I headed back toward the concourse as if I had forgotten something, but instead slipped into a line of parked cars. I kept moving until I saw what I needed, a huge black SUV parked with its back to a wall. Not as private a spot as I would have hoped, but private enough. After a furtive scan to make sure no one was near, I scooted to the rear bumper, knelt down, stuck my screwdriver into the first of the screws holding on the license plate.
By now they would have found the car behind the motel in Kingman. I imagined them surrounding it with their print shirts and bullheads, kicking the tires and leaning over the rear fender to examine the blood of their fellow thug, whom I had crushed into pulp. They weren’t the mangy meth-crazed cycle gang I had been expecting all these years, tattooed and instantly recognizable, without the resources to track the Byzantine trail in which I had directed my life. Instead they were apparently real-deal torpedoes from the Las Vegas chapter of the goddamn mob, with its tentacles reaching all across the country and deep into the nation’s databases. Imagining them kicking at the tires of my rented wreck made me realize how threadbare had been my precautions.
I thought I was being slick flying to Vegas out of Philadelphia instead of the airport closest to my home, and I thought I had covered my tracks out of Phoenix, but I should never have flown as J.J. Moretti out of the city where I left my damn car.
I edged my BMW now to the long row of payment booths at the exit of the airport’s parking garages. Affixed to the rear plate was a valid PA license. Because cars in Pennsylvania have only rear plates, my front plate was covered with an abject show of devotion for the Phillies. I didn’t look around for someone looking for me as I stopped to make my payment, I simply smiled at the lady in the booth as I took my receipt and waited for the bar to rise. When it did, I pulled slowly into the lanes of traffic. I kept my moderate pace even as I fully expected a couple tons of metal to come hurtling at me like a cannonball.
But nothing shot out in front of me. Nothing came careening from behind.
I followed the signs to I-95 North, skirted Center City Philadelphia, and headed toward New York, checking the rearview all the while. I didn’t see anything suspicious behind me, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything suspicious behind me. Cruising in the left lane, I veered suddenly hard right, slipping onto a North Philadelphia exit ramp just in front of a storming truck, spun left at the light at the bottom, and wended my way through a warren of tight city streets.
Nothing following.
I turned into an alleyway between two rows of row houses and parked beside a beat old pickup. I waited for someone to pass. Nobody did. I got out of the car and pulled the two magnetized license plates off, revealing my two Virginia plates. I put the covering plates into the briefcase and drove a few miles south, through the hard urban landscape, still watching behind me.
Nothing following, nothing suspicious.
Maybe I had given the bullheaded bastards too much credit. Maybe they had given up after all. For a moment I let a shard of hope slip into my emotions and fill them with lift, as if the shard were a hypodermic loaded with hop. But then I gained control of myself and spit it out. The hell with hope—it wasn’t going to do a damn thing for me except get me killed. If I knew anything in this world, I knew this: those bastards weren’t done with me yet.
I sometimes played golf with this guy named Joel. He had a nice swing, a pretty blonde wife, he wore a red plaid vest when he mixed drinks at his annual Christmas party, and he had the best damn lawn in the neighborhood. He lavished his lawn with fertilizer, spoiled it with water. Every Saturday he rode his mower across his yard like a frontier cowboy riding the prairie, and he edged with the clean savagery of a surgeon. What I mean is that if his name wasn’t Joel Steinberg, you wouldn’t ever have known he was Jewish. But after 9/11, when everyone in the neighborhood was going on about how shocking it was that we had been attacked and how everything had changed, Joel simply shook his head.
“What’s changed, really?” he said, a glass of chardonnay in his hand. “They’ve always been after me.”
And I now understood how he felt, because no matter how safe had seemed my life in recent years, what had happened to Augie wasn’t a total shock. I had always known they were after me, and though it looked like I had slipped out of Vegas with my skin intact, I knew they still were. But I hadn’t sat idly by all these years, I had gouged a route to safety out of the hardscrabble facts of my circumstance. And now all I had to do was follow the simple steps I had laid out for myself.
First I had to make it out of Philly. Then I had to die.
After one last look behind, I punched the buttons on the car’s GPS.
WHERE TO?
MY LOCATIONS.
GO HOME.
Which for me meant the place that put the über in suburbia, and where I had spent the last fifteen years of my life: the Grande Estates at Patriots Landing.
9. Anyone Home?
THERE IS AN infinite variety of American lives for us to inhabit, from urban living to off the grid, from bohemian rhapsody to rush-hour grind. Usually we don’t end up choosing, we just stumble into something and let sweet inertia sweep us along. One of our greatest freedoms is the freedom to simply fall into a life.
But I was never free enough to let utter randomness select the details of my existence. While it might not have been necessary for me to live underground, moving from safe house to safe house like a Weatherman on the run, the great choice I made as a youth determined to a great extent the life I was forced to live. I couldn’t place myself at the forefront of public events, I couldn’t allow myself to slip into a life of accidental celebrity or make a name for myself in business or the arts. I needed a certain anonymity, not the celebrated anonymity of the Unabomber in his shack, but the anonymity of the man so often seen as to disappear into his landscape.
What I was searching for was a place where with one glance anyone could know all they cared to know about me. A place where I would be judged not by the content of my character—what kind of crackpot would ever want that anyway?—but by the contents of my garage. Where I could strike up a friendship and talk for hours on end, for years even, without ever getting deeper than the secrets of lawn care or the quality of a certain microbrewed beer. Where I could be defined solely by impersonal yet definitive numbers, my zip code (23185), my handicap (14.6), the series of my BMW (the 3, yes, or did I mention that already?), the Btu’s put out by my backyard grill (fifty-five grand, baby, and not a unit less).
What I was looking for was the Grande Estates at Patriots Landing, set nobly on the banks of the James River in Williamsburg, Virginia. Seven different models selling from the mid-threes, financing available.
I remember sitting with my new wife, Caitlin, in the model home slash sales office, built just within the development’s imposing entranceway, with its bold brick wall, its twin white lions, the name spelled out in bright golden letters. We were going over the designs of the models, trying to imagine our future from floor plans and idealized drawings. Caitlin was seeking a house in which to raise a family, to celebrate holidays and joyous events. I was looking for genteel anonymity. As we pored over the choices—that gable, that vaulted ceiling, cherry or oak cabinets—we were both finding exactly what we wanted. Caitlin was pregnant at the time with Shelby, and I had just nabbed a promising sales job in Richmond; this seemed like the time to take a leap and buy a home. We could have lived right outside Richmond for less, and my commute would have been shorter, but a home in Williamsburg seemed like a better investment and I assured Caitlin that we could swing it, even if our income didn’t yet match the suggested guidelines. Funny how we were always able to afford more than our salaries seemed to warrant. Thrift, I told her, and canny investing.
Caitlin thought the modest Carter Braxton model looked nice, with its three bedrooms and butcher-block countertops, coming in at a cozy 1,700 square feet. Or maybe even the George Wyeth model, a similar size but with a jazzed-up front entrance. The sa
lesman was trying to talk us up to something a little more ambitious, four bedrooms and 2,200 square feet, like the Patrick Henry, with its lovely brick front, or the Peyton Randolph, with its stone entranceway.
“What is this one?” I said to the salesman as I stopped paging through the model booklet and pointed a finger at a wide house with a spire rising from the roof and a porch that wrapped across the whole of the front like a bright ribbon.
“That might be a bit overwhelming for your situation,” said the man, smiling kindly, like an indulgent uncle, even as he brought me back to the page he had selected for us. “The Patrick Henry is quite a popular model, and it fits perfectly within the price range you said you were looking at.”
“I like the brick on the Patrick Henry,” said Caitlin. “Is it real?”
“No,” said the salesman, “but you can hardly tell.”
“Let’s get back to this one,” I said, flipping to the page I had been on before.
“That,” said the salesman, “is the George Washington.”
“It has a ring to it, doesn’t it?”
“It is not quite our most regal model—that would be the Thomas Jefferson—but the George Washington is still quite sturdy and handsome. Five bedrooms, a great room off the kitchen in addition to a formal parlor and a cherry-paneled home office, forty-five hundred square feet of gracious living, with a front porch modeled on the rear portico at Mount Vernon.” The salesman sighed the sigh of the disappointed dreamer. “It is grand in every way, including, sadly, the price. Now, the Patrick Henry has quite a few nice options, such as granite countertops for the kitchen or even a cupola for the breakfast nook.”
“Ooh, a cupola,” said Caitlin.
“I could put you on a nice lot on a beautiful and secluded cul-de-sac not far from the entrance.” The salesman pointed at a tiny trapezoid on a map of the development. “Chandler Court, right here.”
“I think we would prefer to be closer to the river,” I said.
“Those lots are reserved for our more expensive models,” said the salesman.
“Nearer the entrance would be more convenient,” said Caitlin. “And maybe we should stay within our price range.”
“Very sensible,” said the salesman, “so let’s talk again about the Patrick Henry. You have your choice of color on the vinyl siding, but I would suggest the off-white, quite classic, and goes beautifully with the faux brick.”
Now, at the end of the long journey from Vegas, as I turned into Patriots Landing and drove past the twin white lions, the fearful clench of my stomach finally eased. I glanced at the rearview mirror and let out a breath of relief at what I didn’t see as I passed the very model house where my wife and I had made our choice. The roads were lined with examples of all the houses we considered that day, each looking neatly squared away on its suitably sized lot, the Carter Braxtons, the George Wyeths, even the insipid Patrick Henrys with their fake-brick fronts.
There is a certain unreality to a place like Patriots Landing. It is at the same time both a living neighborhood and the idea of a neighborhood. Driving through the development, fresh from the travails of Vegas, I could see both aspects at once. Kids playing on small front yards, kids biking on the wide streets, men and women gardening and mowing and coming back from running errands, all the indicia of a normal drowsy Saturday in the real world. Yet the trees were all the same size, and the lawns were maintained according to neighborhood code, and everything in sight had a naturalistic artificiality, as if built by a film crew to evoke a nostalgia for something that had never before existed. The whole thing was a conspiracy between developer and homeowner to pretend to create something real, even though the only thing being created was a real piece of artifice. And it was exactly that quality that drew me to Patriots Landing in the first place. Where better to hide in plain sight than within a shared delusion?
Yet as I drove through my lovely neighborhood, I now felt the exact pang of nostalgia the development’s designers intended. The entire scene was so lovely and rich with meaning that it thickened my throat. Every fertilized stretch of lawn, every strip of vinyl siding, I was seeing it all with new eyes, the eyes of the exile. For my hours at Patriots Landing were now numbered. This place had been my life, my refuge and my sweet revenge, but whatever it had been, it could be no longer. Augie’s murder had seen to that.
Hard by the river, a stone’s throw from the development’s harbor and in sight of the imposing golf clubhouse, I pulled into a circular driveway before a well-maintained George Washington. My George Washington. The wide lawn was mowed, the wooden pillars holding up the porch roof were freshly painted, all was as neat and well-ordered as the feathers on a duck serenely floating on the wide James River as, beneath the surface, webbed feet pedaled hysterically against the inexorable current. I hopped out of the Beemer, grabbed my briefcase from the trunk, jogged up the steps, and patted one of the wide pillars, so warm and solid, on my way to the red front door.
“I’m home,” I called out once inside the center hallway, with its huge mirror and wonderfully pretentious French furnishings.
Silence echoed.
Suddenly the assurance from all my precautions flitted away like a charm of flighty finches. I had visions of my family tied and gagged by a bunch of bruisers. I dropped my briefcase and ran to the soaring stairwell.
“Anyone?” I yelled up, my voice echoing off the marble floor and domed ceiling. “Someone?”
10. Shelby
WHY ARE YOU shouting?”
A voice, cold and sneering, like a hardened terrorist’s. My daughter, Shelby, leaning on the door to the kitchen to my left, stared at me with her customary air of disdain. Short black hair, too much eyeliner, tight T-shirt, pierced nose, short shorts, cell phone in her hand. I was so relieved I almost ran right over and gave her a hug. But I restrained myself. Shelby didn’t let me hug her anymore. I have to admit here that no matter how much those thugs in Vegas terrified me, in her way this small and pretty sixteen-year-old with her punk black hair and tragic eyeliner terrified me more.
“I was just wondering where everyone was,” I said, trying to sound as if everything was normal.
“What are you wearing?”
I looked down and checked out my garb anew, the baggy jeans, the faded T-shirt, so unlike anything she had seen me in before. “You don’t like it?”
“And what’s with that hat?”
“I bought it at the airport for your brother.”
“It’s all white, Dad, like Eric would ever wear something that G. You look like a pathetic middle-aged wannabe.”
“How sweet, Shelby, that’s just what I was going for. Especially the pathetic part.”
“You’re the one who’s dressed like a creep.”
“Here, take it,” I said as I took off the hat and tossed it at her. She avoided it as if it were Oddjob’s bowler as it spun onto the kitchen floor. “Where’s your mother?”
Looking down now, speaking as she texted, “At Eric’s game.”
“Who are you texting?”
“Mom’s mighty pissed at you, you know.”
“What’s new?”
“You were supposed to be home yesterday morning.”
“I got hung up.”
“And your phone wasn’t on.”
“The battery went dead.”
“And you didn’t call.”
“Yeah, well, stuff happens.” I glanced around, tried to pick out if anything was out of place. “Was anyone asking for me?”
She looked up from her phone, tilted her head. “You mean, like, a friend?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You don’t have any friends. But if you keep dressing like that, you can maybe find some in Jackson Ward.”
“Cute.”
This was normally Shelby’s cue to spin and stalk away. She had been my sweet little girl, but something had come between us a few years ago. I liked to attribute it to the general moodiness of
the American teen, but I worried it was something darker. No one can look through you like your teenage daughter and I feared that was what she had done, looked right through me and not liked what she had seen. And it felt exactly like that right now as she stared at me without stalking away, stared at her father as if she was staring at a goggle-eyed alien.
“How are things, Shelby?” I said, suddenly realizing this might be one of the last times I ever saw my daughter.
“They suck.”
“I mean really.”
“They really suck.”
“Are you and Luke still—”
“We’re not talking about Luke.”
“I was just trying to—”
“What’s going on with you, Dad? You’re kind of freaking me out in those clothes and with your sudden concern for my emotional welfare.”
“I love you.”
“So? What’s that got to do with anything? You’re still acting like a weirdball.”
“I had a tough weekend.”
“What, the strippers in Las Vegas had a hard time unhooking their bras?”
“How did you know I was in Vegas?”
“Mom.”
“It was business, not pleasure, not that I go to strip clubs for pleasure. I mean…I don’t…”
“Whatever,” she said. “The whole idea is gross. Middle-aged men with tongues hanging out for half-naked skanky teens.”
“Half?”
She gave me one of those disgusted eye squints that were her specialty. “You’re a bigger whore than Luke.”
“Ahh, now we’re getting somewhere. Can I give you some advice?”
“Please don’t. Please please please don’t.”
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