“This is Ron.” He watched her on the monitor. She tapped a little impatient foot.
“Just a couple of items, Ron. I need you to add two people to the list of permanent residents. They’re allowed through at any time.”
Ron cradled the phone against his shoulder, picked up a pencil and clipboard. Vines told him the names, and he jotted them down.
“I’ll log these,” Ron said. “And I’ll make sure the other shifts know.”
“I appreciate that,” Vines said. “And the other thing just quickly. A quick reminder to please use the back path only coming to and from the parking lot. It’s imperative to Mr. Middleton to preserve the illusion of solitude.”
Ron rolled his eyes. “No problem, ma’am. I’ll make sure the boys remember.”
“Thanks,” Vines said. “You have a good evening.”
Ron hung up, shaking his head. Fucking rich people.
17
Francis checked his pockets before shoving his dirty clothes into the washer. He’d decided to make himself useful while Emma was out. He found the picture of the white-water rafters with the magazine article on the back in his shirt pocket. He stuffed it in his back jeans pocket. Well, not his jeans. Dwayne’s.
He tossed in Emma’s clothing on top of his, detergent, then started a cold-water wash.
Francis turned, scanning the rest of the basement, and his gaze landed on the suitcase.
Yeah. The suitcase. The alligator-covered beacon of regret that had kicked off all his misadventures.
He’d come this far, risked his life. Didn’t he have a right to know? He went to the piece of luggage and thumbed open the latches. Slowly he lifted the lid, looked inside. He saw only the same clothing items as before when he’d first found the suitcase in the alley. He searched, making sure to look between each garment for anything he might have missed.
Okay, so … what? Microfilm? Was this a spy thing? Somehow Emma didn’t strike him as KGB. It occurred to Francis that the KGB might not actually be a thing anymore.
I’m definitely in over my head.
He plucked a pair of especially frilly pink panties from the case and held them up, trying to imagine Emma in them. They were completely different from the plain white underwear Francis had seen hanging in the bathroom back in the adult hotel. Neither those nor these seemed right for her. He picked up another pair, red, thong cut, which would have left nothing to the imagination.
“I don’t think that’s the right look for you.”
Francis spun around, shoving the panties behind his back.
Yeah, that doesn’t look stupid and guilty at all.
She came down the stairs, a morbidly pleased look on her face at having caught him.
Francis smiled weakly, tossed the panties back into the suitcase. “Sorry. How did it go?”
“I parked the stolen car a couple of miles away at a pump station,” she said. “When they do their normal maintenance or whatever, somebody will find it. It was an easy walk back.”
“Okay, good.” Francis nodded. “That’s good.”
“You know, I don’t make a habit out of stealing cars,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I wanted you to know that.”
“No, I get it. Circumstances. Although the fact you can hot-wire a car…”
She laughed. “My dad was in the army. All the shooting and guns, that was him. He taught me. When he died, my mom hooked up with a completely different kind of guy. It was almost like she didn’t care anymore. Like nobody would ever be as good as Dad anyway, so what did it matter? Anyway, this new guy taught me a few shady skills. I always wanted to learn things. To find out, to know things.”
“Your stepdad was a career criminal?”
“Not stepdad, technically, but close enough, I guess. He came and went a lot. Kind of an asshole, really. Actually, the women in my family have a rich tradition of assholes.”
“Like the guy on TV you said was your husband?”
Something deflated in her, a sadness slowly creeping across her face. “I guess you could say that.”
“It’s none of my business. Sorry.” Except it was. Francis was here, now. He’d made it his business. Maybe that was wrong, but it’s what was happening.
Emma looked at the open suitcase. “You want to know, don’t you?”
“Yes, please.”
She sighed, then bit her thumbnail. “Okay. But in order to understand, you need to know from the beginning.”
“I’m listening.”
She crossed the basement to the old, beat-up wardrobe and opened one of the doors. On the back of the door, there was a collage of newspaper clippings and photographs. Francis looked but couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
“I met Aaron at Berkeley,” Emma said.
Francis’s face scrunched into a question.
“Aaron Middleton,” Emma clarified. “The guy from TV.”
“Oh. Right.”
“He taught an undergrad computer programming course, and that’s how I met him,” she said. “Even then, he was starting up his own company in a friend’s warehouse, but he was living on ramen noodles and adjunct pay in the meantime. I’d gotten a scholarship to the university, and that was back when I thought going anywhere for any reason was better than being stuck in flyover country with the rest of the bumpkins. I was way ahead of the other students in the class, so that’s why he noticed me, I guess. We were married a year later.”
“Divorced?”
“Separated.”
“Why?”
She chewed her thumbnail again, thinking, then said, “He got weird.”
Francis didn’t know what to say to that. When in doubt, keep your mouth shut.
“His business took off fast,” Emma told him. “Investors were tripping over each other to give him money. But the more successful he got, the more people crawled out of every dark corner who wanted things from him. I think it touched off some latent psychosis in Aaron. He became suspicious and paranoid. I tried to let him know, tried to help him, but that just made him distrust me.”
Francis shook his head. “But it’s over, right? It’s done. Why would he be after you?”
“I’ll get to it.”
Francis gestured for her to continue.
“See this guy right here?” She tapped one of the pictures tacked to the inside of the wardrobe door.
Francis leaned forward and looked. An Asian man in his midthirties. “Yeah?”
“When Aaron really got things going, he needed to bring in the smartest people,” Emma said. “Look, Aaron is a super genius about computers, but he still needed help. Thousands and thousands of man-hours went into the big project they were working on. There were a dozen teams working on things just to support the main team, and the head of the main team was this guy. Marion Parkes.”
Francis squinted at the newspaper article taped next to the picture. “He’s dead?”
“They’re all dead.” Emma waved at the pictures. “Because Aaron had them murdered.”
Francis was shaking his head now, not understanding. “This says he died in prison. A dispute with another inmate.”
“Aaron arranged that.”
“Oh, come on.”
“He’s a multibillionaire,” Emma said. “He gets what he wants. All he has to do is spend enough money.”
“The guy I saw on TV didn’t look so badass,” Francis said.
“He’s not badass. He’s worse,” Emma said. “He’s afraid. He’s like a little fluffy bunny that’s been afraid of everything all his life. And then somehow the bunny gets a machine gun, and for the first time ever, the bunny can make anything that frightens him go away by pulling the trigger. That’s Aaron. He’s afraid, and that makes him dangerous.”
Francis let his eyes wander over the pictures and the articles. “I don’t understand why.”
“Control,” Emma said. “Marion and the others on the team could reproduce the work. There was always the chance they could sell it to another compan
y or another country. He couldn’t trust them. You don’t understand what he’s capable of. What he did to me was—”
She stopped talking, like maybe she’d crossed a line she hadn’t meant to. Her eyes drifted back to the suitcase.
“Marion figured out what was happening to him,” she said. “Too late to save himself. He knew his days were numbered, but he could get revenge. He was the keyman on the team, had come up with the main algorithm that made the new software special. If he could get it out into the world, then it would fuck up everything Aaron had worked for. The secret he’d killed to keep would be out there. There would be nothing he could do about it.”
“And Parkes gave it to you,” Francis said.
Her eyes slowly came back from the suitcase and met his. “Yes.”
“And it’s in that suitcase.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“And it’s not panties.”
In spite of the grave mood that had descended over the basement, her mouth quirked into a smile. She tried to fight it for a second, then gave up. “It’s not panties.”
She went to the suitcase and dumped the clothing on the floor. She dug at the corner of the lining, and Francis heard a ripping sound as she pulled it loose. She reached underneath and then came out with a folded wad of paper, the kind of paper somebody might use to wrap ground beef or pork chops in a butcher’s shop.
She handed it to Francis.
He unfolded it.
He wasn’t impressed.
“No, dink, the other side,” Emma said.
He turned the paper over, and his eyes widened.
The diagram—what had Emma called it? An algorithm?—was hand drawn, but intricate and precise and used every square inch of the paper. If Francis had a hundred years, he would not have been able to figure what it was for or what to do with it, but it was obviously highly technical. And if he understood Emma correctly, it was the key to the future of computing.
Or maybe it was a circuit for a really kick-ass toaster, and the girl standing in front of him was batshit crazy.
“So why don’t you post it on the internet or something?” Francis asked. “Or sell it to a competitor?”
“And that’s exactly what I’ll tell him will happen,” she said. “Unless he cooperates. I’m hoping he’ll trade.”
“Trade for what?”
Her back straightened, and she lifted her chin. Something in her eyes went hard. “He has something that belongs to me.”
Francis understood instinctively that further questions along this path would hit a dead end. She’d just opened up to him big-time, but there were limits. There would be a time to push those limits, but it wasn’t now.
Francis gently set the algorithm back into the suitcase. “So when do we go?”
“It’s my concern, not yours,” Emma said. “You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.”
“Oh, I agree. Fully,” Francis said. “But I can’t stay here forever, and while I understand ditching the stolen car was probably smart in the context of a criminal enterprise, it begs the question how we’re going to leave. My guess is Uber doesn’t come this far out.”
And just like that, her face softened—not a lot, but noticeably. She fought off another smile, but Francis could see it was there right below the surface. It some acute way, Francis realized this was part of her appeal. In the short time he’d know her, he’d seen her annoyed and angry and afraid and exhausted, but there always seemed room for a shift in mood, a sudden smile as if she were eternally open to something better, refusing to cling to the negative.
“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
* * *
Ike slammed his hands against the steering wheel, shifted the sedan into park, and said, “That map is bullshit.”
Cavanaugh pored over the place mat map Gary had drawn. “Give me a fucking break already, will you?”
The problem with Gary’s map was that while he may have been diligent about labeling things, that didn’t quite translate to reality. For example, he’d drawn a crooked line and labeled it Newton Creek, but one stream looked fairly like another, and there was never a sign saying NEWTON CREEK or SOME OTHER DAMN CREEK, so as a point of reference, it was pretty much shit.
“Come on, Ernie.”
Ernie and Cavanaugh climbed out of the vehicle and looked at the front tires stuck in the mud. They’d been lost for an hour, turned down yet another unmarked dirt road, and gotten stuck in the mud for a second time.
Cavanaugh and Ernie circled to the front of the car, placed their hands against the front, hunched over ready to push.
“Put it in reverse,” Cavanaugh called. “Ike, give it some gas.”
Cavanaugh and Ernie pushed. The wheels spun at first but then found some traction, and the car lurched backward. Cavanaugh stumbled forward, almost found his footing, but then tripped on a root and went down, splatting face-first in the mud. He stood again, spitting curses. His entire front dripped with mud.
Cavanaugh looked at Ernie, who was looking back at him.
“Not a word.” Cavanaugh pointed at Ernie. “Not one fucking word.”
Ernie held up his hands in a No problem here gesture.
Cavanaugh squinted at the sky. Night would fall very soon. If they had trouble following the map in daylight, then he doubted they’d have better luck in the dark. Even more to the point, he was just fed up. “We’re going to try this fresh in the morning. We’re going to bring everybody, and we’re going to get this done.”
“Works for me,” Ernie said.
Cavanaugh wiped mud off his face. “Now let’s see if we can find a drink somewhere in this backwater shithole.”
* * *
Emma led Francis from the house to the barn. Dusk had slipped into night. It struck Francis how utterly dark it was here. It was never truly dark in New York City in the same way it was never completely quiet. Here in the wilds of South Dakota, the darkness was implacable, the silence total.
Except it wasn’t really.
Gradually, Francis tuned into the night. The wind in the trees, the distant babble of running water, some stream, probably the one they’d passed coming in, twisting its way through the shallow valley. There was light also. He paused, looked up. The sky blazed with stars. He couldn’t see them like this in the city.
The creak of the barn door brought Francis back to earth.
He followed her inside. There was a brief moment of fumbling while she groped for the light switch. She found it and flipped it on, and rows of industrial light fixtures hanging from the two-story ceiling cast the interior of the barn in stark illumination.
Against one whole side of the barn was a long row of motorcycles, all in various states of repair. Mostly dirt bikes, but Francis spied a couple of Harleys in pieces and something so ugly it was almost beautiful with the word NORTON on the gas tank. Hubcaps and handlebars and engine parts hung on the walls. There was also a very old tractor, although not as old as the one gathering rust and weeds outside. There were other lumpy things under tarps and a not-too-beat-up Ford F150 from the mid-1990s.
The place smelled like old, wet hay and grease and dust.
Emma went to the closest tarp, grabbed it with two hands. “Our chariot, milord.”
She yanked the tarp off in one smooth motion. The vehicle beneath the tarp was not another rusty heap. Far from it.
Francis’s eyes widened. “What is it?”
“Behold the 1968 Pontiac GTO,” Emma said. “Four-hundred-cubic-inch V8 engine, all fully restored, candy-apple red. Dwayne’s pride and joy. He was a bona fide son of a bitch, but he knew his metal.”
There had not been a single moment in Francis’s life he’d even come close to being a gearhead. He’d bought a $500 junker his junior year of high school just to get around and had coaxed it along enough to get through Wright State. And when he’d moved to Manhattan, it had been a relief not to bother with a car.
But this … this was
something different.
The car gleamed perfection, not a scratch or ding. It looked muscular just sitting there, like maybe it wanted to roar out of the barn and eat a Prius. Francis felt something stir within him as if seeing the car tapped into some deeply buried, hidden reservoir of testosterone. He wanted to get behind the wheel, feel the rumble of the engine in his bones as he thundered down the open road.
“I feel like I want to eat a rare steak and then drink whiskey all night long,” Francis said.
18
There was no steak.
The house had stood empty for a while, and there was no fresh food at all. But there was spaghetti and a jar of sauce and canned green beans. Emma had even produced a bottle of Chianti. They sat at the kitchen table, and Francis descended upon the meal like a starving castaway.
Emma refilled her wineglass. “Not really a wine girl, but I guess it goes better with pasta than Wild Turkey.”
“I like wine,” Francis said. “Seems more…” He groped for a word.
“Stuck up?” Emma suggested.
Francis laughed. “I was going to say civilized. I’ve been reading about it.”
“You’re a fancy lad, aren’t you, Frankie?”
“Francis. But in this shirt, yes, I feel quite fancy.” He refilled his glass too.
They ate. They drank.
Finally, she pushed her plate away and said, “I’m pulling out in the morning. I’ve already packed the trunk of the Pontiac. I can drop you at a train station or bus stop or whatever. Or if you wanted, you could come with me, but if you did that, I’d want to know why. Because if you thought there was some way you’d get something out of it, you’d probably be wrong.”
“I’m not trying to get anything from you,” Francis said.
“Then why?”
A half shrug as he sipped wine. “What I said before was true. Yes, I can go to the police and explain everything, and it would probably work out. But I’d rather you were there to tell them I had no idea what was going to happen when I found that suitcase and contacted you.”
“But there’s something else too.” The way she said it wasn’t a question.
Yes. There was something else too, and Francis tried to think of a way to explain it, knew that he’d be explaining to himself as much as to her.
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