All Lies

by Andrew Cunningham

  "You okay?"

  "I think so." She rolled her neck. "Yes, it just caught me by surprise. You?"

  I didn't answer. I was looking at the side mirror, then the rear-view mirror.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Can you get my gun out of the glove compartment?" Before we left, I had looked up the gun laws in Vermont—basically there were none—and found that I'd be perfectly legal bringing my gun into the state from Massachusetts.

  This was real, and in response, my hands were shaking. I think Sabrina saw that. She retrieved the gun, but didn't hand it to me. Instead, she hid it under the jacket on her lap. "They'll never expect me to have it," she said by way of explanation.

  There were two of them and they split up, each taking a different side of the car. If I had any doubts about their intentions, that certainly erased them. Sabrina put the book under the seat. I could have tried to start the car and pull away before they reached us, but was it worth it? That would be assuming the car would start, and then what? It would result in a high-speed chase down the highway. What would it accomplish? So we waited.

  My guy was right outside my door. He rapped on the window with the butt of a gun. Not a good sign. I rolled down the window, the light rain quickly coating the inside of my door.

  "Can I help you?"

  Without warning, he smacked me on the side of the head with the butt of his pistol. I fell into Sabrina's lap. In my dizzy state, I saw him raise his pistol. He was going to shoot us! Then I heard a gun go off. Heard was putting it mildly. The explosion was right in my ear. I looked up, afraid that Sabrina was the victim. Needless worry. She was holding the gun. A split second after shooting, she whipped open the passenger door, and I heard—with my one good ear—an umph on the other side of the door. She jumped out and I heard her kick the other assailant. As I was finally starting to move, she handed me the second man's gun.

  "Check the other guy." I was oddly pleased to hear—again, with my one good ear—a tremor of fear in her voice. Or maybe it was just adrenaline. I opened my door and looked down at Sabrina's victim. He wasn't going anywhere—ever again. He caught one in the throat.

  I was regaining my senses. I pulled out my phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  "We've just been attacked on Interstate 91, just south of Brattleboro," I reported to the dispatcher. I was still shaking, and it was reflected in my voice. "We've killed one of our attackers and have the other one subdued. I will lay their two weapons and my own—which I have a license for—on the hood of the car."

  "Officers are on their way. Is anyone hurt?"

  "Well, other than the dead guy, I don't think so." I was calming down. "I can't hear out of one ear from the blast of the gun in the car, and my girlfriend kicked the other guy, but I don't know his condition."

  "Do you know why you were attacked?"

  "I have no idea. A carjacking, maybe?" I was learning to lie with the best of them. "I have to check on my girlfriend. I hear the sirens now." I hung up, retrieved the dead guy's pistol, and went around to the other side of the car. The live guy was sprawled on the ground in that ever familiar position, holding his crotch. Sabrina was good at that.

  She handed me the two pistols and I put the three of them on the smashed-in trunk of my car. Then we waited. A Vermont Highway Patrol car pulled up, and the officer got out, pointed his gun at us and told us to lie on the ground, with our arms spread. Easy for us, not so easy for the other guy. A minute later another patrol car pulled up, and then a couple of Brattleboro cop cars. Once they assessed the situation, they cleared us and we were able to get up. A few minutes after that an ambulance arrived. They put a bandage on a cut on the side of my head and determined that my eardrum probably wasn't ruptured. The other guy's balls definitely were.

  It took a while, and we had to accompany them to the local State Police barracks to give our statements. We never mentioned the book, which Sabrina had retrieved and put in her pocketbook, but we did talk about the mystery to some degree and referred them to Sabrina's detective in Boston. Our attacker wasn't talking. In fact, he didn't say a word. When they found out who Sabrina was, they were fawning all over her. I was invisible, once again. By the time we got out of there, several Boston news stations had their trucks parked outside the police barracks. After all, a murder in Vermont was big news. A murder in Vermont by a famous mystery author was even bigger news. Sabrina talked to the press for a few moments, and even though she did well, considering the situation, and charmed them to no end, I could see that she was uncomfortable almost to the point of shutting down. After a few minutes, I hustled her away.

  We decided to head back to Boston and the privacy of her hotel room. Sabrina hadn't said a word since getting in the car, and once I was away from the circus we had just left, I pulled over in the first rest area we came to.

  We hugged, and that's when she let it out. The tears came and she shook in my arms. Oddly enough, I had already done my shaking and was able to be a support to her without breaking down myself. I just let her cry. I didn't know if it was memories of killing her husband coming through, or memories of prison. It was probably a combination of both of them—and maybe other things as well. After all, she had just killed someone, and her name was going to be plastered all over the news. I wisely refrained from telling her that it would help her book sales.

  Things were better after the cry and we talked a bit while I drove. Then Sabrina fell asleep. I let her sleep and drove in silence, thinking about all that had happened. We arrived at the hotel around daybreak. A few minutes later, we were both sound asleep in the safety of her room.

  Chapter 25

  We only slept a few hours. Between the leftover adrenaline and cell phones vibrating all over the table—shutting them off would have been the smart thing to do, but we were zombies when we got to the hotel and clear thinking eluded us—we were up by eleven.

  I called my mother in England. She heard the news and had left six messages. I also called Mo, who had left three, and Seymour, who had been asleep and hadn't heard the news yet. I wasn't sure if he would have called me even if he had heard.

  Sabrina had concerned calls from her editor and agent, and another from her publicist. Thirty seconds into the third call she slammed down the phone.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  "They can find me a new publicist. I'm done with him."

  I waited while she fumed.

  "Do you know what he said?"

  "I can guess."

  She didn't hear me. "He didn't even ask if I was okay. He said that this is the best thing that could've happened. My new book will soar to the top of the lists and my author signings will be even more packed." She was shaking with anger. Or was it anger? "Do you know what I'm going to do?"

  "I do."

  She didn't hear me again. "I'm going to cancel all my signings. It'll be a circus now. People won't come to hear about my book. I bet most of the people couldn't care less about my book. They'll just want to gawk at the famous woman who killed a guy. And do you know what else?"

  "Yeah, I do." Why did I even bother? She was in a different zone. The fact was, I knew precisely what was coming into her life.

  "They're going to learn about my past. It might not be tomorrow, but it'll be soon. They'll be looking at my life with a microscope." She looked at me with tears in her eyes. "I don't mind them finding out about all that. I was prepared for it. I knew the coverage would be pretty intense, but with you in my life, I knew I could handle it. But not this. Not now. I've killed a second man. They'll all be vultures. People will come out of the woodwork. 'Entertainment reporters'"—she made quotation marks in the air while making a face—"will be hounding me, not for my books, but for the 'story behind the story'."

  She sat next to me, her body language saying she needed a massive hug. I obliged. All the trust issues she had been so valiantly working on had just gone out the window.

  "What can I do?" Her voice had taken on a pleading tone. I had to answer, and I had to
say what she needed to hear.

  "Cancel your signings for this book. All of them. Hey, you have a perfect excuse. You've just been through a traumatic experience. Then you announce your past."

  She looked at me in alarm.

  "The suspense of it all is killing you. You know they are eventually going to find out—you knew it before all this—so meet it head-on. Tell your story. You don't have to do it yourself. Let your publisher do it. Give them as many facts as you think pertinent. And then have your publisher also announce that you will not be available for interviews about it. Put it to bed. Let them also announce that you won't be doing any book signings for the foreseeable future. It'll never go away, but over time it will dissipate. Maybe to the point of someday resuming your signings."

  She was silent. I let her think. After a couple of minutes, she gave a little smile.

  "I like it."

  "One more thing," I said. "You don't stop writing. You might gain a whole new audience from this—and I don't mean it the way your ex-publicist meant it. People might discover you through this, but if you keep writing, they will appreciate you for the stories you tell. The rest of this nonsense will eventually fade into the background. Your writing won't. Someday you might be ready to do signings again. But if not? Hey, there have been plenty of reclusive authors. You'll be the J.D. Salinger of the mystery world."

  She was smiling broadly now. I think she approved. Much like the pressure that was relieved when she opened up to me about her past, I could feel her relief in her body language as she melted in my arms.

  *****

  The rest of the day was spent ignoring phone calls and knocks on her door, as she crafted her life story as succinctly as possible. She would tell of the abusive marriage and of finally reaching her breaking point; of the judge who was lenient with her sentence; and the first year of hell in prison followed by the five years of rediscovering herself.

  "I'm not going to name any of the other inmates, but it's important—no, more than that. It's essential—that people understand how these women changed my life. As much as they almost killed me in the beginning, these women saved me in the end. I never want to compromise the relationship that we had … and still have."

  "And then," I said, "you disappear for a while."

  "Which will give us the time and freedom to see this through to the end." Then she added, "Under the cloak of secrecy."

  "Well, not total secrecy. They are all camped out in this hotel waiting for you to show your face. And although I'm not the focus, my name is now out there. I'd say we could stay at my place, but they might be watching that too."

  "Your dad's house?"

  "That might be the safest option. Of course, depending what Mikey says in his book, who knows where we might be headed. Brazil, probably."

  "At least they won't know me down there."

  "Speaking of that, be prepared to be recognized from time to time. Your picture is going to be plastered everywhere, so it won't be like before, when you'd get noticed by a few fans here and there."

  "I know. But I have to tell you what a relief it is that I'll be cancelling my signings."

  "Don't get too used to it. As your teacher, I'm not letting you off that easily. You're not going to learn to trust by sneaking around in the middle of the night. I'm just giving you a free pass for a while. Class starts again when we solve this."

  "You're not giving me a lot of incentive to solve it any time soon," she said with a smirk.

  "If this leads us to Brazil," I said, "I'm going to have to brush up on my Spanish. Haven't had to use it since high school."

  "Well, you could do that," Sabrina answered, "but considering they speak Portuguese down there, I'm not sure it's going to help you much."

  "Oh."

  That evening she had a three-way call with her agent and her editor, and explained her plans. There was no objection. Sabrina had suddenly become a cash cow for both the agent and the publisher, and would only become more of one after the announcement.

  It was decided that the story would be presented by her agent. He would also ask the reporters to give her the space she needed, but we all knew that wasn't going to happen. He would break the story the next day, giving them no time to dig it up on their own.

  When the call was finally done and all the details had been hammered out, it was close to midnight. And by the time we finished making love, it was almost two. Another late night. Before we fell asleep this time, however, we remembered to turn off our phones.

  *****

  We broke out of our hotel prison the next day at noon. It was decided that Sabrina's agent would make the announcement about her past from a conference room at the Westin, and he flew up from New York early that morning. Her editor and a lawyer from the publisher would also be attending. Although nothing specific was said, it was assumed that Sabrina would be present at the news conference. As a result, the reporters camped outside our room stampeded to the conference room to get good seats, leaving the hallway empty. Well, almost empty. There were two tabloid photographers who weren't fooled and hung out waiting for a glimpse of the gun-toting mystery author.

  But I anticipated that. Mo had called during a break at school asking if there was anything she could do. I explained about the news conference and Sabrina's past—with Sabrina's permission—and mentioned my fear that the news conference wouldn't draw them all away from the door. She arranged for another teacher to watch her students for a while and took a ride down to the Westin. So when Sabrina and I left the room, there she was, entertaining the two wayward photographers with her charm and beauty.

  When they saw us and started to follow, she said she had something else to tell them and gently laid her hands on their shoulders. They sat on the floor with a thud and didn't try to move. Mo turned her head toward me and winked. Her day was complete.

  We arrived at my father's house two hours later, free and clear of the hordes of reporters. We didn't know when our fortress of solitude would be discovered, but for now the peace was the most glorious thing we had experienced in days.

  But even more than the peace, we were looking forward to cracking open Mikey's book and seeing if it held the clue that would finally explain all the lies my family had covered up for decades.

  We got comfortable on the couch—the living room couch, not his questionable office couch—and we took turns reading aloud. The writing was pedestrian, but not annoying. As a novel, it was terrible. He basically laid out the facts of his life in first-person novel form, but with little artistic flair. Every character seemed to be a character from his real life. The names weren't even changed. If he had any illusions of becoming a bestselling novelist, it wouldn't have been with this book. Besides the poor grammar, the book was laced throughout with profanity, more than any conventional publisher of the time would tolerate. We were just hoping it would give us something we could use.

  It started out slowly … oh so slowly … describing his—or his fictional character's—childhood in New York and his slow integration into a life of crime. It was the "good boy caught up in events he couldn't control" type of story. He didn't like the life of crime, but was in too deep to escape it. None of it was of any interest to us, but we continued to read every word for fear of missing an important clue. None came for most of the book.

  Finally, at around the three-quarter mark, he began the story we had so patiently been waiting for. It was the story that would answer so many questions. And in the process, would raise so many more.

  Chapter 26

  It started with the Russian. The damn Russian. He wasn't even one of us. Tony met him down there and he convinced Tony to help him look for the treasure. Now Tony is dead, Bruce is dead, John is probably dead, and they think I'm dead. All because Tony got greedy. Vlad (we never did know his real name, but he was Russian, so that's what we called him) thought he was so smart, but in the end he wasn't.

  It was supposed to be an easy job. Flanagan had a friend who told him he'd get
rich delivering booze to this place in the middle of nowhere down in South America. I didn't see it the same way, but I was low man on the totem pole, so what I thought didn't count. Well, you didn't have to say the word rich to Flanagan twice. He put the four of us on a boat with the biggest shipment of booze we'd ever delivered. We were going to a town in Brazil owned by Henry Ford. Imagine, the guy was rich enough to own a whole town in another country. I guess he didn't allow booze in the town, but there was a place upriver that did. That's where we were going.

  I could have told him he wouldn't make any money, but as I said, nobody cared what I thought. I looked the place up on a map. It was going to take us three weeks in the ship just getting to Brazil, then another week to get where we needed to go. And what if they didn't need our hooch? Or what if they paid us in Pesos, or whatever worthless shit money they used down there? It was a big risk, but when Flanagan saw dollar signs, you didn't argue.

  By the time we reached Belém, the port city in Brazil, we all knew it was going to be a bust. Even Tony, who was almost as greedy as Flanagan. But we had no choice at that point, we had to go through with it.

  We hired a river boat to take us to this place called "The Island of Innocence." We knew from the name that it was going to be a wild place. The boat cost us a fortune. It didn't matter which one we used, as soon as they saw what we were transporting, they tripled their price. Flanagan was going to lose his shirt on this one. It took days to get there.

  "No description," said Sabrina.

  "Huh?"

  "He just took a ship to Brazil, then a multiple-day trip down river. Where's the description? Did he not notice his surroundings? He could have added so much to the book with a little description."

  There was no doubt in my mind that the quality of writing in the book was annoying Sabrina.

  The trouble started when we met Vlad. He was a little older than us—probably around thirty—and caught a ride with us down river. Thinking back, he planned it. He was waiting for the right group of lunks to come along to help him pull a job. When he saw us, he knew he'd found them. We were a little desperate. We knew we were going to go back to Flanagan empty-handed, and none of us wanted that. So on the second day on the river when he brought up the job, our ears perked up. Especially Tony, but I can't blame him alone. Vlad told a good story. His English was good, but his Russian accent was a little hard to understand at times. Even so, he had us, and he knew he did.