“Yes,” he said, smiling. “That’s it. I can buy that one.”
Carlos took a breath, ready to tell him to stand up or to make him stand up—this thing was going one way or the other—but the kid finally moved. Still with that practiced laziness, every motion slow, uncrossing his foot from his knee, standing, brushing off his pants, stretching, adjusting the ball cap. But at least he was moving.
“Let’s get you out of here, sir,” he said, formal as any suit-and-cap chauffeur.
“Yeah. Let’s.” Carlos went inside, grabbed the duffel bag that held the only belongings he was leaving the country with, and slammed the door for the last time. He was ready to be out of this shithole. Say what you wanted about Venezuela; he’d take any corner of that country over the Boston winters.
They walked down the porch steps and across the street to the kid’s car. It was a rust-colored Camaro with dark-tinted windows that looked like an unmarked cop car. Or an asshole kid’s car. Carlos opened the back door, threw the duffel bag in, then went around to the passenger side. The kid had the big engine growling by the time Carlos was in the passenger seat. The car was immaculate inside, absolutely devoid of personal effects except for an energy drink sitting in the cup holder, something called Bang, the word written in red on a black can. Music was playing, a high, tinkling keyboard riff over a thumping bass line that rattled the energy drink can against the cup holder. It sounded like the opening of a shitty rap song, dance-floor hip-hop, but nobody ever came on with a verse.
The kid drove them out of the neighborhood while the song played. He sipped the energy drink and set it down and it resumed rattling against the cup holder in tempo with the bass line from the song.
Bang.
When Carlos picked up the can, it was more to stop the rattling than anything else. The metallic jangle was getting in his head, bouncing around like a troublesome pinball determined to jostle every rage nerve it could find. “I bet this tastes like shit.”
The kid didn’t answer. He was smiling and bobbing his head to the music with a little right-to-left shimmy in his shoulders, and Carlos wanted to smash the aluminum can into his teeth. He forced himself to look down at it instead, fighting for calm.
“‘Bang,’” he read from the label. “‘Potent brain and body fuel.’ What did you pay for this, six bucks? Potent brain and body fuel, my ass.”
“Try it.”
“I’d rather drink my own piss.”
“Not in my car, please.”
Carlos set the can down and watched it vibrate with each thumping shake of the speakers, the same riff still playing on loop.
“What is this bullshit music? Anybody ever gonna throw a verse?”
“You can if you want. I won’t laugh.”
“Oh, it’s just the beat, eh? So you’re a rapper? Cool, little man! Let me hear something. I bet you’re good. Like Eminem…nah, more like Macklemore, right?”
Carlos was obviously screwing with him, but the kid didn’t react, didn’t lose his smile. There was a strange quality to him that didn’t just unsettle Carlos; it reminded him of someone. He couldn’t place it.
“What’s your name, anyhow?” he said. It had honestly never occurred to him to ask. Their transactions hadn’t been of the let’s-get-to-know-each-other type.
“Dax.”
“Dax. The hell kind of name is that?”
“Serbian. It means ‘little asshole.’” He said it calmly and quietly and never looked at Carlos.
“Hilarious,” Carlos said, worrying that he’d pissed the kid off and hating himself for worrying. The kid couldn’t be more than nineteen, and Carlos had been in the game for twenty years and had killed fourteen men and two women and he was not about to be intimidated by some child with a weird smile.
But you are. He bothers you. He scares you.
“I don’t like saying Dax,” Carlos said, because talking made him feel better than just riding. “Dax. Makes me feel like I’m gagging.”
“I’m sorry it doesn’t roll off your tongue like Carlos.”
“Sure doesn’t. What’s your last name? I’ll call you that.”
For the first time in their limited relationship, the kid seemed to hesitate. It was quick, just a little hitch, but it was there. It was exactly what you looked for in the ring, and when you saw it, you threw the knockout punch.
“Blackwell,” the kid said then, and Carlos’s knockout punch was forgotten, all his confidence sapped by this unanticipated jab.
That’s it. Holy shit, that is it, he’s just like them.
“Which one?” Carlos asked. He felt a cold tension along his spine.
“Pardon?”
“Which one of them are you related to?”
“Which one of who?”
“Don’t be a dick. Which one of those brothers that got killed in Montana are you related to, Jack or Patrick?”
The kid glanced at him, amused. “That’s a strange question.”
“Why?”
“If they were brothers, and I was related to one, I’d have to be related to both. Do you follow that, Carlos? We’d all be part of the same family then. That’s the way it works.”
Again the urge to smack him rose, but this time it was easier to grip the armrest. The body count that Carlos had amassed would not have meant anything to Jack and Patrick Blackwell.
“I didn’t know either of them had a son,” Carlos said. “They didn’t seem like—”
He managed to stop himself.
The kid said, “Want to finish that thought, Carlos? Or do you want me to guess?”
His eyes were on the road, and his right hand was looped over the steering wheel and he seemed perfectly relaxed, but Carlos did not like the sound of that question, so he decided to answer it without fucking around.
“They didn’t seem like the family type,” he said.
“Oh. All about their work, you mean?”
“I guess.”
“Well, everyone has a personal life. Does that surprise you? That they would have had lives of their own and that they would have been private about those things?” He looked at Carlos, and Carlos struggled to meet his eyes, then chose instead to stare over the kid’s shoulder at the construction site they were passing, the gutted remains of an old strip mall that stood waiting for bulldozers to raze it. Then he looked down at the vibrating aluminum can. Bang. Potent brain and body fuel. He released the armrest so that both hands were free. Suddenly, it seemed very important to have his hands free.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t really give a shit. I was just curious, that’s all. I should’ve figured it out earlier. You remind me of them.”
They’d pulled up to a stop sign. The kid smiled at him again.
“I hear that a lot,” he said, and then he fired two shots from a suppressed handgun that was inside his jacket pocket. He shot left-handed, firing under his right arm without ever removing his right hand from the steering wheel, that confident in his aim, and he never lost the smile.
Then he turned the corner, pulled the Camaro to the curb, and put it in park. He left the key in the ignition and the engine running, the music still playing, those high piano notes over the low bass with no lyrics, but he took the energy drink. He sipped it while he shut the door on the music and the corpse, adjusted his baseball cap with the other hand, and walked away.
Part Two
Locked In
4
The case was so simple that Abby Kaplan decided to stop for a beer on her way to the scene.
This wasn’t encouraged protocol—drinking on the job could get her fired, of course—but there wasn’t much pressure today. The cops had already gotten one of the drivers to admit guilt. They had a signed statement and a recorded statement. Not much for Abby to do but review their report, take her own photos, and agree with their assessment. Cut and dried.
Besides, Hammel was a forty-minute drive from the Biddeford office of Coastal Claims and Investigations, and
Abby, well…Abby got a little nervous driving these days. A beer could help that. Contrary to what most people—and, certainly, the police—believed, a beer before driving could make her safer for society. It settled twitching hands and a jumpy mind, kept her both relaxed and focused. Abby had no doubt that she drove better with a six-pack in her bloodstream than most people did stone-cold sober. She was damn sure safer than most drivers, with their eyes on their cell phones and their heads up their asses.
This wasn’t an argument you’d win in court, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the truth.
She stopped at a brewpub not far from the Portland jetport, a place busy enough that she wouldn’t stand out, and she paid cash so there would be no credit card transaction to haunt her if something went wrong. Not that anything would go wrong, but she’d seen the ways it could. She also made a point of tearing the receipt into bits, because cash could help you only so much; there were different kinds of paper trails. She’d worked one case where the driver had been dumb enough to leave a receipt on the console recording the five margaritas he’d knocked back just before getting behind the wheel and blowing through a stop sign. It wasn’t that abnormal, really. You stopped by the body shop to take pictures of a cracked-up car and found damning evidence just sitting there in the cup holder, a tiny slip of paper with a time-and-date stamp that blew up any possible defense. Amazing. Abby had been on the fringes of the PI game for only a few months, but already she understood what sustained the profession: people lied, and people were stupid.
Oh, and one more: People sued. People loved to sue.
That was precisely what worried the good folks in the risk-mitigation office of Hammel College, her current client. When a world-renowned engineer was killed on your campus while in the care of a student escort, you didn’t have to be paranoid to imagine the lawsuit.
Abby sat at the bar, sipped her beer, and reviewed the case file. She didn’t see much for the college to worry about. The girl who’d been escorting the engineer around town had had clean bloodwork—a relief to the college, since it meant no DUI claim, but not much help to the girl, because she was still lights-out, five days in a coma now. And even though she had a negative drug screen, she could still have been negligent or at fault, which could turn into an expensive wrongful-death suit, but—good news for the Hammel Hurricanes—the second driver involved had taken responsibility on the scene!
He’d given a full statement to the police that was the accident-report equivalent of tying a hangman’s noose and sticking his own head through it: He’d been using his cell phone, trying to get his bearings through the phone’s map application, and when he looked up, he realized that what he’d thought was a road bridge was in fact a pedestrian bridge. He swerved to avoid it—and ended up in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Mr. Carlos Ramirez of Brighton, Massachusetts, was now into the realm of criminal courts, because one person was dead and another was a vegetable and Ramirez had eliminated any compelling argument for even a shared-fault case, what was known in Maine as modified comparative negligence. A good investigator paired with a good attorney could almost always find a weasel’s way into a modified-comparative-negligence ruling, but Carlos Ramirez was going to make it tough on his team.
It was Abby’s job to imagine what that team was considering, though, and in this case, it would be Tara Beckley’s location at the time of the accident. She was supposed to deliver her charge to an auditorium that was nowhere near where she’d parked. Some enterprising attorney might wonder whether her failure to follow the plan for the evening’s keynote speaker might qualify as negligence and, if so, whether the college might be responsible for that.
After Tara had parked her CRV beside a bridge that led to the Hammel College campus, Carlos Ramirez smashed into the car, killing Amandi Oltamu and knocking Tara Beckley into the cold waters of the Willow River. A bystander on the opposite side of the river had heard the crash but hadn’t seen it, and he managed to pull her out in a heroic but ultimately futile effort, because Tara Beckley was in a coma from which she was unlikely to emerge.
That left one dead man, one silent woman, and no witnesses.
I need to get my hands on her cell phone, Abby thought. Cell phones could either save you or hang you in almost any accident investigation. The beautiful simplicity of the case against Ramirez could be destroyed by something like a text message from Tara Beckley saying that her car had run out of gas or that she had a migraine and couldn’t see well enough to drive. You just never knew. Dozens of apps kept tracking information that most users were blissfully unaware of; it was entirely possible that the precise timing of the accident could be established from a cell phone. And if Tara Beckley had been using the phone while she was behind the wheel, Oltamu’s family might take a renewed interest in suing the college and their selected escort. Any whiff of negligence had to be considered.
Only problem: her phone seemed to be missing.
So it went into the river with her, Abby thought. She came up, and the phone didn’t.
She drained her beer and frowned, flipping back and forth through the pages of the report. Explaining Tara Beckley’s missing phone didn’t seem to be difficult, but Amandi Oltamu’s phone could also contain evidence, and Abby didn’t see where that was either. The police report included the items removed from the car, and the coroner’s report had a list of personal effects removed from the body, ranging from a wallet to a Rolex.
No phone, though.
The lead investigator was a guy with the state police named David Meredith. Abby wasn’t eager to speak to police these days, considering that there were two cops in California still urging a prosecutor to press charges against her for an accident that had made her more of a celebrity than she’d ever desired to be.
The concern conjured the memory, as it always did. Luke’s empty eyes, his limp hand, the soft whistle and hiss of the machines that kept him breathing. Synthetic life. And the photographers waiting outside the hospital for a shot of the woman responsible for it all: Abby Kaplan, the woman who’d killed Luke London, cut down a rising star in his prime. James Dean and Luke London, joined in immortality, young stars killed in car crashes. The only difference was that Luke hadn’t been driving the car.
That was a fun little secret about his movies. He never drove the car.
Never felt any shame over that either. Luke was completely comfortable in his own skin, happy to hand the keys over to a woman who barely came up to his shoulder, to smile that magazine-cover smile and say, “One day you’ll teach me how to do it myself.”
And I was going to. That was the idea, you see. It was his idea, not mine, I just happened to have the wheel, and my hands were steady, my hands were…
She shook her head, the gesture violent enough to draw a curious glance from the bartender, and Abby tried to recover by pointing at her now-empty glass, as if she’d been intending to attract attention.
One more, sure. One more couldn’t hurt.
She took out her phone to call David Meredith. He was safe. Most people here were. This was why she’d come back to Maine. David Meredith knew Abby only as Hank Bauer’s employee, nothing more. Hank was the closest thing Abby had to family, and he wasn’t telling any tales about her return to Maine. She owed him good work in exchange, even if that meant speaking with police.
She found Meredith’s number, called, and explained what she was working on.
“You guys caught that one?” Meredith said. “Good for Hank. It’s easy money.”
“Sure looks that way,” Abby agreed. “But I’m heading out to take some pictures at the scene and see if there was anything that might be trouble for the college.”
“There isn’t. Tell the lawyers they can sleep easy.”
“I’m curious about the phones, actually. Where are they?”
“We’ve got his.”
“Ramirez’s, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“What about hers? Or Oltamu’s?”
&nbs
p; David Meredith paused. “I’m assuming hers is in the water.”
“Sure. But his?”
“The coroner’s office, probably.”
“The report doesn’t account for it. His wallet and watch and keys and even a comb were mentioned. But there was no phone.”
“So he didn’t have one. Some people don’t. His doesn’t matter, anyhow. Now hers, I could see what you’re worried about there. Was she texting or whatever. But…she was parked and out of the car. Hard to imagine a scenario where she gets blamed.”
“She wasn’t where she was supposed to be. That’s my only worry.”
“I can’t help you on that one. But like you said, the wreck is simple, and Ramirez is going to be formally charged tomorrow. That’ll help you. I’ve got to talk to the girl’s family today. I’ll ask about the phone, see if I can figure out who the last person to hear from her was.”
“Great.” Abby thanked Meredith and hung up, glad that her client was the university, faceless and emotionless, and not the family of that girl in the coma. Five days she’d been in there, alive but unresponsive. Abby didn’t like to imagine that, let alone see it. That was precisely the kind of shit that could get in her head and take her back…
“I’ll have one more,” she told the bartender.
One more wouldn’t kill her. It just might save her, in fact. Thinking about the girl in the hospital and wondering if her eyes were open or closed was not the sort of image Abby needed in her head before she got behind the wheel. Another beer would help. People didn’t understand that, but another beer would help.
Abby was five foot three and a hundred and fifteen pounds, and two pints of Sebago Runabout Red would bring her blood alcohol content up to, oh, 0.4. Maybe 0.5, tops. Still legal. And steadier.
A whiskey for the spine and a beer for the shooting hand, her dad used to say. Abby had no idea where he’d picked up that phrase, but it had always made her laugh. He also liked to say One more and then we’ll all go, which was even funnier because he was usually drinking alone. Jake Kaplan had been one funny guy. Maybe not in the mornings, but, hell, who was funny in the morning?
If She Wakes Page 3