before he’d smoothed it out on the bedspread, the dime-sized burn hole at its top edge, and fully understood its immense value—he remembered with a jolt what it was: the wire transfer form he’d found in the office. He’d completely forgotten about it, never returning it to DaSilva; instead, he’d carried it around, ignored, in his coat pocket for over two weeks. His pulse thumped hollowly in his ears: it was pure luck he hadn’t lost it. Even now, he handled the damp paper carefully, desperate not to smear the ink.
“What’s that?” Maria asked.
He looked up at her, and she must have seen it in his face, his surprise and excitement, because she quickly leaned over the paper, squinting as she tried to read DaSilva’s scrawl. After a few moments, she raised her head to stare at him: “Holy fuck.”
“I know.”
“You had this the whole time?”
“I forgot about it. I don’t think I quite realized what it was before.”
They looked back down at the paper together. The form authorized the transfer of $380,000 from the Health Solutions LLC account at a Citibank branch on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. This amount, Simon realized now, was exactly what Crewes had paid for the combined cost of Maria’s liver and Health Solutions’ fee. Listed as the beneficiary was a company called Black Sea Holdings, located at a street address in Nicosia, Cyprus; the beneficiary’s bank was the Cyprus Popular Bank, also in Nicosia. The numbers for both accounts were filled in clearly. But all of this would have meant very little without DaSilva’s signature, bold and messy, overflowing its box at the bottom of the page.
“Does he know you have this?” Maria asked.
“No.” He told her how he’d found it where it had fallen behind the fax machine. “He doesn’t even know it exists.”
“He will soon.” She stood up and dug a smartphone out of her bag.
“I thought you threw away your phone,” Simon said.
“I bought this last week. New number, no contract.” She held the phone over the paper and snapped a photo. “I wondered how he was doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Manufacturing all that cash. Clients write out checks, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So he had to figure out a way to turn those checks into untraceable cash. It’s like laundering in reverse. This”—she tapped the form—“is the first step. Getting the money out of the American banks.”
“And this company in Cyprus, they—what, exactly?”
“My guess is that whoever’s behind it has people here in New York who will give DaSilva the amount in cash, for some kind of a fee. Probably dirty money, from drugs, gambling, whatever. Untraceable. And now this guy’s company has a bunch of clean American money sitting in its account.” She shrugged. “But I’m just guessing. It doesn’t really matter. This paper fucks him either way.”
Simon picked up the form. “We should take this to the police, Maria.”
“No.” She spat the word out. “No cops.” She paused, and then, more measured, said, “You broke the law too, remember? You think you can get a plea deal? Maybe. But get ready to give back all the money you’ve made. And what about your clients, people like Crewes and Cheryl? You want to bring everybody down with you?”
He said nothing. She was right—he knew it.
“No cops, Simon,” she said again, defiantly. “I’ve earned my cash, and I’m keeping it.”
“We can still use this though.” He paced back and forth from the bed to the window. “We have some leverage here, we just have to figure out what to do with it.” He stopped, looked at her. “What if we offer to sell it back to him? We give him the form and he gives us—what? Forty thousand in cash? More? And then he agrees to sever all ties with us. We don’t owe him anything more. We don’t tell him anything about where we’re going. He’ll never find us.”
“And if he says no?”
“We say we’re going to take it to the police.”
“He won’t believe that.”
“A reporter, then. Somebody who wants to dig into all this.”
Maria nodded slowly. “Yeah. That might get him out here.”
“How much should we ask for?” Simon said. “Thirty? Forty?”
Maria shrugged. “We can ask for whatever we want. He’s not going to give it to us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s not going to just pay up and leave us alone,” she said. “I’m telling you. He wants you dead. He’ll probably blackmail me so I say what he wants me to say during the Cabrera investigation. Or maybe he’ll just get rid of me too, now that he knows I know about him. Either way, there’s not going to be any exchange.”
Simon sat back down on the bed. “I thought you agreed with me.”
“You got it half-right.” She smiled, the crooked gray tooth flashing. “We get him out here.”
“Yeah? And then what?”
“And then we kill him.”
He barked out a laugh. This was her idea? It was too insane to be serious. But she wasn’t smiling. “Maria. I’m not a murderer.”
“Nobody’s a murderer until they kill somebody.”
He shook his head. “That’s circular logic.”
“This man doesn’t want you alive, Simon. There’s no other choice.”
“I just offered us another choice.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. We disappear.”
“You really think you can do that? And is that how you want to live the rest of your life? Invent an identity? Cut yourself off from your family, all your friends?”
“Isn’t that what you did?”
“I don’t have a family and those weren’t real friends. What are you afraid of? Getting caught? We’ll design it so that’s impossible.” She grabbed his arm and squeezed. “Listen to me now: killing somebody is as simple
as making a plan and having the will to follow through. That’s it.”
“Jesus, Maria.” He pulled his arm free. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you realize how crazy you sound right now?” She shrugged, unmoved. “And how do you know anyway?” She looked away then, down at the worn, nubby carpet. “Maria?”
She raised her head. “Because I’ve done it.”
He stared at her. She held his eyes, steady and calm. Then he broke her gaze and laughed. “Okay, you almost had me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You’ve lied to me about all kinds of things, from the day we met. Now you expect me to believe this?”
“Yeah, and I was protecting myself before. I think you understand that. And I wasn’t lying about the rape.”
“All right, but—”
“Why would I lie about this? Right now?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll play along. Who did you kill?”
“My foster brother.” She spoke without hesitation, her voice steady.
“When?”
“The night I flew to New York.”
“What? Just a few weeks ago?” He said this as though it was only the timing that made the whole thing impossible.
“Thirty days. But who’s counting.”
“You’re telling me that was your plan? To kill your brother—”
“Foster brother. I don’t share any blood with that piece of shit.”
The venom in her voice silenced Simon. For the first time, he wondered if he should be afraid of her. “Maria, if this is true—”
She sliced her hand through the air, cutting him off: “It’s fucking true.”
“If this is true, why are you telling me?”
“To show you it can be done. Nobody helped me. I did it by myself and here I am. Alive. Free.”
Tires hissed wetly on the nearby road; the light around the blinds brightened, suffusing the room with a milky glow.
“This was revenge?” It wasn’t really a question.
The Dismantling Page 24