by Brad Parks
Tina continued moaning, but she had opened her eyes. With an alertness that belied the undertaking her pregnant body was in the midst of, she twisted to the right. With both hands, she grabbed that heavy metal tray, the one that had been holding her ice water.
Then, with a savage yell, she slammed its edge into the side of Zabrina’s head.
Zabrina’s arms went into the air. She toppled over on her left side. My target—her chest—was now on the floor, obscured by the coffee table. Her head was sticking out just beyond the table. I couldn’t tell where the gun had gone but I wasn’t waiting to locate it. I took two long strides, wound up, and kicked her skull as hard as I could.
If Zabrina had any hold on consciousness before my foot met her cranium, it certainly was gone by the time it impacted. I raised up the stock of the shotgun, ready to bludgeon her if she made any move, but her lights were out. Blood was starting to ooze from the contusion Tina had inflicted.
I looked over to the corner of the room. The man I had shot was crumpled in his own rapidly expanding pool of blood. His body had been spun to the side, so I could see that a blue ski mask was sticking out of his pocket.
He was the one whose predilection for murder had started it all, but he wasn’t going to be trouble to me or anyone else; except, perhaps, for the county medical examiner who would have to perform his autopsy.
Zabrina’s gun had dropped harmlessly to the floor. I kicked it out into the hallway, on the off chance she began to stir. Then I grabbed a dish towel that was sitting on the coffee table. I quickly wiped down the shotgun, then set it down in the corner. I was leaving that untraceable gun behind without any fingerprints on it, along with a few shell casings I had never touched. Let the authorities just try to prove who pulled the trigger.
Tina, amazingly, was already standing up. I walked over to her and offered her an arm. She waved me away.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. She was grabbing the sheet she had been using as a cover-up and was wrapping it around her bare bottom half.
I just stared at her. “How the hell did you do that in the middle of a contraction?” I asked, pointing at Zabrina.
“Easy,” she said. “I wasn’t having a contraction. I was faking it.”
I was too surprised to summon a reply, so she continued: “I started faking them the moment they brought me into the house. I thought I could trick them into taking me to the hospital. It didn’t work. But I figured at that point I had to keep up the ruse. I’m still having a real one every eight minutes. I’ve been throwing in two pretend ones for every real one.”
“So, it’s true,” I said, “no one really knows when a woman is faking it.”
She just smiled and began waddling—and, again, this is not a word I would use around her—toward me.
“Come on, Dad,” she said. “Let’s go to the hospital.”
CHAPTER 46
As soon as we were out of the door, I hailed the Sweet Thang Taxi and Limousine Service by calling her on my cell phone.
By the time we had walked down the front steps, she was pulling the Malibu into the driveway. I helped Tina into the passenger seat, hopped in behind her, and asked Sweet Thang to drive with expedient caution toward Saint Barnabas Medical Center.
For the record, my first phone call as we got underway was to my parents. A promise is a promise.
“It’s time,” I said as soon as my mother answered.
“It’s time?” she screamed. But I hung up before the rest of what would likely be a very loud, very prolonged exclamation shattered my eardrums or blew out the speaker on my phone.
Tina’s parents came next. They live in Florida and had already planned to come up the next week, when the C-section had been scheduled. As I hung up on them, they were making noises about changing plane tickets.
I was about to call Buster Hays when Tina went into a contraction—a real one this time. I knew this for sure because when I asked if there was anything I could do to help, she said she preferred silence. Only she said it with a lot more profanity than that.
When she came out of the contraction, I was about to get back on my phone when she said, “By the way, there’s something I want to tell you before I forget,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“They want me to run the paper.”
“What do you—”
“Brodie is going on a three-month medical leave,” she said. “Corporate wants me to serve as executive editor in his absence.”
“Oh. Wow. Congratulations.”
“He’s probably going to retire. No one wants to rush him into it, but that’s how it looks. I get the sense this is my tryout. I’ve got three months to show corporate I can do this job.”
“So how are you going to—”
“Carter,” she said sharply.
“Yes?”
“I really don’t want to talk about this in detail right now.”
“Okay,” I said.
And, really, it was. We could sort out the intricacies of being executive editor and mom at some later time.
My final phone call during our ride was to Buster Hays. I told him he might want to alert his task force buddy to send detectives to Zabrina’s address, where they would discover the Rotary president behind the wave of carjackings in her club and a dead man whose firearm would likely be linked to the shooting deaths of Kevin Tiemeyer and Joseph Okeke.
Later, I would learn the man with the blue ski mask was Zabrina Coleman-Webster’s brother, recently paroled from prison. He had gotten involved in his sister’s scheme and, for reasons only his twisted brain would understand, started killing the cars’ owners. In addition to Tiemeyer and Okeke, he was also believed to be behind the disappearance of his great-aunt, whose house was found empty except for a very hungry cat. The cat had found a place at a no-kill shelter, where he was awaiting adoption. I had a lot on my plate, of course, but I planned to check in a few weeks to see if he found a home. If not, maybe Deadline needed a brother.
I would also learn that Hakeem Kuti had quickly gone to work on the man in the black ski mask, convincing him of the merits of being the first member of a criminal enterprise to turn into a cooperating witness. And it’s true: the first person to make a deal always gets the best one.
Certainly, no such offer would be made to Zabrina Coleman-Webster, who took most of the weight and faced a raft of charges. She ended up pleading guilty anyway, not that it helped her much. At her sentencing, she talked about why she did it. The short version was that “Zabrina From The ’Hood,” as she called herself, got tired of waiting to collect what she felt the world owed her. She saw this as her shortcut. She expressed profound remorse it had gotten out of control. I’m not sure if her apologies helped the families who would never get their loved ones back. But at least it was something.
Zabrina’s cooperation gave Kuti the evidence he needed to uncover a fraud involving policyholders from Obatala and a half dozen other underwriters, all of whom happily paid Kuti a retainer for his assistance. Altogether, more than a dozen of Zabrina’s associates—both from Rotary and the firm of Lacks & Ragland—ended up serving jail time for availing themselves of her illicit offer to cash in on their replacement policies with staged carjackings.
My story on the subject was stripped across the top of the Sunday paper a week and a half later. By that point, Doc Fierro had been sufficiently mollified by my long and self-flagellating apology that he dropped his threat to get an injunction against us. That, in turn, had resulted in my being reinstated to my position as a staff writer at the Eagle-Examiner.
The only other fallout from the story—or, rather, from the dramatic events that took place during its reporting—was that its writer suffered a minor case of post-traumatic stress disorder. There are people, apparently, who can shoot someone and not feel much remorse. I learned I am not one of those people. I replayed the events of that evening many times, including in a series of therapy sessions. Even though it was clear to all the
target in question dearly deserved to be shot, I never really did convince myself to like how it all turned out. Then again, there was never anything I could do to change it. I accepted that, slowly. I suspected it would still haunt me.
The only thing that really helped was that I had something else to occupy my time and attention: a new person in my life, whose arrival was hastened as soon as we reached the hospital that night.
We marched right into the labor and delivery ward, where we had preregistered, and were taken to a room without delay. Tina and the baby really were doing fine, despite the excitement of the evening’s activities. Her water had broken on the early side and the contractions were starting to come faster, but she was buttoned up tight enough. The baby was still happily inside mama, with a heartbeat that was strong enough to keep everyone happy.
That said, Tina’s attempts to get out of a C-section got exactly nowhere. Dr. Marston arrived, performed a quick assessment, then sent us off to an operating room. There, I was given a mask and scrubs and Tina received an epidural that seemed to have the remarkable side effect of removing the four-letter words from her vocabulary.
From there, it was amazing how quickly it all went. Dr. Marston and her team had obviously done this once or twice before. They put a little tent up so Tina wouldn’t have to watch herself get sliced and diced. I got to be on the good side of the tent with her and was thankful for it. Just because I had been urging her to open up around me didn’t mean we needed to be literal about it.
I thought there would be more ceremony to it—shouldn’t someone say something in Latin? or burn incense? or summon the great animal spirits?—but they went about their task in quiet, workmanlike fashion as I held Tina’s hand.
“Just about there,” Dr. Marston said. “You’re doing great.”
Tina had an oxygen mask over her face, so I felt deputized to speak on behalf of the couple. My words, which perhaps should have been more memorable, were something like, “Thanks, Doc.”
Then there came this sound. And oh, dear Lord, it has to be the most joyous thing you can ever hear: the squalling of a baby who, having drawn first breath, now wants to tell the world all about it.
The next thing I knew, Dr. Marston was cradling this little human being and laying it on Tina’s chest. “Congratulations,” the doctor said. “It’s a girl.”
And, in fact, she was. Not that her gender particularly mattered to me in that moment. I was too busy looking at her tiny little fingers and her tiny little toes and her perfect little nose and these narrow slits where she revealed her blue-gray eyes.
“Hi, baby,” I said. “I’m your dad and I love you so much.”
I was calling her “baby” because we hadn’t picked out a name for a girl. Yet another detail we could sort out later. I reached out with my pinky for my daughter’s left hand and she grabbed it with surprising strength and squeezed. My other hand was cupping Tina’s head.
“Say hi to your mama,” I said. “She loves you, too. She can’t say it right now, because she’s got this thing on her face. But, trust me, she loves you more than anything.”
Tina was just holding on to her daughter, feeling our little girl’s skin against her own.
There was apparently a pool at the office over who would cry first during delivery. Let the record show that anyone who put their money on it being Tina Thompson was a blithering fool. My tears were everywhere, welling in my eyes, rolling down my cheeks, dripping off my nose.
I’m not even embarrassed to admit I outcried the baby.
“Oh, Tina, she’s beautiful,” I choked out. “Just beautiful.”
And, yes, I would have died for her. Without question.
But I have to say, in that moment—which immediately put every other moment of my life in a distant, distant second place—it worked out a lot better that I didn’t have to.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I do the vast majority of my writing in the corner of a Hardee’s restaurant near where I live. I get there by seven or eight each morning—or earlier, if the story rattling around in my head won’t let me sleep—and, fueled by free refills of Coke Zero, I stay until the words stop making sense.
Most days, I am joined by Teresa Powell, the longtime manager. Miss Teresa, as a lot of us call her, is the most reliable phenomenon this side of sunrise. In addition to running the show, she pitches in and works the counter, the grill, the drive-through, whatever needs to be done. If the biscuit maker calls in sick, she does that, too.
A lot of authors talk about how hard it can be to find the inspiration to write. Me? I just look at Miss Teresa. I figure if I work half as hard as she does—a single mom putting her son through college on an hourly wage—I’ll still be working twice as hard as most folks. And I’m grateful she lets me clutter up the corner of her restaurant, mumbling to myself, day after day.
A note about a few of the names in this book: Kevin Tiemeyer and Armando “Doc” Fierro donated generously to charities—a library and a women’s fund, respectively—to have their names used. Thanks for your generosity, gentlemen. Sorry I had to kill you, Kevin.
I have others to thank as well.
That always starts with you, the reader, without whom I would be just a guy muttering in the corner of a Hardee’s. I’m particularly grateful to those readers who travel great distances to stalk me, like Candace Perry and my polite Canadian stalker, Amanda Capper. Note to authorities: If I ever disappear under mysterious circumstances, you now know where to start your investigation.
I’m grateful to bookstore owners like Donna Fell of Sparta Books, who always looks for fun, innovative ways to engage her customers. (Not that we’re going to talk about what happened at Girls Night Out, right, Donna?)
And of course I remain a big fan of the library scientists who make it their life’s work to connect people and books. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge Lindsy Gardner, who is feverishly raising money for a new home for the Lancaster Community Library. If any of you have a spare hundred grand or so, please see Lindsy.
Professionally, I’d like to thank my agent, Dan Conaway of Writers House, giver of great wisdom; my editors, Kelley Ragland and Elizabeth Lacks, who make both me and Carter better than we really are; and the rest of the crew at St. Martin’s Press and Minotaur Books, including Hector DeJean, Jeanne Marie Hudson, Matt Baldacci, Talia Sherer, Andy Martin, and Sally Richardson.
I also remain indebted to publicist extraordinaire Becky Kraemer of Cursive Communications for her tireless advocacy on my behalf.
Personally, I need to give a big shout-out to James “Kato” Lum, Tony Cicatiello, and Jorge Motoshige for their never-ending hospitality; to friends at Christchurch School, like Jen and Ed Homer, who are unswerving in their support and fellowship; to my in-laws, Joan and Allan Blakely, whose enthusiasm for grandparenting is always so appreciated; and to my parents, Marilyn and Bob Parks, who remain the first people with whom I want to share good news.
Finally, to Melissa and our two children, who bring us so much joy: Thank you for blessing me with the greatest family a man could ever ask for. When I’m with you, all is right.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brad Parks is the only author to have won the Shamus, Nero, and Lefty Awards, three of crime fiction’s most prestigious prizes. A former reporter for The Washington Post and The [Newark] Star-Ledger, this is his sixth novel. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY BRAD PARKS
The Player
The Good Cop
The Girl Next Door
Eyes of the Innocent
Faces of the Gone
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Brad Parks
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE FRAUD. Copyright © 2015 by Brad Parks. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph © Karl-Fredrik von Hausswolff / Gallerystock
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