Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  When the doorbell rang, she almost screamed. Instead, she let a long breath out through clenched teeth and chastised herself.

  No panic. We will not panic, damn it. Cool your mind, Leah.

  The doorbell again, its cheerful chime an intrusion.

  She rose from the desk and went to the front door. Started to check the peephole before realizing that the man outside was standing at the bottom of the steps, watching her through the windows that flanked the door. He’d pushed the doorbell and then retreated.

  Not Bleak, not Randall, not Lowery. He looked like a college student.

  If he offers to mow the lawn, I’m going to scream, Leah thought as she rotated the dead bolt back and cracked the door. “Yes?”

  “Hi,” he said brightly. “Hope I’m not intruding.”

  “Well, actually, I was in the middle of—”

  “But I wanted to be the first member of the Windward Ridge Homeowners’ Association to welcome you.” He beamed. He was dressed in charcoal hiking pants and black boots that matched his black baseball cap—good boots, she noted, Lowa Renegades, an excellent backcountry boot—and a long-sleeved T-shirt that was fitted to showcase his lean, chiseled torso. He was probably a runner and definitely a hiker with boots like that, and she suspected he was also a rock climber. She’d met plenty of climbers, and they all seemed to share two things: a minuscule BMI and an annoying-until-it-became-infectious enthusiasm. They were also often young or dumb or both.

  He looked like he was both.

  “This is not the right time for—”

  “Completely understand,” he said, lifting both hands, palms out. “I won’t bother you. I just wanted to drop by when the kids were gone, you know, because I didn’t want to freak them out with…” He gave a little between-you-and-me glance around and lowered his voice. “Their safety concerns.”

  Leah stared at him. “What did you say?”

  “Safety concerns,” he repeated calmly, and she pulled the door a bit wider, as if she were about to burst out of the house and run at him. Then she stopped, thinking of her gun, suddenly afraid, because a Lowery man wouldn’t let her go back for the gun…

  “You okay?” he asked, gazing up at her with a bemused smile. He might’ve been older than she’d originally taken him for; maybe he’d just retained that bright-eyed boyish look that some women would find adorable and some would find intolerable. Regardless, too young to be a Lowery man. The company hired only experienced hands.

  But you were bright-eyed and young. When you started, at least. By the end, though…

  “The pond,” he said.

  Leah blinked. “Pond?”

  He lifted his left arm to point east, then winced a little, as if the gesture pained him, and nodded his head in that direction instead.

  “The green space,” he said. “You’re an abutter.”

  Leah’s heart was pounding pavement at about a hundred and fifty beats per minute and her hand was tingling for the feel of a gun grip and cold trigger, and this little prick was talking about…a neighborhood pond?

  “I really do not have the time to—”

  He lifted his hands again. “It’s not going to be me that shows up to cause them trouble. You know that.”

  Something about the way he said that gave her pause. She tightened her hand on the doorknob.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know that,” he said again, and his blue eyes twinkled with mirth that made her want to slap him.

  “Who will it come from?” she said, each word dull and wooden in the crisp morning air, and she knew the name before he said it.

  Lowery. It will come from J. Corson—

  “Mrs. Wilkes,” he whispered. He gave another nod to the east. “You know the one.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh!” He leaned back and laughed, embarrassed. “My bad. Ouch. Shouldn’t have let the secret slip. Anyhow, there’s, like, one lady in this neighborhood who is…” He sighed and lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t trust her when she walks down here with a smile on her face, is all I’m saying. And she will. Mark my words, she will. But, hey, good news, right? I’m here first. That’s good for the kids.” He grinned, showing a dimple. “Safety first.”

  “This is a bad time for me,” Leah said. “Truly. If you could come back…”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I’ll get out of your hair. But when they show up? Just remember I was here first and could have helped.”

  He laughed and turned away. She looked up the drive and saw that there was no car at the top of the hill. He’d come on foot.

  “What’s your name?” she called.

  “Marvin Corson.”

  Time stopped. Blood stopped. Then he turned and gave her the grin again.

  “Just ask anyone to point you to the Carson house up the hill,” he said, waving a hand in the direction of the birch trees across the road. “Everybody knows us.”

  Carson. Carson, not Corson, Leah. Get your shit together. “Carson,” she echoed, and her voice cracked. She wet her lips. Tried to breathe.

  “Yeah,” he said. “My dad’s Scott Carson. More people around here know him.”

  “Thank you,” she said, because he was staring at her so intently that she felt she had to say something.

  “Don’t need to thank me,” he said. “It’s a family thing. I’ve got to do it.”

  This time, he did not smile, and he did not laugh.

  She watched him until he was out of sight, then she closed the door, locked it, picked up her computer, and jammed it into a laptop bag. She needed out of this damn house.

  25

  She found a place called the Camden Deli that looked out across the harbor and had enough tables filled with tourists that she didn’t feel as if she stood out. There she sat down with coffee and an omelet for which she had no appetite and opened the laptop and got to work.

  She returned to the Google News page and put Everett’s name back in, thinking today might bring a new, more detailed story, but the only things she found were rehashings of the initial news stories. If the police had any real information, they were playing it close to the vest. The good news was that she also didn’t find any additional comments about the theory that one of his clients might have been responsible. In fact, the only addition was a quote from someone saying that Everett “didn’t practice the kind of law that brought you in contact with killers. This is someone very sick who probably didn’t know Everett at all.”

  She hoped the source was right, awful as it sounded to wish that a man had been murdered by a sociopathic stranger. Better that than anyone with an agenda or questions.

  She forced a bite of the omelet down. The coffee was gnawing at her empty stomach. She returned to the search page, hesitated, and then entered a new name: Lowery Group.

  She knew what she’d find, of course. References to some charitable contributions made, J. Corson Lowery being the benevolent good neighbor that he was. The strings attached to the donation were likely not to be clear in the article. Most of Lowery’s motivations floated under the radar. She was paranoid, and the best evidence of that was this morning’s odd exchange with the neighbor, who’d said Carson but Leah had heard Corson because she was so damn paranoid and hearing only what she—

  The page refreshed, news results loaded, and Leah’s throat constricted.

  Prisoners Still at Large After Transit Van Accident.

  There was only a teaser line of text below the headline, but it was enough. More than enough.

  Marvin Sanders, 42, and Randall Pollard, 39, remain missing five days after they escaped following an accident during a federal prisoner transport in rural Georgia.

  The teaser text didn’t even mention Lowery, and it didn’t have to. Leah knew. She understood exactly how this had played out.

  He handpicked them, she realized. Two men I would know. Two men who would know me. He could have sent anyone, he didn’t need to risk arranging an escape
, but it was worth it to him because they know me, and because they terrify me.

  Her throat pulsed and her stomach stirred and suddenly she was rushing past people in line at the counter, fighting her way to the tiny bathroom. She slammed the door shut behind her and leaned over the sink, preparing to retch.

  Her gorge held but sweat sprang from every pore. Cold, clammy sweat, drenching her tank top, dripping from her hairline. The sweat of sickness, of fever, or of fear. She hung there, gasping and shuddering, a full-body tremble, and then eventually the nausea passed and she was able to turn the cold water on and rinse her face. She dabbed her skin dry and took a deep breath and opened the door and went back into the restaurant. A few people turned and watched her go by uneasily, and she felt like telling them not to worry, the omelet was fine.

  She took her seat facing the wide glass windows that showed the waterfall cascading into the harbor and looked at her laptop screen once more, this time with a cool mind.

  They’re coming. All these years have gone by, but he didn’t forget. He kept watch, just in case.

  But had he? J. Corson Lowery was a dangerous man and certainly a man who held grudges, but would he have actually kept surveillance on Doug and the children if he’d located them? It felt off somehow. Not impossible but not probable either.

  Coincidence, Leah? The attorney who handled the only dealings between you and Doug has been murdered, Randall Pollard and Bleak are free, and you’re saying it’s a coincidence?

  Bleak. The name conjured the man, and Leah’s stomach clenched again and the world swirled gray at the edges. She remembered the first time she’d heard his name. Rae Johnson, the first of the potential witnesses against Brad Lowery, had explained it to her. Leah could picture Rae in that tiny but immaculate little house in St. Petersburg, just past the Chattaway, where they’d met for a burger and a beer. Rae was a petite black woman with an easy smile and gorgeous eyes. On that day at the Chattaway, she’d looked into the face of a woman named Nina Morgan and said…

  Bleak. That’s all. Just Bleak. Nothing else to the nickname. He’s not a big guy, not intimidating—at least not physically. Some of the guys they hire, the ones who did the bloodiest tours, they’d get to kind of like it, you know? Or anyway, they’d get a high off it. Adrenaline, testosterone, whatever. Marvin Sanders, though? He just seemed…indifferent. Apathetic. They’d all tell stories about him, talk about how fast he moved and how well he shot, talk about how he never said anything but what he needed to say. They steered clear of him too. I noticed that pretty early. People kept their distance.

  He was from Cleveland. St. Claire Avenue, on the east side. Played wide receiver in high school, played it well, got scholarship offers, but never so much as made a campus visit. Enlisted in the army right out of high school. By the time Rae met him, in Kabul in 2005, where she was deployed with the air force, he’d graduated from Ranger school and earned a reputation for being unflappable under fire and unapproachable anywhere else.

  Rae had joined the air force to get through college, the same as Leah, but without the interest in flying planes. She just preferred their pitch and their benefits. She was in the reserves on 9/11 and was called to active duty three years later. She’d been part of an intelligence unit, and eventually that put her in close contact with some operatives of the Lowery Group, back when they were just starting to secure major government contracts. She liked soldiers, she told Leah, particularly the special ops guys. They were courageous, elite, and, for the most part, decent men.

  She did not like Marvin Sanders.

  Empty, she told Nina Morgan. I don’t mean he could create emotional distance between himself and the job, because all of them can do that. Have to do that. I mean just what I say: he was empty, like a body without a soul.

  The nickname came from Marvin Sanders himself. In retrospect, Rae thought that was the only way he’d have gotten one that would stick or at least one that anyone would say to his face. It was during a midnight ambush on a raid that had gone bad in a hurry. Four Rangers were killed, five injured. One of the dead had been in charge of communications. He’d taken three rounds to the face and went over on his back, bone and blood where his eyes and mouth had been, his radio still crackling, Bagram asking him about the need for air support. When he didn’t answer, the edgy commander from Bagram shouted for an update, the radio capturing his fear and fury, a guy miles away from the firefight yelling that he needed to know—how did it look out there?

  Marvin Sanders had picked up the radio and responded with a single word: “Bleak.”

  Then he’d put the radio back down, crawled forward on his belly, and opened fire. His comrades dead, his entire unit and his own life in peril, and all he’d said was “Bleak.” The nickname took hold fast, and while Marvin Sanders was surely aware of it, he didn’t comment on it. He did not comment on much.

  All of this, Rae had told Nina years later. They were colleagues then, all four of them—Rae and Nina and Bleak and Randall Pollard, the man with the mismatched eyes. The Lowery Group paid each of them more than double what the U.S. government had paid them to do basically the same job. Rae still scheduled flight plans and analyzed security concerns. Nina still flew planes in and out of isolated airstrips. Marvin “Bleak” Sanders and Randall Pollard still vanished into the night wearing full combat gear, the only difference now the lack of insignia or dog tags. If they died out there as independent contractors, it was very important that they were clearly civilians. There were multiple reasons for that, of course. One hurt the enemy, it being less impressive to boast of killing a civilian security contractor than a special operator in a Ranger or SEAL uniform. It was less impressive because the nation they were fighting took less interest, and that was even more important to the Lowery Group.

  They wanted anonymity, not credit. The corporate culture could be distilled down to a single word: silence.

  Anyone who didn’t grasp that wasn’t Lowery material. Nina Morgan learned that early. Another pilot had been posting photographs on his private Facebook page. They were innocuous shots of mountains and desert airfields, but he was still fired for the transgression.

  It wasn’t hard to buy into the need for silence, though. In fact, it made some sense when you were part of the mission. As the lines of the Lowery Group and the U.S. military blurred and wavered, as Nina began to fly people with official insignia alongside those in the trademark black of the Lowery Group, the mission began to feel very important indeed. Never mind that she didn’t understand much of it. Who in a war really did? Winning a war was about doing your job. Incremental gains became cumulative successes. Fly safely, land safely. Do it again.

  Strange as it was to say now, it had felt like a family company at the time. J. Corson Lowery—Mr. Lowery; nobody called him anything else—was actually around. He’d come and go frequently, and he made a point to know everyone. His recall for names was remarkable. His son was usually at his side, looking like a carbon copy but with dark hair instead of white, the two of them tall and trim and impeccably dressed. Crisp—that was the word for their look.

  And they were kind, even. They exuded a sense of warmth that made you glad to work for them. When the owner of a billion-dollar operation looked you straight in the eye and smiled and called you by name, you felt a warmth for him, felt both impressed and grateful.

  The old man was the boss—and there was no doubt about that, not even a whisper—but the son was the public face. Brad was the future, and not just because he was the heir apparent. His résumé was polished, his look perfect. Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA. Army reserves. Worked in intelligence during his one brief deployment. Manager of hundreds of millions in capital and friend of a dozen senators, and only thirty-five years old. He would run for something. Everyone knew it.

  In the beginning, he was just a different kind of cargo to Leah. Fly him out, drop him off, pick him up. He always called her by her first name, and he always asked after Doug. She requested stateside work when
she became pregnant with Hailey and was granted it. By then, there was stateside work. Plenty of flights across the border in Mexico, but even those were short trips, and she could start and end each day in her own bed.

  You could believe it was all normal. You learned not to think about the vagaries you used when explaining your own job to strangers. Sometimes, you recognized familiar faces on the television news. You’d see them later in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. They’d usually be touting their foreign-policy expertise, the committees they’d served on. Committees that awarded contracts. You knew that Brad Lowery would be out there soon enough himself. Maybe not the next election cycle, but certainly the one after that.

  You didn’t really care. You had your own life to worry about—a career, a husband, a daughter, a son.

  You had all of those things back then.

  Leah put a new search in on the laptop, but this time she knew the result before it came up. She’d looked at the photograph a thousand times. It was the one the family of Rae Johnson had included in her obituary. In it, Rae was sitting in a pile of leaves with her two sons, Dante and Durrell. They’d been nine and six at the time of the picture, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her in a bright scatter of autumn leaves, mouths wide with laughter. The younger one was in a Batman T-shirt and his older brother wore a LeBron James jersey. Rae was wearing a simple white tank top over jeans and looked young and fit and fearless. There was a single maple leaf, red as a nicked vein, trapped in midair between them.

  They’d been visiting her family somewhere near Philly when the photo was taken. Leah had never met the family. By the time Rae was buried, Leah was already in hiding.

  It had been Rae’s death that brought the investigators to Nina Morgan’s door and, eventually, brought the pistol to Brad Lowery’s lips.

  The hit, Doc Lambkin had told her, wasn’t supposed to involve the children. Just Rae.

  This information came only after Leah flew the woman to her death.