Everything to Lose: A Novel

by Andrew Gross

  I’ve read it happens like that sometimes. To people with my kind of nature.

  Sometimes it just does.

  We moved one last time, shortly after what happened with Deirdre. This time we went away from Staten Island completely, to Waterbury, Connecticut, to live with my uncle. I did my senior year up there and used my middle name, Frank, instead of John, and I just kind of continued it, even after I graduated and enlisted.

  Frank Landry. It just stuck.

  John simply disappeared.

  And I never heard a thing again about what had happened back on Staten Island under the bridge that night. They likely never even found her. Probably for years. Those holes out there near the old soap factory led into tunnels that went on forever. I stuffed her in an empty oil drum and rolled her to one deep in the brush. I dragged a bush over there and kicked and scraped in gravel to cover the smell. Maybe the animals got to her. Or rats. They had large ones there. No one knew of me. We’d gone to different schools. Lived different lives. I’m not even sure she ever knew my last name. Just Streak. No one would ever even connect us. One night she went out on a hot summer eve to meet a friend and never came back.

  I wanted to put the past behind. The army made that easy. Soon it was like none of it ever even happened. Like some event in your past that you couldn’t remember whether you’d actually done it or thought you had done it, kind of just made up, and from then on it’s part of who you are. We all have something like that. Of all the things I’d done, that was the one that I truly regretted. That when I did think of it, feeling her heart beating next to me, touching her body, truly made me feel bad. She was the one person I knew who saw the good in me. I never went back there, to Staten Island. Never set foot on it again.

  I truly loved her.

  It was during Desert Storm, and I was trained as a tank gunner. I saw a bunch of combat in Kuwait and Iraq. The real stuff. I bet I killed fifteen to twenty of Saddam’s infantry. Pow, pow, pow, pow. Whether they had their hands in the air or were running away didn’t matter. They were just like target practice to me. A video game.

  Pow, pow, pow.

  I was even awarded a Bronze Star. For going back in and pulling out two of my crew when our tank got hit by an RPG. I wasn’t brave. It all just happened in kind of a daze. Left a bad burn on my face and arm. I never felt that way before. A hero. And that’s when it happened. That I no longer thought of myself as John anymore. The silent kid always at war with his inner voices and urges. Whose father ran out on the family because of him.

  Instead, I began to see myself as Billy, my older brother who died in that helicopter crash at Camp Lejeune. I began to ask myself, how would Billy handle a certain situation? What would Billy do? And I learned I had something in me. Something buried deep beneath all those other things. That I worked hard to now control. And as Frank I could do it. I could distance myself from my past. From John’s past. The awful things he had done.

  With that medal pinned on my chest, I began to think there was something important being saved for me. That fate had spared me to achieve. I remember my mother, seeing me in my crisp green fatigues, that fancy medal, and it was like she saw me as something new. Something scrubbed fresh and clean. All those bad things, washed away.

  Gone. Forever.

  The army cured me, I remember thinking.

  At least for a while.

  Her name was April. A-prille, she used to say it.

  Like she was in Paris, France, or something, not Paris fucking Island, and that she was a fashion designer with that fancy air and not some filthy whore.

  She was a little chubby with streaky red hair and too much makeup. I saw her a couple of times in the town in the months after I came back from my deployment.

  I’d only been with one girl before.

  She asked me about my burns, and when I told her how they’d come about she said she didn’t mind. She even asked me to wear my medal. She said she’d been with burn victims and amputees, no matter. She’d even done it with some guy who’d come back with his dick blown off, which made me curious how that was done.

  I found myself telling her things. About my family. Billy at Camp Lejeune. About ol’ Jerry the dog and what I’d done, which seemed pretty funny now on half a bottle of Jack. “Hey, pooch.” I sniffed around the bed like a horny bloodhound. “Here, poochie, poochie.” I told her about some of the other things I’d done. She said violence kind of turned her on.

  “You have anyone to go back to?” she asked me one night after we did it. She even stroked my face.

  “No. I don’t.”

  So I guess I started thinking, why not her?

  Next time I saw her I brought her this foxy red dress. I picked it out special for her. I thought it matched her hair. She took it out of the plastic and put it on. “You bought me this?” All excited. Danced around in it and struck a sexy pose. “So, Frankie boy,” she said, climbing onto me and finding me hard. “What is it you’d like me to do?”

  I started to think she reminded me of someone. How she made me feel. I started to tell her something. “Back home there was this girl . . .”

  “What girl, Frank . . . ?” She lifted that dress up and climbed on top of me. “What girl . . . ?”

  “I did something bad.”

  I had trouble doing it this time. “Time’s up, darling,” she said after a while. “There’s more business to be done.” She sat up and unzipped the back of the dress. “You don’t think you’re the only rooster in the barn, do you? Here . . .” She pulled it over her head. “Maybe you want to give this to someone else.” Like the whole thing had been an act.

  I looked at her brushing her hair. “It was yours.”

  I can’t even tell you what went through me. It wasn’t hatred. I actually liked her. At least up until that moment I did. And it wasn’t even anger. It was like I was just watching her brush her hair and I realized she wasn’t the person I thought she was and I had told her those things. Like everyone else, none of them really cared.

  ”And don’t go thinking this goes toward what you owe me.” She brushed out her curly red hair.

  I crawled over on the bed behind her. I cupped my hands over her breasts and brought her close and whispered in her ear, “I promise I won’t.”

  I took the plastic off the floor and wrapped it tightly over her face. She turned, surprised. At first, like it was part of the game. Then I kept wrapping it and wrapping it around her, so tightly her face looked like a steak in the meat department. Her fat nose pressed flat, her eyes bulging. Then her arms suddenly thrashing at me. She made a couple of frantic, garbled sounds and movements, trying to fend me off.

  I just kept twisting and twisting, forcing her onto the bed, the weight of my body pressing against her.

  “It was a present, you stupid bitch.” I glared into her desperate eyes. “You could’ve just fucking worn it.”

  It took about two minutes until she finally went limp. The whole thing had happened with a lot of grunting and writhing. But she barely made a sound. My own breaths were the loudest noise. I unwrapped her. Her eyes were white and wide and her face grotesquely twisted. I stared at her awhile and couldn’t remember what it was I’d ever found attractive. I gathered up my uniform and left her on the bed, one leg hanging off it, one arm crooked above her head. I took the dress and crumpled it into a garbage bag that I tossed into the river.

  I looked down in my shorts and noticed I’d come.

  When I got out, I enrolled in Southern Connecticut State College and studied health administration. I worked in hospitals in Bridgeport and New Haven, starting in administration and then moving into claims management under my new name. A partner and I opened a private health clinic in a rundown section of Bridgeport. Then another up in Hamden. We expanded it into a small health care network. Which we sold to a larger one. I met Kathi, who was a nurse, who saw me as a person with the right qualities and the right amount of drive. She didn’t know anything about the things I’d done. W
e got married. Had Erin and Taylor. People started seeing me as someone who was doing good in the community, and when a state assembly seat opened and there was no one to fill it, the Democratic Party asked me to consider running. So I did and I won. I began to see that anything I wanted was suddenly open to me. I got on the appropriations committee; ten years and four elections later, I became the majority chair. I had sway over who got what, and what projects were funded. And in whose district. People actually kowtowed to me.

  Maybe I grew to feel a little invincible. Like I could do anything, reinvent myself any way. Like the laws didn’t quite apply to me. And maybe I did write my own rules. Maybe I did deserve those names they called me. The Fist. The Scythe.

  After all, I knew how to hurt people.

  And that was all it took, right? The more I buried all those urges, the more power seemed to come to me.

  For years they didn’t visit me again.

  There was this pretty intern once . . . She was from the Midwest and wanted to get into politics. We went out to dinner and I listened to her tell me about boyfriends and college, and I thought, as I stared at her, what it would be like to fuck her and then kill her. Who would ever know?

  Then her boyfriend called and the whole thing was gone.

  Yes, the army cured me. It washed the sand over my past, buried all those things I’d done. Deirdre. April. Buried them deep into my past.

  John was history.

  And for almost twenty years I believed that was true.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Things were fitting together.

  We finally had a name, at least a first name, and that he worked for someone high up at the capitol in Hartford. Someone in the government. Patrick always felt that the guy who came after me was simply the muscle for someone else.

  Someone Patrick’s father was clearly blackmailing.

  I’m on my way back w—

  The exchange of money probably took place in the lot of the Stateline Diner.

  “You know it’s not just about the money,” this Charlie had said as he stalked me at the boatyard. “The money’s only the tip of it.”

  The tip of what?

  “We want those pages,” he said. A diary. A journal.

  Whose diary? And describing what? What had Patrick’s father found?

  We also knew he was tied in with a partner in this. He’d given his cell phone out to someone.

  “Who the hell doesn’t have a cell phone today?” I asked Patrick while he drove back home.

  For a lot of the ride he seemed lost in thought. As if coming to grips with the fact that the man he respected so much had gotten involved in something ugly. Remembering how he was described at the funeral—“salt of the earth”; a guy “who gave his word and kept it,” who “didn’t start out with much and didn’t leave with much either.” I tried to reconcile how these things fit into a person who was blackmailing someone. Maybe someone high up in the state government.

  When we finally made it back to Bensonhurst, Patrick drove up to the driveway and stopped.

  I opened the door. He didn’t move. “You’re not coming in?” I asked.

  “Not right now.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to see someone. I think I may have an idea who my father was working with.”

  “Where’re you going?” I asked. Though I didn’t have to. I knew. I could read it in his eyes.

  “Back to Staten Island,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  I tried Elena again as soon as I got upstairs, and again there was no answer. Which was really starting to worry me now.

  It was after six P.M. Brandon’s doctor’s appointment was for four o’clock and they should have been out by now. Unless Goodwin was running late. Which sometimes happened, of course. But never this late.

  This time I left her a message: “Elena, it’s Mrs. Cantor. I just wanted to make sure Brandon got to Dr. Goodwin’s on time and everything’s okay; I still can’t make it back for another day. Please give me a call as soon as you can. Thanks . . .”

  I hung up and went on Patrick’s computer. I typed in a search in Google: “Connecticut government officials.” I scanned through the list. Sixty of them. Thirty-six representatives. Twenty-four senators. I didn’t recognize any of the names. Nor could I imagine how any of them connected to Patrick’s father.

  I realized another hour had passed and I hadn’t heard from Elena.

  I tried her one more time. Still no answer. I left another message, ending it: “Please call me back, Elena, whenever you get this message. I’m starting to get worried.”

  This wasn’t like her. She never didn’t call me back right away. The only thing that made me feel okay was that no one knew where Brandon was, so he had to be safe. Maybe the doctor had been running late. Maybe she had her phone off for some reason or had left it somewhere.

  It happened.

  I located Dr. Goodwin’s number in my phone. It was late. Who knew if anyone was still there at this hour. I felt relieved when the receptionist answered, “Dr. Goodwin’s office.” I was lucky to even find someone there.

  “This is Hilary Cantor,” I said. “Brandon’s mom.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Cantor,” the receptionist said. “It’s Claudia.”

  “Hi, Claudia. I was just checking up on Brandon. I haven’t been able to reach my housekeeper and I know he had a four o’clock there. I know it’s unlikely, but by any chance he’s not still around there, is he?”

  “No, Mrs. Cantor, I’m afraid he’s not. But I was actually about to contact you.”

  “Contact me? Why?”

  “To make another appointment. Dr. Goodwin said he needed to see Brandon. About the fine-motor issue. You remember, that’s—”

  “Of course I remember,” I interrupted her.

  “I thought that’s why you were calling.”

  “What do you mean, why I was calling?” Now I could hear the worry in my voice.

  “To make another appointment. Dr. Goodwin needs to see him and Brandon never showed up today.”

  Didn’t show up.

  I sat there and the phone almost fell out of my hand, all my worst fears let loose inside me.

  “Is there anything I can do, Mrs. Cantor?” Claudia asked, sensing my dismay.

  “No.” My entire body became numb. Where was my son? “No, there’s nothing you can do.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Mirho had kept his car hidden from the street, down the block from the empty house in Armonk. Sooner or later someone had to go by him. He’d waited all day.

  His ribs were sore and his face was cut in spots, but that was nothing like what he was going to give back in return once he finished what he’d set out to do. This had started out as just a job. A job like many he’d done. Messy. Quiet. Across the lines. He was used to that kind of work.

  But now it had become something more. Now there was a whole lot more at stake. More than just the money. There were too many open questions. Too many loose ends. And only one way to make sure nothing came out.

  He kept his Glock hidden under the newspaper on the passenger seat and rubbed his face.

  Now it had gotten personal.

  Sooner or later she’d be back. There was only one reason the cops hadn’t been called in so far and that was because she wanted a piece of the money too. And this time what he’d done to Rollie would be way too kind for her. He’d learned a few tricks along the way. He knew how to fillet a fish, leaving only one piece of skin.

  It passed the time, just thinking about what he would do. This one had taken a few wrong turns. But in the end, things would all go his way.

  He rubbed his scar. They always did.

  Three twenty P.M. If no one showed, he knew where his next stop would be. Back to Staten Island. More than one way to skin a fish, he knew, right? The money, he’d find a way to make that come to him in the end.

  Suddenly he saw a car go past. A clunky old white minivan. A Dodge Caravan or something.
Two people in the front. He watched it wind up the cul-de-sac and make a turn.

  Into the only house that was up there.

  Mirho lifted the newspaper off his gun. Well, what do you know . . .

  The garage door opened. The minivan pulled up in front. The two people in the car went inside, and one, well, one made his heart jump in delight. He drove his own car into the driveway and parked directly behind the van. He screwed the silencer on the Glock and stepped inside the open garage.

  The door leading to the kitchen was open. He heard a woman shout in broken English. “Brandon, plees, les go. Weel be late for your appointment!”

  Mirho just remained in the doorway as the woman called again. “Plees, come now.”

  Suddenly she came back out into the garage. She was barely over five feet. Wide as she was tall. Her dark hair pulled back.

  Mirho smiled and winked at her. “Señora.”

  She gasped. Probably not sure if she was in danger or not. Until she saw the gun. Her eyes growing wider. Knowing she was.

  The boy came around the corner carrying an iPad.

  “Well, well, well,” Mirho said, swatting the woman to the floor, the boy just staring at him wide-eyed. “I better stop off and play the lottery,” he said, grinning, “ ’cause this be my lucky day.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  As he drove across the bridge, the strangest thing came back to Patrick. Actually, it had come back to him on the drive from the diner. Trying to put together who his father would have been involved with.

  They were blackmailing someone; that was clear now. Someone in the Connecticut state government.

  Patrick went over everybody. Everyone it could be. It just seemed so out of character. So beyond his father. Until it hit him. From out of left field.

  It was something he hadn’t thought of since the funeral. A woman’s voice. A door opened just a crack, only the shadow of her face visible, a look of sadness he had never quite understood.

  “That means it was all for nothing then,” she said simply, closing the door.